Arla Hack: Rethinking Breakfast
This spring we’ve had the honour of helping Arla Innovation rethink breakfast behaviours for the next generation. A journey of purpose, imagination, and belonging. And no, the answer is not a new flavour of yoghurt…
The Confidence to Embrace Life
The playing field for youth today is different from how it was when many of us were young — more chaotic, anxious, transparent, and dystopian. At this time: imagination, optimism, and bravery are needed more than ever before. So kudos to Arla Innovation for focusing so ferociously on solving teen’s real needs and seeing their responsibility in enabling healthy habits, beyond shakable dairy drinks. This is a story of digging deeper, in listening harder.
Better Behaviours & Deeper Empathy
For most Swedes, Arla have featured on their breakfast tables and in school canteens since forever. And so a big question was: how could they leverage this position to accelerate better behaviours? Healthy body is one thing, but what about the mind and soul?
The youth themselves are so core to this question, so we brought them in at the very beginning — establishing, together with Fryshuset: the Youth Advisory Group — a cluster of curious teens we’ve met with regularly to learn from, test with and grow together.
Our amazing “YAGs”, Nina & Julian from Arla, and our very own Joe & Caroline 💚
The depth of discovery this has allowed us to access would have been impossible without such a real relationship with these brilliant young individuals — a testament to taking the time and to truly empathise and engage with the target audience. In fact, it’s been so insightful, that the YAG will continue meeting monthly at least until Christmas.
The Breakfast Unknown
So — what happened at the Hack?
We gathered a top-tier line-up of industry experts connected to the challenge areas: From Snapchat to Save The Children, Electolux to Food & Health Influencers. 10 teams were packed with diverse perspectives to interrogate the challenges and reimagine behaviours. Our facilitators led the teams through a rapid process of Discovery, Ideation and Prototyping to uncover insights, define a direction, and manifest new realities.
Inspiration Stations, designed to inspire and support the teams’ journey of discovery, focused on Food (run by Arla’s own chef) Prototyping (run by Julian, Head of Innovation at Arla) and AI (run by me, Joe). This concoction of characters, flavours, and tools resulted in an electric atmosphere of creative minds rapidly bringing game-changing teen-based concepts to life in front of their very eyes.
Immersive Nutrition
The final concepts — packaged, prototyped and pitched on stage — all solved core needs connected to hectic lifestyles, lack of sleep, and social detachment. They ranged from a nutrition mashup machine and Gamer Influencer Community to stylish, tailored, and free breakfast packs ready and waiting for kids at school. My favourite — Food Inspiration Lab — is all about taking the school environment seriously and to the next level. Making produce, ingredients, and preparation a journey of discovery — not just a process of filling bellies.
The next steps are ambitious and clear: Analyse, prototype, test, and iterate the ideas with the youth and key perspectives to identify and validate scalable solutions to pilot, launch and learn from.
Innovation Eats Strategy for Breakfast
Corporate innovation is a strategic thing. Timing is key and engaging the right people, critical. But leaps of faith (read: smart confidence) are needed to explore the potential of a brand outside it’s comfort zone, and essential if anything original is to be born. Julian, Nina, and the Arla Innovation crew have this coming out of their ears. Which is why they are such an exciting entity.
Bring on the adventure.
/Joe