1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?

Justin Babet: Chief Nutrition is a healthy snacking and supplement brand born in Bondi, Sydney in 2015. We’re here to rewrite the rules of packaged food. To prove that real food can be convenient, that healthy can taste amazing, and that trust is built through transparency, not marketing spin. We’re not just another nutrition brand – we’re the proof that doing the right thing can scale.

Chief was co-founded Libby Babet (former trainer on Channel 10’s The Biggest Loser), Veronika Larisova (nutritionist and exercise physiologist), Justin Babet (Libby’s husband and marketer), and Brock Hatton (product guru and Chief Executive Officer).

As health and wellness specialists, Libby and Veronika kept hearing the same question from clients: “What can I snack on?” Their honest answer? “Nothing in a packet.” But their clients wanted the convenience of something in a packet. The problem was many of the products you can find in the supermarket are ultra processed, even the ‘healthy’ ones. So, we set out to create packaged foods that are actually good for you.

Our first product was a snack bar made from beef – like jerky, just in a bar. It was an instant hit and grew quickly online before we landed deals with major retailers like 7-Eleven, Ampol and Woolworths – we’re soon to launch in Coles as well.

Today Chief has a whole range of snacks and supplements, united under our core mission to help people stop eating junk. We focus on clean ingredients, high protein and low sugar. A lot of the time, healthy food tastes like ‘healthy food’ and that just won’t work – if it doesn’t taste great no one will eat it, so we work hard to create products that taste just as good, or better, than ultra-processed alternatives.

2. Since launch, what have been the 1–2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?

Justin Babet: The biggest impact to our growth has been the success of our online business. At it’s core, success here has boiled down to great creative. We spend a lot of time, effort and money producing and testing all different types of creative and doubling down on what works. Because we’ve been able to scale online successfully, we’ve been able to ratchet up our spend month on month and that means we’re now reaching millions of eyeballs and building our brand which translates into success in bricks and mortar as well.

With online as the foundation, the other turning point for us was ranging in major retailers like Woolworths. For a brand to get cut through you really need to be omnipresent and ranging across 900+ Woolworths stores really has moved the needle as it helps our online business as well as all the retailer partners we work with. It becomes a flywheel of growth when ecommerce supports bricks and mortar, which in turn supports brand recognition which supports ecommerce and the cycle continues to build momentum.

3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?

Justin Babet: Our top channels are paid ads/social, email, and organic/direct (SEO). Influencers and paid partnerships play an important role supporting those channels too. The key learning for me has been that all of these channels work together, for example the ROAS on our Google Ads is great, but it’s supported by and won’t work as well without Meta. Meta ads work great, but they work better when supported by influencers/paid partnerships. It’s better to think of it as a system rather than individual channels.

4. How are you thinking about search in 2025 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?

Justin Babet: We’re starting to see ChatGPT generate sales and we expect this to continue to increase as shopping is integrated into that experience for customers, so we’re investing in GEO (AI SEO) and experimenting with tools like searchable.com to guide our efforts. I’m not sure Google is out of the race, Gemini embedded into Google search results seems to be gaining back some ground from ChatGPT and others, and traditional SEO will continue to be a big part of our strategy.

5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?

Justin Babet: To drive repeat purchase, the most important thing is the first experience. It doesn’t matter how good your product is – if their order takes forever to get to them or they have a poor customer experience you’ve lost them. So, we invest a lot into customer service, fast dispatch, replacing product if it goes missing, etc. We also use email to set expectations and provide deeper education.

We’re lucky to have a product that suits subscription so we’ve worked hard to grow this part of our business. Subscribers are worth 2x a non subscriber so we incentivise subscription in a number of ways including up front bonuses and retention bonuses using our loyalty program points.

Our loyalty program is also a major driver of repeat purchase. We’ve gone with Bubblehouse but there are plenty of good ones out there. The key thing to get right is ensuring people know about your loyalty program (i.e. measure your participation rate, ours is over 90% now). It sounds obvious but it’s harder than you think. You have to really commit and support your loyalty program via email, being able to redeem points via checkout and more.

6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?

Justin Babet: I’d double down on creative – become a student of creative (Youtube is a great resource) and invest your time and resources here – I’m talking static ads, videos, all of it.

This is because average content + an exceptional performance marketer won’t perform as well as exceptional content + an average performance marketer. Great creative will do a lot of your selling before the customer hits your website which also improves conversion. So, if you can crack this nut you can predictably scale and if you can scale everything else gets easier. Don’t start by paying someone, start by doing it yourself and be happy to suck at it until you don’t. This experience will stand you in good stead when you start paying others to do it.

I’d also double down on email marketing. Great pop up forms convert more people you’ve paid to get to your site (we use Alia). Great flows and campaigns mean you make a better return on every lead you’re paying for (we use Klaviyo). Get this right and you’re not sending lots of people into a leaky bucket. I see a lot of brands who are doing pretty well but literally have no flows set up – this is a great opportunity. Well over 30% of our revenue comes from email.

I’d stop obsessing over gaining social followers and focus on getting reach.