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Industrial gases · Europe · 2021

Air Products: the freezer is sold to a food plant. The reason to buy it comes from the supermarket.

SECTOR

Industrial gases and food freezing

MARKET

Europe

COMPANY

Air Products

FORMAT

15-minute proposal

DATE

February 2021

IndustrialFood & Trade

The situation

Cryogenic freezing preserves food quality by freezing it fast.

Air Products sells the gas, the tunnel freezers that use it, and, at the time, two things that had not yet launched: a process intelligence layer, and a connected version of the freezer.

The buyer is a food manufacturer or packager: meat, seafood, vegetables, cheese, bakery, ready meals. The person who signs is under cost pressure. The person who runs the line cares about downtime and cleaning. Neither of them wakes up wanting a smarter freezer.

What they do have is a customer, a retailer, who is being asked by shoppers for food that is locally processed, chemical-free, sustainably produced and traceable. That is the pressure the product actually relieves.

01 · What this engagement produced

8 of 34 outputs

Research

Competition

Segment, position and price

Message

Launch and enable

Measure and maintain

Solid is what the brief produced. Dashed is what it did not reach, and could not from outside.

02 · The decision

Sell it to the plant. Write the value proposition for the shopper.

Nobody in a food factory wants a smarter freezer. They want their retail customer to stop asking questions they can't answer.

A connected freezer described to a plant manager is a maintenance tool. Described through the retailer, it is the equipment that lets their customer make a claim about carbon, waste and traceability and have the data to stand behind it. The gas savings pay for it; the provable claim is why it gets approved. So the value proposition starts at the end of the chain and is transferred back up it.

That is also how you learn about end users when you have access to none. The demand the retail channel is already placing on the manufacturer is public, and it is exactly what the manufacturer is being measured on.

03 · What I wasn't given

15 min

To present

2

Unlaunched products

0

Customers I could talk to

Not givenNo pricing, no launch date, no customer list. Two internal datasheets and a sales deck.

04 · The work

5 moves

Five moves, in fifteen minutes.

01Learn the end user without meeting one

01 Research

  • The brief asked how I would learn about end users, so I answered that before proposing anything
  • Separated the direct customer, food manufacturers and packagers across meat, seafood, vegetables, cheese, bakery and ready meals, from the final end user, the consumer reached through supermarkets, retail, restaurants and cafeterias
  • Used the demands already visible in the retail channel as the proxy for the customer research I had no way to run: locally processed, chemical-free, sustainably produced, traceable
02Where the product sits

02 Competition

  • Two axes: standard or smart, individual or integrated
  • The claim was the empty corner: gas, freezer and intelligence sold as one thing rather than a monitoring add-on bolted to somebody else's equipment
  • Mapped the field across three groups: the major industrial-gas competitors Linde, Air Liquide and Messer; the regional gas suppliers; and equipment manufacturers such as GEA, each of whom sits in a different quadrant

Where the product sits

Smart

Monitoring, bolted on

A connected layer added to somebody else's freezer

The proposal

Gas, freezer and intelligence sold as one thing

Standard

Equipment, off the shelf

A freezer bought on price and lead time

Gas and equipment bundled

Supplied together, but nothing is measured

Individual

Integrated

Four quadrants, and the one worth claiming was empty.

03Three people, three arguments

04 Message

  • A value matrix built by role rather than by feature: the user who runs the line, the decision maker who signs, and the gatekeeper who has to install and support it
  • Each row runs pain, then product value, then the message, so the message is derived rather than written first
  • No two roles are given the same reason, and none of them is given the whole product

One freezer, three people who have to agree

Persona

User

Pain

Freezer efficiency, cleaning and maintenance, downtime

Product value

Higher productivity and lower gas consumption, remote monitoring and notifications, real-time data and predictive maintenance

Message

Smart freezers

Persona

Decision maker

Pain

Food quality, cost, sustainability

Product value

Quick freezing for better quality, prolonged equipment life, reduced waste

Message

Custom and sustainable freezers

Persona

Gatekeeper

Pain

Installation, troubleshooting, support

Product value

Installed by an Air Products engineer, suggestions to resolve issues, remote customer support

Message

Easy to install, in days

Pain first, then value, then the message. Written in that order so the message has somewhere to come from.

