A leading North American food company had identified brothas a strategic growth priority within its broader “savory flavor andnourishment bases” portfolio—a space spanning traditional broth and stock,bouillon, bone broth, and emerging sipping and wellness formats.
The category, however, was evolving faster than the brand’smental model. Wellness-led positioning, premium culinary formats, and new usageoccasions were redrawing who they really competed with. Leadership neededclarity on where the brand could credibly win and where to focus innovation,communication, and portfolio investment.
Existing data showed what shoppers bought, not why. Shareand format reports lacked a consumer-led view of needs, motivations, andoccasions. Growth decisions risked being made on product form and price tiersinstead of the jobs consumers were hiring broth to do. The team needed a consumer-led view of soupand broth needs and occasions.
SIVO built a modern, needs-based segmentation, fueled by AI and grounded in how consumers actually use savory bases, not how the aisle is merchandised.
We redefined the space as “savory flavor and nourishment bases”—any product used as a foundation for cooking, meal enhancement, comfort, or direct consumption. This grouped broth, bouillon, bone broth, cuisine-specific bases, and sipping broths according to the job they solve, nottheir format.
Using mixed methods, we modeled behavior across five dimensions, including flavor philosophy, nourishment philosophy, convenience tolerance, authenticity threshold, and cuisine embeddedness. The segmentation is built on what people actually do in real contexts, not on stated preference alone.
From this, we identified four distinct, needs-based segments that cut across formats and demographics. Demographics profile the segments but do not define them, making the framework durable as populations and life stages shift.
We explicitly accounted for two disruptive forces:
This ensured the model surfaced emerging demand before it appears clearly in sales data.
The segmentation became a shared operating system for growth.
Together, this work gave the client a more confident path to broth category growth, grounded not in formats, but in the real consumer needs that savory flavor and nourishment bases are hired to solve.
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