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How A Team Approach to Package Development Scores Success After Success for General Mills
by Patrick Henry

Nature, philosophers say, abhors a vacuum. Fortunately, packaging doesn’t: after all, where would food retailing be without airtight containers for perishables? Good packaging design, however, can’t take place in a hermetically sealed environment, because in packaging, there’s no such thing as design for design’s sake alone. Good packaging design is a team effort that reflects and supports every other aspect of the package manufacturing process. Nowhere is this approach taken more seriously than in the package development group at General Mills, where teamwork is what enables packages to drive the marketing of the company’s expanding universe of consumer food products.

One of the people at the helm of this multi-disciplinary effort is Jay L. Gouliard, vice president of packaging development at the company’s headquarters in Minneapolis. He directs the largest of six functions that make up what he calls the General Mills “packaging community,” an organization that also includes brand design, procurement; equipment engineering, quality and regulatory management, and operations. Whenever General Mills directs the creation of a package, all six areas of expertise come into play in a “cross-functional package development team” that takes the project from concept and specification through testing and distribution.

Gouliard’s packaging development group is responsible for designating the material, structure, and the basic shape of the package. The group consists of chemical, mechanical, and packaging engineers who have, according to Gouliard, three main responsibilities: lead innovation, build and re-energize brands, and manage “stewardships”—that is, to generate specifications and to provide technical support. Gouliard’s staff works closely with the brand design group, a creative team whose primary mission is, he says, “to communicate the essence of the brand to the consumer” (see sidebar on page 11).

There’s a place for “fun” as well
“We always strive to keep our packages and brands relevant to consumers,” Gouliard says, noting that keeping a package relevant can have many meanings depending on the product inside. With some products, portability and convenience might be the package’s most desirable traits; other products might require security and freshness to top the list of packaging criteria. In the case of products aimed at children, Gouliard adds, the standout quality might simply be “fun.”
In the Yoplait “Save Lids to Save Lives” promotion for breast cancer awareness, consumers collected and returned lids from yogurt containers to prompt Yoplait’s contribution to the fund. The pink foil of the container matched the signature color of the breast cancer awareness movement.
For a global giant like General Mills, there are many preferences to cater to. Although the company doesn’t like to disclose exact numbers, it does boast of distributing “thousands” of products bearing General Mills brands in more than 100 markets around the world. And though he bulk of the manufacturing is done in North America, Gouliard’s package development team includes packaging specialists for the international markets served by General Mills.

Regardless of location, consumers probably identify General Mills most strongly with “Big G” breakfast cereals, the largest segment of its business. Cereals delivered in paperboard boxes with polymer inner bags accounted for about $2 billion of the company’s $10.5 billion revenues in its most recent fiscal year. Next largest at $1.7 billion, and the most diversified in terms of product variety, is “meals,” consisting of foods under General Mills brands such as Green Giant and Progresso.

Designing and redesigning packages for this cornucopia of products keeps the General Mills packaging community in a state of perpetual motion. Gouliard notes that in the last fiscal year, cross-functional teams helped to launch packages for 116 new products, not counting brand extensions (such as new flavors for existing lines). By the middle of the current fiscal year, he says, the teams had launched 81 packages, ahead of the pace from last year. The General Mills packaging portfolio includes, according to Gouliard, “every packaging substrate that you can imagine,” with the lone exception of aluminum cans.

“The majority of our design efforts are managed in-house,” says Gouliard, whose development group provides technical oversight and direction to a number of package design houses under contract to General Mills. He says that the initiative to create a new package usually comes from a response to one of a number of “stimuli”: focus-group input, strategic plans to enter new businesses, or “eureka moments” on the part of staff members. The next step is to develop a “critical path worksheet” that lays out the objectives and establishes a timetable for the launch of the package.

Design shares square one
According to Gouliard, it’s standard operating procedure to involve the internal brand design group at the beginning of every project to assure a well coordinated effort throughout. (“Handing things over the fence,” he observes, “is not the way to do things.”) The fully assembled cross-functional team also collaborates with marketing and sales and may have the additional help of a product development specialist assigned to the launch.

