“Sports Nutrition School was an eye-opener for me – I learned that our ingredients and production processes set the gold standard for nutrition”

Erika Thrun recently joined Glanbia Performance Nutrition as a consumer insights manager and knows first-hand about needing great-tasting, accessible nutrition through the day. Here she tells what she’s learned in her first eight months with us.

I’m based at Glanbia Performance Nutrition (GPN) in Downers Grove, southwest of Chicago, and I bring the consumer voice to our sports nutrition brands.

With a background in industrial organisational psychology, one of my favourite parts of my job is making sense of the patterns in consumer behaviour.

My team uncovers when and why consumers want to use products like ours during what we call ‘demand moments’ and ‘need states’.

It could be: “Hey, I really need some energy in the morning, but I’m not a coffee person. So what products can give me that energy boost to help me get out the door, with that right level of caffeine?”

Or: “I’m on my long commute home. I’m trying to watch my weight. Is there a healthy snack I could stash in my purse to fill the gap before I can get home and make dinner? Something a little more satiating than fast food…”

So, our research partners will use artificial intelligence-based tech to scrape the web, social media, blog posts and news articles to figure out what consumers are talking about. They then bucket these conversations into cultures or trend topics.

That’s how we’ve been able to identify and track different types of demand moments and ensure that the commercial decisions we make across the business are rooted in data.

A lot of brands try to do this but I think we do it exceptionally well.

The X-factor

I’ve been an athlete my entire life. I grew up playing ice hockey so I have a lot of love for sports nutrition products and understand why you might purchase one protein or energy powder over another, or why you might choose a certain product. So that, too, has allowed me to get closer to our consumers and understand them on a more intuitive level.

In my first few months at Glanbia I’ve been involved in product name and packaging testing for the BSN brand. We did some testing to discover how our products look on shelf. Are they visible? Can you find them? Are consumers drawn to them? We’re seeing an influx of brands in this space and we need to understand what it is about these new products that might pull consumers away from ours. They do stay with us, and I think that’s down to the quality of the raw ingredients that go into our end products – we set the gold standard for sports nutrition.

Back to school

One of the best things about my induction has been the chance to go to Glanbia’s Sports Nutrition School (SNS). I did the Level 100 Brand Immersion programme, which was a live, in-person event.

The first day gave us an overview of the business to understand how large Glanbia is and how we operate. Day two, we had a history lesson for each brand which was incredibly helpful. We got to hear about Isopure’s journey, among others: where they had been and where they’re going to, and the same thing about Amazing Grass. Finding out everything that goes into getting that product on shelf was eye-opening. And then on day three we got to work out, do some recipe exploration and chat with the three athletes who were in session with us. It was great and the programme so well organised. The people who lead it are amazing – they are a trove of knowledge.

We had a peek behind the curtain in terms of where some of these brands want to see themselves in the next three, five and ten years. With our tools that can help predict what behaviour is going to be trending upwards or downwards, we’ll really be able to guide our teams on the decisions they should be making.

Proud to help people focus on health and wellness

Learning and development really is a high priority at GPN and I’ve got more coming up. The amount of training I’ve had in the eight months I’ve been here is probably more than I’ve had in my entire career. GPN wants to develop its people and they really do walk the talk. I take a lot of pride in working for a company that invests in people’s wellbeing. I love it here.