The company is adopting this strategy as it expands its consumer base beyond the constraints of the infant formula category, Fiona Scrymgeour, chief marketing officer at Nuchev, said during her presentation at the recent Growth Asia Summit in Singapore last month
She was presenting the topic “Infant formula and beyond: How goat milk outgrew the baby aisle”
The new strategy, which defines the business as a goat milk company rather than simply an infant formula company, focuses on providing goat milk as nutrition for digestion, gut support and related needs
“It is about digestion and gut support and any category that we can identify an unmet need. An example is sleep, which can be related to digestion issues. A lot of people have disrupted sleep because they’re not digesting what they’ve eaten that day or that evening,” she said
Based on this idea, the company has identified three need states – spanning kids snacking, sleep support and functional powder beverage for both kids and adults
Across Asia-Pacific, infant nutrition companies have been broadening their product categories to capture new growth opportunities
The a2 Milk Company, for example, is launching pediatric supplements spanning immunity, anti-allergy, gut health, and brain and eye health in China during Q3
China dairy giant Yili also told us last year that it is expanding into the healthy aging categoryamid a greying population. The company has traditionally focused on general dairy products and infant nutrition
Similarly, Mead Johnson China had announced last year that it would invest in R&D for kids and adult nutrition
The first category the company has developed from goat milk was kids’ snacking, including snack bites and protein balls, which are sold in Chemist Warehouse and health food stores
“When I looked at adjacent categories, kids’ snacking came to the forefront. Kids’ snacking is a category that tends to have very wafer-like ingredients; they don’t fill young kids, they don’t have a five-star health rating and they tended to be little yoghurt puffs etc,” Scrymgeour said
Based on current market gaps, the company has formulated its kids’ snacks with ingredients such as pea protein and calcium, on top of goat milk powder
The snack bites SKUs, on the other hand, were also graded with a five-star health rating
The company then looked into sleep support, an area relevant to both young and old
“Sleep is a universal need state that affects young ones, whether they’re one year old, or whether they’re seven years old, or whether they’re a teenager going through hormonal changes, or whether you’re an adult and you’re balancing the stress of life, or whether you’re a senior,” she said. “Seniors, for example, tend to suffer digestive ailments that disrupt their sleep.”
So far, the company has launched two products – Nighty Night Goat Oli Little Dreamers for children one to four years old and Nighty Night Goat Oli Young Explorers for young children and adolescents
Aside from goat milk powder, the products also contain magnesium, lemon balm, L-theanine, as well as Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG (LGG) at 1bn CFU or 2bn CFU
The company is currently developing two more products – one for adults and one for seniors
“These products all use goat’s milk as their base, but they’ve got other functional ingredients that we’ve added to adapt to the needs of different growth periods in one’s life stage,” Scrymgeour said. “We’ve adapted the formulations with goat’s milk as the core, and developed a new product category that fits a ritual, and that ritual is to wind down before bedtime, which is a real need that every household needs.”
Third, the company is developing goat milk powder as a base for functional powdered beverages, which she said could be an alternative for cow’s milk
“Rather than just going and buying your cow’s milk from the fridge, you can actually shift across to this as being your calcium-rich, protein-rich dairy drink and we’ve got versions that are probiotic-rich,” she said. “We’ll be launching versions with collagen as well.”
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