Food companies trying to understand how consumers feel about a new product have relied on surveys, focus groups, and sensory panels for decades. But according to Mario Ubiali, founder and CEO of neuroscience company THIMUS, these approaches often elicit misleading (and sometimes completely wrong) responses from consumers.
“One of the most interesting discrepancies we’re seeing between declarative – what people say – and implicit – what people experience in the brain – derives from the fact that the brain is very lazy and tends to prefer experiences that are comfortable and repeated.”
Ubiali’s company uses technology that reads electrical activity in the brain to better understand a consumer’s immediate response to food. Using a wearable EEG headband, THIMUS records electrical activity from the frontal part of the brain while someone tastes a food or beverage. The system then translates those signals into measurable insights about preference, familiarity, and emotional engagement.
“Our brain constantly does things, and everything that the brain does translates into electrical activity,” Ubiali said. “Part of that electrical activity becomes an outbound signal, almost like a sound that your brain makes when it’s working.”
According to Ubiali, the company’s technology, which is based on long-standing neuroscience methods, interprets electrical activity to measure likability, familiarity, and emotional engagement. Sensors in the headband capture the signals and send them to cloud software, where algorithms interpret the data.
“We objectify via digital data taken from the brain something that as a principle has always been there: understanding consumer preference.”
When I asked Ubiali why a consumer’s verbal feedback might diverge from their neurological response, he said it often happens for a variety of reasons, including social pressure. He pointed to how responses in consumer panels and tastings for plant-based meat may have been misleading.
“If you went out to consumers and asked them how they liked a plant-based burger, there was huge social pressure,” he said. “People would say, ‘of course, I want to save the planet.’ But when we measured in the brain, the brain really didn’t like it.”
In other words, a person may treat surveys or food tests as an opportunity to value-signal, even when those signals conflict with their true feelings about the product.
Ubiali also said that sometimes the brain reacts differently to products that a person finds interesting but unfamiliar. Even when people enjoy a new taste, their brains often prefer flavors that feel familiar.
“The brain always tends to have food experiences that are comfortable and repeated,” Ubiali said. “There’s a big myth that has been built around novelty and exciting new experiences.”
A product might spark excitement during a tasting panel but fail to become a regular purchase if it doesn’t fit existing sensory expectations.
Unsurprisingly, Ubiali also said the company plans to leverage artificial intelligence to create a new data platform built around its proprietary neuroscience data. Called THIMUS Intelligence, the platform will combine brain data with traditional consumer research, sensory testing, and commercial datasets.
He hopes that the company’s neuroscience data, combined with traditional consumer research, sensory testing, and commercial datasets, will create a proprietary insights layer for product companies seeking to understand consumer brain behavior around sensory food experiences, even without conducting new testing.
“Our device samples the brain 251 times a second,” Ubiali said. “So we’re building correlations between individual aspects of the food experience, formulation variables and preference and emotional engagement.”
Ubiali said his company also plans to bring this technology into the home, where distributed panels of consumers could provide neuroscientific feedback. Today the company operates what it calls Houses of Humans, where consumers participate in neuroscience-based testing sessions. By eventually putting the technology into consumers’ homes, Ubiali hopes the company can provide faster feedback for its clients.
I asked him whether brain activity might be impacted by where consumers are during their tasting sessions. According to Ubiali, the answer is yes.
“You are always going to have a difference based on context because the brain is contextual. Human beings are contextual.”
Long term, I’m excited about the possibility of this type of consumer feedback. In my past career as an industry analyst, I conducted many consumer surveys, and it was always understood that consumers aren’t perfectly honest when responding to surveys for a variety of reasons. By tapping directly into brain activity as people try new foods, this type of feedback could help companies avoid multimillion-dollar bets on new products that ultimately don’t resonate with consumers, but were greenlit based on false signals from consumers.
You can listen to my full conversation with Mario in the video below or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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