Challenge

French’s had been experiencing a steady decline in sales of it’s various marinade product offerings. Ongoing research identified increasingly harried lifestyles, proliferation of dining alternatives, fewer family meals together, and decreasing abilities and interest in meal preparation as contributing factors.

Methodology

Design thinking tools including enhanced ethnographic home visits and collaborative ideation sessions brought target consumers and our creative innovation team together to understand and validate reasons for lack of interest in current offerings, and to identify and visualize opportunities for entirely new ways to facilitate flavor enhancement.

Insights

“It’s hard to plan a meal ahead of time…speed marinating would be great!”

“I want something that is quick with no fuss or mess.”

“My husband likes really spicy chicken, but my kids like more simple flavors.”

“It needs to be small and disposable.”

“Make it clear so I can see what it looks like.”

Impact

Of the many out of the box product delivery methods that surfaced in our exploratory, French’s selected a distinctive yet simple packaging solution to develop and commercialize. The clear inverted flexible tube with integrated infuser probe broke the paradigm of bottles and pouches that previously defined the category at retail. It was intuitive to understand for shoppers and facilitated meal prep by infusing desired flavor into proteins in just 10 minutes, versus hours for traditional marinating.