Customer story: Food Huggers

How Food Huggers Get Even More Sustainable and Increase Sales with FlippingBook Online

Food Huggers is a company that creates easy-to-use sustainable food-saving products by the same name. Made from silicone and designed to snugly cover fruit and vegetable halves, Food Huggers keep food fresh, thus reducing food waste. They also help their customers cut back on single-use plastic items in the kitchen by offering a high-quality reusable alternative, thus making good on their slogan “Sustainability Made Simple and Fun”.

Food Huggers first took their product to Kickstarter in 2013 where they raised $184,000 from more than 5,000 individual supporters. Subsequently, the company was launched. Since then, they’ve been selling their food savers all around the globe and continue to expand their product line to include more reusable replacements for common single-use items.

Challenge

We wanted to make it both easy and fun to be sustainable at home, and this was the best way we could figure out how to do it.

This is what Loni Slatkin, Communications Manager at Food Huggers, tells us when reminiscing about their company’s origins.

Sustainability was the main goal behind the creation of their signature products. But it was just as important in every other aspect of their business, from packaging and shipping to marketing materials. Hence, printing out marketing catalogs seemed counterintuitive—not to mention very expensive.

Upon consideration, Food Huggers decided to look for an online solution, especially since digitization had been a continuing trend in almost every line of business for a while.

We decided we didn’t need a printed version of our catalog. A digital version would be more convenient while also meeting our sustainability goals.

Search for solution

Food Huggers first took their catalog online by converting it into a PDF. But the format wasn’t as intuitive as Food Huggers would prefer. Sending their catalog as a PDF file meant their customers had to download it before they could read it. And even then, the company worried that, compared to printed catalogs, PDFs lacked both the comfort of use and aesthetics.

Before we found FlippingBook, we were sending our catalog as a PDF, but it wasn’t as easy to flip through as a hard copy would be. Something important was lost in that transition from print to digital.

Food Huggers knew they had to find another, more advanced solution for their catalog to become the best representation of their brand.

Solution

In their search for a digital solution, Food Huggers came upon FlippingBook. They quickly realized this was the format and the tool they were looking for.

We immediately saw all that FlippingBook had to offer us and the game-changing improvements it would make to the distribution of our catalog.

The way that FlippingBook presented digital documents appealed to Food Huggers⁠—they found the sound of page flipping especially pleasing and loved how a flipbook would smoothly open to a two-page spread. The company liked the prices and the customer support as well. And when they tried the tool out, it further surprised them with the range of features available—so much so that they wished they discovered FlippingBook sooner. The images inside their catalogs still looked sharp after the conversion, and they could embed YouTube and Vimeo videos into the pages of their catalog.

The fact that the catalog could be updated while the link to it stayed the same was also a game changer.

We update our catalog multiple times a year, so it’s helpful that I can seamlessly upload a new version without having to backtrack and change the catalog link across all communications where it’s published.

It was clear to the company that FlippingBook was a perfect match for their catalogs. Other options they had looked into didn’t meet their expectations in quite the same way, so Food Huggers confidently made their choice in favor of FlippingBook.

Results

With their digital catalogs taken to FlippingBook, Food Huggers feel that they’ve managed to present their products in both a convenient and visually attractive way, in line with their brand’s fresh and smart aesthetics.

All of our products are not only sustainable, but also stylish, and FlippingBook helps us portray that within our catalog as well.

Everyone on their team has the links to the flipbook catalogs and can share them anytime. The company sends the links to their retailers and wholesale customers as well, providing them with all the information they may need and keeping them constantly updated. Food Huggers are glad that they can rely on FlippingBook to keep their catalogs online.

There are no hiccups involved when sharing the catalog with our internal team and wholesale customers. FlippingBook makes this process both professional and straightforward.

Food Huggers even included the link to their catalog in their media kit when they attended Natural Products Expo West in Los Angeles this past year. As people opened the kit and clicked the catalog, Food Huggers could see the analytics in real time.

And, on top of it all, their digital catalogs serve the main purpose of what the company has strived to achieve⁠—they make their business more sustainable. Instead of printing thousands of catalogs, Food Huggers now print a handful for those retailers who still ask for physical copies. Everyone else is more than satisfied to get the digital versions. And the company is happy, too.

FlippingBook makes our business more sustainable, saves us money, increases sales, and is super easy to use. We’re very happy customers!