McCormick Leaves a Mark on Consumers

For consumers, the lines between the digital and physical worlds are blurring. Leaders in the consumer goods industry understand an immediate need to connect these two realms to deliver meaningfully integrated consumer experiences.

Since its founding in a Baltimore cellar in 1889, McCormick & Company, Inc. (www.mccormick.com) has been delighting consumers in the physical world with treasured consumer brands, trusted ingredients and culinary know-how.

Now, it is leading the charge as an innovator in the digital marketing space for food as well. Especially over the last few years, the company has invested resources, including an increased marketing budget, to encourage creative thinking and deeper engagement with consumers.

“We’ve found digital planning increases the purchase of food and flavor, so reaching, engaging and rewarding our loyal fans with flavorful ideas and inspiration where they are spending significant time — web sites, mobile and social platforms — is critical to McCormick’s success,” says Andrew Foust, digital business development director, McCormick & Company, Inc.

“For years, our shopper marketing team has looked closely at what trigger moments exist in the grocery shopping experience and how consumers look for recipe solutions,” explains Foust. “We used this inspiration to take what we already knew about flavor, recipes and our consumers, and built a new format that directly engages with them.”

The new format is called FlavorPrint, a digital service that brings together all of McCormick’s strengths as an expert on flavor to deliver something that consumers have never before experienced in the electronic recipe space.  

Intelligent Design
Put simply, FlavorPrint is the Netflix of the food industry. But whereas Netflix uses movie-picking algorithms to decide what a viewer will watch next, FlavorPrint uses algorithms to help the consumer decide what to cook next based on his or her unique flavor “fingerprint”.

“FlavorPrint is an intuitive visualization of flavor itself; a snapshot of your flavor palette… Everyone has a unique flavor ‘fingerprint’ that can be conveyed through a distinct visual mark,” says Foust.

To develop this visually stunning yet legible mark, McCormick broke down all flavors into 33 “flavor spikes”, which doesn’t sound like much, but they can be combined into millions of different recipes. Each spike represents a different flavor, like nutty, cheesy or spicy. The bigger the spike, the more that flavor dominates the FlavorPrint for each individual, as well as for each recipe and product.

By spending two minutes on McCormick’s web site, consumers can determine their unique FlavorPrint by answering a few questions about flavor preferences, cooking styles, and ingredients and equipment on hand. Once a user has answered the questions, the digital service compares his or her FlavorPrint with thousands of ingredients, recipes and products to offer recommendations suited to his or her unique likes and dislikes.

What’s more, the site’s content gives users a personalized experience. Whether they are browsing or searching, they’ll always know how closely matched they are to a recipe or product. The more a person uses FlavorPrint to rate products, the smarter it gets. And just like Netflix, FlavorPrint evolves with its users, offering new recommendations that keep up with changing tastes.

“The algorithm is a living, breathing tool that we will continually optimize, just like any product. The tool gets smarter over time; the more consumers interact with the service the more tailored the recommendations become,” says Foust.

Behind the Screen
The concept for FlavorPrint emerged as the culmination of many good ideas from across the organization at a time when McCormick was looking for opportunities to innovate in the digital space. It’s subsequent development was the result of close collaboration between internal teams — from information technology to marketing, sensory, test kitchens and sales — and external resources, like R/GA (www.rga.com), its digital agency of record, and Enterra Solutions, LLC (www.enterrasolutions.com), a cloud-based, intelligent supply chain technology company.

“It took a lot of great minds to create such a unique and engaging tool,” says Foust.  

To bring FlavorPrint to life, and with the support of senior leadership, the company created a new team focused exclusively on incubating global digital innovation, outside of the day-to-day business. Charged to lead the team in the new role of Digital Business Development Director was none other than Andrew Foust.

Over two and a half years, the small team — with direct reports to McCormick’s Chief Information Officer and Vice President of Marketing — expanded via internal hires. At the end of 2013, it will be composed of five skilled marketing professionals and another five IT staff members.