The length of time it takes to bring a new package from the design phase to store shelves varies from project to project. The goal, says Gouliard, is always “to enhance our speed to market.” He acknowledges, however, that speed is a factor of the complexity and sensitivity of the product inside the package and of “the risk associated with that development.” A new package could be launched in as little as 60 days if there were not much technical retooling to do. A project involving new or complex technologies, on the other hand, might not send its package to market for two-and-a-half to three years.

Gouliard explains that in a long-term launch, the team could be tasked with developing not only a new package but “basic fundamental technologies” for the successful delivery of the product. For example, the product might have to incorporate new ingredients or use a new method of formulation. Or, it might have to interact in some way with its container—as, for example, in the case of modified atmosphere packaging, where the challenge would be to “create an environment in the package.” In contrast, a 60-day turnaround would be feasible in a line extension for a well-established product that has already mapped out its packaging requirements. “Then we wouldn’t need to do a six-month shelf life test to get the new package out,” notes Gouliard.

Time ultimately tells whether a cereal box or a snack-food pouch will succeed or fail at winning market share for its branded product, but General Mills does everything it can to improve the odds at the front end by taking pains with the design, composition, and testing of all of its packages. What makes a package command attention on store shelves, says Gouliard, is the right blend of message, graphics, and, in some cases, special components such as foil stamping and holograms for cereal boxes. As for testing, he says, “We use all of the tools available to a consumer products company.” In a series of focus-group exercises, in-market tests, and other evaluation procedures, “each one builds more confidence in the ability of the package to do what it’s supposed to do.”
“We don’t just design everything in a vacuum and throw it on the shelf,” says Gouliard. The process starts with defining the “basic architecture” of the package—the combination of features and information that the package must deliver to its targeted market—as elaborated by the cross-functional team. Then the team members pool their creativity and ingenuity to give the concept a visually appealing and consumer-friendly form.

“Relevant to kids”—and yummy, too
According to Gouliard, a good example of building a container around a concept is the packaging for GoGurt, a product in the Yoplait brand family. Here, he says, the challenge was to make yogurt “relevant to kids”—a challenge met by packing tasty yogurts in freezable, squeezable tubes that could be placed in school lunchboxes for snacking straight from the package (no spoons needed). Gouliard says that GoGurt’s innovative packaging helped General Mills create a new and highly successful product category that earned high marks from consumers for convenience and portability.

The high-convenience packaging for Yoplait's GoGurt lets young consumers enjoy the product directly from the tube without using a spoon.
Scoring packaging bull’s-eyes like GoGurt is not automatic, Gouliard emphasizes. “For every new package, there are a number of concepts that don’t make the grade,” he says. “For every one product that hits the marketplace, we probably evaluate 25 to 30 ideas that we then funnel down to one or two.” This is because an “envelope of constraints”—a set of practical considerations imposed by the product—governs the design of every package. And while the envelope must be respected, adds Gouliard, it also can be pushed. He explains that in a development project, he challenges his team to make 75 percent of their concepts fall within the envelope. The remaining 25 percent can be speculative approaches that may point the way to future package designs.

There’s similar latitude in the team’s approach to choosing packaging materials, according to Gouliard. He says that he and his staff review the entire portfolio of applicable materials for each new development project. They also monitor new materials entering the market for improved functionality. The product drives the choice of packaging substrate, but within that constraint, says Gouliard, the cross-functional team can pick the optimal substrate for what the package has to do. In all cases, he adds, “product protection is a priority for us.”

Gouliard’s methodical approach to package development is the hallmark of a long career in designing manufacturing systems that work. With General Mills for two years, Gouliard spent the previous three-and-a-half years as the director of global package development for Coca-Cola in Atlanta. Before that, he put in 10 years with Anheuser-Busch in Atlanta in research and development for mechanical design. He came to the consumer products world from defense contracting, having worked at the Aerospace division of McDonnell Douglas Corp. on air-to-air missiles. An expert in mechanical design and testing for equipment, packaging, and instrumentation, Gouliard has a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Bradley University (Peoria, Ill.) and an M.S. in engineering management from the University of Missouri-Rolla.

