Culinary Cartography: Investigating Real-World Human Experiences with Our Meal-in-a-Bottle

Tine Kolenik
Tine KolenikFood Development

Discover why running a real-world human experience before launching our new product is soo essential and should be more common in food industry.

Reporting live from the middle of the study, we are currently testing our flagship product, a meal-in-a-bottle. The product promises healthy nutrition, convenience, and exquisite taste. To understand its real-world implications, we are performing an ongoing in-the-wild study assessing how potential consumers interact with this product in their daily environments over three weeks.

This study serves multiple purposes. First, it provides insights into behavioral patterns. Are people reaching for the product during a rushed morning or as a fuel-up during a hiking trip? Are consumers likely to integrate it into their daily routines? Are they replacing unhealthy meals with our more healthy product? (Some spoilers: yes! People are replacing unhealthy meals with our healthier product, and feeling all the better for it!) Understanding consumers’ relationship with our product helps us cater to their needs more effectively.

Second, we want to evaluate psychophysiological outcomes. Does consuming our product affect overall physiological and psychological well-being? We aim to ensure that our product not only fills the stomach, but also nurtures the mind – and according to current results, people do feel energized after consuming our meal-in-a-bottle.

Third, one of our core values is sustainability. Fostering a transparent farm-to-flask journey is therefore crucial. Our study places a keen emphasis on testing traceability data pipelines. Through QR codes, consumers can effortlessly track the journey of ingredients from farm to flask.

Fourth, we examine our webshop’s User Experience. The ease of navigating, selecting, and purchasing our product online is crucial to customer satisfaction. This proved to be quite necessary, as we discovered a bug where customers could only order an even number of products – which we jokingly referred to as an evil master plan to make people order more than one!

Fifth, an essential cog in the wheel is the logistics. Our product requires cold-chain distribution to maintain its freshness and quality. This study allows us to test and optimize our cold-chain logistics, ensuring that the product reaches consumers in the best possible condition.

In the food industry, in-depth in-situ studies like ours are quite rare. Most producers stick to basic market research and customer feedback. Our approach, combining real-world testing with time-series data, goes beyond the norm. The resulting time series big data dataset also enables us to apply advanced computational methods for detailed insights.

As we inch closer to the official launch, this study has already been instrumental in charting the course for our product’s journey.

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