Innovation And Entrepreneurship In The Food And Beverage Industry: An Essay.

Understanding Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Innovation can be understood as a successful introduction of a new method or thing. Innovation is combination and original knowledge synthesis along with valuing processes and new products with services. Entrepreneurship is deemed to be a process that includes two process including effective opportunities and existence of enterprising individuals. It is observed that the food and beverage manufacturers are facing new challenges in increasing sales and consumer loyalty (Bolzani et al. 2015). Considering same, several innovative strategies have been developed for generating systematic form of innovation within business that includes increasing technology use and competition. The objective of this paper is to prepare a report on proposed enterprise innovation. It also intends to employ the findings from the enterprise innovation trip for analyzing relevance of innovation in the SME sector industry. The paper will also explain the way innovation is employed as a solution for recent enterprise solutions in food and beverages industry.

Concept of innovation can be understood as successful emergence of an innovative method or thing. Innovation is the process of combination, embodiment or knowledge synthesis for important and valued new goods and services. Innovation process is focused on explain new idea and converting it into something valuable (Cagliano, Worley and Caniato 2016). Innovation can be understood as conducts of people and organization to change them along with the environment. Diffusion of innovations serves as a theory that focuses on explaining the rate of implementation of new technology and ideas. Innovation can be defined as a theory that considers explaining changing processes and developing effective processes, ideas or products. Innovation has the likelihood of ensuring business success. Innovation also involves deliberate information, imagination and initiative application in order to derive increased value from resources along with encompassing processes through which new ideas can be converted into useful goods.

Creativity can be understood as combination of ideas that may not have merged previously. Innovative ideas are generated by developing the recent ones in minds of people. Creativity can be explained as capability to employ innovation for generating new things and ideas or innovative solutions (Caiazza and Stanton 2016). Creativity facilitates people to connect things those are unconnected and from such meeting new ideas are developed for doing or using things.  Creativity is the method of developing useful and exceptional ideas. Creativity can be understood as a process of converting imaginative ad new ideas into reality and this is characterized by the capability to perceive the world in innovative ways, to recognize hidden patterns, to develop connections among seemingly unrelated process and to develop solutions. Being creative in an organizational environment indicates high risk taking that can be employed all through campaign messages, action calls, audiences and communication channels.

Challenges Faced by Food and Beverage Industry

Entrepreneurship can be understood as evaluation, innovation and opportunities exploration. Entrepreneurship is explained as economic process and includes as two phenomenon nexus that presents enough opportunities along with existence of enterprising people (Ford et al. 2014). Creative Entrepreneurship can be deemed as problem of people and opportunities. These entrepreneurs innovation will consider innovating through implementing creative solutions to issues of people that can ensure better life of people. This process is understood as commercialization of creativity. There have been several evolutions of the entrepreneurship theories that consider this process to be a method of risk bearing regarding purchasing at definite prices and selling at some prices. This process can be observed as commercialization of innovation. Basic principles of entrepreneurship include an over-arching process of success along with satisfaction for the entire entrepreneur along with having business respect for all the investors, employees and consumers.

Two major challenges are identified to be present in food and beverage industry that is deemed to have certain impacts on the industry. One among the challenges is that people might get frustrated for standing over a long time in Queue and does not tend come for the second time. The impact of this challenge is that they cannot focus on available menus with pricing details that considers fewer placements of orders. New along with tech-savvy consumers could not be attracted as there is no search engine visibility (Galanakis 2016). A segment of health conscious people that remained untouched and the anti-sugar movement shifted towards e-commerce. The weak online presence facilitates the busy consumer not to come within the company and for this reason the profitability decreases. The successful existence of online services results in employment of several employees to be a delivery person and IT department. Businesses within numerous industries have attained the advantages of such trend of e-commerce as fast as other industries. Other industries are highly established within the e-commerce platform but the food and beverage manufacturers have been slower in this aspect. Consumers are observed to be shopping that perimeter of the store within the expense of store categories centered this obviously challenges traditional packaging goods (García Sánchez, Molero Zayas and Rama 2014).

Second challenge faced by the food and beverage industry is that more sugar level results in poor health of the customers which lead to decreased brand reputation. It is a nutritionist’s responsibility to suggest sugar level within food or else the users’ heath might get impacted. Such challenge also impacts the government performance. The more the level of sugar within food the lesser will be consumer retention within food and beverage industry. It presents a big challenge for the food and beverage manufacturers in addressing the need that consumers look for sweet products but they do not prefer seeing sugar label stuck on their purchased food and beverage items not even with artificial sweeteners. Considering such challenge several food and beverage companies are trying to develop mini cans that can retain consumers back to soda in which a smaller portion size will generally contain less sugar within each can (Ip and Lam 2014). From an analysis of food and beverage industry it has been gathered that children and young adults are generally involved in high sugar intakes that have decreased quality of diet of the general population. Increasing sugar intake is boosting the risk of health issues within the region as the average food and beverage intake is being more than the required daily sugar count. People recently are getting extremely health conscious being aware of the fact that intake of excess sugar can result in excess weight gain and can result in diabetes, heart disease and even cancer. Consuming sugary food can also result in increasing obesity rates among the children and adults and for such reasons intake of sugar and total fat must be decreased as a part of coherent progressive health strategy because of increased obesity threat in America there has been an increasing trend of sugar overconsumption. Recently, certain changes have been made by manufacturers of food and beverage product to mention sugar level added within the nutritional panel of goods (Jack, Anderson and Connolly 2014). Several food and beverage companies are looking for ways that can make their products sweet tasting devoid of adding excess sugar. Setting standards for sugar rich drinks and food offered by government sponsored institutions can resolve such issue.

