Repositioned a global ingredients business from supplier to co-creation partner

Our client is a global ingredients business. Businesses like it make the components that food, drink and other consumer brands build their products from, so their customers are other companies rather than shoppers.

There was far more to this business than the ingredients it shipped. It held deep technical, R&D and market capability: the kind of expertise that can help shape a customer's next product, not just supply it.

In this industry, that difference matters. A customer who sees only the ingredient compares it on specification and price. A customer who sees the expertise behind it has a reason to bring the supplier in early, while new products are still taking shape.

Much of that value never reached customers as a clear offer. The capability was real, but it was not packaged as a proposition that customers could see, understand and ask for.

Inside the business, innovation happened without a repeatable framework, so each new idea found its own route. Value beyond the ingredient was described differently from one conversation to the next. Commercial teams had no common way to tell the value story, and the work of innovating ran separately from the work of talking to customers.

It is a familiar pattern in technical businesses. Expertise builds up in labs and specialist teams, while sales conversations stay with the product, its specification and its price. Unless something connects the two, customers buy the ingredient and never see the rest.

To change how customers saw it, the business needed:

• A repeatable framework for how innovation happens
• A consistent account of its value beyond the ingredient
• One shared way for commercial teams to tell that story
• Innovation and customer communication working as one

We connected how innovation happens inside the business with how its value is communicated to customers. Fixing one without the other would have left the gap in place.

We started by benchmarking the innovation models of leading FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) businesses, the companies behind the everyday products on supermarket shelves. The benchmark showed what a repeatable approach to innovation looks like in practice. We then built a framework fitted to our client's context, rather than copying one designed for a different kind of business.

Alongside the framework, we:

• Mapped capability beyond ingredient supply, across insight, sensory, go-to-market and design
• Reframed the business's story from supplier to co-creation partner
• Created a service menu for commercial teams to sell from

A co-creation partner works with customers to develop their products, rather than delivering an ingredient to a specification. The service menu made that story practical. It set out what the business could offer beyond supply, so commercial teams had specific services to propose and the same story to tell.

The business now offers customers more than the ingredient, and its commercial teams have the story and the service menu to sell it.

A wider offer

At least five new value-added service areas are now mapped into the proposition, so customers can see what the business brings beyond supply.

One story across commercial teams

More than 80% of commercial teams are equipped with a common value story and a service menu to sell from.

More value in customer conversations

Value-added services attached to customer conversations are up by more than 20%.

The expertise was always there. Connecting innovation with the way the business tells its story turned it into an offer that customers can see and ask for.