Month: October 2026

Many of the products we test end up on a shelf, or, next to something else. Shoppers rarely judge a product in isolation. They compare it with the alternative beside it, the cheaper one below it and the familiar one they bought last time.

That’s why product benchmarking, comparing your product with competitors and category leaders, remains one of the most useful pieces of research a food, drink or household brand can commission. As we head towards 2027, we’d argue it matters more than it has for some time.

Shoppers compare more easily than ever

Prices, reviews and alternatives are a few taps away, whether someone is browsing online or standing in the aisle. The effect is that your product is constantly measured against the rest of the category. Knowing how it really stacks up, as opposed to how you hope it does, puts you in a much better position to make decisions.

Budgets keep people switching

When household budgets are under pressure, shoppers trade down, try own-label and move between brands more readily. Loyalty can’t be taken for granted. Benchmarking helps answer a straightforward question: does your product still earn its place and its price in the eyes of consumers?

Own-label has caught up

Retailer brands are no longer assumed to be the poorer option. If a supermarket’s own version is close to your product on taste or performance, it’s far better to learn that from independent research than from a buyer in a listing meeting.

Recipes and packs are always changing

Brands adjust products for many good reasons: cost, supply, sustainability, nutrition. Each change carries a small risk that something consumers valued has shifted. Comparing the new version against the old one, and against competitors, is a sensible way to check you haven’t lost your advantage along the way.

Internal opinion only goes so far

Teams who work on a product every day become very familiar with it, and often have strong views about competitors. That familiarity is valuable, but it isn’t the same as a consumer’s view. Independent benchmarking replaces assumption with evidence from the people who buy the product.

Retailers like evidence

Buyers see many similar new lines. Showing how your product performs against category leaders gives them something concrete to consider. It can also support comparative claims, provided the research is designed around the wording you want to use.

Markets shift quietly

A competitor can improve their recipe, refresh their packaging or launch something new in your space without much fanfare. Without regular comparison, it’s possible to drift behind without noticing. For that reason we see benchmarking as something to revisit periodically, not a one-off exercise.

What good benchmarking tells you

Done well, benchmarking helps you see:

· Where your product leads, and where it trails

· Which differences consumers actually notice, and which they don’t

· What to protect, what to improve and what to leave alone

· How you perform against the competitors that matter most to your category

The aim isn’t simply a ranking. It’s a clear picture of strengths and areas for improvement, so your team can decide what to do next.

Final thought

A product can be well made, well priced and well presented, and still be second choice on the shelf. Benchmarking helps you find that out early, while there’s time to act on it.

If you’d like to talk about how benchmarking could work for your product or category, you can get in touch with our team at wssintl.com.

The day your product testing report arrives tends to bring a strange mix of relief and pressure, because the fieldwork is finally finished and the numbers are in, yet everyone around the table now wants to know what you’re actually going to do about them.

Plenty of brands invest properly in the research itself, recruiting the right consumers and choosing a sensible method, only to let the findings drift into a shared folder where they quietly influence nothing at all.

Getting real value out of product testing means treating the report as the start of a decision rather than the end of a project. If you’re still getting to grips with the basics of how consumer research works, that groundwork is well worth covering first.

However, this piece is about what comes afterwards, when you’ve got results in front of you and a launch, a reformulation or a retailer pitch riding on how you read them. Having the data and then ignoring it leaves you in much the same position as brands that take their chances without any consumer feedback, and they usually find out the hard way once the product is already on shelf.

Reading Your Product Testing Results Beyond the Headline Score

Most people’s eyes go straight to overall liking, and while that headline figure matters, it rarely tells you on its own whether your product is ready, nearly there or in genuine trouble.

A respectable average can hide a split audience where half your target consumers love the product and the other half actively dislike it, which is a very different commercial position from a product everyone finds pleasant but forgettable. Reading your results properly means looking at how scores spread across the sample, how different consumer groups responded and how your product compares with whatever it’ll sit beside on the shelf.

The method behind the numbers also shapes how far you can lean on them, since product tests run in a central venue capture first impressions while studies that put your product into people’s homes reflect repeated use, real preparation and real routines.

