From 1% to 11% Brand Awareness: How Wecook Built a Brand Worth Caring About

Matthew Morein

If this company disappeared tomorrow, what would the world be losing? And like, if the answer is nothing, well, then maybe you have some deeper thinking to do.

Bryan Mahoney

You can achieve overnight success from a growth point of view if you have enough money and you're willing to spend it. But is that. Are you building something that is resilient? Are you building something that is durable?

Matthew Morein

Are we really just giving them a meal that's ready in two minutes, or are we giving them the magic of meal time in a way that is much more frictionless? We went from aided brand awareness in Ontario about 1% to 11. We want to fight against the idea of volume at this point and really go after quality, especially when it comes to storytelling.

Bryan Mahoney

Something that has been on my mind lately, and one of the reasons that I'm thrilled you're joining me here today, is that brands that are winning in subscription commerce, and I've been in subscription commerce for sort of 15 years, are the ones not just with the best product, although that matters and we'll get into that. But it's the brands that have figured out how to create content that reminds people that they've made a good choice, not just on the first purchase, but on that 10th purchase. And increasingly, those that are kind of leaning into an omnichannel world. So how do I tell a great story, show up where my customers are to keep my customers showing back up? I think that's genuinely hard. I think that is exceptionally hard in a category, say, like meal kits or meal delivery, where it can be crowded, customers can be price sensitive, and it's built on this notion of habit over sheer novelty. So my guest today, Matthew Morein, has been living inside this tension at one of the most interesting food brands in Canada. We cook. He also happens to be a Montrealer. He also happens to be in New York. We have an awful lot in common, so there's a lot to unpack. So welcome back to another episode of the brilliant Commerce podcast where I get a chance to sit down. My favorite thing to do is to sit down in person with some of the brightest minds in commerce behind some of what I call iconic or next to be iconic brands. I think WeCook is definitely on the path to becoming iconic, certainly in Canada. So, Matthew, thanks for getting on a plane this morning and being here with me in New York. Welcome to the pod.

Matthew Morein

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Bryan Mahoney

My first question is normally, where do I find you today? Because we get to do these over zoom. More often than not, I know where I'm finding you. Today I'm finding you in New York. But where would we find you most of the time?

Matthew Morein

Most of the time you probably find me working on WeCookMeals.ca and of course, know, working on all of the content and pieces that bring that brand world to life.

Bryan Mahoney

Yeah. And born and raised in Montreal.

Matthew Morein

Yep, born and raised in Montreal. Quick stint in Ottawa when I was a teenager, and then rushed back to Montreal as quickly as I could when I was going to university.

Bryan Mahoney

Cool. I lived here in. In New York for about six years, and I grew up in Montreal as well. And I always thought of Montreal as sort of being New York's little cousin. There's an awful lot of similarities in terms of, you know, it's a city on an island. It's a. It's a city with an amazing food culture. WeCook is only available today in Canada. How much of the Montreal story where there is that strong food culture sort of underpins some of you, where you guys are today?

Matthew Morein

Certainly when I joined, I think the brand expression was really convenience, convenience. And that made sense for the time. Those were the USPs that were like constantly being kind of re hammered into the customer, ready in two minutes, delivered straight to your door. And I think when looking at the broader marketplace and what our competition was doing and what were the brand expressions within our competitive set, everybody was kind of speaking the same language and it was all really functional. And so in an effort to differentiate from, you know, the rest of the marketplace, we looked at, okay, how can we develop a more emotional connection to our brand? And the brand territory that we landed on was really rooted very much in Montreal. The joie de vivre. Obviously, you know, the food scene which you mentioned, our executive chef comes from the Joe Beef group. He was the executive chef of the Joe beef group for 10 years. His name is Gabrielle de Capot. His team also, you know, pedigree of some of Montreal's finest fine dining restaurants. And so I think that, like, joy of eating and the magic of mealtime was really something we wanted to bring in to the brand expression of WeCook. So Montreal is a big part of it, I think.

