M’m, M’m, K-Cup Soup!

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Convenience rules our lives, and it also runs the grocery aisles. Roaming the grocery store shelves, we can find single-serve products, heat-and-go, microwavable, pre-packaged, instant, and a multitude of other easy-serve foods. Every shelf and aisle seems to be packed with new products competing to provide quick and easy foods.  Even the old standby, soup, has a variety of choice for preparing products – dry, condensed, single-serving, home style, organic, and a few more.

But can soup be reinvented yet again? Campbell and Keurig think so and the latest product from Campbell Soup fits nicely into this trend, a single-serve K-Cup that can produce a cup of soup at the touch of a button. Starting next year, Keurig and Campbell will market a K-Cup of soup in three flavors. Using a standard Keurig brewer, the busy professional on the go can quickly prepare a meal in a cup, without the mess.

Group Activities and Discussion Questions:

  1. Start with a discussion of product life cycle. What types of products fit into each segment of the life cycle?
  2. Discuss the difficulties, and necessity, of taking a product from a mature stage and reinventing it for an earlier stage.
  3. Next, ask students to list all the different soups and packaging they can recall. What stage of the product life cycle are soups. Then, discuss the rise of the single-serve coffee makers.
  4. Show the Keurig Web site: http://www.keurig.com/
  5. Discuss the various products, along with the target markets for the products.
  6. Divide students into teams. Have each team take a product that is in the mature phase and redesign it to prolong its life.

Source:  Brandchannel.com

 

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