REDEFINING THE CEREAL AISLE WITH NEXT-GEN BREAKFASTS.
INNOVATION PIPELINE DEVELOPMENT
April 2023 - June 2023
Project Team: Project Lead & Innovation Manager working with a Cross-Functional Client Team
My Role: Innovation Manager
Challenge:
To remain a first choice breakfast provider the client needed to unlock next generation cereal concepts that delivered to changing lifestyle preferences, and created new excitement around the category. As a large coorporation, their organisational proceses weren't set up to keep pace with the rapidly changing market, and required a new innovation approach to avoid falling behind.
Background:
Consumers changing health and lifestyle preferences have driven them away from the cereal aisle, instead looking to other categories for alternative breakfast solutions that are both healthier, and more exciting. This long-term lifestyle shift meant the category was dying, and required a new direction that was led by the voice of the customer.
Approach:
Category Deep Dive
Category Audit: we started with a robust category audit, identifying trends across 5 strategic pillars in local and international markets, as well as from adjacent categories - looking at over 32 major and independent retailers
Knowledge Share: a cross-disciplinary team clue-lab to surface hunches and whitespace opportunities, review existing data, insights, and starting ideas. Working with R&D, ESG, and nutrition teams to extract technical guardrails, possible ways in, and feasibility knowledge gaps. We then analyzed 25 industry reports, extracting further themes, insights, and inspiration.
Technical Inspiration Sessions: we briefed 4 key R&D suppliers to share new inspiration and ideas from a technical standpoint, looking at flavour, format, and nutrition. Over 50 concepts were presented, with 9 prototypes tested.
Consumer & Expert Exploration Research
Parallel Worlds Expert Interviews: to look at the challenge from a new perspective we spoke with two industry experts from adjacent categories. We got into texture and flavour exploration with Messina Gelato’s Head Pastry Chef, then dove into food as medicine with author, nutritionist, and founder of Food Health Wealth, Samatha Gowing.
Test-to-Learn Consumer Sessions: we identified 3 key customer profiles, recruiting and running 6 research sessions with a total of 28 consumers. We acid tested early-stage hunches and hypothesis, looking to understand their changing life priorities, current breakfast routines, and the products, ingredients, and language that stood out to them.
Springboard Definition: from our research, we identified 6 distinct springboards, 3 universal lenses, and 23 targeted sub-challenges that would shape our ideation.
Approach:
Product Tear Down & Ideation
We sourced 48 competitor products from local and international markets, running a technical exploration session to:
Unpack what’s currently working and what’s not
Identify technical principles we can use
Generate starting ideas
Over 2 days, we ran cross-functional workshops bringing together 6 functional teams from within the organisation.
164 ideas were produced, which we then ran through a harvest session - resulting in 30 leading ideas for further development and testing.
Proposition Evaluation
Applying a more robust strategic filter, we further evaluated the ideas through the lens of:
Strategic Pillar Fit
Desirability
Feasibility
Viability
Impact
In preparation for quantitative testing, we crafted concept statements for the leading propositions and worked with the illustration team to bring the ideas to life.
We delivered the final concept proposition pipeline, mapping each output across a short-long term development horizon, with key dependencies, risks, and jobs-to-be-done identified.
Outcome:
The delivery of a proposition pipeline that was reflective of market trends, and the changing lifestyle preferences of key consumer groups, identifying untapped market opportunities that aligned with consumer needs, and the business’ overarching strategic pillars.
The project also resulted in a renewed and refined internal innovation approach that became a benchmark for best practice within the organisation.
This project and pipeline development is ongoing, and still under NDA.