A product that dips slightly over a week at home is telling you something a single tasting never could, and the right research partner will explain those nuances in plain terms rather than leaving you to decode a wall of charts on your own.

The Product Testing Findings Worth Acting On First

Working through a report is far easier when you have a rough order of priority, so that the commercially important insights get dealt with before the nice-to-know ones. Whether your study covered a ready meal, a snack or a soft drink or something from the household aisle, these are the areas that usually deserve your attention first:

• Attributes consumers rated as too strong, too weak or about right, because these point your development team straight at what needs changing.

• Differences between consumer groups, such as heavy and light users, younger and older buyers, or parents and the children actually eating the product.

• How your product performed against the market leader or your closest rival, which is exactly what product benchmarking is built to measure.

• Purchase intent and price perception, since a product people like but wouldn’t pay for is a pricing problem as much as a recipe one.

• Open-ended comments that explain the scores, often in the exact language your marketing team should be using.

• Any results strong enough to back up an on-pack or advertising claim.

• Packaging and usability feedback, from how easy the product is to open to how well it keeps once it’s been opened.

Turning Product Research Into Your Next Development Decision

Where your results point to a clear weakness, the sensible route is usually to refine the product and test again rather than launching and hoping for the best.

Repeating the research after each round of changes builds a reliable picture of whether you’re genuinely moving in the right direction. That cycle of tweaking and retesting is a big part of why testing products as a regular habit pays off, since each study hands you a benchmark the next one can be measured against.

Strong results deserve to work just as hard for you as weak ones, and an independent report can carry real weight when you’re trying to secure a new retailer listing or reassure a buyer that your product has earned its space. Scores that clearly beat a competitor might also give you the evidence for a substantiated marketing claim, handing shoppers a reason to pick your product up rather than the one next to it.

Some findings will raise questions the original study was never designed to answer, which is often the moment to switch methods rather than simply repeat the same test. 

If a product scored well in a one-off tasting but you’re unsure how it’ll hold up week after week, a home use study is the natural next step, and it works for a far wider range of products than many brands expect. Knowing how an in-home study typically runs before you commission one also helps you set realistic timings and brief your own team properly.

Get More Out of Your Next Round of Product Testing

Whether you’ve got a report sitting unread on your desk or a new product heading towards its first round of consumer feedback, a short conversation can help you work out where to go from here.

You can talk through your product and objectives with us in a 20-minute call, and we’ll recommend the right mix of taste testing, home use testing, benchmarking or online research with no sales pitch attached.

We’ve worked with more than 500 brands across food, drink, household and pet products since 1997, and every project we run ends in a report built around prioritised recommendations rather than raw data, so you’ll know exactly where to focus your effort. To book in that call, ring 0151 346 2999 or drop us a line at info@wssintl.com.

Reformulating a product that already sells well is one of the most nerve-racking jobs in food and drink development, because you’re tinkering with something your customers have already decided they like and buy week after week.

Whether you’re cutting sugar, salt or fat to stay on the right side of HFSS rules, swapping an ingredient because a supplier has hiked its prices, or changing a process to make a production line run more efficiently, the commercial goal is usually the same, which is for nobody to notice that anything has changed at all.

Proving that is a lot harder than it sounds, and it’s exactly where home use testing earns its keep. When you put the new recipe into people’s homes and let them live with it for a week or two, you find out whether the change survives normal life rather than a brief, polite sample, which is a point that many of the questions brands ask us about HUT eventually circle back to.

It’s also one of the clearest examples of why home use testing outperforms quicker research methods, since a reformulation that slips past your most loyal buyers unnoticed is worth far more to you than one that simply scores well on the day.

Why a Reformulation Needs Home Use Testing and Not Just a Quick Taste

Your existing customers don’t taste your product once and move on, because they’ve eaten it dozens or even hundreds of times and carry a remarkably precise memory of how it should taste, smell and feel. 

A short tasting in a central venue can tell you whether a sample of the new recipe is pleasant, but it can’t really tell you whether someone who’s had the original in their cupboard for years will spot the difference halfway through the second packet, and that’s the moment that decides whether they keep buying. A home use testing study gets far closer to that reality by letting your product slot back into the routine it already occupies.

