A Recipe for Growth

As one of Europe’s leading high-quality bakeries, serving retailers, wholesalers, and the foodservice industry, Lantmännen Unibake knows its market intimately. Its commercial and innovation teams had already developed a clear view of where the market was heading, grounded in a deep understanding of consumer behaviour, operator needs, and the most promising spaces for growth. The challenge was to translate these insights into a more concrete foundation for future portfolio decisions and sustainable long-term growth. To enable this next step, we partnered closely to explore the market in greater depth and shape a program that could turn ambition into strategic direction.

The first phase delivered a detailed mapping of the Dutch and Belgian bakery markets across bread, fast food, savouries, and viennoiserie, covering category performance, competitive dynamics, and the growth spaces where consumer demand was shifting. The outcome was a clear overview of key product clusters per category that would allow for market share growth.

The second phase focused on translating this strategic foundation into innovation platforms. Trend research identified emerging product opportunities at channel level and explored the underlying human needs shaping these shifts. Working closely with the category leads, Qindle translated these insights into a set of innovation platforms for each category, defining the most compelling opportunities for future product development and enabling commercial, marketing, and R&D teams to build a concrete roadmap that turns opportunity into action.

Over the years, we have seen that workshops are a highly effective way to give strategic direction to innovation pipelines. Their real value lies in connecting perspectives. By bringing together stakeholders from different functions and disciplines around shared customer insights and market evidence, these sessions generate ideas, connections, and strategic opportunities that create real business value.

The output of our collaboration is tangible and actionable: market opportunity reports, trend intelligence, and prioritized innovation platforms that inform product roadmaps, guide investment decisions, and shape future growth initiatives.