Karen Tyner, Senior Manager Food & Beverage, Bord Bia - The Irish Food Board
Innovation which creates new products gives you the opportunity to better meet your consumers’ needs, build a stronger relationships with your customers, helps defend your business against competitors and may move your business in to better margin areas. Choosing what innovation your business should prioritise can be challenging. If you are developing your innovation pipeline, but looking for inputs to stimulate your ideas, there are a number of options available to you.
Companies often develop their innovation pipeline with a specific customer in mind. For this strategy to be successful you need to understand what status the category has been allocated by that customer. The innovation pipeline you develop should reflect the category ambitions of your customer. Are you supplying into a ‘famous for’ category, is the category one the customer wants to grow, or is it a lower margin category that your customer must stock to meet consumer needs.
Retail customers will often publish information on their innovation focus. Waitrose recently released its food and drink report 2019 -2020. This report identified four key trends Waitrose has identified for UK consumers including a refocusing on the fundamentals, mindful spending, a passion for compassion and cutting clutter.
Tesco’s 2019 annual financial report, highlighted their commitment to creating a culture of innovation across their business and the opening of their new ‘heart’ facility on the Welwyn Garden City campus. The ‘Heart’ building brings together Tesco’s product development and customer insight teams with kitchens where suppliers can develop new products. Tesco are focusing their innovation on making their products healthier and more sustainable through sourcing and packaging.
Bord Bia creates reports that can be used to stimulate innovation. The recently published Bord Bia Functional Foods Innovation Playbook is great example of a review of the opportunities and innovation platforms identified by Bord Bia in the growing functional food arena.
Bord Bia’s consumer lifestyle trends may also help you to identify the key trends that are relevant to your sector. The increasingly busy and complex lives of consumers provides opportunities for businesses to develop products that meet these consumers’ needs. The consumer lifestyle website also provides a 4 step toolkit (improve, imagine, improve and initiate) to assist with the innovation development process.
There are many external stimuli available to help you develop your innovation pipeline. If you need support in this area, then please get in touch.
References:
Waitrose Food & Drink Report 2019-2020
https://www.waitrose.com/content/dam/waitrose/Inspiration/About%20Us%20New/Food%20and%20drink%20report%202017/foodanddrinkreport1920v2.pdf
Tesco’s Annual Report and Financial Statements 2019
https://www.tescoplc.com/media/476422/tesco_ara2019_full_report_web.pdf
Bord Bia Functional Food Innovation Playbook
Bord Bia Consumer Lifestyle Trends
https://www.bordbiaconsumerlifestyletrends.ie/