Evaluating Digital Twins & Synthetic Data with a Global Snack and Confectionery Company

The Challenge

A Global Snack and Confectionery Company faced mounting pressure to accelerate innovation cycles, especially with the fast-moving consumer category and highly-regulated audience they needed to reach: teen gum-chewers in the UK/EU. Traditional research approaches were too slow, too expensive, and increasingly unable to deliver nuanced insights at the pace required by commercial and innovation teams.

In particular, the company struggled with:

• Low-incidence of high-value consumer segments
• Fragmented datasets housed across multiple agencies, platforms and formats
• Tight timelines that made it difficult to run full-scale consumer research for each innovation cycle
• The need for deeper emotional and behavioral nuance than conventional survey-only inputs could provide
• Pressure from internal stakeholders to create more agile approaches

The Solution

To overcome these limitations, the Global Snack and Confectionery Company partnered with Panoplai to explore whether Digital Twins (virtual versions of real customers or segments built on foundational data) and Synthetic Data (AI-generated information that mirrors statistical properties of real data) could accelerate learning and unlock new forms of insight.

Panoplai ingested and harmonized:

• 10+ diverse data sources including survey, segmentation decks, strategic & creative brief documents and interview & focus group transcripts across teenager segments.
• New data collected by Panoplai to fill gaps and strengthen behavioral and emotional modeling.

The Digital Twin Validation Process

1. Strategic Questions: To speed time-to-insight and enable action.

• Fit: Can twins work for both qual + quant?
• Replication: Do they mirror real emotional + behavioral nuance?
• Decision-Making: Can they refine and create?
• Beyond Humans: What can they reveal that people can't?

2. Designing the Test: A structured side-by-side comparison.

• 4 surveys, 7 transcripts + one new survey built the foundation for twins.
• Two benchmarking surveys enabled side-by-side validation.
• Twins were tested against humans with identical question structures.

3. Measuring Success: Evaluating alignment, realism, and decision-readiness at scale.

Quant

Benchmarked against human data with ≥ 80% match target.

 

+

 

Qual

Compared side-by-side for tone, nuance, clarity.

 

+

 

Value

Scored on relevance, insight, clarity, ease, and speed.

Results

• Quantitative Accuracy (91%): Digital Twin outputs aligned closely with human interview results in structured, side-by-side comparisons.
• Qualitative Fidelity (B+): Emotional tone, behavioral cues, and attitudinal segmentation echoed the themes surfaced in the quantitative open ended surveys.
  Check out our recent Synthetic Demo featured in Greenbook's Tech Showcase for more information.

Impact

The introduction of digital twins and synthetic data transformed the Global Snack and Confectionary Company's approach to global insight generation and innovation:

• 3x increase in active users and team adoption, elevating the platform into a core as a cross-functional capability.
• 30%+ reduction in research sample and fielding costs.
• 25% decrease in time-to-market.

About Panoplai

Panoplai is an AI-powered end-to-end research platform built for teams that need speed without sacrificing depth. We help content strategists, marketers, and product leaders uncover AI consumer insights, run advanced survey-based audience targeting, and build dynamic digital twin personas. From lead generation to content ops to product-market fit, Panoplai turns static data into fast, scalable intelligence. Want to see for yourself? Let's talk.