ConAgra and Kraft Join Together for On-Going Partnership

In a rare, ongoing partnership between two major food makers, ConAgra Food's Ro*Tel tomatoes and Kraft Foods' Velveeta cheese have been successfully co-marketed, through a "Famous Queso Dip" and other recipes made with the two brands, for a decade.

Now, the companies are not only rolling out the latest co-campaign for those brands, but building on their relationship with two new partnerships: one between ConAgra's Hunt's tomatoes and Kraft 100% Grated Parmesan Cheese; the other between ConAgra's Swiss Miss and Kraft's Jet-Puffed Mallow Bits
The Ro*Tel/Velveeta relationship began 10 years ago with more typical joint in-store displays and promotions, and evolved into a fully integrated marketing partnership starting about six years ago — in which the two separately owned brands actually share portions of their advertising and promotions communications budgets, and collaborate on creative decision-making.
The latest cooperative Ro*Tel/Velveeta marketing initiative, running from September through February 2014, is a 360-degree "Queso for All" campaign.
The campaign aims to build awareness of the Queso Dip and sales for the two brands in markets beyond their strongest markets in Texas and the South Central region of the U.S., reports Jonathan Schaefer, brand director for Ro*Tel. (The campaign's elements declare the brands' "mission to cover the nation in queso," and "bring the country together, one bowl of queso at a time.")
The campaign includes a sampling tour at tailgating events at football games featuring top rivalry college teams, as well as sampling/dip-making demo events outside of grocery stores in target markets around the country. The brands are employing a "Quesobago" RV with two enthusiastic "Queso Queen" ambassadors on board.
The "Queso Queens" are also featured in TV spots showing their adventures as they drive the RV around the country to bring queso to all.
Beyond airing on television, those spots can be viewed on the brands' joint, dedicated Web site, QuesoforAll.com — which also features the "Famous Queso Dip" recipe (with easy social sharing function); a map and details to follow the stops of the Quesobago tour; and embedded feeds showing the latest queso-related posts on Ro*Tel's Facebook page (currently showing more than 69,000 "likes") and tweets on Velveeta @EatLiquidGold (more than 7,000 followers). The campaign's official hashtag is #quesoforall.
The site also features a sweepstakes. The winner will get a fully catered, at-home "Quesobago Bash" for 10 on "football's biggest day" (Feb. 2, 2014...which is, of course, Super Bowl Sunday).
The brands are promoting the sweeps and the tour, with links to the QuesoforAll site, on their respective social media presences. Other campaign elements include joint in-store and shopper-marketing promotions and FSIs
The longevity and continuing expansion over the years of the Ro*Tel/Velveeta queso partnership testify to its success, points out Schaefer. "Obviously, we wouldn't still be doing this if both brands weren't gaining consumers and sales," he says. While he declines to share sales specifics from the partnership, he notes that the Ro*Tel brand as a whole has seen its usage penetration about double over the past 10 years.
Schaefer describes the relationship between the two brands as "very strong." Every aspect of the co-marketing campaigns is agreed upon, ensuring that all strategies and efforts are mutually beneficial, he stresses.
At Kraft, Richard Bode, brand manager for Velveeta and Kraft Grated Parmesan Cheese, likewise confirms that the complementary nature of Velveeta and Ro*Tel — and the increased media spending and reach to consumers that's enabled by their pooling of budget monies — have increased sales for both brands.
Bode adds that the ongoing relationship with ConAgra has in addition benefitted Velveeta's sales by enabling the brand to align its marketing communication closely with its sales execution. "Over the years, this initiative has also become intuitive to our retail teams, and as a result, we are able to coordinate shopper marketing programs that provide the consumer with easy solutions for different meal occasions, while driving the basket for the retailer," he reports.
Hunt's, Kraft Parmesan Team Up
Given the Velveeta/Ro*Tel success, it's not surprising that similar partnerships between other Kraft and ConAgra brands are now being launched.
The Hunt's tomatoes and Kraft Parmesan cheese partnership is focused on campaigns designed to help make the weeknight dinner menu decision easier for busy moms (and dads), reports Timothy Nangle, brand director for Hunt’s. "The two brands both serve that 'What to have for dinner tonight?' needs state," he points out.
The brands began by developing a "Hunt's and Kraft Recipe Collection" — dinner recipes, ranging from traditional Italian fare to more adventurous dishes, that use both brands.
The partnership kicked off in January with initial efforts that included promotions on the brands' respective social media presences, followed by outreach to targeted bloggers in February and in-store promotions in March, according to Nangle.
This fall, a more ambitious campaign is underway. It starts with the paired-brand recipes being showcased on Hunts.com and the Kraft Parmesan area of KraftRecipes.com.
The campaign also includes a "Try, Share, Win" sweepstakes and couponing promotion, hosted on the Hunt's site. These efforts are focused on driving consumers to make and share with their friends nine "signature recipes" using Hunt's FlashSteam peeled tomatoes and Kraft 100% Grated Parmesan Cheese.
The grand prize is $5,000 to host your own party with the assistance of chef George Duran. The brands will also give away up to 10,000 Silicone vegetable steamers – the more sweeps entrants who share the recipes on Pinterest, Facebook or email, the more steamers will be given away (one for every two "shares.") Participants can see the number of steamers given away rise along with sharing activity, via an online "Share-O-Meter.
Sweeps entrants get a digital coupon for the products – and, according to Nangle, they will receive progressively higher-value coupons depending on the nature of their activities, like printing out, reviewing online or sharing one of the recipes.
Supporting media efforts – all digital and social for this campaign – are designed to reach the target audience during the 4-to-7 pm timeframe during which most dinner decisions are made, Nangle reports.
These include paid search and banner ads (shown above) and videos on sites that consumers turn to for dinner ideas during that weekday time window, as well as outreach through the brands' (or companies') well-established respective Facebook and Twitter accounts. The brands are also doing an outreach program to both general-market and Latino bloggers.
Other core elements include in-store displays with coupons and recipes, shopper marketing promotions and FSIs.
Dedicated, co-branded social presences and advertising in traditional media are likely to be employed down the road, once these two brands' partnership "matures," notes Nangle. Hunt's and Kraft Parmesan are hoping to "replicate" the results yielded by the Ro*Tel/Velveeta partnership over time, as this newer partnership "blossoms," he says.
Bode says that Kraft believes that the Kraft Parmesan/Hunt's partnership is, like the Velveeta/Ro*Tel relationship, a natural fit, which will help retailers and their customers with "easy, delicious ways to make dinner" and enable the two brands to "have strong in-store execution, as well as an efficient marketing campaign."
Co-Marketing Swiss Miss, Mallow Bits
In a third new relationship, this fall, ConAgra's Swiss Miss cocoa and Kraft's Jet-Puffed Mallow Bits will be co-marketing nostalgic Swiss Miss canisters and jars of Mallow Bits in coordinating in-store displays.
The displays will include tear-pads with a coupon and a hot cocoa cookie recipe featuring the two brands as key ingredients.



