Eric Siu breaks down how Erewhon uses returnable glass jars with $3 refunds to get customers back in the store. A single order runs $80 to $90, and the jars themselves hold around 600 calories of prepared food like turkey chili and candied walnuts.
Erewhon's marketing strategy here is smart because they just— it's a retention mechanism. It gets you to come back, right? So guys, as you can see, I have a bunch of Erewhon jars in front of me. Now here's the genius of Erewhon. What Erewhon is doing here is they could go with plastic jars with their soup. This is turkey chili, and then I buy candied walnuts too and things like that, right? And but, but it's smart because they know in California at least, if they give you a glass jar, they can incentivize. They say, hey, if you return it to us, we'll give you $3. But returning it means I need to go back and the store. So today, Neil and I, we're gonna go to Erewhon and Noah as well. We're gonna go to Erewhon at lunch. I brought 10 of these jars with me. Guess what? I'm probably gonna buy a lot more stuff than just lunch and probably not gonna just return this, right?
So that's turkey chili?
Yeah.
And does it taste good?
It tastes amazing. 30 ounces of turkey chili.
Is it healthy?
Yeah. Yeah.
We tend to just get the chicken vegetable soup or chicken noodle soup.
Turkey chili, dude, it's not like a bad thing. Yeah, it's like each jar, ChatGPT is like 600 calories or so, right?
But at the end of the day— But no one's gonna eat a whole jar. It's too much.
I do.
In one sitting? Yeah.
Yeah. Hell yeah, dude. A lot of protein. But the candied walnuts are really good. Your kids will like that too. But my point is—
Wait, it has candied walnuts inside?
No, no, no. That's another one. So I have another one that says candied walnuts. See? Candied walnuts.
Oh, that's not a jar of soup.
No. So one— some are jars of soup. Some are different jars.
We have those jars only from the soup.
Because again, they could just go with convenience and go with plastic containers, but they chose to go with the glass. And glass is actually very inconvenient. Like I had so many— I have 10 of these actually. I brought 10.
So $30?
Yeah, $30. I'm gonna get $30 back, so I'm very happy about that. But guess what? I'm probably gonna spend more.
How are you gonna spend more? Lunch is like maybe like $10?
No, lunch is— dude, lunch is never $10, man. Each of my Erewhon orders, okay, each one's like $80, $90 each.
No!
Yeah, but I order a bunch of things. I order it for— I order it for 2 meals and also like snacks. So I ordered popcorn, I ordered the, the overnight oats, I order like And then I order breakfast and dinner.
It's like me ordering for my family.
Yeah.
So similar costs.
But I break it out into 3. Yours is in one sitting.
In one sitting, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, I thought that was interesting because we're going to Erewhon today. So I was like, I need to finally bring these because my cleaner started packing more of these. And so they like contain like a whole, like, I don't know, what do you call it? The pantry? Yeah, it was covered with these. So yeah.
