SECTOR CASE STUDIES

Ensure the right problem is being solved and then solving it in the best way possible.

“There is a huge banana waste problem. Every week, here in north Queensland, around 2.5 million bananas are wasted because of oversupply or crops not matching supermarket standards. 

As banana farmers, it was demoralising seeing all your hard work go to waste – literally. Not just for us, but for other farmers too. And when cyclones came along, income was wiped out virtually overnight. We endured two! This wasn’t a sustainable way of making a living. 

We’d noticed too that wallabies and cattle on the farm were stepping over the ripe bananas to get to the green bananas. We hypothesised that green bananas might deliver nutritional benefits. 

We began making green banana flour by hand and as demand grew, with numerous customers telling us they not only found it delicious but felt healthier too, we recognised the opportunity to scale.

But how and to who, exactly? And was there really something in this banana flour that was bringing curative effects for people?”

Make sure you understand the needs, wants and desires of your customer or end-user at the deepest level possible to ensure you are solving their unmet needs.

“Rob, my partner, had suffered coeliac symptoms for years. He wasn’t impressed with the majority of gluten free products on the market, and we suspected that others may feel the same way.

We did our own desktop research. We could see there was a rise in alternative eating, with more and more consumers looking for gluten free products.  

This would be a new product that we would need to introduce to the marketplace. This certainly was an opportunity!

Over the years, we’ve learnt about our consumer less through formal research and more from face-to-face contact and through our own data. I’ve attended countless Health and Wellness, and Gourmet Food Shows, here and internationally. They give you a unique first-hand understanding of how difficult it is to find gluten-free alternatives that taste great. 

Our Facebook for Business account and online back-end data has also given us great insight into what people are searching for and why.”

Take the best idea and turn it into a realistic outcome so that it can be tested and critiqued so that any flaws can be identified and re-designed. The final prototype is tested and validated.

“From selling only in the family café, we thought we would test out selling online. We were early adopters of Facebook for Business and got a web designer to set us up an online shop. Soon we were selling so much, we couldn’t supply enough bananas from our farm to keep up with the demand. So, we started buying bananas from others farms in the state – Cavendish and Lady Finger bananas. 

Over time we tried our process on other fruit and vegetables – broccoli and sweet potato for example. NutroLock^™ technology can now be used to create products from a range of other fruits and vegetables, and effectively preserves the nutritional benefits for up to three years.  

We had to know more about the supposed health properties of our flour, that had been mentioned by some of our customers. After accessing a FIAL grant, we took both a Cavendish and Lady Finger banana sample to a testing lab. 

Resistant starches, unlike normal starches, are not digested in the small intestine, providing numerous benefits including helping to prevent colon cancer and diabetes, promoting weight loss and boosting the immune system. It is antimicrobial to harmful bacteria and can be used in literally hundreds of applications, from baked goods to boost nutritional profile, to cosmetic and pharmaceutical uses for diet and skin care. More desktop research told us that there was a huge global market for this stuff!”

“Over the years we have commissioned research from many universities to inform how we proceed. We worked with the University of Queensland to understand more about pasta made from green banana powder and the effect that had on digestion. 

We’ve worked with others including the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries in Queensland (DAF) and the University of Queensland and Tasmania, mainly to discover what else is in the powder and how it could be turned into other products. 

We are currently working with a hospital research team who anticipate that our resistant starch may help kidney transplant patients by lowering the rate of rejection as well as lowering secondary infections. 

Research results informed how we proceeded with our products. We recognised the opportunity to produce the higher value prebiotic powder and other health products from the more expensive Lady Finger bananas. We decided to leave the more readily available, and lower price point Cavendish Bananas for baking product. 

We took banana flour, broccoli and sweet potato flour to market, replacing our homemade bags with professional packaging design. We brought in a Marketing specialist to help us launch some pre-mix cake and dough products and advise on how to improve our online shop. 

