For category managers and brand marketers working with Givaudan's flavor innovation teams, speed is currency. The faster you can validate category trends, consumer preferences, and sensory differentiation—the faster you can get winning flavors to shelf. But when flavor partners are drowning in research scattered across platforms and folders, everyone loses retail time.
The Retail Problem: Insights Stuck in Silos
Givaudan's Taste & Wellbeing Marketing & Consumer & Sensory Insights (CSI) team in Europe supports some of the world's largest food and beverage brands across beverages, sweet goods, dairy, savory, snacks, and healthcare. The team holds deep category intelligence—consumer trends, taste performance data, regional preferences—that directly influences packaging decisions, shelf positioning, and sell-through performance.
The problem: that research lived everywhere except where it needed to be. Category briefs required hunting through external platforms, internal systems, personal folders, and colleagues' memories. A single customer question about category performance or consumer preferences could take weeks to answer. The result was delayed time-to-market, decisions made on incomplete data, and missed shelf opportunities.
The Solution: Unified Consumer and Category Research Access
Givaudan's CSI team selected Stravito as their insights platform—essentially creating a "Google for research" to consolidate Givaudan's consumer, sensory, and category intelligence in one searchable space.
Four factors drove the decision. First, intuitive user experience: regional marketing teams and category managers could adopt it without heavy training, making research accessible beyond just insights specialists. Second, rapid deployment with integrations to external category and consumer data sources already trusted by retail partners. Third, vendor support aligned with Givaudan's B2B culture. And finally, clear return on investment—faster access to proof points that inform better shelf and category decisions.
The team named their instance "The Genie," expecting it would help make their retail and category intelligence wishes come true.
The Retail Impact: Faster Category Decisions, Better Shelf Strategy
The results show immediate value for anyone managing category performance or brand innovation timelines. Decision-making is now 3x faster on many projects—and up to 10x faster on others. Category briefs that once took weeks now close in days. Regional teams can rapidly understand local market preferences and category dynamics, even across geographies, because Givaudan's own consumer and sensory research is unified with external category sources.
For brand partners, this translates to faster flavor validation tied to category trends and consumer demand. Less time searching for proof points means more time spent on packaging strategy, retail positioning, and sell-through planning. Teams are also less likely to commission duplicate research when category insights already exist—freeing budget for genuinely new questions about emerging shelf opportunities.
The platform supports both innovation roadmap planning—helping design category-winning flavors based on trend analysis—and rapid customer briefs. When a regional team needs to understand category performance or consumer preference shifts in a new market, Stravito brings together Givaudan's research and external category sources to inform more confident retail conversations.
Category Efficiency and Retail Momentum
Broader organizational expansion is underway. Stravito is already available to regional and local marketing and CSI teams across Europe. Next steps include extending access to sales and key technical stakeholders, so more teams leading customer conversations can draw on unified category and consumer intelligence.
For retail and CPG teams partnering with Givaudan, the payoff is clear: faster access to validated consumer and category insights means faster time-to-shelf, better informed packaging and positioning decisions, and ultimately stronger sell-through performance. Speed and confidence in evidence-backed decisions now matter more than ever in competitive categories.
About Stravito
Stravito is the Insights Intelligence Platform global brands trust to turn their existing research into confident, growth-driving decisions. Purpose-built for insights teams, Stravito pairs best-in-class AI with human expertise to apply vetted knowledge in decision-critical moments.
The platform unifies research in a secure space where teams ask strategic questions and receive synthesized, source-cited answers via the Stravito AI Assistant. AI Personas—built from your own segmentation studies—simulate authentic consumer perspectives, enabling teams to stress-test products, campaigns, and strategies in real-time. The result: evidence-backed decisions, accelerated market impact, and commercial momentum.
Founded in Sweden in 2017, Stravito is trusted by global leaders including Nestlé, and Comcast. The company is ISO 27001 certified, SOC 2 Type II attested, and has been recognized in the Financial Times' FT 1000 list of Europe's fastest growing companies.
