Daily Harvest is a food company that’s making it easy to eat sustainably grown, organic fruits and vegetables every day. They’ve grown rapidly since their founding in 2015 and operate a large and loyal direct-to-consumer business. In July 2023, the company launched in retail stores.

But growth hasn’t come without its challenges. As they scaled their media mix and distribution channels, Daily Harvest had to tackle a host of new marketing measurement problems. They faced growing doubts about their internal multi-touch attribution tool, were planning expansion into brick-and-mortar stores, and were hesitant to test into new media channels – all at the same time!

Daily Harvest chose Recast’s comprehensive measurement platform to holistically measure the impact of their marketing activities on new subscriber growth. Over time, Recast has become their go-to platform for marketing planning and a key lever for efficiently scaling new media channels and subscriber growth.

The Problems: Retail Expansion and Internal Tools

In 2022, Daily Harvest renewed their focus on efficient subscriber growth. This, combined with two core pain points, drove them to seek a Media Mix Modeling (MMM) solution. Those pain points included:

1. Growing doubts about an internal multi-touch attribution (MTA) tool, particularly as Daily Harvest shifted 50% of their marketing budget to offline channels.
2. Expansion into new retail channels – you can now find Daily Harvest in Kroger, Costco, Wegmans and more – and the knowledge this would make media measurement an even more daunting challenge.

Around this time, Daily Harvest was also hesitant to test new media channels that they weren’t able to measure with their MTA tool. They suspected that radio advertising might be a winner, but had concerns that their measurement stack was not equipped to measure offline channels effectively.

Daily Harvest knew that Media Mix Modeling (MMM) could help address many of these problems. They wanted a solution that was best-in-class in providing measurement for complex marketing activities and distribution channels, so began their search for a partner.

The Solution: Recast’s Comprehensive Measurement Platform

Daily Harvest quickly landed on Recast as their MMM vendor of choice. They note two key drivers in their decision to partner with Recast: domain expertise and transparency.

At the time, the Daily Harvest team was particularly concerned with the challenges that retail expansion would present to their marketing measurement efforts. They wanted a partner who was built to handle complex marketing activity, and resonated with the work that Recast had done with Harry’s, Mockingbird, and other retail-heavy brands.

In addition to domain expertise, the Daily Harvest team also valued Recast’s transparency. Recast openly publishes model methodology and provides a model prediction scorecard via backtesting with every weekly model refresh. Daily Harvest knew that (every week) they would be able to assess the ability of their old models to predict the future and hold Recast accountable if they could not – a feature that was unrivaled among other vendors.

This level of transparency stood out in Daily Harvest’s vendor search, and would also help them build the confidence in their model required to take action with its recommendations. Lindsey Rodriguez, Daily Harvest’s Head of Performance Marketing, summed up their vendor search and ultimate implementation of Recast in saying:

Growing with Recast: An Essential Platform for Marketing

From the outset of their partnership, Recast helped Daily Harvest understand the true incrementality of every channel in their media mix. Over the last two years, Recast has grown into their always-on tool for forecasting, a source of truth for tracking pace against marketing goals, and a lever for expansion into new and high-performing media channels.

One of the first key insights that Recast delivered Daily Harvest was a breakdown of saturation for every channel in their marketing mix. Before Recast, Daily Harvest suspected that their marginal Facebook spend was not driving efficient new subscriber growth, but had no way of proving this.

Recast breaks down channel saturation and time shift for all media channels with every weekly update. It quickly showed Daily Harvest that their marginal ROI on Facebook was indeed as low as they suspected, and recommended they move some of this budget elsewhere.

One of the places Daily Harvest shifted this spend was radio. Before using an MMM, Daily Harvest was hesitant to test into radio because they knew their measurement stack was not equipped to measure it properly. With Recast, Daily Harvest has been able to test into radio with confidence and scale it into a winning channel in their media mix.

With this win and others under their belt, Daily Harvest has expanded the role that Recast plays in their organization. Daily Harvest now uses Recast every week to optimize channel budgets, understand saturation, track pacing against new subscriber goals, and more. They also use Recast’s scenario analysis tools to project how different media flighting will impact their growth.

Evolving with Recast: 2024 Goals and Beyond

Fast-growing teams like Daily Harvest make lots of important decisions in a short amount of time, and one of their favorite features about Recast is how the platform takes emotion out of this process. Media optimization and planning can be executed with a data-first approach, instead of gut instincts and back-of-the-napkin forecasting.

For this reason and others, Daily Harvest plans for Recast to play a central role in reaching their 2024 goals. While they currently model new subscriber growth, they have plans to add additional models that measure the impact of their omni-channel marketing efforts on all of their distribution channels.

Daily Harvest also plans to continue leveraging Recast’s team of in-house Data Scientists, who have supported them right from the start of onboarding. What does Daily Harvest think of the support they’ve received so far? Senior Data Analyst Darcy Hinck says it best: “My experience with Recast has been exceedingly positive. I email the team frequently and always get a ton of hands-on support.”

If you think your team is ready for MMM and want to learn more about Recast, we’d love to talk.