How consumer insights are reshaping perceptions & driving innovation in frozen foods

[00:00] Steve Phillips: Welcome to Inside Insight, where marketing strategy meets consumer truth with your Host, Steve Phillips.

[00:09] Steve Phillips: 63% of Europeans believe frozen food is just as nutritious as fresh. But only 21% know it can actually be better for you, according to a report from Nomad Foods. With food prices rising across the world, consumers are under pressure to stretch budgets, reduce waste and still put high quality ingredients on the table. Frozen food is quietly helping meet all three.

[00:30] Steve Phillips: It keeps food stable longer, reduces household waste and gives people access to quality ingredients on their schedule. It's a category that's underestimated and that creates a real challenge for Insight teams. How do you close the gap between perception and reality and show what frozen food actually enables nutritionally, economically and practically? I'm Steve Phillips and today I'm joined by Alex Hardy, consumer insights and analytics director at Nomad Foods, home to brands like Bird's Eye, Findus and Igloo. Alex will share how his team leverages consumer insight and analytics across more than 25 markets, helping Nomad Foods rethink frozen foods value.

[00:59] Steve Phillips: We'll also discuss how data, insights and of course AI can support smarter, more affordable choices for consumers and for businesses. So Alex, welcome to Inside Insights.

[01:05] Alex Hardy: Great, thank you. Great to be here.

[01:07] Steve Phillips: So let's start with the research we cited at the top. It highlights that perception gap not just around nutrition, but around frozen food and what it enables for consumers. How are you thinking about frozen food's role in affordability, waste reduction and access to high quality ingredients and not just frozen in the strength of its role, but communicating that to consumers?

[01:25] Alex Hardy: Yeah, I mean it's, it's a, it's a great challenge to have coming from where we do with frozen foods. And it's such a complex environment out there at the moment with, with so many debates and information and misinformation that's going out there about food. I think for those who kind of maybe closer, you know, closer to frozen food and certainly certainly us at no majesty, we know there's a lot of benefits that consumers kind of play back around frozen food about the convenience, huge benefits around food waste and portionability and subsequently value for money as well.

[01:55] Alex Hardy: You know, it's not all done for great sustainability reasons, but also it saves you money as well if you're not throwing away a lot of food. So there's a lot, there's a lot that's good about frozen food that people know about and there's a lot that's good about frozen food that people don't necessarily know about or have some misconceptions about. So food that's frozen, you know, like, like peas that are the, that are frozen, you know, within. Within a couple of hours of, of being picked, lock in the nutrition and the freshness, in the way that fresh vegetables start to degrade, you know, the, the moment you pick them. So those kind of things are known by less people.

[02:28] Alex Hardy: And I think that's part of our job, you know, here, here is to kind of highlight where, where there's good stuff, you know, whether it's our vegetables, whether it's fish or products like that that actually, you know, in many ways are better, better frozen because they lock those kind of things in. So yeah, it's a challenge challenge for us in kind of knowing, knowing the truth is, is not always out there with some of those, some of those misconceptions, but, but also kind of playing on the stuff that people do know about and love about Frozen.

[02:57] Steve Phillips: It's an interesting challenge, obviously, because you're managing multiple brands, but within a sort of. Within different areas from fish to vegetables. But also it's in a category which is frozen compared to a category which is non frozen. So how much of your time do you think about the brands? How much of the time are you thinking about promoting frozen as a category and does it vary by brand or category within Frozen?

[03:18] Alex Hardy: Yeah, it does. I mean, I mean, again, we think about it at lots of different levels. I think in many of our markets we're the biggest branded player in frozen and often our biggest competitors will be private label, which will be amalgamation of different retailers within there.

[03:33] Alex Hardy: So often we would want to play a sort of category leading role as a leader branded player in a lot of our markets. And I think increasingly wanting to have a voice in food, not just frozen food, but being part of the debate around health and nutrition and what people are eating and how people are getting good health through their food. So I think that's something that we're doing more and more Nomad as a company, although the brands have been around quite some time. Nomad as a company is only 10 years old, so it's still relatively young. And so there's a lot more to do on that in terms of sort of getting our voice out there and then, yeah, we spend time thinking about the category and we spend time thinking about our brands and making sure that they're as well loved as they always have been and how we find new opportunities within our portfolios for people to stick with them through their different life stages and bring in different products and innovations and renovations along the way as well.