Bryan Mahoney

Yeah, I love that. One of the reasons I was excited to talk to you in preparation for this, I did a little bit of homework on your career. I wouldn't describe it as a direct path to get into meals. You've had a really interesting background. So what led you to WeCook?

Matthew Morein

I studied art and then quickly realized I didn't see a future as a studio artist. And I had kind of dabbled in music while I was studying art in university. And, you know, we're talking about, like 2004, 2005 thereof. MySpace started making music. Ended up kind of forming a group with some other musicians in Montreal, putting on some parties. People would kind of. I'd come down here, we'd book people to play in Montreal. And then some of the music I was making started to travel further. And, you know, one day I woke up to a MySpace message asking me if I wanted to come DJ in Hong Kong. Wow. And so I spent about five years globetrotting, making music and DJing, and eventually kind of realized I was better at the fun side of it than the business side of it. And if I wanted to kind of settle down, I might, you know, look elsewhere. And my roommate that at the time had a clothing boutique in Montreal, he was like, why don't we start an e-comm component to this business? He was buying clothing and accessories, a lot of jewelry in Asia. And I thought, well, you know, I know how to work a camera. Like, how hard can it be? And this is like 2008. Shopify isn't popular yet. Everything has to be done.

Bryan Mahoney

Shopify wasn't an option yet.

Matthew Morein

No, it wasn't an option. Everything had to be built from scratch, essentially. I didn't know anything about email marketing. You know, we had no customer database. I think we just kind of put it on our Facebook or whatever, like. Or, you know, gave out a flyer at the store. You know, when somebody walked in, at least he had that, like, brick and mortar footprint. But it was a slog. It was really hard. We had our friends come in, take pictures of them wearing the clothes. They come in hungover. Montreal, like, it was like, okay, this is really difficult. Started kind of focusing more on the jewelry. Smaller items, easier to photograph. Didn't need a person to necessarily, like, model rings and necklaces and such. But it was really hard. And after about three years and luckily I was still DJing, so I had income otherwise, because that business made no money, I decided to get a job and joined a company called Le Château, which is like a very long standing at that point in time. Kind of like the original fast fashion retailer in some respects. They were like pioneers of going to Europe, seeing what was coming down the Runway and knocking it off. And there was.

Bryan Mahoney

Had that Le Château black dress.

Matthew Morein

Oh, yeah. It was like the spot. Also, if you talk to, like, disco DJs and people like that original store, they had store one on St. Catherine, which is now Koss, I believe, was like a hub. Apparently. They would have people playing records and, like, you'd hear the music that you were at the store during the day that you'd be later hearing at, like, the disco club at night. And I kind of cut my teeth there, first as a stylist, and then given that their business was really dominated on the women's side, it was like 6 or 7, 8% of it was menswear. They needed somebody wanted to kind of champion menswear. And so I kind of transitioned from a stylist into, you know, working in marketing. And then I joined Psycho Bunny when it was kind of in the process of being acquired by the group in Montreal that eventually, you know, bought it and have grown it. And at that point in time, it was about seven people in the back of the know, a bigger office of what was Thread Collective that was doing a lot of licensed apparel, Pajar, Mark, Echo, all of that stuff. And it was no ecom, no mono brand stores.

Bryan Mahoney

Yeah.

Matthew Morein

And we just started building re platform on Shopify, started opening stores, you know, following where the e-comm traffic was obviously the brand very endemic to Miami, South Florida, Bright colors, the bunny. And I was there for about six years, led brand and marketing, opened 86 stores across the US and Canada, and learned a whole ton in the process.

Bryan Mahoney

Yeah, I mean, what a journey. I remember those early days of. I remember before it was in e-commerce, it was catalog commerce. And so were launching live sites where we would be introducing that season's line to customers and trying to drive them into stores. And then as the e-commerce market became so nascent, I remember, yeah, it was a slog. Like, just to get 20 products online sometimes would feel like. Would feel like two weeks. And at the same time, it felt exciting. Not too dissimilar from today where you sort of feel like you can do anything. It was hard, but kind of rewarding. Like, were learning it together. Customers were learning the behavior at the same time that we, either as an agency or retailers, were figuring out how to show up on sort of this new channel. And so you really saw that whole thing. And I'm curious when you made the transition from or me back then, like, marketing and brand were like, very closely knit and sort of put together. And then went through this era where there was brand marketing and there was performance marketing. It was very specific to very different disciplines. It feels like today they're sort of coming back together. I'm just sort of like, curious to get your point of view on how you've seen that evolve and like where you are excited to see it go at. At WeCook Meals. It sounds like you had to do an awful lot of brand work when you came in.

