During my 8 years working for Philips Domestic Appliances Multicookers was one big love of mine.
When I just joined the company we have launched this category. And to be honest, not many believed in its success. So in order to get listings in Electrical Chains and to put it on the shelves, I wend with the sales team to every customer to present and demonstrate the product. So for every visit, I was cooking Browny of Cheesecake and took it inside of the device (to demonstrate that it was really cooked in it).
Category ended up being a huge success and the quantities planned for sales that most of the team considered as a huge overestimation put us out of stock several times.
At that time we used materials produced by the RCA team with Lyuda Zueva as head of marketing. But locally we had to develop our own recipe book. That was my first challenge back in 2012. So in 14 days, I cooked in the Multicooker a lot, feeding the whole Philips office with several versions of the Borsch recipe to set the timing and proportions correct. At the same time, I’ve launched an internal contest in the office for the best home recipe. Tested all the applications and top 3 also were included in the recipe book, of course with the adaptations for the processing in the Multicooker.
To produce the assets for the recipe book we collaborated with Pif Paf Production (that became my #1 choice for almost all food-related projects). Little have I known how much will we use them further on. For 10 days I worked from the production studio, navigating through all the preparation stages in every recipe.
My top requirement was to have the end result photos of the recipe to be real, not a brushed photo of the dish you won’t ever be able to replicate.
That was my first project in Philips, which made me fall in love with the company, category, and product.
Some years later, having my round trip to Personal Care Category, I came back to Kitchen Appliances. And while working on the AirFryer Project and searching for best practices and inspiration from other countries I have spotted one very nice device in Australia.
I was an Electrical Pressure Cooker (EPC), and this segment started growing in Ukraine, while we didn’t have a relevant portfolio.
The difference vs. Multicooker is that it cooks way much faster, cause it applies also pressure, not only temperature. For example, Jelly Meat that is usually cooked for 4-6 hours, can be done in 1 hour, while soup of porridge in 15 minutes.
But this particular product also had several programs called ‘Slow Cooking’. While this was a very well-received concept in some countries it wasn’t appreciated by dynamic Ukrainian women, who value their time. Reprogramming a device would be quite expensive and required lots of time.
The benefit of slow-cooking is actually nutritional. But it’s really hard to sell it that way. Experimenting with the product and recipes I have found a relevant point of reference.
The taste of the dishes, cooked with a slow-cooking program was like ‘my grandma used to cook’ – intense and like in a good old oven. That was really a call to the old tradition of cooking in Ukraine.
So in several months, I have adopted the recipes initially developed for the Multicooker launch. And yes, it took me several attempts to get to a perfect Jelly Meat, and there were several days when my colleagues faced corporate fridge filled with the results. So some mornings started with a corporate breakfast with that bloody Jelly Meat, while lots of evenings finished with tasty Ragout and Borsch ‘like my grandma used to cook’.
While that, with the help of our bright and incredibly engaging Lead Coach Oksana and the most sophisticated Trade Shopper Marketer Ivanna, we have developed appropriate naming for the programs on the device user interface.
With that, we didn’t spend any money on assets or device adaptation for local needs, as launched the product within 12 months from the moment of spotting the device in Philips office in Amsterdam up to put it on the shelf.
One very important moment for this particular model was that the US was in the Ukrainian language, which made it the first one to be totally adopted for the Ukrainian market.
Here is the recipe book adopted for the EPC:
It was reworked several times after this launch for the line up of other SKUs by the best professional the category could – product manager Mariia.
While I don’t work for Philips anymore, I feel unbelievably grateful for these amazing experiences and people whom I’ve met and who became very dear to me.
(c) Nika Kiriienko