Product Innovation

Leveraging Sensory & Consumer Studies for Food Product Innovation

Sensory and consumer studies are integral components of food product innovation, providing valuable insights into consumer preferences, perceptions, and behaviors. The combination of sensory evaluation and consumer research methodologies allows the development of innovative products that:

Resonate with target markets
Align with the brand promise and consumers’ expectations
Create a memorable experience to consumers
Drive competitive advantage

How Sensory & Consumer Studies Support the Innovation Process & Product Lifecycle?

Explore

Understanding your market, from unmet needs to competitive landscape, is key to developing either an innovative concept or a product that will differentiate from what exists on the market.

Specific studies of consumers’ habits and usages can help identify unmet needs. Ethnographic studies can be set up to support such explorations.
Gathering insights from consumers on a certain product category can support the identification of market space/opportunities.

Create

When the creation phase starts, you may encounter a significant number of concepts or prototypes. A phase of co-creation to rapidly test with your target market the most promising ideas will accelerate the development of stronger concepts.

Focus groups are an effective way to come up with an innovative concept that fits your target market.
Co-creation surveys and workshops can be deployed to engage your consumers with your product development.

Screen & Optimize

Once your prototype phase is more advanced and that the main concept is validated within your teams and with consumers, incremental improvements can be done to reach the perfect product.

A preference mapping can be performed to identify specific characteristics that contribute to consumers’ satisfaction and likeability of the product, giving R&D teams actionable insights to improve prototypes.
Triangular tests and other comparison studies can be performed to identify the product most associated with consumers’ satisfaction and design brief/perceived attributes.

We can also conduct consumer studies to refine the marketing mix, validating pricing, target market, and product positioning.

Test & Validate

Establishing the sensorial profile of the product is key before passing through the industrialization stage. This step will help ensure the conformity and consistency of the product during production.

This phase is also the final validation of the product, its packaging and marketing mix. This phase can be delicate due to investments in production, promotion, and distribution. This step can thus be supported by some data from quantitative studies, to give evidence of market demand and expected satisfaction from consumers.

Our studies are also instrumental to validate claims around your product linked to consumers satisfaction or perception of specific benefits.

Monitor

Throughout its lifecycle, we monitor the product’s market performance, continuously reassessing its attributes and sensory profiles. Regularly checking formulation, suppliers, and processes is necessary. If product demand falls short, we take corrective actions on the product or marketing mix.

Mérieux NutriSciences & Product Innovation

Our teams have an in-depth understanding of your product thanks to a multidisciplinary expertise gained for over 40 years.

Global footprint: Mérieux NutriSciences conducts sensory and consumer studies in 23+ countries globally and has 7 Centers of excellence to locally support your research protocols.
Local care: locations in 27 countries enabling us to have customer cares right next to you;
Our team of over 160 sensory and consumer studies professionals are committed to drive your research with the most adapted methodology to answer your needs.

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