Matthew Morein

Yeah, I think at Psycho Bunny a big portion or like of the heavy lifting of customer acquisition was done by opening stores. So like you have a branded experience somebody can walk into. We're going into the like a malls all across the US and eventually Canada. We're trying to get you know, lease lines at the 50 yard mark is. Was the internal terminology, you know high traffic. And so we would see a spike in web traffic even when we just put a hoarding up in a market saying like store coming soon. And so that was kind of played a big role in terms of like acquisition certainly for the stores but also on e-comm. But certainly as a brand guy at heart. Like my focus was always more on the brand side. I'm less of a performance marketer in terms of my experience and knowledge. Obviously we feed what ends up going on paid channels as well. But certainly at Psycho Bunny what was in my mind a very brand led organization. And we did a lot of exciting brand campaigns and initiatives over the years to come to WeCook which had really been like a performance only company. I think there was a realization at some point that like there's whether by a shift in what works and or to your point in order to build something that's a little bit more resilient and that has the opportunity to open doors and new channels which we're now exploring. I think it was important to kind of view the importance of really having both. And I think research shows evidently that brand activity can increase performance marketing effectiveness as well. But it was, there was a lot to do. There was some internal kind of education around. Sure, this is what brand building is. And I think there was a sense initially a brand is kind of just what it looks like, you know on the box or the email. And like we can build so much more than this and we can try to tell like what I said earlier, like a more emotional story. Like people need to connect more than just this is the meals that I get that you know, I can peel off the thing and it's ready in two minutes or I can eat it right away. Like what are we providing? Yes, we're saying you don't have to cook, you don't have to clean. But like we're also delivering the magic of mealtime and giving you more of the ability to enjoy that by not having to necessarily do the prep. And the other thing is, like, our customers, it's not like they never cook. Like, we just sent out a survey this morning. Over 30% of them cook basically every day. It's like, it's not a customer base that is replacing all of their meals. It's a couple lunches here, a couple of dinners there. They don't have the time. We're there for them, and the rest of the time, they do cook. So the idea that we're, like, completely solving all of their meals, I think, also is. Is not really the reality. And so how do we develop products that can potentially help even when they are cooking?

Bryan Mahoney

Right, right.

Matthew Morein

So like, sous vide products, proteins that are already in a sauce ready to eat, and they just have to, like, add sides or what can they do with it? You know, we have a. A General Tao chicken that's ready to eat. We made banh mi, you know, sandwiches with them the other day. You can put. Obviously put it over rice, but like, opening the door to kind of different creative expression through food and, you know, opportunities.

Bryan Mahoney

Yeah, I can't. And I imagine, like, that doesn't happen without brand. And I. I do think that more founders, more marketers, more operators need to. They need to develop that internal courage to be able to invest in. In brand marketing. Like, there's sometimes there's this feeling of, like, oh, this brand is an overnight success, but when you start peeling back the layers, you realize, like, they've been at it for a little while. And I think that I have always seen those iconic brands, those ones that have invested in becoming a durable company, getting to know their customers. You do it through brand marketing. Like, yes, it's true. You can. You can achieve overnight success from a growth point of view if you have enough money and you're willing to spend it. But is that. Are you building something that is resilient? If you're. Are you building something that is durable? And as you talk about, not necessarily category expansion, but you created a product that people start to use in a different way. Like, maybe I'm using this sous vide protein as a part of a meal that I'm doing, and I reach for it, and I'm going to share that content because I have a relationship with the brand. So I would be curious, you know, what advice you would have for someone who is moving into a brand role for the first time and maybe needs to advocate to some of their leadership group that we're going to invest in something that is. Let's acknowledge it sometimes difficult to measure, but that the payoff two years down the road, three years down the road, four years down the road, that gives you permission to expand doors, to expand channels, to expand usage of the product. That's when you start to realize the benefits of that durability and the resilience. So, yeah, I mean, big question, but I'd be curious, like, what advice you would have for someone who got, I got to go in there and I got to pound the table and fight for this.

