Helping Ocean Mist Farms go from Farming to Food Company.
Ocean Mist Farms has been growing artichokes since 1924. Four generations, the same families, started in Castroville, CA and have since expanded. That's the kind of legacy that earns you real estate in the produce aisle, a legacy most shoppers never think twice about. It's also, eventually, a trap.
Because being known for one crop stops being enough at some point. The next move— building a value-add portfolio or becoming a brand shoppers reach for over the competition— asks a farming company to become something it's never had to be: a food company.
That shift got harder to pull off these last couple of years, with food safety scrutiny raising the bar on every new SKU. We worked with Ocean Mist to make that leap with Heartichokes and Roastables, their fresh-cut, ready-to-cook lines.
Knowing your buyer isn't the same as growing your potential.
The consumer research (which focused on market and shopper intelligence) was clear on who was already buying value-add produce: a woman in her mid-40s to 60s, working full time, running a household, already sold on convenience and already loyal to brands she trusted. We called her the “Natural Nourisher.” It also described the audience Ocean Mist already had, and a strategy built only for the audience you already own doesn't leave anywhere to grow.
So the work took what the research confirmed and built past it: hold onto that buyer, and engineer a positioning that could also bring in an audience the brand didn't have yet. You can measure who's buying today. Deciding who you want to show up at checkout in three years takes a point of view that research can inform but never quite hand you.
Our positioning effort was anchored in what we knew and built for where we see buyers and opportunities for tomorrow and beyond. We knew Ocean Mist needed to break out of the sea of sameness in value-add produce, where every bag makes some version of the same three promises and none of them are memorable. “No Shame in a Shortcut” became more than a positioning line. It became the tagline and the foundation the entire value-add portfolio was built on.
The first place we told this story was on the package itself.
Produce packaging runs on a formula: earthy greens, a product photo, a clear window to view the product, color-blocked by variety. Efficient, but feels like everyone’s signed a homogenization pact— stand ten value-add bags next to each other in a cold case, and you'd need the logo to tell them apart.
So the Heartichokes and Roastables packaging borrowed from aisles Ocean Mist had never competed in before. The designs that make a snack bag pop off a shelf. How pasta and condiment brands use color and type to signal flavor before a shopper reads a word. Bringing those cues into produce was the first signal, before a single ad ran, that Ocean Mist was ready to play in this category on the same terms as the brands already living there.
Visual identity is world-building, and world-building takes perspective.
Flannel shirt. A field. Sunrise light. That's the default photography for a vertically integrated grower, and it's not wrong exactly; it's just table stakes (and screams farming). Every brand in the category owns a version of it, which means none of them do.
Heritage photography stayed part of the story. It just wasn't the best part.
The content that actually moved people was recipe-driven and community-built, made by creators who treated Roastables and Heartichokes like ingredients in someone's actual week rather than a product on a pedestal.
A 20+ creator influencer program ran alongside paid media, and one Roastables recipe reel alone pulled nearly 100K organic views on Instagram. Across both product lines, creators posted 91 times across 36 accounts, reaching a combined 2.83 million followers before a dollar of paid amplification touched it.
The first four weeks of the integrated campaign moved real numbers: 16 million Meta impressions, 65,000 clicks; 4.7 million digital video impressions with 8,900 clicks and 12,400 site visits. Organic social generated 801,000 impressions in 2026 at a 4.1% average engagement rate. Spoiler alert: it was the recipe, culture and community content carrying that number, not the heritage posts.
Here's the part that actually matters to a produce buyer, though: site traffic went up 35x from January to March. "Find Roastables," the store locator click, the moment someone decides they want this product badly enough to go find it, went up 18x in that same window. Roastables sales projections nearly tripled, with key retailers signing on for multiple years.
The retail floor is the only vote that counts.
Positioning and packaging only matter if the people deciding what goes on the shelf believe in them too. We sat down with retail buyers to walk them through what Heartichokes and Roastables would look like in the new packaging before any of it shipped, bringing them into the story early instead of asking them to react cold to a finished product later.
Industry publications covered the relaunch at the International Fresh Produce Association Global Produce & Floral Show (IFPA) and the Southern Exposure Produce Council showcase (SEPC) as it happened, which mattered less as press and more as a signal that buyers were already talking about the brand before those meetings. The real point of those meetings wasn't the meetings themselves. It was getting people who'd looked at Ocean Mist as a legacy artichoke company to see it as something else entirely.
Strategy is about making choices, not a spreadsheet.
The research told us who was already buying. Deciding to build past that, betting the packaging on cues borrowed from categories Ocean Mist had never touched, choosing recipe content over heritage content—none of that came from a dashboard. Every one of those was a choice, made by people willing to be wrong about it.
The harder part isn't making the calls. It's sticking with them long enough to find out if they worked, and staying the course without abandoning the thesis the first time a number dips. Produce hasn't historically been where grocery innovation happens. Walk the rest of the store and it's obvious how much room is still sitting untouched in this aisle. Closing that gap takes more than a good idea. It takes the fortitude to keep operating differently once the idea gets uncomfortable.
That's the real lesson from Ocean Mist's value-add build: know exactly who you are, know exactly where your growth has to come from and have the discipline to see both all the way through. Most companies can name their growth sectors. Fewer are honest with themselves about whether they have the fortitude to get there alone, and that's usually the moment outside counsel is worth the call.
We’re heading to IFPA this October and would love to talk with those who have similar innovation ambitions. We’d love to set up some time to chat or walk the floor together.
