Tata Consumer Products Delivers Fresh Ideas with AWS Partner Tastewise

While innovation has always been a cornerstone of the food and beverage industry, it has grown even more important for consumer goods companies seeking to drive volume after sales decreases in 2023. In fact, a survey by Deloitte found that 80% of executives plan to increase investments in production innovation in 2024, as “innovative products tend to command higher margins.”

As competition stiffens, food and beverage brands aren’t only looking for ways to innovate quickly, but also are searching for insights to help them create unique, net-new products and capitalize on changing trends and tastes.

For Tata Consumer Products, getting the right insights was always the most challenging part of the business. Tata Consumer Products (Tata) is a fast-moving consumer goods company. It’s the world’s second-largest manufacturer and distributor of tea, and it’s also a major producer of coffee. With such profound influence on the beverage industry, Tata faces immense pressure to stay ahead of its competitors. However, with competition growing fiercer, Tata found that “getting inspired” had become a more formidable task than ever imagined. That’s where Tastewise, an AWS Partner, came in.

Tastewise: The GenAI-powered consumer data platform

Tastewise helps agile food brands place consumers at the heart of marketing campaigns and product development. It offers innovative processes as well as customizable generative AI solutions. From ideation to product development, marketing execution, and sales enablement, Tastewise’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions fuel cutting-edge AI models with the industry’s largest dataset. It captures food innovation instantly from millions of restaurant and delivery menus, recipes, retail shelves, and consumers—and billions of social media shares—across all food and beverage categories. Tastewise already works with the world’s most influential food brands, manufacturers, ingredient companies, and flavor houses, including Nestle, PepsiCo, Givaudan, Campbell’s, and Kraft Heinz.

No more guessing games

With the help of Tastewise, Tata can now focus on data and analytics to drive successful products and test intuition. “The difficulty was always coming up with an idea and justifying it when there was no product in the market,” said Mark Donovan, Botanical, Flavors, and Innovation Director. According to Donovan, Tastewise has helped Tata “see the momentum,” giving the company data-driven snapshots into the topics and trends people are buzzing about. “It’s helpful because we get data telling us there have been 500 people in the UK talking about ‘X’ in the last year. It’s not just one person saying, ‘This is going to be a good ingredient so we should do this.’ Tastewise has allowed us to pick up more fact-based ingredients.”

Thanks to Tastewise, Tata can get its products to market more quickly. “We had databases where we were looking at products that were already in market. By the time we’ve launched, it’s going to take us another 12–18 months to get another product into market. That’s too late,” Donovan said. With Tastewise, Tata can generate ideas quickly and build on them faster. Real-time data creates a better understanding of ingredients and how they’re being used. In fact, Tata can build an idea in a live environment—something it couldn’t do before implementing Tastewise. Now, Tata is putting 20–30 items into research, studying specific flavor combinations.

Tata has used Tastewise in a striking number of its concepts. For example, Tata recently created 26 concepts, a third to a half of which Tastewise supported in ideation. When looking for combinations out of the 50–60 ideas, Tastewise’s solution powered by AWS was used to generate half of them. “Tastewise allows us to focus in and say, ‘I can write a concept that I guarantee will research well every time by putting in a few keywords,’” Donovan explained.

Tata knows how influential Tastewise and its customizable generative AI solutions can be—both to its company and the global beverage industry. “Tastewise will without a doubt allow us to make better decisions in the long term,” Donovan said. “If I were to go on Instagram and type in ‘match,’ I’m going to get worthless results. If I were to do the same search on Tastewise, I can filter through the results and get different takes by looking at all the combinations. Before Tastewise, all we had was noise. Now, we have highly specialized and…valuable results.”

Tastewise and AWS

Tastewise uses the world’s largest public cloud provider to ensure the security and reliability of its platforms and its customers’ data. Built on AWS as a multi-tenant SaaS platform, Tastewise is an AWS Partner committed to co-building, co-marketing, and co-selling. The company prides itself on three factors backed by AWS.

1. High availability: Tastewise’s platform uses multiple replicated instances to ensure uninterrupted services for its users. The platform is backed by the AWS uptime service-level agreement.

2. Security: Tastewise takes the security and privacy of its users’ information seriously. To ensure the safety of user data, Tastewise doesn’t store any personal information on its servers.

3. Monitoring and logging: To ensure the security of its AWS infrastructure, Tastewise uses the following AWS services.

• Amazon CloudWatch observes and monitors resources and applications on AWS, on premises, and on other clouds.
• AWS CloudTrail enables auditing, security monitoring, and operational troubleshooting by tracking user activity and API usage.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

Conclusion

Many companies, including consumer goods manufacturers, are exploring how data and generative AI can help them drive profitability by delivering innovative, new products faster and to the right audiences. To learn how Tastewise can help you, visit its page in AWS Marketplace.

Further reading

How Campbell’s redesigned their innovation processes with an efficient, data-driven approach

How Givaudan successfully answered customer briefs based on real-time consumer data