Is Fibre the Future? Test Your Innovation Lets Us Know

Our new Innovation Of The Week feature takes a recent new product launch, runs it through System1’s Test Your Innovation product and explores what makes it work – and how real audiences respond to it.  

We’re kicking off with Activia’s Big Pot Natural and Fibre, a range featuring fibre-added and natural yoghurt varieties, which are being rolled out across the UK this month. 

What makes it innovative? Activia’s bet here is that fibre will be the next big thing in active foods after the protein trend peaks. Protein-packed ranges have been a huge consumer success, tapping into an overall fitness trend, especially among young men. Our recent blog on the subject lays out how food brands are spotting an opportunity for fibre-added foods to enjoy similar success, with rising interest in gut health. As with protein, the trick is finding foods where adding fibre seems natural and not like something that will compromise flavour, texture or pleasure. 

Like Test Your Ad, Test Your Innovation has a Star Rating at its heart, running from 1-Star to 5.9-Stars. And also like Test Your Ad, around half the innovations we test crash to a 1-Star result. This stark differentiation between winning and losing ideas is critical to innovation testing – we don’t want results that just bunch a lot of mediocre ideas together. 

The Consumer Verdict

One of the questions the test aimed to answer is – can a fibre-added product really match the proven appeal of protein, or is it still too early? The results prove that for fibre, the time is right. Activia’s Big Pot Natural and Fibre got a very good 3.7-Star Score, putting it in the top quartile of all innovations, higher than many protein-based products in our extensive database. Whether fibre is the next step for functional food or not, this particular yoghurt has firm consumer appeal. 

The Star Rating is built out of a range of measures, most importantly people’s emotional response to a new idea. But we include other metrics too. You might not personally want to buy or try the product yourself, but you might still spot a winner and realise other people would, so we tap the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to ask whether or not you’d buy or sell shares in each product. Activia scored well here – 66% of people would buy shares in the idea, a very good result. 

And we also measure the speed of response to that question – a proxy measure for how quickly people can ‘get’ an idea. That helps you spot ideas with raw potential but that need refining to be more easily understood, for instance. Activia’s results here are interesting because people decided very rapidly: it’s very encouraging that Activia’s fibre-add yoghurt is as clearly understood as its protein-based rivals. 

Test Your Innovation also gives vital diagnostic feedback. Why do people like the Big Pot range? Size does seem to matter here, and there’s a really positive response to the fibre idea. How could it be made even better? Flavour is the big ask from our panel, from fruit flavours to actual fruit pieces. 

Is the age of protein ending? Is fibre the future? Activia’s scores don’t suggest a market-breaking product – heavily functional products rarely are – but it’s a strong entry into the functional food category and from the Test Your Innovation results we can see solid indications that fibre really might be the future.