Culinary & Creative

At Highland Baking Co., our culinary team blends proven research methods with strategic food immersions to deliver meaningful, real-time market insights for your brand. We partner with you to explore opportunities that drive innovation and connect with your target consumers.

Our services include:
• Targeted trend reports
• Category and day-part food immersions
• Customized ideation sessions, held at our Northbrook facility or your location of choice

Our team is professionally trained in session facilitation and is fully focused on delivering customer- and consumer-driven results. We’re here to help you generate breakthrough ideas that resonate with your audience and fuel your brand’s success.

Developing new products is our passion. Concepts that embody your company’s identity and speak to consumers are the building blocks of brand equity. Using a holistic and integrated approach, we study your brand, target current and world markets, and develop strategic initiatives to create prototype concepts that are innovative, exciting, and unique to your brand.

Our collective team combines vision, passion, creativity, and the experience to provide assistance with individual items as well as entire menus. Using photography, art, graphics, and style, we bring a whole new meaning to industry-leading menu writing and design, suitable for any consumer base.

Our team of experienced chefs is here to support your culinary and operational goals. Whether you're launching a new product or enhancing an existing one, we provide hands-on expertise to help ensure success. We offer assistance with:

Looking for fresh culinary inspiration? You’ve come to the right place. Our team of Chefs stays on the pulse of what’s current and what’s next, by closely monitoring the food scenes in key urban markets and trend-forward neighborhoods.
We can strategically tailor trend research to align with your target demographics, delivering insights that help shape relevant and impactful product strategies.
Our custom trend presentations can include:

We believe food is far more than fuel—it’s an experience. Food is art, emotion, and expression. The perfect dish has the power to inspire, connect, and create lasting impressions—much like a masterpiece painting or a moving piece of music. In an industry that never stops evolving, we’re here to help you stay ahead of the curve with ideas that truly stand out in the marketplace.

S.C.A.M.P.E.R is an acronym for the following set of categories and actions that we use during the Ideation & Innovation sessions: (S) Substitute, (C) Combine, (A) Adapt, (M)Modify/Magnify/Minimize, (P) Put to other uses, (E) Eliminate, and (R) Reverse/Rearrange. The method presents each person with a set of possible action categories to generate ideas that may be used to develop solutions to a design problem(s).

Let the food experts lead you through a total food immersion and experience trends first-hand. Join our chefs as they lead you and your team on a Culinary Immersion Tour tailored to your brand’s needs. Tours can be targeted to anything, from specific dishes to distinct food types, from style of cuisine to restaurant type, from a city to a region, or from a menu category to a specific day part…the options are virtually limitless.