The supermarket shelf has become a monument to creative timidity. Blame the retailers if you like, they certainly deserve some of it. As public corporations laser-focused on financial returns, they prize predictability and incremental volume over anything that might actually take a risk and possibly surprise a consumer.
Their overheads are enormous, their tolerance for risk minimal, and their enthusiasm for the genuinely new essentially theoretical. But suppliers and their so-called marketers have been equally complicit, and strategically gutless, offering up range extensions dressed as innovation and apparently hoping nobody notices.
They haven’t.
The result is aisle after aisle of house brands and proprietary products that are distinguished from each other by the typeface on the label, the colour, or pack size.
I’ve been around long enough to have watched this pattern repeat itself with depressing regularity. And the lesson that emerges, without an exception I have seen, is that the products which truly succeed don’t just occupy a shelf position.
They create a category that didn’t previously exist.
Not a new flavour. Not a reformulation. A new reason for a consumer to reach for their wallet in a way they never had before.
Finding that gap has always felt harder than it actually is. It felt that way fifty years ago when I created my first genuinely new product: a mix of broken olive pieces and pimento in a lightly spiced brine, launched under the Oliveholme brand into a market that barely knew what an olive was. The gap was real, the timing was right, and the product acted as a catalyst for the explosion of ‘continental’ products that followed.
Steve Jobs noted that you can always identify the pioneers by the arrows in their backs. He was right. What he might also have noted is that for every pioneer who took the arrows, three more held back in the tree line and watched someone else make the same journey first, and make a fortune doing it.
The muesli bar story is the one that still stings.
Working at Cerebos forty years ago, we had Cerola muesli and a clear gap in the market: there was no convenient, portable breakfast option. We developed the concept of what we now know as the muesli bar, ran the formulation work, did the factory trials, and built the financial model. I pushed the sales forecast as hard as I felt I responsibly could. As it turned out, it wasn’t hard enough, and the project was shelved. Twelve months later, Uncle Toby’s launched their muesli bar and sold in the first month what I had projected for an entire year. A category was born, and Cerebos was watching from the sideline.
The Light and Crunchy story is a different kind of cautionary tale. We test marketed a cereal product in South Australia designed to fill the then gap between muesli and the two dominating products, Corn Flakes and Wheat Bix. The initial results were very strong, and we congratulated ourselves thoroughly, while planning a national rollout. Then Kellogg’s appeared over the hill with ‘Just Right’, backed by promotional firepower designed to make clear this was their patch and trespassers would be dealt with. Light and Crunchy died on the test bed. Just Right remains on the market, a small but valuable Kelloggs sub-brand. At least I got the strategy right, while dramatically underestimating the competitive response.
Then there was the pasta sauce. Cerebos had the Fountain brand, then dominant in tomato and flavoured sauces. Australians were eating increasing but still small amounts of pasta and making their own sauce. It was a category gap so obvious it almost announced itself. We test marketed in Victoria, managed to fumble the distribution timing and the support package, and watched the whole thing unravel for reasons entirely unrelated to the product itself. A year later, Masterfoods launched Alora — later renamed Dolmio, and created a category worth tens of millions.
The pattern in all three stories is the same, and it isn’t subtle.
Category creation is where the real money lives. Not in the incremental, not in the safe, and certainly not in the fourth variant of an existing product line.
Seeing the future is no easier today than it was fifty years ago. If anything, it’s marginally harder with more people are looking at the same trends, applying the same tools, drawing similar conclusions. But the fundamentals haven’t changed.
You need foresight, yes, but you also need the courage to act on it with aggression and conviction rather than retreating into caution the moment a spreadsheet looks uncertain. Deep pockets help. A tolerance for failure is non-negotiable. Most ideas will founder somewhere along the path — before launch or after — for reasons that range from the predictable to the profoundly unfair.
But the search must continue. Stop looking, and the retailer’s private label will eventually occupy almost all the shelf space, and the shelves will evolve into a grey monotone of sameness.
Consumer boredom is patient and unnoticed, but waiting to be tapped. The retailer’s distribution chokehold drives their margin calculations. They are not patient, are continuingly demanding and risk averse, except when it is not them taking the risk.
Header: via nano banana
