Before she came to Fair Food, Isabelle Fouard worked in the marketing department of global food giant Nestle.  She was deeply involved in the product development and launch of the kind of drink, yoghurt and fruit snack items you see lining the fridges and shelves of your local supermarket.At Nestle Isabelle was schooled in the most sophisticated marketing techniques her industry had to offer. After years of intensive development she became a sort of marketing Jason Bourne only without the memory wiping and the violence and killing – in short Isabelle was trained to sell.  After many gruelling years on the marketing frontline, Isabelle stepped away from FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) to start a family.  It was then she also began to wonder about her career.

Years later when her sons started school and it was time to return to work Isabelle made a decision to use her skills for good rather than for an organisation that she wasn’t really aligned with.  Isabelle had been a customer with Fair Food for a few years.  She’d heard the previous marketing person had recently moved on and so she wrote an email offering her services.   She was in the right place at the right time.

At Fair Food it was obvious from the outset that Isabelle’s skills were of an another order – she was the kind of person who could dive into a sea of seemingly meaningless data and emerge with a catch of concise tables and graphs revealing patterns of behaviours and trends so subtle that it often took several explanations for her boss to catch on.To her co-workers she was a mystery; with her French accent and a tendency to disappear for weeks at a time (okay, she worked from home) and then appear with a reinterpretation of several years of survey data, sales figures and product offering analysis proposing a new type of mixed produce box, another bakery line or more cheese, always more cheese.  She came up with The Generous Cook’s Box and The Good Gut Box, brought in a range of sliced breads and expanded the refrigerated section beyond recognition.

Recently, Isabelle returned to the set produce boxes – she felt in her bones there was something missing. She went over the figures again and again, but couldn’t see it.  And then finally one day staring at a sales graph there it was – hiding within a seasonal sales trend like the line drawing of the young woman that’s also a picture of an old woman it was clear as day.  The Veg Only was one of Fair Food’s most popular boxes and was only getting more popular.  The problem was it only came in one size.  It was so simple Fair Food needed a larger sized Veg Only – it could be called The Veg Only Medium.And that’s pretty much how it happened.  The Veg Only Medium is starting this week and you can find it here.