For restaurant and food service professionals developing new menu items, understanding flavor strategy and consumer preferences is critical to success. Givaudan, a global leader in flavors and fragrances with more than 16,900 employees worldwide, supports some of the world's largest food and beverage brands through its Taste & Wellbeing business – advising across beverages, sweet goods, dairy, savory, snacks, and healthcare categories. But the company's European Marketing & Consumer & Sensory Insights (CSI) team discovered that access to flavor and consumer research was fragmented, slowing down the collaborative innovation process that drives menu development and customer satisfaction.
The Insight Challenge: Research Scattered Across Systems
Flavor creation is both a science and an art. At Givaudan, when creation and product development teams bring new ideas to life, they shape them with relevant, unique consumer and sensory insights to meet real human needs. But accessing those insights wasn't always easy.
Research lived across external platforms, internal systems, personal folders, and even colleagues' memories. Answering a single customer brief often required knowing where information lived and who to ask. Some team members went the extra mile to track everything down; many understandably didn't, because it took too much time.
The result was slower decisions, a growing reliance on inference when evidence couldn't be found quickly enough, and mounting search fatigue that threatened the team's insight-led culture. What the team really wanted was simple: a "Google for research" that made insights easy for everyone to find and use.
Centralizing Flavor & Consumer Research for Faster Development
The team needed a fast, reliable way to bring their vision to life. After evaluating several vendors, they selected Stravito, with four key factors driving the decision.
First, the people. From the start, the Stravito team demonstrated a strong service mindset that resonated with Givaudan's own B2B culture. "The attitude made a big difference," says Basak Oker. "You could feel, 'We're here for you.'"
Second, the user experience. Stravito felt modern, intuitive, and self-explanatory. Users could understand how it worked within minutes, without heavy training – critical for driving adoption beyond insights specialists.
Third, speed to value. The team wanted a solution they could implement quickly, including integrations with key external content providers. Stravito supported both the technical setup and the internal rollout.
Finally, value for money. Stravito wasn't chosen for being "cheap," but because the overall value – combining speed, usability, support, and adoption – made clear business sense.
The team named their Stravito instance "The Genie," trusting it would help make their insights wishes come true.
Speedier Menu & Flavor Development, Richer Customer Partnerships
Even a short time after launch, Genie's impact on flavor development timelines is striking.
On many projects, the team estimates decision-making is now 3x faster – and in some cases up to 10x faster. With Stravito's AI Assistant surfacing relevant internal and external research quickly, projects that once took weeks can now be completed in days or even hours. For food service professionals and brand teams collaborating with Givaudan, this translates to faster time-to-market for new menu offerings and faster responses to emerging consumer trends.
Easier access to existing insights also means less duplicated work. The CSI team can support more briefs with the same resources, while teams are less likely to commission new research when the answers already exist. That reduces waste and frees budget for genuinely new questions – a benefit that extends to Givaudan's customers who partner on flavor innovation.
Stravito plays a central role in both proactive and reactive work. For proactive innovation initiatives – such as helping customers design "iconic" flavors – the platform supports an internal Innovation Roadmap process, enabling teams to immerse themselves in category, consumer, and sensory trends more quickly and systematically.
For reactive customer briefs, Stravito helps regional teams rapidly understand local markets – even if they don't live there – by bringing Givaudan's own research and external sources together in one place. This leads to richer discussions internally and more informed, confident conversations with customers seeking to refresh menus or launch new products in specific regions.
Formal KPIs continue to evolve, with further impact measurement underway.
Beyond Speed: Creating Space for Culinary Creativity
Beyond productivity gains, the team sees meaningful human benefits that matter to hospitality professionals. Thanks to Stravito, people spend less time searching and synthesizing – and more time creating, collaborating and innovating.
As Basak puts it, 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 step is to extend Genie further into the organization, particularly to sales and key technical stakeholders, so more people can lead insight-led conversations with customers.
While broader global initiatives are still being explored, one thing is clear: speed and confidence in decision-making now matter more than ever. For Givaudan, Stravito helps teams move beyond access to insights and toward faster, better-informed decisions that benefit every partner in the food and beverage supply chain.
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 categories, including beverages, sweet goods, dairy, savory, snacks, and healthcare – anywhere taste plays a critical role in success. The team works closely with internal stakeholders across marketing, sensory, and technical teams, as well as external customers ranging from global to regional food and beverage manufacturers.
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. The result: evidence-backed decisions, accelerated market impact, and commercial momentum. 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.
