Strategic Co-Creation · a case from the co-creation research
A meat producer stopped selling meat and started co-creating its customers’ menus — and in the process became indispensable to the restaurants it served.
Prof. dr. Régis Lemmens — Future of Selling research programme
From selling meat to shaping menus
Salomon FoodWorld was originally a hamburger and meat producer, supplying restaurants and wholesalers. That is a commodity position. A burger patty is hard to differentiate, easy to substitute, and bought largely on price. A supplier in that position competes on cost and specification, and watches its margins erode. Salomon chose a different path. Instead of competing to sell more meat into a restaurant’s existing menu, it set out to help the restaurant design a better menu in the first place.
The vehicle was a method Salomon developed called the Culinary Code — in German, Der geheime Code der Speisen, the secret code of dishes. The Culinary Code is a way of designing dishes and menus around the emotional motivations of a restaurant’s guests, rather than around the chef’s own preferences or tradition. It draws on neuromarketing — specifically a model that maps human emotional drivers into broad territories such as stimulance and variety, dominance and power, balance and security — and applies that map to food: to ingredients, to plating, to the way a dish is described on the menu.
Co-creating the menu
The co-creation works like this. Salomon offers the restaurant a service: survey your guests, on a regular basis, to understand which dishes connect with which emotional drivers. Then, using the Culinary Code, redesign menu items to fit what the guests actually respond to. A dish plated in small, clearly structured portions signals discipline and control; the same ingredients presented rustically on a wooden board evoke adventure. The way a dish is named on the menu can steer choices by appealing to different emotional drivers. Salomon brings the method and the neuromarketing foundation; the restaurant brings its kitchen, its guests, and its culinary judgement. Together they redesign the menu.
The crucial line from our research note on the case captures why this is genuine co-creation.
This is an example of how a supplier and its customer co-create new product innovations together because neither party is actually able to do it alone.
Future of Selling research note, Salomon FoodWorld
Salomon cannot redesign a restaurant’s menu by itself — it does not know the restaurant’s guests, its kitchen, or its culinary identity. The restaurant cannot apply the Culinary Code by itself — it does not have the method or the neuromarketing foundation. The redesigned menu exists only because both contribute. And because the redesign is driven by what the guests actually respond to, it tends to increase the restaurant’s sales, which makes Salomon a partner in the restaurant’s success rather than a line item in its cost base.
The transformation of the supplier
Something important happens to Salomon in the course of this. By co-creating menus rather than selling meat, the firm escapes the commodity trap. A restaurant that has redesigned its menu with Salomon, around Salomon’s method, using insights from surveys Salomon helped run, is no longer comparing burger-patty prices across suppliers. It is in a strategic relationship with a partner who helps it understand its own guests. And as the menu evolves, Salomon’s own product range evolves with it — the firm expanded from meat into other products, such as mozzarella sticks, that the co-created menus called for. The supplier’s catalogue grew out of the customer’s strategy, rather than being pushed onto it.
This is the strategic move in its clearest form. Salomon moved, in the words of our research note, from delivering a meat-based product to delivering a customer-experience service. The meat is still sold, but it is now sold inside a relationship organised around the restaurant’s menu strategy. The thing being co-created — the menu — is the restaurant’s, not Salomon’s. Salomon’s reward for helping create it is a durable, differentiated, hard-to-displace position in a market that would otherwise treat it as a commodity.
What the case teaches about Strategic Co-Creation
The first lesson is that Strategic Co-Creation is the most powerful escape from commoditisation available to a product supplier. Salomon could not differentiate a burger patty. It could differentiate itself completely by helping its customers design menus their guests would love. When a supplier helps shape the customer’s strategy, the supplier’s own product is no longer judged on its own terms; it is judged as part of a relationship the customer cannot easily replace. The deepest moat a commodity supplier can build is to become co-author of the customer’s strategy.
The second lesson is that Strategic Co-Creation requires the supplier to develop a genuine method, not just an opinion. Salomon did not simply offer chefs friendly advice about menus. It built the Culinary Code — a structured, repeatable, evidence-based method grounded in neuromarketing and tested through guest surveys. That method is what makes the co-creation credible and repeatable across many restaurants. A supplier who wants to co-create strategy with its customers needs to bring something more rigorous than experience and instinct; it needs a method the customer could not assemble alone.
The third lesson is that the supplier’s product range should follow the customer’s strategy, not lead it. Salomon’s expansion into new products came out of the menus it co-created, not out of a decision to push a wider catalogue. When a supplier co-creates the customer’s strategy first, the products the customer needs reveal themselves, and the supplier can grow into them with the customer’s blessing. That is a far stronger basis for range extension than persuading customers to buy more of what the supplier already happens to make.
About this case. This case is documented in the Future of Selling research programme led by Prof. dr. Régis Lemmens (Solvay Brussels School / AMS Antwerp Management School) and Prof. dr. Javier Marcos (Cranfield School of Management). Salomon FoodWorld, originally a meat producer, developed the Culinary Code (Der geheime Code der Speisen) to help restaurants redesign their menus around guests’ emotional motivations. It illustrates Strategic Co-Creation — the form of co-creation in which a supplier helps the customer develop their own vision and strategy. A companion Strategic Co-Creation case is MLP, which co-creates the customer’s career. To follow the research, visit futureofselling.eu.
Future Of Selling 
Leave a comment