Challenge

With Block processed cheese being the biggest sub-category of Total Cheese category in the Southeast Asia region, our client, an established dairy cooperative is looking to expand its offering to include Block cheese in their Cheese portfolio. With Philippines being one the main markets to be heavily consuming Block cheese, our client wishes to tap into the Philippines market/consumers and hence, the intention to gauge Philippines consumers’ perceptions and acceptance towards their new Block cheese product innovations and ultimately identifying the go-to-market product.

Approach

The study was conducted in the Philippines, where we invited n=160 mums aged 25-49 years old to a centralised location in Metro Manila to evaluate their preferences i.e., liking, intention, sensorial measures, etc. towards our client’s Block cheese prototypes and competitor’s (as benchmark product) with product rotation applied. During the test session, mums had a hands-on experience to slice and grate the test products after which they tasted the sliced cheese as filling on a pandesal and the grated cheese as topping on a spaghetti. At the same time, mums also evaluated prototypes’ pricing to gauge prototypes’ optimum price point to go with as well as product concepts (idea) to gauge uniqueness, product fit, etc.

Results

Considering the new product offering, there is a need to ensure our product is accustomed to suit the taste of the Philippines consumers. Based on a pre-defined action standard where our client’s prototypes need to be either on par or better than competitors to go ahead, we see that our client’s prototypes met the action standard and through a detailed sensory elements analysis, we were also able to identify the winning prototype to move ahead with.