GOED expands ‘proud member’ logo to finished product brands

The Global Organization for EPA and DHA (GOED), started its ‘Proud Member’ seal scheme in 2010 with suppliers in mind. The logo was originally designed to help product manufacturers flag which suppliers follow GOED’s rigorous membership conditions, outlined in the association’s voluntary monograph​​.

“When GOED started, we were much more of a business-to-business organization, and we really weren’t talking to consumers and educating consumers,”​ Ellen Schutt, the organization’s executive director, told us. “We didn’t have a lot of consumer brands in our membership.”​

In the past three or four years, she added, consumer outreach increasingly became an important part of the association’s strategy. With that, the organization brought more finished products companies into its membership roster, and these companies were interested in also using the logo

The first CPG brand to use the logo is Trident Seafoods for its Pure Alaska Omega-3 500 mg EPA+DHA capsules, scheduled to launch with new packaging featuring the logo on Costco.com later this month.

“It’s a way for our members to be able to showcase their product’s integrity by associating themselves with GOED,”​ she said.

Not a consumer household name… yet​

Creating awareness of what GOED stands for among consumers is key to add meaning to the Proud Member logo on finished products, and this will take some time.

“We’ve spent a good amount of time over the past couple years educating consumers about the benefits of Omega-3s, but we never really cared about GOED being known by consumers, it just wasn’t a focus for us,”​ Schutt said.

“But now that we’re going to have finished product companies use our logo, we have to start teaching our consumers about what GOED and what our proud member logo is all about.”​

The organization is at the beginning stages of talking directly to consumers. They set up a website (AlwaysOmega3s.com​​) as their primary consumer-facing landing page. They’ve also set up social media platforms on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

“We want to start building a community of interested consumers who want to learn more about omega-3. We’ll be using that audience to get more information out about the logo too,”​ she said.

Transparency is the trend​

Motivating this move was increased consumer scrutiny and demand to know how products are made and where their ingredients  come from.

As following GOED’s monograph for oxidative quality, environmental contaminants and measurement of EPA and DHA are conditions for the association’s membership, Schutt hopes that the logo can communicate a company’s commitment to all these things to consumers.

“We want to have more CPG companies and brands join our membership. To us, this is a value for them because once we are more successful in having consumers make the connection between what this ‘Proud Member’ logo means on the products that are using it, we feel that it would be an appealing benefit for CPG companies to join GOED.”​

She added: “Getting that word out to consumers I think will be beneficial to members and ultimately the whole industry because they can feel that there are products out there that consumers can trust.”​

From fashion week to gaming exhibitions

Ingredient suppliers have mostly focused most, if not all, of its advertising and marketing efforts in the B2B space, with product formulators as their target audience. But many of these ingredient companies get feedback from customers that today's end consumers want to know where their products come from and what ingredients go into them. This has prompted some ingredient suppliers to invest part of their marketing spend to communicate directly to consumers.

For example, lycopene and carotenoid supplier Lycored launched the #RethinkBeautiful campaign and went on a road trip that included New York Fashion week and South by Southwest in Austin, where it sponsored booths to raise awareness of ingestible skincare. The latest move of its campaign is the launch of the app littleglow, on which consumers can complete different activities that promote mental health and wellness. READ MORE​​

Another example is Cognizin, the branded citicoline by Kyowa Hakko. It had a booth at SXSW Gaming, showcasing nootropics manufactured by its customers at an event attended by consumers in the gaming industry. READ MORE ​​