Paying it forward

Providing children with milk as a school-time snack has long been deemed a great way to supply them with the nutrients needed for healthy growth; contributing to over half of their calcium and a third of their protein requirements.

Dutch multinational dairy cooperative FrieslandCampina had been the executor of ‘Schoolmelk’ in the Netherlands for quite some time - offering the dairy-based beverage as a subscription service paid for by parents and subsidized by the EU and Dutch government. The issue, however, was that even subsidized, the scheme was operating at a loss. And pulling the plug wasn't an option as FrieslandCampina was committed to its strategic goal of executing brand awareness among younger generations as a means of ‘paying it forward’.  

Having already launched dozens of initiatives with Innoleaps, coaching C-level, executive and adjacent teams on how to innovate beyond the core, FrieslandCampina put its trust in us yet again in a bid to achieve its primary goal of creating a ‘schoolmelk next-generation’ proposition that would operating, at the very least, EBIT neutral.

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Remove the fee, reduce the costs 

‍The mission was to quickly test and develop a modern way to deliver Schoolmelk next-gen, calculating how to make it a healthy business model for the next 10 years while stimulating dairy consumption for school-going children and contributing to their healthy living; in an operational excellence way, of course.We developed a new ideal consumer journey, by understanding the school environment, parent perceptions, efficient dairy consumption by young children and also taking into account external partnerships and the government subsidies.

In the first week of working on this project, we discovered in the costs inventory that the overheads in providing the paid subscription service alone were nothing short of immense. As many of the costs were tied up with handling the payments for the milk, we calculated that getting it viable was as simple as moving away from the subscription model and offering the milk for free. This way, we would reach the same or higher amount of kids while ensuring FrieslandCampina weren’t operating the scheme at a financial loss. We also moved to shipping bigger volume packs of milk of which the teachers would have to open and serve to children. After establishing this was feasible, we ran with it and found that it not only helped save on costs, but was more sustainable due to the reduced packaging.‍

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Happy parents, happy client 

‍After a lot of experimenting around feasibility and desirability, FrieslandCampina agreed to move from a paid subscription model via parents to a free model via school, abolishing the old structure in the process. By 2nd November, around 200 schools were signed up to be part of the new approach for the 2020-2021 academic year, with the entire school receiving dairy two or three days a week.

Moving forward, the new program means approximately 30,000 children will receive free school milk, while ensuring that it’s no longer operating at a loss for FrieslandCampina.