At a glance

Client: IANSA, a leading Chilean food manufacturing company

Sector: Food and beverage, retail

Challenge: A regulatory label change putting a core product under pressure

Agents deployed: Innovation Agent, with Market Intelligence and Quality and Compliance

Talio’s role: Talio surfaces and evidences the direction. IANSA’s R&D builds it.

Engagement: Eight weeks, three sprints, with a client gate at each stage

The challenge

A proposed change to Chilean food labelling would place a warning on the front of any pack containing certain regulated ingredients. Those ingredients are what most of the category is built on. One of IANSA’s core products was suddenly exposed, and the clock was set by a regulator, not by a planning cycle.

Market intelligence of the usual kind was no help here. A panel report arrives quarterly and is weeks stale on the day it lands, and it describes the category as it was, not the ingredients coming into it. IANSA needed to know what could actually be built and needed that direction to be supported by evidence.

The Innovation Agent

The Innovation Agent mines millions of data points ingested daily across retail, social media and product launches, surfacing the new claims, ingredients and whitespace from which the next product can be built.

It was pointed at three markets: the home market, the closest regulatory comparison and the market where the relevant product trend runs deepest.

It read the shelf

The agent created a structured retail picture across the three markets, assessing products based on what is actually in them rather than the aisle in which they sit.

New ingredients do not always launch first in the most obvious category, so a search confined to that category can fail to identify emerging opportunities.

It read the conversation

The agent analysed live social signals rather than relying on a year-old consumer panel. It examined how people choose and use these products and, specifically, what they criticise.

Criticism was matched to the exact ingredient it targeted, making the analysis precise rather than a blur of general noise.

It scored against the regulation

Regulatory status in each market was used as a scoring criterion from the outset, alongside retail presence, clean-label fit and performance. It was not treated as a compliance check added at the end.

The Quality and Compliance Agent tracks regulatory change across markets, ensuring that the constraint remained live throughout the analysis.

The result was whitespace the original brief had not anticipated: ingredient directions that were not part of the existing category conversation and were not already on anyone’s shortlist.

What was delivered

Opportunity Map

Natural ingredient directions sitting outside the regulated list, ranked by retail presence, clean-label fit, regulatory status in-market and performance. Options outside the project scope were separated out, with the reason for each exclusion clearly explained.

Candidate and Combination List

Each candidate and combination was presented alongside the retail evidence supporting it and its regulatory position, allowing R&D to understand not only what to test, but why it qualified.

Category Benchmarks

Pricing, claim and whitespace positioning across the target markets, delivered through the Innovation Agent.

Consumer Signal Read

A detailed analysis of where criticism lands by ingredient across the social conversation, matched to the exact target so that potential taste and trust risks were understood before a formulation was selected.

R&D-Ready Test Plan

A test plan of compliant builds to validate, with the supporting evidence structured so that the engagement ended with a working brief the team could build from rather than a report they had to interpret.

The outcome

IANSA entered the engagement with an open regulatory question and no defined answer.

Eight weeks later, its R&D team had a ranked set of natural ingredient directions, the evidence behind each one and a test plan ready to run.

Set up once. Working every day.

What happens next

The engagement proved the method. The next step belongs to IANSA’s R&D team.

The ranked directions and test plan now move into their hands for formulation and validation of the compliant builds. The work was designed to hand over cleanly, allowing R&D to begin with a working brief and the supporting evidence behind each candidate already in place rather than a report they first have to interpret.