ConAgra Looks to Big Data for Sales Growth

You already know grocery and big box stores are collecting data on your shopping habits — what you buy, when, how often, and for how much.

But behind the scenes, Omaha's ConAgra Foods and other consumer product manufacturers that sell to these stores have become even bigger and more sophisticated players in the “big data” game.

They're now borrowing shopper-specific data directly from retailers and crunching it in new ways to better understand consumers and respond to their needs. That's in addition to how they use internal data to forecast demand and increase sales, and use aggregate retail data to plan promotions and strengthen supply chains.

“It's a gold mine of insights and knowledge that nobody has tapped into in a big way,” said Bob Nolan, ConAgra's vice president of customer insights and analytics.

ConAgra, behind brands such as Hunt's, Orville Redenbacher and Marie Callender's, is now studying individual shopper habits at several major U.S. grocery retailers and big box stores. The retailers don't share a shopper's name, demographics or financial information, but do provide all the purchase information associated with a particular customer number.

Now, ConAgra can see how often Shopper 1234 comes into a store, how often she buys a certain product and what products she tends to buy together — pasta and tomato sauce, for example, or seemingly unrelated items, like tomato sauce and diapers. ConAgra can learn how loyal the shopper is to a certain brand, and what makes her switch among brands. And the firm can sort shopper habits by individual store location, seeing differences among neighborhoods.

Now well into its 2014 fiscal year, ConAgra is intently focused on sales growth after a disappointing 46 percent decline in first-quarter profits.

The solution will involve being more competitive on price and investing more in promotions, CEO Gary Rodkin told analysts last week.

Data analytics can help the company target exactly where promotions and discounts are working.

“We need to bend the trends on our market share. It is a market share gain. It's category by category, customer by customer. We've got smarter analytics, and we've got to put them to better use,” Rodkin said.

