Frulact is a Portuguese multinational company established in 1987, positioned as a top-ranked innovative company in the supply of added value ingredients for the food & beverage industry, focused on fruit preparations, plant-based, and other specialty ingredients.

Frulact creates customized and innovative products to serve customers’ needs, from the classic and typical to the most exotic combinations. Frulact serves a full range of dairy, beverage, and ice cream producers from its production bases in Europe, North America, and Africa.

The company is owned by Ardian, a world-leading private investment house, that in close coordination with the management team, defined an ambitious growth plan for the next five years (2020-2024). To achieve Frulact growth goals, it was necessary to develop further the innovation practice at Frulact.

Frulact has a strong commitment to innovation and has a dedicated Investigation, Development, and Innovation center, Frutech, since 2012. Despite the good innovation results, Frulact realized it was time to speed up and scale the innovation practice to achieve the new growth aspirations in a very competitive market.

Frulact hired Innovsky, a Portuguese consulting boutique on Innovation Management, to help define an innovation strategy and improve the innovation practice. Speed and fast action were crucial for Frulact, so Innovsky planned a short intervention designed to produce results in just three months.

“Innovation is crucial for Frulact success and sustainability. We will not achieve our growth goals without a very efficient innovation engine. This project allowed us to have exactly that not only via the internal alignment created but also by the tools developed to manage our innovation.” Clara Meira – Frulact Research, Development & Innovation Director

Innovsky started the intervention by assessing Frulact innovation practice using a proven methodology already applied in more than 5000 companies across 105 countries that identified the actual innovation capabilities, benchmark the innovation practice, and identified Frulact specific innovation enablers and blockers.

Innovsky also reviewed the external and internal innovation environments, market intelligence practices, organizational culture (from an innovation perspective), innovation ecosystem, and innovation resources during this initial phase.

After having a clear and in-depth knowledge about Frulact innovation practice, it was time to help the Frulact management team co-create the innovation strategy and define the innovation strategic initiatives across horizons. Both the strategy and the three strategic initiatives were built, considering Frulact specific strengths and Frulact market vision.

Finally, it was time to start implementing. The governance model was set, as well as innovation process, performance metrics and project selection criteria.

“Frulact already had a very mature and sophisticated innovation practice. The leadership team was focused on taking that practice to the next level by improving execution speed and business impact in terms of growth and profits. It was a pleasure to help Frulact develop the new Innovation Strategy and Innovation Management Model. I’m sure they will start to see the impact on growth in a short time.” Paulo Malta – Innovsky Managing Partner