[04:17] Steve Phillips: Yeah, and I was thinking about, you're looking across countries and categories and that obviously the frozen versus non frozen, you operate in more than 25 markets, each with its own cost of living reality. And food culture. How do you lead insights of scale with that level of sort of complexity metrics within matrix? Can you. And do you try and get a consistent narrative across those brands, cultures around frozen, or do you just make it very, very local and brand specific?

[04:42] Alex Hardy: I mean, it's a bit of a balance. I mean, food, food is, food in Europe is really complicated because you can just travel down the road and you can enter into such a different food culture. So although, you know, Nomad's journey has been a lot of like M and A and acquisition and over the years as different sort of brands have come in and it's so built up into, into the business it is today. But even, you know, even with our business today, we, we have a, for example, a regional cluster which includes France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Now France and the Netherlands couldn't be perhaps more different as a, you know, if, if you look at kind of the diet and the importance of food and the role of food in culture.

[05:17] Alex Hardy: So there are incredible differences, you know, just by traveling a couple of hours up the road in, in Europe. But that doesn't mean to say that we end up with 25 different, totally different businesses either because there are some commonalities and people eat fish and chicken and veg and whatever it might be in different forms and in different ways. And I think sometimes we also need to recognize that a lot of the kind of meal occasions that people will eat during a typical week have a lot of similarities. There'll be, there'll be busy parents who need to get something, you know, quickly for their kids before they go off to play football or dance or whatever it might be. And that happens in every country across Europe.

[05:52] Alex Hardy: And you know, often a lot, you know, big benefit that people do know about frozen is how convenient it is as well that you can quickly knock up something that's pretty, you know, pretty filling and nutritious as well. So there are some commonalities, some innovations that we're trying to scale across markets and some that you say actually that is really just about that market where they've got a particular need, particular occasion or a particular product, you know, range of products that they're, that they're really into there that just don't, they just don't travel. So it's, it's the complexity of working in food I've worked in other categories like personal care and laundry and I must say the differences there are minuscule compared to, compared to the complexity of food.

[06:27] Steve Phillips: Yeah, well, I mean also within food you're working across multiple food subcategories which obviously, and some, sometimes it might be an, you know, a base ingredient like a pea, but sometimes it's going to be the key part of the meal like the fish. So I can see across those brands. How do you try and work across brands having a consistent category message about frozen? I mean this is again, this is the type of issue that, it's the same type of issue that people like Unilever or Proctor Gamble faces can. Can. Is there something at a company level that suggests quality that that creates a message or, or do you, you really stick to the, the brand itself and just maximizing the salience of that?

[06:59] Alex Hardy: Yeah, I mean, you know, at a high level, you know, we would be about making meal times better and often kind of better for, you know, better better in terms of great taste and great and great nutrition within there as well.

[07:10] Alex Hardy: And you know, we spend a lot of time thinking about what goes into the products we sell to make them as good for people as they can be. And we also, although we have kind of different brand names in different countries, we often speak in the same voice about our master brand. Whether it's Bird's Eye in the UK or Iglo in Germany, we would still be kind of broad, broadly in the same position with the same kind of messaging that we have there as well. So some of our, you know, some of our ads travel well. Some of them may be a little bit more local if there's a bit more, bit more nuance there.

[07:38] Alex Hardy: But we often speak in the same voice which is all about, you know, like yeah, as they making meal times better through great taste and great nutrition.

[07:46] Steve Phillips: Yeah. And I like the point about you know, activities and the stresses and strains that parents go are under and you know, whether it's the UK or front Belgium or, or, or, or Zimbabwe, it's going to be the same types of pressures we're all facing though. So that, that makes perfect sense. Yeah. And when you've got this complex structure, how, how do you think about running it from an insights perspective? So are you structured by country, by brand? How do you think about trying to, you know, maximize the, the power of the local insight that you have for that wonderful brand that is working really well in the market? But also think about, you know, across regions and across countries trying to leverage the size of the organization and the capabilities and skills that you have.

