Innovation - Frenchmaid Smoked Vegan Aioli

Background

The foodservice sector is highly competitive, and the sauce category offers a plethora of options for buyers, making it a saturated market. Innovation here is vital to stand out from competitors. As part of Groenz' (a Golden State Foods company) strategy to grow their share of the market, the team committed to launching 2 new products a year. One of these launches was Frenchmaid Smoked Vegan Aioli.

Challenges & Solutions

As this was a new product development, a full Stage Gate process was utilised to run the project plan. Stage Gate process is a methodology that improves project outcomes and prevents risk by adding gates, or areas for review, throughout your project plan. The first step in this process is Ideation and this was undertaken by way of a team Brainstorming session with the Product Development, Marketing, Sales and Operations teams.

The ideas generated were then filtered down by market trends, versatility, and development time. Ten ideas were then settled on and these progressed to kitchen development. To quantify these concepts a Chefs' Council of industry experts was pulled together in. The Council consisted of 5 Chefs from various backgrounds to get a good spread of experience and knowledge. All concepts were tasted, critiqued and ranked from most promising to least. This was repeated in both New Zealand and Australia.

Vegan Aioli was rated the most promising as being Vegan was seen as a huge win. The Council commented that the impact of this was that Vegan was very much on trend and restaurants could present this as their staple Aioli. i.e. it looked and tasted like a classic Aioli and they would not need to stock a non-vegan and vegan option.

The council recommended adding a smoke flavour to give it an extra twist. From their experience they had found smoke infused flavours were becoming more popular and had been performing well.

Results

From here the Chef inspired Smoked Vegan Aioli was born. The development followed through the remaining Stages and Gates to become a successful launch. Versatility played a big part in the success here – it could be used as a dressing on salads, as a dipping or finishing sauce, or use to spread on burgers, wraps and sandwiches.