My Addictive Personality Manifests Itself in Odd Ways

My addictive personality manifests itself in odd ways.

In 2019 I had a thesis about bread. My friend Keith owned a bread biz here in DFW.

"Keith, what if you pointed your retail customers towards your online store, to sell more bread without a middleman?"

"I don't  have an online store."

"I know, what if I fixed that?"

Back to my addictive personality. When I have a new marketing idea, I literally cannot help but test it.

In this case, I wanted to see what would happen if we inserted ads into each loaf of bread that Keith sold in store.

You see, his bread is only sold in DFW and Austin-area stores, and it's been around for 29 years. So people all over the country had moved away from Texas (Texpats), but still had a craving for Heartland Bread.

People buy Buc-ee's online because they only have 52 stores in far-flung areas. I thought the same would be true with Heartland.

I was so dang curious what the conversion rate would be. Has this ever been done before? I had to know.

A month later I was standing in an industrial bakery, training a dozen line workers how to insert bookmarks into bread bags.

Why bookmarks? Because it was the only printable ad that Visaprint had that fit perfectly.

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This was the bookmark:

He was selling about 10,000 loaves per week, so I ordered around 40,000 bookmarks for a 1 month test.

I threw up a Shopify site with some nice pictures.

What happened? Orders started rolling in! Not just orders, but orders that were about 200% more profitable, because he was selling direct to consumer.

It wasn't a huge bump to his top line, but it definitely boosted his bottom line considerably.

Then Covid hit, and his orders exploded. His website was the only place that customers could even find his bread!

Being an addict, I couldn't stop with Heartland. Me and a partner took on dozens of fother ood customers, started a logistics company called Send Eats, and shipped millions of items all over the world.

But that's a story for another day, let's go back to Heartland.

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After Covid died down the company ran into some trouble, and Keith announced to the world in July that Heartland was closing down on Sept. 1st, 2023, with this post:

Sept. 1 came along and Heartland was still alive, but not doing great.

Keith and I had lunch that month and discussed turnaround options. He had some promising things and big customers in the pipeline, but he wasn't sure that he could make it through.

I offered to send out a post here on X to see if we could drum anything up. I was absolutely gutted that this amazing brand and product was on it's last legs. It's legitimately the best bread you've ever eaten.

The post attracted 240k views, 48 DMs and 8 offers! I was thrilled that so many people saw the promise in this great brand.

I'm stoked to announce that the deal officially closed yesterday, and Heartland Bread is here to stay!

The buyer would prefer to not be known for now, but he's someone many NBA fans might recognize.

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I want to say thank you.

Thank you for believing in Heartland and for sharing that post with your friends. Your help saved his business.

Also, thank you to the haters in the comments, as your engagement shared the post even further.

Heartland can be found in DFW and Austin area Sprouts, Whole Foods, Kroger and Albertsons, with more to come.

And of course, you can buy it online at HeartlandBreadCo.com. 😃🍞

Thanks for reading.