Matthew Morein

Yeah. So I've definitely been in the room where you're trying to advocate for a big brand spend. And the question's like, okay, so how are we going to measure if this is a success? Well, we're not. You just need to believe in the process. Yeah, but I think also, I think sometimes people get trapped in this idea that investing in brand means out of home, it means billboards, it means like a PR stunt or some, like, very expensive campaign. And I think the fundamentals of brand is just doing the work, trying to understand, like, what your unique value proposition is. Like, I've, I really love that question. Like, if this company disappeared tomorrow, what would the world be losing?

Bryan Mahoney

Yeah.

Matthew Morein

And like, if the answer is nothing, well, then maybe you have some, you know, deeper thinking to do. Right. So, like, yeah, because there's a product. Right. But then, like, what is the brand on top of that, like, deliver to you? We recently had an off site and I asked the room, I was like, what, you know, everybody in the room. What's, what's a brand? What's a brand? And I always show, and I use this a lot when were going around Psycho Bunny stores trying to, like, educate store staff to be able to, like, deliver the brand experience and try to be excited about it. And I always show the swoosh and the siren, the Starbucks siren. And I, and I say, like, look, I show you this and like, I don't need to explain it. You know exactly what it means. I mean, anybody can be an athlete or it means coffee can be, like, an affordable luxury that, like, everyone can participate in.

Bryan Mahoney

That's on every corner.

Matthew Morein

Or consistency. Yeah. And so what does this brand mean? And like, what do you want people to, like, feel or, like, have in their heads as the, like, positioning or idea about this brand when they interact with it, and then understand that, like, every single thing we do is going to have an impact on that. You want to get in as high as you can because it's so easy for that impression to fall it's so hard to like climb up, back up that ladder of somebody's impression of you. So it needn't always be a big multimillion dollar brand campaign, which if you can't afford, great. But it's also like, let's build the fundamentals, like, who are we? Who's our customer? How do we want them to see us? And then how do we kind of start to make incremental steps towards brand building? It's not something you can do overnight and I've seen that mistake or the perception there be had or something that you can do once and then be done with it. Oh, we did brand. We're done. Our brand is finished. And you know, we're seeing it at WeCook now with having to kind of rework or re question and revalidate the work that we did when I arrived that was really like direct to consumer focused. And now say, okay, but what if we're going to retail? What if we're going to, you know, go after businesses and like have meal delivery in office buildings because a lot of them don't necessarily have cafeterias. What about different types of retail and different use cases? Is the brand that we built for D2C still makes sense for all of these new channels? So I think also knowing that it's made out of clay, not out of cement, and it needs to be something that you keep evolving, keep working on, and it needn't necessarily be like these big swings. You need to fire bullets and make sure that they're hitting before you start to fire cannonballs, essentially.

Bryan Mahoney

I like the clay analogy. It's interesting because you're not going to fundamentally change it, but you can evolve it over time.

Matthew Morein

And it needs to stretch. Yeah, your brand needs to stretch into the new places that you might need to take it or want to take.

Bryan Mahoney

And maybe your customers stretch you there or maybe you sort of on certain moments you have to stretch your customers to be where you sort of want them to be. And totally if they're. I like, I think about brand as a thing that you want to be friends with sometimes. Like a brand is really doing a great job. If I'm proud to wear it, if I'm proud to introduce it to someone.

Matthew Morein

Yeah.

