Creating Breakthrough Innovation for Healthy Foods

The Challenge

Creating a breakthrough innovation path for a global beverage brand’s nutrition portfolio in order to grow presence in C&G channels.

The shopping experience for healthy foods was (and still is) an ever-changing experience, and this global beverage brand wanted to see what innovation meant for them and their portfolio of brands. They wanted to uncover mainstream and emerging opportunities for the short-term and long-term. They were interested in understanding how healthy foods were perceived in the NA market as well as the broader cultural impact of food and health.

The Approach

We first wanted to get right to understanding people and conducted online diaries to uncover shopping habits within the C&G space and barriers when shopping for and eating healthy foods. We then dove deeper by conducting in-home ethnography sessions – to understand people’s relationships with nutrition, and what their dreams and desires were when shopping for healthy foods.

In tandem with this, we conducted trend treks using desktop research and expert interviews, to tap into the most forward thinking trends to help illuminate emerging white spaces.

The Impact

Through this work, we were able to bring to life the rich nuances of ‘the healthy foodie’ (news flash – they aren’t as extreme when it comes to their health that our brand expected!) and shift the client team’s perception of who their audience truly is.

We were then able to merge those insights with the trends we uncovered to present five rich, robust dig sites for innovative exploration, and organized them from short-term to long-term, to fuel the pipeline for the brand well into the future.