How McCormick's Kelly Smith brings her "Passion for Flavour" to Life
Kelly Smith, EMEA Consumer Research & Development (R&D) Innovation Manager at McCormick U.K.'s Haddenham facility, has been a part of the McCormick family for over two decades. She joined the company 21 years ago as, as a Junior Home Economist, where she spent most of her time in the kitchen testing recipes for the Schwartz brand. But, Kelly's role has evolved many times since then, and today she works on the consumer side, driving McCormick's R&D innovation pipeline with central and local Marketing teams. "I love the work I do at McCormick because it allows me to constantly feed my passion for product design in innovative ways. My career is always changing and evolving, and I enjoy that," Kelly said.
Kelly's role is truly a combination of science and R&D as she leads her team from concept through to implementation. "To really drive innovation, it is important to spend time talking to consumers and understanding their needs. That way, I can focus on writing concepts and ideas and then turning them into prototypes," Kelly said. A valuable, pivotal change she has made over the last year was
streamlining the creative process with Marketing to help bridge any gaps and speed up the process. Working together from the start, they can keep consumers at the center of McCormick's innovation, get products to market faster, and meet consumer needs quicker.
At McCormick's global headquarters in Hunt Valley, Maryland a few years ago, Kelly participated in a design thinking week, where she worked with Marketing on a line of breakfast products. She discovered that her passion was really the front-end design piece – working with consumers, observing them, and understanding their desires and pain points so she could in turn initiate designing and product developing to meet those needs. During the course of her McCormick tenure, the product development scope widened, and her focus shifted to the culinary side. In 2016, she successfully set up a central culinary function to bring culinary chefs together and to drive the company's insights and nutrition expertise, once again fueling her passion for culinary and product design innovation. "Today we test and learn in a digital world and are challenged to stay agile to evolving trends and desires that consumers want to see. Digital transformation and e-commerce have evolved quicker than expected, particularly in the last 12 months," Kelly said. In fact, matching McCormick's manufacturing scalable capabilities to quick win innovation is the biggest challenge she and her team come up against at the moment – the desire to produce quick but good products for the short and long term.
Bringing her passion for innovation and food together, Kelly was influential in creating Passion for Flavour U.K. about six years ago. It was created to bring together employees who are truly passionate about herbs, spices and seasonings and who work to engage McCormick employees as brand ambassadors for our key brands. Starting out as a small, cross functional team from R&D, Marketing, and Operations, the group has grown to include a more diverse mix of employees across many functions of the U.K. businesses. Kelly served as Chair for three years before moving to the role of sponsor.
One of the most memorable activities Passion for Flavour U.K. organized this past year was an on-site event with DJ BBQ (aka Christian Stevenson), influencer, radio host, author, and trailblazing barbeque cook. More than 300 employees enjoyed live culinary demonstrations, had the opportunity to taste new products, and engaged in games and competitions to win signed DJ BBQ books and McCormick products. It was also a great chance to capture real product feedback from employees on the spot.
For another event, the group organized a campaign to deliver McCormick products to our U.K. employees, which had become difficult with the temporary closure of the company store. Working together, they filled more than 1,000 goodie bags with recipe cards and McCormick products and sent them to their colleagues. "This was an effort to live out our purpose To Stand Together for the Future of Flavour - bringing food and flavour to employees at a time when many felt isolated. It felt like the right thing to do," Kelly said.
A few years after establishing Passion for Flavour U.K., Kelly played a critical part in supporting the setup of a similar group, Passion for Flavour France, aligning their activities, events, and goals with their U.K. counterpart.
In 2019, as a key member of the project team refurbishing McCormick EMEA headquarters in Haddenham, UK, Kelly lead the branding and communication elements, edited the monthly newsletter, Furby News, and introduced Our Space, internal communications on digital noticeboards to support our employees and discover new ways of working. For Project Furby as it came to be called, she organized a grand opening event and a street food takeover in the employee restaurant, The Hub, to celebrate. Once employees are back in the office regularly, Kelly will continue to build out our brand by displaying artwork of herbs, spices, and seasonings and encourage employee engagement.
Outside of work, Kelly combines her passion for food with her passion for dance. She and her two daughters dance in regional and national competitions in disco freestyle, rock n roll, lyrical and street dance. Taking her love for Passion for Flavour, Kelly chairs the dance schools' social activities and fundraisers using the same skills she uses when leading the group. "I bring in street vendors so the dance community, particularly the children, can taste new flavours and discover new foods. People are less hesitant to try new cuisines if we make it fun and exciting," said Kelly.
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