Bryan Mahoney

Maybe I'm not hiding the fact that I, I bought this and I'm actually sort of saying, hey, I put this meal together and you know what helped me. We cook. Like that's a kind of a, that's sort of a cool story. And I think as I, again, did my research leading up to this. I think you guys have done a great job telling stories as, like any good Montrealer. I'm a Montreal Canadiens fan. I, I, of course, I noticed the partnership with PK Subban. And so there's the Joe Beef. That story extends well beyond Montreal. That's like one of Canada's best known restaurants and restaurant groups and sort of having that sort of like anchoring the food story and then having, you know, one of the Montreal Canadians most recognizable faces in the last 15 years as a brand ambassador. How big a chance was that, that you all took sort of going and having PK be a part of this because, you know, he was a big part of the Montreal food scene when I was there.

Matthew Morein

Yeah, yeah. Definitely known in many establishments. Look, I think, you know, I'm a Habs fan at heart and a PK fan at heart, so there was obviously, I would never, like, be like, we should work with this person if I didn't also think they were, you know, really great for the brand. I think for us being from, you know, Quebec, being headquartered and founded in Montreal and wanting to expand beyond the borders of Quebec, there's always this challenge where, language aside, you know, how do we find somebody who could be a port, who could be an ambassador, who will not alienate our existing customer base at home, but is also, you know, a known entity outside of Quebec? And I think PK kind of just fit perfectly. He's from Ontario. He played in Montreal. He played, you know, had a bit of French, you know, and were able to kind of work with him on getting him to, you know, be the face of our brand campaign in both languages. And I think people appreciated that in.

Bryan Mahoney

Front of a camera.

Matthew Morein

He is a natural in front of the camera. English first take every time. Yeah, French took a couple tries, but he was a good sport. And, yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's so interesting shooting somebody who's media trained and who's on tv.

Bryan Mahoney

Yeah.

Matthew Morein

Every week versus somebody who's a model. And, you know, normally the most of the content we do, if we're going to work with models, they're not speaking to camera anyway. But anybody who does need to speak to camera or like, even in a, you know, a shooting like this, it's. It's wild how on, like, he can just turn it on and same thing. We're working with Marie-Pierre Morin. Yeah, she's like, amazing in front of the camera. We always have way more time than we thought, you know, we would need to shoot things with her because she's just, like, nailing everything first try. But I think it was. Look, he's really charismatic. He loves food. He was excited about the idea of, like, building dishes with our chef. You know, we got on the phone with him, started talking about meal ideas, and that's a really fun part of the job, you know, collaborating with people. And he started telling stories of food that his mother used to make when he was a kid. And so were like, you know, just jamming out. And look, I think he was. He was a great ambassador and fun to work with, and he fit that kind of ability to appeal, I think, both to people within Quebec and. And beyond.

Bryan Mahoney

And I think there's more good lessons to pull out of that as we think about how obviously, like affiliates and influencers, that's an important part of anyone's growth strategy nowadays. But as I bring it back to brand, there's an. It sounds like there's an authenticity there in the partnership with pk. Like, he wanted to collaborate on the dishes you obviously created with him for him. Is that something. Was that, like, an important consideration going into finding an ambassador? Is that something you would recommend that people do? It's not just about someone who's willing to say good things about your product, but someone that, yeah, wants to be a part of the brand building story too. Just, like, looking for more good advice that you can offer up to others.

Matthew Morein

Yeah. I mean, and that's one. That's. It's. It's not always repeatable or replicable. And I think, you know, thinking about Marie-Pierre Morin, she was a customer first, so, like, her authentic, like, love for the brand and, like, she'll be. She eats it every single week. So, like, we'll get on set with her and she's like, oh, by the way, this thing, you know, I loved this dish. This dish. Maybe tweak it a little bit and, you know, we're obviously all ears. For somebody who has, like, a lot of kind of like, experience interacting with the product itself, feeds it to her family and is generous with her time and, you know, generous with her. Her posting on social and the like. But certainly, even if you don't have that kind of existing customer relationship, I think you need to have an initial conversation and kind of gauge the vibe, see how excited they are. I've definitely done partnerships in the past or big campaigns with people who were more interested in the paycheck than. Than the actual, you know, ambassadorship, let's call it. But, and again, it's not always the easiest thing to find, but when you find it like multiplies what you end up getting out of a relationship like that, like by many fold because of their authentic interest and kind of love for your brand, especially if they use the product. So it's certainly something as we're continuing to build new partnerships and have new ambassadors that we're looking to replicate as much as we can. And so when you kind of get on the phone with somebody, and especially people love talking about food, so it's a bit of a passion place to start from. But when people are really excited about the idea of building a dish together, I think it's a good initial sign. And so one of the things to look for, I think, is how excited somebody is in the onset. And yeah, it could be a sign of like how willing they're going to be to really deliver, you know, in the partnership.

