Pronaca brand mark, shown in the portfolio's two-tone palette. Source: company brand assets. Trademark belongs to its owner.
A restaurant owner walks into a professional kitchen, learns to cost a recipe with your product, and leaves a better customer. That same afternoon a video recipe filmed in the same room reaches half a million people. That is the Culinary Centre I built and launched at Pronaca in 2019: one kitchen doing five jobs for a food company.
Pronaca brand mark, shown in the portfolio's two-tone palette. Source: company brand assets. Trademark belongs to its owner.
One kitchen, five jobs: a live video studio for the digital community, a school for consumers and employees, a training room for food-service customers, a design-thinking lab for new products, and the venue for every launch.
Live-streamed recipes, hands-on courses, food-service workshops, design-thinking panels, product launches.
The client base the training programme was built for: 15 to 20 courses a year, 25 customers each, on product use, recipe costing and good manufacturing practice.
Partnership meetings in year one, in Quito and Guayaquil — the talent pipeline the centre later drew on.
Pronaca's stated purpose is to feed people well. The country's numbers said it was not happening: a quarter of children under five with chronic undernutrition, more than six in ten adults overweight, protein and vegetables under-consumed while carbohydrates, sugar, salt and fat rose from 29% to 37% of the diet in eight years. The company sold the protein. It had no place where it taught anyone what to do with it.
The corporate concept — Vive bien, vive saludable: eat well, be active, live in harmony — gave the company something to say. The Culinary Centre gave it somewhere to say it: a physical kitchen where the message could be cooked, filmed, taught and tested instead of only printed.
That was the argument for the investment. The second argument was that the same room solved four other problems the marketing function already had.
Video recipes, cooking tips and nutrition advice streamed to the digital community — the daily fuel for TQMA's channels, produced in-house instead of commissioned.
Hands-on courses: a monthly consumer workshop tied to the calendar and the brands, and a rotating course for employees on each protein.
Practical workshops for restaurant and catering customers on product use, recipe costing and good manufacturing practice — sales support that a brochure cannot do.
Consumer panels evaluating new products before industrialisation, run with R&D — nine value-added products in the first launch plan.
Every new product introduced to consumers, customers, the sales force and distributors in the same place, by the people who developed it.
The centre needed a job that did not exist in the company: a chef who works inside product innovation.
| What was created | What it does |
|---|---|
| Head of culinary innovation | Writes the initial recipe for every new product, standardises it, works with R&D so the product survives industrialisation, and evaluates it with customers and consumers |
| Consumer-service chef and food-service chefs, Quito and Guayaquil | The three chefs the role supervises — one facing the community, two facing customers |
| Promoters and kitchen support | Five promoters and an assistant: the courses, the events and the daily production |
| Escuela Vive Saludable | An internal school on nutrition and physical activity, built as train-the-trainer and later virtualised — starting with the company's own leadership |
A corporate concept is worthless until it tells a team what to make on a Tuesday. The Culinary Centre is where Vive bien, vive saludable stopped being a line on a slide and became video recipes, courses, trained customers and tested products — every week, from one room, with a team of ten.
Launches, customer training and consumer courses in one room your team controls.
Recipes and expert content produced in-house every week, feeding every channel you own.
One team of ten, and a slogan that turns into weekly output.