For brand manufacturers competing on retail shelves, the ability to move faster from concept to launch directly impacts category share, sell-through, and shelf placement negotiations. Givaudan's Taste & Wellbeing Marketing & Consumer & Sensory Insights (CSI) team supports some of the world's largest food and beverage brands in developing products that capture evolving consumer preferences across beverages, dairy, sweet goods, savory, snacks, and healthcare. The team relies on consumer, category, and sensory research to inform everything from flavor development to long-term innovation strategies—and speed of execution increasingly determines competitive advantage at retail.
The Retail and Speed Challenge
Givaudan's research—the foundation for retail-ready product development—was dispersed across multiple platforms, external providers, internal systems, shared folders, and individual teams. This fragmentation created delays in responding to customer briefs, slowed product development cycles, and limited the organization's ability to quickly adapt to retail category trends and consumer sell-through signals.
Projects moved more slowly, existing research was sometimes duplicated, and teams occasionally relied on inference when relevant evidence could not be found quickly enough. Rather than generating more research, Givaudan needed a way to better leverage the knowledge it already possessed by creating a single, searchable destination for trusted insights that could accelerate time-to-market and strengthen retail performance decisions.
The Solution: Unified Insights for Faster Retail Response
After evaluating several knowledge management platforms, Givaudan selected Stravito to serve as its centralized insights platform. The decision was based on several factors, including the platform's intuitive user experience, rapid implementation, ability to integrate with existing research providers, strong customer support, and overall business value. The goal was to create a solution that employees across marketing, sensory, technical, and commercial teams could begin using with minimal training while making trusted research significantly easier to access.
Internally, the team named its Stravito platform "Genie," reflecting its ability to surface relevant research quickly and simplify access to existing knowledge across the organization. By consolidating internal and external research into a single point of entry, Givaudan reduced the time employees spent searching for information and increased the time available for analysis, collaboration, and innovation—critical factors in developing products that win shelf space and drive consumer purchase intent.
Measurable Impact on Development Speed and Retail Competitiveness
The impact was measurable almost immediately. According to Givaudan, many projects now move three to ten times faster than before implementation, with research that previously required days—or even weeks—to locate becoming accessible in minutes through Stravito's AI-powered search capabilities. For brands competing in fast-moving retail categories, this acceleration translates directly to shorter development cycles, faster response to category trends, and earlier shelf availability.
Easier access to existing insights has also reduced duplicated work, allowing the CSI team to support more customer briefs while directing research resources toward genuinely new opportunities rather than recreating work that already exists. This efficiency improvement enables suppliers to deliver more innovation to retail partners, strengthening category performance and sell-through outcomes.
The platform has strengthened collaboration throughout the organization as well. Marketing, sensory, and technical teams now work from a shared foundation of consumer and market intelligence, enabling faster decision-making on retail strategy, packaging, and product positioning. Regional teams are also able to better understand unfamiliar markets by accessing centralized research instead of relying solely on local expertise, leading to more informed retail conversations and greater confidence in customer-facing negotiations around shelf placement, pricing, and category management.
Building Retail Advantage Through Faster Innovation
Today, Stravito is available to Givaudan's regional and local Marketing and Consumer & Sensory Insights teams across Europe, with plans to extend access to additional commercial and technical stakeholders. As the company continues evaluating broader global expansion, leadership views faster access to trusted insights as an increasingly important competitive advantage in an industry where consumer preferences, product development cycles, and innovation timelines continue to accelerate.
For Givaudan, the value of Stravito extends beyond organizing research. It has transformed existing knowledge into a more accessible business asset, enabling teams to make faster, better-informed decisions while creating more capacity for innovation. In today's food and beverage landscape, where speed and confidence are becoming just as important as creativity, that ability may prove to be one of the company's most valuable competitive advantages—and a key differentiator for retail partners seeking brands that can move quickly and deliver proven sell-through performance.