This is a unique synergy of three fibre groups, vitamins and minerals that delivers an all-natural product designed to optimise gut health. It is registered as a food with health claims through FSANZ including support and protection of a healthy gut microbiome and support of gut barrier health, among others.

It was an iterative process, with a lot of trial and error over an extended timeframe to create this new product. We had to determine the perfect balance of plant fibres and probiotics to ensure consumer palatability derived from only all-natural ingredients.

We used it on our blue heelers who would suffer ‘hot spots’ a bacterial infection related to staph that is present during tropical months. Its effect was transformational and fast – we wanted other people and animals to experience it.

The only reason we have not launched in the US market, is that we are struggling to keep up with current demand. When our new facility comes online in 2022, we will launch in the US. 

To meet the increasing consumer demand for the banana flour and in order to scale the health supplement side of the business we applied for a grant from Commercialisation Australia. 

This facility can produce one tonne of flour during an eight hour, two-person shift, and the richest and most natural prebiotic supplements. 

We also applied to FIAL for funding to help us execute and deliver our design for a new drying technology.

Working alongside design engineers and a software designer, we have developed a new Blade Dry model that not only provides us with ten times the volume, but it can simultaneously mill and dry large volumes of highly fibrous material, delivering an end product that has even greater nutritional integrity. 

We are in the process of replicating this technology to help advance opportunities for other Australian farmers and businesses that require disposal of organic matter, or for pharmaceutical production. They too could create products from waste on a commercial scale. 

Initially, we marketed our banana flour under a different shelf name. When we recognised the opportunity to produce prebiotic powder and other health products, we changed our name to ‘Natural Evolution’ to better reflect the consumer’s expectations. We created the brand name and engaged a designer to bring our visual identity to life.

Now we are selling our drying processing technology to farms around Australia to help them create more scientifically verified functional foods and products from their own fruit or vegetable waste we have again redeveloped our business model. ‘Evolution Industries’  better aligns to our new customers’ expectations.  

This means that within any given area of particular fruit or vegetable mix, there would be a central processing location that the farms would send their produce just for bagging and blending.   

I’ve been looking into purchasing a new facility for the first one. Not only would it do the bagging and blending but we would bring the brand part of our business together under the one roof and hire a full-time visual designer. I may create a precinct where we can join with other complementary food producers working with food waste. 

We no longer grow bananas on our own farm but buy it from others farms across the state. Last year, we purchased over 1 million metric tonnes of bananas. We have developed a unique quality assurance program that traces those bananas from paddock to factory.

Growers have the option of another marketplace for their produce and in fact the potential to earn more for their higher grades of bananas. Rather than sending to the fresh food market growers they have the option to supply to us. This means they save on packaging and freight especially when prices are low due to oversupply in the fresh fruit market.

Everything we have done has been driven by a desire to reduce food waste and tread more lightly on the earth. 

The bananas we now buy from other farms are grown organically and bio-dynamically with optimal nutrition and care to ensure we deliver the best nutrient dense and completely natural food product for our customers.

This has transformed not just our lives as (ex) banana growers giving us a more secure income, but its effect is being felt across Queensland. 

It is reducing food waste on a state, if not national scale, while increasing the security and wellbeing of families and communities.”

Ensure the right problem is being solved and then solving it in the best way possible.

“We are third generation apple growers. We have been growing apples for over seventy years and we wanted to make sure we were here for the next seventy! 

We knew we needed to innovate beyond our core business, to secure the future for the next generations. The supermarkets were increasingly upping the ante on the specifications for Grade 1 fruit, which meant that more of our apples were being demoted to Grade 2 and used only for juice – and at a much lower return. Plus, fresh apple consumption in Australia was also declining. These conditions combined reduced the future viability of our orchard business. 

We needed to find a new way to use our quality apples that fall just short of supermarket specification. To start this journey, we undertook a market review to understand how and why consumer apple consumption had changed and to investigate consumer food trends.”

Make sure you understand the needs, wants and desires of your customer or end-user at the deepest level possible to ensure you are solving their unmet needs.

