Capabilities

Sensory

Turning "yummy" into "mouthcoating"

Sensory translators

Creamy. Crunchy. Rich. Mouth-watering. All words consumers use to describe textures and eating experiences. They're useful for marketers, but imprecise for food developers. So we start by engaging in our own consumer insights.

Consumer insights

Consumer testing helps us benchmark leading products to tell us what consumers like and what terms they use to describe food texture.

Descriptive analysis

How do we translate consumer terms into actionable data for food scientists? We turn to our expert descriptive sensory panel for sensory analysis and to our material science experts for instrumental analysis to characterise the texture of a product. They, in turn, translate this vocabulary into fundamental sensory and rheological terms that are objective, measurable and quantifiable.

We might begin by characterising a specific set of competitive products that represent the texture diversity across an application space to create a texture map. From this we can then identify the key textural attributes for that application. If this were your product, you would then be able to see how you stack up against the competition and where you can improve or differentiate your textural attributes.

Consumer testing

Armed with benchmarks, precise language and consumer insight, our expert analysts brainstorm with our technical teams to assess ingredient interaction and performance, which leads to fast-track prototype development. In turn, these prototypes can be quickly put into the hands of consumers for preference testing.

This all means you get exactly the products and formulations you need with a faster time to market.