When the Canadian frozen food manufacturer ditched the unpronounceable, mad science-sounding ingredients in its product lines, health-concerned shoppers embraced the change, and now McCain’s is expanding on its "All Good" recipe to success
McCain Foods Canada VP marketing Heather Crees was sorting through the frozen pizzas in the grocery store one day, when she was approached by a fellow shopper.
"I had a competitor's product in my hand, and she stopped me and said, 'Please don't buy that, I need to show you something.'"
The woman picked up a McCain pizza box and flipped it over. On the back was a list of ingredients that looked like a recipe in a cookbook instead of an inscrutable legal disclaimer from a food processor.
"She just walked me through the ingredients on the back," says Crees, "which was unbelievable."
As part of the It's All Good initiative, Florenceville, New Brunswick HQed McCain has reformulated the recipes for over 70 of its pizza, pockets and potato SKUs to include only recognizable ingredients. In other words, if you wouldn't normally have it in your kitchen at home, McCain doesn't want it in its kitchens, either. Hence the recipe.
"We thought, why not use that real estate, which had always been used as completely factual, informational," says Maxine Thomas, VP executive strategic director at McCain's advertising agency of record, Toronto-based Taxi Canada. "We showed people that, and they said, 'oh, it's like I would make it myself.'"
Now McCain is reworking its dessert products as well. It hasn't always been an easy process. For instance, the kids' potato product, Smiles, took 72 iterations to meet standards for ingredients, taste and nutritional value.
"As we get to desserts, you'll find that the number is even higher," says Crees, who joined McCain four years ago, and has since built a marketing team of about 20 people, all based out of the company's Toronto offices.
Since the campaign's launch in 2010, the efforts have resulted in some impressive numbers, and not just reducing sodium in Pizza Pockets by 15 to 20 percent. In the 12 months after the campaign launched, net dollar sales for McCain Superfries increased by +10.5% (as reported by Nielsen MarketTrack) and the category continues to grow.
Back in the highly competitive pizza aisle, McCain has secured listings for new SKUs like its newly launched Ultra Thin Crust line.
"We've been able to show that we're leading the category across pizza and pockets and potatoes in terms of bringing some new thinking to the business, and therefore have been able to justify bringing more SKUs and facings into the mix as well," says Crees, who has 16 years of experience in packaged goods with companies like Kraft and Procter & Gamble.
"Said another way, if you have products that people want to buy, then [retailers] want to allocate more space to that."
The campaign has also opened a new channel of communication with consumers, like the Good Samaritan shopper.
"When you have a conversation, you're typically asking each other questions and providing answers. It's a very simple notion, just about how we connect with our consumers, and either ask or answer the question."
That conversation began with a simple question – "what's in dinner?" – in the first of more than 10 TV spots and numerous print ads created by Taxi for the campaign, as well as PR by Veritas Communications. Crees is expanding that conversation online, with a relaunch of McCain.ca this past winter that integrated broadcast and social media campaigns. The company also entered Facebook last fall, and is currently running a campaign that gives coupon rewards for answering polls about Harvest Splendour Medleys, a new line of potato-vegetable side dishes.
"We're going to continue to evolve the product line, and for us this is an ongoing journey," says Crees. "Part of it is, how do we have more of a dialogue with consumers? And it is getting more into the digital space. The space is changing so quickly that we need to adapt with it as well."
Crees is also looking at ways to integrate corporate social responsibility under the It's All Good umbrella, both inside the organization and out.
"The first step was recipe changes, but it is about the 'All,'" she says. "Sometimes you just assume that food needs to be made the way it is because it's always been made that way. And it was just literally because someone asked the question, we were able to change. My hope is that the industry will embrace this movement and we'll continue to see change as we go forward."