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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, whose shoppers are asking for food that is locally processed, chemical-free, sustainably produced and traceable. That is the pressure the product relieves.

01 · What this engagement produced

9 of 34 outputs

9 of the 34 outputs, across five of the six stages.

01Research1 of 6
03Market report

5 not produced

Voice of customer, Win / loss, Why now, Assumption log, Pre-mortem

02Competition1 of 4
08Table-stakes read

3 not produced

The Fifty, AI visibility, Competitor monitor

03Segment, position and price4 of 6
11ICP and segments13Buying committee14Positioning15Packaging and pricing

2 not produced

Use cases, Deck spine

04Message1 of 4
17Messaging framework

3 not produced

Claim check, Landing page review, Message drift

05Launch and enable2 of 8
22Launch brief23Channel and funnel

6 not produced

Launch tiers, Product Oracle, Sales enablement, FAQ, Onboarding journey, Release notes

06Measure and maintain0 of 6

6 not produced

Product funnel metrics, Launch post-mortem, Trust metrics, Customer case studies, Half-Life Map, Six-stage readout

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

02 · The decision

I sold it to the plant and wrote 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 works 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 the retailer measures the manufacturer on it.

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.

01The end user, learned 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
  • Mapped the field across three groups, each sitting in a different quadrant
  • The major industrial-gas competitors: Linde, Air Liquide and Messer
  • The regional gas suppliers
  • Equipment manufacturers such as GEA

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: 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 comes from the pain
  • No two roles get the same reason, and none of them gets 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
  • 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. Wave 1: ES, PT, FR, BE, NL. Wave 2: DE, PL, CR, SL, HU. Wave 3: IT, GR
05The 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 in a set order: 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.

The brief presented APPI and the connected freezer 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 only a maintenance tool, and no fifteen-minute version of this 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. So did the retrofit logic: the intelligence layer had to reach the installed base, which is what the launched product does.

The wording didn't survive. They market Freshline Smart Technology and Freshline IQ. That is the normal fate of a candidate's tagline, and the panel should have judged the rest of the proposal.

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.