Beta Glucan Value Proposition

In this case study, an international food ingredients company engaged CPL Business Consultants to advise on a product positioning, pricing strategy and value proposition for a new heart health ingredient based on beta-glucan.

Objective

The project assisted a client in planning how best to exploit the beta-glucan ingredient it produced and included an overview of the sector and advice on product positioning, pricing strategy and value proposition.

Method

The sector into which beta-glucan fits is the heart health, cholesterol reduction and gut health sectors for food ingredients and supplements. In each of these segments, oats, oat bran, and oat products have been known for many years as being ‘healthy’. For this project, CPL looked almost exclusively at the dry products sectors – bread, cereals, pasta, snacks and other baked products. However, we also included yoghurt mixtures (as a dry product inclusion).

CPL has developed a general cost-elasticity model, which was used to model the pricing and addition of ‘healthy’ ingredients. This model used the ‘effective dose’ per person per day of the ingredient that either allows a health claim or is known to be effective. The model used a broad cross-section of prices of products from the UK and USA to assess cost elasticity. A review of recently published news information on beta-glucan products was also collated and summarised.

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