04Two packages, three tiers of market

03 Segment, position & price

  • SMEs and large enterprises separated by package, channel and message rather than served one campaign
  • SMEs: reached through trade shows, trade magazines and field teams; concerned with cost, onboarding and support; sold the basic intelligence tier with the freezer
  • Large enterprises: reached through trade shows, social, email and paid search; concerned with food quality, efficiency and carbon footprint; sold the premium tier
  • Geography sequenced in three waves rather than launched at once: level 1 ES, PT, FR, BE, NL; level 2 DE, PL, CR, SL, HU; level 3 IT, GR
05Sell the category before the feature

05 Launch & enable

  • Physical: field sales, the trade shows this industry attends, and the specific trade press it reads
  • Digital: owned site, e-CRM, paid search, the industry web properties, and a B2B e-commerce route
  • Content ordered deliberately, cryogenic freezing against traditional blast and mechanical freezing first, the connected layer second, because a plant that hasn't accepted the category will not pay for the intelligence on top of it

Where I pushed back

The brief said two products. I proposed one.

APPI and the connected freezer were presented as two launches. Sold separately, the intelligence layer is an upsell a plant manager can defer indefinitely and the freezer is a commodity bought on price. Packaged with the gas contract and split into a basic and a premium tier, they become one smart integrated offer with a reason to choose the more expensive version.

I also answered a question the brief didn't ask, what the shopper at the end of the chain wants, because without it the connected freezer is a maintenance tool rather than a commercial argument, and there is no fifteen-minute version of this that works otherwise.

05 · What I'd change

I proposed a tagline, and I shouldn't have spent any of fifteen minutes on it. Taglines are the part of a go-to-market proposal a brand team will replace, and offering four alternates signals that none of them is right. The packaging argument and the three-tier geographic rollout were the load-bearing parts and they got less time than they deserved.

What happened next

HELD UP

The category went where the deck said it would.

Feb 2021

I presented this. Neither product had launched.

After

Air Products launched a digital intelligence tool giving real-time and historical analytics through live dashboards, retrofittable to existing Freshline freezers, positioned on remote performance evaluation, reduced food waste and lower nitrogen consumption. Food and Drink Technology

Mar 2026

Air Products showed its Freshline IQ Freezer at Seafood Expo North America, describing Freshline Smart Technology as remote monitoring of food manufacturing equipment to optimise processes and track key performance parameters. airproducts.com

The positioning held: a smart, integrated freezing solution sold on efficiency, waste and sustainability rather than on freezer specifications. So did the retrofit logic, the intelligence layer had to reach the installed base rather than wait for new equipment sales, which is what the launched product does.

The wording didn't survive. They market Freshline Smart Technology and Freshline IQ, not my line. That is the normal fate of a candidate's tagline and it is not the part of the proposal that should have been judged.

The brief, as it was set

Brief set by Air Products

February 2021

Circa fifteen minutes

Present a proposal (circa 15 minutes) for the go-to-market strategy for APPI (datasheet attached) and our connected freezer (MP V4.0 tunnel freezer).

How would you learn about the end-users, the value proposition of these products for them?

Feel free to give your own point of view and ideas. The datasheet and the presentation are only informative/guidance and are still internal Air Products documents. The APPI product and the connected freezer haven't been launched yet. You may make any changes and proposals you like.

Quoted from the brief. The attached datasheets and internal sales presentation are not reproduced anywhere on this page.

What I wasn't given

15 min

To present

2

Unlaunched products

0

Customers I could talk to

Not givenNo pricing, no launch date, no customer list. Two internal datasheets and a sales deck.

Set by the company.