In this series, we ask top industry execs and marketers across the country about their biggest fears and concerns. What is giving top marketers less than restful sleeps? This week, we caught up with Foodtastic’s senior VP of marketing, Vlad Ciobanu. He leads marketing at the company that has a roster of brands that includes Freshii, Milestones, Pita Pit, Shoeless Joes and Second Cup, which is currently undergoing a large transformation and expansion. 

What is keeping you up at night these days?

Obviously, like a lot of my colleagues I’m sure, the economy has been a preoccupation for us. All these types of shocks have had a severe impact on our industry when it comes to rising food costs, sourcing of products and whatnot.

Another, I guess, keeping me personally up at night from the pure marketing side is, how do we appeal to the next generation of customers? So, Gen Z and millennials, get them in our stores and keep them loyal, right? There’s just an infinite amount of choices out there now. So, how do we get these guys in and to enjoy and be relevant to these guys?

I was just going to say, obviously, as we [at Foodtastic] manage 27 brands, it’s to have an oversight of all 27 brands [which] are at different levels of maturity with different challenges, with different opportunities, with different marketing budgets.

Second Cup has 50 years of brand equity behind it. What are some things you still need to work on in terms of evolving customer perceptions of it?

One of the first things we did when [Foodtastic] bought Second Cup [from Aegis Brands] back in 2021 was, when we looked at [it], we kind of noticed that it had no brand recognition when it came to the [branded products].

Look at McDonald’s with its brown coffee cup, Tim Hortons with the red, Starbucks white. What’s Second Cups? It was a black cup, like one of those that you could buy at a convenience store. We looked at the whole branding and then the team did an amazing job here, just rebranding Second Cup to these newer colours and brand guidelines that we have now with this iconic black and yellow cup.

There’s a lot of different signage, also the first Second Cup logo back in 1975 with that cup and the smoke coming out that’s brown, and it kind of evolved over time.

And, funny story, we were visiting some of the stores when the [Foodtastic] acquisition was done, and kind of noticed that it’s an older brand – 50 years – so there’s a lot of different designs out there, lots of different signage.

One thing that I did notice was a lot of them had an espresso machine that was yellow, so it was kind of like this one similarity that all [of the stores] had, and we started working on this as a starting point, and created this, this brand guideline with the black and yellow that we have now.

The other thing we did is we did a massive shift when it came to the marketing strategy of the brand. So with previous ownership, the overhead and the admin expenses were very high, it was very close to 70%. We flipped that around, so our costs, overhead, admin expenses are sitting around 20% and we flipped the other 8% to direct media and to some production.

And we did a heavy shift toward social media, relaunched the loyalty program, which has been very successful for us in the last couple of years, and got this massive shift when it comes to the image on social. And I think the team also did a fantastic job also on creating new and exciting limited time offers. [In April, as part of seasonal menu innovations, Second Cup rolled out a lineup of eight LTO beverages designed to “refresh, energize, and delight.”]

Second Cup underwent a design refresh in 2023. How did the rebrand perform and what did you take from the results?

The store design was great! Once we finished the renovation and then promoted it, we saw a lift of almost 40% of sales for that one particular [pilot] store. The redesign has just been very well received by our customers, by our franchisees, and now we’re looking at the program to refresh all our locations.

How closely do you follow the trouble Starbucks is having and what issues are they facing that affect you as well?

Starbucks is always gonna remain Starbucks. It’s an established brand, much bigger than Second Cup, that’s been around for so long as well. It’s almost like a cult following, right? So, one of the key differences with Second Cup is, I think the quality of our coffee has been a key differentiator for us. We’ve run multiple research and studies, and from those focus groups, telling us that our coffee is better, which also helped a lot, and the experience in the cafe is a lot different. I think nowadays, when you think of Starbucks, if you don’t order ahead, it’s going to be very tough and a longer wait time at the store to get your coffee, whereas at Second Cup, it’s very personalized and a more community centric cafe and more of your neighbourhood cafe than this massive chain.

One thing for sure is, with this whole post-pandemic and the tariffs and “Buy Canadian,” Second Cup is the largest Canadian coffee brand that’s left right now when you think of McDonald’s, American, Starbucks is obviously American, and then you have Tim Hortons [RBI] that became Brazilian. So it was good for us, in a sense, but we didn’t just expect people to go shop at Second Cup. We earned that customer.

So how important will “Canadiana” be as you expand the brand’s footprint?

We’ve always done it. We’ve been doing it a little more, but funnily enough, on our social it’s people that are reminding us we are the Canadian brand, and they’re asking us for more locations. And if you just go through our social-media posts all the comments are like, “open more locations,” which our development team is working on.  You know, we’re looking at 20 to 25 locations over the next 12 to 16, months and there’s just a lot of enthusiasm for Second cup. And, honestly, Second Cup has been our best performing brand at Foodtastic over the last two to three years.

How do you expect your messaging to change?

We don’t want to change our media mix right now. We are happy with where we are. We want to focus a lot more on on the digital and loyalty aspect. So what we’re saying we have got to realize is, you know, it’s easy to create a loyalty program now, if it’s just based on points and then get a reward, or a discount. We really work on personalizing the offer. So, example, you like cold brew, I like hot coffees only, and it wouldn’t make sense for me to send you a communication on hot coffees. If you only drink cold brews, really, they won’t resonate with you. So we want to work a lot more on this data that we have of our customer preferences, working with AI, working with our loyalty partners, providers, to create a personalized experience.

And our social media, honestly, I think we’re in a really good place right now. The social-media team here at Foodtastic, led by the director and her team, have just been doing a great job. And they’ve had a lot of fun when this whole “Buy Canadian” thing exploded, and we did some friendly jabs at Tim Hortons and Starbucks, and it resonated really well with the customers and followers on socials.

We are going to do a lot more with [PR firm] Torchia, and working with the media, but also, one thing that we do a lot of Foodtastic is buy a lot of billboards, just some out-of-home campaigns that we’ve had a lot of success with. People see our brand. People see our graphic designs. We have 14 amazing graphic designers on our payroll here at Foodtastic that just do an outstanding job of getting us to stand out from all the marketing and different visuals that potential customers see on a daily basis.