“We commissioned a consumer insight research agency. Consumers wanted apple consumption to be nutritious. This was something we felt deeply passionate about too – more than 1 in 2 children and 7 in 10 adults are not currently meeting recommended daily fibre intakes. They wanted it to be convenient, quick to consume when ‘on-the-go’ and with no mess (e.g., no core!). Something like an apple, but not an apple! Something nutritious and filling to better suit a modern Australian lifestyle. 

Through this research we also narrowed down our target group. This was a young demographic interested in health and wellness who wanted maximum nutritional value and were actively looking for healthy food snack replacements.

We then invested in market analysis to identify key food product opportunities. There’s no point developing a product first, and then going back to the market and hoping it fits! 

We spent considerable time looking at market trends here in Australia, and overseas. What are people looking for? Where are the gaps? Where was the opportunity?”

Generate innovative ideas to help solve those needs and desires. Take the best idea and pursue further to find the most feasible for the company, most viable commercially and most desirable to the customer.

“Working with a Brisbane based food innovation expert, we came up with several new product ideas that matched our key research learnings about how consumers use and perceive apples. 

We created several new product ideas at bench level and independently tested some of these with consumers.”

Take the best idea and turn it into a realistic outcome so that it can be tested and critiqued so that any flaws can be identified and re-designed. The final prototype is tested and validated.

“We found a highly skilled food processing engineer to further develop the product concepts. 

After developing a method for each prototype, we did an additional two rounds of product concepts, testing them with the target group to make sure the prototypes actually matched consumer needs and expectations in terms of taste, performance, flavour and texture.  

To really solve our business problem though, we wanted to create a product with a whole-apple full nutritional profile which meant maximising all three components of the apple – the pulp, the peel and the juice. Creating a method to do this presented a significant challenge. It had to utilise the whole apple to maintain the nutritional benefits, as well as preserve the fresh apple taste and have a delicious texture.

It was healthy, containing the full nutritional value of a whole apple (unlike juice) and was convenient – it’s an apple on the run. We knew we were on to a winner!

It took us three years to get the unique manufacturing process bedded down. FIAL supported us by matching funding which allowed us to further develop the product for commercialisation.

While the innovation journey wasn’t easy, we failed quickly and early so we could eliminate those ideas that weren’t feasible at scale.”

Use what we have learned about the customer to inform how we proceed.

Upple^® stands alone in a new beverage category of drinkable whole fruit, offering a far higher fibre and nutritional level than fruit juice. 

Upple^® was launched through greengrocers in Queensland, a number of IGAs and to the school market. To date Upple^® has also achieved extensive distribution in NSW through large IGA’s and a major retailer, Harris Farm Markets. We’ve had interest from airlines, a number of supermarket retailers, more schools and are looking at export markets. COVID has just slowed it all down.

One of the biggest challenges was to find a way of achieving a viscosity or thickness of the product that was pleasant to drink. We liaised with the University of Queensland (UQ) to use equipment which could measure apple fibre particles so they couldn’t be noticed in the mouth.

To manage our value-added business, we set up a new innovation arm of P. Savio & Co called Savio Healthy Innovations. Upple^® is the first new product to be commercialised and we are continuing to develop other product ideas which leverage our brand, food processing skills and market opportunities. 

Our new innovation division allows us to focus both on our apple growing and value adding pursuits and develop skills within the family.

We created a strong brand name ‘Upple^®’ that is now trademarked globally, visual identity and a unique packaging design. 

The raw material, whole fresh apples, are supplied directly from our orchard. In time, we hope to be able to use out-of-spec apples from the whole district.  

We worked with experienced Queensland suppliers on our marketing and packaging and brought skilled workers in to build the new factory facility and mentor family staff.

Upple^® is produced on site at our orchard in a custom-designed HACCP accredited new facility using a unique manufacturing patent-pending process.

To align with our consumer values (and subsequently our brand values) we’ve created a custom apple-shaped bottle from 100% recycled plastic that is itself recyclable.

