Pages: 6

This chapter introduces the purpose and motivation behind the book, which is to describe the design thinking methodology specifically for the food and beverage industry. While design thinking is widely used in fields like IT, its application in food and beverage innovation remains limited and often lacks practical examples. The author shares a personal turning point that sparked the idea of creating a guide tailored to the unique challenges and realities of food and beverage development. The chapter outlines the intended audience, ranging from startups to large corporations and supporting industries. It highlights the importance of balancing creativity with feasibility, embracing both consumer insight and strategic execution. The book is positioned as a practical travel guide through the innovation process, offering tools, inspiration, and real examples to support professionals in bringing relevant and desirable products to life within a constantly evolving market.

Pages: 40

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 10

This chapter examines the fundamental role of food and beverages in human life, from basic survival to sensory enjoyment and cultural expression. It introduces the structure of the retail landscape by categorizing products based on storage conditions: ambient, chilled, and frozen. Each category is described with practical examples that reflect how consumers use these products across various occasions and motivations. The chapter also highlights the complexity of managing large product assortments. It reflects on impactful innovations from the past, such as canned food, pasteurization, and microwaveable meals, and explores future opportunities driven by sustainability and technology. Topics such as alternative proteins, cultivated meat, and the debate around ultra-processed foods are presented as part of an evolving innovation agenda. The chapter closes by emphasizing that priorities in the F&B industry are constantly shifting in response to global events and consumer concerns.

Pages: 5

This chapter introduces the fundamentals of the Nutrition Science and its role in food and beverage innovation. It explains how nutrients from food support energy, growth, and essential bodily functions. Nutrients are grouped into macronutrients, such as carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, as well as micronutrients, including key vitamins and minerals. This chapter also describes how nutritional information is presented on packaging, and it highlights the distinction between regular food labels and those required for fortified products. It concludes with a peek into functional foods and beverages, which aim to support health beyond basic nutrition, and explores the challenges of health claims and global regulation.

Pages: 13

This chapter explores the importance of sensory and consumer science in food and beverage innovation. It explains how the consumption experience is shaped by five sensory properties: taste, smell, sight, touch, and sound. Each of the five basic tastes – sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (a Japanese term for a pleasant, savory taste) – is described in relation to biology, preservation, and culinary use. The chapter highlights how smell contributes to flavor through retronasal perception and clarifies the difference between aroma and flavor. It discusses the influence of visual appearance on consumer expectations and the role of touch in mouthfeel, texture, temperature, and spiciness. Sound is also introduced as an often overlooked but influential part of the eating and drinking experience. Methods for evaluating sensory qualities are presented, including professional sensory panels, descriptive analysis, and statistical tools like spiderweb charts and principal component analysis. The chapter also covers consumer testing approaches such as drivers of liking, central location tests, and home use tests. These methods help to ensure that products meet the consumer’s expectations. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the need for companies to prioritize sensory and consumer science when designing food and beverage products, rather than relying on personal taste or assumptions.

Pages: 10

This chapter provides an overview of the food and beverage industry, outlining the many types of companies involved in producing, distributing, and supporting food and beverage products. It explains the distinction between business-to-consumer and business-to-business companies, as well as the unique innovation challenges and strategies within each. Company sizes are explored, from small startups to large global players, with a case example of the Danish company, Reduced, which turns side streams into natural food ingredients. The chapter also highlights the importance of supporting industries that offer expertise in areas such as consumer research, innovation process design, branding, packaging, and sensory testing. The role of private labeling in retail is explained, along with the potential tensions it creates for branded manufacturers. Lastly, the chapter distinguishes between customers and consumers, illustrating how different users have distinct needs and motivations, and why understanding both is crucial. Through real-world examples, the chapter illustrates how retailers, producers, and supporting companies collaborate to meet market demands. With this foundation in place, the chapter concludes by transitioning to the core focus of the book: how to apply design thinking to food and beverage innovation in a way that creates products people want to buy, use, and enjoy.

Pages: 214

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 29

This chapter explores how design thinking can effectively be applied in the food and beverage (F&B) innovation, emphasizing the need for deep consumer understanding, iterative prototyping, and cross-functional collaboration. Design thinking has thrived in industries such as IT due to flexible, rapid prototyping and real-time feedback; the F&B sector, however, presents unique challenges. Prototypes must be safe, tasty, visually appealing, scalable, and viable within strict shelf life and regulatory constraints. The chapter introduces an adapted eight-phase design thinking model tailored to F&B, encompassing understanding, defining, ideating, selecting, prototyping, testing, evaluating, and executing. It stresses the importance of balancing divergent and convergent thinking throughout the process and assembling diverse teams aligned with each phase. Strategic alignment with company goals, brand positioning, and innovation ambition is also emphasized. Practical tools such as the five innovation lenses: desirability, feasibility, viability, sustainability, and responsibility, are introduced to guide the valuation. The chapter also contrasts circular and linear innovation approaches, highlighting the limitations of rigid gate models and stressing the need for flexibility and iteration. Real-life examples and reflections on past innovation attempts enrich the discussion, reinforcing that successful innovation requires both creativity and structure, grounded in meaningful consumer insight and organizational readiness.

