INNOVATION AT THE SPEED OF TIKTOK
Select the right platforms and keywords. Yes, TikTok and Instagram Reels are the ‘cool places’ for viral food content, but Reddit is one of the best sites to catch undercurrent debates in your category. Educate yourself and your team on the simple rules to search and monitor the best platforms for your category. This can be everything from a mix of short-form (e.g., hashtags) and phrase-based (e.g. “How do I use yogurt in X”, “sandwich trend,” “gluten-free snack”) monitoring. While it seems simple, knowing how to search each site correctly greatly increases your experience and success.
Innovation at the Speed of TikTok
Kevin Ryan, CEO, Malachite Strategy and Research, LLC The traditional product development cycle, with its 18-month timelines, focus groups, and committee approvals, has become a relic in an industry where a single TikTok video can spark a nationwide trend overnight. When a Korean corn dog, stretchy cheese pull, or weird sandwich creation can go from unknown to must-have in days, businesses face a fundamental challenge: how do you innovate when the innovation cycle has compressed from years to weeks?
The answer isn’t in responding faster than your competition to trending videos and memes, it’s in inserting social media into the DNA of your innovation process.
Embedding Social Intelligence in Your Innovation
In a world where millions of social media videos and comments are created every day, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. However, if approached correctly, your brand team (not just your media creatives) can learn how to use social media to greatly enhance and accelerate every part of the innovation process.
1. Start with a strategic listening framework (don’t just “scroll and hope”)
Too many brands dive into social media without boundaries (or just wait for a ‘cool’ trend to make its way into their Slack channel). That leads to noise, false leads, and wasted effort. A well-defined listening framework turns chaos into signal and is an easy first step toward getting ahead of trends.
Define and focus your objectives up front. Are you looking for emerging flavor themes? Texture trends? Usage occasions (e.g. breakfast, snack, after dinner)? Competitive moves? With your team, discuss what’s really important for your consumer, category and brand and choose 2–3 priority areas you’ll monitor (Also, one “wild card” domain you let the team roam in, loosely).
Use tools, even cheap ones. You don’t need to purchase enterprise listening software out of the gate. Many free / low-cost tools exist that surface trending terms and spikes. Combine them with manual spot checks and some human filtering (AI-enabled filtering helps too.) The key is: don’t let your tools run wild. Having too many tools is often a distraction, instead rely as much as possible in team review.
Create dashboards and alerts. Once you’ve spotted a few interesting trends to watch, set alerts for sudden spikes on keywords or new hashtags. Maintain a lightweight dashboard (weekly updates) your cross-functional team can scan to see things that are rising and falling.
2. Use social signals to fuel opportunity ideation
Once your listening engine hums, you’ll begin seeing recurring patterns, micro-trends, and radical outliers. That’s where you can plug your discoveries into everything from opportunity identification and ideations.
Trend mining vs. trend chasing. Don’t merely chase what has already gone viral. Look for micro clusters (30–100 posts repeating a pattern) which indicate early trends. Correlate those with your brand strengths or capabilities. For example: maybe your team noticed that a few grilled cheese fanatics on TikTok were raving about putting kimchi on their sandwiches, so you created an alert (“kimchi + grilled cheese”) and saw an upward trend. That’s a signal that your deli or cheese line might want to start to experiment with bringing more funky flavors into the mix.
Map social chatter to usage moments. Many posts are just consumers with problems trying to create their own solutions when they are not seeing them in the market. By watching and reading, you and your team can not only uncover needs but also needs in context. For example, seeing a rise in ‘bircher muesli’ might really be about “I need a breakfast I could eat cold and on-the-go on campus”. These usage clues not only help you understand your consumer more, but they also identify occasions that you should focus on.
Trend “playgrounds” in internal sprints. Challenge your group with short 1–2 week internal sprints where your innovation team is asked to combine one social media nugget you’ve identified + one brand asset + one constraint. Use this as the basis for ideation and prototyping. Then bring it back to the whole team and jointly judge how well the idea delivers on each point.
WHAT’S IN STORE | 2026 © 2026 International Dairy Deli Bakery Association
Industry Landscape
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