Troy HicksSr. Vice President, Global Supply Chain
Two of our values are at the core of innovation at Herbalife Nutrition: We Work Together and We Build it Better. We work together, collaborate, and empower our teams to bring new ideas to market, and we build it better by having the courage to think differently about how we get things done.
These values, combined with focusing on emerging nutrition trends and sustainable growth is transforming Herbalife Nutrition into an innovation powerhouse. The introduction of our High Protein Iced Coffee is the innovative result of our values, trend-spotting, and the belief that good nutrition should taste delicious.
Providing Nutritious Options for Consumers
People love their coffee, especially in the United States, where 66% of Americans drink at least one cup daily. But we saw an emerging trend of coffee combined with protein, a nutrient core to our business and widely popular.
By collaborating with our regional experts worldwide, we’re able to understand local cultures and preferences, allowing us to successfully spot these trends and then adapt them to drive product innovation globally.
This market understanding becomes even more powerful when you add the advantage of our distributor network and their personal relationships and intimate knowledge of their customers’ needs. And what they also told us is that their customers wanted coffee.
The growing iced coffee market spans a range of our key consumer demographics, including busy moms and working professionals and younger generations like Gen Z. Since coffee is a new category for Herbalife Nutrition, we saw its potential to be an incremental purchase. It was also an opportunity to provide our customers with a more nutritious alternative to the typical high-sugar, high-calorie, and high-fat beverages, without compromising on taste.
Our executives agreed and were so convinced they challenged us to make it happen in one-third the time it normally takes us to launch a new product. And we succeeded.
How? Recognizing that start-ups can be nimble, flexible, and operate quickly, we looked for a reliable, small company to partner with that could help significantly compress our timeline without sacrificing quality.
Breaking the Mold to Meet Customer Demand
As a company that has been building a world-class “seed to feed” program since 2009 by self-producing the majority of our own products to our exceedingly high standards, this was a completely different way of approaching product development. We created a cross-functional team of employees from ten departments whose singular focus was to launch a new product in record time. They were empowered and motivated to work outside the norm to get things done.
The result? Out of the gate, the excitement among our Distributors and customers exceeded our expectations. The demand from other markets was immediate – and we are already in the process of launching High Protein Iced Coffee around the world. This launch proved to all of us that with focus and our values of “We Work Together” and “Build It Better” we can be nimble despite being a large company that operates in 95 countries and territories.
This exciting, challenging project — and others like it in our product pipeline — helps to unleash the passion and innovation in all of us at Herbalife Nutrition. We are working together and building it better every day to bring new ideas and develop products that provide healthier options for our distributors, their customers, and our employees.