15 Years of New Products Pacesetters: Excellence in Innovation Drives CPG to the Next Level

SPECIAL REPORT: JANUARY 2010
EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW

IRI's Times & Trends highlights new developments and critical events across all major CPG categories and channels, providing powerful benchmarking data to help guide your strategic decisions. This special edition of Times & Trends highlights some of the key findings from a New Product Pacesetters soon-to-be-released celebratory research endeavor.

Introduction

In 1995, IRI released the first annual New Product Pacesetters report. Each year since then, New Product Pacesetters has drawn upon IRI’s extensive New Product Profiler database to showcase the year’s strongest product launches.

Brands featured IRI’s New Product Pacesetters report truly beat the odds. Less than one-quarter of new brands exceed the $7.5 million hurdle for year-one sales that is required to earn Pacesetter status.

In celebration of 15 years of New Product Pacesetters, IRI is proud to be releasing Innovation Highlights from 15 Years of New Product Pacesetters.

The report is an in-depth analysis of 15 years of Pacesetter products. It is designed to capture the essence of successful innovation, providing insights into strategies that have led to true market success.

Brands featured in the report are illustrative of best practices in how to create new markets leveraging advanced consumer insights and new technologies.

Select Findings

On average, nearly 80% of new product introductions fail to garner more than $7.5 million in year-one sales. Less than 3% of products achieve “mega hit” status, or over $50 million in year-one sales. The nature of new products has changed over the past decade, though. On the whole, new product launches are becoming increasingly targeted. As a result, “successful” launches may well be below $50 million in year-one sales.

The rate of new product innovation in the CPG industry has increased fairly steadily over the past seven years, with food and beverage introductions climbing nearly 3% annually and non-food introductions growing at an average annual rate of just under 9%. New UPCs have grown from 7% to over 15% of all moving UPCs in IRI’s CPG category database. Most of these are flavor/form extensions or novelty/seasonal items brought to market in hopes of stimulating short-term incremental purchases. Only a small fraction of these new UPCs represent new brands or major innovations.

See the complete report in the "15 Years of New Products Pacesetters: Excellence in Innovation Drives CPG to the Next Level" pdf.