As an important part of its 2025 digital strategy, Givaudan recently launched its Customer Foresight. This proprietary futurescaping platform, built in-house at the company’s Digital Factory in Paris, leverages Givaudan’s human expertise, big data and AI to anticipate tomorrow’s challenges, foresee consumer expectations, and create winning food experiences.
According to Givaudan, Customer Foresight is an industry first, as the platform is able to identify early indications about impending, future shifts that will impact the food and beverage industry.
It is designed to support customers in understanding, planning for and addressing disruptive changes in consumer desires, guiding strategic planning, and leading to co-creation opportunities. As the company anticipates for the platform to become smarter through AI, Customer Foresight will have the ability to anticipate what’s next a decade from now – or beyond.
“We’re dedicated to helping our customers understand and unravel the complexities of consumers’ evolving needs and expectations. I’m truly excited about the limitless applications and use-cases that Customer Foresight will provide,” explained Louie D’Amico, President Taste & Wellbeing, Givaudan. “Our experts are able to gain insight and foresight into any future food or beverage opportunity. Their resulting foresights can include anything from customisable and transversal future scenarios, to visualized target personas brought to life virtually.”
The company announced its development of Customer Foresight during the first half of 2022 and has been working with a select group of customers in different markets testing it from end-to-end. The results from the pilot showed forward-thinking and new experience concepts which are driven by data.
Nandita Prabhu, Customer Foresight Director at Givaudan said, “For our customers, understanding potential futures in a category, particular market, and for a specific target consumer can be a game-changer. In our recent pilot programme we supported a customer in turning around declining growth in their carbonated soft drinks category in an important emerging market. Customer Foresight considered every aspect of the market – the region, country, segment, category, and brand dynamics, as well as related or adjacent consumer and product attributes and movements.”
From there, AI refined, sorted and clustered the data into clear patterns of weak signals and drivers of change, which ranged from demographic and social to economic, and environmental.
“Our foresight experts, known as ‘futurescapers,’ then mapped these patterns and created potential scenarios, leading to specific ideas for new product experiences. The result was true, actionable foresight that – in a fast and entirely new way – guided high value concepts fit to address a complex issue such as declining growth. This really is an industry first,” added Prabhu.
“Customer Foresight has now been rolled out to Givaudan futurescapers globally for selective use on key opportunities that meet certain thresholds. Givaudan’s exclusive AI enabled capability will continue to evolve through data enrichment and deep learning to create unique and disruptive innovations as it anticipates what is to come in the years ahead.”
This news follows on from Givaudan celebrating its 30th anniversary for Sense It, a taste language created by the company to enable consumers to better express what aspects of a product they do or do not like.
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