With the holiday season in full swing, it’s a great time to look beyond our borders for some fmcg inspiration. The UK has a well-deserved reputation as a world leader in grocery retail, but that isn’t to say we can’t learn a thing or two from other countries when it comes to NPD. Plus, there is something quite fun about running around a foreign supermarket and taking a look at all the strange and not-so-strange food products (or perhaps that’s just me and I need to think of some more exciting holiday activities).

I was reminded of this recently when I went to Denmark as part of press trip organised by Arla, which involved some time at the Arla Strategic Innovation Centre.

In between the quirky (a blueberry-flavoured soft cheese from Germany, for example) and the very country-specific (a Danish buttermilk drink that comes with little biscuits to be thrown into the drink), there were a couple of dairy product ideas that especially resonated with me.

I really liked a flavoured butter/vegetable oil spread sold under Arla’s Scandinavian Kærgården brand, which comes in garlic and Italian herb variants. What sparked my interest wasn’t so much the product itself (although nice, flavoured butters and spreads are hardly new to the UK), but the way the marketing suggests it could be used as a topping or finishing butter to round off dishes. Given household penetration of butters and spreads is incredibly high and consumption is notoriously difficult to expand, suggesting new ways for consumers to use BSM products is key to category growth. There are no current plans to bring something similar to the UK, but in light of Lurpak’s cooking-focused marketing, I wonder if the idea of using specialist flavoured butters to round off a dish is something Arla will be looking to make more of.

There certainly appeared to be some appetite within the Arla team to bring another of their specialist milks to the UK. The recently launched WingCo high-protein milkshake was modelled on a similar drink sold under Arla’s Matilde brand in Denmark, and a high-protein and high-fat milk it sells under the name Protin in Scandinavia could also be a candidate for coming to this country.

High-protein and high-fat sounds at odds with current UK consumption trends and health messages, but the drink is targeted primarily at elderly consumers who suffer from reduced appetite and therefore struggle to take in the calories they need. Such high-energy drinks are already widely used in hospitals and available through chemists, but consumers can’t typically buy them as part of their usual supermarket shop – the idea behind the Protin brand is to make such products more part of the mainstream and less medicine-like.

In Scandinavia, Protin is now being extended from flavoured milk drink to desserts, and Arla says it is considering its potential for the UK, although no decision has been made. Farther afield, Arla is working on a tofu-type product made from milk instead of soya for the Chinese market, which it expects to launch some time in 2015 – an interesting way for a European dairy company to try to encourage dairy consumption in emerging markets without expecting everyone to convert to cheese and milkshakes en masse.

If you stumble across some interesting fmcg products on your holidays, send us a pic to the usual address or tweet us @thegrocer using the hashtag #holidayNPD. Alternatively, leave a comment below.

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