At Kerry our expertise is in taste and nutrition, and we have a wealth of experience in product formulations to help our customers deliver on great tasting beverages for foodservice operators. The beverage industry has a huge role to play by creating more sustainable products that are better for our health, our planet without compromising on taste.
The road to changing a foodservice beverage offer to one that is more sustainable: is a journey. We wanted to work in partnership with our foodservice chain operators to help them unlock future sustainable beverage growth opportunities.
In 2024 we launched a campaign called “Rethink Every Drop” to show foodservice chain operators how to understand and develop a sustainable beverage range fit for the future.
Our Research and approach:
We conducted a piece of proprietary research to develop an understanding of foodservice consumers sustainable nutrition needs, attitudes and decision-making barriers and drivers. We discovered that eating and drinking more sustainable foods and beverages is perceived as being inextricably linked to eating and drinking healthier food and drinks. We know that consumers’ propensity to purchase one food or drink item over another increases significantly if a sustainable nutrition message is added. At the same time, they are also willing to pay more for it. The biggest challenge, apart from the lack of knowledge of this fact, is food and beverage operators’ ability to start that journey to reformulation and how to communicate it in an impactful way on their menus.
As a European foodservice beverage team, we set out to:
- Demonstrate thought leadership in the sustainable beverage journey for foodservice chains and show a path forward (very often they don’t know where to start).
- Show how we understand the market landscape for sustainable beverage in different markets.
- Discover the foodservice beverage consumer segmentations in different markets and their attitudes to taste and nutrition.
- Deliver impact by market – linking sustainability with health and addressing the HFSS legislation & regulations by market.
- Identify the future opportunity platforms for growth in sustainable beverage by country.
- Bring all this together and communicate this under a target campaign directed at European Foodservice beverage operators.
Project Achievements:
We decided to launch our targeted chain beverage campaign by defining what sustainable beverages were through the lens of the foodservice consumer in 4 different markets: the UK, France, Germany and Spain. We called this campaign: Rethink Every Drop. To that end we took a 3-phase approach:
- Understand
Ascertained that there is consumer demand! Through our research, we ascertained the motivators and drivers behind the demand for alternative beverage solutions and showed our customers what these could look like. Key components of that research entailed:
- In-depth interviews conducted with relevant sustainability industry pioneers: Pizza Pilgrims UK, Amass Restaurant, Denmark, Max Burger Sweden and Wahaca UK.
- Consumer mobile Immersions – understand the journey that occurs when eating & drinking with sustainability in mind.
- Upcycling current research
- Hypothesis development
- Define
With the beverage element of the research, we designed a “menu selects” as an experiment to mimic the drink ordering process and understand how consumers order their beverages out of home. We did this over different randomized experiments:
- We showed 5 different menu designs ideas covering:
- Control
- Price
- Calories
- Co2 impact
- Visual descriptors
Our results showed that that there is great opportunity to drive more sustainable choices through low-cost menu design intervention based on how menus are presented to them.
This was completed across the UK, France, Spain, and Germany, among a robust nationally representative sample of 2400 foodservice consumers between 18-55 yrs.
In addition to this we reviewed and evaluated the upcoming regulations around (HFSS) and illustrated that the nutrition landscape is changing. We showed how Kerry could mitigate some of the opportunity costs associated with this.
- Invent
We developed a series of actionable insight guides by region to position Kerry T&N as the go-to supplier of nutrition optimisation solutions for beverage and a thought leader in its evolution. The key elements entailed:
- Key headline insights and implications and ways to position menus for foodservice operators by market.
- Simple examples and solutions on how foodservice chains could reformulate their ranges to be more customer centric.
- Key areas of relevance to explore platforms for future growth.
Bringing all this together under our campaign banner with regional content enabled us to start having some serious conversations with foodservice beverage chain customers. We grew our social and PR engagement scores. Through a series of targeted media, we overachieved on our targets for engagement in this campaign which enabled us to have qualified strategic discussions with our foodservice chain customers.
Summary
Kerry’s vision is to shape a future of sustainable nutrition. As a global taste & nutrition company Kerry drive change by partnering with their customers to innovate for the future of people, planet, and society.
