The challenge
The bakery counter is where Starbucks meets millions of customers every day, and across a region as varied as EMEA, what counts as an iconic bake changes from market to market.
Starbucks wanted support in bringing teams together from across the region to ideate around iconic bakery platforms.
Our role was to dig into the trends and nuances of each key market and generate deliverable concepts the markets could genuinely run with and launch, not blue-sky thinking destined for a drawer. Running through the whole brief was a specific focus: how to win with Gen Z audiences, the customers who will define the next decade of the coffee shop visit.
What we did
Trend analysis prepared by thefoodpeople, an ideation workshop, concept crafting and rationalisation, and illustrations.
How we did it
We partnered with thefoodpeople, a leading food and beverage trend agency, building their trends framework into opportunity platforms that gave the workshop real structure. Trends on their own are interesting; trends translated into platforms a bakery team can ideate against are useful, and useful was the brief.
We then facilitated a carefully crafted innovation workshop, bringing together attendees from markets across EMEA. The craft in a session like this is in the preparation as much as the room. We synthesised a vast number of insights from across the markets and leaned into the needs of the key demographic, so that every exercise pushed towards ideas with Gen Z relevance and local credibility. The collaborative energy did the rest, generating a vast number of ideas, and by the end of the day, ten big platforms had been identified.
The workshop was the midpoint, not the finish. Following the session, the winning concepts were built on and further refined, with illustrations bringing them to life so that every market could see, not just read, what each concept could become. The refined concepts were then sent to the attendee markets to be quantitatively tested and shaped into R&D briefs, moving the work from inspiration to pipeline with nothing lost in translation.
What it delivered
Ten big bakery platforms identified in a single workshop, refined into illustrated, testable concepts with R&D briefs formulated by the markets. Most importantly, several strong concepts were selected by the markets to be built into NPD pipelines for 2025 and beyond. For a cross-market programme, that is the result that matters: ideas with enough substance and enough local relevance that individual markets chose to invest in them.
Bakery is a category close to our hearts, and this project had everything we enjoy: a world-class name, a region full of distinct baking traditions, and a generation of customers rewriting the rules of what a coffee shop moment looks like. Bringing teams from different markets into one room and watching shared platforms emerge from very different starting points is collaborative innovation at its best, and it is even better when those platforms go on to earn their place in real NPD pipelines.
View more case studies
-
Geeta's
Geeta's commissioned FIS Group to expand their portfolio into curry pastes and chutneys, building on a successful earlier partnership. We developed three new paste flavours in pouch format and a range of savoury chutney recipes, each rooted in authentic Indian flavour but designed for UK consumers and existing manufacturing capabilities.
-
Life Health Foods
A food business with limited insight history needed a robust foundation to inform category strategy, retail partnerships and brand vision. FIS Group delivered an end-to-end programme from stakeholder workshops to quantitative validation, creating a living strategic resource the whole business now builds from.
-
YO!
YO! needed to understand customers across three channels while balancing growth with brand loyalty. FIS Group combined quantitative survey work with agile listening groups to shape twelve months of marketing decisions.
Got a brief? Let’s talk.
Tell us what you are working on. We will tell you straight whether we can help, what the right approach looks like, and how quickly we can move. No long discovery dance, no qualifying call before the qualifying call.