Innovation

We continue to focus on understanding the ever-changing needs of our consumers and customers through observations, conversations and ethnography. This work feeds our innovation efforts as we design products that meet the lifestyles, life stages and needs of our global consumer base. As part of our 20 By 30 Challenge, our goal is to achieve 15% of sales from new products each year.* We are proud to report we achieved this goal in 2021.

Our innovation management team supports our product innovation efforts and is responsible for major new product development projects in our company. We have a system for measuring key indicators to help manage the new product innovation process and a formalized companywide governance system to maintain the necessary checks and balances of our product innovation process. In addition, we hold an annual summit for team members involved in innovation and have an Innovation Steering Committee that meets quarterly to review the company’s innovation progress.

We established our internal Innovation Best of the Best competition to recognize teams and highlight our focus on successful innovation. In 2021, our Wholly^® convenience avocado product team was named our Innovation Best of the Best champion for creating a no added preservatives line of diced and smashed avocados in a ready-to-use format.

Our consumer and shopper insights team, along with our dedicated cultural anthropologist, regularly engage with our consumers and customers to ensure our brands and products remain current and relevant. In addition, our consumer engagement team is dedicated to maintaining strong relationships with our consumers. In 2021, the consumer engagement team fielded more than 89,000 consumer contacts. Through these efforts, we keep the cultural reference of food front and center to all decisions.