Food and Drink
#1 food and drink market research agency
Food and drink research and consumer insight specialists for grocery, online, convenience stores and the hospitality sectors
We’re Vision One — an award-winning market research agency built for companies that want to grow. We help you uncover deeper customer insights, explore new markets, track your brand and create thought leadership. We deliver fast, powerful research that moves your business forward.
Insight isn’t just information – it’s your competitive edge. Let’s sharpen it.
Product & Category
Working alongside food and beverage (F&B) producers and retailers, we help local and international brands bring their products to market with smart insights. Services include: ideation, concept development and testing, pricing and competitor analysis.
Shopper Behaviour
Understanding the retail environment and shopper decision-making is critical for success.
Our services include: eye-tracking, shopper intercepts, accompanied shopping and surveys to deliver the insights you need.
Brand Health & Tracking
Long-term growth is largely driven through brands and branding. Our leading-edge brand research helps companies build stronger brands.
Services include: brand naming, positioning, brand tracking and competitor monitoring.
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Food and drink research and shopper insight expert
The food & beverage and grocery sectors are some of the most innovative and exciting markets. Why? Simply because it is so competitive. With so many established and new/emerging brands vying for consumers’ attention, it has never been so exciting and important for brands to understand what makes customers tick.
What do brands need to do to succeed?
Can you grab their attention? What drives consumers to buy? How effective is your brand identity and branding? How can you position yourself as the market leader? Food and Drink Research helps brands with everything you need to know.
Researching your target market’s behaviour, needs, and preferences produces insights that can proactively expand a brand in the ever-evolving market. Starting the research journey allows your brand to break new ground and discover avenues for growth.
Food and drink research services
(Click on the images below for details about each service)
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Eye-tracking research
We are experts in eye-tracking and have a comprehensive range of cutting-edge tools for measuring consumers’ visual attention, including stationary, mobile, online, and field-of-view.
Our mobile eye tracking is ideal for in-situ research (shopping, eating out, surfing the internet, etc.). We even offer predictive AI-based eye-tracking called VAA (Visual Attention Analysis).
Vision One offers a comprehensive suite of eye-tracking tools, enabling us to tackle any research problem related to conscious or unconscious visual attention and behaviour.
Segmenting customers
Defining your target market is essential for effective marketing for all businesses. Customer segmentation breaks your target audience down into smaller, more manageable segments based on a variety of characteristics – including demographics, attitudes, needs, values, behaviours and geography.
Most marketers would agree that the first and arguably the most important step in developing your marketing strategy is defining your target market – we help you avoid the pitfalls and get it right.
Shopper research
As behavioural researchers, we specialise in observation and ethnography to gain a clear and unobtrusive view of how consumers naturally behave in the digital and real worlds.
Observation research involves unobtrusively and naturalistically observing your customers’ behaviour – to determine how they naturally respond to a product displays, websites, products or situations. These insights often provide the most natural, compelling and actionable insights possible.
We also specialise in exploring and understanding the Shopper Journeys giving you insights how people shop.
Packaging research
Packaging Research That Drives Purchase — Not Just Preference
If you’re investing in new packaging or refreshing an existing design, you need more than opinions — you need evidence.
That’s where PackProbe, our advanced pack testing and development tool, delivers real commercial clarity.
In crowded FMCG food & beverage categories, packaging is your silent salesperson. It has seconds to grab attention, signal quality, communicate value and trigger appetite appeal. The question isn’t “Do people like it?” — it’s:
- Does it stand out on shelf?
- Is the brand recognised instantly?
- Are key messages understood at speed?
- Does it increase purchase intent?
- Is it premium enough to justify the price?
For deeper insight, we combine quantitative pack testing with qualitative focus groups, shopper interviews and eye-tracking studies. This reveals not only what works — but why — uncovering emotional reactions, attention flow and decision triggers in real retail or on-trade contexts.
Innovation (NPD)
Smarter, Faster, Consumer-Led Innovation
Launching new products in today’s FMCG and food & beverage markets is high risk — and high cost. Too many ideas make it to shelf without being fully validated. That’s why we created Innovision — our consumer-led innovation philosophy designed to optimise new product development and user experience from day one.
Innovision goes beyond traditional concept testing. It’s a structured, insight-driven framework that supports every stage of innovation:
- Opportunity identification and white space exploration
- Co-creation and ideation workshops
- Early-stage concept screening
- Proposition refinement and optimisation
- Product and sensory testing
- Packaging and price validation
We combine qualitative depth with quantitative rigour to move quickly without sacrificing quality. From collaborative ideation sessions to robust product testing in real consumption contexts, we help brands stress-test ideas before major investment.
The goal isn’t just to test ideas — it’s to make them stronger.
