Choosing which new snack flavours to launch in three countries

What is shaping food & beverage

Food and beverage brands compete on taste, price, health perceptions and shelf presence. Small changes in pack, recipe or price can shift share quickly.

• Health and natural claims influence choice
• Quick commerce and modern trade change shopping habits
• Taste remains the deciding factor at repeat

A packaged snacks company, working in India, Malaysia & UAE. Client identity is withheld to protect confidentiality.

Organisation

A packaged snacks company

Sector

Food & beverage

Team engaged

Market Research

Services

Consumer panel, Quantitative research, Offline data collection

The company had developed twelve new flavour ideas for its baked snack range and planned to launch the best three in India, Malaysia and the UAE. Internal tasting panels disagreed sharply, and the marketing team worried that flavours popular in one country would fail in another. Launching the wrong flavours would mean costly production runs and retailer delistings.

• Deliver on the brief: choosing which new snack flavours to launch in three countries.
• Understand the views, needs and behaviour of concept respondents.
• Understand the views, needs and behaviour of taste-test participants.
• Produce results that can be compared across groups and locations.
• Give the client evidence it can act on within 9 weeks.

The work focused on 2,400 concept respondents and 900 taste-test participants.

• concept respondents2,400
• taste-test participants900

Audiences we typically reach in food & beverage

Shoppers and consumersHouseholdsRetailers and kirana ownersQuick-commerce usersFood-service buyers

Coverage: India, Malaysia & UAE. Markets: India, Malaysia and United Arab Emirates.

• India
• Malaysia
• United Arab Emirates

A structured quantitative design, so results could be compared across groups, locations and time.

1. 1Brief
2. 2Online concept screening
3. 3Central location taste tests
4. 4Insight

We screened all twelve concepts online with category buyers in each country, measuring appeal, uniqueness and purchase intent with a monadic design so that every idea was judged fairly. The six strongest moved to central location taste tests in Mumbai, Kuala Lumpur and Dubai, where participants tasted coded samples in rotated order and rated taste, aftertaste, spice level and value. Questionnaires were available in English, Hindi, Malay and Arabic, and quotas covered age, gender and household type.

Consumer panelQuantitative researchOffline data collection

concept respondents

2,400

taste-test participants

900

• Respondents were selected across India, Malaysia & UAE using quotas set in advance for each location and respondent type, so no single area or group dominated.
• Online respondents were drawn from verified panel members who matched the screening criteria, with quotas on key profile attributes.
• Telephone contacts were dialled from verified lists, with quotas tracked live by the field team.

• Trained local-language interviewers conducted interviews in person, supervised in the field.
• Telephone interviews were run from our CATI centre, with calls monitored for quality.
• The online survey was mobile-friendly and offered in respondents' languages.

• Back-checks on a share of completed interviews
• Time and location checks on field interviews
• Supervisor accompaniment in the field
• Live call monitoring and recording review
• Call-back verification
• Digital fingerprinting and duplicate checks
• Attention, speed and straight-lining checks
• Review of open-ended answers
• Logic and range checks on the final data
• Work carried out under our ISO 20252 quality procedures

• Cross-tabulation by key groups and locations
• Significance testing on the differences that mattered
• Comparison of concepts, messages or products against each other

• Two flavours performed strongly in all three countries, while a third, a spicy tamarind flavour, won clearly in India and Malaysia but tested poorly in the UAE.
• Early retail sell-through matched the research rankings, and no flavour had to be withdrawn in its first year.

Testing taste in each market protected the launch from assumptions made around a single tasting table.

• Build on the core insight: testing taste in each market protected the launch from assumptions made around a single tasting table.
• Focus effort where the evidence was strongest: two flavours performed strongly in all three countries, while a third, a spicy tamarind flavour, won clearly in India and Malaysia but tested poorly in the UAE.
• Re-measure after the changes to confirm the effect.

• The company launched the two universal flavours everywhere and a market-specific third flavour in each country.

What changed in the business as a result of the work. Impact is described qualitatively.

• Insight report and management presentation
• Cleaned data file and data tables

• Repeat the measure after changes are in place to track progress.
• A natural follow-on question: how do people use the category?