Innovation Spotlight: AI-generated Comfort Craves

Welcome to Innovation Spotlight! Each month we’ll spotlight a brand that’s capitalizing on a current consumer trend with a new product innovation.

This month we used Zappi’s AI Concept Creation Agents to create something indulgent for the holiday season, similar to the AI-generated Halloween candy we made earlier this year. We just couldn’t resist creating one for the winter holidays as well. 

Read on to learn how we leveraged all our seasonal learnings to come up with something great, our analysis of its in-market potential and what you can learn from it to innovate smarter. 

First, let’s talk about the iteration process. We started with a festive wintery chocolate called YuleFusion.

But we weren’t completely happy with the initial concept that was generated, so we worked with our AI Agents to come up with alternatives, ultimately exploring a filo pastry direction — which resulted in these delectable filo twists. 

Finally, we ended up asking the AI Agents to combine the two into Comfort Craves — a filo-fusion chocolate bar that has the flaky, crispiness of filo pastry with flavors of caramel apple and chocolate.

The result is a candy bar offering indulgent, creamy chocolate punctuated by intermittent bursts of crisp filo pastry flakes and a delectable filling, leading to an interpretation of the traditional chocolate bar that's not only delicious but refreshingly unique.

A few other things worth noting about Comfort Craves (according the the Agents): 

1. Unprecedented texture experience: The innovative integration of filo pastry within the candy bar introduces a texture twist to the regular chocolate experience, providing a flaky crunch surprise in every bite.

2. Festive flavors in every bite: The classic holiday flavors of caramel apple and chocolate are innovatively infused, giving out festive vibes with every mouthful, anytime you desire.

3. Snackability & portability: This new candy bar format allows you to take along and relish the warmth and comfort of holiday snacking, wherever and at whatever time the craving strikes. Whether you're on the move or cozying up at home, carry a little comfort in your pocket.

Zappi’s AI Concept Creation Agents use cutting-edge language models (LLMs) to help brands quickly create, iterate and optimize product ideas based on real consumer data and brand-specific insights. They reduce the concept development timeline from weeks or months to mere hours, enabling brands to quickly deliver unique, data-backed ideas that resonate with consumers.

This is particularly interesting because the Comfort Craves concept was fully AI-generated, using Zappi’s AI Concept Creation Agents and consumer data from testing our seasonal product innovations. Typically seasonal innovations are product variations that are created by an existing brand. However, despite being a new AI-generated brand, it performs well.

You can learn more about our AI Concept Creation Agents and what the process looks like in the video below:

1. Taste is the number one driver of purchase for food and beverage products, which is why tapping into well-liked flavors and enhancing the promise of the taste experience through textures and visually stunning presentations works particularly well. Comfort Craves builds on the sensory and indulgence trend — consumers’ growing desire for products that deliver multi-sensory experiences and elevate everyday consumption into a special experience or moment of pleasure.

2. Packaging is the best sales person. It plays a powerful role in influencing consumer decisions at the point of purchase. In a crowded marketplace, where customers spend only a few seconds evaluating products, effective packaging can capture attention and create desire for the product. The Comfort Craves package does a great job in conveying the indulgent taste and motivates consumers to purchase.

3. Iteration is a great way to get to a better result. Whether you're creating new product concepts through AI or in a traditional way, iterating on the concept tends to deliver much better results than the first attempt. In fact, according to Bain & Company, agile, iterative product development with consumers in the loop is proven to deliver 4-6 times higher success rates than traditional product development methods.

Comfort Craves scored in the top 20% for trial potential and an incredible top 3% on breakthrough potential. That puts us firmly in “Scale and Sustain” territory of our matrix — which is an incredible feat for any innovation, let alone an AI-generated one.

In fact, this is the only “Scale and Sustain” we’ve featured in Innovation Spotlight this year! We are particularly impressed by the trial potential of this concept, since this is a new brand that can’t benefit from any existing brand’s equity. 

Diving further into breakthrough, breakthrough in the Zappi platform is driven by distinctiveness and advantage. Comfort Craves scores high in both distinctiveness (79% vs. 70% norm) and advantage (63% vs. 53% norm) — which means that consumers see the concept as stronger than what is available in the market.

Based on the feedback, the product description and texture were the most exciting part for respondents. The enticing, flavorful description and the thought of experiencing a crunchy or flaky texture stirred their curiosity. They particularly appreciated the caramel apple and dark chocolate flavors, which they found appealing and relatable to the season. 

They also liked the sleek and refined look that made the product appear as highly appetizing — and the “sneak peek” packaging cutaway really stole the show. 

Finally, the idea of portability was well-liked, as respondents liked the idea of a treat they can conveniently carry around.

Here’s what people had to say about Comfort Craves:

• “It’s new and different, filo dough makes it intriguing.”

• “I like that it’s different from the regular chocolate I’ve been having.”

• “The packaging looks elegant and classy. The description of the texture with the filo dough is a new interesting take.”

• “I think the packaging looks amazing and has a sleek design.”

• “It looks ridiculously yummy!”

• “The picture of the inside of the chocolate looks good and I would love to try it.”

Across seasons, we tend to see that the most successful formula for seasonal innovation is to enhance an existing, well-loved product with seasonally relevant colors, shapes, packaging, etc. 

As you can see in the chart below, in our seasonal analysis for last year’s winter innovations, the “enhanced core products” all scored well in trial potential.

Some new flavors of existing products also performed well — depending on the flavor. But completely new products did not score well on either trial or breakthrough potential. 

With all that in mind, it’s incredible that this innovation performed well on trial and breakthrough with not just a completely new product but also a completely new brand. 

Overall, Comfort Craves is set to be a successful winter holiday treat that taps into consumers’ desire for an indulgent, multi-sensory experience. If you want to read more about how Comfort Craves performed with consumers, check out the AI-generated summary from the Zappi platform.

What did you think? Let us know by interacting with our coverage of the product on LinkedIn.

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