Sweetgreen is giving farmers the celebrity treatment, online and in person.
Dan Drake, a goat farmer and second-generation owner of Drake Family Farms in Southern California, is the newest face of the brand’s “Faces of the Farm” content series, which kicked off in the spring with fellow Sweetgreen supplier and potato farmer Alex Weiser.
The latest iteration of the series centers on Drake Family Farms, which supplies goat cheese that will be a mainstay of Sweetgreen’s upcoming seasonal menu. A campaign supporting the series officially launched last week on Wednesday with a teaser billboard of Drake in Times Square, while a video of Drake sharing his story and his farm went live online today. This weekend, Sweetgreen will host a “Goat Mart” meet-and-greet activation with Drake and his baby goats at its Silverlake location in Los Angeles.
“These farmers are heroes,” Jonathan Neman, co-founder and CEO of Sweetgreen, told us. “They’re so important to the food we grow, and they are the stars that make the food delicious, so we wanted to give them a bigger stage.”
We spoke with Neman and Nicolas Jammet, co-founder and chief concept officer of Sweetgreen, about why the brand opted for real spokespeople over celebrities and the story it’s aiming to tell in the process.
Keeping it real
Sweetgreen has worked with small and local farmers since its early days in DC, when Neman said he developed connections with farmers at the Dupont Circle Farmers Market. Many partners, he said, are ones the brand has been working with for a decade or longer, including Drake Family Farms, and part of the campaign strategy is to inform customers of the brand’s commitment to continue doing so as it scales and works to differentiate itself from competitors.
“It’s not a ‘slop bowl,’” Neman said. “We’re not calling up a distributor and having the food come in. We’re working with real farmers and chefs.”
The marketing effort is also focused on projecting transparency and showing customers where their food is coming from, Jammet added.
“When you come to Sweetgreen and you order goat cheese or you get peaches, we do source them differently,” he said. “It does, we think, make a difference.”
The campaign shows the reciprocal nature of the brand’s partnerships. In Drake’s video, he says that Sweetgreen is “bankrolling the farm,” after mentioning his past need to sell goats to stay afloat. He concludes the video by saying that if everyone gets “three scoops of goat cheese at Sweetgreen, maybe [he] can keep all 3,000” goats.
Celeb treatment
While Sweetgreen is focusing on non-celebrity spokespeople for this campaign, it’s worked with celebrities in the past, including tennis pro Naomi Osaka, singer and actress Reneé Rapp, Phoenix Suns guard Devin Booker, and chef David Chang. Neman said there’s room for both types of partnerships in the brand’s strategy because they serve different purposes.
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“There’s the authenticity of working with someone who actually is supplying our food and telling a big story around that, and then there are times where we want to tell a bigger story with Naomi or Devin around performance, or with chefs in…creating new menu items,” he said. “They each have a different angle.”
“Faces of the Farm” is a social-first campaign, Jammet said, with a focus on Instagram and YouTube. Neman said the creative approach to the series was inspired, in part, by brands like Patagonia and Nike and their work highlighting everyday people and athletes. This was the first time Sweetgreen experimented with bringing the campaign to a large OOH location like Times Square, which Neman said was not only a way of celebrating Drake but also surprising the Times Square audience.
“You see a lot of things in the Times Square billboards, but you don’t usually see a goat farmer,” he said.
Drake seems to agree. In a video shared with Marketing Brew, he shared his reaction to being in New York for the first time to see the ad. “Certainly one of the greatest events in my life,” he said.
As for who the next farmer to grace Times Square could be? Jammet said Sweetgreen has a couple of longtime farming partners in mind. Neman said they’re considering not only the signature products that Sweetgreen is proud of but also the people who are good on camera with a story to tell, like Drake.
“He’s someone who needs to be put on the screen,” Jammet agreed. “He’s such a star.”