[08:23] Alex Hardy: Yeah, well, I mean, as an insight team, we reflect the organization of the company.

[08:26] Alex Hardy: So we, we've got, you know, a good proportion of our team based here in the UK in the head office who run a lot of the kind of big central projects and the kind of, you know, this, the way we do things and the, you know, the partners we work with and some of the bigger studies like demand spaces or brand tracking or, you know, market mix modeling program, those kind of things that we do centrally. But equally we have people based in our regional clusters. So spread across, we're just based in, you know, just in Europe, but we have people in all corners of Europe in my team that are there as kind of local regional cluster insight managers. So they're there to both take from the center and make sure it lands well in their markets, but also to feed back to the, to the center to reflect what's going on in their cluster and what the kind of local needs are or what might be things that we need to take into account when we're designing kind of broader programs. So an example right now is, you know, we're doing a big sort of project around demand spaces and how we understand how, how people eat and therefore how we, how we can kind of best serve them.

[09:23] Alex Hardy: Whilst we're running it centrally, we can't do it without local input to make sure that we've got the nuance there or the occasions that they have that we don't have in the UK and therefore might miss. So it's kind of the sweet spot is getting both of those feeding into the right way to make sure that it's not sitting here in an ivory tower throwing stuff out and saying just pick it up and use it. And them saying, well, it doesn't really make sense.

[09:47] Alex Hardy: But equally, we're not doing well. We have six regional clusters, but we're not doing six things in six different ways and can't speak in a common language. So it's important we get that balance right. I think from an organizational point of view, we're one team. So everybody reports into one place in the Insights team, which is great because then we're not fragmented and sort of going off in different ways.

[10:06] Alex Hardy: So I think it's been working well in that way. But it works best when we have both of those working in harmony.

[10:11] Steve Phillips: Thinking about, I'm fascinated by the demand spaces, particularly on the occasions, how similar are they across countries, people, markets and how much they differ. I mean, if you give us an example. It'd be amazing. But whatever you can.

[10:25] Alex Hardy: Well, I'll give you a couple of examples. So we're sort of in the midst of a whole new refresh. But if I think about kind of where we were, we had three big demand spaces that were common in every market that we did the. Well, in fact, we had more, but we had three that we prioritized that were common across every market we did work in.

[10:43] Alex Hardy: One was the one I mentioned earlier. You know, I need something to keep the family happy and kind of get something out there quick. We had one which is probably a bit more of a sort of weekend treat night. You know, I'm less worried about. I'm less worried about kind of giving them loads of vegetables and nutrition, you know, sharing a pizza as a family, watching their favorite TV show, that kind of occasion.

[11:01] Alex Hardy: And then one, one which probably would be a bit more health centric, which is about, you know, this is my moment to get vegetables and salad and things and fish and, you know, goodness into my, into my kids and my family. And those three, you know, what people gave them would be different in Italy to what it would be in Sweden or where I shopped or how much I spent or those things would be different. But the reality of, you know, those occasions just popped up every, everywhere really with differing importance. But there's a commonality and there's one or two things that pop up and say, okay, that's really unique to France. No one else has that.

[11:34] Alex Hardy: We can add that, that's fine. But most of the time there is commonality.

[11:39] Steve Phillips: Now, you've described Nomad Foods as needing the agility of a challenger brand in a category filled with long established players. How does that influence the way you manage the team, the way you work on projects, the type of, you know, the way you run. You run the Insight team.

[11:56] Alex Hardy: I've been at Nomad a coup about two and a half years or so, and as I said earlier, it's quite a young company. And a lot of the people that have joined Nomad in that time have come from different places and brought ideas or ways of doing things. And it's very much a. A company where someone has a good idea, you can adopt it relatively quickly. And I think that's probably where, where it may fit fits as a sort of a sort of challenger company.

