How The Honest Kitchen launched a new product into 80% of their top stores and grew the business by 15%.
When a new product launch was looming and the sales strategy wasn't ready, Elwin Warsh at Honest Kitchen needed a tool that could turn a capable sales team into a strategic one. Badger Maps delivered.
About The Honest Kitchen
The Honest Kitchen is a San Diego-based pet food company crafting natural, human-grade dog and cat food. Their customer base ranges from individual consumers to independent pet stores and major national retailers, spanning the country.
With approximately 15 reps covering the entire United States and Canada, The Honest Kitchen operates at the intersection of innovation and execution. Their products are genuinely differentiated. The challenge was making sure their sales operation could keep up.
The challenge
When Elwin Warsh joined The Honest Kitchen as Strategic Sales Analyst, the team was already capable but operating without the tools they needed to perform at their best. Two problems stood out immediately.
The first was field visibility. Sales data arrived a month and a half after the fact, which meant Elwin and leadership had no reliable way to see in real time where their strategy was working and where it wasn't. They couldn't make informed decisions about where to focus the team, redirect resources, or double down on what was winning.
The second was efficiency. Reps were spending too much time on admin — pulling together customer information from multiple databases before meetings — and too much time driving inefficiently between accounts. Without route optimization, they were going from A to B without considering C, D, and E along the way. Time that should have been spent selling was going to logistics.
With a major new product launch approaching and a goal of placing it in their highest-performing stores, the stakes were high. The Honest Kitchen needed a smarter way to run their field team fast.
“We wanted to progress our business from telling our reps where to place an item to informing them so that they can use their time more efficiently based on data.”
Elwin Warsh, Strategic Sales Analyst, The Honest Kitchen
How Badger Maps helped
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A sales team fully trained in one month
The implementation was as smooth as the results were impressive. Badger's account team ran both group training sessions and individual sessions for each team member. Within one month, the entire sales team was fully trained and using the app comfortably.
“It's a simple program, and in addition to group training, our Account Manager had a personal training session for each team member so they get to ask questions their way.”
With routes optimized around their highest-potential customers, reps stopped driving inefficiently across their territories and started spending more time in front of the accounts that mattered most. The time saved on driving went straight back into selling and executing the new product launch at the pace The Honest Kitchen needed.
“Our team loves having a route and being told the best way to go with very little effort.”
Better meetings with the full account picture in hand
Before Badger, reps arrived at meetings without easy access to the account history and previous sales data they needed to have meaningful conversations. Badger put all of that at their fingertips the moment they arrived at a location. It accelerated sales cycles and enabled more informed and productive conversations with every customer.
“Notes helped our reps have better and more informed conversations with each customer.”
Check-ins after every meeting gave Elwin and leadership a live view of what was happening in the field: where the new product had been placed, where it hadn't, which reps were hitting their goals, and where they needed to redirect focus. Instead of waiting six weeks for sales data, leadership now had a continuous, real-time picture of performance across every territory.
That visibility changed how The Honest Kitchen made decisions. Rather than telling reps where to go, Elwin could inform them, giving them the data to make smarter decisions about where to spend their time and how to prioritize their accounts.
“The visibility that Badger gave us of the field revealed what was creating sales and what wasn't.”
New product launch with 80% placement at target stores
The proof was in the launch. Every team hit their placement goal, getting the new product into 80% of all their top target stores. A goal that had seemed ambitious became achievable because the team finally had the routing, the data, and the field visibility to execute.
“There is no better mapping software than Badger.”
Elwin Warsh, Strategic Sales Analyst, The Honest Kitchen
