Fresh Thinking

Greg Silich has been named at COO at Chicago-based Curion Insights, https://www.curioninsights.com, the world class consumer insights and sensory company that accelerates client businesses by providing powerful, actionable consumer data for Fortune 500 and other blue-chip companies in the food and beverage, personal care, fine fragrance and home and fabric care industries.

Silich has held multiple C-Level roles throughout the course of his career, and has served as a senior executive with vast experience in categories such as B-to-B services, technology and market research. He is joining Curion to scale it’s rapid growth, as he will be responsible for providing strategic direction for the company’s existing client business and for the company’s operational units. In his new role, Silich reunites with Curion CEO, Sean Bisceglia. Over the last 25 years, they worked together at Leo Burnett and since, sat on countless Corporate Boards for fast growth companies.

“Consumer insights are the rocket fuel that drive business today,” says Silich. “I am thrilled to again be working with Sean and his team. Curion partners with 65% of Fortune 500 CPG companies, all leaders in their categories. The combined strength of their talent, methodologies and marketers, position Curion as a true disrupter. I look forward to contributing to their growth.”

Sean Bisceglia adds, “We’re delighted to have Greg join our team. His strengths include both the ability to think and plan at the strategic level and to manage the day-to-day, tactical challenges of rapidly changing organizations. His experience and drive will help Curion as we introduce disruptive tools for our clients and grow our footprint.”

About Curion:
Curion provides world-class quantitative and qualitative product insights. Applying proven industry-leading, innovative methods to service over 65% of Global 100 companies, Curion works with its clients to determine not only what products consumers like but why they are liked and how. As a result, Curion 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. Curion accomplishes this with its disruptive methods and approaches, sensory processes, facilities and world class data insights. In 2019 alone, Curion tested 127,000 consumers across its San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas and New York metropolitan-area facilities. The result of a merger between Q Research Solutions and Tragon Corp., Curion brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the consumer science industries.

CONTACT INFORMATION
Lisa Spathis, Lisa Spathis Public Relations, Inc.,
lisaspathis@gmail.com
847. 831.1367

With technology and predictive analytics encroaching on human functions across all industries, why do CPG companies still use testers in product development?

Read the latest Food Dive article where Curion’s CEO, Sean Bisceglia, speaks to how product and consumer insights firms must evolve to integrate large shifts in the industry and how his company has created services to pair with these transformations.

Additionally, hear from two of their clients, Mars Wrigley and Ferrara, on how their R&D priorities have changed with increased access to consumer feedback

The Prepared Foods’ 37th annual New Products Conference will take place in Chicago at the Swissotel from September 30th-October 2nd. Featuring the latest information and trends presented by the Food and Beverage Industry’s top experts, the 3-day program will encourage companies to re-think their business efforts to help them obtain an edge on their competition.

As part of the New Products Conference, Chicago-based Curion (https://www.curioninsights.com), a leader in sensory and consumer product research will host an exclusive Sensory Luncheon experience on September 30th with Swissotel’s lead chef, Dan McGee. After the luncheon, Keren Novack, Curion’s VP of Client Services, will illustrate the application of consumer insights in context using live data from a recent Life Labs™study. Says Novack, “Attendees will be surprised to find out who the consumers are!”

“The most revered food and beverage companies are having to evolve how they create new products to stand out on the shelf. With this evolving creation process, our research methods must also evolve. As more new products are being introduced, the way we think about, approach and apply our methods to gain consumer insights is changing. The area of focus will be how consumers perceive a particular product and the influence of environment- therefore, Curion is innovating both in and out of the lab,” continued Novack.

During 2018, Curion, which serves Fortune 500 and other blue-chip customers in the food & beverage as well as personal care, fine fragrance, and home & fabric care industries, Curion tested 97,000 consumers in its facilities in Chicago, California, Dallas, and New Jersey. The leading legacy brands have long enjoyed the competitive advantage of sensory research, coupled with precise data analytics. Curion aims to make sensory research widely available, recently debuting its eFive™ platform that offers emerging brands and global CPGs quick, accurate, and affordable consumer insights. This solution democratizes access to the knowledge challenger brands need most to succeed with a suite of offerings.

Curion is also using data to transform the way that consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies execute product testing for their brands. While product testing had been one of the last industries to embrace big data, Curion is guiding both long standing and established brands, as well as unheralded and emerging brands in the design of their packaging to meet and optimize consumer preference.

For more information on the New Products conference, visit https://www.preparedfoods.com/new-products-conference/agenda.