We are also contributing to reducing the food waste problem in Australia, which accounts for more than 5% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions (according to the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment).”

Ensure the right problem is being solved and then solving it in the best way possible.

“We had ambitions to scale our table fish business. However, it became apparent a key constraint was the reliable supply of high-quality fingerlings (baby fish). 

It occurred to us that this constraint was not just particular to MainStream but was shared by every other Barramundi company on the planet. 

We needed to further investigate both the industry itself and the end consumer to inform our strategy.”

Make sure you understand the needs, wants and desires of your customer or end-user at the deepest level possible to ensure you are solving their unmet needs.

“We conducted extensive consumer and trade research. We did this on two levels, both directly as a business but also through framing research questions at an association and industry level with the Australian Barramundi Farmers Association (ABFA).

Consumers told us that sustainable farming practices with no antibiotics or hormones was important – ultimately giving the market a better-quality product than what was imported. They wanted a safe and trusted seafood offering. They wanted to know that it came from a locally domiciled, sustainable producer of premium seafood. But what we heard the most, was the desire for more consistent product quality. 

With FIAL’s help, the trade research we were able to perform through ABFA – whose members collectively account for over 90% of production – revealed structural supply chain issues and inconsistent quality standards across farms. 

It also revealed that Australian Barramundi was being undercut by imported products, misrepresented as Australian origin. 

It’s not about protectionism. The industry is comfortable with half-price product sourced from Southeast Asia so long as it is recognised as imported product. It simply isn’t the same as premium Australian grown Barramundi, which at its best is recognised as being right up there with the best eating fish in the world.”

Generate innovative ideas to help solve those needs and desires. Take the best idea and pursue further to find the most feasible for the company, most viable commercially and most desirable to the customer.

“We had to think of a way of restructuring the supply chain. What if we grew our own improved fingerlings? That would enhance not only our own product consistency, but we could sell them to the wider industry, and not just here in Australia but to overseas markets too.  

It would be a way to differentiate the product and drive consumer trust and demand for Australian-made across the board.”

Take the best idea and turn it into a realistic outcome so that it can be tested and critiqued so that any flaws can be identified and re-designed. The final prototype is tested and validated.

“We checked in with our customers throughout our business journey. Whether from a supply chain perspective – shortening that supply chain to provide a fresher product, from a packaging or a branding perspective, or even to the extent of how we harvested and despatched our product to maximise quality. We’ve received feedback from our customers, and along the journey we’ve responded.

With the fingerlings, we undertook – and still undertake – continuous stock improvement. Through genetic selection and various stock improvement methodologies we provide what the market wants. Our fish are a lot more rotund and whiter because what we hear from the market is that they prefer a thicker wagyu type fillet cut with a lighter flesh colour. We improve these traits with our selective breeding program.”

Use what we have learned about the customer to inform how we proceed.

We had no aspirations to be a supplier of seed stock or fingerlings when we started out on this journey.  Our ambitions were with scaling our table fish business.  But now we knew that it made sense to start a breeding program. We could control the quality and consistency to our own farms, as well as to the rest of the industry.

It was a gamble, but it paid off. It took less than three years for us to become by far the world’s biggest supplier of fingerlings.

We recruited people to come into the business from other sectors, to bring a wider experience. In fact, almost all of our senior executives have come from outside of the aquaculture industry.

We commissioned a branding and creative agency, going through a very comprehensive process to arrive at the right brand name, the brand portfolio, and then all the brand assets across numerous touchpoints. 

By understanding what the consumer needed we realised we needed to disintermediate our supply chain. We implemented a forward integration of our business into processing and packaging and relationships with our distributors that was more strategic instead of transactional – explaining the size of the prize and their role in helping achieve that means.

We now have the capacity to scale without being reliant on third party providers in hatcheries, production, processing and distribution.

It also means we now have a much greater connectivity with trade – the restaurants and retailers buying our product, as well as the end consumer through our online business. This allows us to have much stronger relationships and easier feedback loops. 

