Sally Lyons Wyatt, EVP of client Insights at Circana, noted that marketing is especially important for frozen comfort foods. In stores, it’s offering coupons and samples. To make sure people know about Homebake, the company is advertising with commercials, social media and partnerships with influencers. Kraft will have to reach people before they even get to the store. “Not everybody goes down the aisle and looks for the category, and not everybody uses it,” he said. It will have to find ways to tell customers that there’s something different in the frozen aisle, Mintel’s Owen said. With Homebake, Kraft is starting from scratch. Since then, the company has focused its energy on its classic, highly-processed items like Velveeta, Lunchables and Kraft Mac and Cheese.īut those items have lots of brand equity - people may not love them, but they know what they are. The following year, it said the same of Planters, saying goodbye to the iconic Mr. In 2020, Kraft Heinz announced that it was divesting its natural cheese business. The Homebake strategy aligns with Kraft’s overall approach to growing sales without worrying too much about offering products perceived as healthy. “I wouldn’t call this a dish that is health-forward by any means, it’s a taste-forward dish.” But, he said, the brand is still focused on “high-quality” ingredients, and he thinks people could eat the food on a regular basis. “For this consumer, taste really is number one, with convenience being number two,” said Kleinerman. Many of Homebake's offerings are loaded with cheese. Many of the items are loaded with cheese. The Homebake lineup includes pulled pork with barbecue sauce, meatballs, green bean casserole and scalloped potatoes - nothing particularly healthy. Still, he said, “at its heart, it’s about convenience.” In recent years in the frozen meals category, there’s been a “move beyond traditional comfort food … cuisine exploration, global flavors, and much more variety than there once was,” said John Owen, associate director of Food and Drink at Mintel, a market research firm.Īdditionally, “a lot of what both old and new competitors have been doing is trying to kind of counteract that traditional view of this as an unhealthy, over-processed category.” With Homebake, however, Kraft will have to win people over even as it bucks certain trends. In that time, frozen food prices jumped 16.3%, well above recent annual trends for grocery prices as a whole. Even as unit sales have slipped, high prices have led to a 9.3% sales jump for frozen meals in US retail in the year through April 23, according to data from Circana, which tracks sales and was previously known as IRI and NPD. There’s good reason to go big on frozen for its next act. The frozen offerings could also enable Kraft to steal some market share from meal kit and delivery services, which have become competitors to packaged food makers as people looked for new ways to eat at home. “If it was super simple to make, even if it was delicious, it wasn’t solving the problem that Homebake was there to solve.” When Kraft replaced the barbecue chicken, it brought on a garlic butter chicken scampi, which remains in the portfolio and “has many steps and different ingredients,” said Kleinerman. “It didn’t have that value-add,” he told CNN.įor Kraft, “that was a really important insight,” he added. That’s easy,’” customers said, according to Alan Kleinerman, VP of disruptive innovation at the Kraft Heinz Company. “‘I can take some chicken breasts, I can pour some barbecue sauce on it, stick it in the oven. But when Kraft launched it in a test market, it stayed on the freezer shelf. One item, a honey BBQ chicken, got great reviews. (KHC) learned that lesson during a market test. But if the meals are too easy to make, customers will just prepare them from scratch rather than from a box. The trick is to model meals after comfort foods you could make at home, if you had the time. Kraft thinks it can expand the market with classic comforts that customers could make at home, but don’t want to. “We’ve breathed new life into our brands through renovation, and we must now innovate to meet future needs of consumers.” “US Retail is a must-win for us,” Carlos Abrams-Rivera, president of the company’s North America business, said in a statement announcing the sales growth plan in February. As part of its earlier turnaround efforts, Kraft Heinz has been trying to reinvigorate decades-old brands like Velveeta and Oscar Mayer. It follows the food company’s strategy of leaning into comfort and convenience over healthy options, even as competitors focus on health. Kraft Heinzįor Kraft, the new brand is part of an effort to increase the company’s net sales by $2 billion through 2027. Homebake is Kraft Heinz's new line of frozen meals and sides.
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