Agency reflects on UK’s ‘biggest ever’ product testing project

The Chosen By You initiative was announced last October and promised to give consumers a greater say in Asda’s own-brand products. The results are starting to appear on shelves now.

Cambridge said that that work it carried out for the supermarket was “the biggest piece of product testing anyone has ever done in the UK” involving more than 200,000 blind taste tests with around 40,000 consumers.

The firm said that more than 3,500 products have been tested and around 1,500 have been “improved” as a direct result of consumer input.

Cambridge’s managing director Paul Beresford said: “This would have been a major undertaking for any market research agency. At one stage we were running more than 50 hall tests each week across the length and breadth of the UK, week after week, plus testing in home for products that needed a different approach.”