Once you’ve found a taste testing company you’re comfortable working with, the preparation that happens on your side before a single consumer picks up a fork has more influence on your results than most brands expect.
A clear brief, consistent samples and a sharp picture of who your product is really for give the research team everything they need to design a study around your decision, and that groundwork is often what separates taste testing that moves your product forward from a report that gets filed away and forgotten.
The same holds true whether you’re a start-up commissioning your first study with a taste testing company or an established brand that puts products in front of consumers every quarter.
Why Your Preparation Matters to Your Taste Testing Company
Every decision the research team makes, from the test design they recommend to the consumers they recruit, is shaped by the information you hand over at the start, so gaps in your brief tend to resurface later as gaps in your findings. You’ll have weighed up panel quality and methodology when choosing your taste testing partner, and those strengths only really come through when the team is able to fully understand what you need to learn.
Good preparation also keeps your project moving, because the most capable taste testing companies can recruit and run fieldwork quickly once a brief is locked down, but they can’t make up for samples that arrive late or objectives that change halfway through. Getting your side in order early means you get the full benefit of that speed.
What to Prepare Before Briefing a Taste Testing Company
Most of the groundwork comes down to three areas, and spending an afternoon pulling them together with your development and commercial teams will make your first conversation with the research team far more productive. It also puts you on a firmer footing when you come to use the findings as part of your wider taste testing market research or share them with retail buyers.
Pin Down the Decision You Need to Make
Your brief should open with the choice the results will inform, whether that’s picking between two recipes, checking that a cheaper ingredient won’t be noticed or seeing how you measure up against a market leader, since each question calls for a different test design at a different point in your product development process.
Keep Your Samples Consistent
Your samples need to come from batches that genuinely represent what shoppers will buy, supplied with clear storage, preparation and serving instructions, because a product that’s cooked, chilled or poured differently from one session to the next can easily skew your scores.
Describe Your Target Consumer in Detail
The more precisely you define who buys your product, from age and household make-up to shopping habits and dietary preferences, the more closely the panel will reflect your real market, which matters all the more given how heavily taste shapes whether shoppers come back for more.
Making the Most of Your Taste Testing Results
When fieldwork wraps up, you’ll typically receive a report that sets out your scores, highlights statistically significant differences and recommends where to go next, and it pays to get your development, marketing and commercial people in the same room to work through it together. Findings that leave you wondering why consumers favoured one sample, such as a flavour note or texture that divides opinion, can often be explored in more depth by pairing taste testing with sensory profiling.
Plenty of brands find that their first project with a taste testing company develops into a longer relationship, as each new study builds on the benchmarks and consumer understanding gathered the time before. That continuity is a big part of why specialist taste testing support tends to pay for itself across several launches.
Planning Your Next Project With Our Taste Testing Company
You don’t need a polished brief before you speak to us, because a short conversation about your product, your timescales and the decision you’re facing is usually enough for our team to suggest the right approach. We recruit from a database of more than 10,000 food and drink tasters and have been running consumer research from our base on the Wirral since 1997, so we can match your target audience quickly and turn most projects around in roughly two weeks.
If you’ve got a product approaching the testing stage, send us a few details about it and we’ll get back to you to talk through the best way forward, or you can call +44 (0)151 346 2999 if you’d prefer an informal chat first.
