For health and wellness brands developing better-for-you beverages, fortified foods, and functional products, the intersection of great taste and proven nutritional benefit is non-negotiable. Givaudan's Taste & Wellbeing team in Europe—which supports customers across beverages, sweet goods, dairy, savory, snacks, and healthcare—understands this challenge intimately. The company recently solved a critical bottleneck: how to translate consumer sensory preferences and health insights into faster product decisions that drive both nutrition claims and market success.

The Wellness Challenge: Connecting Taste, Health Data, and Consumer Insights

Creating functional foods and better-for-you beverages demands rigorous integration of three elements: sensory science (taste and texture), nutritional efficacy, and authentic consumer wellness needs. Givaudan's Marketing & Consumer & Sensory Insights (CSI) team works across these domains, but their research—consumer studies, sensory panels, health trend data, category benchmarks—was fragmented across platforms, personal folders, and institutional knowledge. Answering a single customer brief about a functional product required piecing together insights that already existed but couldn't be accessed quickly. The result: slower time-to-market, reliance on assumptions rather than evidence, and delayed launches for products designed to meet real health needs.

The Solution: Stravito as a Single Research Hub

Givaudan selected Stravito, an Insights Intelligence Platform, to unify research and sensory data into one accessible resource. Four capabilities proved decisive: First, the Stravito team demonstrated deep service alignment with Givaudan's B2B culture. "The attitude made a big difference," says Basak Oker. "You could feel, 'We're here for you.'" Second, the platform's user experience is intuitive—teams understood how to use it within minutes, enabling adoption across sensory specialists, product developers, and marketing teams. Third, rapid implementation with integrations to external content providers meant faster time-to-value. Finally, the overall business case was clear: speed, usability, and adoption justified the investment. The team named their instance "The Genie," signaling their hope that insights access would enable rapid innovation.

The Results: Faster Functional Product Development, Evidence-Driven Health Claims

Within weeks of launch, impact became measurable. Decision-making accelerated 3x on average projects—and up to 10x on others. Projects that once required weeks of research synthesis now complete in days or hours, with the Stravito AI Assistant surfacing relevant consumer, sensory, and external research instantly.

For functional and wellness brands, the implications are significant. Teams can now:

  • Reduce duplicated research. By finding existing consumer data and sensory insights quickly, product teams eliminate redundant studies, freeing budget for new functional benefit exploration and clinical validation work.
  • Accelerate better-for-you formulation. Sensory teams rapidly confirm that health-optimized formulations maintain taste appeal by accessing historical consumer taste preference data and category benchmarks in real time.
  • Support health claims with confidence. Marketing teams access vetted consumer perception research and sensory science together, enabling faster validation of nutritional and functional benefit claims.
  • Scale local wellness strategies. Regional teams now understand local health trends, consumer preferences for specific functional benefits (protein, clean label, functional botanicals, etc.), and category sensory standards—even without local market presence.

Stravito plays an active role in both innovation and customer work. For proactive launches—designing new functional products or fortified categories—the platform supports an internal Innovation Roadmap process, helping teams immerse themselves in health trends, consumer wellness preferences, and sensory science. For customer briefs, regional teams rapidly access Givaudan's research and external sources together, enabling richer internal discussions and more informed conversations with health-conscious food and beverage manufacturers about functional benefit positioning.

Human Impact: More Time for Nutritional Innovation

Beyond speed, Stravito creates space for deeper work. Teams spend less time searching for existing research and more time on what matters: collaborating on functional formulations, identifying emerging health trends, and designing products that authentically address consumer wellness needs. As Basak notes, Stravito gives people "more time to think about new opportunities and new ideas – and maybe have some time to themselves… more time at home with their loved ones, kids, or dogs, or cats."

Today, Stravito is available to regional and local marketing and CSI teams across Europe. The next phase expands access to sales and technical stakeholders, enabling faster, insight-led conversations with health and wellness brands about functional positioning, sensory validation, and nutritional benefit claims.

About Givaudan Taste & Wellbeing Europe

Givaudan is a global leader in flavors and fragrances, with more than 16,900 employees worldwide. Within its Taste & Wellbeing business, the European Marketing & CSI team supports customers across beverages, sweet goods, dairy, savory, snacks, and healthcare categories—where taste and sensory science are critical to success. The team partners with creation, product development, marketing, and technical teams to integrate consumer insights and sensory research into functional and better-for-you product strategies.

About Stravito

Stravito is the Insights Intelligence Platform global brands trust to turn their existing research into confident, growth-driving decisions. Purpose-built for insights teams, Stravito pairs best-in-class AI with human expertise to apply vetted knowledge in decision-critical moments. The platform unifies research in a secure space where teams ask strategic questions and receive synthesized, source-cited answers via the Stravito AI Assistant. AI Personas—built from your own segmentation studies—simulate authentic consumer perspectives, enabling teams to stress-test products, campaigns, and strategies in real-time. Founded in Sweden in 2017, Stravito is trusted by global leaders including Nestlé and Comcast. The company is ISO 27001 certified, SOC 2 Type II attested, and has been recognized in the Financial Times' FT 1000 list of Europe's fastest growing companies.