Because in competitive grocery and foodservice markets, successful innovation isn’t accidental — it’s insight-led.
Brand tracking
Today’s most successful food & beverage brands don’t rely on instinct — they rely on evidence. In fast-moving grocery and hospitality markets, understanding how your brand is performing over time is critical to sustained growth.
Our brand tracking programmes go beyond awareness metrics. By evaluating hundreds of food & drink and FMCG brands, we measure the indicators that truly drive performance — consideration, preference, usage, trust, value perception and emotional connection.
Brand tracking allows you to see momentum in action. Are campaigns strengthening equity? Is price perception shifting? Are competitors gaining ground? Through robust quantitative tracking combined with deeper diagnostic research, we identify what is improving, what is declining, and why.
We analyse both rational drivers — quality, price, availability — and emotional associations that influence loyalty across in-home and out-of-home consumption occasions. This provides a clear picture of brand health within the competitive landscape.
By combining commercial experience with proven brand theory and advanced analytics, we deliver insight that goes beyond reporting. The result is confident, data-led decisions that protect market share, strengthen positioning and drive long-term brand growth.
Because in competitive categories, what gets measured gets managed — and what gets managed grows.
Pricing research
n competitive food & beverage and FMCG markets, pricing is one of the most powerful — and sensitive — growth levers. Small changes can significantly impact volume, margin and brand perception.
Our pricing research goes beyond simply asking what consumers would pay. Using advanced techniques such as price sensitivity analysis, elasticity modelling and value perception testing, we identify optimal price points, acceptable ranges and psychological thresholds. We assess how pricing interacts with pack size, promotions and positioning — and how consumers respond in both in-home and out-of-home settings.
Crucially, we help brands understand perceived value. Can you justify a premium? Are you vulnerable to private label trade-down? Will a price increase erode loyalty or protect margin?
The result is clear, evidence-led pricing decisions that balance competitiveness with profitability — giving you the confidence to protect revenue while maintaining brand strength.
Neuromarketing research
In food & beverage and FMCG markets, many purchase decisions happen instinctively — in seconds, at shelf or on menu. Our Advanced Research Unit (ARU), made up of psychologists and neuroscientists, helps brands understand these fast, automatic responses using advanced neuromarketing and System 1 research techniques.
Alongside traditional research, we use implicit testing methods such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT), reaction-time measurement and behavioural experiments to uncover subconscious brand associations, emotional responses and bias that consumers may not be able to articulate.
For deeper neurological insight, we offer sophisticated neuroimaging solutions, including mobile and stationary EEG to measure brainwave activity in response to packaging, pricing, advertising or product experiences. Our expertise also extends to fMRI recording and analysis, enabling us to identify which areas of the brain are activated when consumers process brands, flavours or purchase cues.
The result is a clearer understanding of why people choose — not just what they say. By revealing subconscious drivers of appetite appeal, trust, premium perception and emotional connection, we help food and drink brands optimise products, packaging and communications with greater precision and confidence.
Client feedback and testimonials
The team were a pleasure to work with. They went above & beyond to deliver an answer to our business issue with tight deadlines and an even tighter budget! I look forward to working with them again!
Vision One were excellent to work with throughout the process. They understood our brand and its needs and took on feedback to make changes where necessary. We’re very happy with the level of insight gained.
Thanks for a stimulating debrief and a wealth of insight that will continue to keep us in tune with the UK beverage consumer and what they want from our products
Vision One assisted us with great agility and quality.
I have thoroughly enjoyed working with Vision One. They are very helpful, knowledgeable and approachable. I would definitely recommend their services.
Research case studies
A range of our market research client case studies
Satisfaction guaranteed
We are three-time winners of the Best Market Research Agency (The Drum Awards). We take quality seriously and strive for excellence in everything we do.
With the global ISO 20252 accreditation, we are proud of our Customer Satisfaction ratings. See our latest ratings that highlight our exceptional performance and, in particular, the high ‘effective’ score for our work.
Vision One is a specialist food & beverage (F&B) research agency based in London (UK), delivering insight across grocery, FMCG food categories, hospitality, foodservice and out-of-home dining — from pantry to plate and shelf to table.**
Understanding consumer behaviour in the food & beverage sector
Consumer research helps food manufacturers, grocery retailers, and hospitality brands understand how and why people make eating and drinking decisions. Whether exploring snacking occasions, beverage preferences, or the shift between in-home consumption and out-of-home dining, we uncover the motivations behind choice.
Using qualitative techniques such as focus groups, in-depth interviews and sensory taste testing — combined with robust quantitative studies — we reveal the emotional and functional drivers influencing brand selection, trade-up behaviour and repeat purchase across packaged foods and drinks.
