Permeal’s Secret to Competing in the Specialty Food Market

l Delivering high-quality local agricultural products to consumers directly 


Hello, I am Jung-Hyun Park, an employee of Permeal Marketing Team, and Ara Won, Head of Accounting Team.

Despite the difficult e-commerce environment, Permeal is recording overwhelming growth in a short period by sticking to the management principles of the win-win strategy with food producers and by staying customer-oriented. We are increasing our market influence by securing our own specialty raw materials that our competitors cannot afford based on our contract cultivation, monopoly purchase, and imported seafood capacity. 

As a result, we have secured more than twice as many customers as in 2018 through reasonable marketing costs due to our brand name’s rapid growth in the market and providing the best quality food from the production center to the table at the most reasonable price. Permeal’s fresh food online shopping is one of the most competitive malls in the industry, with more than 1 million cumulative visitors in 2019. Although we are not one of the fast delivery companies like Amazon Prime, we focus on delivering the most delicious and healthy produce to our customers. 

Permeal’s Management Philosophy 

  • We enrich our customers’ lives by delivering full value for food.
  • We pursue a food platform that adds a unique story to properly produced food.
  • We create a company that creates an environment in which producers can keep their beliefs, produce good food, and offer good food choices to consumers.

 

l We started using JANDI because personal messengers were prone to hack.


Before, we used personal messengers for work. However, there were instances where private messages were leaked or phishing attacks where an outsider would pretend like they were one of our employees. Due to the circumstances, we had to look for an enterprise collaboration tool. 

At first, we were thinking of Slack or JANDI. After experiencing both services, we decided to go with JANDI because Slack was in English. Also, we couldn’t share HWP (Korean Document Editor) files, which is pretty standard in Korea. In JANDI, you can just preview the file without having to download the HWP file. 

Because we had a clear objective, to find a collaboration tool that was not prone to hacks, introducing, and getting used to JANDI only took us a week. Another thing that helped everyone adapt to JANDI was that our development team members held a training session regarding essential JANDI tips such as creating teams, topics, and handling the admin menu. 

 

l We like to receive food trend news through RSS feeds.


Like in any other industry, it is also important to quickly identify trends in the food industry. In particular, if there is a product that has become a hot topic on TV or online, sales may increase unexpectedly. At our company, Table With Life, we like to receive news using JANDI’s RSS feature. 

After creating a Topic called ‘News RSS,’ register search keywords like Permeal, Chodang Corn, and Competitor Open Market, then we can receive any press release news about our company. We also receive many RSS notifications regarding our competitors. By integrating RSS in JANDI Topics, we can automatically receive notifications, which is faster and more accurate than our employees having to search every single keyword. 

 

l Exchange feedback about your tasks in real-time.


The best part about using JANDI for work is that JANDI provides a mobile app. Whether we are in the office or at a farm, we can always exchange feedback about our specialty foods. The mobile app design is similar to personal messengers, so it’s not difficult to use. Let’s take a look at how Table With Life uses JANDI for work!  

 

1. Exchange comments from experts on ingredients and produce. 

Permeal’s strength is that it simplifies the complex distribution channels of agricultural products, allowing high-quality agricultural products harvested directly from the source to be delivered directly to consumers. To this end, the company currently manages over 150 farms and 40 exclusively sold food items. In particular, since the food industry trend is changing rapidly, we like to share new products on the ‘All Employees’ Topic.

In this Topic, we can receive expert opinions through comments. For example, tomatoes are one of our popular products. When we have different species like the salty tomato or the sweet tomato, we ask experts for their opinions and reflect them on our contents. We also share photos of the cultivation process or produce collected fresh on the farm on this Topic. 

 

2. Exchange work requests through comments

The accounting team needs proof to handle expenses. Therefore, if possible, we open a Topic where the team making the request and the accounting team join together and leave a JANDI message rather than requesting directly. In the ‘Request Sales Tax Invoice’ topic, team members can know the status of tax invoices in real-time and share the invoices issued using the JANDI screen capture feature. Of course, the IRS can issue the invoice as a PDF file, but we like sharing through JANDI because it can be shared faster through the JANDI screen capture feature. 

 

The marketing team also uploads a Google document file that summarizes the business status and uses it for meetings. The marketing team calculates promotional data, sales data, and expenses using Google Sheet and shares Google Presentations for the report. Jung-Hyun from the marketing team has won JANDI’s comment feature launch event in the past. We use the thread feature to manage social media, upload content to our online mall, or collect opinions from the team on viral marketing’s video results. Using the thread, we can focus on the subject instead of being distracted by other messages in the chat room. It helps us gather relevant information. 

 

3. We have a board view topic for requesting office supplies. 

‘Office Supplies / Book Order’ topic is for requesting the purchase of office supplies. Whoever is in charge can let everyone know about the process, and people can ask questions on the Topic. This Topic is a board view Topic, so every post can be about a different request. 

 

l CS outsourcing employees are invited as Associates.


We create a Topic for our Associates who are in charge of orders and reshipments. Once the CS employee sends the order tracking number as a message in the Topic, we can see the entire shipping process by looking at the comments under the message. It’s quite convenient because we can always search the messages from the past. We recommend all commerce distribution companies to use the Associate invite feature and the comment feature. 

 

l Share company car dispatch schedule in JANDI Topic. 


We share the schedule for dispatching company cars moving used for visiting the food production area in the ‘Schedule Sharing’ Topic.

 

l Create your own topic and organize them using folders. 


As a marketer, I have a few personal Topics. I usually name the Topic using ‘my name + task’ and upload task-related materials. Then I organize my personal Topics using folders. This comes in handy for collecting Instagram photos or guides that you send to influencers over and over again. In addition, we need to deliver product information to be promoted on time to the influencer, and we register this as a to-do, so we can receive notifications and contact the influencer on time. Most To-do apps ask you to type in a bunch of information, but on JANDI, you can just type in the subject and description on the mobile app so I use it quite frequently. I am organizing my marketing post schedules on a Google Spreadsheet for now, but I think it is a good idea to connect it to JANDI and Google Calendar. 

There are other JANDI features regarding files that I enjoy. For instance, my favorite ones are the file preview feature, the fact that the files don’t expire, and search files uploaded by members that have left the Team. The previous files were not deleted or expired, so it was a great help when I first took over.

Our company is using the comment feature so well that we can’t imagine working without the comment feature. We hope that we can comment on using images in the future, as it will help us greatly. 

 

l We’ve never had an employee ask how to use JANDI.


We recommend JANDI for smaller companies!

We’ve never had an employee ask about how to use JANDI. That is because JANDI is an easy and straightforward collaboration tool. With JANDI, we can organize work channels in chat rooms, and share files permanently. In Table With Life, we use JANDI for a variety of purposes including sharing fieldwork hours and company car schedules on JANDI Topics. We don’t need additional tools or services to collaborate as a company and as a team. If you are running a smaller company, I recommend that you use JANDI!

 

Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.

%d bloggers like this: