Professional Results at Home


Can packaged foods deliver professional results at home?

Why do people like to eat out? Certainly there’s the appeal of the social atmosphere. But I think many people eat out because the food simply tastes so much better than what they can cook themselves. Why isn’t it possible to get the same professional results when we cook food at home?

The ability to deliver professional results at home represents a huge opportunity for the food industry. Other categories have tapped this trend. P&G’s Dryel was the first product that let consumers do professional dry cleaning in their own clothes dryer. Crest White Strips brighten teeth—a professional service for which you used to have to visit a dentist and pay hundreds of dollars.

P&G’s Dryel:

professional dry cleaning at home.

Tapping into this trend requires real technological innovation. It’s not enough to market a product as “restaurant style” or “professional quality.” The results really need to be measurably different. One successful food example is Kraft’s DiGiorno Rising Crust Pizza. This product introduced a new technology that allowed consumers to make restaurant-quality pizza in their home oven.



I was exposed to another food industry example of this trend at last week’s Innovators Conference: Diageo’s Guinness Beer Pod. As any Irish stout drinker can tell you, the appeal of Guinness is the creamy, thick head that comes from a slow pull off the tap. The Pod allows consumers in Europe to duplicate the draught Guinness head at home. It’s ingenious.

What is the best part about these types of “home professional” innovations? In almost every case, they are incremental to the category. People do not stop buying P&G’s venerable Tide detergent because they buy Dryel. Rather, they buy Dryel to replace a professional dry cleaning service.

To me, the food and beverage opportunities are endless! What if I could bake bread at home that tastes as good as my local bakery? How can I make my stir-fry taste as good as the local Chinese restaurant’s? Why can’t the steaks I pan-fry at home equal those I get at Ruth’s Chris?

Think about your category. What type of professional service can you enable your consumers to achieve at home? And what kind of innovation would allow you to deliver it?


Posted: Mon - March 21, 2005 at 09:21 PM        

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