Crunching the future: El Origen’s innovative snack journey

How do you inspire consumers to try an innovative new product, especially in a crowded category? It’s all about disrupting habits so that new innovations have a chance to succeed. That’s never easy, but with the right insights you can deliver an offering that can attract and convert shoppers.

El Origen, a food start-up introducing organic and socially sustainable snacks from Latin America, recently turned to SKIM with its newly developed value propositions to understand which had the most potential.

How could El Origen optimize its value proposition to increase consumer awareness at the shelf and ultimately convert more shoppers into customers?

At IIEX Europe, SKIM’s Henrike Reinhardt, Senior Director of Innovation Research, was joined by El Origen’s Head of Sales, Salvatore Caldiero, and Senior Product and Marketing Manager, Franciska Maβ, to share how they used consumer insights to inform their strategy.

The challenge: Find a winning value proposition

El Origen is an innovator in marketing snack chips made from organic and sustainable ingredients like plantain and manioc. Produced in Ecuador from cultivation to finished bag, El Origen prides itself on supporting local farmers.

As a newcomer to the market in Germany and Austria, El Origen had developed several potential value propositions using different names, variations, and packaging designs. But the team needed to know which ones had the best chance of capturing consumers’ attention at the shelf.

“We chose to partner with SKIM to evaluate our offerings,” said Salvatore, “because of their experience with innovative brands and their unique approach to testing in a relevant and realistic context for reliable results.”

The research: Uncover insights to drive behavior change

Changing habitual purchasing behavior was at the heart of El Origen’s challenge.

That’s why the team based its research on SKIM’s innovation-related framework that is based on ​​COM-B and the Fogg Behavior model.

To predict the success of El Origen’s value propositions, it was essential to understand the motivations, pain points, and triggers that would drive consumers to change their snacking habits, plus test the innovations in a competitive context.

“Testing innovations in context is crucial to mimic real-life trade-offs that consumers make, and eventually can predict the success of an innovation,” explained Henrike. “So, we tested El Origen’s value propositions using our intuitive mobile survey tools that replicate real-life shopping experiences and capture both implicit (system 1) and conscious (system 2) decision making.”

In the testing phase, the team also saw that testing innovations in isolation leads to overstatement of product performance, while in-context methodologies aligned with actual sales data after launch, as well as in a recent validation study.

The insights: Optimize packaging and messaging

SKIM’s research delivered detailed insights that drove key changes to El Origen’s packaging design and communication strategy.

Packaging improvements: Colors, relative font size, and product messaging all play important roles in consumers’ perceptions and choices at the shelf. For example, the research revealed that consumers associate the color combination of orange and green with a paprika flavor. This learning inspired El Origen to relaunch their paprika variety with a different pack design.

A more effective communication strategy: El Origen is a brand driven by a socially sustainable mission, which had been emphasized in their packaging and communications. Yet, SKIM’s research showed that these factors play a subordinate role in impulse purchases. Good taste, price and an appealing image are more important, especially for a newer brand. Now, El Origen’s communications focus more on taste and good vibes, while its mission is shared on other channels.

“We are excited to re-launch our new value propositions driven by insights from SKIM,” said Salvatore. “We have already received enthusiastic feedback from our retailers.”

Launching innovative products: 3 key takeaways

El Origen’s approach reveals three crucial learnings for brands looking to innovate:

1. Understand consumer behavior and habits: To change consumer habits, you need a deep understanding of consumer behavior, triggers and pain points.
2. Test in context: For more reliable insights, be sure to test in a realistic context environment.
3. Embrace behavioral research solutions. Consumers make choices based on both implicit, emotional triggers (system 1) and rational, conscious decision-making (system 2). For a robust prediction model, choose research tools that capture what consumers do instead of what they think they would do.

To learn how to leverage the power of SKIM’s innovation expertise in your next product launch, schedule a consultation with one of our experts today.