Bryan Mahoney

I mean, I looked at an awful lot of the content. I mean, I want to say congratulations. It seemed like, it seemed like a genuinely fun thing to do. I can imagine measuring the halo effect that a part of any of those ambassadorships could have on the brand would be difficult, but I would also assume that measuring the performance side of it, like, what sort of lift you all saw once you rolled that content out. Was this a. Is this like an ROI positive initiative for you guys? Like, is it something that you're excited to do again or. This was like a, this was a good experiment for us and now we're, we're trying other things. Maybe it's like opening up physical spaces or that.

Matthew Morein

Yeah. Look, I think like I said earlier, I don't think there's any one silver bullet for brand. I think it definitely had an impact. It wasn't without investment. You know, we shot this brand with him. You know, we made other parts of it, you know, affordable. We shot part of it at my house. We shot some of our employees instead of models. There's ways to kind of like round out the whole thing. But ultimately, you know, it was on broadcast TV. Was on connected TV. We did an out of home campaign with TikTok. They have the Out of Phone program. We did that in Dundas Square in Toronto. Look, it had an impact. We went from aided brand awareness In Ontario about 1% to 11.

Bryan Mahoney

Wow.

Matthew Morein

After, you know, that campaign kind of ran its course. So certain elements of it. Yes. For sure. Like, all of these things have an impact, but again, like, it's. You could. We could do that. And then if we don't keep building our brand, we're going to just go right back down. And so certainly we're excited. We're working with Sangeeta Patel this year from Entertainment Tonight. She's really excited to be building some dishes with us. So we're gonna go toronto and shoot with her in a couple weeks. Those meals are gonna come out in June. So what can I say? Would we do it again? Probably, yeah. You know what I mean? I think it's like, every time there's learnings, but, you know, we'll shift things. We'll do certain things the same, certain things a little bit different. That was, you know, our first time doing something like that. We applied those learnings to working with Marie-Pierre Morin. Now we're taking even more learnings towards working with Sangeeta. And then I think outside of that, one of the other things that was, I think, really impactful last year was we did a collaboration with Schwartz's so iconic Montreal smoked meat. So smoked meat was already popular kind of whenever we would put it in dishes on the menu. But to be able to do it with the most recognizable name in smoked meat, I think was. Was obviously something we're really proud of. But what really was impactful was an event we did in Toronto where we brought Schwartz's toronto for a day. So I think, again, not always the most replicable thing, because after we did this, I was like, okay, what's the next one gonna be? But if you can take an iconic institution and bring it somewhere where people all know about it, the people who, when they visit Montreal, will line up for hours to get one of those sandwiches. We took over a diner. We, like, put shorts of signage out front. We got the word out in the media before were there, and there were 500 people lined up down the street.

Bryan Mahoney

These are the things that are really fun. And as I think about the category that you're operating in, bringing it back to those pounding the table to make those brand investments, having permission to work with the Schwartzes, having permission to get PK Subban excited about creating this content, you're not in the sexiest category out there. You're in a difficult category. And we'll segue to that in just a sec. But I think, like, I would point to that again as evidence that if you build the brand the right way, you give yourself permission to go out and create these Opportunities, and even to think, like, what is the next ambitious thing we're going to go and do? Because if you established a brand that people are okay attaching their own personal brand to, where it can become accretive, where it's not just transactional, we can tell those stories together. And these are the things that are difficult to measure sometimes. But if we want to talk about building a durable business, whether it's online or offline or it's everywhere our customers are, I think these are the things that matter, and more people need to talk about them. I would like to segue it to the category. So you're in the meal delivery, not necessarily meal kit, but meal kit adjacent category, and also subscription. These are two categories that a lot of people have tried and haven't necessarily been successful at. Is that something that you thought of before joining the team? And I'd be just super curious, like, what surprised you the most about moving into a category that, I mean, has some challenges. There's. There's a lot of people that have tried before you. Yeah. Haven't necessarily been successful.

