At the Insight Platforms Virtual Event 2026, quantilope’s CEO and Co-founder, Peter Aschmoneit, and VP of Solutions Consulting, Beatrice Capestany, sat down with Leah Swalling, Director of Brand Management at Kettle & Fire. In this session, they discussed how the bone broth pioneer moved beyond surface-level data to build a sophisticated "Brand Growth System" where they can continuously explore, monitor, and activate their consumer insights.
For Kettle & Fire, staying at the top of the premium bone broth category requires more than just product excellence; it requires being "present" in consumers’ minds in precise moments of need. To determine whether those moments are “to improve gut health,” or “for a recipe,” Kettle & Fire leverages quantilope’s Mental Availability tracking to ensure they aren't just an option, but the first choice that comes to mind.
Key Takeaways:
- Actionable science for growth: Hear from Kettle & Fire on how they’re using two scientifically-proven concepts to accelerate growth beyond basic awareness metrics: Category Entry Points (CEPs) and Mental Availability.
- Scaling with confidence: How Kettle & Fire applies findings from their innovation, campaign, and competitive research to scale in their category with confidence.
- AI as support, not a replacement: Learn how the Kettle & Fire team is using quantilope’s Category Twins for real-time, executive-level decision-making without having to dedicate resources to full additional studies.
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The unbeatable value of Mental Availability tracking
Like us at quantilope, Kettle & Fire’s Leah Swalling is a longtime advocate of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s (EBI) How Brands Grow framework – one where Professor Byron Sharp challenged decades of traditional marketing beliefs. This framework, further explored in Professor Jenni Romaniuk’s Better Brand Health, is now a fully automated and foundational part of quantilope’s approach to brand tracking.
Unlike traditional tracking metrics which focus heavily on the brand funnel, these esteemed EBI professors introduced two pivotal concepts to the insights world:
- Category Entry Points: What’s bringing consumers to a category in the first place?
- Mental Availability: Which brands consumers are thinking of when they arrive in that category?
For Leah, these are exactly the type of metrics she and her team were looking for to drive real growth at Kettle & Fire — going beyond brand awareness to understand how consumers are thinking about their category as a whole, especially as bone broth becomes more mainstream.
Leah explains below how this fundamental shift has redefined Kettle & Fire's strategy:
Back to Table of Contents“Mental Availability led us to rethink how we measure brand performance. It gives the marketing teams, innovation teams, and sales teams more of a perspective on whether or not we are showing up in the right buying situations. Mental Availability gives us a clear blueprint on how we can grow rather than making people more aware of us.”
- Leah Swalling, Director of Brand Management at Kettle & Fire
One solution with a variety of use cases
Leveraging Mental Availability insights isn’t just a marketing exercise; it’s a strategic way to ensure every department is moving in the same direction. By moving beyond surface-level metrics, brands can identify the specific cues that trigger a purchase decision long before a consumer reaches the shelf.
At Kettle & Fire, these insights serve as the foundation for high-impact decision-making across several key functions:
- Campaign planning: Using Category Entry Points to drive effective messaging
- Product Innovation: Tapping into under-served markets by developing products to meet those needs — be it flavors, packaging designs, or co-branded offers
- Competitive landscaping: Uncovering whitespace opportunities where no competitors are winning
- Category exploration: Exploring ways to expand into entirely new categories where there’s credibility for the brand
- Consumer understanding: Understanding the breadth of category consumers, not just loyal customers
By embedding these insights into their brand DNA, Kettle & Fire has transformed their research into a proactive engine for growth.
Leah summarizes the transformative power of this approach in saying:
Back to Table of Contents“We’re continuing to lead through innovation by getting more people to use bone broth in different ways. Knowing where consumers think or don’t think of us in buying situations helps us to understand our biggest growth opportunities and competitive whitespaces. We can lean even more into the Category Entry Points that we’re strong in but our competitors aren’t. It helps make our marketing more precise and our innovation more intentional.”
The brand growth flywheel
With their consistent collection of Mental Availability insights, Kettle & Fire have ongoing access to data that’s been proven to correlate with sales market share. They can track shifts in their data each time they run a new wave of their tracker, test new ideas (for example, changing a package design or introducing a new flavor), and see how those decisions actually affect brand performance.
That’s the power of the brand growth flywheel: a continuous way to explore, monitor, and activate marketing research findings.
With a clear view of where they stand in their category, what’s working, and where there’s room for improvement, Leah and her team can proceed with high-stakes strategic initiatives with total confidence.
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Accelerating growth through quantilope’s centralized platform
Kettle & Fire chose to partner with quantilope to move away from the fragmented nature of traditional market research. Prior, Leah’s team faced the constant hurdle of vetting new vendors and navigating learning curves for every new study. By consolidating their research into a single platform, they’ve shifted to a streamlined, trusted partnership that’s equipped to keep up as they scale.
As Leah notes:
“We don’t treat quantilope as validation at the end; we use the platform upfront to shape where we play and how we win. We now have a flywheel of exploratory research, activation, and tracking, which all feeds into one platform, dramatically incre asing our speed and contributing to our growth. What used to take weeks we can now get done in days.”
Beyond the platform’s advanced methodologies and research solutions, Kettle & Fire is also leveraging quantilope’s cutting-edge AI tools like Category Twins to maintain their competitive edge.
In a fast-paced retail environment, executive leadership often requires immediate answers that don't allow for the timeline of a full-scale study. By leaning on AI as a tool to supplement and strengthen research (rather than replace it), the Kettle & Fire team can generate directional insights in real-time, based on their own verified data.
In a final reflection of her team’s work with quantilope to date, Leah shares:
“It’s really nice to have quantilope because alongside brand health research, we already have a trusted partner in place when other research needs come up.
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