Caprese, Analytics, and the Unmet Need
I couldn’t believe it. Like a five year old who refuses to eat his vegetables, I had picked around the Caprese. When I bought the Caprese pasta salad, I knew immediately that I was only going to eat the pasta salad and ignore the Caprese. But looking at the result, I lamented the waste. Was this avoidable? Certainly not, I wanted pasta salad and it was all that was offered. Was this common? For my dignity, I had to assume so.
And then it hit me. What I lamented most was not the avoidable waste of food but rather the unavoidable loss of information and room for improvement. The supermarket had no way of knowing my uncommon behavior. No way to judge size of the market or ability to quantify the risk of introducing a new product. If I had been on a website, on any digital medium really, my journey and actions would have been captured. Instead, the supermarket was left to assume satisfaction based upon purchase while other companies, with a mature approach towards analytics, could obsess over behavior. As a result, I was doomed to the only choice available: learning to love Caprese.
