What I've learned about…. Product development

For a food startup, retail success can seem like a moonshot. Margins are paper thin, competition for shelf space is fierce, and it's hard to scale up while maintaining quality. Yet Jake Karia has made it happen. In 2017, he and his brother Nayns founded the on-the-go Indian food brand Jake and Nayns'. Since then it has won multiple awards and sells more than 100,000 products per week via a range of British supermarkets including Asda, Sainsbury's and Tesco, plus shops like Boots and Aldi.

Product development and innovation has been key to its success, from new food concepts like the Loaded Naan—a curry-filled folded naan flatbread akin to a Cornish pasty—to new tech like the MicroStation, the brand's customer-operated microwave station for making non-soggy toasted sandwiches on the go.

Here, Karia shares what he has learned about how to develop and launch new products successfully.

Karia's other core source of product ideas is himself. “I look at my lifestyle and I look at what would make life easier for me,” he says. “I look at the problem that I have, and I create the solution that I need.” Take the Jake and Nayns' MicroStation. “The problem was that I wanted to eat hot food on the go without it tasting 'microwaved'. And then I worked backwards to see how I can try and make it work.” The solution came in the form of innovative packaging that ensures the product gets crispy as it warms up.

Prototypes turn ideas into something tangible—they are a great way to test whether the fundamentals of your idea have legs. It's vital to see a prototype that fails not as a problem but a learning opportunity for building further prototypes. Of course, that principle works best if the prototype is quick and cheap—a basic 'good enough' version that embodies the core thinking. Food is, naturally, easy to prototype, so Karia does so constantly. "The ideas that you see that hit the road are probably five per cent of what I put my test chef through," says Karia. One idea that never made it to production was a steamed rice patty with fried spam in the middle and wrapped in seaweed—called spam musubi in Japan—which Karia tried to replicate as an on-the-go product after seeing it made on TV. "The chef made it; it tasted awful. But it was an idea nevertheless, and we tried it." The point is that occasionally, he says, you hit gold—such as with Jake and Nayns' signature Loaded Naan, which began life as a similar prototype.

Karia's focus on innovation began long before Jake and Nayns'. In 2009, he launched a frozen food e-commerce business—well ahead of the direct-to-consumer revolution. He thought his customer would be time-poor men. "We pitched these fantastic meals to men, to all the health magazines, and then it flopped," says Karia. Further market research showed that despite his assumptions, men only decided on the day what they were going to eat, while women would plan the week ahead. "But our frozen food took a day or two days to arrive." Karia changed his marketing strategy—"we started hitting Mumsnet and things like that"—and the sales started going up.

Product development can be costly, but you may find that commercial partners are willing to assist. When Jake and Nayns' won shelf space in Sainsbury's and Tesco, for example, Karia pushed to be part of each chain's "accelerator brand" programmes, which supported particularly innovative brands. "Through that, we were launching plenty of new products." Nevertheless, even with the retailers' support, it's necessary to spend five to ten per cent of your turnover on marketing the product, Karia says, to make sure people pick it up in the first place. "You have to front-load your investment," he says. But give the product what it needs to flourish, and that investment will pay dividends. "There is nothing like true product innovation to give you an edge over the competition."