Saving the World One Meal at a Time: Launching Edible Insect Products in the West

Abstract

As World’s population keeps growing, the demand for food will keep increasing in a rapid phase. A great part of population’s protein demand is now covered by lifestock products. Although widely consumed in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia, not many edible insect products have been introduced to the Western market - yet. Many companies are developing insect-based food products, and the first ones are already in the stores. The launch is extremely crucial phase in the new product development and this paper will go through the strategic and tactical launch decisions of a new product as a literature review. The purpose of this paper is to find the most critical elements of the launch and what are the most important considerations in each of these phase. These findings are then implemented to the launch of insect-based food products. The findings suggest that the launch can be separated to strategic and tactical launch decisions. Tactical decisions are usually made after strategic ones and therefore strongly affected by them. Tactical launch decisions include those considering marketing mix, whereas strategic launch consists of the level of innovativeness, timing of the launch, targeting, positioning, and branding.