Collaborating with others in the industry through the Australian Barramundi Farmers Association (ABFA) was critical to our success. With FIAL’s assistance, we collectively commenced an ambitious program of provenance testing (through chemical evaluation of the product) and implemented a national quality framework.

We’ve had a long-standing collaboration with a number of universities including RMIT, James Cook University, University of Melbourne and Deakin. Mainly, we have needed their expertise with breeding, to make sure we get the profile of fish that the market wants.

We have also undertaken considerable research into Golden Barramundi. A rare genetic mutation, it occurs naturally in 1 in 8 million fish. We have sought to identify the molecular markers that lead to the phenotypes and the golden characteristic.

We are now at 1 in 20. This could be a game changer. It’s a highly differentiated, bright white fleshed premium fish that could offer the market something entirely new.

We sit it on the nexus of advanced manufacturing and agriculture. Deep consumer insight and market demand has driven our capital investment. 

This technology is supported by the development and implementation of our own proprietary enterprise management system, built over multiple years and specifically designed for complex aquaculture operations.  

Our consumer demands sustainable practices, but it’s a core part of who we are too. 

By eating our Barramundi, they are saving the oceans one fish at a time. 

With existing forecasts for per capita consumption of fish due to population growth and changing diets, the aquaculture industry will need to triple in size by 2050! 

We operate on a zero net discharge basis, meaning that when we’re using water from the surrounding environment, we discharge that water as clean as it came into our farm. 

We also don’t waste our waste! We commissioned James Cook University to complete analysis on the compositional profile of our waste to determine whether it would be a suitable fertiliser. Unsurprisingly to us it’s a wonderful organic fertiliser. Our waste also ends up in pet products.

Consumer insight brought clarity on what the product needed to be – a highly consistent fish, with firm, white succulent flesh and mild flavour. 

Due to our rapid distribution channels and short supply chain, we can have Sashimi grade fish from farm to plate within hours. Just what the customer ordered!

We can also prove that it is Australian, sustainably produced, premium seafood, worthy of a premium price point. 

This has built valuable brand equity and fostered growth – for us, as well as the domestic premium Australian Barramundi market.”

“My partner, chef Shaun Quade and I, felt that existing dairy alternatives to cheese tasted terrible!

Research also told us that those cheeses were made from only two formulations, either from nuts or coconut oil. Expensive to produce, not environmentally sustainable or allergen-friendly, these two formulations had been used for years. The category was ripe for innovation.

We thought that if we could create an insanely tasty cheese out of plants, that would appeal to everyday people (not just a small audience of vegans) they will happily buy it as an alternative. That’s a much larger consumer base to build a business around plus we wanted to rather aggressively avoid targeting vegans as vegan cheese has a terrible reputation. If we were to have any success at all, we simply couldn’t be put into that category.

If we could make it from ingredients close to the source of production – not importing whatever is cheapest or easiest, and upcycle food waste, even better. We could genuinely shift consumer behaviour in a meaningful way.

After a lot of experimentation in our kitchen, we felt we had a formulation that worked – fermented ‘imperfect’ cauliflower and hemp. Now we just had to turn it into a product!”

Make sure you understand the needs, wants and desires of your customer or end-user at the deepest level possible to ensure you are solving their unmet needs.

“I’m a behavioural economist by background, I also ran my own marketing agency in the Food and Beverage Sector, so I had my finger on the pulse of consumer insight and trends. 

From extensive research, I knew that the market for plant-based food was going to explode at some point. Veganism was already popular, maybe not mainstream, but it was clear what direction the industry was heading. I think that businesses that aren’t looking in that direction are soon going to get left behind. It’s the exact same with sustainability. So, there was no point us using ingredients that we already knew were not eco-friendly – nuts for instance. It’s just not environmentally sound or business resilient. 

Research also revealed where the biggest market would be – the US. California, specifically, was the epicentre of all things plant-based. Not only was there a receptive market there, but there was also a large pool of investors.

