Subway brings back honey oat bread and creamy sriracha sauce
Can you eat the same breakfast cereals every day? What if you had to eat the same dal rice everyday for lunch? Monotony kills the interest of consumers even if the product is good for their body. Every successful businessman would agree that innovation is the key to rapid market development. Especially in today’s times, consumers tend to get bored very soon. They want novelty in everything they use. .
At Naturell, our goal has always been to introduce innovation in existing products to meet the market requirements. If we look back at the history of Naturell and our brand RiteBite in specific, one will see the gradual introduction of bars each with benefits unique from the others. Today, we are proud to showcase a range of more than 20 variants of nutrition bars including protein bars, snacking bars, diet bars and even herbal protein bars.
Latest innovation happening at Naturell is focusing on combining herbs and proteins together in delicious bars. Understanding the impact of Ayurveda and herbs, we have combined them with nutrition bars and introduced three variants that work on specific wellness needs of weight management, stress management and immunity management.
For the public sector involving the army, navy and military the food needs to be rich in dietary nutrition like proteins, fibres, electrolytes, omega3 etc. The products introduced for them have to be compatible to their living conditions. Government involved wellbeing programmes to eradicate malnutrition and disease management also require food companies to introduce healthy products in reasonable prices. Such products have to be specially formulated to cater to the specific need within the given price range.
On the other hand, private sector involves catering to different classes of the mass market including middle class, higher middle class and the crème category. Within each category also several sub divisions need to be considered while creating a product. These include age, gender, geographic division and more. One product seldom fits all. A child might require a high energy product whereas a woman will require a product high in calcium. It becomes important to study the consumer’s lifestyle and analyse regular changes in their behaviour.
Without good research, even the best of innovations can fail. Every successful product is introduced after keen understanding of the market. For the nutrition category an experienced R&D team involving nutritionists, dieticians and food technologists are mandatory. But other than these, the sales and marketing teams need to be closely involved to strategise the product revenue opportunity and communications related to the product. Market research and test marketing should be given prime importance to check acceptability of products.
Once a company is backed with strong research, innovation will involve experimenting with shelf life of products, packaging options, ingredients, technology and more. There needs to be a well-planned goal on what exactly the company wants to create and accordingly capital needs to be invested. Well strategised pre-planning and forecasting of possible expenses helps the company reduce wastage of investment and resources. When accomplished with minimum resources, such premeditated innovation becomes feasible for the company and can be planned at regular intervals.
For a brand to stay on top of consumers mind it is important to be constantly visible and regularly surprise the consumer. It becomes necessary to constantly research for new products and categories and when an idea seems viable the company can start planning for the further process. For a product launch it can take anything between 6 months to 1 year of complete planning followed by execution. Usually the stages of a product launch would involve ideation, planning, research, investment, product testing and finalising, understand sales channels and USP, packaging, marketing and finally market introduction.
The main aim of innovation in nutrition industry should be giving the customer more options to choose from, betterment of the society by providing healthy substitutes and of course keeping the brand on top of the consumers mind. However it should be noted that innovation should never go against the existing brand and product range.