About Curion:
Curion provides world-class insights. From quantitative to qualitative product research, Curion applies proven industry-leading, innovative methods to service over 65% of Global 100 companies. As a full-service product and sensory insights firm, Curion works with its clients to determine not only what products consumers like but why they are liked and how to make optimizations. As a result, Curion 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. Curion accomplishes this with its expert employees, sensory processes, fully-equipped facilities and data insights. In 2018 alone, Curion tested 97,000 consumers across its San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas and New York metropolitan-area facilities. The result of a merger between Q Research Solutions and Tragon Corp., Curion 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™.

CONTACT INFORMATION
Lisa Spathis, Lisa Spathis Public Relations, Inc.,
lisaspathis@gmail.com
847. 831.1367

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

Alyssa Hayes has been named Vice President of Data and Consumer Insights for Chicago-based Curion, https://www.curioninsights.com. Curion is a leading provider of consumer research and product sensory testing for both legacy and challenger brands in the food and beverage, personal care, fragrance, and home care categories.

Hayes is an experienced leader of data and research and has a history of providing insights that are used to drive decisions throughout organizations.

According to Curion CEO, Sean Bisceglia, “Our clients include legacy and emerging brands, all seeking to launch products that disrupt their respective categories and build loyalty. Alyssa has a track record of providing insights that are used to drive decisions throughout organizations. Her passion for data decision making, collaboration, building cross-functional relationships and establishing and growing strong teams will serve Curion well.” Continues Bisceglia, “As the future of sensory product testing is replaced with big data, Alyssa will help to guide Curion through this evolution and build a process that will be second to none in the industry for our clients and help them to utilize data as an accurate and measurable indicator.”

At Curion, Hayes will lead her team with a focus on delivering insights and strategic recommendations to clients. She will immediately create a team that will provide the best analytics, but above all, streamline the process and drive efficiency in the company’s data services and analytics teams.

Prior to joining Curion, Hayes worked at Gogo and served as their Senior Director of Data Strategy and Insights. While there, she led a team responsible for delivering insights and recommendations leveraging database analytics, web analytics, and qualitative and quantitative research findings. Additionally, she improved the organization’s insights and decision-making capabilities by establishing an internally managed customer panel used for ad-hoc monthly research projects.

“I am excited to be a part of Curion’s vision,” says Hayes, “and I look forward to adding my signature to this vital endeavor. Consumer insights are the guidepost for all new product innovation. As Curion is poised to become the number 1 sensory and consumer insights company in the world, we must provide our clients with meaningful insights powered by quality data that my team will deliver.” Continues Hayes, ” I am thrilled to be part of this best-in-class company.”

About Curion
Curion is a leader in sensory and consumer product research and serves Fortune 500 and other blue-chip customers in the food & beverage, personal care, fine fragrance, and home & fabric care industries. In 2018 alone, the company tested 97,000 consumers in its facilities in San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, and New York metropolitan areas. Curion’s insights provide data such as product readiness for launch, consumer purchase decision process, competitive landscape and more to its clients. The result of a merger between Q Research Solutions and Tragon Corp., Curion brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the consumer and sensory science industry. The company pioneered many of the sensory methodologies considered industry standards today, including Quantitative Descriptive Analysis (QDA)® and Partnership Solutions (PS)

CONTACT INFORMATION
Lisa Spathis, Lisa Spathis Public Relations, Inc.,
lisaspathis@gmail.com
847. 831.1367

CHICAGO IL

Andrew Livermore has been named Senior Vice President of Product & Client Services Strategy for Chicago-based Curion, https://www.curioninsights.com. Curion is a leading provider of consumer research and product sensory testing for both legacy and challenger brands in the food and beverage, personal care, fragrance and home care categories.

Livermore, an experienced leader of consumer, sensory, market and product research, has had global responsibility in the FMCG/CPG industry, focusing on product innovation. He has expertise with a wide variety of research and trend analytics tools, working with R&D and Marketing leaders to create new opportunities that align with business strategies.

According to Curion CEO, Sean Bisceglia, “Our clients include legacy and emerging brands, all seeking to launch products that disrupt their respective categories and build loyalty. Andrew has a track record working with large consumer packaged goods companies, where he identified innovation opportunities, sharpened positioning and used consumer insights to optimize product performance.”

At Curion, Andrew will lead the account management team with a focus on strategies for growth. He has been instrumental in launching new platforms such as eFIve™, designed specifically for emerging brands. He also helped to design Curion’s Packaging Optimization Approach, a unique testing methodology specifically for packaging.

