In the fast-moving food and beverage industry, speed to market and decision confidence are critical competitive advantages. Yet many organizations—including some of the world's largest flavor and nutrition companies—struggle with a fundamental challenge: their most valuable research is fragmented across disconnected systems, making it difficult for teams to access the insights they need when they need them.
Givaudan, a global leader serving beverage, dairy, sweet goods, savory, snack, and healthcare categories, faced this exact problem. Its Taste & Wellbeing Marketing & Consumer & Sensory Insights (CSI) team manages extensive consumer, category, and sensory research that informs flavor development and long-term innovation strategies. But as the volume of available data expanded across multiple platforms, external providers, internal systems, and distributed teams, accessing the right information quickly became increasingly difficult.
The Business Impact of Fragmented Data
Research stored across multiple locations created real operational friction. Employees needed to know not only where information was stored but also who held access to it. Valuable insights often existed somewhere in the organization, yet locating them consistently demanded significant time and effort. The business consequences were clear: projects moved more slowly, teams duplicated existing research, and decision-makers sometimes relied on inference when relevant evidence couldn't be found quickly enough. Rather than generating new research, Givaudan needed to unlock the knowledge it already possessed.
Selecting a Centralized Platform
After evaluating several knowledge management platforms, Givaudan selected Stravito to serve as its centralized insights platform. The decision hinged on several factors: the platform's intuitive user experience, rapid implementation capability, ability to integrate with existing research providers, strong customer support, and demonstrated business value. The goal was straightforward—create a single, searchable destination for trusted insights that marketing, sensory, technical, and commercial teams could adopt with minimal training.
Internally, the team branded its Stravito deployment "Genie," reflecting the platform's ability to surface relevant research quickly and simplify access to existing organizational knowledge. By consolidating internal and external research into a single point of entry, Givaudan reduced the time employees spent searching for information and freed capacity for higher-value work: analysis, collaboration, and innovation.
Quantifiable Results: Speed and Efficiency Gains
The impact became measurable almost immediately. According to Givaudan, many projects now move three to ten times faster than before implementation, with research that previously required days—or even weeks—to locate becoming accessible in minutes through Stravito's AI-powered search capabilities. For a company managing complex customer briefs across multiple categories and geographies, this acceleration directly improves time-to-market.
Reduced duplication of effort has also allowed the CSI team to support more customer briefs while redirecting research resources toward genuinely new opportunities instead of recreating existing work. The platform has strengthened cross-functional collaboration as well. Marketing, sensory, and technical teams now work from a shared foundation of consumer and market intelligence, whether supporting proactive innovation initiatives or responding to customer requests.
Regional teams have gained particular advantage. They can now access centralized research to understand unfamiliar markets, reducing dependence on local expertise alone and leading to more informed internal discussions and greater confidence in customer conversations. Beyond productivity gains, the platform creates organizational capacity for strategic thinking and creativity—the work that ultimately drives customer value and competitive differentiation.
Expanding the Advantage
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. As leadership evaluates broader global expansion, faster access to trusted insights is viewed as an increasingly important competitive advantage in an industry where consumer preferences, product development cycles, and innovation timelines continue to accelerate.
For organizations across food and beverage, Givaudan's experience demonstrates a critical insight: the value of operational platforms extends beyond organizing data. By transforming existing knowledge into an accessible business asset, companies enable teams to make faster, better-informed decisions while creating more organizational capacity for innovation. In today's competitive landscape, where speed, confidence, and efficiency increasingly determine success, that capability represents a meaningful strategic advantage.
