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Mintel Research Consutancy is a division of Mintel Group. Visit our group site at www.mintel.com.

Mintel is a global supplier of consumer, media and market research. For more than 35 years, our groundbreaking products have provided unique insight that directly impacts the success of our clients.

Quality Assurance

In-depth insight
into the consumer
environment

Foodservice equipment checking
To ensure your customers receive the best end-product from you, you need to have confidence in the equipment used to serve it. Our associates can covertly or overtly feedback on the way products are served and the quality of the equipment used to serve them. The results can help you to benchmark the quality of the end product against your own product standards.

Mystery shopping
Use our associates to gather invaluable feedback on your consumer experience. Gain insight into the environment, service, staff attitude and knowledge that surround that customer experience. Use this information to optimise sales opportunities and maximise repeat custom potential. Spot geographical and seasonal trends and identify areas for improvement. Better understand the customer experience to improve customer service strategies and increase customer satisfaction.

Trade Age
Whether selling through channel distributors or retail outlets, track how long your products are spending on the shelves, measure stock movement and turnaround. Monitor your competitors' products and evaluate the average time it takes to sell products in the marketplace. Quickly identify problem outlets or regions and develop stocking solutions.

Trade Sampling & Package Appearance
Have batches of your own or competitor's products delivered to you from around the world, enabling you to accurately assess on-shelf quality at point of consumer experience. Analyse primary and secondary packaging in-store to see how the consumer receives it to help you evaluate your packaging performance.

Case Studies

Covert trade sampling
A market-leading lager producer employs our covert trade sampling services to assess the quality of its lager being sold in pubs and bars within key target market cities. Our trained associates enter these outlets, carefully assessing each step of the customer experience from the way the lager was poured, head-size, lacing, carbonation the cleanliness of the glass it was served in, to the final temperature and taste of the beverage. As a result, our client has a clear view of the overall customer experience and is able to develop strategies to further improve on this.

Quality assurance testing
Mintel's global shopper resources are deployed on behalf of a household fizzy drinks brand to perform quality assurance tests on drinks fountains in outlets worldwide. Testers are trained to understand desired quality levels and score taste-testing in a consistent way. Elements such as carbonation, equipment, stock storage and syrup concentration are monitored. The results are fed back into a database and are used to identify problem outlets. As a result the client is able to improve the quality of the product in these outlets by re-training employees helping safeguard their brand in areas where they would otherwise have no control.

Testing the food chain
Government agencies have food produce samples from across the UK bought and sent to their laboratories within 12 hours for testing. This is a continuous study that assesses the levels of pesticides and antibiotics entering the UK’s food chain.

Mintel has been known to ship takeaway pizza and fish and chips to arrive fresh and ready for testing within a 12 hour timeframe. No request will surprise us!

Product retrieval case studies
1.We collected samples of tap water from the East and West coasts of the US, for a Japanese company – they didn’t tell us why.
2.We shipped 200 kilos of ice cream from the UK to Australia for focus groups – it was still edible when it arrived.
3.Every month we collect around 500 products for a multi-national company, to enable them to track new launches across their product categories in over 100 countries

More Case Studies:

» Product review case study
» Competitor tracking case studies
» Accompanied store guide case study
» Category audit case studies