Warm weather, LA sunshine, and, of course, food, beverage, beauty, and pet trends called our names as we took to the floor at Natural Products Expo West 2018.

We are excited to release our official 2018 Expo West Trend & Insights Report.  Enter your email below to download the full report. 

In case you missed them, here are a few highlights from our official on-the-floor updates:

• We took note our favorite products throughout day one and day two. Here are a few that made the list: Poof Diapers, Fidobiotics, All Good Skincare, Binnie’s Coconut Butter, and Bonafide.

• Three themes, Clean Label Caution, Nutrition for All, and Sustainability and Regenerative Options, were present throughout speaker sessions and booth chatter at Expo West. Read more about these noted themes.

• Most successful brands discussed their “consumer-first approach” often during education sessions, but hearing it from beef industry leaders was an interesting insight for premium brands and premium SKUs. 

Enter your email to download the official 2018 Expo West Trends & Insights report. 

After ExpoWest, we were curious about whether the trends we were discovering would have consumer traction, so we put our top three trends into a quick video study. 25 participants fitting our profile each completed a 2min or less video response to the question below. Within 48 hours of placing the question, all 25 video responses had been collected, analyzed and clipped together in the below clip reel.

Recruiting Criteria:

• 18-55
• 40k+ HHI
• Most or All of the packaged products (food, snacks, beverages, beauty, personal care, pet care, etc) regularly purchased at the grocery are natural, simple or organic

Participants were asked this question:

At a recent natural products trade show, lots of products emerged in the following three areas:

1. Sustainable and/or Regenerative Practices – Companies can source crops that help the soil instead of hurting it, they can offer fair wages to farmers, they can package products in ways that biodegrade quickly or packaging that is made from renewable resources. There are a variety of ways that companies can be sustainable and/or regenerative anywhere in the process, from farm to store.
2. CBD-infused – Non-psychoactive hemp-derived CBD oil can be infused into snacks, chocolates, bars, mints and more. Companies indicate the amount of CBD in each serving. Benefits of CBD oil vary by variety, but some benefits that products are sharing about include supporting pain relief, stress reduction or relaxation.
3. Functional Ingredients – Instead of just removing chemical or synthetic ingredients like dyes, nutrition or benefits can be included in food or beverages through ingredients that naturally do this. Examples include using ingredients like turmeric for inflammation or ginger for digestive support in beverages, foods, snacks or treats.

Which one of these is most impactful or important in your life? Why? Tell us which specific aspects of the trend are appealing and why they’re appealing. If possible, share an example of the impact you could see it making in your life. If you have any questions about the trend or things you wish brands and products would explain related to the trend, let us know that, too. If none of these trends are appealing to you, explain why.

Participants were intrigued by all three trends and were able to make tangible connections to why they would be important in their lives. Sustainable and/or Regenerative Practices was the trend that participants were most passionate about because of the broad-reaching impact it could have (beyond the participants themselves, and their personal health, impacting farmers and future generations), followed by CBD-Infused, and finally Functional Ingredients. Participants want to see product production from seed to store leave less of a mark on the environment and to be less harmful to soil, but had lots of questions about the topic. Those familiar with CBD readily understood its benefits and wanted to see it included in food, snacks, and desserts. And finally, many participants voiced that they wanted food to achieve nutrient dense profiles through functional ingredients, not synthetic, because “there’s so much junk in food!”

Don’t take our word for it, though – check out what participants had to say!
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At the 2018 Front End of Innovation conference in Boston, we’re specifically aiming to push the convo forward around operationalizing startup approaches in Bigcos. Our vision for this track is leaders won’t just learn about single methods or theoretical approaches, but learn from and be inspired from courageous leaders setting the vision for and starting the hard journey of implementing an entirely new way of working. These leaders are setting strategy, and operationalizing these approaches across their organizations by combining both tried and true methods with emerging approaches, along with new entrepreneurial competencies, skills, and tools to tackle strategically important innovation and growth challenges.

Driving Business Model Innovation at Scale for Worldpay

Tara Newboult, VP of Product Planning & Strategy at Worldpay will share her lessons learned from when her team, in partnership with The Garage Group, took a Lean Growth Bootcamp approach to explore 6 disruptive trend spaces in 12 weeks, and simultaneously built the capability and culture to repeatedly search for new business models on-demand. Condensing a typical 18-month process down to 12 challenging weeks led to breakthrough results, and boundary-pushing capability development. In partnership with Keri Stephens, VP of Lean Innovation, Tara will share the intense training & real-time application approach they took, enablers and principles that led to their success, results to date, and lessons they plan to apply to future Lean Growth capability development efforts.

