Food supplements: A blessing or a curse?

In the health industry, there has been an ongoing trend for the last few years of people focusing more than ever on their personal health. People are turning to commonly used techniques to do so, such as exercise and a balanced diet. However, food supplements are making their way into people’s everyday life. Food supplements currently on the market have important health and wellbeing benefits: they give you energy, help you to fill a nutrient gap and increase your immunity. The most popular and high demanded ones such as multivitamins, vitamin D, vitamin C, protein, calcium, vitamin B, magnesium, probiotics and iron are becoming a dime a dozen.

These supplements are mostly consumed by the notorious food supplement pills or tablets, which are distributed in pharmacies, drugstores and by specialized retailers. Powders and drinks, available at sport centres or health and nutrition webshops, are also becoming more popular. However, consumption methods are requiring additional steps in one's daily routine. As a result, people experience the consumption of food supplements often as a struggle and stop taking them early on. This hurdle is exactly where Curocaps saw an innovative opportunity. What if you could have the best of both worlds by integrating your food supplement intake as a part of your morning routine?  

A new innovative way to enjoy your morning coffee

Next to a healthy lifestyle, people are also finding convenience more important in their everyday life. Call it a result of the modern world, but people want what they want, when they want it. Curocaps took that wish for consumption as their starting point for developing an innovative product.

Instead of hanging on to the traditional consumption ways of swallowing pills or tablets or drinking powder drinks, the Belgian start-up started to think about how you can combine your daily routine with the supplement's consumption. Because what is the first thing you and probably a billion others do first in the morning? Right, they drink their morning coffee.

Curocaps came up with the idea of developing Nespresso® compatible coffee cups filled with nutritional food supplements. So that people could consume their food supplements as easily as coffee. No more struggle, just doing what you do every day and simultaneously improving your health. A great food innovation model! What is there not to love?

Knowledge of your ideal customer is power

Obviously, a successful brand also needs customers buying their products. Knowing your ideal consumer persona, is therefore mission critical.

Defining and validating ideal customer personas is one of the first things we did at Stretch Innovation for Curocaps to ensure their success. First, we performed an internal exploration to understand the products, customers and employees of Curocaps. Next, we explored externally by deep diving into the market, trends, business models and innovations. As a result, Stretch Innovation created 10 possible ideal customer personas in 4 different markets based on assumptions out of our extensive research.  

Validation is key in all our innovation tracks, so Stretch Innovation conducted interviews with consumers and stakeholders to verify our 10 ideal customer personas. As Stretch Innovation we aim to go the extra mile by ensuring a go-to-market (GTM) strategy to launch our innovative concepts.  

After defining the personas, we also worked out go-to-market concepts for Curocaps. First, we hosted an ideation brainstorm workshop. Next, Stretch Innovation summarized the go-to-market concepts that came out of the brainstorm. Together with Curocaps, we selected the most promising ones. Those promising GTM concepts were used to form a small, scaled pilot project for further validation. Stretch Innovation assisted Curocaps in launching a lean start-up to further validate our defined concepts and strategy.

Getting the products to the customer, another matter of convenience

As a business, you also must define your distribution channels. The products of Curocaps are aimed at having a high convenience rate to meet up to the wishes of consumers nowadays, so the distribution must follow the same trend. Defining your ideal distribution channels is an uphill climb for most companies. Stretch Innovation took on the challenge for Curocaps and explored different possible channels. Retail seemed to be the most ideal channel at the start, but we also listed other channels to explore more in detail. As validation is key in every step of our innovation tracks, we also validated each channel with possible consumers to define the most ideal one.  

During this validation process, retail soon turned out to be not the most ideal channel for Curocaps, as it was not answering all the needs of their ideal customer personas. But based on our validation research, an online webshop was defined as the most ideal channel as this met up with the convenience demand of consumers and had all the necessary possibilities to bring the coffee capsules to the market.  

Just recently, Curocaps has launched their webshop on which their broad range of products can easily be ordered online. Curocaps currently offers drinkable food supplements in Nespresso® compatible capsules with the following formulas: Slim Coffee, Slim Tea, Energy, Multivit, Immunity, Sleep, Stress and Detox. An additional benefit of the capsules? They are eco-friendly as they are 100% biodegradable, 100% plastic-free, 100% recycled packaging.

From game-changing idea to webshop launch

What all started out as an innovative approach to an upcoming trend, has now turned out into a convenient webshop offering various drinkable food supplements in Nespresso® compatible capsules with the different formulas. One often has innovative ideas but finds it difficult to translate them into validated and working businesses. Stretch Innovation is happy to have assisted Curocaps in the crucial step of rolling out their go-to-market strategy by defining and validating their ideal customer profiles and ideal channel. The only question that remains is: Are you ready to improve your morning coffee routine giving you enough energy to innovate?

Discover Curocaps wide variety of drinkable food supplements on their webshop!