Food, meet the future! Tyson Innovation Lab, the Tyson Foods, Inc.
(NYSE:TSN) team tasked with bringing new consumer products to
market in just six months, launches
¡Yappah!, its
first brand. It debuts May 31st with a campaign on Indiegogo, a
crowd-funding platform, and challenges consumers to re-think snacks
for good. The brand name was inspired by a tradition in the South
American Andes called “yapa,” which refers to the little something
extra a merchant gives to a valued customer so that nothing gets
wasted.
“The ¡Yappah! brand mission is unique,
important and far-reaching,” said Rizal Hamdallah, Head of Tyson
Innovation Lab. “The brand was created to inspire people and
partners to rethink their relationship to food and how it impacts
society. Through this launch, we intend to address global food
challenges such as food waste.”
Tyson Innovation Lab sought like-minded partners to
Fight Food Waste Given the scale of the food waste
problem, Tyson Innovation Lab sought partnerships with like-minded
food companies. The first product under the
¡Yappah! brand, Protein Crisps, is crafted from
rescued and upcycled vegetable and grain-based ingredients that
might otherwise be left behind.
Tyson Foods provides upcycled chicken breast trim that is still
full of flavor and protein and combines it with either rescued
vegetable puree from juicing or rescued Molson Coors spent grain
from beer brewing to create the line’s four flavors.
“We could not have developed the Protein Crisps without the
enthusiastic collaboration of partners like Molson Coors,”
Hamdallah said. “We will continue to seek out other great partners,
large and small, who have resources and goals that complement our
own.”
"This collaboration is consistent with our sustainable brewing
priorities to address waste,” said David Durkee, Senior Director of
R&D and Innovation for Molson Coors. “There is great potential
to upcycle our spent grains into amazing products and this is a key
area of development for our innovation team."
The ¡Yappah! brand is designed to be an
umbrella under which future products and product categories will be
launched that help address major social and sustainability
challenges related to food.
“With the Protein Crisps we are taking
‘forgotten’ ingredients and crafting them into a delicious protein
snack,” continues Hamdallah. “For the ¡Yappah!
brand, sustainability is not an add-on, it’s our DNA. Fighting food
waste is just the beginning.”
A snack crafted by a chef trained at a Michelin-Star
restaurantIn January 2018 Tyson Innovation Lab was
challenged to re-think the culinary possibilities for ingredients
that are typically left unused during food production, often
becoming food waste.
“We wanted to be ingredient-driven in order to create a
flavorful snack that people would absolutely love,” said Chef Kang
Kuan, Executive Chef at Tyson Innovation Lab.
Chef Kang is no stranger to innovation, having built his
culinary career at such highly original and nationally acclaimed
restaurants as the French Laundry and Morimoto.
“I was thrilled by the opportunity to source ‘forgotten’
ingredients and compose them into something more flavor nuanced and
protein-filled than typical snack foods,” said Kang. “People might
not realize that vegetable pulp left behind during juicing is
arguably better and richer tasting than the juice itself, and spent
grain is surprisingly delicious. So, we had these amazing flavors
to work with. The result is a crispy snack that comes in four
culinary-driven flavors that will appeal to all food lovers.”
The four flavors are:
From Rescued Veggie PureeChicken Carrot-
Curry FlavoredChicken Celery- Mojo Flavored
From Rescued Spent GrainChicken IPA White
CheddarChicken- Shandy Beer Flavored
The ¡Yappah! brand’s commitment to using rescued
ingredients stems from a major food challengeThe team is
passionate about the idea that rescuing ‘forgotten’ ingredients
means using food to its full potential. The statistics behind the
wasted food challenge are overwhelming. In the U.S. alone, nearly
one-third of all food used in food production ends up as waste,
according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations. The average person wastes 3.5 pounds of food per week and
uneaten food equates to Americans throwing out as much as $218
billion each year, most of which ends up rotting in landfills where
it emits harmful greenhouse gases. Go-to-Market
Approach Testing, evaluating and iterating is integral to
the Tyson Innovation Lab approach. As such, Tyson Innovation Lab is
launching ¡Yappah! Protein Crisps on the Indiegogo
crowd-funding platform in May followed by a 90-day pilot at one
Chicago-based supermarket in July.
“We think a chef-composed snack is a groundbreaking idea, but
are cognizant that products fighting food waste are in their
nascent stages,” said Santiago Proaño, Brand Lead, Tyson Innovation
Lab. “Indiegogo is a great channel for testing since consumers on
the platform are known for being early adopters of new to the world
ideas and products. We want to connect directly with this
enthusiastic community that cares about creating better food. Their
reaction to the product, and their engagement with us, will help us
get ready for what we hope will be a much broader rollout.”
About Tyson Innovation Lab Tyson Innovation
Lab, formed in late 2017, is a specially-selected team charged with
driving faster innovation, new growth and increasing speed to
market for new products. In six months, the team must design a
product that is market launch ready. This small yet agile and
highly creative team is forging new paths as Tyson Foods strives to
transform itself into a leading twenty-first century food
company.
“Tyson Foods’ leadership team understands that to meet the
global food challenges of today and tomorrow, the company has to
make innovation, agility and outside-the-box thinking central to
its DNA,” said Hamdallah. “Our mission at Tyson Innovation Lab is
to spearhead the creative process and come up with solutions that
will make a positive difference in the lives of the next
generations. We have a startup mentality—we must be creative and
resourceful enough to work speedily. We are employing some
innovative methods to reach this high-speed goal.” Tyson Innovation
Lab’s framework uses a unique acceleration phase that enables the
team to create and test a product in a six-month window. The team
uses approaches and tools that are not traditionally part of a CPG
company such as design sprint in the ideation stage combined with
empathy exercises and rapid prototyping. Tyson Foods is a company
that focuses on “AND” rather than “OR” scenarios. Often food
companies make choices and decide between “speed or scale,”
“innovation or incremental,” “inhouse creation or acquisition.”
Tyson Innovation Lab’s creation is a result of taking a step back
and looking at how things could be done differently.
“We refer to it as failing forward,” said Hamdallah. “We try new
approaches, learn from our mistakes and keep rethinking how we can
do things better.”
Media Contact: Kurman Communications, Inc. and
JD Thompson Communications team@kurman.com or jmeyerstho@aol.com
Office: (312) 651-9000 x 11 – Cindy Kurman Office: (317) 590-4436 –
Jackie Thompson
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