Innovative Solutions to Increase Sales and Consumer Loyalty

Considering the challenges faced by the food and beverage industry certain solutions are offered that can increase consumer base and profitability of the companies operating within the industry. Such innovative solutions are explained under:

• The increasing demand for healthy foods has also developed a climate of ingredient demonization in which the regulators, medias along with lobbying groups is centered on a specific ingredient that is highly on use of sugar (Jolink and Niesten 2015). The companies in food and beverage industry are recently focusing on cutting extra sugar out of the diet in which the customers are selecting to decreasing sugar content from their diet hoping that it can enhance their wellbeing and health. The fast food chains are supporting the healthy growth within the free from markets that is gluten and lactose free. Decreasing the size of food products with using less amount of sugar in it. Moreover the sweaters that are used must be approved by the country’s food safety authority. The companies operating within the food and beverage industry considers organizing anti-sugar movement campaigns in order to impact consumer purchasing for healthier food and beverage products. Additionally, natural fruits along with their extracts must be added by the food chains in order to add sweetness within the food (Lacroix, Laios and Moschuris 2015). Decreasing sugar level along with adding value to the food products can serve as another solution for such issue. Value can be added in the form of vitamins, protein or minerals are turning out to be extremely popular as consumers prefers additional value other than the flavor and price at the time of making purchasing decisions. Manufactures are recognizing ways that can decrease sugar level and add value to the products in a manner that makes sense without experiencing exorbitant expenses along with adding ingredients which cannot bed recognized by consumers and hence might reject.
• The existence of 3^rdparty IT service providers can facilitate in including their online services devoid of compromising time from their major businesses. Association with the delivery services is also recommended so that people can attain their food from their preferable fast food chain. The fast food chain can consider hiring third party service providers in order to deal with their online existence. Development of a different application is also recommended so that users might get customized experience in consideration to their services (Ludvig et al. 2016). As an increasing number of consumers are shifting their preference for online shopping and the manufactures are revealing ways in implementing e-commerce as an aspect of their marketing and sales strategies. E-marketers within food and beverage industry estimated that the e-commerce sales will be increased through offering food products in a convenient manner. The food chains are considering that with the increasing demand for online grocery delivery with food services subscription for the busy lifestyle of consumers indicates preference for prompt doorstep delivery. Fresh product delivery has increased in demand such as Amazon Fresh service offering on-demand fresh vegetables, fruits and other food items (Maietta, Barra and Zotti 2017). Consumers will be able to order their food from their own devices and the food will get delivered within hours or will be easily available for delivery in nearby locations. Such service development must be considered by all the food and beverage companies that can facilitate them to grow their business locally being local grocery outlets, diaries and farmers advancing their operation in order to address needs of consumers.

Figure 1: Dimension of Innovation

(Source: Schaltegger, Lüdeke-Freund and Hansen 2016)

• Extend of Change- Consumer megatrends is deemed to shape the future of the industry including from local sourcing to ready to eat products along with clean labels. These changes might be extraneous to food manufacturing and this have a drastic impact on the food manufacturing process (Massa et al.2017).
• Modality of change- In order to address consumer demands, certain changes in reformulating food products are ensured through use of sustainable ingredients by adding vitamins, proteins and antioxidants within the food and labeling them as allergen and gluten free. Sugar is also being decreased in foods and steps have been taken in increased food shelf life.
• Materiality of change- Taking several market dynamics, materiality changes are also detected in which the manufactures predict increasing implementation of robotics and automation in order to bring highly flexible machinery for efficient operation of the production lines.
• Relatedness of change- Food industry efforts are increasing to develop exciting and interesting food culture along with new food experiences and there is observed to be longer periods between increased innovations of products within the industry.

