The Food Academy

The exercise
For this exercise I’ve selected Option 2; “What’s the most inventive or innovative thing you’ve done.’
Although the content has been discussed publicly with suppliers, please treat as confidential among the interviewers.

Why this paper matters

Food is fundamental to our customers’ lives and at the heart of Tesco. We have a responsibility to excite and inspire
customers by providing a broad choice of food to meet and exceed every need. In return we aim to grow their loyalty.

Context
The project began back in 2012 when I was posed a question by the UK leadership team; “How can we improve our food
development to inspire customers to shop with us more frequently.”
During that time our customer measures showed that we were failing to deliver newness in the Tesco Own Brand that
excited customers and inspired them to select Tesco as their destination store.
Equally, when visiting stores and reviewing ranges across the major supermarket chains, we saw that ranges were
broadly similar, lacked innovation and didn’t always reflect the changing needs of customers.
To check the findings I set up a series of customer focus groups, which both confirmed our views and reminded us that
customers expected us to help and excite them across all types of foods and all meal occasions.

The fundamental issue

The commercial buying team controlled the range and was responsible for profit. They determined what was bought,
price position and how product was displayed in shops. The customer voice often became lost when these decisions
were made.
Product Development had long been devolved to our supplier partners leaving our internal development team in the role
of “selecting” from a choice of ideas presented. Although our best partners were customer focused, too many were
driven by operational needs. For example, capital investment in manufacturing equipment required a return, so in those
cases volume became the principal measure.

Our solution
I researched widely with our customers and supplier partners that worked closely with our commercial teams. These
conversations showed that we needed fundamental structural change. As a result we elected to create The Food
Academy, a separate team reporting to the commercial leadership. This would be a team with the specific skills and the
mandate required to take back ownership of food development from beginning to end of the process.
It’s important to note at this stage that the Tesco Own Brand range stretched to 10-15,000 products. Therefore, the
direction for The Food Academy was to focus on areas that mattered most to customers. For example, Health, Value for
Money and Convenience.

Food Academy strategy

In early 2013 I set out our vision, in line with our corporate mission; “We believe passion and knowledge is central to
delivering great products customers’ love.”
Central to the strategy were four elements. Understand and Follow the Customer, Innovation and Inspiration, A Highly
Enabled Team and The Right Environment.
These elements, the strategic intent and the broad action plans are outlined below.

1. Understand and Follow the Customer

I needed the team to get closer to our customer. Understand what mattered to them, how their lives were
changing and where they expected Tesco to play a significant role.
We began by unlocking internal customer knowledge including foresight into Tesco Customer Personas, their
differing attitudes and behaviours around food, eating occasions and their shopping habits.
We coupled that with a deep understanding of food trends in the UK and internationally across retail and food
service and then collaborated with customer groups to understand what resonated and mattered most to them.
 2. Innovation and Inspiration
Customers can direct us to areas where they need our help but we can’t expect them to innovate for themselves,
that’s our role. This was a critical part of the strategy and where I invested in recruiting a team who could
provide a full Tesco point of view on food development.
The team consisted of experts in ingredients, recipe development and product development. I then added a
Development Chef team who were essential to changing the way in which we discussed food across all parts of
the business and with customers. This was the first time we created and cooked food ideas in Tesco and brought
them to meetings to set a more creative, innovative conversation.
I then added skills in packaging innovation and food manufacturing to complete the internal knowledge base
across the complete development process.

3. A Highly Enabled Team

The fundamental issue I described earlier signposted a key challenge. We needed to change our culture to put
customers and food front and centre of commercial decision making.
I took important decisions to hire the best people in critical roles, invest in training existing colleagues and
engender a “one team” approach across different departments to ensure food and customers came first.
We also utilised the skills of our supplier partners to compliment and support the team. For example I created
“The Chef Network.” This was a group of six suppliers providing Development Chef support to supplement our
team. This created a broader creative team and in return these suppliers got full access to our ways of working.

4. The Right Environment

To ensure the strategy delivered and could be sustained over time, I identified the need to build a single, joined
up process to develop products for the Tesco Brand. Up to five divisions of Tesco plus suppliers and other
external companies can be involved in taking a single product to market. To reduce complexity we created the
“Tesco Brand Development Process” as a consistent method for all parties to develop any new food product.
We had also discussed for some years the idea of a Centre of Excellence for innovation. I believed that a new
facility at the heart of our office campus would drive culture change and provide a home for celebration and
education around food and customers. This would be a place where customers, suppliers and colleagues could
come together to explore food and feel inspired to create new ideas.
The consolidation of our offices in 2018 gave us the springboard to create “Heart”, the new Centre of Excellence
that opened just over a year ago and exemplifies my original vision.

Learning to “pivot” as we progressed

I adapted the strategy along the way. It became clear that the change I championed was too broad for our commercial
team. They recognised the need for more customer focus and food development creativity but trying to change our
approach to packaging and food manufacturing at the same time was a step too far. It was my miscalculation but I learnt
quickly. We pivoted away from packaging and processing inside the first year and focused on our core competence
around customer insight, food trends, ingredients, recipe and product development.

We made a significant contribution in the first 5 years

Every year £20M+ of new business is driven by The Food Academy through our innovation pipeline including
championing the development of the “Wicked Kitchen” plant based range, 1 st to market with annual sales >£25M.
The Centre of Excellence has driven industry leading ideas including; Tesco Chef Network, Global Food Trends,
Community Cookery Schools, Product Development Forum and our Innovation Restaurant.
The centre has also enabled us to create a compelling food culture across the head office campus for 6,000 colleagues
and use our new, dedicated space to re-establish customers at the heart of our decision making on food innovation.

The Food Academy remains a unique approach within the retail food industry. It doesn’t stand still any more than our
customers’ lives stand still. The Academy continues to inspire new ways of thinking, new ways of working with
suppliers and customers and new ways to innovate great food ideas that meet their constantly changing needs.