About Blend 45
A Legacy Brand Meets Modern Wellness Needs
Universal Robina Corporation started its competitive beverage business with Blend 45, the first locally manufactured soluble coffee. Blend 45 is dubbed as the “Pinoy Coffee” because it of its distinctive flavor, tailored to suit the Filipino palate at an affordable price point. Despite the success, in a market rapidly pivoting toward health-conscious consumption, Blend 45 – a heritage coffee brand, faced a key question: how to stay relevant in a world that now demands more than just taste.
Health is the New Daily Ritual
The pandemic not only accelerated health awareness, it transformed into a daily behavior. Consumers began looking for immunity-boosting products, even within categories like ready-to-drink and instant beverages. Functional health claims, especially around vitamins and natural ingredients are now essential for product relevance.
Blend 45 identified this shift early. Using deep consumer consumption data, they uncovered a growing preference for beverages including powdered coffee that offer more than as a drink that “pumps up/awakens” them, but also products that help with health and immunity support.
Goal & Challenge:
The Innovation Balancing Act: Health vs. Taste
The vision was clear: launch a health-forward coffee mix using malunggay, a local superfood known for immune support – fortified with relevant immune support vitamins such as Vitamin C and Zinc. But innovation had a catch. Coffee products with a “healthy” positioning often suffer in taste perception.
Blend 45’s challenge was striking a delicate balance, using enough malunggay to establish credibility, but not so much that it turned off taste-driven consumers. As the team put it:
“We needed a truly unique proposition that adds value in a highly competitive coffee mix category, without compromising on the consumer’s first expectation: delicious taste.”
Solution
The NIQ Advantage: Data-Driven Confidence at every step
Blend 45 identified high-growth opportunities in the healthy coffee mixes segment by leveraging NielsenIQ Retail Audit data, allowing the team to pinpoint year-on-year growth and segment value.
In the early stage, idea prioritization focused on evaluating concept potential, ensuring that only the most promising health-driven ideas advanced to development. NielsenIQ’s Concept Product Test was the final validation test. Concept learnings show consumer appeal due to the functional ingredients, landing health believability. It also helped the team determine how concept can further be improved on ‘deliciousness’ which helped in guiding the communications strategy.
NielsenIQ’s Retail Audit data helped the team identify opportunity channels and regions for the brand and for healthy mixes segment, aiding the team in prioritizing support of Above-the-Line and Below-the-Line efforts for efficiency.
Bold Moves, Brilliant Results
- Winning over Taste skeptics: There has always been a notion then that healthy doesn’t sell in mass market products like Coffee Mixes because of the assumption that Taste is the main reason for consumption and adding healthy ingredients will affect it. That is why after receiving positive feedback in the concept evaluation stage, Blend 45 had a single-minded focus of ensuring that the team have good reception from General Population Coffee Mix drinkers who would be more taste-conscious versus the Healthy Coffee Mix drinkers who are more amenable to certain bitter/herbal taste profiles at the expense of getting a Product Benefit.
- Proving healthy can taste great: During Concept Product Test, Blend 45 learned that the concept lands the health message very well, but consumers are yet to fully believe that the product would be delicious hence messaging on ‘delicious taste’ and ‘value for money offering’ were overtly communicated during our launch efforts on Above-the-Line and Below-the-Line.
- Finding the winning proposition: Understanding which Proposition will resonate with consumers. To some extent, the Covid19 Pandemic was that lightning-in-a-bottle moment that made the notion of health very salient in the minds of Filipino Consumers. As Blend 45 goes along with churning out new innovations and sustaining the momentum, finding that distinct proposition and realizing it to be a good product and concept is paramount to ensure that the launches will be sustainable.
Key learning
- Winning on more than just Health: Taste, Value, and Access
While the “healthy” claim created initial intrigue, the real impact came from how Blend 45 Malunggay was positioned: as a delicious, value-for-money coffee in a twin pack format priced competitively below rivals. The message wasn’t just about wellness, it was also about enjoyment and accessibility. - Go-to-Market Precision: Focus where it matters
Knowing that successful innovation doesn’t stop at launch, the Blend 45 team executed a sharp go-to-market plan. Backed by early NielsenIQ insights, they focused distribution and brand support in high-potential VisMin areas disproportionately investing in BTL channels, on-trade, and targeted media. - Impact that speaks for itself
In just six months post-launch, Blend 45 Malunggay didn’t just meet internal benchmarks, it became the leading growth driver within the Blend 45 portfolio. The product captured notable market share, gained wide consumer acceptance, and secured retailer support – all proof points of a well-executed, insight-led innovation strategy.
Looking Ahead
Blend 45 Malunggay’s success is a powerful reminder: today’s best innovations begin with understanding not just trends, but the precise moments consumers live, feel, and choose. With NielsenIQ’s data-led approach, Blend 45 turned a health-driven insight into a category-shifting success.
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