SoCal Food Industry Conference

The Southern California Food Industry Conference (SCFIC), part of the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), was on March 1, 2022. This virtual conference explored “Solutions for the Food Industry in a Post-Pandemic World.” While the food industry continues to adjust to the impacts of the ongoing global pandemic, SCFIC focused on solutions that food companies can utilize to mitigate several hurdles posed to the industry. Topics that were explored and discussed with a series of expert panelists in the field included food safety, supply chain management, technology and best practices, as well as our favorite: consumer insights and innovations.

Insightful Innovation Talk at SCFIC

CuliNex, a partner of InsightsNow, participated in the conference. Their Director of Innovation, Emily Cruz, spoke on “Insightful Innovation: Consumer Insights for Successful Product Design.” When looking at agile product development, she discussed Discovery, Concepting, Development and Commercialization—and how important consumer feedback is to this process at every stage.

Emily discussed important topics like shifting buying behaviors, the challenges food companies face keeping up with these behaviors, as well as looking at the motivations behind and influences on shopper trends. Things have changed since the pandemic hit, as we uncovered in a recent study, and discussed in our webinar “The Trust Economy: How is the pandemic shaping what we trust and the landscape of innovation opportunities?”.  Emily dig into that more in her presentation.

Boosting Consumer Choice Through Insights

Some different tools and techniques companies can use to help understand consumers in today’s world include focus groups and interviews, surveys and central location testing. But one of the key, and easy, ways to get insights is through what we call a Clean Label Ingredient Score. Clean Label Scores are grounded in our patent pending approach to behavioral research by utilizing InsightsNow’s Implicit/Explicit Test™. To learn more about how this works, download our white paper, “Applying the Ingredient Clean Label Score for Clean Label Product Design.”

If you missed her talk, we hope you can join Emily at Natural Products Expo to learn more!