The company, which is the brainchild of Afif Ghannoum, launched in 2024 with the aim of driving innovation and strategy across the supplements industry.
Speaking with NutraIngredients this week, he explained that the CPG Radar has moved from an “analysis as a service” approach to being a self-service platform called Signals, and this has accelerated what the company can do with partners.
“We work with both brands and ingredient companies and also actually manufacturers on that, because everybody not only needs to understand what’s going on in the space, but down at the granular level,” he said.
The company has built a framework of true benefits analysis, which it explores from three angles: First, what is the science around the benefit area? Second, are people making that claim in market? And third, are consumers aware of it?
“You really need to understand where all three are,” Ghannoum said. “When all three align, that can create a big opportunity, but it’s often saturated, because everybody’s there, right? Like consumers know about it. Tons of people are marketing it. Science is well established. A lot of times it’s in the mismatch of those where there’s real opportunity.”
Signals
Signals was born from frustrations that Ghannoum experienced when we was building his previous company Biohm.
“It would drive me nuts looking at general trend data a lot of time, because it’s retrospective, and it’s not necessarily pragmatically applicable,” he said.
“It’s interesting, but how do I actually use it? So I tried to build this out with our team looking at if I was a PD [product development] team, or the exec team trying to understand the space, how could I get from 1,000 feet down to the granular ingredient level?”
By tracking over 20 categories in the market, the company is able to give a big picture view of each —from high level metrics about the category to consumer sentiment across platforms like TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram and Amazon.
The platform also allows companies to dig into data at the ingredient level, which tracks both generic and branded ingredients.
“The other thing we’ve seen when brands are looking at branded ingredients is they’re trying to get a sense of the value commercially of that ingredient,” Ghannoum said. “That’s a big challenge, because a lot of times they’re hearing from suppliers, here’s my ingredient, here’s this amazing science, and they’re like, that’s great, but is it worth the cost compared to the generic?”
The system allows brands to explore how the branded ingredient compares to its generic equivalent on price, on additional claims that would be allowed on pack and how that could affect actual sales velocity.
“That’s very meaningful,” Ghannoum said.
Accelerating innovation
Ghannoum noted that he believes that the last 15% of any innovation is always going to be a human centric process involving key strategic decisions that a team is going to want to make. The problem, he added, is that narrowing down options (the first 85% of the process) takes a long, and this is the percentile of the decision making that CPG Radar seeks to address.
Watch the video for the full interview.