[12:22] Alex Hardy: It's not a big sort of, you know, long established giant, multinational giant where they've been doing the same thing for 30 years. And, you know, it's kind of, that's how we do things around here. I think there's a bit more. Bit more flex and fluid fluidity in Nomad, and I think that that's sort of how we've operated a bit where something's not working. We've said it's not working.

[12:41] Alex Hardy: Let's work out what we do differently. And, and I, and I've been like, it's a thing I've loved about, about being here is you. You can, you can change things to make them better relatively quickly. You know, having worked in big, big companies before, you, you kind of needed thousands of people to be moving in the same direction, to make a small shift here. Here it can be a little bit more dynamic.

[13:07] Alex Hardy: Well, a lot more dynamic, actually. So, so I think that that's kind of sort of how we, how we've operated a little. A little bit. And I think, you know, we've either introduced things that maybe weren't, you know, weren't in operation before or change. Or changed how we've done things kind of relatively quickly, not, not trying to change them every year so that people don't really know where they are.

[13:24] Alex Hardy: But it's just, how do we keep sort of raising the, raising the bar in certain areas so that we sort of get to get something that works for a company like, like, you know, Nomad in the scale that we are?

[13:33] Steve Phillips: It's such an interesting challenge as a, as a relatively young company, but with incredible brands that are, you know, I don't know, 50, 100 years old, I suspect in some of the cases. And, and across markets and keeping track of all these things must be quite difficult. Of all the things that are going on, all of these matrices of, of new company, new processes, changing processes being in 25 countries.

[13:54] Alex Hardy: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a, it's. There is complexity, for sure, and, you know, fragmentation across markets and across, across different product segments that we operate in there. I think, I think that, yeah, the challenge is how do we, how do we simplify some of the stuff that we do? Because I think also the nature of the way the company has grown up has created its own complexities with, you know, so we've ended up with. With, you know, needs around how we do things like harmonizing our data and making it look the same and talk to each other and things like that, which in the speed of kind of the company sort of coming together, some things just kind of didn't, you know, didn't happen, or they just kind of. The moment was missed a little bit.

[14:41] Alex Hardy: So there's some things we're just trying to sort of iron out and make life a little bit simpler moving forward. So yeah, there's that and there's also kind of like the what's the appetite for new stuff without having enough but not overwhelming marketing colleagues with 10 different frameworks of looking at things. And I think that's a serious challenge that we have, is that we've got different strategic models, we've got different consumer models, we've got different ways of looking at trends and foresights. And it's like, do you bring them together? And if so, how do you do that?

[15:07] Alex Hardy: And I think that's again, one of the challenges we're looking at with this, with this Demand Spaces project is how can we make it speak to some of the other stuff better? Because at the moment they're kind of isolated, good studies in themselves, but they're quite isolated and that's interesting.

[15:21] Steve Phillips: And of course AI is going to be a help in sorting through some of these disparate data sources, these multiple markets, simplification, democratization of insight. AI I know has become a practical tool for your team, from internal data modeling and forecasting to testing incremental pack designs and changes at a fraction of the traditional research costs. Talk me through how AI expanded, what's possible for your team, how you started and thought about introducing it as a capability, concerns you might have had, but also where you think that human judgment, how it stays at the center of it and doesn't get overwhelmed.

[15:56] Alex Hardy: Yeah, I've had, I would say honestly I've had quite a mixed experience with experimenting with AI so far. So I think as a company we've been definitely quite cautious in terms of making sure that what we're doing is not going to create issues that we didn't want in terms of information security. And some of the big high profile cases that we've seen have kind of bear that out really. So I think it's absolutely the right thing to do. What we've done is trial things to see whether A, whether they're useful and B, what they offered versus what we did already.

[16:25] Alex Hardy: So you mentioned a couple there around pack testing. We've tried AI LED qual and various other kind of methods along the way and some other things that kind of tried and were like pat really was not what it was what I expected and didn't meet. You know, we were looking at tools and I'm sure there's kind of tons out there, but tools that might be able to take a couple of presentations and kind of turn them into like a sort of three minute video that kind of brought that to life. And perhaps it was the choice that we made, but it's like the ones that we looked at, it was like they don't really do what we want them to do and kind of, you know, probably back to the drawing board a little bit there. So I would say probably a bit, probably 50, 50 success rate really in terms of like some things have been really great and saved time and you know, did stuff that.

