Creative thinking reveals new ways for Arla Foods Ingredients’ customers to make a market impact

Arrive at Arla Foods Ingredients’ application centre on Monday, and take a customised solution home by Friday. Customers can cut away up to a year’s development work by spending a week with the functional milk proteins (FMP) application team in Denmark.
For Arla Foods Ingredients, it’s all about value innovation – the ability to provide a unique product and service and, at the same time, enable customers to save money. The inspiration for the approach comes from Blue Ocean Strategy.

Strategic creativity
Carsten Kirkegaard Jensen, FMP application manager, calls it creativity with a strategic direction. “Many markets are characterised by lots of competition, where the players are fighting for the same customers and can only increase their market share by winning over each other on price, supply and other paramteers. 

“Blue Ocean is about finding a new way to differentiate yourself so you can leave the competition behind and create a new market where there are no competitors.”

By serving as a knowledgeable sparring partner and securing fast product development, this is what Arla Foods Ingredients can help customers achieve.

Finding real value
“A number of the factors that companies compete on do not give their customers any real value. Using Blue Ocean tools, we look at removing or reducing unimportant factors, determining which factors should be higher priority, and creating new factors that the industry has never before offered,” says Carsten. 

“What we are concerned with is not just developing new products, but also having an awareness of why we do what we do.”

The implementation of Blue Ocean tools reinforces the customer inspiration days that Arla Foods Ingredients has offered over the past two years. Here customers have been presented with product samples based on untraditional formulations and processes. Creative dialogue is the inevitable outcome.

Blue ocean room
Later this year, Arla Foods Ingredients will be able to invite customers to a brand new and bigger application centre at Arla Foods Ingredients’ head office in Denmark. Among the facilities will be an inspirational blue ocean room, specially designed for working with customers on projects that make a difference.

For more information please contact: ckj@arlafoods.com