Independently to my research, Shaun was telling me about the customers coming into his restaurants in Melbourne and Sydney with an increasing number of special dietary requests. This wasn’t always easy for the restaurant to manage, juggling different iterations of every menu item and it certainly wasn’t much fun for the customer. It got us thinking that if there was one foolproof option, it would help the restaurant as well as the customer.   

I should mention that this research doesn’t ever stop. We are always updating our audience personas. We update them about every two months. In this space, trends are moving so quickly, and people are changing their tastes and preferences so rapidly, it’s critical to stay on top and respond accordingly.”

Generate innovative ideas to help solve those needs and desires. Take the best idea and pursue further to find the most feasible for the company, most viable commercially and most desirable to the customer.

“Shaun is an R&D wizard, known for delighting customer’s senses with unusual ingredients in his restaurants! He tried all sorts of combinations of ingredients.

It was after serving up a cauliflower dish and seeing all the leaves and stems and bruised bits going to waste that he started to experiment with it and try out different fermentation techniques. 

Not to use the active ingredient to make our customers high, but to see if we could use hemp waste in any way, as well as give our brand an appealing edge. 

With FIAL’s help, we were chosen as one of six Australian-based start-ups in the Seeds of Change Accelerator (a partnership with FIAL and MARS Food Australia) to fast-track the growth of innovative food-focused businesses.

We got some key help thinking through how to design our business model, what channels of distribution we were going to go after, how we were going to grow and getting the right mentors around legal advice and strategy. It was really pivotal.

Within two months of being in the Accelerator program, we had attracted our first round of venture capital, and had moved to the US to commercialise the concept.”

Take the best idea and turn it into a realistic outcome so that it can be tested and critiqued so that any flaws can be identified and re-designed. The final prototype is tested and validated.

“Shaun tested out the cheese on discerning restaurant customers. He was watching their expressions, getting immediate feedback and tweaking the formulation multiple times. This is how we arrived at the final formulation of fermented ‘imperfect’ cauliflower and hemp. The process was very iterative.  

We were lucky that restaurant environments generally have an international clientele, so we could try it out with visiting Americans. As we had identified that market as key, we were heartened to get such a great response.  

As part of our day jobs, we also took part in some pop-up dining events in the US backed by Tourism Australia.

By that time, we had multiple cheese products – around 35. We had butters, creams etc and we could try them all out and see what resonated. 

We talk to our customers constantly. One of the benefits of being a start-up, is that we enjoy a close relationship with our customers. After we launch a new product, we contact them personally, not through some e-mail marketing campaign. They are happy to tell us how it was received, if the packaging was ok, or if there was anything we could have done better.”

Use what we have learned about the customer to inform how we proceed.

We’re the first commercial plant-based cheese brand that’s using cauliflower and hemp as the basis of our products. Based on consumer feedback, we launched initially with three products: Hemp Seed Goat Cheese, Hemp Seed Cream Cheese and our Cheese free Cheese sauce. We have managed to crack the flavour of the product so that it is in no way a compromise compared to real cheese. It simply wouldn’t have appealed to the market, as much as it has.

Initially, we launched direct to consumer in the US, but this was a marketing play, simply to build brand awareness. Now we are also selling to retailers across the US with a view to opening up food service in the future – once the restaurant trade is more secure post-COVID.  

We have patented our product in the US, and we’ve already extended our patent and trademark into the EU, Australia and Canada.

We knew our business model needed to reflect the values of our customer and market. We designed a model that replicates the manufacturing process in the markets that we’re selling the products, hiring local workers and using ingredients from that geography. 

We have been extremely structured and strategic in how we’ve built the brand. We worked out very quickly that we had to avoid the vegan audience in our branding and messaging. It’s really important to us that we get traction with a broader audience first, of just everyday people that are just interested in trying something that is novel, that is healthier for them, that’s more sustainable and avoid being pigeonholed as just yet another vegan product. We’re doing something wildly different, and it was important that this was communicated through our brand identity and all brand touchpoints, our packaging design, and our digital channels for example.

