Name: Here’s How ConAgra Is Planning to Go Healthy
Uploaded: 2017-01-30
Duration: 4 min 19 s
Description: According to CEO Sean Connolly

Sean I see that you've been making a lot of changes at Conagra in just the two years you've became CEO. Splitting the company, changing the company name, moving the headquarters. Why are you doing all this? Because we wanna win. It's been a busy couple of years. We were not competitive in the marketplace. We had too many things competing for our attention, but we've become a focused pure play branded company largely focused in North America. And it's still early days, but we're well on our way and we're starting to win in the marketplace again, we're winning in the workplace. We're winning in our communities. We've got momentum and it feels good. So, what's next on your to- do list? For us, what's next is innovation and growth. We've done a great job of redesigning our company to be a brand at pure play. We are now in the process of rebuilding our innovation funnel. Later this spring, early summer, we'll be launching some of our new innovations in the marketplace. You'll see them next year. We're tremendously excited about them. But innovation is one of these things that builds after you get your team in place and we feel really good about what's coming this year in 2017. What do you mean by innovation in the food industry? Well we've got legacy brands that have been around a long time, and they're iconic brands, but you always have to refresh your brands to be contemporary and relevent for a whole new generation. Some of our brands had gotten stale over the years, we are in the midst of refreshing them, bringing in what we call modern food attributes, making them exciting again, and you're gonna see some of that stuff hit the marketplace later this year. Well, given that consumers are so focused now on organic fresh food. No artificial coloring, no preservatives. How do you decide which brands to keep and which ones to let go? We prioritize them based on which ones offer the greatest top line and bottom line opportunity. And that's where we put our energy. And a lot of what we're doing is what you just described, bringing in modern food attributes. Clean label, more natural, more organic, no growth hormones, things like that. Global flavors, bold flavors, modern packaging. These are things we're doing to our top priority brands where we get an outsized return, and we like what we see. Mm- hm, well as you say about clean labels, everybody's reading those nutrition labels a lot more carefully. I mean, how do you handle Some of your very well known brands, let's say like Chef Boyardee, that have ingredients that are not considered so healthy. Well, we have made a lot of our products more and more healthy. And not just more healthy. What the consumer would call more authentic. If you look at Reddiwip as an example, [ COUGH ] it is one of our iconic brands, the number one whipped topping in the country. We've always been made of real cream, but now we have no rBST in the product, which is no growth hormone, which is a modern food attribute that people want. They want that reassurance that it's a clean label, quality product, not only with the flavor they want, but without the things that they don't want. You have more than 50 brands, and a lot of them are ver famous company brands, like you said, Redi Wip, Slim Jim. Swiss miss there's so many of them. But they are identified with maybe not having healthy ingredients, how do you change that perception and reality. Well it's an important part of our innovation agenda. Even if you look at the word healthy it has evolved materially over the last 30 years. We have a brand that was founded by our Old CEO in the 1980s, Mike Harper, called Healthy Choice. Healthy Choice meant something different in 1988 than it means today. Health has evolved. It's all about the presence of positive food attributes, not just the absence of negative. So evolving our brands is an important part of what we do. If you look at a brand like Pam as an example, we know there are some consumers out there that don't want aerosol So we're relaunching a new PAM line, that is a pump spray with no aerosol. So you're just meeting consumers needs by evolving your business model. What feedback have you been getting from consumers on all these changes. Well it's early days, but so far we like what we see and you know we've got more and more of these more natural and healthy and wellness benefits coming into our portfolio. And our 800 line is ringing off the hook with positive feedback. There are so many big food companies that are changing the ingredients and changing the recipes in their food. Do you have a role model out there that you're emulating that's getting it right? Well, ironically, it wouldn't be the big food companies, it would be the small entrepreneurs. These are people who are externally focused and all of their attention is on the consumer. Not on internal corporate office politics and Powerpoint presentations and meetings. Importantly their putting their energy studying our consumer and they're coming up with novel ideas. We need to do more of that as big food companies. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]