Client Challenge – Another CRI founding client, Rich Products, a leading supplier of food products to the foodservice industry, has repeatedly partnered with CRI to create breakthrough new products and services that create value for their customers. CRI has helped Rich’s set new standards for foodservice operators’ expectations of what is possible in quality; seemingly homemade products that reduce time and labor while enhancing an operator’s reputation.
Collaborative Breakthrough – One example of the power of our innovation process resulted from some qualitative CRI customer research that revealed foodservice operators’ frustrations with whipped dessert toppings. Traditional dessert toppings were labor intensive, messy and inconsistent. Rich’s needed a faster, simpler, cleaner way to make whipped topping. During a creativity session in Rich’s innovation process a group exercise in movie imagery led one participant to link a scene with comedian John Belushi from the movie Animal House. It drove a wish for “a bagged whipped cream that looks like a ‘zit’.” (Can you guess which scene?)
Reality – The On-Top® line of non-dairy whipped toppings, packaged in plastic cone-shaped pouches (like a zit), that can be easily opened and dispensed through an internal, gravity fed decorative tip, to perfectly dispense whipped toppings. On-Top requires no messy preparation or cleanup. A simple innovation that won the Innovation of the Year Award from the Frozen Food Association the year it was launched, On-Top has been one of the company’s top three product platforms for almost two decades, and it is only one of many innovations that CRI has helped them create.