The challenge: Making better business decisions in CPG
As one of the world’s leading branded food companies, Hormel Foods manages a diverse portfolio that includes 30+ brands including Skippy, Planters, SPAM, and more. Facing growing market pressure, Hormel recognized that traditional research processes alone could no longer keep pace with the organization’s needs.
Hormel Foods’ Insights team’s central mission is a simple one: help their business counterparts make better decisions. Historically, this has meant identifying business questions, searching for existing research, commissioning new studies, and synthesizing findings into recommendations. While effective, the process often requires significant time and investment.
Hormel partnered with Market Logic to implement their purpose-built insights market intelligence solution DeepSightsTM, and dynamic, AI-driven synthetic personas DeepSights Personas. Together, these capabilities are helping Hormel Foods build what Gartner describes as an “active intelligence system”: one that accelerates innovation by combining trusted organizational knowledge with AI, while keeping human expertise firmly at the center of decision-making.
The recent surge of AI capabilities has presented an opportunity for the Hormel Foods Insights Team to rethink this workflow. Their goal was to leverage AI to reduce repetitive work, surface existing knowledge more effectively, and allow insights professionals to spend more time interpreting information and guiding business strategy.
Establishing new ways of working with DeepSights
A critical requirement for Hormel Foods was ensuring that AI recommendations were grounded in their trusted, proprietary data rather than generic LLM content.
Market Logic and Hormel Foods worked together to build out The Hive, Hormel’s centralized knowledge management system, housing internal research projects, and purchased reports alongside trusted external sources.
DeepSights acts as the enterprise AI layer that sits on top of The Hive, enabling much more efficient engagement with their wealth of trusted, proprietary data. It is designed to connect, synthesize and explore an organization’s knowledge, powered by agentic AI. Years’ worth of valuable intelligence can be surfaced in seconds, and because the platform searches only vetted and contextually relevant information, users know exactly where each insight originates. Additionally, agents continuously scan connected research and data sources to surface personalized, contextualized updates.
This approach saved Hormel Foods’s teams hours of manual research for each business question. DeepSights synthesizes findings into a coherent picture while maintaining traceability to the original research. This gives both insights professionals and business stakeholders greater confidence in the results.
Onstage at IIEX North America 2026, Hormel Foods’s Senior Insights Analyst Dave Anderko gave this example:
“Let’s say I’m working with innovation on trying to figure out what are some pain points with pepperoni. DeepSights can search dozens of reports that I have on pepperoni, [as well as] dozens of industry reports on pizza and pizza toppings and other things to do with pepperoni… Now, instead of only getting maybe five percent of the way there, I might be fifty percent of the way there, maybe further.
So then, I don’t necessarily need to do a big piece of custom research. I may not need to do research at all or maybe I just need to do a quick like agile piece of research just to validate what I found.
DeepSights is a collective AI ecosystem that joins all these pieces together to give you an answer that you wouldn’t have been able to get to before.”
-Dave Anderko, Senior Insights Analyst, Hormel Foods
Bringing consumers to life with DeepSights Personas
With this new way of working firmly in place, Hormel took one more step to bring their active intelligence system to life by adding synthetic personas to their workflow. DeepSights Personas brought an additional layer of consumer centricity to Homel’s insights capabilities.
DeepSights Personas enables insights and business teams alike to custom-build and engage with AI-generated consumer personas built from a company’s existing research database.
Rather than functioning as generic chatbots, these personas are built on an organization’s data sources — structured, unstructured and a combination of both — designed to reflect specific consumer segments derived from qualitative interviews, segmentation work, and another proprietary research. This allows teams to engage in natural language conversations with realistic consumer segments representations, to test concepts and validate ideas instantly and at scale before commissioning new research — either as individual personas, or as panels.
Hormel Foods views these synthetic personas as an important complement to traditional research, not a replacement for real consumers. By making richly informed consumer perspectives available on demand, the company enables faster exploration of ideas while preserving the rigor of foundational consumer research.
The result is an AI capability that feels less like querying a database and more like consulting an informed consumer panel whenever questions arise. In this sense, DeepSights is enabling Hormel Foods to invert traditional market research processes, and unlock faster innovation cycles.
“Instead of it just a generic, custom GPT, this is a deep layered consumer persona that’s going to give you much better and more articulate feedback… it’s like a real consumer that’s on demand”
– Dave Anderko, Senior Consumer Insights Lead, Hormel
Looking ahead: From periodic research to continuous customer-centricity
Hormel Foods’ vision for insights democratization is not to replace human intelligence with artificial intelligence, but to combine the strengths of both. DeepSights is now available to their marketing, sales, category management, R&D, and other teams, but it is underpinned by vetted, quality research and good data governance provided by Hormel’s consumer insights team.
In short, DeepSights’ AI solutions act as an assistant that retrieves information, synthesizes research, and accelerates routine tasks. Human experts remain responsible for defining business problems, evaluating evidence, setting strategy, and making decisions.
As AI capabilities continue to mature, Hormel expects the role of insights professionals to evolve from research execution toward strategic consultation, storytelling, and cross-functional leadership.
Supported by Market Logic’s expert team and their AI-powered solution DeepSights and DeepSights Personas, Hormel Foods is building an active intelligence engine that enables faster decisions, deeper customer understanding, and more impactful insights across the enterprise.
