Project description
Real-life product testing at a subscription supermarket
The Weekend Shop is a bricks-and-mortar supermarket in Vienna, where consumers can try out 20 new products for a low monthly subscription. As a new product in Europe costs around EUR 250 000 to develop but has a 90 % rate of failure, this minimises the cost for manufacturers who pay a fee for cheaper real-life product testing. Such direct feedback improves the rate of success of products that end up on supermarket shelves, while reducing production and distribution expense of failed products. The Weekend Shop project currently has 1 500 customers and 80 brands, and plans to open two more stores at Graz and Linz.
Objective
In Europe, 30,000 new produce products are launched per year of which 90% fail and consumers end up with only 3,000 new products that stay on the shelves. Manufacturers put a great deal of passion and time into developing a new grocery item and spend an average of €250,000 per innovation but most fail, which means they lose €6.7 billion on a European level. In order to minimize losses, brand owners and manufacturers purchase syndicated or custom market research reports, rely on scanner data or hire mystery shoppers.
We have invented the Weekend Shop, the supermarket where consumers can choose 20 innovative products for a small monthly fee, and we launched our first flagship store in Vienna, Austria. We are about to open two further stores in Austria (Graz and Linz). The concept allows members (shoppers) to get access to products before they are in the conventional retail stores in exchange for a small monthly fee and their opinion. Manufacturers and brand owners can run product acceptance tests that provide them with unique representative information about their product. We call this real-life product testing.
Innovations in data analytics allows the emergence of online market research. The advances in market research allow us to create our real-life product shopping concept and therefore enter the €40 billion global research market. We have two streams of revenue, including membership fees from consumers and product test-based fees for manufacturers. Currently, our customers are 1,500 members and 80 brands at the Vienna store (e.g. Manner, Dr. Oetker, Knorr, Red Bull).
For the EU, fostering innovation in agriculture and food manufacturing needs to be supported by a retail landscape that allows for innovative products to be purchased by consumers. With initiatives such as our Weekend Shop, those innovations have a higher chance of being accepted by the market due to direct feedback, and give opportunity to SMEs in the field to grow and provide quality produce.
Fields of science
- engineering and technologyother engineering and technologiesfood technology
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managementbusiness models
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencecomputer visionmotion analysis
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwaresoftware applicationssimulation software
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculturegrains and oilseedscereals
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
1060 WIEN
Austria
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.