In the recent years, innovations are increasing within the food and beverages industry. For instance, Blue Apron Company considers developing exceptional home cooking delivered to consumer doorstep with ingredients properly portioned along with recipes to the online subscribers at affordable prices. Another innovation focused on preventing tooth decay and decreasing sugar levels in the food is maintained by zollipop Company that is intended to prepare lollypops with stevia and xylitol that intends to increase PH level of the mouth which normalizes acid along with preventing bacterial growth (McAdam et al. 2014). A new innovation introduced within the food and beverage industry is liquiguide that is an innovative way of packaging that includes lubricant with glass or plastic containers. This also enables the most viscous contents to slip out of the bottle that reduces excess pounding to take out ingredients from the bottles. As there was no conveniently packaged nutrient rich animal protein within the food and beverage industry, a new epic savory protein bar is developed and introduced in the industry made from high quality meats, nuts and fruits. These bars come in flavors such as bacon, bison, cranberry and chicken sriracha.

Figure 2: Innovation Landscape Map

(Source: Setyawati et al. 2014)

Several innovation strategies are introduced within the food and beverages industry that considers consumer, food safety along with certain regulatory changes. Opportunist strategy developed within the industry considers evolvement to survive and for such reasons there needs to be step-change in the manner food and beverage companies conduct businesses (Saguy and Sirotinskaya 2014). This strategy considers re-evaluating the way the companies operate along with making certain business decisions for reacting to transforming landscape through inventing 3D and 4D printing that will contain nutritional information.

Figure 3: Generic Innovation Strategies

(Source: Tell et al. 2016)

Differentiation strategy is greatly employed within food and beverage industry focused on the food quality. For instance, Burger King focuses on the quality of its flame-broiled within advertisements. Increasing number of food and beverage companies are developing a different taste or cooking process that can serve as better opportunity in differentiation rather than competing on cost with huge chains (Saguy and Sirotinskaya 2016). The industry is also trying to implement cost leadership strategy and through such strategy Mc Donald’s have even highly successful. The company developed a strategy to maintain low prices through providing basic fast food meals. The industry is therefore making increased attempts in maintaining low prices through labor division that facilitates the company to hire and train inexperienced staff that supports the food chains to provide food at bargain prices. Focus strategy is greatly implemented by this industry as it totally focuses on a particular area of product development which is centered on decreasing salt and fat content from the food products. As consumers are turning out to be health conscious, companies within food and beverage industry focuses on offering low sodium and fat food alternatives (Santoro et al. 2017).

Figure 4: Porters Generic Strategies

(Source: Tepic et al. 2014)

Figure 5: Innovation Culture Canvas

(Source: Triguero, Córcoles and Cuerva 2013)

• Leadership- Leaders within the food and beverage industry impacts innovation through taking explicit decisions along with subtle behaviors.
• Technology- Tools and capabilities present in the advancing food and beverage industry facilitates the food manufactures and employees, external parties as well as consumers to connect, innovate and share relevant knowledge.
• People- Within the food and beverage industry the skillets and mindsets of employees, eternal partners and leaders along with the consumers has made attempt in prototyping, increasing creative thinking for food product development along with implementing ne opportunities and ideas in food innovation.
• Metrics, rewards and recognition- Within the food and beverage industry the skillets and mindsets of employees, eternal partners and leaders along with the consumers has made attempt in prototyping, increasing creative thinking for food product development along with implementing ne opportunities and ideas in food innovation.
• Processes- Growth strategies and innovation within the food and beverage industry are implemented internally and externally through encompassing functional and cross functional techniques, information sharing, customer engagement, advancement of product and services along with other activities.
• Structure- Structure of the food and beverage industry has formal along with informal organizational principles and functional designs which facilitates increased collaboration along with guide behavior and mindsets.

Innovation culture can be clearly observed within the food and beverage industry. Innovation leaders within the businesses are becoming highly important for the reason that the industry is dealing with properly capitalized competitors (Vyas 2014). Moreover, PepsiCo has turned out to be an innovation leader within the industry as the company has been capable to develop link between innovation and sustainability. The company is increasing diversity that is focused on hiring people, bringing new skill sets within their research and development such as computer modeling. Innovation geniuses are increasing within the industry (Schaltegger, Lüdeke-Freund and Hansen 2016). For instance, Dominos Pizza has turned out to have the second largest pizza chain through being innovation geniuses. The “Anyware” digital strategy of the company has facilitated the company to increase its sales by 10% with its domestic franchise locations.

Figure 6: Agents of Innovation Culture

(Source: Tsimiklis and Makatsoris 2016)

Conclusion

The objective of this paper is to prepare a report on proposed enterprise innovation. It also intends to employ the findings from the enterprise innovation trip for analyzing relevance of innovation in the SME sector industry. From analysis of the paper it is gathered that the increasing demand for healthy foods has also developed a climate of ingredient demonization in which the regulators, medias along with lobbying groups is centered on a specific ingredient that is highly on use of sugar. The companies in food and beverage industry are recently focusing on cutting extra sugar out of the diet in which the customers are selecting to decreasing sugar content from their diet hoping that it can enhance their wellbeing and health. Moreover, In order to address consumer demands, certain changes in reformulating food products are ensured through use of sustainable ingredients by adding vitamins, proteins and antioxidants within the food.

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