Strengthening innovation and product development
In fast-moving grocery and foodservice markets, innovation must be evidence-led. Our food market research supports new product development through white space analysis, flavour optimisation, concept testing and packaging evaluation.
Eye-tracking, shopper research and sensory studies show how consumers engage with products in real retail and on-trade environments — helping optimise shelf standout, appetite appeal, labelling clarity and point-of-sale impact across supermarkets, convenience and hospitality settings.
Optimising grocery and out-of-home experiences
Understanding the shopper and diner journey is critical across both retail and hospitality. Through in-store observation, intercept interviews, merchandising audits and menu research, we identify how consumers navigate grocery aisles, choose snacks, or select dishes in restaurants and cafés.
For foodservice and QSR brands, we explore evolving consumption occasions, delivery behaviours and pricing sensitivity — informing menu innovation and promotional strategy.
Driving growth across every consumption moment
From FMCG packaged goods to premium dining, our insight supports pricing strategy, brand positioning and channel optimisation. By analysing performance across grocery retail, convenience, and hospitality environments, we help brands maximise visibility, relevance and profitability.
Making confident, evidence-led decisions
In the world of everyday consumption, trends shift quickly. Our research ensures every decision — whether refining a beverage concept, launching a new snacking line, or optimising in-store execution — is grounded in robust evidence.
The result: stronger innovation, clearer positioning, and sustainable brand momentum across the full food & beverage landscape.
Your food and drink research questions answered.
Food innovation is exciting — but risky. We help brands identify genuine white space before development begins.
For example, by combining trend analysis with early-stage concept testing, we’ve helped clients refine flavour profiles, adjust portion formats, and sharpen claims — increasing purchase intent before launch and reducing costly reformulation post-launch.
Shoppers don’t make decisions in isolation — they make them in front of shelves, under time pressure.
We explore customer journeys and focus on real behaviours. We examine decision trees, switching triggers and private label trade-down behaviour. In one category study, we identified that packaging cues were influencing quality perception more than price — allowing the brand to protect margin while increasing standout.
Snacking is emotional and situational.
We use usage diaries, segmentation and attitudinal profiling to uncover mood-based triggers — from “functional fuel” to “permissible indulgence.” This helps brands reposition products for new consumption moments and expand penetration.
At VIsion One we go further. Not only do we use obsevation to see what people are doing, but we also use eye-tracking and video shopper missions and in-home behaviours with smart glasses to capture the required evidence.
We go beyond reporting metrics. Our work helps clients:
- Secure retailer listings with insight-backed range reviews
- Refine NPD before national rollout
- Protect margin through pricing optimisation
- Increase campaign effectiveness
- Identify growth opportunities across at-home and out-of-home consumption
In a category where trends shift quickly and competition is fierce, we provide the clarity needed to act decisively — and grow confidently.
In crowded grocery aisles and fast-moving categories, packaging is often the first — and only — chance to win attention. Packaging research helps you understand whether your design stands out on shelf, communicates quality, and triggers appetite appeal. Small design changes can significantly influence purchase decisions, brand perception, and even willingness to pay.
In a category where trends shift quickly and competition is fierce, we provide the clarity needed to act decisively — and grow confidently. We focus on…
- Standout & Attention – Grabs attention quickly in crowded shelves or online listings, interrupting autopilot shopping behaviour.
- Instant Recognition – Enables shoppers to identify the brand within seconds through distinctive colours, shapes and visual cues.
- Clear Communication – Helps consumers immediately understand what the product is, what it offers, and why it’s relevant to them.
- Appetite Appeal – Stimulates desire through imagery, textures and cues that trigger taste expectations and emotional response.
- Quality & Trust Signals – Communicates freshness, provenance, health credentials and reliability at a glance.
- Ease & Convenience – Feels practical and intuitive to use (resealable, portable, easy to store), supporting repeat purchase.
- Value Perception – Influences how premium, affordable or “worth it” a product feels before price is even processed.
Yes, That’s exactly its purpose. We test early-stage concepts, flavours, pack formats and claims before full investment in production and distribution. By measuring purchase intent, uniqueness and relevance, we identify which ideas have genuine traction — and which need refinement. This can significantly reduce launch risk and increases retailer confidence.
Pricing isn’t guesswork — it’s psychology and value perception. Through price sensitivity testing and elasticity modelling, we identify optimal price points, acceptable ranges, and tipping points where demand drops. This helps brands protect margin while remaining competitive, particularly in categories affected by private label and cost-of-living pressures.
Contact Us
We are quick, responsive, and above all, our research is customised precisely to your needs, ensuring you get exactly what you need every time.
Email us at mail@visionone.co.uk
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