Mintel x Dragonfly AI: Closing the Gap Between Product Insight and Packaging That Wins

Innovation has never been more complex or more compressed.

CPG brands are navigating faster innovation decision cycles, more fragmented categories, and increasing pressure to get it right the first time. Even with a clear understanding of what’s happening in your market, the risk of failure is huge because you don’t know what will actually work when the product hits the shelf.

That’s why we continue to invest in bringing together richer, more connected data sources. A year ago, we brought Black Swan Data into Mintel to strengthen how brands understand what’s coming next. This partnership with Dragonfly is the next step, helping clients understand what will actually work.

Mintel GNPD has long been the industry’s most powerful view of global product innovation, tracking what’s launching, how categories are evolving, and where opportunity is emerging. It helps our clients make smarter decisions at the front end of innovation.

But we’ve seen a persistent gap.

Brands invest heavily in product development, insight, and positioning. Yet one of the most critical moments — the point of purchase — is often the least understood. Packaging decisions are frequently made without clear evidence of what shoppers will actually notice.

That’s a big problem because shoppers don’t read packaging, they scan it. What gets seen first shapes what gets bought.

Our partnership with Dragonfly AI brings a new layer of intelligence into GNPD, one that connects innovation strategy with real-world performance.

By integrating Dragonfly AI’s attention analytics directly into GNPD, every product now includes a packaging performance score. Clients can see what stands out against category benchmarks, what gets missed, and how effectively key messages are communicated, based on how the human brain processes visual information.

I find this so exciting because it moves packaging decisions from assumption to evidence and changes when those decisions can be made.

Instead of waiting for in-market results, or relying on late-stage testing, clients can now understand how packaging is likely to perform before they commit to launch. That means faster iteration, stronger execution, and more confidence at every stage of the innovation process.

We’re very deliberate about who we partner with.

Dragonfly brings something genuinely differentiated to this space: a scientifically grounded understanding of human attention. Their technology is built on a decade of neuroscience research and independently validated against eye-tracking benchmarks, offering a genuinely reliable way to predict how humans visually engage with packaging and creative.

But what makes this partnership powerful is how their technology connects with Mintel data.

GNPD shows what products are launching and how categories are evolving. Dragonfly shows what actually captures attention in those environments. Together, they give clients a more complete view of what it takes to succeed. Not succeed ‘in theory’, but in practice.

This is part of a broader shift we’re seeing across the CPG intelligence industry.

For a long time, insight has been focused on understanding what consumers want, what trends are emerging, what competitors are doing, etc. That remains critical. But increasingly, clients are asking a different question: Will this actually work?

That requires a more connected, predictive approach that links strategy with execution, and insight with outcome.

By bringing together global product intelligence and attention data at scale, we’re helping clients answer that question with greater clarity so they can:

Like most things in business, ultimately, this is about outcomes.

Great innovation can fail, not because the idea isn’t right, but because it doesn’t get noticed. And in today’s environment, that’s a risk most businesses can’t afford.

We’re confident the combination of Mintel GNPD and Dragonfly directly addresses that challenge.

This partnership gives our clients a more reliable way to bridge the gap between insight and execution; to move from understanding innovation to delivering it successfully in market. It’s another step in how we’re building a more complete, connected system for front-end CPG innovation.

And that’s where we believe the future of this industry is heading. Not just predicting what’s next but helping our clients shape what wins.

Or are you still making those decisions without a clear view of what people actually see? Find out how your category communicates on pack, and where there’s room to win at mintel.com.