New food technology – Cooking with Friends.

A leading FMCG company had developed a new food technology which was in need of a ‘purpose’. So we set out to investigate consumer associations and applications of several prototypes in order to uncover the consumer opportunity.

We adopted a 2 stage approach, starting with a full day cooking workshop followed by friendship pair in-home IDIs. The Cooking workshop was very exploratory and used to ‘discover’ the category that the prototypes are potentially most suitable.

After the workshop, we generated initial product hypotheses with our client to determine which applications and dishes to explore further in consumers’ homes. The friendship IDIs involved a more detailed in-home consumer evaluation of selected prototypes and applications, including full cooking sessions with prototypes and side by side comparison with current food preparation solutions.

Ultimately a rich, detailed understanding of the potential application of each prototype was generated with suggestions for optimisation.