Tackling Tough, Strategic Growth Challenges for Kimberly-Clark

Sara Stabelfeldt, Innovation Strategy Leader at Kimberly-Clark will share how teams throughout her organization have been, in partnership with The Garage Group, taking a Lean Innovation approach to fast-track strategic development for various team initiatives. Along with Erin Faulk, Innovation & Growth Strategist at The Garage Group, Sara will explain how the full adoption of an entrepreneurial mindset enables the teams to condense typical 12-18 month processes down to 5-10 days using the structure of a Strategy Sprint. Erin and Sara will share the overall approach they took, key enablers that led to their success, and lessons they plan to apply to future Lean Innovation Workstreams.

Corporate Transformation Efforts to Enable Sustainable Business Model Innovation for CSAA Insurance Group, CME Group, JPMorgan Chase & Santander Bank 

The following leaders will share lessons learned on strategies and tactics they’ve personally used to allow their organizations to search for sustainable, and bold new ways to add value in the face of increasing market uncertainty:

• Meng Chee, Head of Digital Customer Experience, JPMorgan Chase
• Debbie Brackeen, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer at CSAA Insurance Group
• David Wong, Executive Director, Innovation and Growth, CME Group
• Kellie Goodwin, SVP – Head of Enterprise Payments Strategy, Santander Bank
• Ann Thompson, Co-CEO, The Garage Group

Minimum Viable Prototyping to Invent New Business Models at AARP, Tyson Foods, TripAdvisor, Worldpay, & Verizon

These corporate innovation leaders, experts, and Bigco entrepreneurs will share examples of MVP approaches they’ve leveraged to either transform existing business models or invent new business models, setting the practical vision for how this could come to life in other organizations:  

• Andy Miller, SVP Innovation and Product Development, AARP
• Rizal Hamdallah, Head of The Futurist – Innovation Lab, Tyson Foods
• Matthew Mamet, VP Product, Hotels at TripAdvisor
• Tara Newboult, VP of Product Planning & Strategy, Worldpay
• Nancy Wellott, Consumer & Product Experience Innovation Leader, Verizon

Click below to learn more about the conference or to register at a discounted rate.  Give us a shout if you’ll be there!

We are excited to organize and host our next fireside chat on Operating Like a Startup in a Bigco on May 30th at 5 pm at the WeWork Kinzie in Chicago, IL. 

Corporate leaders are under tremendous pressure to keep their organizations relevant and growing in the face of increasing market uncertainty.  Listen in for battle-tested lessons learned from these top corporate leaders on strategies and tactics they’ve personally used to allow their organizations to search for sustainable, and bold new ways to add value in the face of increasing market uncertainty.

• Erin Faulk, Innovation & Growth Strategist, The Garage Group
• Rizal Hamdallah, Head of The Futurist – Innovation Lab, Tyson Foods
• David Wong, Executive Director, Innovation and Growth, CME Group
• Ben Feeney, Director of Foresight & Design, MillerCoors
• Alex von den Steinen, Senior Marketing Leader, experience at Glanbia, Birds Eye, Kraft Heinz, and P&G

Event costs have been covered by The Garage Group so it is free to attend the event. Join us at WeWork Kinzie in Chicago, IL, 20 W Kinzie St, Chicago, IL 60654 on May 30th at 5 pm. Register below!In March, we hosted battle-tested Bigco leaders from Gatorade, Pepsico, Grainger, and Mondelez as they spoke to how their large organizations are operationalizing startup approaches. Here are a few of our favorite quotes from March’s panel:

“From an innovation standpoint, you don’t want to sprint for the sake of sprinting.” –  Chris Hintermeister, Senior Manager, Innovation, Gatorade

“Get things off of paper into the real world.” – Tharius Sumter, Director, Global Portfolio Insights, Pepsico 

“Within startups it is do or die. How do you create do or die within a big company, because that’s what’s needed.” – Barry Calpino, Senior Innovation Leader, experience at Conagra, Mondelez, SCJ, Newell, Wrigley, & Kellogg’s

“It’s about finding the right people, at the right time at different points in the journey. That’s what real collaboration is about.” –  Erin Overly, Head of Brand Communications, Grainger

Be sure to join us for our next fireside chat on May 30th at 5 pm at the WeWork Kinzie in Chicago, IL. Register below! 

Thank you to our hosts, WeWork! 

WeWork provides small businesses, startups, freelancers, large enterprises, and everyone in between with the workspace, community, and services they need to make a life, not just a living. With weekly events, personalized support, month-to-month flexibility, and access to over 190,000 like-minded creators around the world, WeWork is the perfect place to grow your business. Book your tour here!