Upon joining the Heinz team as a Market Research Coordinator, Meghan led the research planning, execution, and analysis for three major brands within the Heinz portfolio including TGI Friday’s frozen snacks and Boston Market frozen meals.  Also, Meghan developed internal standards for Name Sort, Concept, Confirmatory (HUT), and Copy (print) testing, coding of open-ends, ROI calculation of in-store activity/promotions, as well as a Concept database which resulted in refinement of success criteria and more robust analysis around NPD projects.

As an Associate Manager of Market Research on the Ore-Ida brand (frozen potatoes), Meghan created a standard “living” document allowing the research function to accurately communicate objectives, timelines, and assumptions to the rest of the geographically-dispersed team for long-term strategic projects.  She conducted trainings relating to Copy (print) testing and qualitative methodologies to align the process across Heinz moving forward.  Meghan also led the creation of an on-site qualitative facility and co-led the development of a local panel for qualitative recruiting (saving approximately $15K per qualitative study conducted locally).

Just prior to promotion to Manager, Meghan spearheaded in-store quantitative shopper research with the goal of optimizing the frozen potatoes aisle identifying five key shopper segments (or “mindsets”) among frozen potatoes shoppers.  Additionally, Meghan used innovative technology (eCollage) to understand visual equity ownership of key brands as well as consumer-created blogs/myspace/facebook to bring various brand positions to life.

Prior to joining the HJ Heinz Company in 2004, Meghan received her Bachelor’s of Science degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Economics, obtaining minors in both Business Administration and Ethics.