Flavour Discoveries Through Interactive Cooking Sessions

The Challenge:

Our client developed new cooking sauces and creams aimed at providing simple, easy, and flavourful meal solutions. They needed to understand consumer perceptions, usage, flavour preferences, and expectations regarding these products. What did consumers think of them? How would they use it? Where would they expect to find it in store?

The Solution:

Keeping the client’s key research objectives in mind, we developed an innovative methodology to get closer to ‘the moments that matter’ for consumers – to deliver best-in-class research for our client.

We carefully recruited consumers from our active in-house panel and invited them to interactive group cooking sessions hosted at our Sense:lab facility. Participants included people who were regularly cooking healthy, nutritional meals from scratch in their household, and were open to trying something new.

The space was carefully tailored to provide individual cooking stations. Each consumer had three clear instructions: cook, taste, and reflect. They cooked a pre-determined dish (ingredients provided and chopped by us for consistency!) before tasting it.  They completed a questionnaire throughout the cooking and tasting process to capture their thoughts and feedback. The third and final step allowed our consumers to regroup, discuss, and debate their preferences collectively, allowing us to obtain the valuable qualitative insights our client desired. 

The Result:

This innovative approach, blending traditional focus groups with bespoke cooking sessions, enabled us to observe product usage, gather feedback, identify strengths and weaknesses, and preferred flavours.

The insights helped refine and optimise the products to win in the real world and ensure market success.