Challenge

From being US market leader for several years, our client’s pizza brand was losing share to its two key competitors. The need was to identify a development strategy for product improvement that would recreate differentiation and help regain previous advantage.

Solution

A three-stage programme focusing on two pizza types and involving qualitative, quantitative, and sensory research plus physical quality measures. QSR pizza buyers participated in a three-week qual immersion programme to highlight the language, imagery, needs and issues with their QSR pizza purchases.  A nationwide quantitative consumer benchmarking study benchmarked client’s pizza against five competitors, both blind and branded.  The sensory experience of each pizza was assessed by a trained sensory panel. 

This study served over 1000 QSR pizzas all of which were photographed, measured, and counted for number of brown spots and pieces of topping.

Outcome

The study validated that product improvement was required but that this should be focused on sauce and cheese quality rather than base.  A bonus insight was the identification of higher operator and bake variability compared to competitors which significantly impacted consumer quality and choice.

The next stage of this research is focussing on recipe optimisation.