Ask An Innovator

Ask An Innovator


How to Leverage Consumer Insights for Innovation

August 06, 2020

SUMMARY WITH ANDY RENAUD

Andy Renaud from Ferrara Candy is on AAI today and a common theme that comes up is what do we do with consumer insights? How do we use them to fill our innovation pipeline? How can we use them to engage our customer on social media and beyond? Andy talks to Josh about how they’re doing this in the candy space, from Crunchy Crawlers to a specific Wonder Woman candy – Ferrara is engaging customers in so many different ways.

The discussion loops around to COVID-19 and how Ferrara has remained agile through it all. From setting up employees to do R&D at home to understanding what the best tech tools are to use for collaboration. As consumer behavior changes, how does Ferrara change with it and keep innovating despite limitations?

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Full Transcript with Andy Renaud

Erin Srebinski: [00:13] Hi, and welcome to Ask an Innovator. This morning we have Andy Renaud from Ferrara Candy Company talking with us about innovations in the confection space. He talks about the innovation practice at Ferrara and how knowing your key strengths is essential for growth and launching new products. The podcast was recorded during COVID-19, so Andy and Josh also cover how Ferrara has remained agile and is continuing to deliver sweet delights to customers. For more, keep on listening and for the full transcript check us out at cityinnovationlabs.com/ask-an-innovator

Josh Barker: [00:42] Andy, I really appreciate you coming on. I’d love for you to give just a little intro to yourself.

Andy Renaud: [00:47] Yeah, of course. So I’m Andy Renaud. I’ve been in the confections category for my entire career. So I have an undergrad from UW Madison. In food science and so that’s just a study of all of the know-how in engineering, chemistry, even regulations, the marketing behind food, and how things are made for our food industry. So I got that back in 2009, I graduated and I had an internship in Chicago, which actually led to a full-time position at my prior company. Work they’re doing a lot of in the lab at the factory scale-up of product development, both on gum and candy and confectionery sugar, confections.

As of last year, January of ’19, I moved over to my current employer for our candy company in Chicago. And so since then, I’ve been doing a lot. My title is senior manager of innovation, growth management. Really, what that entails is looking at how Ferrara is doing innovation and what roles do we need in place? What process do we need to implement and deploy? What capabilities do we need to develop? But also from a strategic standpoint? What should we be having in our innovation pipeline to deliver growth not only for the company but also for the category? But also, what insights from consumers are we leveraging to develop that pipeline.

It’s been a really interesting opportunity over the last year and a half just because I’ve been able to really leverage my kn...