Thelma’s Treats:
A Recipe for Success

What are some of the cool things happening at Thelma’s right now?

We recently expanded how we sell our product! We started out on the shelf with individual 6-ounce ice cream sandwiches, and this year we launched our very first four-packs, which are four 4-ounce ice cream sandwiches in a fun square box that is brightly colored on the shelf. We’re excited that we’ve found our niche in mastering the art of small-batch frozen novelties.

What are your main strategies to help build loyalty with your customers?

It’s really important to our brand that we continue to share the authentic story of Thelma and our family-run business with customers, so we call that our “recipe for success” to reach new customers. We are focused on balancing, telling, and scaling our authentic story with what we know works in grocery from a traditional marketing perspective.

What are you trying to achieve with your marketing initiatives?

We are committed to authentic growth. We want to make sure that the feeling of love is felt and shared with as many people as possible across the country. However, we want to do it authentically. We’re a small and mighty team, and we’re hard workers. We have Midwest grit, and we want to make sure that even with our growth, we stay authentic to our roots and true to who we know we are.

We want to get more Thelma’s into the hands of consumers and just balance the traditional and the new from a marketing perspective to reach consumers in unique and unexpected ways with our story. This means that more people will have smiles on their faces and our delicious handmade products in their freezers.

How do you manage your retailer relationships?

We have amazing relationships with each of our retailers. Navigating this is tricky because each retailer in the grocery world operates very differently — they have their own cultures. The trust that we’ve built by having our individual 6-ounce sandwiches on the shelf has allowed us to add our new 4-packs as well. This is an indication that we are on track to achieve authentic growth together with our 6,000 retail partners.

Why did you partner with Syndigo?

When I began leading marketing at Thelma’s I realized that two areas of our organization were using Syndigo separately. We decided to consolidate all of our Syndigo interactions because we’re small and moving quickly and the way it was set up was fragmented and inconsistent. We wanted to create new efficiencies.

Our decision to work with Syndigo was driven by several factors. First, we were receiving increasing requests from retailers, retail partners, and distributors to submit our product content through Syndigo. Also, it was a priority for us to maintain control of our brand and our story and ensure that it was consistently shared with our partners. We realized that with Syndigo we could successfully accomplish them both

Can you share your experience working with the Syndigo team?

The Syndigo team across the board has been amazing. My interaction started on the sales side. Once we figured out what our contract should look like, and what all our opportunities were, we navigated through implementation and customer success. It has been wonderful.

Everyone is understanding of my urgency and my questions. They even respond if it falls into a different group, so it can be handled quickly. It has been great. Everyone has been super understanding of our needs.

We are smaller in food and beverage, so we must act very fast. However, we also have to be very efficient with every dollar that we spend. The Syndigo teams have been very understanding of that and very open to being creative in how we navigate our contract.

How do you measure your success and wins?

We celebrate our wins by the number of retailers who have our products on their shelves, and we also celebrate when we can expand our footprint with retailers to offer more SKUs.

As it relates to Syndigo, we had a recent win to be on shelf at a new retailer who asked us to submit our product information. Our broker told us that it needs X, Y, and Z, plus forms to be submitted. After hearing all this I was able to say that we are already a Syndigo client and could syndicate to that retailer right now — done, done, and done. Now we can skip all those steps and paperwork that we were previously doing every time a new retailer said yes to Thelma’s product.

Before we consolidated our Syndigo solutions, it would have taken at least a month for us to set up a new retailer relationship. Now I just click a button and the product information can be there in one day, saving weeks of time per retailer to get started. Speed to shelf is critical for us.

What do you like about Syndigo’s Syndication Network?

Most of the retailers we work with are part of Syndigo’s Syndication network. I also realized that there were a lot of retailers that we already have relationships with that we were not currently syndicating to through Syndigo at all. They were getting our information elsewhere or it was happening through email, which isn’t trackable. We weren’t optimizing syndication. Now we are.

Have any of your processes improved since using Syndigo?

We are a small team, so anytime we can do something once and have it impact multiple outputs, that’s a win for us. And so Syndigo has allowed us to do that from a people and process perspective.

I mentioned earlier that we have robust photography product imagery. All of our data matters to us and we put a lot of work and thought into that, so any time we can use a tool to ensure that that integrity is maintained, that is a huge win for us.

An interesting side win has been more team connectivity between marketing and sales. Now we’re both in the loop on what the other is doing and are connected to each other’s bodies of work on the same platform. This has been a great new benefit since our Syndigo optimization. The alignment and confidence in what sales is doing that connects with what marketing is doing makes for one big happy family.

What would Grandma Thelma think about what you’re doing? 

Grandma Thelma passed away right before her 109th birthday. One of the last things she tried was my brother’s take on her snickerdoodle. But we always say that she would really get a chuckle about all this hullabaloo that we have created over her name and her recipe. She was a very humble lady and we always say that she would laugh and just say like, wow, you really made a big deal out of all that.