Our Food & Beverage Practice

Food & Beverage Innovation: Finding the Next Opportunity

Should your next new product be full-flavor or low-fat? Fortified with omega-3 or all-natural? Premium or private label?

If you have no idea then you are not alone. Faced with consumers demanding more variety, increased competition, and higher slotting fees, most food and beverage companies don’t know which way to go.

The natural reaction: Offer something for everyone. But that just dilutes what your brand stands for and guarantees that an increasing number of your offerings will fail.

You can see the carnage at the checkout counters. Grocery retailers lose millions of dollars annually because of failed new products, and they place the blame on food and beverage manufacturers for insufficient market research.

And they are absolutely right.

Consumers are always looking for variety, convenience, and health-conscious options from food and beverage producers. But the definition of what makes a product new and exciting, convenient, or healthy is constantly evolving in the consumer’s mind. Too many manufacturers find themselves launching me-too products, only to find that consumers have already moved on to something else.

One obvious conclusion? You can’t play it safe. Products at the extreme edges of the category are finding success, and two highly successful products might offer directly conflicting benefits. For example, beverage industry growth is being driven simultaneously by high-calorie meal replacement drinks and no-calorie water beverages.

The bottom line: manufacturers are failing at the basic levels in terms of understanding their target consumers.

Markitecture believes that success in food and beverages comes only from a) dedicating the time and effort to developing a sophisticated process for understanding your most profitable customers and having done that, b) targeting those customers precisely with new and/or repositioned offerings