Healthy Choice Fresh Mixers

ConAgra | Healthy Choice Fresh Mixers

R&D: What We're Thinking About

  • Childhood obesity: The causes, implications, and responsibilities that this rising crisis has had on our culture and clients.

    Wellness: The evolving and ever-broadening definition of this domain, including how people choose to define their personal wellness and the role that food and beverage can play.

    Water: Access to clean drinking water and its impact on emerging markets.

  • Sustainability: The inevitable overlap of sustainability and food and beverage as driven by consumer wants, needs, and desires, and the implications these have on a product’s complete cycle—from responsible growing practices and sourcing to considered packaging and waste.

    Community: The role and responsibilities a community and/or company has in supporting local agriculture. Case in point: IDEO's deepening relationship with Capay Valley Growers in order to prototype different ways to create and sustain a mutually beneficial partnership.

Food & Beverage

Using a human-centered approach to innovate within Food & Beverage means exploring deep emotional and functional connections between people and consumption. We mine these connections to work on a broad landscape of projects – from defining strategic growth opportunities to developing new product and brand experiences.

We are often asked to look at tough issues and translate them into progressive and palatable outcomes. Through fieldwork and human-focused research we have sought to understand the evolving and broad definition of wellness, to address the causes, implications and responsibilities of childhood obesity, to translate human desires and needs within the overlap of sustainability and food, and to expand the role and responsibilities of communities and companies in local agriculture.

Resources, Partners, Favorites

Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) is a nonprofit scientific society working in food science, food technology, and related professions in industry, academia, and government.

Food Marketing Institute (FMI) conducts programs in public affairs, food safety, research, education and industry relations on behalf of its 1,500 member companies — food retailers and wholesalers — in the United States and around the world.

Capay Valley Grown is a partnership among twenty-three farm and ranch charter partners in the Capay Valley region that wanted to increase the marketability of their high quality products.

Slow Food USA is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to supporting and celebrating the food traditions of North America through programs and activities dedicated to Taste Education, Defending Biodiversity and Building Food Communities.

Edible Schoolyard provides urban public school students with a one-acre organic garden and a kitchen classroom.