New AI aims to reduce food and beverage product launch risk
When a new product is launched, it of course presents risks. Bluntly, the risk that the launch will be a failure, and all the money the manufacturer has spent on it will be wasted. This risk lurks ever presently under the surface even for the most established of companies. According to some estimates, a failed product launch causes on average 50 days of wasted staff hours and €500,000 in wasted costs.
Cambri, a Nordic tech company, has today announced Launch AI, which aims to reduce some of these risks by providing predictions and advice to manufacturers on the potential of their launches.
According to Cambri, launches using its AI have a 73% success rate (whereas the market average is 5-25% successes).
The AI has two functions: ‘predict’ and ‘advise’. Predict uses a combination of deep survey data and post-launch data to predict whether an NPD (new product development) will be successful or not, giving it a score. Advise generates a summary of key strengths and weaknesses of an NPD, and provides ideas on how to improve if it’s not up to scratch.
In the food context, the AI may look at an NPD idea and suggest things such as convenience or ‘eye-catching branding’ as things it does well, and ‘limited flavour options’ and concerns on the environmental impact of the packaging as potential negatives. It also presents areas of ‘uniqueness’ for the product, such as its unique flavours.
Secondly, it shows consumer interest, both in the context of what they want in a product, and areas of concern. In an example provided to FoodNavigator, 15% of consumers were shown to want healthier options, whereas 5% were shown to be concerned about misleading health claims on pack.
“Cambri isn’t a simple validation tool,” Ben Harknett, CEO at Cambri, told FoodNavigator. “It connects brand innovators with over 240m consumers globally to help test and co-create products by getting real-time feedback that enables agile and iterative innovation.”
The AI and food
Food and beverage launches, says Harknett, are a big part of the AI’s focus. “Over the last 4.5 years we have many clients from the Food and Beverage category using Cambri to guide and inform their NPD,” he told this publication, “so have amassed a large amount of pre-launch test data.
“Since companies in these categories often work across multiple categories and markets and they launch products continuously, the amount of data we have gathered from those categories is very extensive.
“Also, our proprietary natural language processing (NLP) solution has been built with data where these categories are very well represented, which makes our GPT integration very contextually accurate.”
