Stories
Nestle Relies on Outset to Test its Most Innovative Product Concepts
Mar 6, 2025
By
Aaron Cannon
Nestle accelerates the time-to-market of new products by testing over 100 new concepts with Outset’s AI interviewer
The challenge:
Nestle is known for product innovation. As a prime example, Nestle launched an entire new brand specifically designed for GLP-1 users called Vital Pursuit.
But bringing new products to market is incredibly time consuming – it can easily take 12+ months from idea to launch. As part of its innovation process, Nestle conducts consumer research to eliminate the bad ideas or validate and refine the great ones.
While this process is important, it’s too slow. The faster Nestle brands can conduct the research, identify the winning and losing concepts, and optimize the final product offering, the quicker they can stock shelves and increase revenue. And with the market as competitive as it is, speed is everything.
Nestle needed ways to accelerate their product pipeline.
The process:
The consumer insights team at Nestle began working with Outset to do just that
Brands around the world – from Coffeemate to Stouffer’s and even to Vital Pursuit – deploy Outset to test, validate and refine new product concepts at a speed and scale that was never possible.
Research teams would traditionally run large scale surveys to gather quantitative metrics about concepts and then run qualitative studies to get the more nuanced concept feedback. This was a long, drawn out process and required stitching several sets of data together for suboptimal results.
AI-moderated research with Outset offered an alternative. This is where an AI agent presents concepts to participants, asks multiple choice questions, and then engages in dynamic, in-depth discussions. The platform also synthesizes the results into a mix of quantitative metrics and the qualitative reasons behind them.
“We needed to both go deep with consumers to understand their feedback but gather it at real scale. We needed confidence in our findings.” recalls Michael Widenmeyer, Consumer Insights Sr. Manager at Nestle.
The brand teams at Nestle provided the concepts to Outset along with consumer target criteria and then let AI take it from there – screening participants, conducting interviews, and analyzing results.
The results:
The first and most obvious outcome has been speed.
“We were very impressed with how much depth people shared with the AI moderator – it was more than twice as much as our next best method” shared Michael Widenmeyer, “and we got both the quant and qual concept validation done in record time, allowing us to rapidly prioritize what we put through our innovation pipeline.”
Secondly, the AI-moderated tools unlocked scale. Usually, qualitative research might include 20 or 30 people. Most projects with Outset include more than 10x that numbers. And with Outset’s multilingual interviewer, that scale often includes multiple countries and languages – this work helped them make smart market-by-market decisions that might not have been possible otherwise.
Third, this new method has been cheaper. The traditional testing methods often require expensive outside firms, hundreds of moderator hours, and costly translation services. With Outset, they’re able to get more data at a fraction of the cost.
Now, Outset has been deployed across >100 different concepts, >7 brands, and >5 countries.
“Outset is now a key tool for our team to get more, better, and most importantly, faster research done,” said Michael Widenmeyer, “accelerating our innovation pipeline substantially.”
