I just got back from Dublin where I was speaking at the World Food Technology & Innovation Forum and wanted to share this inspiring new packaging idea with you. As I finished my presentation I was approached by a familiar face – Helen Cooper – another ex-Boots The Chemist marketer who showed me her exciting entrepreneurial idea for on-the-go packaging…

Inspired by IKEA and a bendy straw. Yes that’s what it took to come up with this moment of genius that you’ll going to start seeing a lot more of in the years ahead.

The “Hopper Pot” as it’s called is ‘pocket sized and perfect’. When you are on the move and space is at a premium, trying to fit a pot of portable food into your bag is at best awkward and at worst dangerous!

Enter the Hopper Pot(TM) – the new way to “flat pack” your food. Both squash proof and space efficient it’s small when you need to take it with you and expands to size when you want to use it to eat your food from. It’s perfect for putting into rucksacks or commuter bags.

And it’s already been winning awards: Gold at the Lunch 2012 exhibition in London as well as being shortlisted at the UK Packaging Awards 2012.

Find out more here: http://www.grasshopper-foods.com/hopper-pot/

For more information you can contact the Grasshopper Team at: http://www.grasshopper-foods.com/contact-us/

Jeffrey Hyman - Founder of the Food & Drink Innovation Network

“Co-Creation” is something of a buzz in the world of NPD right now. But what is it all about? And how can you make sure you are maximising its benefits while avoiding its less well publicised pitfalls? My friend Jeffrey Hyman, is helping us to find out…

Join the interactive Co-Creation Experiment here.

One way to find out is to get involved with a neat free experiment set up by The Food & Drink Innovation Network (FDIN). The FDIN is the UK’s Best Practice Club for Food & Beverage NPD; a place where those from all areas of the industry can meet, talk, share and learn.

The way the FDIN works is [..]

Speaking at the Fi Conference: Innovations in Dairy in Amsterdam, July 2012

On 10 July 2012 I was invited as an innovation speaker to present at the Radisson Blu Hotel at the heart of beautiful Amsterdam at the Fi Conference, Innovations in Dairy.

Speaking on how to use consumer insights to improve brands and products, I explained the stages of category development and the importance of timing your innovation with consumer readiness for your new idea.

One of the hardest things for Marketers to achieve is to change someone’s mind. Have you tried changing someone’s mind? A far better, far easier and far more cost effective approach for Marketers is to find an audience who are looking for a story and tell them the story they already believe. That way, when they see your innovation it strikes them with instant appeal as being a solution for their lives that they’ve been looking for all the time!

Instead of resisting your new idea, they are instantly open to its arrival because it comes from their frame of reference and understands their way of seeing the world. In this way, as soon as you know your target, the task of launching and communicating your innovation becomes hugely simplified.

The Radisson Blu Amsterdam - venue for The Fi Innovations in Dairy Conference.

At the Healthy Marketing Team, we use a proprietary innovation model to predict the up-coming opportunities within the categories of food, beverage, ingredients, supplements and personal care. The way we help our clients, who range from the world’s largest multinational corporations to small local and family businesses, is by helping them to predetermine the success of their launch. Not only can we help them to time it and position it correctly, but we help them to fine tune the concepts prior to launch as well – all based on what their target consumer already wants to buy. It’s so logical it’s a wonderfully exciting process to save companies and individuals the pain of launching the wrong product at the wrong time. [..]

Sam Waterfall on Emerging Market Innovation: Addressing 100+ of Egypt's leading Marketers at a private bluechip invitation only Innovation Seminar in Cairo in June 2012.

Addressing Leading Marketers in Cairo, Egypt…

Having worked with a client extensively on a global basis, in June I was asked to speak at their headline customer event. With an audience of 100+ top marketers from the Food & Beverage industry in Egypt, I was asked to outline the drivers of Emerging Market Innovation: “What makes it successful?” and “How can you predict what’s coming next?”

While these both seem like massive questions, it turns out that with the right strategic tools and an overview of global Food & Beverage activity, answering them may be easier than you’d think. As Senior Partner at the Healthy Marketing Team, I use our Healthy Marketing Innovation Model to help our clients predict and create successful products and brands.

It turns out that Egypt is a particularly fascinating market for Food & Beverage Innovation. While the countries is at a political crossroads following last years revolution, the people of Egypt, like the populations of other emerging markets are full of hope that tomorrow will be better than today. They are looking for products and brands to support the development and health of their families as they strive to achieve in an economy which is set to grow.

While the timeless Egyptian Pyramids have stood still for thousands of years, the country's Food & Beverage Consumers are increasingly demanding, creating huge opportunities for companies who can deliver the right combination of quality, differentiation and branding.

What I observed was in many ways similar to my observations in Vietnam last year: There is a huge amount of launch activity but there is a lack of structure and clear communication. The result of this is visible in many emerging markets… Lots of new products, all struggling to create meaningful differentiation and all contributing to growth stultifying consumer confusion. The problem is that this ends up with brands fighting it out in the commodity zone and [..]

This is what I call “Brand Appropriate Innovation.” It’s possible when a brand team understands their brand and their consumer so well they don’t fall into the classic marketers / innovators temptation of pushing innovation too far for the brand. Instead they conduct “Brand Appropriate Innovation.”

Brand Appropriate Innovation: Heinz Tomato Ketchup

When your brand is long established and loved, consumers don’t want you to change it. For brands in this situation appropriate innovation doesn’t change the much loved flavour or alter the trusted name. What it does is make the brand experience better fit the consumers’ lives.

We’d already seen this beautifully exemplified by Heinz Tomato Ketchup. Their version of “Brand Appropriate Innovation” was to move from the traditional glass bottle, to the more convenient squeezy bottle. But then they realised that consumers were storing these bottles upside down in the fridge to get the … [..]