How McCormick Uses Design Thinking To Innovate on Its Product Line
Spices are an old category: the earliest traces of the spice trade go back to at least 2,000 BCE. So to most outsiders it might seem like there’s not much room for innovation.
But McCormick, the largest spice-maker in the world, doesn’t see it that way.
Not only have they been an active acquirer in the space — with at least 13 acquisitions in the new millennium — they have also made a significant investment in their internal innovation group.
Unlike most legacy companies that just track trends and read analyst reports to help guide their product decisions, McCormick has integrated a global team of innovation managers that are responsible for teaching cutting edge design-thinking concepts to the rest of the organization. They do this to create a culture where innovation is everybody’s job, to ensure their product lines are aligned with actual customer problems and needs, and to share ideas and best practices across markets.
We spoke with Jacqui Wilson-Smith, Global Innovation Manager at McCormick, to uncover their innovation process. Jacqui reveals the best practices that McCormick uses — classic startup tools like design thinking, getting out of the building to interview customers, journey-mapping, and rapid iteration — and how her team is tasked with building cross-functional groups of innovators inside of McCormick.
Jacqui started her career as an accountant out of school, but quickly transitioned to working on innovation initiatives for her employers. Over the last 20 years she’s worked in innovation and marketing for a variety of food and spices brands including Kraft, Constellation Brands, and now McCormick.
Tell us about your role at McCormick?
It’s a global innovation role, where I use different aspects of design thinking to drive our innovation process. What that means is it’s my job to help McCormick be more consumer-centric in our approach, and to try to build collaborative cross-functional teams to discover and solve consumer problems.
One thing a lot of companies will try to do is have one team that does innovation, but we don’t believe that really works. Instead, at McCormick, we think that innovation is everybody’s job.
At McCormick, we think that innovation is everybody’s job.
It’s my job to go out and train McCormick’s global workforce on how innovation works, how to do design thinking, how to understand the consumer better and then to foster collaboration between different parts of the organization to bring innovative new products to market.
Doing things this way allows you to tap into the communal brain trust of the organization, to bring all of their knowledge to bear, and to solve problems that have the consumer at the center.
What I see is that this kind of innovation work is actually a great way to bring teams together inside of a large organization, encourage teamwork, and add purpose to everyone’s day job.
What I see is that this kind of innovation work is actually a great way to bring teams together inside of a large organization, encourage teamwork, and add purpose to everyone’s day job. It really changes things when people understand at a more personal, visceral level what the needs of actual consumers are. It makes their jobs much more engaging and exciting, because they can see the change they’re making in people’s lives.
Tell me more about how you actually implement this type of innovation at McCormick
The first thing is embedding design thinking, and I have workshops to help do that. That really helps people think in this new way where we’re trying to identify and solve consumer problems.
Then the other part of my job is getting connectivity between marketing and R&D across different markets. Often you might find that scientists are working on similar projects and problems in different parts of the world. So in my global role I’m trying to improve those connections so that collaboration can happen and innovation can come to market at a faster pace.
We’re trying to share best practices between all of our global teams. There might be great ways of extracting consumer insights that we’ve found in one particular market, and we’ll take that and then share the methodologies and processes as well as the outcomes with the rest of the organization.
We can do this because regardless of what country you’re working inside of everyone wants to cook more healthy and nutritious meals. They all want more flavor, they want to experiment more, they want to increase their culinary skills. These are just macro consumer trends that hold across different countries and cultures.
How do you do consumer research and design thinking at McCormick?
For the most part we’re encouraging a very immersive approach to our research.
We’re really trying to enable people to get out of the building, conduct observations, even down to the basics of going into stores, going into homes, and even creating journey maps.
We’re really trying to enable people to get out of the building, conduct observations, even down to the basics of going into stores, going into homes, and even creating journey maps. We’re not just looking at the use of the product itself, we’re trying to understand the whole build-up to the purchase.
We’re asking questions like: When someone’s about to buy spices how do they plan for it? What are the triggers? What are the pain points? What are the triggers to repurchase once you’ve thrown the product away?
We’re even using techniques like mind mapping and empathy mapping so that we can classify the different emotions that consumers are feeling.
Can you tell us more about the process you use to identify and solve customer problems?
Sure. We break the process up into a few stages.
The first stage is observation, which is just observing consumer behavior and identifying problems.
The second stage is ideation, where we’re trying to identify the biggest problems and pain points, and then reframe and distill them down so that we can come up with solutions.
The third stage is testing. Once we have a solution that we like, we’ll actually go out and test it in the market. In the testing part of the process, we’re really quite creative in how we design our experiments. It could be mock shops, or online tests. We’re trying to get the situation as close as possible to real life. That might even include placing a limited run of products into pilot test stores.
So to bring this to life, I’ll use an example from the previous company I worked at called Gourmet Garden which was acquired by McCormick.
At Gourmet Garden we created a new category of spices called convenience fresh herbs and spices. Convenience fresh is halfway between dried and fresh herbs — where they have the positive aspects of being fresh in terms of look, flavor, and texture, but they last a lot longer than a regular fresh herb.
So when we were creating this product, we did this process of observation and we identified a number of problems that consumers had when it came to traditional herbs and spices. For example, washing and chopping fresh herbs is a pain point. Also, knowing how to use a particular herb is another one. But we found that by far the biggest pain point was that a fresh herb would go bad quickly.
The only way we discovered this was by going out and observing actual consumer behavior to find it. Once we picked it as our main problem to solve, then we were able to go and figure out how to technically create a product that lasted longer and still retained a lot of the benefits of a fresh herb or spice.
And it worked out incredibly well. It really revolutionized the category.
This process of innovation is an iterative process, and we’re always looking for improvements, and we want to fail fast and small and learn fast and adapt quickly.
This process of innovation is an iterative process, and we’re always looking for improvements, and we want to fail fast and small and learn fast and adapt quickly.
The part that I can’t stress enough is that all of these things also happen simultaneously: so you can be observing at the same time you’re ideating and testing. It’s a very rapid process.
If our readers are trying to bring this kind of thinking to their company what other types of content do you suggest they read? What do you read?
I read lots of different business books and I subscribe to a lot of design thinking-type newsletters like the stuff that IDEO puts out — Tim Brown specifically is great. I also read the newsletter from the D School at Stanford.
I like Steve Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany. He’s got some really cool little video clips about getting out of the building and about customer discovery. I use his video clips and I share them all the time to marketers and R&D teams to encourage them to get out of the building.
I love the book the Business Model Canvas. There’s another book called Value Proposition Design which is great. And I, of course, love the Lean Startup.
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