Innovation in Food Products and Consumer Benefits
Berlin, 17.05.2001
By the beginning of the 20th Century, based on the emerging food industry during the 1800s, many household names on our dining tables today were already selling high quality innovative products. Henry John Heinz's baked beans, Henri Nestlé's Milk Food for babies, Julius Maggi's pea and bean flours and seasonings, Libby's canned meats, John Harvey Kellogg's cornflakes, and Clarence Birdseye's frozen foods, to name a few. Each of these new industrialists provided consumer benefits through innovation in three distinct domains of quality. Social quality covers benefits like price/performance, convenience, conviviality and pleasure. Much of the pleasure comes through Sensorial quality touching the five senses, namely aroma, taste, texture, colour/appearance and sound. And Health quality covers the important benefits of nutritional value, authenticity and safety. These three domains, and their associated criteria, function as a subconscious checklist within the consumer, that determine his or her personal food choice and habits. The main difficulty in developing any product to meet the consumers' real needs and desires is that we cannot focus exclusively on one or two of these criteria.
We must get them all right at the same time. For example, innovation may lead to the most nutritious and safest product in the world, but the consumer will only buy it if it also has appetite appeal!
The record of the food industry in meeting world needs to date through innovation is good For reference, at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, where a wide range of processed foods was displayed for the first time, only royalty and the aristocracy could afford them. In 1960, still only 30% of the world's population could buy industrial food products every day. By 1995, the proportion had increased to 70%. Progress in agriculture, an increased buying power in many countries, but also affordable prices for industrial food products, available today in the farthest reaches of the planet, have all played their part. But the success story does not end here. With the steady and continuous increase in world population, further innovation both in agriculture and in the food industry is needed, if the whole world, and not just 70%, is to share the pleasure of being able to eat and drink every day.
In recent years, with a view to improving the innovation and development process, the Nestlé R&D international network has undergone a vast restructuring process.
This is now completed, and gives the Company the necessary resources to respond quickly to new consumer needs and desires, through a wide international presence where we can draw on the specific know-how in each part of the system. The ease of operation and of communication between the various centres of the network has been greatly improved, as well as the alignment to the Company's business strategies, as has the interaction of R&D with all other sectors of Nestlé involved in innovation and renovation.
Today's structure is based on four pillars:
- The Nestlé Research Centre
- The Product Technology Centres
- The Adaptation Centres
- The Application Groups
Together, these form a solid base for new product and process innovation and renovation at all levels of complexity, allowing us to meet the challenges of present and future trends, for example, in nutrition and functional foods, in packaging and in out-of-home consumption.
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