What's Best? An Insider’s Look at Entering Competitions
Editor’s note: Kristin Thalheimer Bingham is a co-owner of Dean’s Sweets, a business we profiled in a story on creating a sense of place in chocolate.
Maine Sea Salt Caramel Sauce photo credit Melissa Mullen photography
You’d think we’d won an Oscar. It was a huge deal for us, winning a prestigious national culinary award in 2020 for our Maine sea salt caramel sauce. We got the good news in September, but we couldn’t tell a soul. Keeping the win a surprise to the rest of the world was part of the rules of the game, though learning the news in advance did allow us to book our flights and reserve our hotel room. That January, we traveled 3,000 miles, from Maine to California, for the honor of standing on stage with a bunch of other passionate foodie types. The travel expenses and the night of pomp – and the new outfit I had to have – were all worth it. The award confirmed for us that our hard work and dedication to quality mattered.
Then this summer, we lost a competition, on purpose. It’s not that losing was our first choice. It stung for half a second when I saw the results, but the competition was not worth our time. Even more, it was not worth the time and energy of our friends, family, and closest customers.
The competition we lost was one of the “Best Of” kinds. The contest pitted all of the local chocolatiers against one another, which is not the problem. A friendly, local competition can be fun and good for us all, especially if it’s to raise money for a good cause. We’ve done plenty of those, and we try hard and enjoy seeing our friends from other businesses. It’s a win-win.
No, this “Best Of” competition was won or lost by how many votes we could secure online. And though that may sound innocuous enough, here’s how it really goes down and what we would need to do to win:
1. Send out social media blasts. Encourage people to vote. Make a big deal about the contest. Generate enthusiasm and buy-in.
2. Email our closest friends and customers and ask them directly to vote for us.
3. Keep up the (gentle) pressure. Most of these competitions allow “one vote per day,” so we would need our loyal followers to vote often. They would need to scroll through “The Best Of” burger joints and dive bars and dry cleaners to get to our listing. We’d send more emails, more social media blasts, put up signs in our stores, and gently nudge anyone who might vote.
Chocolates and sauces photo credit Melissa Mullen photography
There is nothing malicious about these competitions. The contests are ordinary parts of everyday business, and they come up several times a year. No one is out to scam anyone (though the contest organizers do “profit” from the hits on their website with each vote). And while no one part of the contest process is all that onerous, every business has to think about opportunity costs. Added together, to win this contest, we’d be spending a lot of time pushing something that has no direct commentary on the quality of our chocolate or our business. The fact that we can mobilize the people who love us anyway (thanks, Aunt Edna!) means nothing about the taste of our truffles. What we end up doing is spending our time chasing a hollow prize and tapping the goodwill of our inner circle again, and again, and again. Whoever chases the votes and taps their inner circle the most, wins.
And because we know that time and energy and goodwill are finite resources, we decided not to play. So we lost, on purpose. It still burns a tiny bit, but I can live with that.
We don’t seek out many competitions. As noted, they take time and entail a not-insignificant expense. What motivates us to enter the ones we do, however, has some element of “reading the tea leaves,” and some foggy sense of potential ROI, return on investment. We try to get a grasp, after a bit or research, on whether the judging will be done with care and expertise.
Hot chocolate photo credit Melissa Mullen Photography
Prestige of the competition plays a role, too. That doesn’t mean celebrity chefs and fancy red carpets. More simply, the competition has to mean something to the consumer, so the organizers have to do their part to promote it, to build brand recognition of the competition itself.
In the end, the return we’re most looking for will come in the form of increased visibility for our business and our products. We will have better and bigger reasons for local and national magazines and newspapers to take an interest in us, to follow our story. It’s hard to measure that kind of success on a spreadsheet, but when we’re competing chocolate-for-chocolate with other reputable businesses and the word is getting out, that’s what we look for when we enter any competition. The sales will come more easily after that.
There was a bright side to losing the most recent “Best of” competition: With the time we saved not competing, we entered the big national award competition again this year with a new product. Of course, I can’t give away any of those details. We are hopeful of another win – another walk across the stage in a new outfit – but we have no idea. The prestige of the award is based on experienced, knowledgeable judges sitting down and tasting our chocolate and comparing it to the taste of other chocolates. If we lose, we get some valuable feedback. If we win, we’re ecstatic. Win or lose, though, the real meaning comes from a real competition.