Matthew Morein

Yeah. I was really excited about food. I love food. You know, as somebody who came from fashion, I think, and. And was a musician before then, and whose primary interest is connecting brands to culture, fashion made a lot of sense. It's, It's. It's already kind of very close to music, to art, to things that I. I really love. But I think that food is another, you know, look, food has become ascendant as far as, like, popular culture is concerned. When we're doing the brand research, you know, broad market research. When I joined WeCook, and we're looking at, like, okay, how are we gonna re. Retool this brand? One stat that popped out that I was, like, completely at first amazed by, and then kind of like, no, I would do the same. It was 60% of millennials would rather attend a food festival than a music festival.

Bryan Mahoney

Wow.

Matthew Morein

And so. And just like, look at, like, you know, I mean, perhaps not everybody's Instagram feed is the same, but, like, mine is, you know, abundant with food content. And you see, you know, food creators that have grown to have millions of followers, then they get book deals, they're opening restaurants. Like, food is exciting, it's fun. It's one of the great pleasures of being a human being. And everybody has to eat.

Bryan Mahoney

Yeah.

Matthew Morein

But you're right, it is a tough category. You know, I was excited about the idea of being able to bring brand into an org that had been really performance and kind of like selling proposition focused. Okay, but what's the value? Yeah, what's the value Prop? Like, are we really just giving them a meal that's ready in two minutes, or are we giving them the magic of meal time in a way that is much more frictionless? And you know, one of the other things I think people have, not just.

Bryan Mahoney

A subtle change, by the way, like, that's very powerful. When I think about what it's going to take to get a customer to come back or what you're trying to achieve to make subscription work where I don't have to constantly reacquire you and reacquire you, it's because you have been able to deliver on that promise of magic of meal time.

Matthew Morein

Totally. And especially within a category that's really been driven by like, acquisition offers, deals that like, run out and then so like the churn is rampant. People are jumping around from deal to deal. And I probably didn't know or do a ton of research on the like, marketplace at large before I joined, so that might have come as somewhat of a surprise. But I think that being able to bring this refreshed expression of a brand and have a board and leadership that believe in it and are kind of like, wow, okay, we finally realize like, what this is all about and who we are and it's like, it's about enjoyment, Ready to eat, made to enjoy. And like, this is who we are, this is who we want to be to our customer. I think has been, you know, a great experience for me. And I think, look, brand building has helped open doors to. Now we're, you know, like I said, expanding into retail before we built, you know, did work on the brand, Would that have been possible? If we're an unknown entity, would people be willing to have us come and, you know, ply our wares and propose products to them? But the chef that we have and the team that we have in terms of ops and our ability to innovate and create new products, I think is really like a big part of that flywheel. Right? And trying to now open new doors. It's been amazing to see, like, how quickly things that are ideas can become, you know, real products in real life in what I think a very short development cycles. And the logistics of it is like, really impressive to see. You know, like a facility that. A federally licensed facility that operates 24/7 and produces like 90,000 meals a week.

Bryan Mahoney

Yeah, it's.

Matthew Morein

It's wild. So it's cool to be able to create new products. The menu changes every week. So we can do these collaborations. We've got a bunch of them coming out this year with some exciting brands. And yeah, it's very different than fashion, but the fundamentals of brand building are the same. And I think we're finding ways to innovate and kind of continue the growth of WeCook despite headwinds in the direct to consumer, like, subscription market.

