For years, price increases did the heavy lifting for value growth. That window has closed, and getting pricing wrong now costs you volume and/or trust.

Your product test is scheduled. Samples are packed, the timeline is set, everyone is ready to go. Then customs holds your shipment for three weeks, in a country you have never tested in before. Your launch date does not move. This is what product testing looks like once you step outside the spreadsheet. If it were really that simple, everyone would do it. There are reasons why not everyone does, and reasons why Haystack Consulting has been doing product testing for 50 years. These reasons multiply even further when testing goes international.

Discrimination testing plays a crucial role in product development, quality control, and reformulation. Yet in practice, not every company has the capabilities to do so. In addition, if the capabilities are there still many companies rely on internal employees to run these tests, often leading to long recruitment times, low engagement, and in the end inconsistent results. At Haystack Consulting, we saw this struggle again and again with our clients. That’s why we developed the Haystack Discrimination Panel: a ready-to-use, always available, always reliable panel of screened consumers, specifically designed to support high-quality discrimination testing.

You know the moment. A project has just wrapped up. The insights have been presented, the team is aligned, and everyone is ready to move forward. And then the questions start: “What if we explored another direction?” “How would consumers react to this claim?” “Are we sure this message feels credible?”

At NIMA Marketing Day 2026, Stefan Peters of Haystack Consulting took the stage with a session that hit close to home for many marketers. Whether you work in B2C or B2B, the pressure is the same: more data, more AI tools, more noise. And yet the big question remains stubbornly hard to answer. What actually works?

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.