Pages: 59

Chapter 7 is about how successful food and beverage innovation begins with a deep understanding of the consumer. This chapter explores how empathy, observation, and structured research methods lay the foundation for creating meaningful, relevant solutions. It introduces frameworks such as Jobs to be Done and unpacks how motivations, behaviors, occasions, and barriers shape consumer choices. By combining qualitative and quantitative research and avoiding the trap of assumptions, teams can uncover the hidden needs and design with greater clarity and purpose. The consumer purchase journey is explored in six phases, from initial awareness to advocacy. Through the story of Carrie, a working mother navigating her daily routines, we follow how needs emerge and evolve across moments in her day. From a missed breakfast to the search for functional beverages, her decisions are shaped by emotional and functional needs, influenced by social context, product packaging, and the product experience itself. Carrie’s journey highlights how unmet needs and small frictions – sometimes hidden in plain sight – can reveal major opportunities for innovation. A case study of Nordic Kombucha brings these principles to life. Founded by a team blending anthropology and food engineering, the company used design thinking to tap into trends like a clean label, fermentation, and holistic health. With limited resources but strong consumer empathy, they developed a product that speaks to a growing segment of health-conscious women. Their thoughtful use of pack design, sensory cues, and storytelling demonstrates how expectations are built long before the first sip. The chapter concludes by emphasizing that understanding is not a one-time phase, but a mindset that fuels innovation. Returning to consumer insights throughout the process ensures that solutions are grounded in real lives, real needs, and evolving behaviors – setting the stage for relevance, differentiation, and long-term success.

Pages: 20

Chapter 8 focuses on the Define phase of the innovation process, where insights gathered in the previous Understand phase are synthesized into clear opportunity spaces. The concept of Constellations of Potential Demand (CPD) is introduced as a structured way to cluster consumer knowledge across five dimensions: who the target is, the trends influencing them, their motivations and tensions, the usage context, and internal constraints. These constellations serve as the basis for framing distinct opportunity spaces that reflect real consumer needs and behavioral patterns. The chapter guides readers through formulating personas, insight statements, and “How Might We” questions to bring clarity and direction. Using rich examples, such as the personas Career Carrie, Family Franz, and Yoga Yara, it illustrates how different occasions and tensions can unlock innovation potential. Emphasis is placed on making the opportunity spaces tangible, empathetic, and aligned with strategic business goals. The chapter also highlights the importance of project constraints, cross-market relevance, and the power of storytelling in stakeholder engagement. Ultimately, this phase prepares the project team to transition into ideation with focus and confidence, grounded in a deep understanding of the people they are designing for and the real-life contexts in which the solutions must deliver value.

Pages: 21

Chapter 9 explores the Ideation phase, where creativity is unlocked to generate innovative solutions to well-framed consumer tensions. Building on empathy and clarity established in earlier phases, this chapter emphasizes how divergent and convergent thinking work together to fuel idea generation. Drawing on examples like adapting a dinner recipe, it illustrates how design thinking can be rooted in everyday creativity. The chapter encourages a “Yes, and …” mindset, where ideas are built upon rather than dismissed, and introduces the concept of working like a jazz band – listening, contributing, and improvising in harmony. It outlines how to set up successful ideation workshops, including team composition, physical and digital tools, and the importance of flow and structure. It clarifies what qualifies as an idea in F&B innovation across products, services, communication, and business models, and it explains how to pitch and refine concepts through internal one-pagers. Practical tools such as AI persona bots and mood boards are introduced to enhance empathy and inspiration. The chapter also addresses how to balance time, structure, and reflection ensuring that quality ideas are generated, refined, and evaluated in a collaborative environment. Ultimately, ideation is portrayed as both a creative and a strategic act that benefits from empathy, preparation, and purposeful facilitation.

Pages: 6

Chapter 10 explores the Select phase, where the innovation team shifts from diverging to converging by evaluating and choosing the most promising ideas to prototype. A structured and empathetic process is essential, combining creative intuition with strategic analysis. The chapter introduces the use of a war room, either analog or digital, as a collaborative space for reviewing, clustering, and categorizing ideas. Emphasis is placed on understanding each idea’s potential from multiple angles, including desirability, feasibility, and incrementality. Tools like the 2x2 matrix help filter ideas based on consumer value and company fit. Ultimately, through careful discussion, pitching, and voting, a small group of ideas is selected to move forward into prototyping.

