Open Innovation Brings Flavor to Green Giant

For more than 100 years, General Mills brand, Green Giant, has brought vegetables picked at the peak of perfection to dinner tables across the country, making nutritious vegetables even more delicious through unique combinations and a variety of sauces, from Rosemary Butter to classic Cheese.
 
In early 2011, the Green Giant team at General Mills began exploring new ways to offer consumers great flavor without adding sauce or butter to its vegetables. While the Green Giant line already included a wide range of plain frozen vegetables and dozens of sauce-based varieties, consumer feedback consistently showed a preference for even more varieties of flavors and seasonings.
 
While the General Mills R&D team could have started from scratch, spending valuable time and resources to experiment with brand new formulations and flavor combinations, the Green Giant team recognized that an outside partner company may be able to provide the know-how to help get the job done more effectively and efficiently than keeping the project entirely in-house.
 
By tapping into the company’s open innovation strategy, also known as the General Mills Worldwide Innovation Network (G-WIN), the team connected with Burley Foods, a local company and trusted General Mills partner representing numerous ingredient suppliers from across the globe.
 
Through a stroke of serendipity, in February 2011, the Burley team had already brought in a highly-trained chef to demonstrate numerous new vegetable blends and recipe ideas to a group of cross-functional General Mills team members, from R&D scientists to marketing managers to consumer insights experts. The prototypes tasted great, so it was an easy decision to move forward and collaborate with Burley on the new project, according to Green Giant R&D manager Kate Gallager.
 
“From the very first presentation, we were excited about how Burley brought new ideas to life, while really thinking about how the prototype offerings complemented our existing product portfolio,” Gallager says. “The culinary knowledge of Burley’s chef provided the expertise we needed to bring more complex seasonings and unique vegetable pairings to Green Giant.”
 
Working together with the Burley team, Green Giant was able to refine the recipes and develop a new, chef-inspired lineup of frozen vegetables. Green Giant® Seasoned Steamers™ were born, in six flavors such as Tuscan Seasoned Broccoli and Honey Roasted Sweet Corn. Seasoned Steamers is one of the first sauce-free seasoned frozen vegetables lines available.
 
What could have been a tedious, time-intensive process experimenting with recipe after recipe in the culinary labs of General Mills was instead a mutually beneficial collaboration with an external partner company.
 
“The opportunity to partner with General Mills to create Green Giant Seasoned Steamers enabled Burley Foods to bring a new business model to our ingredient supplier partners and our customer General Mills,” says Mike Burley, owner of Burley Foods. “With the transparent clarity we received from General Mills’ marketing and R&D personnel, our Burley Foods team was able to leverage and guide the vast culinary and technical resources of our suppliers to find innovative ingredient solutions and arrive at the desired end product in record-pace time. We believe this model and our partnership with General Mills will be the blueprint for success in the future.”
 
Green Giant Seasoned Steamers launched in May 2012. Three of the line’s six unique flavor varieties were derived from the recipes initially presented by Burley, and the two companies continue to work together today exploring line extension possibilities for the future.
 
To learn more about the General Mills Worldwide Innovation Network, visit www.generalmills.com/win.  
 
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