Food and beverage marketers are always racking their collective brains to develop new products and line extensions. Sometimes the shortest distance to success is to watch and listen to how consumers use and define food products. Hidden Valley Ranch has taken a cue from consumers and acknowledged that their product is so much more than a salad dressing. It is launching Hidden Valley for Everything, a condiment, shelved in the condiment aisle right next to Ketchup.

Millennials have grown up using Hidden Valley Ranch on much more than just the veggies their moms insisted that they eat. From potatoes, aka fries, and sandwiches to, yes, pizza, this generation associates ranch style dressing with a wide range of foods.  And, Ketchup has been replaced by ranch style dressing as the condiment of choice for many of them.

The take away for food and beverage marketers is: the demand chain is now in the driver’s seat of CPG growth. For marketers who pay closer attention to how consumers are actually using their products, there may be some golden opportunities for product innovation and line extensions. From a pure marketing perspective, it is much easier to reposition a well known, branded product for wider use, than to sell a new product concept from the ground up.

Hidden Valley for Everything has undergone some product reformulation in redefining the base salad dressing as a condiment. In addition, a well crafted advertising and marketing campaign targeted to Millennials launched last week. The campaign speaks to them, not their moms, and includes video of battling bottles of Hidden Valley for Everything versus Ketchup, via Facebook and other social media. The real winner is likely to be the Hidden Valley Food Products Company.