Portfolio›Case studies›Pronaca›Natural Heaven — U.S. market entry·Pronaca · INAEXPO · U.S.

Natural Heaven: an Ecuadorian crop turned into a brand on U.S. shelves.

A shopper in Miami asks for hearts of palm by name and pays a dollar price for it — for a crop that used to leave Ecuador as a commodity in a tin. Natural Heaven is the brand definition, portfolio plan, U.S. marketing plan and marketplace presence I built as a consultant with the exporter behind it.

Brand definitionCategory benchmarkU.S. market entryPortfolio strategyMarketplaceExport

The brief

Four workstreams between a processing plant and a U.S. shelf.

The consultancy covered the whole distance between a Santo Domingo processing plant and a U.S. shopping basket. Four workstreams, each one useless without the other three.

Front 01

Brand definition

Positioning, identity and narrative for a U.S. consumer brand built on an Ecuadorian crop.

Front 02

Portfolio plan with INAEXPO

Connect the consumer brand to the export capacity behind it — turning commodity volume into branded product.

Front 03

U.S. marketing plan

How the brand reaches an American household that has never heard of hearts of palm.

Front 04

Marketplace presence

Listing and retail presence online, where a category like this is discovered before it is bought.

Category benchmark

The competitor arrived first and told the story better.

Any market-entry plan starts by looking honestly at who already owns the shelf. In hearts-of-palm pasta on the U.S. marketplace, that is Palmini — and the gap is not the product, it is the story around it.

Marketplace search results for hearts-of-palm pasta: the category is led by Palmini listings with tens of thousands of reviews, alongside Miracle Noodle, BRAMI and other low-carb pasta brands. — The category as a shopper meets it. Captured September 2026 — the benchmark is live, not a slide from a deck.

22.3k

reviews on the category leader's flagship listing — social proof compounding for years

"Shark Tank"

written into the product title itself: borrowed credibility doing the work of an ad budget

net carbs, printed on the pack corner — the category is sold on a number, not on origin

20 cal

the second number. Whoever owns these two numbers owns the search result

The lesson I took from this benchmark is the one that shaped the brand work: in this category nobody is buying a vegetable, they are buying permission to eat pasta. The winning pack sells a carb count and a TV credential. Origin — the thing Ecuador actually owns — earns nothing on the shelf unless it is translated into that language first.

Brand identity

A gourmet label cannot survive a marketplace thumbnail.

The identity the brand carries today came out of this consultancy. The two marks below are the before and the after — and the distance between them is a strategy, not a taste preference.

The artwork was executed by an agency, which is how brand direction works at corporate scale and is worth saying plainly: my job was the brief, the positioning it had to express and the decisions it had to survive. A director who cannot tell the difference between setting the brief and drawing the logo is not much use at either.

Before

The gourmet label

A script wordmark on a yellow oval, topped by the descriptor low-carb gourmet. It reads as a delicatessen product: careful, artisanal, and quiet on a shelf where everything shouts. At thumbnail size on a phone, the script is the first thing to disappear.

After

The shelf brand

Rounded capitals, one colour, no container, no descriptor. It survives being shrunk to a marketplace thumbnail and it survives being printed on a flexible pouch. The gourmet cue is gone on purpose: this category is won in mass grocery, not in delicatessen.

The decision

Drop the descriptor

"Low-carb gourmet" put two positioning claims in the logo. Gourmet caps your distribution; low-carb belongs on the pack front where the number lives, not in the mark.

The decision

Kill the container

An oval is a shape competing with your packaging. Removing it lets the name work on any background, in any format, at any size.

The decision

Legible before it is pretty

Script reads as craft and disappears at 60 pixels. Rounded capitals read as food and survive the thumbnail — which is where this category is actually chosen.

The brand today

The brand is on the U.S. shelf and the range keeps growing.

The test of a brand foundation is not how the launch deck looked. It is whether the thing is still standing years later, run by other people, selling more than it did.

Natural Heaven website in 2026: hearts-of-palm pasta, rice and ready meals presented across a bright green branded environment, with claims of ready to eat, low carb, low calorie and a good source of fibre. — eatnaturalheaven.com, September 2026. The range has widened from pasta into rice and ready meals; the site now sells subscription as well as one-off purchase.

Then → now

Pasta → pasta, rice, meals

The portfolio plan built with INAEXPO was about giving the crop more than one destination. The range on the site today is that plan, three years on.

Then → now

Retail → retail + subscription

A repeat-purchase mechanic on the brand's own property — the cheapest revenue in consumer goods.

Then → now

Product claims → lifestyle claims

"Ready to eat · low carb · low calorie · good source of fibre." The category language the benchmark predicted, now owned rather than borrowed.

What sits behind it

A consumer brand is the last mile of an export business.

None of the brand work matters without the supply chain underneath, which is why the portfolio plan was written with INAEXPO rather than for it.

43%

of the world's cultivated hearts-of-palm market held by INAEXPO — the global leader

countries served, across Europe, North America, Africa and Australia

1 in 3

hearts of palm consumed worldwide is Ecuadorian

99%

of production exported — an operation built entirely around leaving the country

That last number is the strategic point. An operation that exports virtually everything it makes has enormous volume and almost no relationship with the person who eats the product. A consumer brand is how a commodity exporter finally gets to meet its customer — and charge for it.

What it changed

The same crop, worth several times more, with a name on it.

Commodity export sells volume at a price somebody else sets. A branded product on a U.S. shelf sells a promise at a price you set, and it compounds: reviews, subscribers, a range that widens, a shopper who asks for it by name.

This is the piece of my record I would point at first when the question is whether marketing can move a P&L rather than decorate one. It is also the clearest evidence of the thing I care about most — a brand built on foundations solid enough to keep working after the person who built them has moved on.

In your company

What this looks like when you bring it in.

What you get

A brand definition built for the market you are entering

Positioning, identity and narrative written for the shopper who will compare you.

What builds up

A commodity that sells as a brand

A portfolio plan, a marketing plan and a listing that give it a reason to be chosen.

What you stop paying for

Selling at commodity price

The margin sits with whoever owns the shelf.