Innovators in nutrition, health and beauty. Read more about our new company at dsm-firmenich.com or continue here to read more on the incredible solutions and services that we offer.
Human Insights
Consumer & Sensory Insights
Central to our Human Insights mission at Firmenich is a strong capability to conduct powerful primary consumer & sensory research.
Out team of highly respected professional consumer & sensory researchers use robust and scientifically validated methods to measure human preference, attitudes, behaviors and emotions. We scrutinize food and beverages on an emotional, rational, and behavioral level. Combined with a powerful sensory science capability to accurately measure human perception, we build deep seeded understanding of the drivers of preference. We use this to inspire and guide innovation and validate new foods and beverages featuring our flavors and technologies.
Powerful, Trusted Research.
Our Approach
Our Consumer & Sensory Insights Team is global with researchers and research facilities located in all of Firmenich’s key creative centers around the world. We focus on providing authentically human, trusted and accessible data. We then translate that data into unique differentiated insights so you always have clear direction forward and understand why a specific solution will work best for your consumer.
Through a robust in-house infrastructure as well as agency partners, we design and implement qualitative research, quantitative concepts and product testing andquantitative surveys. We nurture sensory panels and facilities (including our renown Visually Impaired Panels). We are also growing a strong capability in multivariate statistics and data science.
Sensory Science Core
Agile Collaboration with Consumers
Product Testing Infrastructure Communities & Panels
Measuring Emotions
Digital Futures: Capturing Vital Data
At Firmenich we’ve made unprecedented investments in building our own in-house tools to capture consumer and sensory data. We are leveraging the power of that data in ways that others cannot as we move to include Artificial Intelligence into our approach. Firmenich has built IRIS™, a global system for capturing consumer and sensory product testing data and linking it to flavor formulation and design. Currently we are rolling out our YUMmm™ app for mobile devices to measure live reaction to market products at the moment of consumption in a fun and consumer friendly way. All of these systems position us for a data-rich future where machine learning & “AI” are a routinely used to enhance the creative skills of our flavorists and food scientists. Together, with our insights and our creators, we ensure each product we work on delivers a finely tuned emotional and functional experience optimized for consumer and occasion.
Do you have a full understanding of product benchmarks in your category? Can you better understand your target market?
SENSORY SCIENCE CORE
AromaSphere - An Uncommonly Good Common Sensory Language
Our expertise in decoding consumer preferences is only the first step. We must then translate that feedback into understandable and tangible drivers to guide Flavorists and Product Developers. At Firmenich, we maintain expert trained sensory panels in all of our key creative centers. Many of these panels are external, dedicated panelists. Still others are part of our VIP Program, where we employee visually-impaired individuals as taste panelists, whose heightened dedication and attention to detail bring many additional benefits to our data as well as the community around us.
Firmenich Aromasphere® is our highly acclaimed global flavor language, with a lexicon of over 160 chemical references descriptors and over 700 tonality descriptors. AromaSphere® has become a model for the food and flavor industry and ensures that as we work together to create the best food and beverage products we are speaking the same language. Aromasphere allows us to translate the language of your developers and of our taste experts so that our teams can collaborate faster and better to create winning products.
Product Testing Infrastructure
A Global Network at Your Reach
With twenty-five locations worldwide, our consumer testing can scale to any size view you need to fully understand how real people are reacting to your food and beverage concepts.
AGILE COLLABORATION
In our largest markets, we've established our TasteLounge™ Community program, which are large nationally representative online communities for instantaneously and continuous feedback. With TasteLounge™, we can decode more complex and lengthy consumer experiences, and deeper longitudinal views of how consumers really live their lives when it comes to food and drink. We combine this with in house qualitative and quantitative methods to apply human insights and co-creation into our most challenging projects.
MEASURING EMOTIONS
Scentmove- Connecting Taste & Emotions
Flavor drives much more than just liking. Two flavors can be equally delicious, but one may more successfully evoke emotions that connect to your brand’s core. Firmenich Scentmove® was co-developed by our Research and Development division and Geneva University over 20 years ago to be a comprehensive model of declared feelings validated worldwide across hundreds of flavors and a dozen languages. It’s been the subject of multiple white papers and academic examination. Our Flavor Emotions360™ program a is a large scale global quantitative study that leverages ScentMove™ to understand the real connections consumers make between flavor ingredients, and emotions and benefits. Do you know how your consumers feel when enjoying your products?
