Shaping Food Perception Through Real-World Merchandising
The Call
A global brand was evolving its in-store food presentation strategy and needed to understand how changes to the product display would impact customer perceptions and behavior.
At the center of the challenge:
While our client had invested heavily in how their products were presented, key questions remained:
- How does merchandising influence perceived food quality?
- What role do product displays play in brand trust and credibility?
- Which elements enhance the experience—and which inadvertently detract from it?
While the team had hypotheses around display effectiveness, they needed a deeper understanding of how customers actually experience and interpret merchandising in the moment, rather than relying solely on stated feedback.
Our Response
Catapult Insights designed an in-person qualitative research program grounded in real-world observation and behavioral decoding.
The approach included:
- In-store qualitative interviews with customers interacting with the food display in a live retail environment
- Real-time observation of how customers notice, interpret, and engage with merchandising elements
- Intercepts with customers actively purchasing food items to capture decision-making in context
- Probing to uncover how displays influenced perceptions of quality, freshness, and brand commitment
This methodology allowed us to go beyond what people say and instead capture what they actually do and feel in the moment, where real decisions are made.
The Celebration
The research revealed that merchandising plays a powerful—and often underappreciated—role in shaping food perceptions.
Key insights included:
- Customers form instant judgments about food quality based on visual presentation and display context
- Merchandising acts as a proxy for freshness and effort, directly influencing trust in the product
- Even subtle display elements can create outsized impact on perception
- When displays create confusion or friction, customers question not just the product—but the brand’s overall commitment
- Customers rarely separate the product from its presentation—the two are experienced as one unified signal
These patterns reinforced that in food retail, the environment is part of the product.
Catapult Insights translated insights into clear merchandising direction, including developing principles for how to design displays that reinforce quality, trust, and ease of choice. Our work aligned internal stakeholders around the behavioral role merchandising plays in the customer experience and ensured the insights could be immediately applied to real-world decisions and ongoing market tests.