The Challenge:

Ah, pickles: those salty and sour creations that we love to add to our favorite burger, dice up straight into our chicken salad, or snack straight from the jar. According to the Tastewise Index, pickles are featured on 45% of restaurant menus in the US. It’s hard to imagine visiting a restaurant that doesn’t include pickles as an ingredient in at least one dish on the menu.

TreeHouse Foods knew exactly this when looking to reposition their already successful line of pickle products. They needed to understand what types of ingredients are paired together with pickles to create new dishes that people will be talking about — and want to put on their plates.

The Solution:

In order to understand exactly how people talk about their pickle products, TreeHouse Foods needed real-time data from social media - and fast. The other methods of research that the TreeHouse team used at the time presented outdated consumer insights, and weren't reliable in a quickly changing market. Using ingredient discovery within the Tastewise Explore solution, they were able to understand what consumers wanted to eat with their pickles: fish sandwiches !

The main takeaway? The combination of fish sandwiches & pickles has grown the fastest among trending dishes. This data point became the driving force behind creating new recipes, shooting an exciting new campaign, and developing compelling sales collateral.

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The Tastewise Impact

TreeHouse Foods created a successful sales campaign backed by Tastewise's real consumer data - and it all started by identifying consumer excitement around the combination of fried fish sandwiches and pickles. This discovery influenced:

• A creative product photo shoot
• A new, data-backed guide suggesting pickle applications for food service vendors
• A new set of recipes shared across all teams and incorporated into sales collateral and presentations
• Commercial materials used in food service restaurant magazines

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In conclusion, Tastewise’s impact was twofold:

• Campaign (and product!) success : TreeHouse Foods succeeded in introducing a well-penetrated product to a saturated market by creating an innovative campaign for their pickle products based on data-driven insights.
• More efficient innovation processes : TreeHouse Foods also implemented new work processes before each campaign shoot to ensure that every recipe or creative idea is first backed by Tastewise’s real-time consumer data.

The beauty of this tool Tastewise is that you can use the data for so many different things. The idea that you can have a salesperson, an analytics person, an e-commerce person, a ‘Food Away from Home’ person - all using the tool and getting something out of it that addresses the need and their own business is pretty cool, and I don’t think we have any tools that have that sort of broad use.

Norman McKoy | TreeHouse Foods, Food Away From Home Marketing