Nielsen, Label Insight Partnership to Focus on Label Transparency

Today, label transparency plays an influential role in what consumers buy, what manufacturers make and how government organizations regulate, according to Nielsen and Label Insight, a cloud-based product data refinery platform.

The companies announced a strategic alliance to help bring clarity to food, beverage and non-food transparency for the consumer packaged goods (CPG) and retail industry. This alliance will help enable CPG companies and retailers to make faster and more informed data-decisions to grow sales by understanding product trends and creating better personalization for the wellness consumer. Together, Nielsen and Label Insight will develop and maintain a CPG industry retail and consumer measurement capability incorporating food, beverage and non-food ingredients, nutrients and U.S. government regulated product attributes.

With this alliance, Nielsen's market measurement and Homescan Consumer Panel data will be combined with Label Insight's cloud-based product attributes. This will bring an unmatched level of data granularity to CPG manufacturers and retailers, generating attributes - such as nutrients, derived ingredient properties and allergens - for 80 percent (and growing) of U.S. food, beverage and non-food retail sales. For example, using this new offering a retailer could identify a growing wellness or ingredient trend (ie: clean label, vegan, paleo, sprouted, etc.), determine where they have opportunity to grow sales and make assortment changes in local stores to better fulfill the growing demand.

"With the ability to examine products beyond marketing claims and explore derived ingredient properties, this enhanced offering helps to deliver a fuller view into consumer shifts across total retail grocery and goes beyond what is currently available in the marketplace," says Chris Morley, president, U.S. Buy, Nielsen. "As consumer demand for product transparency continues to grow, it's increasingly important to offer consumers a detailed view of products and ingredients. With over 1000 different variations for a single ingredient, this highly detailed information will enable our clients to have the information they need to win with today's health-conscious consumer."

The Nielsen and Label Insight alliance will strengthen data and unlock ingredient and attribute insights never before available, company officials say, helping CPG brands and retailers to uncover performance drivers and emerging trends among consumers. Additional benefits include the ability to identify trending ingredients, forecast their relevance five years out, understand competitive product formulation and evaluate the impact of government regulations.

"Consumers are becoming increasingly sophisticated with their food-purchasing decisions as their definitions of healthy become more varied – from gluten-free to low-sugar to sustainably sourced. This has created unprecedented pressure for brands and retailers to provide increased product transparency," says Ronak Sheth, chief customer officer, Label Insight. "Our alliance will enable brands and retailers to better respond to this heightened demand for transparency, by not just understanding what is being purchased, but why consumers are motivated to buy a certain product. Unlocking insights and trends around formulations, claims, nutrients, and other rich content will allow brands to innovate faster and will allow retailers to have personalized conversations with their shoppers."

This new service offering from Nielsen and Label Insight of premium health and wellness characteristic information built from ingredient and nutrition panel intelligence across food and beverage categories, including beverage alcohol, will be available in Q1 2017, followed by non-food categories (personal care, beauty care, household care, vitamins/supplements and pet food) in Q2 2017.