‘Revolutionary’ platform from maker of Love With Food offers agile alternative to focus groups

11-Oct-2017 - Last updated on 11-Oct-2017 at 18:58 GMT

From the makers of the better-for-you snack subscription box Love With Food, which builds brand awareness and gathers consumer feedback for finished products, comes a new product testing and insights platform that promises to do what traditional focus groups deliver – only bigger, better and faster.

Rapid Test and Learn is a “revolutionary” platform for gathering consumer reactions to products before they launch – giving companies’ an invaluable opportunity to learn about potential kinks in their products and iron them out by reformulating, updating packaging and improving the overall experience so that when products land on store shelves they are the best version and have the best chance to succeed, according to the parent company of both services, EdgiLife

“The goal when I started Love With Food has always been a way to collect consumer insights for brands using a very active, engaged community, and this new solution – Rapid Test and Learn – came out of a lot of brands coming to us and saying, ‘Hey, we have a new product that we are thinking of launching … can we test it with your community, but we don’t want to be in the Love With Food box and we only want to test it with a few hundred people,” said Aihui Ong, founder and CEO of EdgiLife.

With Rapid Test and Learn companies can do this by sending their product either by itself or with a blinded control product that is representative of the category they are entering to a select group of “elite” Love With Food subscribers, Ong said.

She explained for each review she can select hundreds of testers, based on clients’ specifications, from a pool of more than 500,000 natural and organic consumers nationwide who subscribe to Love With Food and who most consistently provide user feedback. This selection process usually takes 48 hours and then consumers have three days from when they receive the product to share their feedback through an online survey that EdgiLife analyzes and presents to companies in the form of a detailed analytics dashboard – all within two weeks.

The scope and speed of Rapid Test and Learn far surpasses that of the traditional testing models, Ong said.

“The current ways of testing a new product is either with friends and family or expensive focus groups, and these are pretty antiquated and usually much smaller,” she said. “When you test with friends and family, they might be bias, and focus groups are not scalable, whereas for us we can easily test a product with 500 people nationwide.”

EdgiLife helps brands reach early adopters

While EdgiLife can pull together quickly a large group of testers from around the country, it is upfront that its selection pool is 95% women who are 25 to 45 years old and favor natural and organic products.

“They are definitely not the general population,” but they are early adopters who more often than not are the ones willing to give new brands a chance when they first launch, she said.

A more agile approach to user testing

The service comes at a fraction of the cost of traditional focus group tests, Ong said.

“Traditionally, testing products in homes would cost around $50,000, but what we do costs only about $10,000, and we can do it faster and better because we don’t have to go out and recruit people – it is all automated and we have a very engaged community that wants to try new products and help companies develop brands,” Ong said.

Because Rapid Test and Learn is so much less expensive than traditional consumer testing, companies can use it multiple times throughout the development process instead of just once at the end of development, Ong said.

“When a company gets their results if they go back to the drawing board and do some reformulations based on what they learned before the launch, they can still test it again. So, we basically are adopting more agile consumer research,” Ong said.

Once the product is finalized and on the shelf, companies can continue their relationship with EdgiLife to gather user feedback by participating in one of Love With Food’s subscription boxes, Ong added.

“We are finally able to bring the EdgiLife brand full circle because we are able to help brands at every stage in the product lifecycle now,” including pre-launch with innovation and development and with building brand awareness, she said.

“Ultimately,” she added, “We do three simple things. We help you reach the right consumers, engage with the right consumers and understand the right consumers.”