Consumer goods manufacturers that use data analytics to understand shoppers outperform competitors that don't, according to Progressive Grocer, citing two IBM studies published in July.

“In an increasingly competitive marketplace, the ability to detect subtle shifts that were previously indiscernible is imperative,” found one study, by the IBM Center for Applied Insights and Kantar Retail.

That's because consumers today are not only bargain-conscious, but they're also no longer limited to a few retailers. Consumers, empowered by technology, have more choices — not just the neighborhood grocery, but also the warehouse club, the dollar store, the pharmacy or Amazon.

“The best way of winning their business is not to try managing them: it's to listen to them, understand them and serve them as discrete individuals,” authors of the IBM/Kantar study found. “That requires considerable analytical horsepower, though, and two-thirds of consumer products companies don't have enough.”

To boost its own horsepower, ConAgra made a big investment in its data analytics capabilities starting in early 2012. The firm hired Nolan, a former PepsiCo. executive, for a newly created position. Under his management, ConAgra added a new business function called customer analytics to the same department that houses two existing areas: shopper insights, a group started in 2006 that studies shopper behavior and needs, and category leadership, where the firm works with retailers and other manufacturers to improve the selection and display of various products. The group employs about 125 people.

Under the new customer analytics area, ConAgra has hired a dozen new employees, recruiting from other consumer goods companies and market research firms. Hiring is competitive as retailers and other manufacturers are also stepping up hiring of data analysts.

“These are different skills than we would have hired for in the past,” Nolan said. Some of the employees work in ConAgra offices, while others are deployed directly to retailers' corporate headquarters.

The firm has also leaned on its IT department to expand its in-house data center to handle the additional terabytes of information now coming its way.

With the new data enabling it to drill down to shopper-level habits, ConAgra can put a finer point on work it is already doing to understand the shopper needs and emotions that drive decisions.

Walmart also has amped up its capabilities. Even though the retailer doesn't use a loyalty card program outside of Sam's Club, it has a unique ability to correlate geography with purchase information because it has so many outlets, including Supercenters, Sam's Club, Neighborhood Markets and its online store, CEO Bill Simon said in September at a Goldman Sachs Global Retailing Conference.

“We think that gives us a competitive advantage that others would really struggle to get to,” he said.

A recent Deloitte Consulting analysis of manufacturers' use of big data analytics found that most of these firms lag in developing their analytical maturity, even though their competitive advantage depends on it. The Grocery Manufacturers Association, which sponsored the study, this fall will host its first conference designed to help retailers and manufacturers take a shared approach.

What ConAgra will do with retailers' data depends in part on what its retail customer wants out of the partnership. ConAgra declined to name its data-sharing partners but said the first retailer to share data in February wanted to better understand how people shopped in its frozen food aisles. Frozen food sales are stalled industrywide, and both retailers and manufacturers like ConAgra are eager to see that change.

One early finding was that people who buy one kind of single-serving frozen food tend to buy several kinds of single-serving frozen food. ConAgra could suggest to the retailer that it group smaller portions together, instead of stocking single-serve pizzas by family-size pizzas, for example.

That strategy might work well in one store but not in another, depending on demographics, and any suggestion to change displays would have to be easy for the retailer to execute, Nolan said. “You can't make things more complicated.”

The data may also reveal other shopping “affinities,” for example that people buying pizzas also love buffalo wings, and the retailer might decide to produce a buffalo-flavor pizza, said Christopher Durham, a private brand consultant based in Omaha.

By sharing and studying the data, he said, retailers can use it to inform private brand product development, another area where ConAgra could benefit considering its acquisition this year of private-label manufacturer Ralcorp.

“With retailers, it's not about big data, it's about big answers,” Durham said. “You can have piles and piles of data, but if there's nothing actionable coming out of it, it doesn't matter.”

It may seem strange that a grocery chain or big-box retailer would give up its information, for free, to a supplier. And strange, too, that a supplier would, for free, work with the numbers and offer advice on how the store could improve sales. Historically, retailers were reluctant to share this information, fearing that manufacturers might give the data to a competitor, or use it themselves to enter the market.

But sharing is becoming more widespread as the value of studying the data becomes clear.

Nolan said sharing information takes a sensitive approach. While ConAgra is the one crunching the numbers, the focus has to be on mutual benefit, not just what ConAgra can gain. “It's almost like being a consultant. We want to become the indispensable partner to our customers.”

