Every summer, the same thing happens across food and drink. Key stakeholders disappear on holiday one by one. Diaries that were packed in June open right up. Projects that need a room full of people to move forward quietly stall. And yet the pressure to grow, to respond to a customer, to have something ready for the autumn range reviews does not pause for anyone.
For a lot of innovation teams, that turns July and August into a write-off. The people you need are not around, so the work waits. Come September, you are starting from a standstill, with less runway than you had before the break.
There is another way to look at it. The quiet is the opportunity.
Why summer suits a Hothouse
A Hothouse is an intensive ideation sprint. You hand over a short brief and a data pack, and our innovation team takes the challenge off your plate. We immerse ourselves in the category, build the stimulus, and develop finished concepts that are ready to go into screening and validation. No large cross-functional working group. No twenty people to free up across five functions. No diary Tetris.
That is exactly why it suits the summer. The one thing a Hothouse does not need is your team in a room. You set the direction and step away. While you are out of office, the work is happening.
| “The summer lull is not a problem to manage, it is a window. Hand us the brief and the summer does the waiting for you. You come back to a refined concept bank instead of a to-do list.”
Danny Butt, Group Innovation Director |
What you actually get
A Summer Hothouse runs over three weeks. In twenty-one days, you get up to fifteen research-ready concepts built around as many as three platforms of your choice. These are not rough thought-starters. Each concept is developed around your brief, supported by the right stimulus and rationale, and built to stand up commercially, not only creatively.
The process moves through five clear steps. It starts with your objective and the essentials we need to understand it. Our team then works up all the stimulus, drawing on cross-category experience and trend mining. We ideate around your platforms in a highly focused setting, generating long lists and prioritising them against principles we agree with you up front. Finally, we refine the strongest ideas into concepts, using your data pack as the guide, so what lands on your desk is ready for the next stage.
| “You do not get a list of half-baked ideas. You get research-ready concepts you can put straight into screening. Every one is built around your brief and your data, so it feels like it belongs in your category from day one.”
Evie Morrice, Senior Innovation Consultant |
When it fits, and when it does not
A Hothouse is not the right answer to every challenge, and we will always tell you when it is not. It is built for reactive and customer-driven briefs, time-pressured work with a two to four week turnaround, cost-conscious projects, and categories that need an injection of creativity. Think a retailer asking for a range refresh at short notice, or a trend you need a point of view on before a category review. It suits clear-outcome briefs where the platform is reasonably well defined and the job is to build a bank of concepts ready for a stage gate. It is a format small teams can commission without a large internal lift.
Where the work is genuinely strategic, where it defines investment decisions or reshapes the core, a full creative workshop or pipeline programme is usually the wiser route. Those need deeper discovery and a different kind of rigour. Part of our job on the scoping call is to point you honestly towards the right approach, even when that approach is not a Hothouse.
Food and drink is all we do
The depth of a Hothouse depends entirely on the experience of the people doing the thinking. We are not a generalist innovation consultancy that takes the occasional food brief. Food and drink is the only sector we work in. This is not a sector we tolerate to win work, it is the one we care about most, and that enthusiasm shows up in ideas that understand how a category really behaves on shelf and at the table. Our team knows the categories, the consumers, the channels, the operational realities and the commercial environment, because it is all we do. That focus is why we work with eleven of the UK’s forty biggest food and drink companies, and it is why the concepts land in the real world rather than on a mood board.
One route, or a fuller one
For most summer briefs, the three-week route is the one to reach for. Simple, quick and commercially sharp. For teams who want a consumer read built in before concepts are finalised, there is a fuller route that adds a consumer testing stage over four to five weeks, so the strongest ideas are shaped by real people before they reach your desk. On the scoping call we will help you work out which one fits your brief.
Set the brief. Go on holiday.
The whole point of doing this now is simple. You set the brief, hand over the data pack, and go on holiday knowing that when you come back, your project is research-ready. No hard sell, just a straightforward conversation about whether and how a Hothouse can help.
If you have a summer brief you want to move on, a Hothouse is the first step. Let us talk about your challenge.