Case Name :      Montreaux Chocolate USA: Are Americans Ready for Healthy Dark Chocolate?

Authors :           John A. Quelch, Diane Badame

Source :             HBS Brief Cases

Case ID :            914501

Discipline :        Marketing

Case Length :    12 pages

Solution sample availability : YES

Plagiarism : NO (100% Original work)

Andrea Torres, director of new product development at a high-end chocolate confectionery company, leads her team through a carefully sequenced program of market research to support the development and launch of a new product, healthy dark chocolate with fruit. This is the first time Montreaux USA, an offshoot of a Swiss confectioner, has created a product specifically for U.S. chocolate consumers. The case explains the steps Torres and her NPD team have completed and describes the decisions that lie ahead, a few months in advance of the anticipated launch. A challenging situation is intensified by a competitor also having tested a dark-chocolate-with-fruit product that was likely to be introduced into the U.S. marketplace in the near future. Students must perform a quantitative analysis as part of their work.