The real-world setting brings its own complications, of course, and anyone familiar with the key challenges of home use testing will know that compliance, consistent usage and clean data all need careful management when you can’t watch people in person. 

With a reformulation, though, those uncontrolled conditions are the whole point, because your new recipe will face exactly the same everyday chaos the day it lands on shelf in the familiar pack at the familiar price.

What In-Home Use Testing Reveals About a New Recipe

Repeated consumption is where most reformulations either hold up or quietly unravel, and it’s something you simply can’t see in a single sitting. 

A reduced-sugar cereal might taste fine on day one yet start to feel flat by day five, a lower-salt soup could seem perfectly seasoned in a small pot but disappointing as a full bowl at teatime, and a new sweetener system can leave an aftertaste that only becomes irritating with regular use. Because HUT captures how people genuinely behave with a product over time, those slow-burn problems show up in your data long before they’d ever show up in your sales figures.

Preparation and storage matter just as much as taste, particularly for anything your customers cook, heat or keep in the fridge once opened. A change to a sauce’s thickener might affect how it behaves in a pan on a domestic hob, while a tweak to a frozen product could alter how it crisps in a typical home oven rather than the commercial kit in your development kitchen, and you’ll only discover these things when real people prepare your product their own way. 

Timing your fieldwork sensibly helps too, since the time of year you put a product into homes can colour the results in ways that have nothing to do with the recipe itself.

Reformulation pressure isn’t limited to food and drink either, with household brands constantly reworking fragrances, removing unpopular ingredients or moving to more sustainable formulations. The same logic applies whether you’re testing a new washing-up liquid or a reworked moisturiser or shampoo, because your loyal users will judge the new version against their lived experience of the old one rather than against a blank page.

How to Structure a Home Use Test for a Reformulated Product

Running a reformulation study well takes a slightly different mindset from testing a brand-new product, because you’re usually aiming for parity with something consumers already know rather than chasing outright delight. Most of the good practice that applies to any home use test still holds, but a few areas deserve extra thought when your goal is a change your buyers won’t notice.

Recruiting Current Users for Your Home Use Test

Your sample should lean heavily towards people who already buy and use your product regularly, since they’re the ones whose loyalty is genuinely at risk and the ones best placed to notice a difference. 

We screen participants on purchasing behaviour and product usage through our database of more than 10,000 consumer tasters and our dedicated recruitment app, and the same principle holds for home use testing on pet food, where owners whose animals already eat your recipe make by far the most useful testers.

Comparing Old and New Recipes Side by Side at Home

A blind comparison between your current product and the reformulated version, presented in neutral coded packaging so brand cues don’t sway anyone, gives you the cleanest possible read on whether consumers can tell them apart and which one they prefer. 

Depending on your objectives, participants might try each version in turn over consecutive weeks or rate both against the same set of attributes, and it’s this kind of real-world comparison that has reshaped how brands approach consumer research over the last few years.

Agreeing What a Successful Result Looks Like

Deciding before fieldwork what counts as a pass saves a lot of internal debate afterwards, whether that’s statistical parity with the original, no meaningful drop in overall liking, or a clear preference for the new version among your core buyers. 

Our reports include statistical analysis where appropriate, so when your new recipe holds its own you’ll have the evidence to reassure retailers and your own commercial team, and if it falls short you’ll know exactly which attributes need further optimisation before you go any further.

Reformulate With Confidence Using Home Use Testing

Changing a recipe your customers already love will always carry some risk, but putting the new version through a properly designed home use test takes most of the guesswork out of it and gives you solid evidence long before the reformulated product goes anywhere near a shelf. 

We’ve been running HUT studies for food, drink, household and pet brands across the UK and Europe since 1997, with most projects taking around two weeks from commission to report, so the research needn’t hold up your launch timeline.

If you’re planning a reformulation and want to know how your loyal buyers will really react, get in touch with our team on 0151 346 2999 or at info@wssintl.com, and we’ll help you design a study that answers the question that matters most to your brand.