[17:08] Alex Hardy: Did stuff that we just either wouldn't have done or would have had to, you know, spend a lot of time and money doing before and then other things where perhaps my, you know, my expectations are way higher than what is possible at the moment as well. So yeah, I think we're still trialing. I think my, you know, my approach really has been don't start with I need to do AI, but start with I've got a problem or I've got something that I can't, I can't do or I can't afford or I haven't got time for like is there a better solution out there? But the, you know, the, the volume of different agencies and approaches that are out there is just like, it can be a little bit overwhelming I think in terms of just how. Well, how, how do you cut through and kind of say well what, what's the thing that I really want and need, which is a challenge.

[17:48] Alex Hardy: I think all of us are just trying to sort of cope with that a little bit because everybody's got a tool, everybody's got an approach, so trying to work out where we go next. But definitely it's always kind of problem first rather than AI, I need AI. Where can I put.

[18:02] Steve Phillips: Feels like companies, a lot of organizations are going through that sort of experimental phase where you try trying lots of different things and then perhaps some are beginning to say, well that definitely doesn't work, that doesn't work right now. You know, maybe it'll work some other. Like your example of the presentations I think is a great example. Probably, probably the models aren't ready for two yet, but maybe in six months time. And then some things where you go, yep, that's brilliant, let's scale it.

[18:27] Steve Phillips: How are you still doing lots of experiments here and there. Are you starting to sort of package and scale approaches?

[18:33] Alex Hardy: I think we're still experimenting to be honest. I think there are some things in, you know, I'm thinking from an IDASight's point of view there's, I would say pretty much every agency we work with is using AI to do things quicker and better and, you know, save time almost in the back end. And we don't necessarily see that day to day.

[18:54] Alex Hardy: So I think we're using it in the collective sense way more than. Way more than we would probably think. But we're still trialing, still trying to work through where will we get the value and we're not and making sure that we're, I guess, eyes wide open to some of the pitfalls and challenges of using it. Because it can feel a little bit like this is too good to be true. Right.

[19:13] Alex Hardy: Where's the catch? And they're all pretty much always is a catch. There might be some exceptions, but I think we're just trying to work out, well, what, yeah. What would be the downsides of using this to see, like to make sure we're going in kind of with our eyes wide open with some of these things. But I would say, yeah, we're still very much in experimentation mode still.

[19:32] Steve Phillips: And it's really into. Obviously AI is helping us get more insight, get it faster, get it cheaper, get it more democratized, more available. How is it changing the way you work with your marketing colleagues so suddenly, you know, they have more access to data, they have access to more insight that, that must change the dynamic. You're enabling it some of the time sometimes they might be going off and trying to do their own work. How do you manage that, that interaction to ensure that the insight you do have is genuinely creating change for brands and improvements for the company?

[20:00] Alex Hardy: Yeah, it's a really good question. And I think where, where it's. Where it works well and where it has worked best is, is getting a good blend of the two, where you can cut out some of the manual labor and the time that we'd be spending kind of finding stuff and churning data and trying to get to that and spend more time on what does this mean? Where are the gaps? How do we go fill them?

[20:19] Alex Hardy: So I think it's definitely, although I say we've had a probably 50, 50 success rate with tools, I think, you know, it's overwhelmingly a positive in terms of kind of how we've, how we've sort of been able to benefit from it in terms of time, in terms of money, in terms of enabling us to do stuff that we just couldn't do before, you know, So I think, yeah, I would say, I would hope, I'd hope. I wouldn't say we're perfectly there yet, but I'd hope it just means that we have a lot more time to think about what we do and what the implications are and what the actions are rather than necessarily, you know, 80% of the time getting to that point before you could have a first discussion.