Our visual identity is sleek and sharp, it has a minimalist aesthetic of black and white. Just like the high-end restaurant that it was borne from, it needed to exude luxury and differentiation – it couldn’t be the basic, tree-hugging stuff of other brands. We knew this would appeal more to the audience.   

We have very strict rules around the photography and styling of our products and the tone of voice to use in marketing.

We have 100% local supply chain. It’s important to our customers, plus it’s just the right thing to do. 90% of cauliflower in the US market is grown here in California, and of course there is a sizeable trade in hemp. 

This has become ever more important to us since COVID-19 as we saw others struggle with their supply chains where even one link missing caused major issues for the whole chain. We definitely see the benefit of building as local a supply chain as possible, with local co-manufacturing, local workers and so on. 

At the moment, it is actually more difficult and expensive for us to source imperfect produce from farmers. The infrastructure is not properly there yet, but we do it anyway, because that’s part of our commitment as a company. 

We’re comfortable with change. If we need to design and redesign our systems and processes to achieve a better outcome, then we will. 

There was no manufacturing facility in the world that could do what we needed it to do, because no one’s ever done a product like this! If we were just another plant-based cheese company doing one of those tried-and-true nut or coconut oil formulations, we would have been fine. But we weren’t, we had to create something entirely new! 

We use a co-packing facility, but we needed to buy and custom design the equipment we needed that would give us the taste and texture profile that our customer expected. Our last funding round helped us with this. Shaun didn’t have to change his kitchen bench top recipes, they worked at scale, which is extraordinary!

We’re very conscious of the overall environmental footprint we make in producing Grounded products. This aligns with our consumer’s values too. For that reason, exporting our products to the other side of the world just doesn’t make sense right now. But here in the US where we sell online, we work hard to provide the most sustainable packaging solutions. We use recycled and recyclable carboard boxes. We use recyclable plastic for our tubs and pouches, but we’d really rather not use it at all. Unfortunately, options are limited right now for wet food-safe alternatives. 

Our ice packs that are packed with the cheese to keep it cool contain a biodegradable, nitrogen-based gel that doubles as plant food. And depending on a customer’s location we have to use different types of insulation, like RenewLiner. It is PET plastic sourced from 100% recycled plastic water bottles. It’s been recognised by the Cold Chain Global Forum as one of the most sustainable, temperature-controlled packaging materials available. Which is basically like winning an Oscar for cold chain logistics.

Overall, we believe that plant-based dairy alternatives are key to building a more sustainable and secure food supply chain for future generations. We choose not to use nuts in our products because they’re extremely resource-intensive to process (and use far too much water). Cauliflower scraps and hemp, on the other hand, are far more environmentally resilient. 

The future of dairy is completely unsustainable. The amount of water and environmental resources needed to manufacture dairy cheese is ridiculous and from an economic perspective, small-scale farmers don’t get compensated fairly for their efforts. The entire system is archaic and inefficient.

We’ve set out to change that, and our consumers feel the same too.”

Ensure the right problem is being solved and then solving it in the best way possible.

“First, we had to understand the consumer. Having a hunch that our snack would appeal, is different to actually knowing it! We needed to understand who they were, what motivated them and when they might buy.

Until we knew that, we couldn’t move forward with any confidence, with any aspect of our business.”

Make sure you understand the needs, wants and desires of your customer or end-user at the deepest level possible to ensure you are solving their unmet needs.

“We undertook market and consumer insight research

It identified a clear consumer desire for a new healthier wholefood treat that promised a delicious eating experience with chocolate, similar to Maltesers, but ‘better for you’’ ensuring consumers don’t feel guilty.

It also showed that we could tap into the trend towards ‘lighter enjoyment’ whereby consumers want that indulgent moment, later in the day. To date, we had only been focusing on a snacking window of morning or afternoon tea.

