The Hub Magazine: Cool News: Issue 24

“We are the nostalgia,” says Bob Unanue, ceo of Goya Foods. He adds: “We welcome the immigrants into the country with food.”

Goya Foods has been playing that role in America for 72 years now, when Prudencio Unanue started the company so that Spanish immigrants could have “authentic ingredients.”

Today, Goya remains a family-run business, and under Bob Unanue’s leadership, it is now “the USA’s largest Hispanic foods company” with 3,000 employees and “more than $1 billion in sales per year…”

To match the tastes of its consumers, “Goya sells 1,600 products ranging from bags of rice to ready-to-eat frozen empanadas, up from 1,100 five years ago. The mix includes 38 varieties of beans alone, including the ‘powerhouse’ frijoles negros favored by Cubans and the recently added mayacobas favored by Peruvians.”

For Goya, success is also in its distribution. “Almost daily, Goya drivers deliver cases of products to tens of thousands of U.S. food stores, from supermarket chains in Texas to independent mom-and-pop bodegas in New York City to the Wal-Mart chain.

“It’s a more costly method than dropping off jumbo shipments once a week and letting stores warehouse goods, but it lets Goya offer greater variety and ensure that products match each store’s demographics.”

Last year, one of Nokia’s designers, Andrew Gartrell, came across a Nokia phone he had helped design — the Nokia 1100 — crushed and “discarded in the middle of a dusty road” in Ghana. This got Andrew, and Nokia, thinking about “how to make more environmentally sound products.”

The result is a phone called Nokia Remade. It’s still in prototype, but Nokia Remade is “made entirely out of recycled aluminum cans, old tires and plastic soda bottles.” The idea is to arrive at a keener sense of what it is consumers really want, versus what brands want them to want.

“We have the ability to clarify the needs of real people,” says Rhys Newman, Nokia’s insights chief.

But Nokia designer Jan Chipchase says it’s not just about selling more phones: “Are you innovating something gimmicky just to sell a product?” he asks rhetorically. “Or is it saving the planet you are after?”

“People are looking for a store to call their own,” says Jane Elfers, ceo of Lord & Taylor, explaining the 182-year-old retailer’s improbable revival.

Most folks assumed Lord & Taylor was a goner when it was bought by financier Richard A. Baker in 2006. “The store had become a dump,” says Jane, and the assumption was that Richard would sell it for parts, for maybe $600 million. “But what happened, literally days after signing the purchase agreement, is that the business started to perform better than we expected,” says Richard.

In fact, sales were up about 10 percent on a monthly basis. The reasons were both internal and external. Internally, Jane, who had been ceo since 2000, sold off 32 underperforming stores, dumped its Liz Claiborne mid-priced clothing and “recruited more than 200 new upscale brands.”

Externally, “Macy’s decision to eliminate century-old local brands, like Marshall Field’s in Chicago, pushed shoppers into Lord & Taylor,” where, for the first time, they experienced Jane’s makeover:

“Once-dowdy floors are now lined with up-to-the-minute fashions. Cheap plastic shopping bags have given way to hefty, luxurious ones.”

Both Robert and Jane are in it for the long haul, currently plowing another $500 million into the store that refused to die. “What else could be done to this brand?” says Jane. “The more barriers that are thrown in front of it, the more people believe in it.”

Cool News of the Day, a daily e-mail newsletter of marketing insights, ideas and inspiration, is edited by TIM MANNERS. For a free subscription, visit www.reveries.com