Sizing future food models for a foodservice business

The question

A foodservice company could see the way people eat at work and on the move changing, and it wanted to be ahead of the change.

A list of trends would not be enough. The team wanted a roadmap of future food models with real potential: where the big opportunities would be over the next few years, which early wins would last, and how able the business was to win in each space.

Our approach

We began with what the company already knew, reading its own research and interviewing its people, and tested every force of change against the headwinds that could reverse it.

Opportunities were built where forces of change meet, so none rested on a single trend.

The company’s team chose the shortlist with us in a digital sprint, judged on fit with the business, and each opportunity on it was sized with its own model, built on one shared logic with assumptions the team could see and change.

What the team came away with

The roadmap set out each shortlisted opportunity with a closer look at what it would take, its size as a range, and what could slow it down.

The sizing model came with it, as a tool the business could keep using. Its assumptions, such as how many sites an opportunity could reach, were set out so the team could refine them segment by segment as new information came in.

Every opportunity area the work considered stayed on record, including those left out of the sizing, with the forces behind each one, ready to revisit if the market moved.

With the roadmap and the model side by side, the business had a common basis for choosing which future food models to resource first, and a way to keep that choice up to date.