Bianca Deslouches’ job is to live in the future. Her official job description may not say that, but as senior director of innovation strategy at Daily Harvest, it is the responsibility of her and her team to collaborate with customers to dream up the company’s next great culinary innovations.
Daily Harvest is reimagining how food can nourish both humanity and the planet by making it easy to eat more whole, organic, fruits and vegetables every day. The company helps you stock your home with delicious plant-based food that’s made to keep up with your life. Daily Harvest was recently recognized on the 2021 LinkedIn Top Startups list as one of 50 emerging companies where people want to work.
Deslouches is one of those people. She left a job with Anheuser-Busch InBev eight months into the COVID-19 pandemic to join Daily Harvest, where she now uses storytelling to be the voice of the company’s customers.
“In my mind, everything is a story,” Deslouches said. “In my role, storytelling shows up by taking data on a screen or on a page and weaving it into a story of what could be.”
Deslouches oversees the portfolio strategy and culinary innovation teams, and works hand-in-hand with Daily Harvest’s data science and customer research teams to better understand the company’s customers and what food they are missing. That way, her and her colleagues are able to nurture and grow the existing culinary portfolio.
To do that, Deslouches first needs to intimately understand and anticipate customer needs.
“Innovation is not something you can put on a list in front of people and ask them to rank,” Deslouches said. “Most people can’t quite articulate what they want, they often know it at a subconscious level. You have to ask a lot of questions and circumvent the issues with peripheral questions until you can triangulate the problem — and its solution.”
That’s when her storytelling gene kicks in.
There’s a connection between what people eat and what people grow. Luckily, what’s better for human health is also better for the planet and Daily Harvest sees an opportunity to be the connector. The company leverages culinary innovation to support agrobiodiversity and organic production, and ultimately nourish their customers while doing no harm for future generations.
Deslouches use stories to connect the dots between customer needs, Daily Harvest’s farmers, and the company’s long-term sustainability goals, then collaborates with internal partners to make new visions a reality. It’s not always easy. Giving customers what they want, when they want it requires Deslouches and her team to remain nimble — and creative. And they always look out for their farm partners. If the company has a two-year contract with a grain grower, it finds new and interesting ways to incorporate that grain into the company’s innovation pipeline in a way that meets the ever-changing needs of the customer. To push those new ideas, Deslouches needs to have a compelling story to tell.
Sometimes she’ll go for an emotional hook — like demonstrating a father’s pride for developing a new morning routine with his daughter that includes a Daily Harvest smoothie.
Sometimes she’ll go with simply supporting the brand’s mission — Daily Harvest makes it easy to eat more fruits and vegetables, so here is a new way to get your daily dose.
And sometimes, Deslouches likes to use suspense — the essence of any good story.
“One method I often employ is explaining what’s at stake if we don’t do what we’re proposing,” Deslouches said. “I know people presented with risk tend to be more likely to be receptive to changing their opinion. So we present a world that shows what life would be like if we say no to our proposal, and then we contrast that by building excitement and energy around what life would be like if we say yes.”
While it can be exciting to tell a story, Deslouches reminds her direct reports never to forget why it is being told. When preparing for a meeting, it’s critical to know what you want to have happen as a result of that meeting. Are you looking for the CEO to sign off on a new capital investment project? Are you trying to get honest feedback on a new campaign? Knowing that goal beforehand gives you a new lens to view the information you’re presenting.
“There is a temptation when you are heads-down in the data to present everything you possibly know,” Deslouches said. “Knowing what your overall goal is, you can look at every sentence in a correspondence or every slide in a presentation and ask whether it supports that overall goal.”
She also makes it a point to remind her team that there are stories all around just waiting to be told.
“There are stories that are not articulated yet show up all the time, either visually, in an online review, or in some other way,” Deslouches said. “It’s easy to miss them, so you have to decide you’ll always be on the lookout for them.”