Innovation and Project Management
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Culinary Sauces
Project Type
Innovation in the Food Category
Year(s)
2024
Location
Peru
Role
Project Lead
As the head of the experimentation team and project lead I was responsible for setting up the team, the scope, the budget, and the schedule of the project with the aim to deliver an objective report that would help the brand managers in their investments decisions.
My role also involved managing a team of 3 people in securing the quality and compliance of the planning and execution activities. It also included managing the relationship and communications with internal and external stakeholders.
Key Learning
Gathering data from Early Adopters is a challenging task, especially if their isn't a direct distribution channel. In order to connect with them and get valuable feedback, one must explore a diverse range of methods and incentives and influence internal stakeholders.
Nicolini is one of the oldest food brands in Peru (100+ years) with several products across the Pasta and Culinary Sauces categories.
In 2023, the brand managers decided to explore new opportunities to expand its Culinary Sauces portfolio and invested in developing a new sub-category around the concept of semi-ready Culinary Sauces with the aim of helping Users that have little or non cooking experience to increase their confidence in meals preparation.
Once the value proposition was developed (formula & packaging) and the concept testing was succesfully achieved, the brand managers wanted to test the products in real environments (MVP testing) which gave birth to a 3-month experimentation project to test the desirability of the new proposal.
The experimentation planning involved setting up an hypothesis and designing the activities that would allow to capture the data needed to test the hypothesis.
The execution of the experimentation involved selling 3 skus across 150 retailers in 3 different cities in Peru within a 3 month period and gathering selling data of the retailers and qualitative data of the end users.
At the end of the experiment, the data was analysed and a final report including conclusions, recommendations and learnings was delivered to the brand managers.
This final report is being used as part of the decision making process of the brand managers in whether they should move on in a full scale deployment, pivot the value proposition and retest, or cancel the project. This decision was still pending as of Q4 2024.
