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Fresh and Easy: Creating Restaurant Quality Meals for a Grocery Retail Innovator
Challenge
The UK-based leading retailer Tesco has been in market-expansion mode for the past ten years. The company quickly gained a stronghold in Asian and European markets but till recently had yet to tackle the huge, fragmented US grocery market.
The company spearheaded a vigorous two-year market research process to understand the US grocery retail market place and the consumer mindset. The concept banner under which the US market entry would launch "Fresh & Easy" played to key trends: the desire for good price/value propositions, with premium products offering restaurant quality, healthy food with an environmental orientation. All culinary development needed to be 'clean label' with organic and natural ingredients and no artificial additives or preservatives.
The project team sought support from a culinary services leader in the US that would bring creativity and strength in operations with a thorough understanding of commercial manufacturing processes so that all new product development and formulation work was mapped to actual manufacturing capabilities, real cost parameters and Fresh and Easy's food requirements.
The challenge the team faced was:
- To understand what the current UK offering was, test the existing recipes and prove-out or validate them using domestic (US) ingredients.
- To localize the existing recipes, tweaking them to allow for variances in consumer taste and preference and ingredient availability.
- To create new US-relevant food products and develop them for commercial scale-up.
Process
The team's first step was to complete a thorough culinary review of the existing UK recipes using local ingredients and then to optimize the formulations for the US. The second phase consisted of the bulk of the team's culinary work: in creating new products and refining the menu strategy and formulations. Based on these recommendations the team prepared prototypes and mocked up manufacturing processes and worked to present to a team of executive level decision-makers at an in-store (prototype) showing.
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"Fresh & Easy's Weekly Menu Flyer Promotes Red Wine Braised Short Ribs" Formulated by The Culinary Edge |
Results
At launch in late 2007, more than 100 of the Fresh and Easy product line of ready-to-eat refrigerated meals were conceptualized and formulated by The Culinary Edge.