How Del Monte created a successful, data-driven brand & increased sales with Tastewise

The category team at Del Monte faces a unique challenge: it’s hard to innovate a banana. When you can’t iterate on the product, it all comes down to marketing. Del Monte is already an expert in produce harvesting, logistics, etc. but is facing a new opportunity: the need to create great new brands that bring consumers to their produce. How can they create branding that differentiates their banana from their competitors’?

To make matters more complicated, the category of bananas had seen a significant drop in retail sales and consumer interaction. Del Monte needed to find a way to reinvigorate the category, given steep competition from two primary competitors in the market and the rise of more specialty fruits, like super fruits, creating distraction from historically well-established categories — like bananas.

The Challenge:

Del Monte’s category team needed to:

• Create an impactful brand to get bananas in front of customers after lagging sales
• Introduce new marketing angles for produce in an oversaturated market
• Back up their retail research with real-time consumer data

The Solution:

The solution in differentiating produce is to have a story that adds value to the actual ingredient (in this case, a banana). Typically, Del Monte relied on static retail data; today, they’ve also introduced Tastewise to understand what is happening in customer consumption and menu presence.

Using Tastewise, the team:

• Validated retail insights into declining banana engagement, using consumer data from social media & recipes
• Created new innovation processes to get accurate insights, fast – crucial for the produce category
• Created a successful banana brand focused on fair trade, reinvigorating a stagnant category to increasing sales

The team used Tastewise to complement and reinforce insights they pulled from retail: that bananas were losing share across the board with consumers and losing traction to more popular, “trendy” fruits. This validation was the starting point needed to create a new, compelling story that would “bring bananas back to the minds of consumers”.

This story resulted in a successful campaign introducing Del Monte’s new organic banana line, which in turn increased sales of the product and brought interest back to the category.

The Impact:

The Del Monte team is now able to:

• Approach innovation more effectively, with faster time to insight
• Use a data-driven approach for decision making
• Stand out from competitors with unique, validated market positioning
• Quickly identify and validate market white spaces within produce categories
• Create campaigns that speak directly to consumers

The Bottom Line: