Nothing Says “I Love You” Like a Heart-shaped Donut
The heart-shaped donuts Baker & Baker launched for Valentine’s in 2023 are a work of love. Not only because they are meant to help people express their feelings, but also because making an irregular-shaped donut involves extensive testing and attention to detail.
Jonathan Adams, UK R&D Director at Baker & Baker, loves food and discovering what’s on people’s mind when it comes to food trends. Ever since he became the head of research and development at the company, in 2021, he made it part of everyone’s job to go out a couple times a month and taste bakery products and not only, to observe what people are excited about, and to bring back ideas about what’s hot out there. They have a WhatsApp group where they constantly share what they discovered, on the spot. That, he believes, is a great way of finding ideas and staying relevant.
But an R&D process takes a lot more than a good idea, however well-documented it is. And a recently launched product, a heart-shaped donut Baker & Baker put on the market in February 2023, is a great example of how much effort goes into making a successful launch. The product was developed at the Delmenhorst factory in Germany, with contributions from all the R&D teams. The whole process, from idea to product-on-the-shelf, took 12 months.
The first step was to convene the product approval group (PAG). “It’s a group of different people from different parts of business,” explains Adams. “I’m one of the people in there, from an R&D point of view. We have somebody from category marketing. We have a financial person. We have someone from the supply chain, the factory side, the production side. We’ll look at all the different parts of that product. Is the volume good enough? Will we make enough money for it to be worthwhile doing? Is there CapEx (capital expenditure) required? Do we need new equipment? Are there new ingredients required? What’s the shelf life? How long have we got from the brief landing to when we need to launch it? Is that enough time? Lots of questions come up at that very first stage. We really dig deep into it and make sure that it’s the right product that we should be launching.”
The process is even more complex if they’re going to make something for their own brand, Baker & Baker. For that, they require a lot more insight from their marketing category team. Sometimes they work with external companies to test a product.
“With the heart-shaped donut in particular, we did quite a bit of research first to make sure that the investment we were going to make would pay off”, says Adams. “And when that came back, we were saying, yes, this could be a really good idea. Then we moved forward and we started to look at, okay, how do we make this work in the factory. And we got the right people involved from the factory, from R&D, from our processing team. And we started to build a plan of how we can make it work.”
The next stage was to make the samples in the test kitchen. That meant testing for taste, but also building a cost behind that, to make sure that it was viable. The cost was then shared with the sales team, who had to make sure they would be able to sell it for that price and the company would make a return on the product.
You can read the rest of this article in the July-August issue of European Baker & Biscuit, which you can access by clicking here.