The recipe of our portfolio

Liv Up is a D2C food tech startup that makes tasty, natural and convenient food. We are a vertical company, taking care of business from end to end: selecting our raw materials, partnering with local producers to prioritize organic food, developing and producing products designed for our customers and delivering it to their hands. We do it all with love.

I work on Liv Up’s Portfolio department and our mission is to develop relevant and innovative products to our customers’ daily lives, overseeing it from the conceptualization of the ideas all the way through until the implementation of the production process, at scale at the factory. In addition, it is the Portfolio area that, if necessary, will introduce improvements to the product or to the production process and follow up on the product’s life cycle.

Our competitive advantage is that Portfolio department is growing in a strategic structure enabling the launch of simple and innovative products. We work in multidisciplinary teams with a lot of autonomy, without forgetting the value of communication. Also, working in multidisciplinary teams gives our Creative Chefs a better vision of the entire production process, hence allowing them to create delicious yet scalable recipes.

I. HOW’S LIV UP’S PORTFOLIO DEPARTMENT ORGANIZED

In a company with exponential growth that aims to be present at various moments over the customer’s daily journey, the Portfolio department must be ready to absorb different development demands.

Here at Liv Up, our area is organized in four teams:

· Discovery & Research: Responsible for generating insights from consumer research, benchmarks, and trend hunting. This team supports strategic decisions for new product development, looks for innovation opportunities and also tracks customer satisfaction about the portfolio as a whole.

· In-House Product Development: Responsible for the development of products that are produced in our factory, from the idea’s conception until launching. This team is also in charge of monitoring the products that are already being sold and continuously improving the existing products.

· External Product Development: Acts as an interface between Liv Up and the partners that provide a few of the products in our portfolio. This team assists in launching and enhancing these outsourced products to maintain Liv Up’s high quality standard.

· Business Developers: This team has the challenge to search and study the viability of new categories and new businesses in which Liv Up does not yet operate.

By dividing our department this way, we have people engaged in both current and future products, whether it’ll be produced internally or not. The vision is that no matter what we want to sell, there will always be someone familiarized with the needs of any certain type of development process.

To increase efficiency, we use Kanban to map our value delivery flow, make retrospective meetings for continuous improvement, and we are starting to introduce flow metrics into our daily lives to support our decision making and predictability, but this subject deserves another post.

To fulfill the mission of bringing products that are relevant to customers’ daily lives, the Portfolio department works directly with just about every team of the company. For example, Sourcing and Procurement teams find the best ingredients for our recipes. Production and Quality work side by side to make sure that the products are being produced as they were meant to be. The Customer Experience Management team shares constant customer feedback. And Branding, Acquisition, and Retention teams communicate the products that will be launched to the various target audiences.

II. HOW DO WE TAKE CARE OF OUR PORTFOLIO?

First, it is important to remember that Liv Up is a consumer centered company and this is in the heart of the Portfolio department. Another factor, that’s also important is that our decisions are data driven, and we have the support of Business Analysts on each team to support decision making. The combination of these two factors is the basis for deciding which products should make up our portfolio.

Every month we evaluate the performance of each product according to several indicators. Two of them are:

1) “Carts insertion” which is the number of carts with a given item in relation to all carts — measures the attractiveness of the item in relation to the others.

2) “Monthly rebuy” which is the index that measures the monthly immediate repurchase of an item, the calculation is made from customers who bought the item and made another purchase within 30 days with the same item in the cart.

For example, a product that has a high insertion but has a low rebuy is a warning that customer expectations are not being met. On the other hand, a product that has low insertion but high monthly rebuy may mean that the product is attractive to a specific audience and is meeting the demand of that niche.

In addition, after 15 days of a purchase, we send an email to review some of the products with grades 1 to 5 and, and the customers can comment about the products if they wish.

As a direct to consumer company, we are able to directly collect a variety of data to track product performance, detect and act on any problem quickly, always working according to the opinions and behaviors of our consumers.

III. ONE CASE: DEVELOPING AND LAUNCHING SAVORY PASTRIES

The development of a new product or category can go through different routes, here we will illustrate from the perspective of the savory pastries launch, one of the most relevant last year:

Consumer Surveys: We conducted a qualitative survey through in-depth interviews and another quantitative survey through an online questionnaire. From the results, we extracted insights as indispensable features for these products, consumer behavior and price sensitivity.

Product development: Based on the research results, the in-house development team created 10 products for the line. The Creative Chefs performed various types of taste and cooking tests until they reached the desired result, all accompanied by nutritionists who take care of the nutritional quality of the product. In addition, raw materials and labor costs are taken into account to make the selling price compatible with the consumer intent.

From development to production: Throughout the development process, food engineers followed the creation of recipes to ensure they were scalable. After development, they still follow the first three productions at the factory — an indispensable work to map potential problems and also ensure a high productivity in the manufacturing process.

Outsourcing: In this project, some of the recipes developed by our chefs were designed to be outsourced. The External Product Development team searched and negotiated with partners that attended Liv Up’s demands and were able to execute the recipes thought by Liv Up’s chefs.

After launching the 10 complementary products to the savory pastries category, we had a 33% increase in the “carts insertion” of this category. We continue to track all the internal metrics month by month, in a continuous flow.

IV. 2020 HERE WE GO

Last year we launched more than 70 products. In 2020, we want to go further and explore baby food market and others new categories, always pursuing customer satisfaction and building the food of our time.