Podcast: How creating a ‘culture of failure’ fosters innovation
Startups are “really good at failing fast, learning and iterating,” says Christy Sink, head of research and development at SPC Global. “How can you bring that mentality into a big FMCG company?”
Speaking on the latest episode of Women Transforming Food, a monthly podcast from Inside FMCG and G100 that explores inspiring journeys of women shaping the future of the Australian food industry, Sink stressed the importance of encouraging a ‘culture of failure’ and how it can underpin innovation and success in product development.
“It’s really important to create an environment where people feel psychologically safe,” Sink told Amie Larter, CEO of Inside FMCG’s publisher Octomedia, and co-host Angeline Acharya, Asia Pacific chair of the Food Systems Innovation and Resilience Wing at G100 Mission Million.
“The other thing that’s important is creating a culture of failure and that’s much easier said than done. It’s something I’m always working on, and when you work in a big business where failing can cost millions of dollars, it’s sometimes easier said than done.
“I had a leader say to me once: ‘If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough, you’re not being innovative enough.’ So, trying to maintain that mentality is always really important.”
The key to such success – learned through her career in startups and with pioneering US grocery retailer Whole Foods Market – is to test concepts and ideas with consumers and learn as you go. It might cost $50,000 or $100,000 to test a product robustly, but that might save millions of dollars on the back end. So food makers should prepare to test ideas in a way they can fail and know it is “okay to feel comfortable failing”.
Part of Sink’s strategy to encourage innovation is to build safety within her team, creating connections and deep bonds.
“We find ways to try to interact with each other and problem-solve together. We have a weekly Monday meeting where a different person will bring a problem that they’re working through, and they might be able to brainstorm between the different sites around what’s worked, what hasn’t, trying this ingredient, or trying this process.”
Teams and individuals, she says, need to feel they are in an environment with psychological safety where they feel free to truly innovate and bring their wild and wacky ideas to the table.
A journey from North Carolina to Australia
Sink’s product development and innovation career began in the US and has included roles locally in Coles and SPC. Consistent throughout has been a deep commitment to positive change within the food system.
Her passion for food is rooted in her formative teenage years when she read a book called A Diet for a New America about how food choices can impact the environment, our health, and animal welfare. “It was really life-changing to think about how the things that I ate on an everyday basis could impact more than just me and had an impact sort of outside of the scope of just myself.” Growing up in North Carolina, in the deep south of the US, she considered the state’s rich history of agriculture and food as part of her DNA.
She studied environmental engineering, stopped eating meat, and soon realised that living in the US capital of hog production was probably not her appropriate career path. She found her calling in food science, recognising it merged two of her passions: a love of food and her science skills.
After graduating from university, Sink moved to San Diego to work for an ingredient company, learning how to build the foundations of product formulation, how ingredients can interact with one another and what it meant to build a food something from scratch. Later, she joined Whole Foods Market as a product developer working on its private label brands in Austin, Texas.
She worked across everything in the private label space, from peanut butter, bagged salads, and frozen ready meals to dog food, shampoo and baby nappies.
“Whole Foods Market is the largest natural and organic retailer in the US and a purpose-driven organisation. One of the critical things I took away from my time there was learning how to think about the consumer carefully. To craft every single element of a product to make the world a better place was a foundational learning experience for me.
“That’s something I’ve taken with me everywhere I’ve gone. That’s probably changed over my career from being an idealist and wanting to change the world to how I can turn that into commercial outcomes.
“That might mean creating better value on a product for consumers – making it more appealing – or finding ways to make something more sustainable while reducing costs.” Or, as she puts it, transforming grandiose ideas into something practical and business-led.
Driving change at Coles
Sink joined Coles in 2011, amid the retailer’s turnaround program after its purchase by Wesfarmers. “When I joined, Coles was probably 10 years behind the US, and it was a formative time of changing how things were done.
She applied her skills in working with teams to “clean up” private label products by introducing simpler ingredient declarations, reducing the use of artificial colours and flavours, introducing animal welfare certifications and sustainability initiatives that required recycled content and similar agendas – all things that have since become mainstream across the nation’s grocery industry.
“The whole FMCG industry in Australia has really lifted its game because of what’s happened across the private label stratosphere here,” she concludes.
More recently, from 2019 to 2022, she also witnessed a huge shift in consumer demand for plant-based foods.
“It was a global phenomenon. Everything had a plant-based claim on it. Even things that had always been made out of plants all of a sudden were plant-based. And VCs were piping funds into all these new startups, and the selection of plant-based meat alternatives and non-dairy beverages exploded. It was such a significant shift in such a short amount of time.”
While there has been a swing back driven by the cost-of-living crisis, principles like meat-free Mondays and adding more plants to the diet have endured, and there remains a demand for non-meat alternatives, albeit more subdued. Sink also sees an ongoing focus on waste reduction and circular economies in the future.
Offering an example of how a seemingly small change in product packaging or process can reduce waste, Sink relates SPC’s move to reduce the weight of its cans. When you are producing 100 million cans of tomatoes, baked beans, spaghetti and canned fruit annually, cutting just 1gm off the weight of a single can can save 10 tonnes of steel.
“These tiny little changes can really have a big impact. We often talk about innovation being a disruptive, game-changing thing that has to change the world. However, often it’s the little things that, when you add them up over millions of customers over decades of consumption, have quite a significant impact.”
- Listen to the podcast to hear Sink advocate cross-functional collaboration, how changes in the beverages category are a beacon for what’s happening in consumers’ minds, and the importance of calling on diverse perspectives to be truly innovative.
The post Podcast: How creating a ‘culture of failure’ fosters innovation appeared first on Inside FMCG.
February 19, 2025 at 06:34AM
https://ift.tt/Wcuk4ht
Robert Stockdill