SUPREME
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SUPREME
Focus groups & tasting
Three moderated sessions with 36 participants (university students, athletes and women over 50), combining free associations, mind maps and a tasting of both prototypes.
Visual collages and latent-structure tasks brought out the symbols, fears and expectations that people attach to protein, nature and food technology.
Projective techniques & semantic differentials
Tasks such as “If the bar were a house…” and art-based associations accessed meanings that people struggle to put into words.
Semantic differential scales measured how natural, healthy and tasty each prototype was perceived, segment by segment.
Digital ethnography
A 25-day private online community on the Sicché platform, where 27 participants shared diaries, photos, videos and voice notes from their daily food routines.
Guided by the Think Feel Do model, the study followed how meanings around alternative proteins form at home, at the gym and at the supermarket shelf.
SUPREME (SolUzione per Proteine alternative nel Rispetto dell’Economia circolare: le MicoproteinE) turns agri-food by-products into mycoprotein, a complete protein that needs less land and fewer resources than livestock.
Our team led the consumer research, exploring how people perceive a food that fits neither the animal nor the plant category, and what would make them try it, buy it and keep buying it.
The findings show that the classic opposition between natural = good and artificial = bad no longer holds. The fungus is a liminal symbol: it evokes the forest, tradition and fairy tales, but also mould, poison and decay.
Technology, in turn, is accepted when it reads as an intelligent extension of nature rather than its replacement, opening the way to a new positioning: natural innovation.
The bar was readily accepted thanks to its familiar format (rated 5.5/6 for taste by students, 5.1/6 for naturalness by athletes).
The spread was rejected on taste and smell and spontaneously reimagined as a condiment, signalling that a direct consumer launch would be premature.
Each segment reads the product through a different lens: comfort and ethics for women over 50, function and planning for athletes, novelty and taste for students. Transparency on fermentation and the supply chain emerged as the precondition for trust across all groups.
