Three Considerations for Food Brands Launching a New CPG Product

Consumer food preferences constantly evolve, and, to stay competitive, successful brands continually adapt and respond to those changing consumer needs. As a brand committed to providing accessible, wholesome, and delicious snacks, Nature's Bakery takes a holistic approach when deciding what products to launch. This approach balances market opportunities and trends (“where to play”), with the brand’s ability to deliver against those benefits consumers seek (“how to win”).

Nature's Bakery is known for its soft-baked, nut-free, plant-based snack bars, with our best-selling Fig Bars (also available in Gluten-Free), Oatmeal Crumble, and Brownie bars. When evaluating product portfolio expansion, brands should prioritize whitespace opportunities of either consumer segments or occasions – areas of high growth potential exist due to unmet consumer needs.  This is where agility and speed can make all the difference.

From a marketing perspective, expanding a product line brings both advantages and challenges. For a brand, new product lines allow you to reach new consumers and/or penetrate new usage occasions. However, the business case must first be substantiated. This doesn’t require years of research, as insights can come from anywhere, including TikTok.  The strongest product ideas will be incremental to the brand and the category.  In addition, there is the challenge of acquiring incremental shelf space for your brand--ideally, you’ll present a strong case that shows how adding one more item from your brand helps the retailer meet their sales and/or profit goals.

There are many considerations to keep in mind when expanding your product offerings, and here are three best practices to consider:

1) Start with Consumer Insights: Understanding the trends in food & snacking and how well your existing product portfolio meets those changing and emerging consumer needs is critical.  For every concept or product idea, pause and ask yourself, “What’s the job to be done?”  Stay diligent and only pursue opportunities that fit what consumers know and expect from your brand. For example, at the height of the Keto trend, Nature’s Bakery was frequently asked when we would launch a Keto bar. Because we are an all-family brand, and our core consumers did not heavily seek this popular benefit – households with school-aged children – a Keto-focused bar was not a viable idea to pursue. By contrast, our consumers told us they wanted more snack options for pre-lunch snacking, and from this, our successful Oatmeal Crumble product line was born!

2) Consider your Retail Partner’s Goals: Always test your product portfolio strategy to ensure alignment with your retailers’ areas of strategic growth and focus. Listen with curiosity to identify win-win opportunities. Retailers have a strategy for their category assortment tied to their overall goals--make sure you understand this well.  If you don’t know, ask about it. Your objective is to align your innovation plan to help them achieve their goals while growing your brand and market share at the same time.

For the launch of our new Salted Caramel Brownie, we leveraged the insight that consumers are seeking a better-for-you, yet permissibly-indulgent snack for those much-needed me-time breaks later in their day. This data helped secure distribution for our Brownie line as an addition to our product lineup because it will help drive brand and category growth through additional usage occasions.

3) Determine your Ability to Win: Innovation is not without complexity, and which you must mitigate as an organization. A winning strategy identifies an area positioned for growth in which your brand has a right to play and the ability to win. From there your job is to design potential product concepts that can win the purchase intent of your target consumer. You may need additional technical capabilities, new routes to market, or supply chains (here, partnerships come in handy!), and all this must be weighed against the opportunity’s potential. Lastly, consider the investment required to support a new launch; it’s never wise to launch a new item and not invest to drive trial.  These investments should be fully considered in the your P&L assumptions.

So how will you manage your competing priorities, i.e. supporting the core product lines vs a new product launch? This is particularly challenging for smaller brands, which are resource-constrained.  Ultimately, a deep understanding of what consumers want and need, where and how your retailers are trying to grow, and your brand’s potential fit against these will help you consider if, when, and how to prioritize product portfolio expansion.