Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

THE FOOD INDUSTRY ADAPTS 151
of light ice cream), and cold cuts. Whereas Weight Watchers
was one of the most successful new range brands in the 1980s,
Healthy Choice earned that claim in the 1990s.
During the ensuing decade, Healthy Choice lost momentum,
in part because ConAgra was looking at effi ciencies and cost
control instead of the menu and product appeal. As a result, the
offerings began to be tired. As the Healthy Choice team ’ s focus
was on limiting undesirable characteristics such as fat and salt,
its offerings began to develop a signifi cant taste disadvantage in
relation to competing products that did not have that goal. As
a result, the Healthy Choice frozen dinners, in particular, were
considered irrelevant by many. Further, there was little innovation
or news.
In 2004 and 2005 the Healthy Choice team undertook a
major study of customers to explore what consumers were looking
for in frozen food. A takeaway was that a major unmet need
was to obtain the same food freshness that is available from prepared
meals. Freshness was associated with a good eating experience
in regard to taste, texture, and health benefi ts. Another
insight was that steaming was a strong freshness cue. Steamed
frozen vegetables, for example, were perceived to result in freshness
characteristics. Bird ’ s Eye Steamfresh, a line of vegetables,
came out in May 2006, and customer acceptance of that product
reinforced the study ’ s insight.
One challenge for Healthy Choice was to create a steaming
technique for frozen dinners, in which the sauce is typically
frozen with the other ingredients. The R & D solution was
a two - tiered set of trays, by which the sauce on the bottom tray
would both steam and add aroma to the food on the top tray.
The result was a steam - cooked experience that retained the
color, texture, and fl avor of the food, resulting in crisp vegetables,
juicier meats, and al dente pasta. The other challenge was
to create more appealing recipes. Toward that end the concept
of removing things like fat and salt from food was replaced with
a focus of putting in healthy ingredients, such as whole grains,