There was nothing we could see in the market that was using a wholefood as the main ingredient, was free from all declared allergens, and nutritionally superior in terms of reduced saturated fat, quite low in sugar yet higher in protein and fibre to fill you up.

We visited these consumers at Food Allergy Trade Shows, and it’s extremely clear that a young child just starting school who faces these allergies is emotionally very vulnerable – they’re excluded. It’s a big emotional challenge for the family. So, we knew that framing our proposition around designing for that big unmet need was at our core, and they would be our core consumer. But, and this is a big ‘but’, that consumer group alone was not big enough to build a sustainable business around.

We identified peripheral consumer groups that would be more interested in the superior nutritional aspect – sports and fitness enthusiasts, health conscious Mums looking to balance taste, nutrition and convenience, plus a growing number of vegetarians and vegans. We identified that although our market penetration had been with families and children, there was a generation of millennials who had little experience with roasted chickpeas and fava beans. They wanted healthy but they also wanted adult indulgence – accepting chocolate coated would reduce any perceived barriers to purchase.

And as we did more research around the world, 90% of the consumer data was the same, and 90% of the design issues that we were trying to solve – the right messaging, packaging, brand – were also relevant in the UK, so that enabled us to have the minimum amount of disruption.”

Generate innovative ideas to help solve those needs and desires. Take the best idea and pursue further to find the most feasible for the company, most viable commercially and most desirable to the customer.

“We now had clarity on what the product needed to be, and set about thinking how we could do it.

Then we had a communication design challenge. How do we create a common design style that highlights the key emotional objectives for those consumer groups?

We also wanted to convey that snacking should be exciting. It should be interesting. It should be a celebration. Most safe food products are boring and tasted terrible! We wanted to communicate to them that their needs can be met with this brand.

Our packaging needed to communicate those messages, as did other forms of communication, our digital channels for example.”

Take the best idea and turn it into a realistic outcome so that it can be tested and critiqued so that any flaws can be identified and re-designed. The final prototype is tested and validated.

“We sampled the consumer base, asking questions and exploring the unmet needs. We did focus groups, qualitative and quantitative research – there are excellent organisations that do that in this country.

We presented the product concept range to the major supermarket buyers. We were able to talk confidently to them about the insight into the consumer base that we had gained, the growth trend of that market and why there was incremental opportunity for them.”

Use what we have learned about the customer to inform how we proceed.

We were able to assess whether we had the right business model, with the right people, with the right skills, to deliver what we know we needed.

We brought the ambitions for the company together in one place – a Vision Document – to make sure that we were all singing from the same song sheet.

It led us to reconsider our company brand. We now knew that our existing Partner Foods brand (that the business had started with) wasn’t going to convey the messages we needed it to. A Brand Strategy was created, with our unique visual assets trademarked globally.

We were able to identify the right R&D partner that could help us make allergen free chocolate, with the right flavour and consistency that will appeal to the consumer we had identified.

Specialist chocolate processing expertise such as conching and panning the allergen dairy-free chocolate, was not available for us to access in Australia (it is held within existing commercial confectionery manufacturers).

With FIAL’s help we brought capability into the business from Italy, home of confectionery manufacturing. Vital knowledge transfer and staff training was also provided, and advice on the right equipment to buy.

Adopting new advanced manufacturing technologies and processes felt like the right thing to do, but now we were sure that it made sense for our operation. Courtesy of our R&D collaboration we knew which capital we had to buy, to deliver the impact we wanted. We had confidence that we were spending our FIAL grant money wisely!

We were able to commit significant resources to expanding our existing manufacturing facility at Landsborough, Sunshine Coast. We knew what the optimum design layout should now be for the factory and were even able to streamline production on the factory floor, taking 150 metres of process movements away.

The expansion allowed us to manufacture the chocolate coated chickpea in volumes necessary to supply Coles, Woolworths and commence export market trials.

Put simply, we now knew that we were creating a new product range, with flavour and texture consistency, that would appeal to the consumer we had identified.”