[20:51] Steve Phillips: And is it changing the way you work with marketing? Are you moving away from, you know, from big presentation to bite sized insights regularly fed through with more time to think about things, you becoming more of a strategic partner? How does that relationship between marketing and insight evolve?

[21:08] Alex Hardy: I think in some cases that is the case. So I think, I think AI would certainly have helped this, but there's, there's some projects where doing some work and getting some results on a dashboard is enough to enable you to move, move on. And that is, you know, a lot of that has kind of been automated in the background. I think that, you know, the days of, or we need to put two hours in for a face to face debrief and go, you know, go through the slides. I think, you know, they're, they're kind of in most cases long gone.

[21:33] Alex Hardy: I think there will always be exceptions for those kind of things where you really do want people in a room talking about stuff. But a lot of the time if we're doing some ad screening or concept screening or something like that, we don't necessarily need to go through all of the depth here. We've got enough here to be able to move on. So I think that certainly changed and made things, I guess, kind of quicker and a little bit lighter than where we were before.

[21:56] Alex Hardy: Yeah, I think, you know, that's, I'd say that's probably, probably kind of how it's changing a little bit. And it's also probably just enabling us to say, well, you know, in some cases let's treat AI like someone else in the room that can maybe do, you know, keep on working away on something and that helps, you know, to again, churn through lots of information or come up with, you know, either reinforce some thinking or maybe to come up with some different thinking or different ideas that might be there as well. So again, you know, getting the balance between relying on it and trusting the information that comes back, but maybe perhaps using a bit more as a sort of prompt.

[22:27] Steve Phillips: Brilliant. We're going to go on to our lightning round. Okay, in a minute. I just have a question, personal question before we go. You, you're in a category and in a company where you must be forced to go to 25 different countries across Europe and try new foods. How difficult is that?

[22:44] Alex Hardy: Oh, it's awful, it's awful. I mean, it's, it's one of the reasons I, and probably many people in Nomad work for Nomad is because we love food, so love eating it, cooking it, reads, you know, reading about it, talking about it. So, yeah, I, I mean, it's a highlight for me when, when we, when we sort of travel to other markets and things like that, we, we have chefs in each of the sort of offices as well. So often when we turn up, there'll be, we'll do a tasting of the sort of local products there and, and it's always an absolute treat. So, you know, whether we're in Italy or Germany or France or wherever it might be, it's always absolute treat.

[23:19] Alex Hardy: Oh, brilliant. Very lucky, very lucky.

[23:23] Steve Phillips: Okay, now our lightning round. Are you ready?

[23:26] Alex Hardy: Okay. Yes. Okay.

[23:28] Steve Phillips: Right, firstly, what's one insight that most changed how Nomad foods thinks about frozen food's role in everyday life?

[23:35] Alex Hardy: I mean, I think, I think actually maybe something you even started with was about kind of how people perceive frozen and this stuff that people know that is true. And there's stuff people believe that may well be true to them, but there's this bit in the middle which is this stuff that believe. Stuff that people believe to be true that is actually a misconception. So the thing that chilled food is always better than frozen food is just in many cases just simply not true. But it's a belief that many people have. And I think that that's an insight that kind of drives us to try and tell people and educate people and hopefully change their mind around that over time. I think that's a, it's a fundamental one at the heart of frozen food.

[24:11] Steve Phillips: Really great. And what's one lesson you've learned? Leading insights in a company that needs to stay agile despite your scale?

[24:19] Alex Hardy: I think having a clear, you know, a clear direction of where we want to be as a team and making sure that there's a foundation of really strong strategic understanding. So whether it's around, keep on referring back to the Demand Spaces project, but, you know, for that that is how people eat and how people think about food, which is fundamental and having a view on where, where, where food is going. So there's so many debates at the moment about GLP1 and ultra processed food and HFSS and, you know, food labeling and nutrition monitoring and that it goes on and on and on. So understanding kind of how food potentially would change and people's relationship with it I think is absolutely fundamental.

[24:54] Alex Hardy: To be on the front foot and kind of be one step ahead or at least adaptive to where Things are going. I think that's kind of really critical for us.

