Customer Experience & Preference

Customer Experience & Preference – Brewing Fresh Growth in a Declining Category

Helping restaurants respond to customer's changing tastes.

Situation

Iced tea had long earned its place on restaurant menus. Keeping its place in the order was becoming another story.

With away-from-home iced tea sales declining, a leading coffee and tea supplier needed a closer look at the behaviors and expectations behind the shift.

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Listening & Learning

So, Compendium studied iced tea in context, not in isolation.

Current and lapsed iced tea drinkers across a mix of U.S. regions, ages and client segments completed a 7-day interactive diary, logging food and beverage choices, completing daily activities, answering moderator questions and sharing photos of their meals and drinks.
From there, selected participants joined customized 45-minute one-on-one conversations to dig deeper into their behaviors, preferences, barriers and unmet needs around away-from-home iced tea.
The client team participated in the journey, observing both phases and feeding follow-up questions to the moderator as new themes emerged.

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Leveraging Insights

We learned that refreshing the category meant thinking beyond what was in the cup.

The order: Consumers were increasingly skipping a beverage purchase altogether or choosing free water.
The offering: Sweet vs.unsweetened iced tea wasn’t going to cut it. Consumers wanted greater variety, including fruit flavors and sparkling tea.
The experience: Freshness was something they wanted to see. Clear dispensers offered more visibility than the stainless-steel dispensers commonly used in restaurants.

Compendium turned those findings into a fresh pour of direction around innovation, variety, messaging and dispensing. The client now had research-backed recommendations to bring directly to restaurant customers, so they could do more than keep iced tea on the menu – they could keep consumers choosing it.

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Compendium helped us move beyond simply knowing what consumers were doing to understanding the ‘whys’ behind their choices. The research provided clear direction that guided our product development and changed how we worked with our restaurant customers.

Client Insights Manager

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