Kavli & Q
Kavli, one of Scandinavia’s most popular food brands, was founded in 1914 and sells products in 30 countries with plants in Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, England, and Scotland.
70 Employees | 5 Managing Directors |
5 Group Companies |
10 Face-to-Face Days |
2 Online Days | |
6 Design Sprints | 2 Massive Customer Events
“We’ve been working closely with Fede and his team for six years now. It has been one of the most fruitful collaborations we’ve ever established with an outside trainer. Pracademy has offered our product development and innovation teams new methodologies and mindsets that have made a tremendous difference in the way we think about our customers and develop our products. We can attribute a great deal of our recent success in the marketplace to what we learned from them.”
— Annette Jung, Director of Innovation and Product Development, Kavli
Innovation in its DNA
Kavli and its subsidiary Q–Meieriene have been recognized for many years as highly innovative food companies that listen deeply to their customers. The companies have developed dozens of award-winning products, which delight both young and old and have become staples of the Scandinavian diet. They run multiple (online and offline) open-innovation campaigns every year where community and customer input are taken very seriously.
Start of a Great Relationship
Pracademy was therefore thrilled when Kavli’s head of innovation, Annette Waage Jung, reached out to us in 2015. This first contact quickly sparked what has now evolved into an extremely fruitful and mutually beneficial six-year collaboration. Since then, we’ve run six design sprints; executed a company-wide design-thinking workshop; led a global executive workshop with top management in the Netherlands; offered public talks for over 1.000 customers; and coached dozens of managers and product innovators.
Launching Design Thinking
More importantly, we’ve helped Kavli and Q launch several popular product lines like jalapeño cheese and expand into new product categories like fruit yogurt. This is due in large part to how naturally Kavli’s product and marketing managers embraced Design Thinking. They began by spending extended periods of time with key customers in supermarkets, homes, schools, and workplaces. The enthusiastic and go-getting managers leveraged the power of ethnographic research by observing the behavior of their customers and then engaging in long, personal interviews.
Sprinting Fast
Once this empathy work had taken place, we helped the managers sift through the copious amounts of customer data through the sensemaking and synthesis process. The teams crafted multiple Point of Views, where they narrowed down the challenge to a specific type of customer and his or her needs (e.g., culinary, health, environmental, activity-based, etc.). Once this specific challenge was defined, then the multiple product teams jumped into the solution space with a level of creativity that blew the Pracademy team away. They quickly ideated and prototyped dozens of foods, packages, and messaging for novel dairy products and quickly took them out into the real world to test them with actual customers. This process was iterated on during many quick Sprint rounds until the winning products emerged.
Into the Future
Today, Kavli and Q are two of the most design-thinking oriented companies in Norway. This is thanks to the awesome leadership of Annette Jung (Director of Innovation and Product Development), Kristine Aasheim (Managing Director of Kavli), and Bent Myrdahl (Managing Director of Q); the tremendous efforts and creative confidence of the Kavli and Q teams; and the trust they placed on Pracademy. We are very proud of the relationship we have built with this cutting-edge, customer-focused organization and are already planning our next exciting steps together!