Beyond Sampling: How In-Store Activation's Became Taste of Nature’s Live Insight Lab

Most CPG teams still treat in-store demos as a cost of doing business:book the table, hand out the samples, hope the sales lift justifies the spend.

But when you design an activation as a live research lab, you don’t just move cases for a weekend you come away with the kind of insight that can sharpen your targeting, your messaging and your next retailer pitch.

That’s exactly what happened with Taste of Nature and their recent activation with Sprouts in the U.S.

The brief: grow awareness and get smarter, fast

Taste of Nature is a Canadian snack bar company built on organic, non-GMO, gluten-free, kosher and vegan ingredients. As they expanded in the U.S. natural channel, they needed two things:

1. Trial and awareness in key Sprouts markets

2. Real shopper feedback on how their bars were perceived vs. the crowded set

I led a team that

helped design an in-store sampling program in 36 high-traffic Sprouts locations across Texas, California and Arizona, with a simple promotional offer: 2 bars for $4.

On paper, it looks like a classic demo: table, samples, deal. In practice, it was a structured experiment.

From demo table to data engine

The Sprouts activation did what every demo should do — it drove sales.

• The campaign delivered a 48.9% conversion rate from interaction to purchase.

• Stores outperformed the original sales target by 80% on average.

Strong numbers… but the real value was in the data we captured while we were sampling.

Instead of just counting “how many bars sold”, we treated each store as a mini-lab and recorded:

Demo information

• Date, time, store, demo rep

• Start/end times, so we could link performance to daypart

Store information

• Impressions and interactions

• Samples prepared vs. actually distributed

• Units sold vs. the sales goal

• Store traffic during the demo

• Exact product location in store (endcap, aisle, near till)

• SKU availability

• Brand ambassador notes and suggestions for improvement

Customer information

• Baseline product knowledge

• Receptiveness to the product

• Perception of sampling experience

• Demographics and quick “why did you buy / why not” notes

This turned a “weekend demo” into a multi-store dataset we could mine for patterns.

What we actually learned

A few examples of the kind of questions this data can answer:

1. Who’s our real buyer here?

Because reps captured simple demographic cues and comments, we could see:

• Which age bands were most open to trying a new organic bar

• How often “vegan”, “organic”, “low-sugar” or “no junk” came up in purchase rationales

• Which attributes mattered most at shelf vs. in conversation

That’s gold when you’re refining your U.S. shopper persona or briefing your media team.

2. What really moves product in this banner?

By comparing:

• Foot traffic vs. interactions

• Interactions vs. samples

• Samples vs. units sold

…we could see which stores and demo reps were converting curiosity into purchase most efficiently — and reverse-engineer what they were doing differently.

Layered with price promotion (2 for $4) and placement (endcap vs. aisle), we could see where the combination of message + offer + location was strongest.

3. Where does the shopper journey break?

Because we tracked samples prepared vs. distributed and SKU availability, we could spot friction points like:

• Great traffic, but product hard to find after the sample

• Strong interest, but the preferred flavour out of stock

• Curious shoppers who liked the taste but were confused by the pack or claim hierarchy

Those are packaging, merchandising and supply chain questions, not just “demo” issues, and they’re fixable before the next big reset or retailer meeting.

Why this matters for your next retailer pitch

Retailers like Sprouts don’t just want brands that sample well.They want partners who:

• Understand their shopper

• Invest in learning, not just loading up deals

• Bring back insight that can grow the whole category

Because we treated the Taste of Nature activation as an insight engine, we could walk back into the room with:

• Hard numbers on conversion and sales lift

• A clear picture of who was buying and why

• Actionable recommendations on placement, time of day, flavour mix and messaging

That’s a much stronger story than “we did demos and people seemed to like it.”

Designing your next in-store as a live research lab

If you’re planning activations for 2026, here’s how to upgrade them:

1. Start with 3 learning questions

Before you book a single table, answer:

• What do we need to learn about this shopper or banner?

• What decisions will this data actually influence? (pack, price, promo, media, innovation?)

• How will we capture that insight at the demo table?

2. Standardize your data capture

Give every brand ambassador a simple, structured template that logs:

• Store + time + traffic

• Interactions, samples, units sold

• 3–4 quick-tick perception scales (taste, health credentials, value)

• Space for verbatim comments and their own observations

Make it easy enough that they can fill it in between waves of shoppers.

3. Treat reps as field researchers

Train them not just to “push samples”, but to ask one good question:

“What made you say yes / no to this bar today?”

Those micro-conversations will tell you more about positioning than another deck of trend stats.

4. Close the loop internally

After the activation:

• Share the numbers with sales and category teams

• Pull out 5–10 shopper quotes for marketing & innovation

• Document what to repeat, tweak or retire for the next retailer

Make “demo debriefs” a standard part of your go-to-market rhythm.

The bottom line

In-store activations will always be a powerful way to drive trial and awareness.But in a crowded, margin-tight CPG world, the brands that win are the ones that use those activations to learn faster than their competitors.

Taste of Nature’s Sprouts campaign proved that you can do both:

• Deliver strong sales and conversion

• Come away with the insight needed to sharpen your next move in the U.S. market

If you’re planning demos for 2026 and want them to function as real-time insight labs not just sampling tables, this is exactly the kind of work we love to design.