When insights live everywhere, they are effectively nowhere. Givaudan found a way to fix that — and the results are measurable.
Givaudan, the global flavors and fragrances company, has significantly accelerated the pace of its research and decision-making in Europe after deploying Stravito, an AI-powered insights platform, across its Taste and Wellbeing Marketing and Consumer and Sensory Insights teams.
The team, which supports some of the world’s largest food and beverage brands with insight-led flavor strategies, estimates that decision-making on many projects is now three times faster than before — and up to ten times faster in some cases. Projects that previously took weeks can now be completed in days or hours.
The Problem: Insights Scattered, Time Wasted
Givaudan’s Consumer and Sensory Insights team operates at the intersection of science and creativity. When product development teams bring new flavor concepts to life, they depend on consumer and sensory insights to ensure those concepts meet real human needs. The quality of that input directly shapes the quality of the output.
But accessing the right research had become a meaningful operational problem. Insights were distributed across external platforms, internal systems, personal folders, and the institutional memory of individual team members. Answering a single customer brief often required knowing both where the relevant information lived and who to ask for help finding it. Some team members invested time tracking everything down. Many, understandably, did not — because the search cost was simply too high.
The consequences were predictable: slower decisions, a growing reliance on inference when evidence could not be found quickly enough, and a creeping search fatigue that threatened the team’s insight-led working culture. What the team wanted was straightforward — a search experience for internal research that felt as natural and reliable as a general web search.
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The Solution: Bringing “Genie” to Life
After evaluating several vendors, the team selected Stravito. Four factors drove the decision.
The first was the quality of the relationship. From early conversations, the Stravito team demonstrated a service-oriented approach that resonated with Givaudan’s business-to-business culture. “The attitude made a big difference,” said Basak Oker, a member of the insights team. “You could feel, ‘We’re here for you.'”
The second was user experience. The platform felt modern, intuitive, and self-explanatory — users could understand how it worked within minutes, without extensive training. For a tool intended to drive adoption well beyond the core insights function, accessibility was essential.
The third was speed to value. The team needed a solution they could implement quickly, including integrations with key external content providers. Stravito supported both the technical setup and the internal rollout without significant delay.
The fourth was the overall value. Stravito was not selected for being the cheapest option, but because the combination of speed, usability, support, and adoption potential made a clear business case.
The team named their Stravito instance “The Genie” — in the hope, as the name suggests, that it would make their insights wishes come true.
The Results: Faster Decisions, Richer Conversations
Even in the early period following launch, the impact has been tangible across multiple dimensions.
Stravito’s AI assistant surfaces relevant internal and external research quickly, compressing project timelines and reducing the likelihood that teams commission new research when the answers already exist in the organization’s own knowledge base. The reduction in duplicated work frees both budget and bandwidth for genuinely new questions.
The platform supports both proactive and reactive work. For proactive innovation initiatives — including a process that helps customers develop what the team calls “iconic” flavors — Stravito enables faster, more systematic immersion in category, consumer, and sensory trends. For reactive customer briefs, regional teams can rapidly build an understanding of local markets they do not physically operate in, drawing on Givaudan’s own research and external sources in a single interface. The result, the team reports, is more informed internal discussions and more confident, substantive conversations with customers.
Formal performance metrics are being developed, with further impact measurement underway.
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What Comes Next
The human benefit of the platform may be as significant as the operational one. Less time spent searching and synthesizing means more time available for the creative and collaborative work that the insights function exists to enable.
“Stravito gives people more time to think about new opportunities and new ideas,” said Oker — and, she added, more time at home with family.
Stravito is currently available to regional and local marketing and consumer and sensory insights teams across Europe. The next phase is to extend access to sales and key technical stakeholders, enabling more people across the organization to lead insight-led conversations with customers. Broader global expansion is under consideration.
For Givaudan, the ambition has moved beyond improving access to insights. The goal now is to translate that access into faster, better-informed decisions — consistently, at scale, and across an organization of more than 16,900 people worldwide.