“This hybrid of marketing and IT is particularly important as consumers become even more reliant on digital technology; we need both working seamlessly together,” says Foust.

The team tapped R/GA, which shaped the big idea of FlavorPrint, formed the digital strategy behind it and put the service swiftly into action, working alongside the internal team of IT professionals and flavor scientists from McCormick.

“They took our end goals and key strengths and created a breakthrough concept, design and user experience,” credits Foust.


Getting a Taste
McCormick launched the beta version of FlavorPrint in March 2013, and consumer response among home cooks and foodies has been encouraging. More than 43,000 individuals had already been “FlavorPrinted” as of October 2013, which led to:

• 4x greater time spent online by users
• 6x more pages viewed by users
• +30% more recipes saved

Anecdotally, consumers have told McCormick that FlavorPrint is quick, fun and easy to use. Dramatic increases in social sharing, ratings and reviews have also been observed. Here’s what users are saying:

• “I thought the FlavorPrint was pretty cool. It was quick, great graphics, very interesting selections of items. The top three flavor types were right on the money, and all of the recipes looked great. I’m always on the hunt for new recipes and recipe ideas, so I’m glad I signed up. Good job.”
• “This thing is very accurate! I picked out 160 recipes that I would love to try within 20 minutes. I have never had such an easy time. If I were to compare it to Netflix’s rating engine to try to determine preferences, I would say yours is easily 100 percent more accurate than theirs. I love this thing!”

These early measures of success are even more compelling given that advertising and marketing support for the service didn’t start until late in September 2013. Moving forward, FlavorPrint will become part of all McCormick campaigns. It was designed as a tool that could be attached to any marketing or social media campaign.

“It is the underlying technology and call to action driving consumers to find more personalized content,” adds Foust, who notes that it will also fill the gap between marketing campaigns as it ties to everyday meal planning, beyond holidays or special occasions.

The industry is also recognizing FlavorPrint as it recently won two global 2013 Cannes Lion awards, one of the most important and famous international competitions for creative work in the world of advertising.

“This has reinforced our dedication to innovation in the category and our commitment to offering our consumers something truly unique that also delivers on their needs in the evolving digital space,” says Foust.

McCormick’s retail customers are also intrigued.

“Retailers are focused on developing the in-store experience, but they want to figure out how to take that one-to-one relationship into the digital space,” says Foust. “FlavorPrint offers a personalized solution that our retailers have been overwhelmingly supportive of, and they are excited to work with us as we move forward beyond the beta test.”

And that’s great news for McCormick, which is actively seeking partnerships that will help extend the reach of FlavorPrint.

“We want to go wherever our consumers are looking for recipe recommendations,” says Foust.

The Payback
FlavorPrint allows McCormick to have one-on-one conversations with its consumers and develop relationships in ways that would have been impossible before. Foust says that the insights gained through these conversations allow McCormick to keep a finger on the pulse of flavor in real time — what are customers making and what’s trending with them on a personal level?  

These conversations and their resulting insights will provide fuel for McCormick’s development of future recipes and products that connect with what consumers are looking for, adding a layer of personalization to the process and creating a richer brand experience.

“We know consumers want to tell us more about flavor, their family members, dietary restrictions, etc., so we will continually look for ways to tailor the experience,” says Foust.

Beyond FlavorPrint, Foust’s team has since moved on to tackle other initiatives — from e-commerce and digital shopper marketing to partnering with start ups that have potential to disrupt the way that consumers are inspired, plan, shop and celebrate the foods they love.

“That being said, FlavorPrint will always be at the heart of what this team does — and how we build off it and continue to make it bigger and better,” closes Foust.

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That’s the Recipe

These three ingredients were vital to FlavorPrint’s successful development, launch and adoption:

• A newly formed, dedicated team allowed McCormick to be flexible
• and optimize in real time;
• Empowered champions  that encouraged big thinking and an “it’s okay to fail” attitude;
• Devoted resources and tremendous support from senior management throughout the project.