Mars Adding a Dash of Digital Tech, AI To Boost Product Development
Developing new food and beverage products, particularly for large companies with a wide range of product styles and types, can seem like a crowded pipeline — and with poor information, it can be like throwing darts to get a new product accepted by consumers.
Although food and beverage companies have made amazing strides in terms of making foods healthier, more convenient and easier to prepare and consume in and out of their homes, consumers continue to demand more.
Karina Zimerfeld, global vice president of R&D for Mars Food and Nutrition, breaks down the goal of any product development team into a very easy-to-digest statement around consumer demand. “We need to continuously look into insights,” she says. “If you're not obsessed with consumers, you will probably never do a good job in servicing consumers.”
It seems to be an obvious guiding light in R&D, particularly when the product pipeline is packed with opportunities of all sorts. However, uncovering the realities behind what consumers say they want and what they’ll actually purchase is paramount.
“Sometimes what consumers tell you is not exactly what they meant, and it's not because they’re not good people — much to the contrary,” Zimerfeld adds. “It’s because sometimes they struggle to explain what they actually want because they’re not food experts [or] they won’t know exactly what they’re looking for.”
Mars Food and Nutrition’s R&D team spends lots of time on interpreting and decoding what consumer demand and insights say about products they want. R&D works with its consumer insights and technical insights teams, as well as culinary experts, to get their product development efforts pointed in the right direction.
AI as an R&D tool
Other tools, such as artificial intelligence (AI), are working their way into the R&D process, Zimerfeld says, and that has her very excited for the possibilities AI and other digital solutions present.
“We are strong believers that digital technologies will help us in multiple different ways to get better at what we do in serving our consumers, delivering our mission,” she says. “It's not only about speeding up the process, but it's also getting better at what you do through the use of technology.”
To that end, Mars Food and Nutrition has been using more AI to analyze trends and help the company predict future consumer demands, making the process more efficient and improving the outcome in Mars’ favor.
“Leveraging artificial intelligence, we get a lot more insight, a lot better insight, into a much broader cohort of consumers than if we were relying on just us looking at it and trying to make sense of the data on our own,” Zimerfeld explains. “So it's been a very exciting journey, also in terms of how we position, communicate and convey the messages for our consumers.”
The company currently has a strategic initiative called the AI Test Kitchen that aims to increase AI projects in Mars Food and Nutrition across numerous areas, from product development to marketing and beyond. Zimerfeld says the initiative is still in its infancy at the moment, but the company is “very conscious” and “very specific” in terms of its pursuits.
With the flood of data that a company the size of Mars produces and receives from external sources, the implementation of technology to analyze it and identify real trends is critical.
“We’re capable of digesting that and getting insights in terms of flavors people are looking for, actual products people are looking for,” she says, “That will then trigger some new trends in the future.”
Zimerfeld’s excitement over the current and future state of the food business bubbles to the surface when discussing these solutions and how they may help companies like Mars meet consumer demands.
“There is no better time to be working in foods than now,” she says. “There is much more awareness around the role that food plays in society, in getting people together. There is an emotional element of food that has always been there, but people are getting much more comfortable about it and much more excited about it.”
Meeting that rising wave of enthusiasm can be more challenging, but with the solutions in the works today, food and beverage companies are finding ways to improve their ability to ride that wave and bring consumers products that truly delight them and meet their needs.
