Stop guessing. Start predicting.
What if you could know how much consumers will like your next product? Before you run a single consumer test. That is exactly what HaySense does. It is a predictive analytics tool built by Haystack Consulting that tells you how consumers in your target segment will respond to any new product. Based on its sensory profile. Not after months of testing, but right now.
What's in it for you?
Product development is expensive. Each reformulation cycle, every prototype, every consumer panel comes with a cost, in both time and budget. And yet, products still launch that miss the mark.
HaySense changes that by letting you simulate and predict before you invest. You feed in a product's sensory profile. How it tastes, smells, feels, and looks. And you get back a predicted liking score for any consumer segment you choose. France, women aged 25-44? Done. Five markets at once? No problem.
The result: faster decisions, fewer wasted cycles, and a clearer path to the product consumers actually want.
A worked example: dark chocolate
Take a chocolate manufacturer with several dark chocolate variants in its portfolio. Some perform well. Others sit below expectations. The question is why. And more importantly: what to do about it.
Using HaySense, the team mapped the full sensory landscape for the category. The tool showed exactly where the high-liking zones were for their target segment, and where each product sat relative to those zones. One variant scored a predicted 4.7 out of 10. The benchmark product from a competitor sat at 7.5.
HaySense then generated a reformulation path: increase milk flavour, improve smooth mouthfeel, adjust fatty mouthfeel. Three changes, in priority order. Expected liking lift: plus 2.8 points. No new consumer panel needed. No guesswork about where to start.
That kind of direction used to take months. Here it took days.
Human understanding. AI speed.
HaySense is built on real consumer and sensory data. It can work with your existing internal data. Or Haystack Consulting can collect it for you. Either way, the model learns what your consumers respond to and translates that into clear, actionable direction.
This is exactly where Haystack Consulting sits: turning complex human understanding into decisions you can act on with confidence. HaySense puts that capability directly in your hands, combining the rigour of sensory science with the speed of AI.
Ready to know what your consumers will love before you build it? Let's talk.
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