Kate Farms's CMO Treats Credibility As the Growth Strategy

GLP-1 medications have pulled an entirely new set of consumers into a category that used to sit inside a hospital formulary. Retailers want a share of that demand now, and the easiest way to get it is to simplify the pitch: soften the clinical language, speed up the launch calendar, chase the shelf space. That pressure sits directly under Catherine Hayden’s job.

Hayden is EVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Kate Farms, a foundational nutrition brand built for what she describes as “ages one to 101,” for anyone on a health needs journey, whether that means chemotherapy or a convenient lunch option for a kid. She trained as a registered dietitian and spent years on pediatric wards before she ever held a marketing title. Danone acquired Kate Farms last July, and Hayden now has to carry a clinical brand into a much bigger, much faster consumer marketing machine. At eTail Boston 2026, she spoke with ClickZ about what she will not compromise to get there.

Clinical training set the terms before marketing did

Hayden traces her approach directly back to the ward.

“The piece that always stands out, that I hold true in our business development, our marketing, and our sales today, is that it’s always around the needs of the people.”

A clinician diagnoses an issue, builds a solution, and works with the patient toward it, and Hayden treats that as the same job as a product launch or a messaging campaign. The other carryover is evidentiary. In medical nutrition, credibility means substantiated claims, and substantiated claims are what create trust.

Product standards do not bend for retail speed

Asked what she refuses to simplify as Kate Farms moves from healthcare-provider channels into mainstream CPG retail, Hayden pointed straight at formulation. “Our product standards,” she said, describing what the company calls the Kate Farms Difference: plant-based, organic, non-GMO, free of common allergens, and made without artificial colors, flavors or sweeteners. The product has to work for whoever it serves, and that bar holds as the brand expands into new retail doors.

That discipline showed up concretely in the brand’s High Protein Nutrition Shake launch. Kate Farms built a high-protein shake for GLP-1 users and timed it to Amazon Prime Day, then withheld its highest-volume flavor, vanilla, because it failed internal taste standards. “We did 800 variations to get the flavor right, to work with the right flavor house,” Hayden said, and the finished vanilla launched a full year after chocolate and strawberry. The brand is now at Walmart with all three flavors and in 6,800 doors including CVS over the past 60 days, a payoff for a delay that a growth-at-all-costs retail calendar would have skipped.

The industry still oversimplifies the GLP-1 consumer

Hayden also pushed back on a common assumption about that same customer. “That the only thing that matters is protein,” she said, is wrong. Digestive health matters just as much to a GLP-1 consumer’s daily experience, so Kate Farms frames its formulation as “protein with purpose,” weighing fiber, complete nutrition, and a full micronutrient profile alongside protein content.

Brand love is a number, not a feeling

Kate Farms measures loyalty through what it calls a brand love metric, a composite Hayden’s team introduced two years ago across a consumer brand equity tracker and a healthcare professional equity tracker. It scores five attributes, emotional connection, loyalty, brand attachment, brand superiority, and brand perception, then ranks the result against competitors. Hayden also tracks something she calls “tracings,” shipment data from distributors straight to a household, which gives her a weekly read on real demand rather than sell-in to the channel. Fifty percent of Kate Farms purchases trace back to a healthcare professional recommendation, with another 20% from friends and family, a trust signal Hayden ranks above Prime Day visibility when asked which drives more of it.

Acquisition does not reset the mission

Danone’s ownership brings scale, distribution, and a shared philosophy Hayden calls “health through food,” and Kate Farms will sit inside a new North American platform for better-for-you medical nutrition alongside other Danone brands. Staying authentic inside that structure, in her framing, starts with clarity on what the brand stands for, since that clarity is usually the reason a larger company acquires it in the first place. From there, she treats evolution as compatible with identity: “Don’t lose who you are, but be open to evolving to the next stage.”

The same logic carries into how she runs her team. Her leadership approach, she said, starts with hiring the right people, then getting out of their way.