Johnsonville Case Study
Industry: Food & Beverage
Service: ITG ACCELERATE®
From Empty Pipeline to 25 Active Stage Gate Projects. In Under a Year
Johnsonville faced a ticking clock after a major strategic shift left their product pipeline nearly empty. In partnership with ITG, they didn't just catch up, they leapt ahead.
3,000+
New Sausage Ideas Generated
41
Consumer-Validated Concepts
25
Active Stage Gate Projects
The Challenge
In 2018, Johnsonville made a bold and exciting decision: double down on what they do best. A renewed strategic focus on sausage created an energizing opportunity — and a real one. With new consumer insights and innovation teams coming together, the moment was right to build a next-generation product pipeline from a fresh foundation. The challenge wasn’t a lack of talent or ambition. It was velocity — moving fast enough to capitalize on the momentum, while building the cross-functional alignment needed to keep great ideas moving through the organization.
What Success Looked Like
Rapidly fill and reinvigorate a new product pipeline with strong, consumer-backed sausage ideas — and close a 5-year category knowledge gap before momentum was lost.
How We Got There
Johnsonville assembled an integrated team of specialist partners: C+R Research to conduct ethnographic field work and surface fresh category insights, and ITG to lead the ideation and concept development. Working alongside Johnsonville’s ad agency, the three organizations operated as one unified team — sharing inputs, aligning on opportunity spaces, and building momentum at every handoff.
Once opportunity spaces were defined, ITG’s Creative Consumers® associates joined the Johnsonville team for high-energy co-creation sessions spanning four major meal occasions. These weren’t passive focus groups. They were structured ideation sprints where consumers and client teams built ideas together, generating hundreds of possibilities in every session. The energy was intentional: Creative Consumers® are trained to be innovation partners, not just research subjects.
After ideation, ITG guided the team through a structured convergence process, prioritizing the strongest ideas and developing them into early-stage concept outlines ready for the next stage of validation and development.
4 meal occasions explored through dedicated co-creation sessions
Hundreds of ideas generated per session, then systematically narrowed
Cross-functional teams aligned throughout, from ideation through concept writing
The Results
In less than a year, Johnsonville went from near-empty to full pipeline momentum: 3,000 new sausage ideas, 84 early-stage concepts, and 41 consumer-validated concepts ready for development. Today, 25 of those concepts are active stage gate projects — and counting. A five-year knowledge gap, closed in under twelve months.
“On every project, the Ideas To Go team has really gotten to know our business to help us maximize both our consumer learning and our team's productivity—in a fun and intuitive way.”
— Karen Kraft—Senior Consumer Insights Manager
This project used ITG ACCELERATE® — New Product & Service Development
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