In this engineer’s opinion, the most valuable attributes of a package developer are creativity and the ability to collaborate successfully in a cross-functional team. For designers, he says, “it’s critical to know the printing and graphics process pretty well.” A knowledge of converting, although not essential, can be helpful.

But the key to success for every member of a development team is a commitment to uniting all of the disciplines that go into the design and manufacture of a good package. “For us to launch a package, we have to be hitting on all of those cylinders,” Gouliard says.

“Brand Design”:
The Persuader in the Package

Corporate package design operation without package designers might seem incongruous—but only to those who do not understand how the package creation process at many consumer-product companies has changed. General Mills no longer employs designers per se, preferring to outsource the creative work to agencies specializing in package design. According to Janine Heffelfinger, director of brand design at General Mills, the in-house approach is in fact “a very old model” that has gone the way of the drafting table. It has been replaced, she says, by a more strategic concept that has transformed “people who took orders for art” into “sophisticated advocates of design as a marketing tool.”
Heffelfinger, who has spent the last three-and-a-half of her 10 years with General Mills in her present position, says that she joined the company from a packaging design firm “with a lot of ideas about what I would do differently as the client.” An idea that she remains committed to is maintaining solid relationships with design service providers so that the agencies can stay focused on their particular brands. There’s always turnover in the design world, Heffelfinger acknowledges, and occasionally a change of vendors is necessary; but enduring partnerships, she says, serve the marketing goals of a company like General Mills best in the long run. After all, she says, “three firms in three years is not good for the long-term health of a brand.”

She’s equally clear about her objectives for the brand design group, one of six units that make up the General Mills “packaging community.” What counts most in a brand design manager, she says, is “a good understanding of the business objectives of the brand.” She adds that her job is to “breed brand stewards” who can help internal marketing groups and outside design agencies improve speed-to-market and productivity—tasks that make the brand design unit influential in all functions that touch packaging at General Mills.

The unit’s main creative responsibility, according to Heffelfinger, is to find ways to give General Mills packages the flair and persuasiveness they need to command attention on hyper-crowded retail shelves. The challenge, she says, is that “in store environments, people are looking at many things at the same time, whereas when they’re looking at an ad, they’re looking at only one thing.” To blind shoppers to the competition, a package must above all look attractive. “Typically people shop with their eyes when they’re buying food,” she says, noting that the color, shape, and structure of the packaging all play a role in turning a glance into a grab.

Tantalizing “Toolbox”
The better to nudge shoppers in that direction, Heffelfinger’s brand designers can specify what she calls “toolbox enhancements”: an assortment of materials and production techniques intended “to make existing graphics and design work harder.” Within the toolbox are holograms, Hexachrome (an extended ink set that adds two colors to four-color process printing’s C, Y, M, and K), foils, embossing/debossing, and “fifth-panel” box flaps that “open like a storybook” and can even incorporate pop-ups (as seen in last year’s Halloween campaign for “Monster” brand cereals).
Sometimes the toolbox helps a General Mills brand to support a worthy cause, as in the case of Yoplait’s “Save Lids/Save Lives” promotion for breast cancer awareness. In this campaign, consumers collected and returned lids from yogurt containers to prompt Yoplait’s contribution to the fund. The pink foil of the container matched the signature color of the breast cancer awareness movement.

Heffelfinger says that in packages “where we have more real estate,” such as cereal boxes, the brand design team can specify on-package or in-package premiums, a choice driven “by what’s hot in the premium world for kids.” Options include affixing CDs and DVDs to the outside of the box, and installing clear plastic windows that enable kids to see the prize inside.

But no matter how unusual the enhancement, says Heffelfinger, the design scheme must always take the package’s “structural integrity” into account—its ability, for example, to be packed and palletized efficiently. This emphasis on the practical keynotes her approach, and that of General Mills, to the business of package design.

“People think that ‘design’ and ‘art’ are interchangeable, but they aren’t,” Heffelfinger observes. “Art is the free expression of the artist, but design is a problem-solving tool. Design management is the discipline of using design to solve business problems.”
—Patrick Henry
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