A food processing company produces a variety of cookies in the mid-tier price range (value segment); Dad's, oatmeal, milk chocolate chip and sugar. All are nut-free. The company wants to expand its selection. The front end innovation process has yielded four new cookie ideas:

The lemon cream filled sugar cookies use the sugar cookie dough base, cut into a different shape with a lemon cream filling sandwiched between two of the sugar cookies. Additional equipment is required to mix and extrude the filling, to cut the different cookie shape and to assemble the cookies. Aside from lemon flavouring and colouring, no new ingredients need to be purchased.

The almond brittle cookies use the Dad's cookie base with almond brittle bits, which is an inexpensive waste product from a candy manufacturer. Other than adding the almond brittle bits to the formulation with minor adjustments to the process, there are no additional modifications to production required.

The dark chocolate with peanut butter chip cookie is a more "luxury" cookie. The dark chocolate and the peanut butter chips will need to be purchased and are more expensive ingredients than any of the other cookies. Production processes are the same as the current chocolate chip cookie.

The oatmeal/hemp seed cookies with the yogurt chips use hemp seed, which is added to the oatmeal base along with the yogurt chips. These additional ingredients are less expensive than the ingredients required for the chocolate peanut butter chip cookie option, but more than the almond brittle cookies. This requires adding the hemp seeds and yogurt chips, and a number of costly modifications to the production process.

The peanut butter chip and the almond brittle options introduce nuts into the product offerings, this will require changes to labelling of all the products and will impact its nut-free brand status. The existing packaging products will not require any changes although the lemon cookie packages will contain less of the assembled cookies per package, which will affect pricing.

Which cookie option would have the most impact, positive and/or negative, on their brand?

1 The almond brittle cookie

2 The lemon filled sugar cookies

3 The dark chocolate and peanut butter chip cookie

4 The oatmeal, hemp seed and yogurt chip cookie