“Mars Chocolate is an exciting place for budding creatives to work.”
Innovation satisfies consumers’ tastes for new and exciting products. It’s about continually working to improve packaging, format, colours, textures and nutritional value in order to excite audiences and grow a category. Within the confectionery industry, innovation is a crucial driving force. But what does real innovation look like?
At Mars Chocolate, innovation and development of new products and packs are intrinsic to everything we do, touching all aspects of the business and firmly instilling their place at the heart of our company.
We feel that, for businesses to really be innovative, collaboration across all parts of the business is essential. We do this by ensuring our R&D team is interconnected with other teams across our business. Only by embedding our teams with colleagues in marketing, procurement, sales and supply chain, as well as the factory floor, can we ensure that we get information first hand. By doing so, we can ensure that the new concepts we create will be commercially viable.
The research and development team shape chocolate innovation right from the top. With a seat on the management board we enter into conversations on business development from the very beginning – it’s not a case of us being told by the business what we should do. In this way, we can verify that the work that we do is not only meaningful to our customers, but also to the business as a whole.
Investing in R&D
In September 2012, Mars were proud to announce the opening of a new state of the art £6 million (€7m) R&D facility in Slough, our UK manufacturing headquarters. This was a significant milestone for UK manufacturing and indeed the future of the confectionery industry as a whole.
Our site is now home to the company’s largest research facility in Europe with 100 associates working on exciting projects everyday, ranging from quality initiatives to new product development, packaging design and sensory experimentation. The aim of the facility is to drive the business forward through continued innovation and research and development.
However, we realise that it takes more than financial investment to secure the future of the industry, and that’s why R&D associates are allocated time for experimentation and interactive prototyping. This is a great opportunity for associates to get creative and adventurous and we really ask them to challenge the norms with new ideas to drive growth, efficiency and quality improvements. Doing so could transform the industry forever, as well as enable associates to better develop their own skills and understanding.
The outcome
Over the past few years, the R&D team has made some incredible developments and innovative steps that are a first for the industry.
In 2010, Mars Chocolate reduced the amount of saturated fat in its chocolate bars. Each bar now contains 45 per cent less saturated fat than the top 25 chocolate brands per 100 grams. We achieved this without compromising taste, which is a must for our consumers. This is something we couldn’t have done without a collaborative approach between scientists, engineers, product developers, and the entire supply chain, who modified the manufacturing process to deliver the new recipe. Ultimately, we want consumers to feel great about enjoying our chocolate and we are always looking for ways to improve our products, but we can only do this by speaking to the entire business.
Brands and products that have become household names, are not only manufactured in the UK but we also masterminded here, in fact, Maltesers was invented in Slough over 75 years ago.
Since then, the Malteaster Bunny, which was also invented here, has become synonymous with Easter and is now a must have seasonal treat. Both Galaxy Counters and Galaxy Bubbles were also both designed by our UK R&D teams, and all three are the result of our collaborative way of working.
Most recently, Snickers launched More Nuts and More Caramel, offering consumers the chance to choose between two of their favourite ingredients. As part of this new limited edition campaign, we worked with consumer insights on two new limited edition bars pitting consumers’ two favourite ingredients against each other. At the moment, the fight for which is most popular is just too close to call but we are watching closely.
Each product is the result of a cooperation of skills, knowledge and hard work from across the business. It is the concepts and vision that come from working with the marketing team, the creativity of our industrial designers and the efficiency of our engineers that allow us to work in harmony and establish effective processes for innovation.
It is important for businesses to think about how a focus on innovation can remain a vital output, whilst also becoming more embedded within its culture. With product innovation and packaging at the forefront of growth in the confectionery market, Mars Chocolate is an exciting place for budding creatives to work.
By Geoff Bryant, R&D director for Mars Chocolate UK