Prior to joining Curion, Livermore worked at Kellogg Company and served as their Global Director of Product and Consumer Science. While there, he led a team of scientists and contractors to direct consumer, sensory science and shelf- life research. He worked with R&D and Marketing to provide consumer and sensory insights with the mission to commercialize on-trend food products and packaging. Prior to that, Livermore served in global leadership roles at Edgewell Personal Care and Avon. In the words of Sean Bisceglia, “Andrew is a perfect addition to our team.”

“Curion has been the go-to research provider while I was on the client side,” says Livermore. “Curion is unique in its ability to deliver both sensory and product research on a wealth of consumer categories. On multiple occasions, they executed research under nearly impossible time constraints when I really needed it. Their consumer database enables them to provide study respondents from across the nation and from all demographic groups. Curion is moving in innovative directions in response to the evolving retail space. In fact, they pioneered many of the sensory methodologies that are industry standards today. I am thrilled to be part of this forward-thinking team.”

About Curion

Curion is a leader in sensory and consumer product research and serves Fortune 500 and other blue-chip customers in the food & beverage, personal care, fine fragrance, and home & fabric care industries. In 2018 alone, the company tested 97,000 consumers in its facilities in San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, and New York metropolitan areas. Curion’s insights provide data such as: product readiness for launch, consumer purchase decision process, competitive landscape and more to its clients. The result of a merger between Q Research Solutions and Tragon Corp., Curion brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the consumer and sensory science industry. The company pioneered many of the sensory methodologies considered industry standards today, including Quantitative Descriptive Analysis (QDA®) and Partnership Solutions (PS).

CONTACT INFORMATION
Lisa Spathis, Lisa Spathis Public Relations, Inc.,
lisaspathis@gmail.com
847. 831.1367

A consumer’s embrace of a new brand begins before they ever try the product. If the packaging is inappropriate, brand acceptance can fail and consumers may not choose the product to start with. That’s why first impressions matter.

For example, in a FoodDive article on packaging fails, there is the story about Sun Chips’ biodegradable bag made from plants. What Millennial wouldn’t love that? But sales began to decline shortly after launch because the bag made a loud “grumbling” noise that consumers said reminded them of a jet engine or lawnmower. It even spawned a Facebook group called “Sorry but I can’t hear you over this Sun Chips bag.”

This is just the type of scenario Curion can help brands avoid. A well-respected partner to leading consumer brands in the area of product and sensory testing, Curion is now turning its research and consumer expertise toward packaging.

“We believe in a holistic approach,” says Sean Bisceglia, Curion’s CEO. “All elements of a brand’s offering — the product, positioning, messaging and the package itself — need to tell a cohesive story, one that gives consumers a reason-to-believe that this product is the right one for them.”

The goal of Curion’s consumer driven package design approach is to develop the ultimate prototype and test its viability with consumers. This rigorous system, designed by Curion’s Andrew Livermore PhD, Senior Vice President for Product and Client Services, is already available at Curion sites across the nation.

Says Livermore, “Big CPG companies spend a lot of time and money developing products, but the packaging often doesn’t get the same emphasis. We work alongside brand marketers, designers, and product developers, taking them through a six-step process that identifies the functional and emotional benefits most important to the target consumers. This informs the creation of packaging prototypes with strong consumer appeal that reinforce the concept and positioning. We then put prototypes in front of consumer panels and even gain insights from large-scale confirmatory testing.”

For example, sustainable packaging is also imperative today for many retailers like Wal-Mart who have set high standards, demanding that packaging for their private brands be recyclable or compostable by 2025.

Adds Livermore, “Our process answers questions such as: Is the product positioned for sustainability? Does the packaging reflect those values? You may not want a health bar in a non-recyclable package. ”

Curion’s consumer-driven packaging design approach addresses the above questions and drills down into others, such as:

•    Does package design fit your product concept?

•    Does it take a creative approach to restraints such as budget, time to market, and types of materials?

•    Can it be executed without unreasonable demands?

•    Does it reflect the appropriate functional and emotional benefits?

•    Is it differentiated from competitors?

•    Does it check all the boxes for sensory appeal on the shelf?

“The main goal of our packaging research,” adds Mr. Bisceglia, “is to mitigate risk on behalf of our clients. We are thorough. Our approach combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies.”

