August 2019

Curion’s Growth Plan for 2019 is 32%.

    “We have brought in professionals from leading Fortune 500 companies, including leading data companies and airlines as we need support to continue our growth and continue to develop and introduce new products.”

In an effort to keep up with their explosive growth and new initiatives, Deerfield based Curion, http://www.curioninsights.com, a leader in sensory and consumer product research and serves Fortune 500 and other blue-chip CPG customers in the food & beverage, personal care, fragrance and home & fabric industries, has hired 35 new employees since the beginning of 2019. Under the direction of CEO Sean Bisceglia, who joined the company in November 2018, Curion has introduced a number of new initiatives including eFive ™, a product that quickly delivers reliable consumer insights and is both affordable for emerging brands and positioned to be part of the agile development process that large CPG companies require. S2P followed, where Curion evaluates features that are important to maximizing liking and integrate product, packaging and positioning to reinforce each other. The latest innovation is Life Labs™, an initiative that tests products to gain consumer insights in a real-life environment. These services have fueled the company’s need to bring on seasoned experts in a number of different departments throughout the organization.

According to Bisceglia, “Curion is moving in innovative directions very quickly. We have recently introduced eFive ™ and Life Labs™ to our offerings. With our services for our customers expanding and the increasing number of industries we are serving, our internal staff needs to be broad-based and stacked with leaders in all areas of concentration. We have hired outside of our industry to add invaluable insight and perspective as Curion continues to evolve. Says Bisceglia, “We have brought in professionals from leading Fortune 500 companies, including leading data companies and airlines as we need support to continue our growth and continue to develop and introduce new products. These additions to our company will ensure that we can provide our clients with the most exceptional talent across the industry.”

The largest increase for Curion in hires has been in the Sales, Analytics and Marketing teams. This investment has already paid off as Curion has recently been recognized for their marketing efforts for several campaigns, including the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals as dotCOMM award winners and through the Summit International Awards organization as Summit Creative Award winners.

About Curion:

At Curion, we provide world-class insights. From quantitative to qualitative product research, we apply proven industry-leading, innovative methods to service over 65% of Global 100 companies. As a full-service product and sensory insights firm, we work with our clients to determine not only what products consumers like but why they are liked and how to make optimizations. As a result, our clients mitigate risk of marketplace failure by ensuring that only products of quality and character will be introduced to the market, providing repeatable delight to their consumers. We accomplish this with our expert employees, sensory processes, fully-equipped facilities and data insights. In 2018 alone, we tested 97,000 consumers across our San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas and New York metropolitan-area facilities. The result of a merger between Q Research Solutions and Tragon Corp., our company brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the consumer and sensory science industries and pioneered many of the sensory methodologies considered industry standards today, including Quantitative Descriptive Analysis (QDA)® and Partnership Solutions™.

How consumers buy and experience food is changing with the emergence of online shopping and a busy on-the-go culture, so it only makes sense that how companies test potential new products also evolves to better align with modern usage and values, according to consumer insight and product testing firm Curion.

“Consumer habits and styles are changing, including where they are shopping, the brands they want, what they look for, the value propositions and claims and packaging and tastes they like – it is all changing,”​ Curion CEO Sean Bisceglia told FoodNavigator-USA at the Digital Food & Beverage conference​ in Austin, Texas.

And as such, he explained, companies can no longer rely on old taste test data that may have helped them create successful products in the past but which is no longer current. Neither can they rely on the same old tactics for reaching consumers, such as rounding them up at a mall for a small focus group, in part because these strategies can take too long in today’s rapid innovation cycle, he said.

In response, Bisceglia said, Curion has developed four new ways of connecting with consumers or analyzing taste and sensory data to distinguish whether a new product will be a success.

The first is a new “self-serve” online portal called eFive that launched in February and is all about helping companies “fail fast and fail cheap,”​ Biscelgia said.

He explained that the sensory and product insights platform is specifically designed for emerging brands – whether at a startup or within a larger established company – that are trying to get to market as fast as possible with a minimally viable product.

Recognizing that emerging brands often have more limited budgets, eFive is an “off-the-shelf”​ take on Curion’s more traditional and tailored sensory testing that comes in around $7,500 versus $50,000 for Curion’s more premium offerings. The platform allows brands go online and choose how many products it wants to test, where it wants to test them, how many consumers it wants and then “swipe the credit card and off you go,”​ Biscelgia said.

[Editor’s note: See Curion in action at our upcoming Food For Kids conference in Chicago in the fall. Find all the details HERE​.]​

“Big data” could provide answers to big questions​

The second way that Curion hopes to soon help brands is by harnessing the sensory data it has collected from testing more than 7,000 products in 30 categories with more than a half million consumers over the years.

Curion is still working out the kinks on how companies will be able to access the data, but the general idea is that brands can come to Curion with specific questions and based on anonymized past consumer test results Curion can provide detailed guidance and answers.

For example, if a company wanted to launch a new oatmeal but wasn’t sure what type of raisin to include, Curion could comb through its past data to provide insights on how consumers responded to different types of raisins in different oatmeals. Or, if a company wanted to develop an oatmilk, Curion could provide guidance on what qualities consumers like and don’t like about the category.

“We might be putting ourselves out of business with this, but the data we have is very valuable and can be harnessed to help brands go to market faster and be more agile,”​ he said.

Curion hopes to pilot this “big data play” by January 2020, and then make it available more broadly after that.

Life Labs allows for real life testing​

The third way that Curion already is helping brands gather consumer insights in today’s quickly evolving world, is through its Life Labs program, which is about to get a boost with a few prospective in context partners.

“We are exploring a potential partnership with an international shared workspace. This will allow us to pop-up​ anywhere in their 300 locations”​ to test a product and gain consumer insights in a real-life environment, Biscelgia said.

The Life Labs program also works with gyms and other community hubs to test products “in a more natural environment” with people who are eager to be apart of the creation process, he added.

Behavior scientists in the Life Labs program also offer virtual reality rooms where they create mock ups of how a product might look on a store shelf and then tracks participants decision-making process as they “shop” and evaluate products.

The fourth way that Curion hopes to help companies evaluate potential products is by expanding all of its services beyond just food and beverage to include testing consumers’ sensory experiences with electronics, automobiles, packaging and more, Biscelgia said.

“Right now we are only in food, but I see a lot of potential beyond food that will follow the same general testing principles,”​ he said.

Yuck or yum? Learn from Curion about how it conducts product testing with kids at the FoodNavigator-USA FOOR FOR KIDS summit​​ November 18-20.

Curion offers four diverse ways to test potential products, gather consumer insights
By Elizabeth Crawford
19 August 2019