We are always updating our audience personas.
I should mention that this research doesn’t ever stop. It got us thinking that if there was one foolproof option, it would help the restaurant as well as the customer. This wasn’t always easy for the restaurant to manage, juggling different iterations of every menu item and it certainly wasn’t much fun for the customer. Independently to my research, Shaun was telling me about the customers coming into his restaurants in Melbourne and Sydney with an increasing number of special dietary requests. Not only was there a receptive market there, but there was also a large pool of investors. California, specifically, was the epicentre of all things plant-based. Research also revealed where the biggest market would be – the US. It’s just not environmentally sound or business resilient. So, there was no point us using ingredients that we already knew were not eco-friendly – nuts for instance. I think that businesses that aren’t looking in that direction are soon going to get left behind. Veganism was already popular, maybe not mainstream, but it was clear what direction the industry was heading. “I’m a behavioural economist by background, I also ran my own marketing agency in the Food and Beverage Sector, so I had my finger on the pulse of consumer insight and trends.įrom extensive research, I knew that the market for plant-based food was going to explode at some point. Make sure you understand the needs, wants and desires of your customer or end-user at the deepest level possible to ensure you are solving their unmet needs. Now we just had to turn it into a product!” We could genuinely shift consumer behaviour in a meaningful way.Īfter a lot of experimentation in our kitchen, we felt we had a formulation that worked – fermented ‘imperfect’ cauliflower and hemp.
If we could make it from ingredients close to the source of production – not importing whatever is cheapest or easiest, and upcycle food waste, even better. If we were to have any success at all, we simply couldn’t be put into that category. That’s a much larger consumer base to build a business around plus we wanted to rather aggressively avoid targeting vegans as vegan cheese has a terrible reputation. We thought that if we could create an insanely tasty cheese out of plants, that would appeal to everyday people (not just a small audience of vegans) they will happily buy it as an alternative. Expensive to produce, not environmentally sustainable or allergen-friendly, these two formulations had been used for years. Research also told us that those cheeses were made from only two formulations, either from nuts or coconut oil.
“My partner, chef Shaun Quade and I, felt that existing dairy alternatives to cheese tasted terrible!
0 kommentar(er)
