KeHE-Owned Cadia Rebrands, Adds New Everyday Line as Private Label Demand Grows

Wholesale food distributor KeHE is rolling out a new look for its private label food brand Cadia in tandem with the debut of a new non-organic line under the banner. Cadia, which sells exclusively to independent grocers, is looking to establish a more eye-catching presence throughout the aisles while also offering price sensitive shoppers more options.

Launched in 2010 by California-based health and natural food products distributor Nature’s Best, Cadia was acquired by KeHE as part of its deal to buy Nature’s Best in 2014. The brand offers over 280 grocery items across more than 40 categories, from snacks to frozen food to condiments and baking items.

For the rebrand, KeHE partnered with Boulder, Colorado-based Faven Creative, whose past CPG clients include The Good Crisp Company and Ancient Harvest. According to Ben Friedland, executive director of exclusive brands at KeHE, Cadia redesigned its logo to more clearly communicate its association with independent retailers, with its logo now featuring the tagline “Empowering Neighborhood Grocers.”

The revamped design swaps out white for green, a nod to Cadia’s original logo, across the whole pack with the intent to boost the “shopability” of the brand’s products, Friedland said. The ultimate goal is to make the brand’s products look more like items consumers “want to pick up [and] want to experience,” which it hopes will lend itself to stronger brand recognition across the many categories it plays in.

“A lot of times when you have brands that cross so many categories, you sort of regress to the lowest common denominator, which winds up being more of a white palette, because it’s easier to just execute across multiple categories,” Friedland said. “So we thought through that and said, ‘Okay, we don’t want to do that, we want to own a color.’ Even though it’s a private label solution, it needs to be able to stand up against brands in multiple categories.”

Cadia, which had previously offered only organic and non-GMO products, has also expanded with a new non-organic line called Everyday, which features blue packaging to differentiate it from the green organic line. While still free of artificial colors, flavors and preservatives, the line meets retailer demand for products that carry a lower price point than its organic line, Friedland said.

Both Everyday and the redesigned Cadia packaging will be rolling out slowly over the next year as retailers work through their current inventory. The company is also rolling out a slew of new products for its organic line, starting with 25 new spices, extracts and nutritional yeast, a space its partners have said they’d like to be more competitive in, he said.

While Cadia will see “robust growth” product-wise in the next year, it will remain focused on staples, Friedland said, while KeHE’s MADE•WITH brand is home to more innovative products. MADE•WITH, which unlike Cadia is available to all retailers, recently expanded into bakery items with the launch of Brioche Hamburger and Hot Dog Buns and a Braided Challah Loaf.

Private labels saw an uptick in sales since the onset of the pandemic, with sales up 11.6% to $158.8 billion across all major retail channels in 2020, according to NielsenIQ data reported by the Private Label Manufacturers Association. During this time, Cadia has seen higher demand from independent retailers, Friedland noted, particularly as supply chain issues have led to out-of-stocks and forced consumers to branch out from their usual purchases and try new brands. He noted that consumers’ increased price sensitivity has also contributed to a boost in private label demand.

Looking ahead, Friedland said he expects this momentum to continue, and hopes the expanded offerings in independent retailers will drive more traffic to the channel.

“I’m a believer that the next 50 years of food is going to be a lot of the undoing of the last 50 years of food,” Friedland said. “I think more and more people are going to have a desire to revisit those independent retailers in their community, because they’re more than just a place to shop for groceries, they’re a place of community that people are really wanting and seeking.”