-Towards a green dairy industry- Creating a sustainable New Product Development process. The case of FrieslandCampina

Abstract

This research focuses on the integration of sustainability in new product development (NPD) processes. Regarding the integration of sustainability requirements in NPD practices, different authors conclude that there is often a lack of knowledge on why and how firms should accomplish this. If firms have no clear scope or tangible sustainability targets, it is difficult to shape an NPD process with exact steps that help integrating sustainable practices in the NPD process. The dairy sector aims to define a clear scope and sustainability targets but there seems to be a misalignment between the company's environmental strategy and its sustainable NPD practices.

The objective of this thesis was to understand how a sustainable NPD process could be created in the dairy sector, more specifically at FrieslandCampina Domo (FC Domo). FC Domo, part of Royal FrieslandCampina N.V., is a leading producer of ingredients, base powders and total formulas for the infant and toddler markets and producer of ingredients for the medical and cell nutrition markets. FC Domo was chosen as case for this study because its current NPD process does not consider any sustainability actions. Nevertheless, according to route 2020, sustainability should be part of the product development process.

A new, synthesized NPD model was created for FC Domo combining literature on front-end innovation (FEI), NPD processes and design for environment (DfE). The proposed model was used as a theoretical basis for further research. Data was collected through internal and external interviews, and workshops with employees of FC Domo were organized. The synthesized NPD model was further developed by including important concepts and elements that help integrating sustainability in NPD processes at FC Domo. Factors such as awareness and obligatory goals were found to be specifically important to FrieslandCampina. It was found that the DfE strategies found in the workshops and interviews corresponded to six of the seven DfE strategies from the literature. The refined synthesized NPD model should be used and refined after every product launch. In this way sustainability will be integrated step by step in the NPD process of FC Domo.