Empowering Packaged Goods Brands with Real-Time Consumption Data

Executive SummaryPackaged goods companies have historically been at the mercy of indirect data. They’ve relied on point-of-sale transactions, loyalty programs, and retailer partnerships to infer consumer behavior—but these sources rarely capture what happens after the product leaves the store. Chef.ai closes that gap by delivering direct, in-home consumption insights powered by smart vision hardware and AI. This case study explores how a national CPG brand leveraged Chef.ai to unlock product-level insights, improve campaign targeting, and optimize replenishment timing across key product lines.

Industry ContextConsumer packaged goods brands are under increasing pressure to personalize marketing, reduce waste, and forecast demand with greater precision. Yet most analytics platforms stop at the register. With growing investments in first-party data and the collapse of third-party cookies, brands are looking for new, ethical ways to understand consumer behavior at home—where most decisions are actually made.

This shift requires a new kind of visibility: one that doesn’t just track purchases, but connects those purchases to real-world usage, inventory depletion, substitution patterns, and restocking habits.

The ProblemThe CPG brand in this case study had several key challenges:

1. Lack of in-home usage visibility: Despite knowing when a product was purchased, the brand had no data on when or how it was used.
2. Limited attribution accuracy: Marketing teams couldn’t reliably measure if a campaign led to increased consumption or just purchase, leading to misaligned ROI calculations.
3. Ineffective replenishment timing: Retargeting and CRM efforts were based on estimated product usage cycles, not real-world behavior.
4. No understanding of competitive substitution: The brand couldn’t track when its product was being replaced by a competitor at home.

The Chef.ai SolutionChef.ai installed smart, AI-powered kitchen cameras in a panel of 2,500 opt-in households. These cameras were positioned in pantries, fridges, and kitchen shelves, using computer vision to identify and monitor CPG products as they were placed, used, and depleted. Each camera fed usage data into the Chef.ai analytics layer, which anonymized and aggregated insights before surfacing them to the brand in a secure dashboard.

Rather than relying on survey-based consumption panels, Chef.ai provided passive, continuous, and real-world product telemetry. This enabled the CPG brand to observe:

• Frequency of product interactions
• Time between placement and depletion
• Cross-category usage (e.g., condiments paired with proteins)
• Substitution moments (when a competitor brand appeared after their product ran out)

Implementation ProcessChef.ai coordinated with a market research partner to ensure demographic diversity across participating households. The deployment took place over 90 days and focused on the brand’s top 5 product SKUs.

The data was streamed and tagged in real-time using Chef.ai’s proprietary object recognition model, which was fine-tuned for CPG label detection under varying lighting conditions and camera angles. Edge processing ensured privacy compliance while delivering high-fidelity insights.

A shared dashboard allowed the brand's insights and marketing teams to filter by SKU, household segment, usage time, and competitive overlap.

Key Features Used

• Real-time SKU tracking: Precise identification of brand vs. competitor items.
• Depletion analytics: Automatic calculation of average product lifecycle per household.
• Predictive repurchase triggers: Signals to power ad delivery and CRM based on actual usage, not guesswork.
• Substitution detection: When a household began using a different brand after depletion.
• Campaign impact attribution: Correlated time of media exposure with consumption lift.

Insights & Data OutputsChef.ai delivered a set of deep insights that immediately changed how the brand viewed its customers:

• Average time-to-depletion was 18% shorter than the brand’s original models had assumed, indicating higher usage frequency.
• Usage clusters revealed peak consumption times on weekday evenings, informing optimal media buying windows.
• Loyalty mapping showed that 62% of households returned to the brand when auto-prompted within 48 hours of depletion, compared to just 29% without the prompt.
• Substitution events were more common in single-person households, suggesting an opportunity for targeted loyalty offers.

Results & Impact MetricsOver a 90-day pilot:

• +22% increase in CRM campaign ROI due to better-timed promotional nudges
• +16% lift in repeat purchases for test SKUs
• +9% reduction in promotional waste due to more precise targeting
• Real-time attribution allowed for rapid iteration on campaign creative and channel mix

Strategic Value to the BusinessWith Chef.ai, the brand finally bridged the gap between product purchase and product experience. It could now:

• Personalize marketing based on how quickly households consume
• Trigger reordering prompts exactly when needed
• Allocate budget toward high-value segments with predictable usage patterns
• Track the success of loyalty initiatives by observing household-level behavior

This not only improved their marketing efficiency but also laid the groundwork for dynamic pricing, on-demand replenishment partnerships, and smart packaging R&D.

Forward OutlookBased on the success of this pilot, the brand began planning a rollout across 10 additional SKUs and proposed a deeper integration with grocery retail partners to experiment with real-time restocking APIs.

Chef.ai is also developing a lightweight mobile scanning SDK that would allow households to participate without a camera, further expanding the available panel size.

Key Takeaways

• Traditional POS data is no longer enough. In-home behavior is the new goldmine.
• Chef.ai delivers SKU-level, real-world usage data through passive computer vision.
• Brands can now personalize outreach, reduce churn, and drive smarter media spend based on true consumption signals.

Chef.ai turns the kitchen into the final mile of insight—and for CPGs, it’s a game-changer.

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