Then, if ConAgra foods fit into a larger sales plan, he'll talk about how his canned tomatoes or frozen pastas can help the store.

“If they do a better job of managing their frozen department, and get more people down the aisle, ConAgra will get our share of it,” Nolan said.

Contact the writer: Barbara Soderlin

barbara.soderlin@owh.com    |   402-444-1336

Barbara Soderlin covers food safety, ConAgra, technology and employment/unemployment issues.

‘Table is set’ for growth at ConAgra Foods

OMAHA — Fiscal 2013 was a “successful and transformational year” for ConAgra Foods, Inc., as the Omaha-based company grew through both acquisition and strong performance in its core businesses, said Gary M. Rodkin, chief executive officer.

After introducing its “Recipe for Growth” roadmap as part of its 2012 annual report, Mr. Rodkin in the 2013 annual report released in late August said the most recent report, titled “The Table is Set,” is an apt descriptor for where ConAgra stands on delivering against five key areas: core/adjacencies, international, private brands, people and citizenship.

“In FY13, we took a big leap forward in delivering on those strategies,” Mr. Rodkin said in a letter to shareholders. “The acquisition of Ralcorp is a transformational move for our company, and a catalyst for our growth. Our Consumer Foods business successfully added the P.F. Chang’s and Bertolli frozen meal businesses to the portfolio, broadening our reach in the frozen aisle.”

Delving deeper into several of the company’s five growth strategies, Mr. Rodkin pointed to private brands as a substantial and sustainable growth opportunity for ConAgra.

“With the acquisition of Ralcorp complete, we’ve increased our annualized net sales of private brand products fourfold, making us the largest private brand food company in North America,” he said. “Having successfully integrated prior acquisitions of private brand nutrition bar, pretzel and pita chip businesses into our existing private brands capabilities, the addition of Ralcorp was a landmark step in transforming our private brands business.”

The first several months of ownership of Ralcorp have opened eyes for ConAgra executives, Mr. Rodkin said.

“Through our new, larger scale, we are better positioned when it comes to product sourcing and supply chain efficiencies,” he noted. “We’ve already begun to realize some of these synergies and expect to continue to identify additional sales-related opportunities as the integration progresses. We expect to achieve $300 million in annual cost savings by the end of FY17.”

Another focus area at ConAgra is “growing the core.” To that end, Mr. Rodkin said the company is leveraging the strengths of its portfolio and accelerating strategies related to innovation and marketing. He cited the integration of the Bertolli and P.F. Chang’s frozen meal businesses as an example of how the strategy is taking shape. The company currently is expanding its facility in Russellville, Ark., where the two brands are made.

“We’re excited to apply our transformational approach to innovation to these great brands, while taking advantage of opportunities to expand brand reach through strategic adjacencies such as desserts,” he said. “We’re applying what we’ve learned through the Marie Callender’s dessert pie business — where we’re driving category growth of 5% annually — to reach new consumers.”

ConAgra also succeeded in its goal of expanding internationally, Mr. Rodkin said. In the fiscal 2013 annual report, he noted that net sales of Act II popcorn increased 10% in the 13 weeks ended March 24, according to data from Information Resources, Inc., a Chicago-based market research firm.

“The brand underwent a package redesign and reformulation to address its value position in U.S. markets and premium position in international markets, applying successful strategies from Mexico throughout Latin America,” he said.

Two other international success stories were ConAgra’s affiliate, Agro Tech Foods, Ltd., in India, and Lamb Weston.

Agro Tech in fiscal 2013 launched peanut butter under the Sun Drop brand and is in the process of building a facility to locally produce the peanut butter in India. Meanwhile, ConAgra is expanding its Boardman, Ore., Lamb Weston facility to meet growing demand, especially from international markets. Mr. Rodkin said Lamb Weston sells to 2,500 customers in more than 100 countries, and in fiscal 2013 Lamb Weston’s international sales increased nearly 9%.

“We’re projecting continued, dynamic international growth in the future,” he said.

Original article posed on Food Business News here (8/29/2013 - by Eric Schroeder)

New hires: Who’s on the move in June 2013? PepsiCo, ConAgra, Hershey, Hillshire Brands, Pinnacle Foods, Coca-Cola, GOED

Checkout who is moving on up and onward in the US Food Industry in June 2013!

The people over at Food Navigator - USA have put together a little Food CPG Movers and Shakers Slideshow to showcase the new hires for the companies who are making moves this month; Check it out here at FoodNavigator.com