Naturelly: Optimising products to success

Naturelly is a challenger brand in the healthy kids snacks category. Their mission was to make a new snack product for children that is both healthy and fun. They came up with a range of Naturelly Jelly Juice, which is made from a gelatine-free jelly called gellan gum. With only 36 kcal and 7g of naturally occurring sugars, Dean and Joanne were onto a winner. The pouches also mean a mess-free experience for both parents and children.

Recently voted Best Children’s Snack in Britain, Naturelly comes in five flavours and can be found in Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Boots, and Holland & Barrett. They used Vypr to help with their product development, instrumental in getting them listed in Waitrose, which went live in October 2018.

How Vypr helped

Vypr determined an appropriate audience split for testing of parents with children under twelve years old.

These respondents were targeted with a series of Vypr’s unique “steers” to identify what was really important to parents when choosing a snack and how Naturelly could optimize their existing product to maximise sales.

How they used Vypr

• Split testing for design of packaging
• Competitor testing: understanding how Naturelly would fare against other SKUs on shelf at different price points
• Consumer research: discovering attitudes towards product claims such as Vitamin C content or natural ingredients

With Vypr data, they showed Waitrose that many people who currently buy a leading competitor would buy Naturelly. They presented data for the switchers and also how many who don’t currently buy the leading jelly provider would buy Naturelly if it were available.

One of the steers they asked was: “Would you buy this product in this format for yourself?” when testing a natural energy gel for adults. They concluded that adults who are interested in natural gel-like products are likely to buy a similar product for children.

Successful outcomes

Thanks to the work from Vypr, they have now launched Naturelly Juicy Jelly in Waitrose stores. Each pot is made with only 5% fruit sugar, contains only 20 kcal, and is made from organic fruit juice.

Naturelly used Vypr at several stages of their NPD process: for testing product messaging, optimizing packaging design, and for pricing strategy. The quantitative data generated from real-time responses from consumers made a convincing case to Waitrose for listing the product range.