CASE

Taste the future: Avara’s AI-driven approach to poultry innovation

How AI-generated and consumer-reviewed concepts helped Avara keep up with evolving consumer needs and uncover opportunities to strengthen their position with a major British retailer.

 

How it started

Avara, a leading food supplier in the UK, set out on a mission to explore creative and out-of-the-box ideas in the poultry category. Their goal was to innovate and enhance the range of Added Value options – a category worth £400 million in annual sales. Despite its worth, this category has seen a decline in volume performance, as cost of living pressures have driven shoppers to buy less and revert to cooking from scratch.

The main consideration was that ideas needed to incorporate their customer’s (a major British retailer) key territories of interest. By aligning with the retailer’s themes, Avara aimed to transform the poultry landscape, offering consumers unique and compelling choices that elevate everyday meals.

 

How we inspired change

To avoid customers having to generate innovative ideas from scratch, we adopted a unique, two-staged approach designed to ignite creativity in a time and cost-efficient way:

  • Stage 1: We leveraged AI to generate 28 ‘sacrificial ideas’ via prompts rooted in the retailer’s key territories of interest.
  • Stage 2: We identified the most feasible and interesting AI-generated concepts and used them as starting points for further evaluation. Since 2019, we’ve been running an online community for Avara, the Fresh Hub (n=187). We enlisted the help of this community, as well as Avara’s panel of internal colleagues, The Taste Community (n=23), to review the concepts. Through a looped series of questions in an online survey, both groups were able to refine or reject the ideas. The survey explored each idea’s appeal and relevance and gathered valuable feedback for improvement.

 

How it lives on

The project responded to evolving consumer needs such as healthier consumption, sustainability and excitement, generating a total of 200 innovative ideas using AI. This initiative significantly strengthened Avara’s innovation pipeline for Added value options, positioning them at the forefront of market trends and consumer preferences. With these fresh and compelling ideas, Avara is poised to rejuvenate the poultry category, making it vibrant and appealing to shoppers once again.

Moreover, Avara has since  briefed suppliers and visualised concepts to develop new products that consumers will soon be able to taste and see. The team is diligently working on the next steps, ensuring these exciting, new products will ultimately reach the plates of consumers, promising a revitalized and engaging culinary experience.

 

“Our customer was delighted with the results of this AI led innovation, generating hundreds of ideas that targeted a multitude of areas. We felt positively overwhelmed with the amount that was captured and have enough innovation fuel for further exploration and workshops, to develop all our categories and enter new ones. This was great value for money and an interesting way to use AI to enhance existing insight techniques.”

Sarah Brown
Head of Category & Insight, Avara

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