Pages: 35

Chapter 11 explores the crucial phase of turning ideas into tangible prototypes in the food and beverage innovation process. It begins by emphasizing the power of visual cues, packaging design, and sensory expectations, drawing a parallel to the culinary principle that we “eat with our eyes.” Prototyping in F&B involves two main components: concept prototypes and product prototypes, each with varying levels of fidelity depending on their purpose and stage in the process. Concept prototypes help visualize and communicate ideas early on. They may take the form of a one-minute pitch, an external one-pager, or a mockup of the packaging – sketched, printed, digital, or physical. These tools allow teams to gather feedback on whether the idea resonates with consumers, supports their needs, and fits the opportunity space identified earlier. Product prototypes, on the other hand, bring the eating or drinking experience to life. This includes low-fidelity mixes for early-stage feedback, medium-fidelity lab samples to assess feasibility and taste, and high-fidelity prototypes used for pilot-scale production testing and validation. The chapter outlines best practices for balancing basic tastes, designing product recipes, and preparing packaging that communicates effectively. Special focus is given to the importance of internal pre-testing, sensory consensus mapping, and the use of tools like TURF and the design of experiments to iterate and optimize product ideas. The chapter also introduces practical methods such as SCAMPER to fuel creativity and recommends collaborative iteration workshops with chefs, developers, and even first-mover consumers. Throughout, it stresses the importance of ensuring that any product prototype – regardless of fidelity – tastes good and functions as intended. The Prototype phase is where empathy, creativity, and feasibility converge to bring promising innovations closer to market reality.

Pages: 12

Chapter 12 explores the Test phase, where ideas and prototypes are shown to consumers for feedback. It marks a return to consumer research, aiming to validate assumptions and measure resonance with the target audience. Depending on the results, teams may proceed confidently, pause to reassess, or refine elements based on insights. The chapter highlights a range of research methods, including qualitative and quantitative testing, sensory and consumer science, and tools like conjoint analysis, home use tests, and street immersions. Emphasis is placed on asking the right questions, avoiding bias, and selecting appropriate participants. The goal is to ensure the product delivers on expectations before moving forward. Ultimately, testing informs decisions and strengthens the chances of innovation success.

Pages: 8

Chapter 13 focuses on the final evaluation of the most promising innovation concepts before entering execution. It introduces the Innovation Potential Indicator, a structured tool that assesses ideas across five key lenses and generates a comparable innovation score. Concepts are rated based on their fit with consumer needs, company strategy, and feasibility. This assessment guides the selection of one concept to develop into a full business case for the final decision gate. The chapter provides a detailed walkthrough of how to build a compelling business case, integrating insights from earlier phases and supporting it with storytelling. Ultimately, the evaluation process ensures that the chosen idea is desirable, viable, and aligned with strategic goals.

Pages: 18

Chapter 14 focuses on the Execution phase, where innovation becomes reality. Led by the project leader, cross-functional teams across product development, procurement, supply chain, quality, sales, and marketing work together to finalize the product and prepare for the launch. Structured coordination through a critical path timeline ensures deadlines are met and nothing is overlooked. A detailed target brief guides the final recipe development, production scale-up, and validation testing, while packaging design and marketing efforts run in parallel. Special attention is given to shelf life, food safety, and sensory consistency across chilled, frozen, and ambient products. The chapter also highlights the importance of strong storytelling and brand positioning through the New Dawn case, showing how packaging design, consumer fit, and marketing campaigns come together to support a successful launch. Sales teams must be equipped with compelling tools to secure retailer listings, while launch activities across digital, analog, and hybrid channels help build momentum. From aligning stakeholders to testing packaging and securing shelf space, this phase demands attention to detail, speed, and clarity. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the holistic role of empathy and collaboration in delivering a well-crafted product that meets consumer needs and business goals.

Pages: 4

This final chapter highlights the importance of celebrating innovation milestones and learning from the process. A launch party serves not only as a morale boost but also as a way to build company spirit and recognize collective effort across departments. Beyond celebration, the chapter underscores the need for patience after a launch, as market traction takes time and requires continued marketing and sales support. Evaluation is key, both in terms of team performance and product success. Metrics such as sales data, consumer feedback, and social media engagement should be tracked to extract learnings for future projects. The chapter concludes by reaffirming design thinking as a mindset that balances empathy, creativity, data, and business sense – offering a flexible yet structured approach to food and beverage innovation.