[25:03] Steve Phillips: That makes perfect sense. And if you could keep just three types of research in your toolkit, what would they be?

[25:09] Alex Hardy: Well, so I can't have Qualcomm and Data then, can I?

[25:12] Steve Phillips: That's quite big, isn't it?

[25:13] Alex Hardy: Yeah, that is quite big. Yeah, yeah, it's quite big. Um, three, three tools within it. I, I would, I would say one of, one of those kind of big strategic understanding frameworks, like you know, like a demand space type type thing.

[25:23] Alex Hardy: I think with that you have a good fundamental understanding of how, how people eat. So I, I'd, I would definitely, definitely have that as my sort of number. One surely on the ground ethnography.

[25:33] Steve Phillips: Yeah. So that you can make sure you're trying and seeing what people are eating.

[25:37] Alex Hardy: Oh I see. So I can actually. Yeah, that would go down well. But I mean, yeah, on a serious note, I think literally one to one discussions, you know, doing in a company shop with a consumer or an in home interview or you know, those kind of things, you get to see what's really going on, you know, beyond the PowerPoint and the, you know, the pages of a document. So I definitely keep that one.

[25:56] Steve Phillips: Creating genuine empathy. I think it's so, so powerful within as a, as a brand leader. You have to understand your consumer and spending time with them is.

[26:05] Alex Hardy: Yeah, yeah. One of the best ways of doing it. Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely A third one. I probably have to go for a bit of data I reckon so some good kind of shopper panel data I think is, is one that I love to get into. So we, if we understand what people are eating, we get the Qual from the 1 to ones and then, and then the panel data should just give an idea of like things like penetration, repeat those, you know, core metrics but understand exactly scale of what's going on and then behavior, actual behavior I think is critical.

[26:33] Steve Phillips: That makes perfect sense. Next, what's one way AI has genuinely improved your team's work? Not just spread it up, but just genuinely improved.

[26:42] Alex Hardy: I mean the speed is definitely a big benefit I think in terms of improving. I think it's helped provide a critical, maybe like a critical voice where I think the danger is if we're going into like innovation and idea generation and things like that, it could often be the same people coming up in a room with similar ideas and actually kind of feeding into AI engines to say look, here's everything we know. What would you think would come from that? I think it's come obviously they had the speed benefit, but coming up with things, it was like, not sure I would have come up with that myself there. And I think using it as a creative tool rather than a reference tool, I think a creative tool has probably been a good sort of sounding board almost to say, are we missing something here?

[27:19] Steve Phillips: Great. And then finally, you lead a big disparate insights team and have had the chance to mold it in a way because Nomad is such a new company in so many ways. You've had the chance to mold it and make sure it working. It is working really well with marketing. What's one piece of advice you would give other insight leaders about maintaining and improving that relationship between insight and marketing?

[27:39] Alex Hardy: Yeah, I mean, it's critical we work with people across the company, but marketing are the ones that we're, you know, most closely associated with. And it just comes. I mean, God, it comes down to the people, really. Right.

[27:51] Alex Hardy: You know, they're developing strong partnerships with people, with their stakeholders. So the marketing directors in the center and the marketing directors in our, our markets as well, making sure they're really kind of tight with them and understanding what the big priorities there. It comes down to having having this is really hard lesson, isn't it? But it's just having really good people, really good team relationships. It's about building relationships.

[28:13] Alex Hardy: You know, they're all. They're all talented in their own way and they're all, you know, got great people working on, you know, whether it's in the data side, whether it's in innovation, whether it's in brand or whether it's, you know, the local cluster roles there. They're all, they're all kind of really talented people. But, you know, the key is having great relationships.

[28:28] Steve Phillips: That's a brilliant place to finish. So. Okay, that wraps up this episode of Inside Insights podcast. Thanks to Alex Harding, consumer insight and analytics director at Nomad Foods, for joining us. If you'd like to contact Alex, you can find his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or at insideinsightspod.com or you can visit his company website at nomadsfoods.com. Thank you again, Alex. That was really interesting.

[28:49] Alex Hardy: We much appreciate your time. Thank you very much.