Consumer demand for functional foods, wellness-driven beverages, and nutritionally optimized products continues to accelerate. For ingredient and flavor innovation leaders like Givaudan, developing products that deliver genuine health benefits while meeting sensory and consumer preference expectations requires rapid access to robust consumer, category, and sensory research. Yet as the volume of available health and nutrition research expands—spanning beverage formulation, dairy innovation, nutritional snacks, healthcare products, and beyond—accessing actionable wellness insights quickly has become increasingly difficult.
Connecting Consumer Health Insights to Product Development
Givaudan's Taste & Wellbeing Marketing & Consumer & Sensory Insights (CSI) team supports some of the world's largest food and beverage brands in developing products that align with evolving consumer health preferences and nutritional expectations. The team's research informs everything from functional flavor development to long-term innovation strategies across beverages, dairy, sweet goods, savory, snacks, and healthcare categories. However, valuable consumer wellness research—including insights on functional benefits, nutritional positioning, and health-conscious consumer behavior—was dispersed across multiple platforms, external research providers, internal systems, and individual teams. Responding to a customer brief often required employees to know not only where health-focused research was stored but also who had access to it.
This fragmentation slowed product development timelines. Projects moved more slowly, existing wellness research was sometimes duplicated, and teams occasionally relied on incomplete evidence when relevant nutritional or functional insights could not be found quickly enough. To accelerate better-for-you product innovation, Givaudan needed a way to better leverage the health and wellness knowledge it already possessed by creating a single, searchable destination for trusted functional food and consumer insights.
Building a Centralized Wellness Research Platform
Givaudan selected Stravito to serve as its centralized insights platform, with a specific focus on consolidating health, nutrition, and wellness research alongside traditional sensory data. The decision was based on the platform's intuitive user experience, rapid implementation, ability to integrate with existing research providers and wellness databases, strong customer support, and overall business value. The goal was to create a solution that employees across marketing, sensory, technical, and commercial teams—including those focused on functional and nutritional innovation—could begin using with minimal training while making trusted health and wellness research significantly easier to access.
Internally, the team named its Stravito platform "Genie," reflecting its ability to surface relevant research quickly and simplify access to existing wellness and consumer knowledge across the organization. By consolidating internal and external research into a single point of entry, Givaudan reduced the time employees spent searching for functional food insights and increased the time available for analyzing health trends, collaborating on better-for-you formulations, and developing nutritionally differentiated products.
Accelerating Functional Food and Wellness Product Development
The impact on product development timelines was measurable almost immediately. According to Givaudan, many projects now move three to ten times faster than before implementation, with wellness research and health insights that previously required days—or even weeks—to locate becoming accessible in minutes through Stravito's AI-powered search capabilities. Faster access to existing functional food research and consumer health data has also reduced duplicated work, allowing the CSI team to support more customer briefs focused on nutritional and wellness positioning while directing research resources toward genuinely new functional innovation opportunities.
The platform has strengthened collaboration across marketing, sensory, and technical teams working on health-focused product development. Whether supporting proactive functional food innovation initiatives or responding to customer requests for better-for-you solutions, teams now work from a shared foundation of consumer wellness intelligence and nutritional research. Regional teams are also able to better understand health-conscious consumer segments and emerging wellness trends by accessing centralized research, leading to more informed product positioning discussions and greater confidence when communicating nutritional benefits to customers.
Beyond productivity gains, Givaudan views the platform as a way to create more time for higher-value innovation work. By reducing the time employees spend searching for wellness research and synthesizing health trend data, teams can focus more attention on strategic thinking, creativity, and developing innovative functional products that truly address consumer nutritional and wellness needs.
The Future of Data-Driven Functional Food Innovation
Today, Stravito is available to Givaudan's regional and local Marketing and Consumer & Sensory Insights teams across Europe, with plans to extend access to additional commercial and technical stakeholders focused on functional and nutritional innovation. As the company continues evaluating broader global expansion, leadership views faster access to trusted health and wellness insights as an increasingly important competitive advantage in an industry where consumer health demands, product development cycles, and functional food innovation timelines continue to accelerate.
For Givaudan, the value of Stravito extends beyond organizing research. It has transformed existing wellness and health knowledge into a more accessible business asset, enabling teams to make faster, better-informed decisions about functional product development while creating more capacity for innovation in nutritional and health-focused categories. In today's functional food and beverage landscape, where understanding consumer wellness expectations and speed-to-market are becoming just as important as product creativity, that ability may prove to be one of the company's most valuable competitive advantages.
