For food and beverage companies competing on innovation and speed to market, the ability to move quickly from customer brief to decision is a competitive advantage. At Givaudan, a global leader in flavors and fragrances with more than 16,900 employees, the European Marketing & Consumer & Sensory Insights (CSI) team serves major brands across beverages, sweet goods, dairy, savory, snacks, and healthcare. But a fragmented research infrastructure was slowing the team down.

The Operational Problem: Insights Trapped Across Systems

Flavor creation depends on combining art with science – translating consumer and sensory insights into product reality. Yet at Givaudan, research data was scattered across external platforms, internal systems, personal folders, and colleagues' knowledge. Responding to a customer brief meant knowing both where information lived and who to ask for it.

The operational cost was significant: slower decisions, growing reliance on new research when existing evidence could not be found quickly enough, and mounting fatigue that drained team bandwidth. The team needed a "Google for research" – a single, fast entry point to the insights they already owned.

Selection Criteria: Adoption, Speed, and Business Value

After evaluating vendors, Givaudan selected Stravito. Four factors drove the decision.

Service and culture fit. From initial conversations, the Stravito team demonstrated a B2B service mindset aligned with Givaudan's own approach. As Basak Oker, a team member, noted: "The attitude made a big difference. You could feel, 'We're here for you.'"

User experience and adoption. Stravito's interface was intuitive and required minimal training – essential for driving adoption across insights specialists, marketing teams, and non-specialist users who needed to access research independently.

Implementation speed. The solution supported rapid deployment, including integrations with key external research providers, enabling quick internal rollout.

Total value. Rather than focusing on cost alone, Givaudan evaluated the combination of speed, usability, support, and adoption likelihood – and found clear business justification.

The team branded their instance "The Genie," betting it would make their insights wishes come true.

Impact: Faster Cycles and Smarter Resource Allocation

Within weeks of launch, measurable improvements appeared.

Decision-making accelerated dramatically. Many projects now move 3x faster; some execute 10x faster. By surfacing relevant internal and external research through AI-assisted search, projects that once required weeks now complete in days or hours. This speed directly translates to faster response times to customer briefs and quicker time-to-market for customer innovations.

Reduced research duplication means the CSI team supports more customer briefs without adding headcount, while reducing unnecessary new research commissions when answers already exist. This efficiency frees budget for genuinely new consumer and sensory questions that drive innovation.

The platform also streamlines both proactive and reactive workflows. For proactive innovation work – such as designing "iconic" category flavors – the system enables teams to immerse themselves in trends systematically. For reactive customer briefs, regional teams can rapidly understand local market dynamics by accessing Givaudan's research and external sources together, enabling more confident customer conversations.

Formal KPIs continue to be developed, with further impact measurement underway.

Organizational Benefits: Shifting Work Toward Strategy

Beyond productivity gains, the implementation has created meaningful human benefits across the team. Time spent searching and synthesizing research has declined, freeing capacity for creation, collaboration, and innovation – the higher-value activities that drive competitive advantage.

As Basak observes, the platform 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 organization is now exploring extensions to sales and key technical stakeholders, enabling them to lead insight-driven conversations with customers and support internal decision-making beyond the CSI function.

Global expansion is still being evaluated, but the underlying imperative is clear: in fast-moving food and beverage categories, speed and confidence in decision-making are non-negotiable. For Givaudan, a centralized insights platform transforms research access into a competitive operational capability.

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.