Blending methods, building stories: Telling consumer-driven stories for food ingredient innovation
Editor's note: This article is an automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity.
Kerry Group and Matrix Sciences partnered to develop a new product for grilling. To do so they combined multiple methods to tell the stories of the consumers.
During the 2025 Quirk’s Event – Virtual Global, Stella Salisu, Ph.D., director of sensory and consumer products research, Chad Richards, sensory scientist, both at Kerry Group and Donya Stubbs, CAIP, VP research and insight at Matrix Sciences teamed up to share insights from a recent project.
Session transcript
Joe Rydholm
Hi everybody and welcome to our session, “B Blending methods, building stories: Telling consumer-driven stories for food ingredient innovation.” I'm Quirk’s Editor, Joe Rydholm.
Before we get started, just a quick housekeeping note that if you'd like to interact with other attendees during the session, you can use a chat tab to submit your comments and questions.
Our session today is presented by Kerry. Enjoy the presentation.
Stella Salisu
Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today on our webinar.
Before we get started, I'd like to introduce to you my colleagues that will be presenting with me.
First, let us meet Chad Richards. He is a sensory scientist who transforms how we understand food through the lens of humor and perception. With eight years of experience at Kerry Group, Chad uses sensory science to bridge the gap between data and decision-making. Helping teams translate what people taste, smell and feel into insights that move businesses forward. He's not just testing products, he's uncovering the ‘why’ behind consumer choices.
For Chad, the real power of sensory lies in the ability to inspire bold informed action rooted in how people truly experience food. When he's not changing minds in the food industry, he is power lifting and participating in Strongman competitions.
Next, I'm excited to introduce our next speaker, Donya, who began her career as a food scientist focused on formulas and technical position. But early on she realized she wanted to have a greater impact helping businesses succeed, solving problems creatively and making people's jobs easier. That led her into sensory consumer and market research where she spent the past 27 years turning data into decision-driving stories.
Donya has held executive roles in research and nonprofit organizations across Canada and the U.S. and contributes to global best practices through ISO and ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials).
Outside of work, she's a trail runner, a softball outfielder and a HYROX competitor. Please welcome Donya Stubbs.
Donya Stubbs
And I'd like to introduce Stella.
It’s my pleasure to introduce Dr. Stella Salou, an industry leader who has been shaping the world of sensory and consumer research for over 20 years. Her journey began in the fragrance industry and evolved into food where she's made it her mission to help brands deeply connect with consumers through the power of perception.
A proud moment in her career working on a fragrance launch and meeting none other than Britney Spears. A reminder that insights don't just live in data tables, they influence culture.
Stella has served on the executive board of the Society of Sensory Professionals and is an active member of a SMS committee on sensory evaluation where she recently helped release a groundbreaking guide aligning sensory perception with instrumental data. Whether she's in the lab, the boardroom or on stage as a real-life MC. Stella brings a human-centered lens to every conversation. Because of her insights are more than numbers. They're stories waiting to be told.
Please welcome Stella and thank you for joining our session.
Stella Salisu
Thank you, Donya.
Before we begin our actual the ‘why’ to why we are here today, we have a few questions that we'd like to ask you. We're going to start by thinking about Dubai. How many of you have been to Dubai?
How many of you have heard of Dubai chocolate? We would like for you to answer in the chat.
Finally, have you ever tried Dubai chocolate?
Next, we'd like to play a short video on how Dubai chocolate came in.
[Video played about Dubai chocolate.]
Stella Salisu
Having heard and seen the creation of the Dubai chocolate, you can almost imagine how we turnaround ingredients and make it something insightful that we know that all consumers want and will eat.
In order to do that, we had to make sure that we tell the story, we blend methods into understanding how a consumer might want to consume and select your own product.
We already did the introductions, so I'll skip on to the main reason why we are here today.
Today we will really highlight a real-world case study and share practical tips on how we turned data into story, saying that inspired brand partnerships.
Let's talk about why this matters.
Innovation cycles continue to get shorter and the competition on the shelf is fiercer than ever. We are being asked to not only deliver just ingredients, but we need to tell a story behind these ingredients or our ideas.
This means including a consumer lens in our creation and making it relevant to all of our brand partners. Because, guess what? Without our consumers, we won't be successful in everything we do. Not only do we want to be successful, we want to make sure that our brand partners are also successful. Since that's the case, we have to include our consumers.
Our case study is going to talk about how flavor and trends truly inspired innovation.
This case study truly outlines how we took an approach to get ahead of a flavor dish trend. Yes, a flavor dish trend that was translated into a salty snack.
Think about if you're having Thanksgiving dinner, all those favorite dishes, which we took flavor trends, turned it into dishes and then created snacks out of it.
Our objective really was to uncover flavor preferences, better for you, which is very in line with today's trends, snacking behaviors to inform new ingredient-based product platforms and ensuring that it is convenient.
So, we went from culinary trends to snacking that would include some flavors that would include grilling, charring, making sure that it's health conscious, and ensuring that it's convenient. Our consumers, when they snack, they want an on-the-go snack.
Our framework starts with the business goals and layers in market insights, informal tasting, quantitative and qualitative research. And the penultimate goal for us is rich insights, driven stories that support faster innovation, better alignment with consumers, and stronger collaborations with food brands.
Donya Stubbs
So, why do we use blended methods?
Stella talked about looking into the trends, understanding the trends and doing some more non-specific methodologies, informal methodologies, desk research, trend tours, etc. And then we just wanted to make sure that we were covering both sides, both confident and empathetic innovation.
Chad Richards
So, when we were doing this project, we started out by looking at our market insights and flavor trends, specifically in the area of outdoor grilling and smoking techniques. From there, we chose some popular culinary dishes ranging from appetizers to full meals that represented these trends.