Bryan Mahoney

I mean, it sounds like you're doing an awful lot of the things that like, forget the category, forget the industry for a second. But if you unpack what a durable company or resilient company or a company that is now iconic has done, it's. They've invested in brand, they have innovated not for the sake of innovation, but innovation because you want to continue to sort of bring new product to market and you do that quickly enough that your customers are along the ride with you and that they're really excited. And then I think it'd be used to be remiss. Not to mention the logistics side of it, like being able to crack that logistics code, like those ingredients together, it's like sort of this three dimensional puzzle. Seem like it's really important. Maybe the last thing I wanted to pick your brain on the fourth dimension, I guess. You create so much content. And the content that I've seen, there's like a real authenticity to it. And when I think back to the earlier days of your career, you talked about like, how hard things were. We are learning something that is brand new. We are all learning AI together. And I think through the lens of content creation, it'd be interesting to get your sort of point of view on how do you balance out the using of these tools to create content without losing what it seems like you've developed as a superpower and telling authentic stories and creating really great product. How do we make sure that it's not a race to a bottom and you don't water it down? Yeah, more to unpack there.

Matthew Morein

Yeah, that is a tough question.

Bryan Mahoney

Save the best for last.

Matthew Morein

Yeah, I think there's different types of content that needs to play different roles. And I think what we're kind of realizing, and you mentioned storytelling, like that's really tough to kind of find a substitute for.

Bryan Mahoney

Yeah.

Matthew Morein

And I wouldn't want to like really start going down that path just yet. We need real stories, we need real people. We want our chef to, you know, get in front of the camera with his team and try some idea that we've come up with of a way of using, you know, for example, the sous vide proteins because they're so, you know, polyvalent. You know what I mean? You can do so many different things with them. There's thousands of possibilities. But for me, I would say more on the like, paid side where like static ads, for example, we can iterate and then like try to, you know, create again, a bit of a flywheel in terms of like implementing learnings and testing different variations. You know, a kind of manual DCO, if you will, like trying to find incrementality there. I think probably for me feels like a use case that's more ready today, let's call it. But look, I mean, it's wild what you can now make really quickly. But I think that, you know, despite the temptations that many of us are, you know, myself, I'll speak for myself, have had to say, like, try an AI avatar, like to replace UGC for a talking head ad or what have you. We've just kind of like resisted everything beyond, I would say, like voice for now. Like, I think that's an unlock that I feel like is the technology is there. It's multi language. We can get French, we can get English. We no longer necessarily have to hire a voice actor for every iteration of an ad. We can, you know, clone our own voices too. And we've been able to find like some efficiency there and with like subtitling and editing and some of that. But for me, it's really like it's something we're layering on top of real people, real food, real storytelling. It's hard even, you know, if we want to do, you know, editing to photos of food, the models, they have a hard time replicating kind of what really looks real and tasty. So it's definitely something that we're, you know, tiptoeing through, I would say, at this point in time. But. But there's a. I think we want to fight against the idea of volume at this point and really go after quality, especially when it comes to storytelling. And, you know, there's always a desire to chase trends. There's a desire to be topical, be salient, be in front of the customer. But I want us to do it in a way that feels like right and endemic to our brand.

Bryan Mahoney

Yeah, again, I think that's a story that people need to hear more of that. Sometimes it feels like if we're not. If we haven't imbued AI into all of our workflows, we're somehow behind. But we also, and I think you said it really well, we got to strike this balance of, you know, you're telling real stories with real people, with real food, and you're building a real brand. And so if you can use AI to give the real people within the organization superpowers so they can do more of, like, create more of those authentic moments, I think you're going to keep building upon the successes that we've seen. And so I think that's probably a great place to wrap us up. I was very excited for this conversation. I love. I'm a proud Montrealer. When I see other Montrealers being successful, like, outside of even the borders of Quebec, doing things the right way, sort of like telling those. Those Montreal stories, it's. It's got a really special place in my heart. So thanks. Thank you for being here today, sharing so much wisdom, sharing, like, your background, which is fascinating, and, yeah, I'm cheering you on.

Matthew Morein

Thanks, man.

Bryan Mahoney

Thanks again.

Matthew Morein

This is great. Yeah, appreciate it.