Innovating New Retail Opportunities in the World of Potatoes

Challenge

Illuminating the role of potatoes in meals today, and its’ future possibilities, to inspire new retail product opportunities.

Our client – a leading snack brand – wanted to unpack the role of potatoes in meals today in order to surface potential new retail opportunities for one of their key brands tomorrow. So we were tasked with three main objectives: to explore the role of potatoes and it’s uses in everyday meals, to investigate trends across the category and in culture, and to identify white space opportunities that would provide the greatest growth potential for our client’s brand over the next 3-5 years.

Approach

Our approach was broken up into three phases. During the first phase, we conducted a comprehensive remine, social listening to uncover themes in conversations about potatoes, and virtual discussion groups with potato superfans to dive deeper into people’s attitudes, perceptions and eating habits today. Then we did a comprehensive horizon scan and spoke to several potato experts (yes, there are such a thing!) to uncover trends and signals likely to shape the future of the potato in retail tomorrow. During our final phase of work, we developed and sized a series of Dig Sites which were used during an exciting 2-day innovation workshop (IRL!) that ended in 10 screenable concepts which we prioritized and plotted onto a 3-5 year pipeline map.

Impact

Armed with the insights and foresight our work provided, our client was able to clearly see the path forward in the retail-potato space. The robust 3-5 year product pipeline we helped to build was put into action, with the close-in concepts handed off to R&D & brand for refinement and development.