Together with ICA, we’ve embarked on various projects aimed at creating more relevant, healthy, and sustainable private label products that will make a meaningful impact in people’s lives.
ICA is the number one grocery store chain in Sweden with stores across the whole country and daily interactions with millions of Swedes. Being the market leader comes with great impact and responsibility, which has made ICA motivated to inspire their customers to make more sustainable and healthy choices in their everyday life.
After many years of partnership, the relationship between the ICA organization and Augur has recently gotten even closer – due inpart to our working even more with the EMV (private label) innovation department. Together, we’ve embarked on various projects aimed at creating more relevant, healthy, and sustainable private label products that will make a meaningful impact in people’s lives.
We really value our close and smooth collaboration with Augur as it gives us an in-depth understanding for our customers’ challenges and needs. In addition, our projects aiming to create new product and service innovation really enables us to help our customers in their everyday life (through less sugar and more fruits and veggies).
Reducing sugar consumption is a key part of ICA’s health strategy, and in 2021 ICA contacted Augur with a need to better understand the high consumption of sugar among families with young children.The goal was to identify challenges and opportunities in relation to sugar consumption, thus empowering ICA to take on the role as a helping hand to parents wishing to reduce their kids’ sugar intake.
Augur created an insight platform where we singled out key challenges for families (relating to their attitudes, behaviours and specific situations) and identified opportunity areas, i.e. springboards for future innovation. This insight platform then resulted in two different innovation projects; “The breakfast hero” (targeting the very sugary breakfast situation) and “The sugar journey” (supporting parents throughout the different life stages of their children).
In these projects, we at Augur had the opportunity to use many tools in our toolbox:
- Insight: identifying key challenges and opportunities in relation to sugar consumption (through digital pre task and focus group discussions)
- Opportunity mapping: using the insight platform to identify relevant areas for innovation
- Trend scouting: finding inspiring examples of products and services across the globe, to fuel the innovation process
- Innovation and concept development: creating new product- and service embryos (some of which will soon be part of the ICA private label portfolio, at a store near you)
Photo credit: Jessica Gow/TT