Curion’s Qualitative Sensory Immersion (QSI) identifies key features that enhance product trial and repeat purchase through collaboration with articulate and involved consumers. Adds Livermore, “Using this tool for packaging allows us to tap attributes such as alignment with brand, concept, the products function, ergonomics, usability, materials, believability, sustainability and quality. We also learn what is most important to them and what drives them crazy. All these insights get built into our prototypes.”

“On the quantitative side,” he adds, “we recruit consumers from our extensive database. They provide feedback on prototypes regarding overall liking, drivers of consumer appeal, fit to product concept, uniqueness and emotional profile. The value of this Qual-Quant method is that it combines the rich learnings from talking and interacting with consumers — backed by the numerical validation that comes from data analytics. This helps transform packaging concepts into best-possible prototypes that have strong consumer appeal.”

Curion is a leader in sensory and consumer product research and serves Fortune 500 and other blue-chip customers in the food & beverage, personal care, fine fragrance, and home & fabric care industries. In 2018 alone, the company tested 97,000 consumers in its facilities in California, Chicago, Dallas, and New Jersey. Curion’s data analytics give brand owners what they need most: product readiness for launch, consumer purchase decision process, competitive landscape and more.

The result of a merger between Q Research Solutions and Tragon Corp., Curion brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the consumer and sensory science industry. The company pioneered many of the sensory methodologies considered industry standards today, including Quantitative Descriptive Analysis (QDA)®  and Partnership Solutions (PS).

Visit www.curioninsights.com for more information.

Curion: First Impressions
Curion applies its research lens to consumer-driven package design
21 May 2019

Do kids always prefer sweeter products than adults? And are children’s palates really more conservative, or have we ‘trained’ them to like a limited set of flavors (banana, chocolate, vanilla, strawberry) by playing it safe with new launches? And how do you conduct product testing with three-year olds?

For a start, said Keren Novack, VP sensory and consumer insights at Deerfield, IL-based consumer insights and product testing specialist Curion​​, CPG companies need to develop products that parents will like as much as their kids, even if they are not the target consumer.

“A lot of products we test that are geared towards children are also tested with parents, because very rarely does a parent give something to a young child that they have not first tested themselves,”​ she told FoodNavigator-USA.

“As far as the taste goes, how the children rate it matters the most, but you want to make sure that the product is not rejected by the parents.”​

If parents and​ very young children consistently prefer product A over product B, meanwhile, the more detailed answers that the adults are able to provide on specific product attributes might help clients unpack what is determining liking among the kids, which three-year olds may not be able to articulate if you ask them, she said.

Children can be much more adventurous than we give them credit for​

So what about flavor preferences? Are kids as conservative as we think? It’s hard to say because packaged food companies – unlike parents trying to get their kids to eat veggies at home – want to make products that kids will embrace immediately, not something that they might like after repeated exposure, which can encourage an inherent conservatism, said Novack.

Put another way, if we only expose kids to a limited number of flavors, they will inevitably have a less adventurous palate, she speculated.

“Children can be much more adventurous than we give them credit for. What I’ve found from personal experience is that if you just put broccoli or whatever the new food is on the plate every meal, then after a while they might eat it.​

“But if you’re buying a snack for your child’s lunchbox, you are often scared if kids don’t like something straightaway as you don’t want to waste time and money and you want them to eat, so you can tend to stick to the more familiar products.​

“It’s also why products have a lot of sugar added because it increases the likelihood that the children will like them straightaway. But you wonder if that is because we’ve just exposed them to so much sugar.”​

Do kids like food with ‘bits’?​

The same might also apply to texture, she postulated. If you give babies “mushy​” pureed foods for any length of time, could this make them more suspicious of different textures?

“With the baby led weaning movement, where you’re encouraged to expose them to pieces of food off your plate earlier, I have to think that the exposure to those different textures might impact what they end up liking later.”​

She added: “One thing I also warn my clients is that if you just take one or two bites of something in a testing booth, you can often prefer a product with more sugar or a stronger flavor, but if you were to take the product home and eat the entire box, the flavor build and development can be very different, so you have to factor that in. The sweeter products often win out in early testing, but I think we are seeing a shift now.”​

Blind taste testing​

While packaged food is not consumed ‘blind’ (it always comes in a package with branding and messaging which can have a huge impact on how its contents are perceived), there is still value in blind testing at the product development phase, said Novack.

