During his career, Parrott, 44, has targeted younger consumers with sugar-laden breakfast cereal and used free toys to push crisps. Now he heads up the marketing department at chilled-foods company Daniels Group, which owns the New Covent Garden Food Co and Johnson's freshly squeezed orange juice brands.
Parrott took an unconventional route into marketing. He graduated with a degree in biology before landing a job at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
He then switched to accountancy, working at Rank Hovis McDougall, now part of Premier Foods. However, after a short secondment to the company's marketing department he decided 'the marketers were having a lot more fun than the accountants' and opted for another career change.
After Rank Hovis, Parrott moved to Cereal Partners, working on brands such as Shreddies and Lucky Charms. He admits that, despite lavish marketing spend, Lucky Charms was not successful in the UK, because most parents here were not willing to feed their children a breakfast cereal containing marshmallow pieces.
In 1993, he moved again, to Golden Wonder to work on its snack brands. Two years later he was a member of the team that negotiated a management buy-out. However, after struggling to make a success of the company, the team decided to split up the business in 2001, selling off key brands such as Wotsits, which went to Walkers. 'We were always going to be outgunned by [Walkers owner] PepsiCo,' he concedes.
An eternal optimist, Parrott accentuates the positive, and takes credit where he feels it is due. 'During my time at Golden Wonder, people remember me for the growth I achieved for Wotsits,' he says. 'I was the first person to introduce free toys into the bag-snacks market.'
These days Parrott is focused on healthier food. 'I enjoy dealing with fresh produce and chefs every day,' he says. 'I love talking about good food. I'm a foodie.'
However, joining Daniels also meant waving goodbye to huge marketing bud-gets. He must now split a relatively meagre £4m across four business sectors: fresh soup, fresh juice, desserts and ready meals. The company's biggest brand is the New Covent Garden Food Co, which Daniels acquired from its founders in 1997.
In the 90s, New Covent Garden Food Co invented the fresh-soup category, which has since grown to be worth an impressive £132m. Its spinach-and-nutmeg soup be-came a mainstay for dinner-party hosts less gifted in the culinary arts. However its stat-us as market leader has been eroded by supermarket own-brand products.
After joining Daniels, Parrott did not take long to make his mark on the brand. He relaunched the range and, due to its status within the company, it still demands the majority of his attention. 'Innocent always used to flatter us by saying its business model is based on New Covent Garden soup,' he says.
According to Parrott, he launches 12 different marketing initiatives for the brand each month, including additional flavours and brand tie-ups. However, its next brand activity, a national TV campaign, will not roll out until October 2010. This lead time may seem excessive, but it is the brand's first national TV advertising in more than a decade and Parrott intends to test the campaign, by The Brooklyn Brothers, in central England before he expands it.
Another possible reason for the cautious approach may be what he admits were several unsuccessful marketing initiatives over the past 18 months. These included a 1l-carton family-friendly variant in flavours such as carrot and coriander. He says the reaction from consumers 'wasn't great'.
However, these setbacks have been balanced out by recent successes. 'We launched 300ml products in September, which are selling extremely well,' points out Parrott. 'We also launched fruit soups in the summer, which proved popular.' He adds that the company is eyeing opportunities in other markets such as Australia and the US.
If an attempt at global expansion works out, it will be a case of second time lucky. The brand had already tried to crack the US before it was bought by Daniels, and even opened a shop in San Francisco. However, it became obvious that the majority of its customers were in the colder states of New England. There was also an unexpected problem with distribution - when the soup cartons were driven over the Rocky Mountains, the change in atmospheric pressure made them explode. Under the shadow of this ill omen the business was shut down.
In 2008, Daniels decided to diversify into ready meals, first using the New Covent Garden Company brand, and then a specially created brand, Sprout. The launch may have been doomed from the start. 'As soon as we did this, supermarkets launched their own ranges of own-brand natural ready meals and delisted us,' says Parrott. 'We were trying to get a brand into own-brand territory and we struggled.'
A year after launch Sprout still exists but has struggled to get shelf space and remains unknown to many consumers. 'We could get around it with a huge marketing spend but supermarkets would probably still re-move our brand from stores,' adds Parrott.
The brand vs own-brand issue is a thorny one. Daniels also runs a £40m food-services business supplying own-branded ready meals to supermarkets. The company is also the biggest food-service supplier of fresh fruit and freshly squeezed orange juice in the UK. Yet, Parrott is un-daunted. 'I welcome the own-brand strug-gle,' he says. 'Own-brand is part of our business.'
The fourth part of the Daniels business, is dessert products. The company owns the Farmhouse Fare hot-puddings brand, and it is reported that it recently made a play for Gü, but lost out to Nobel Foods.
Unlike most other marketers, who rarely talk about their setbacks, Parrott is almost too open about his company's mistakes. Perhaps it is the adventurer in him - he is a scoutmaster in his spare time - that makes him so willing to try different things knowing that there is a risk of failure attached to each one.
However, the figures tell the other side of the story. Since Parrott joined Daniels in 2001, the New Covent Garden Food Co has been clawing market share back. According to Nielsen it now has a 45% share of the fresh-soup market - this had fallen to just 33% share when he started in 2001. It appears that this self-styled 'foodie' has been making his mark.
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