How the Amazon Innovation Accelerator helped MAHI take a more systematic approach to innovation

For a small business, every new idea comes with a choice. Either you pursue it or put it aside. Making that choice can be the difference between innovation that creates value and innovation that simply consumes resources. 

For MAHI, this became more important as the business looked at how it develops and packages new products, and how the ingredients it uses are grown. With ambitious sustainability goals in place, Director Dee Bakshi joined the Amazon Innovation Accelerator to find a better way to assess ideas and decide where to invest. 

From good ideas to better decisions 

MAHI is a British food brand specialising in sauces, marinades and condiments. Founded in 2008, it has family roots in garlic farming in Himachal Pradesh, India. MAHI leads product development, sales and growth, while its sister company Eastern Country Foods manufactures the range in the Cambridgeshire Fens. 

We’ve always been quick to try things: a new flavour, a new format, a packaging change. What we didn’t always do was step back and ask if it fitted our strategy and would pay off. Amazon's programme made us far more disciplined about that before we commit time and money.

Amazon’s PRFAQ model gave Dee a different way to approach innovation, encouraging him to examine an idea from the perspective of each stakeholder, identify potential obstacles and work backwards from the desired outcome. 

The clearest example was a new product. Normally, we’d have gone straight into the kitchen. Instead, we wrote the press release first – who it’s for, what goes on the pack and what a retail buyer would ask. That surfaced a packaging problem before we’d spent anything on development, making the product much stronger.

Putting a more systematic approach in place 

The new approach has changed more than how Dee evaluates ideas. It is also shaping how MAHI thinks about packaging, its supply chain and its route to net zero. 

We now look at packaging as a whole system and we ask suppliers much harder questions about what goes into their materials and whether they can be recycled. Our target is to eliminate plastic in MAHI packaging by 2030 and Amazon’s PRFAQ gave us a way to test each step against that target.

The same thinking is being applied further up the supply chain. The business is now working with growers and ingredient suppliers to improve soil health and traceability, so that its sustainability story starts in the field, not on the label. 

Our family grew garlic, so a regenerative supply chain isn’t a marketing line for us – it’s where we came from Amazon's programme gave us a way to build the commercial case before we ask a grower to change anything.

MAHI is also connecting supplier and purchasing data so the team can benchmark decisions, factor in sustainability and Extended Producer Responsibility, and plan further ahead. 

More conviction to lead innovation 

For Dee, one of the biggest changes has been the confidence to make decisions knowing ideas have been properly considered. 

I have far more conviction in our decisions now, because we’ve done the work. We challenge the assumptions, find the constraints and work out how we’d handle the risks before we commit money or management time. 

The result is a more systematic approach to innovation, helping MAHI decide which ideas deserve investment across its products, packaging and supply chain.