Creating Cranberry Product Platforms

Client: Ocean Spray Cranberries

Situation: Ocean Spray is a vertically integrated cranberry cooperative with a major consumer brand name.  But it was losing market share in a mature beverage category. Its core business was requiring an increasing amount of energy, drawing resources away from its once-robust innovation system. The company needed to define competitively insulated growth opportunities that targeted new consumers. Ideally, it needed an opportunity that could revitalize its existing product lines and redefine its category.

Strategy: Establish a front-end innovation process based on best-of-class benchmarking. Organize a dedicated, cross-functional innovation team, including internal and external participants for a broader perspective. Charge the team with developing a portfolio of new product concepts, ranging from close-in derivatives to platform-level opportunities.

Tactics: Using the framework of Innovare’s front end process, team members developed insights on evolving science and technology, new consumer needs, and market trends, then used those insights as input for concept development.

In a Tech Explorer workshop, the team covered advances in agriculture, biotechnology, nutrition and health, consumer psychology, food processing, and packaging. A consumer exploratory defined the needs of various age groups in a range of product use occasions. The market trend exploratory covered leading research on buying patterns, lifestyle changes and evolving attitudes towards health and nutrition.

From the discovered insights, the team created a portfolio of validated product concepts, from close-in product extensions to platform level innovations ready for phase review chartering.

Result: The company populated their product development pipeline and introduced their first category-defining new product platform, The White Cranberry which generated $100 million in revenues in its first 18 months without cannibalizing the $600 million Red Cranberry core business.

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