We got together a cross-functional team to describe their tastes and experiences. When we went out to these restaurants and we translated these descriptions for our product development teams to make our prototypes, we then brought the cross-functional team back and have them evaluate the prototypes to ensure that that translation from culinary dish to salty snack was successful.
Through this process, we were able to create four unique flavors ready for the next steps.
Donya Stubbs
From there, we took them into some quantitative research. So, this was sensory based, consumer research.
We follow best practices that are established within the industry, but we also understand that as a food ingredient supplier, there's not always the budget necessary with many companies these days, but there's not always the budget necessary to do this research on a grand scale.
So, we got a set number of consumers that were category users. We created an efficient questionnaire. We did the appropriate analysis required for quantitative research and, as always, non-compromising with sensory sciences, best practices and market research best practices.
In addition to the quantitative, we also took people out of the quantitative and some of them took some of the products home.
They were able to join online discussions that evening. And while they were there, they were able to follow along with the discussions, retrying the samples, just to jog their memory, get more in-depth discussion out of them, a deeper dive.
But we didn't just talk about the sensory components that we had discussed in the quantitative. We also started to understand more about these consumers and their relationship to these products.
As Chad outlined, this was about grilling and smoking. We talked about their cooking methods, because these flavors were about and tied into dishes.
So, what did these flavors make them think about when it came to cooking methods? Was it correlated with grilling and smoking?
We talked about the strengths of the products. We understood the opportunities of products, and that's getting very specific to the flavor nuances and how closely they reflected the meals that we were targeting. We talked about emotional connections with these products and how these products made them feel.
Then you get into family, and you start to uncover occasions that they associate with the flavors. And it was fascinating when it was about four meals and it was about grilling and smoking, but the different occasions and emotions that each of them brought out was really great to uncover and see that there was nuanced differences.
From there we put together a quantitative and qualitative one pager to help our story.
It doesn't have data. It has some quotes from the qualitative. It has the description that we use to help people understand in the quantitative what they were going to taste, set the context for them. Then we had this one pager that not only could Stella and Chad and their internal team use at Kerry, but they could also transfer it directly to their client partners.
And so, this flavor was the top one of the overall four. We talked about whether it had liking and purchase intent. What were the key features of it that were noted in liking of the different attributes? Did it fit the concept, is very important when you're talking about communication. We had sensory attributes. How did it perform? Was it launch ready or did it need any tweaks?
Then we got into reporting at a high level some of the top-level nuanced learnings from the qual.
This one was about grilled and charred. The emotions while it was happy and excited, also had entertained involved in there. Then occasions were around football and sports and grilling opportunities.
And I'm not going to show you the scorecard for the other three products, but especially on these bottom three, of course, we had the ranking and different performances in the quantitative, the sensory component. We also saw some variation within these bottom three cooking methods and motions and occasions.
So, from there we crafted a story, and Stella's going to continue with this on the next slide, but we uncovered these different personas. And I think Stella, you can probably take it from here.
Stella Salisu
Yes, I can take it from here.
So, it's all about blending methods to craft the story. Because after all, even though we're an ingredient company, we want to make sure that we're telling the story and holistic approach to everything to bring about customer satisfaction.
From the qual side, we uncovered core emotional and behavioral drivers. As Donya explained, not just what people eat but how they feel about it. These insights actually helped to shape the way we framed our ingredient storytelling for our brand clients.
To make these insights actionable, it was important for us to build certain personas.
So, for this particular research, we built personas and matched them with ingredient narratives. These were brought to life visually and verbally for our clients, which helped position us not as a vendor, but a strategic thought partner for our clients.
Chad Richards
And with all of this data, we were able to make pitches to our brand partners. We actually had several wins and multiple snack bases on the market now.
It really showed the power of blending sensory methods and having a consumer-based narrative to your approach.
Donya Stubbs
We find that working together as Matrix Sciences and Kerry, we define the business goal.
We design the hybrid research, and sometimes that involves the quantitative and qualitative doing it together. Sometimes that involves our clients, such as Kerry bringing in previous research they'd done. Such as the meals investigations that they had done in trends research.
We take all that research and we bring it together to synthesize into a story.
Then most important is to deliver tools to help Chad and his sales team have that success that they're looking for. And it leads into a successful story that isn't just from a developer's point of view, but from the consumer's point of view.
Stella Salisu
Look, at the end of the day, it's important to note that innovation never happens in a vacuum, in a silo.
As an ingredient supplier. We recognize that insights must be embedded in every stage, from trends, from sensory, from quantitative, from qualitative, as much as street flavor trends.
It is important to note that we have recognized, and this is how we position ourselves, as thought leadership partners. If we're trying to innovate a product for our brand partners, we cannot be in a silo. We have to all work together to create a powerful and useful product for our consumers.
Donya Stubbs
Some of the key takeaways that we had was to make sure that together with your partners, you determine your business needs.
You understand the relevant market trends, so that you can do that together or separately and come together and debrief on that.
Utilize strong collaborative, but informal approaches. I think that Kerry used some great approaches in this informal way to better understand the direction that they would take going into R&D.
Then with those prototypes, combine quant and qual early on. That's one of the key takeaways that we have discovered along the way is that they don't work in silos. As Stella said, the research portions also work together.
You turn insights into client ready stories.
You empower your cross-functional collaboration throughout. And I think that line ties the whole idea that we have together.
Ultimately, you use consumer voices to elevate ingredient value. And that's where Chad has seen such great success.
Stella Salisu
Thank you, Donya and Chad. I believe that wraps up our presentation for today. It's been a pleasure being able to share our story with you.