Disrupt like a start-up

With the food market becoming increasingly dominated by the likes of disruptor startups such as Jimmy Joy Food, legacy brand Nestlé was keen to explore this segment with its own complete meal replacement proposition. Aimed at arming those with busy lives with all the nutrients they need while on the go, the product strategy was essentially fast food for the health-conscious; a product that’s convenient yet doesn’t compromise on quality and can be consumed in-between work, social events and exercising.

Before Nestlé  could get to work on getting this product out there, it had a number of important queries to address: How do we enter this market? What type of format - powders? Sporty nutrition bars? Which persona are we going after? How can we scale this up into having mass market appeal while differentiating its proposition? To answer these questions, Nestlé  sought the help of Innoleaps, of which a strong relationship had already been formed. We’d worked on multiple projects with the brand in the past, including the coaching of c-level management in our methodology and to enable innovation to take place without the usual limits and drawbacks.

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Healthy yet convenient: the test

Kicking off the project in January 2020, oblivious to the tribulations the following year would have in store, Nestlé and Innoleaps got down to work with some good old market research. We talked to consumers that fit the personas of the proposition; those with demanding jobs and limited spare time on their hands, yet were conscious about retaining a good level of health and fitness.  We sought to understand a lot about the working day of our potential customer: how and when they ate meals, and how, much to their frustration, they had less time to do so. Most, it seemed, had trouble understanding how to eat healthily and stay fit while not consuming too many calories, alongside navigating a packed schedule. 

And so we got to work on the ideation, creating multiple different types of ready-to-eat, complete meal mock products, from meal replacement shakes to complete nutrition bars. We did all the testing possible, conducting interviews, ads and landing pages. We created over 60 landing pages, reached over five million on social media, garnered over 9000 survey responses and over 700 subscribers. The most impactful, however, was a conjoined analysis, where we were able to test things with prices compared to competitiveness. From our results in online experimentation, we settled on the bowl design - a spoonable pudding with nuts and seeds - purely because it was the best-performing concept. 

Just as we were about to launch the test product, COVID hit, resulting in several delays. Nonetheless, we powered on regardless, launching the test product in July in three markets: the Netherlands, Denmark and the UK through one webshop and 34 physical shops in NL.

Zero to 5000 in 12 weeks 

The result was the creation of an ultra-convenient, ready-to-eat, plant-based complete meal which had taken less than 12 weeks to develop from the initial idea creation to production and had proved popular with consumers within three different markets, garnering over 5000 sales.

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