“We always say that m​arketing will do all the work to get people to buy a product the first time, but that our our job​ ​[for Curion’s CPG clients] is to get people to buy the product a second time.​ So when you’re considering different prototypes or you want to know how your product stacks up against the competition, blind testing is very important.”​

If your product performs better in blind taste tests than a rival brand with stronger sales, for example, you might need to look again at your packaging or marketing.

One interesting phenomenon, said Novack, is that the market leading product is not always the most liked product in blind taste tests with adults, whereas with kids, that is more likely to be the case.

“We’ve had kids say, ‘Excuse me, I don’t like this,’ and push it back through the window,” says Curion VP sensory and consumer insights, Keren Novack. “Kids are not afraid to tell you the truth.”

The logistics of product testing with children​

When it comes to designing tests, “obviously what a six-year-old can handle is very different from what an 18-year old can handle, so with adults we’ll use a nine point hedonic scale, whereas for younger kids we may use a three-point scale for liking but also for things like flavors, colors, and textures,” ​she said.

“Was the flavor too strong, too weak, or just about right? ​

“One thing we’ve also noticed is that adults tend to have what we call ‘end scale avoidance’ and are almost afraid to mark the very highest point, whereas if a kid likes something they will often give it the highest mark. But that can make it hard to compare two products they like.”​

So what about babies and toddlers?

“We’ve actually done tests with children that are just a year old, and when you’re talking about a child that young, they are obviously not filling in a questionnaire on a computer,” ​joked Novack. “Rather the parents are looking for cues from their children as to whether they like something or not. However, at that age it’s quite simply will they eat it, but you can also see which ones they choose from a selection of products.​

“For particularly young children you can have an interviewer read some questions and the older children get the more complex you can make the scale. If I have a 12 or 13 year old in sitting a testing booth however, I’d consider putting them on the similar scales to the adults.”​

Can you train your kids to love broccoli?​

Find out at FoodNavigator-USA’s FOOD FOR KIDS summit​​ in Chicago November 18-20, where delegates can hear from Dr Catherine Forestell, associate professor, at the department of psychological sciences at William & Mary, who will explore when and how children’s flavor preferences are developed, why children prefer or dislike certain foods, and whether we can shift these hardwired preferences through early sensory experience.

You can also learn more about product testing with Curion and others in our new panel session: Yuck or Yum: Product testing with kids.

Get full details about the summit​​ HERE​​​.

FOOD FOR KIDS: Yuck or yum? Product testing with children
By Elaine Watson
03 May 2019

CHICAGO IL

Kari Mannina has been named Global Strategy Director for Chicago-based Curion, http://www.curioninsights.com,. Curion is a leading provider of consumer research and sensory testing for both legacy and challenger brands in the food & beverage, personal care, fragrance, and home care categories. Mannina is an experienced account manager with a specialty in sales and marketing in the market research industry.

“Our clients include legacy and emerging brands, all seeking to launch innovative products and find loyal consumers. Kari has a track record from large companies where she grew accounts, achieved year-over-year growth and collaborated with marketing teams to drive brand awareness. She has worked with global brands, and she will be a great asset as we seek to expand our current client base with large, global clients,” says Sean Bisceglia, CEO of Curion.

Mannina will be responsible for the acquisition, growth and expansion of new clients to the Curion roster. She has almost 10 years of account management experience in sales and marketing within the market research industry. Most recently, she worked at Mintel and served as a Senior Account Manager of CPG Sales. There she managed a portfolio consisting of top CPG manufacturers and suppliers in the food and beauty sectors while also growing the portfolio via product upgrades, or engaging clients in Mintel Consultancy & Mintel Services. Prior to Mintel, she was with HelloWorld (formerly ePrize), where she partnered with top CPG and retail accounts to develop and implement thoughtful digital campaigns to support client specific marketing initiatives.

“Curion is my dream job,” says Mannina. “In addition to account management, my career has touched on key disciplines such as product development, R&D and digital marketing. Curion pioneered many of the sensory methodologies that are industry standards today. I am excited about joining this forward-thinking team.”

About Curion
Curion is a leader in sensory and consumer product research to top companies across the United States. In 2018 alone, the company tested 97,000 consumers for 25 leading brands. Their insights provide a wealth of data such as product readiness for launch, consumer purchase decision process, key attributes for optimization, market and demographic opportunity, flavor and texture profiles, competitive landscape and more. Curion was formed with the merger of Q Research Solutions and Tragon Corp.’

CONTACT INFORMATION
Lisa Spathis, Lisa Spathis Public Relations, Inc.,
lisaspathis@gmail.com
847. 831.1367