Indonesian Snack Taste Test

A prominent Indonesian food and beverage conglomerate, looking to expand its portfolio into the highly competitive sweet and savory snacks category, needed to identify flavor profiles that would resonate with urban millennials in Jakarta and Surabaya. The challenge was to test 12 prototype biscuit and snack variants against leading established brands to determine which had the highest potential for market penetration and to refine the flavor intensity of the top performers before mass production.

Our Approach

We designed a double-blind, sequential monadic taste test. We recruited 600 target consumers (urban millennials, frequent snackers) across central tasting facilities in Jakarta and Surabaya. Participants evaluated the prototypes and competitor benchmarks on overall liking, flavor intensity, texture, appearance, and purchase intent using a 9-point hedonic scale and Just-About-Right (JAR) scales. We also conducted brief qualitative exit interviews with participants who gave extreme scores to understand the “why” behind their ratings. Penalty analysis was used to identify which attributes most heavily impacted overall liking.

Outcome

The study identified three clear winners among the prototypes that matched or exceeded the preference scores of the market leaders. However, the JAR analysis revealed that the savory variants were perceived as slightly too salty, and one sweet variant lacked crunchiness. We recommended specific formulation adjustments to optimize these attributes. The client launched two of the refined variants six months later, capturing a 4% market share in the target segment within the first year, exceeding their initial projections.