orkla Foods: Getting the Right Portfolio for the Future
The development and implementation of Orkla’s portfolio strategy
TASK
Orkla Denmark is one of Denmark’s leading branded consumer goods companies, with a portfolio of 20+ well-known and locally anchored food brands across multiple categories.
With consumer needs, eating habits and food trends changing rapidly, Orkla Denmark wanted to take a more strategic and future-focused approach to managing its portfolio. The ambition was to move beyond optimizing individual brands and categories and instead create one integrated portfolio strategy capable of guiding growth across the entire business.
The challenge was to determine how Orkla Denmark’s brands and categories should evolve to remain relevant to future consumer needs while strengthening the overall competitiveness and efficiency of the portfolio.
The portfolio strategy therefore needed to answer three fundamental questions:
Where are the most attractive future growth opportunities?
How should Orkla Denmark compete to capture them?
What role should each brand and category play in the future portfolio?
The objective was to create a clear strategic framework that could guide decisions around innovation, investment, brand development, portfolio optimization and potential acquisitions — balancing short-term commercial opportunities with long-term growth.
OUR APPROACH
CPH Strategy was responsible for the strategic design, synthesis and development of the portfolio strategy, covering more than 20 brands and nine supercategories.
The project brought together extensive internal and external research from Orkla Denmark and several research partners. This included quantitative and qualitative consumer research, brand and category performance, market and competitive analysis, emerging food trends, consumption patterns and consumer demand spaces.
Our role was to bring these different sources of knowledge together and turn a large and complex body of data into clear strategic choices and actionable growth opportunities.
We structured the work around a seven-step portfolio development process:
1. Ambition
We started by aligning the portfolio work with Orkla Denmark’s overall business ambition, strategic priorities and long-term growth objectives.
2. Trends
We identified and assessed the most important food, consumer and societal trends shaping the future market — distinguishing between short-term movements and structural changes with the potential to create new growth opportunities.
3. Performance
We evaluated the existing portfolio to understand how brands, categories and subcategories were performing and where Orkla Denmark had the strongest foundations for future growth.
4. Categories
We analysed the dynamics and attractiveness of Orkla Denmark’s nine supercategories, including their size, growth potential, competitive landscape and strategic role within the overall portfolio.
5. Consumer Needs
Moving beyond traditional category definitions, we explored consumer needs, consumption occasions and demand spaces to understand where future opportunities could emerge — including opportunities that cut across existing categories and brands.
6. Growth Strategies
By combining market attractiveness, consumer needs, trends and Orkla Denmark’s existing strengths, we identified four strategic growth platforms defining where Orkla Denmark should focus its resources and how the portfolio could win.
For each growth platform, we defined the strategic opportunity, relevant demand spaces, portfolio implications and the potential roles of existing and future brands.
7. From Strategy to Action
Finally, we translated the portfolio strategy into an actionable framework for the organisation. This included defining how the strategic growth platforms should guide brand strategies, innovation pipelines, portfolio decisions and future investment priorities.
The strategy was subsequently implemented together with the individual brand management teams, ensuring that the portfolio ambition was translated into concrete opportunities and actions at brand level.
SOLUTION
The result was a future-focused portfolio strategy connecting consumer needs, market opportunities and Orkla Denmark’s brand assets within one strategic growth framework.
Rather than viewing the 20+ brands as separate businesses, the strategy established a shared perspective on where future growth should come from and how individual brands could contribute.
At the heart of the strategy were four clearly defined growth platforms, providing direction for where Orkla Denmark should invest, innovate and build stronger positions.
The framework also created a common strategic language across the organisation, enabling management and brand teams to make portfolio decisions based on the same understanding of future consumer relevance, market attractiveness and competitive advantage.
RESULT
The portfolio strategy gave Orkla Denmark a long-term strategic tool for actively managing and developing its portfolio of 20+ brands.
It established clear priorities for future growth and provided a framework for deciding where to invest, innovate, acquire, strengthen, reposition or potentially consolidate across the portfolio.
Most importantly, the strategy connected corporate ambition with brand-level action — helping ensure that Orkla Denmark’s brands do not simply respond to today’s market, but actively evolve around the consumer needs and growth spaces shaping tomorrow’s food market.
