Vypr wants your bad idea caught before it hits the shelf

A bread bag has a difficult job. It must suggest a good sandwich, survive a supermarket shelf and, in Wildfarmed’s case, explain a farming philosophy. The company wants regenerative agriculture to reach ordinary shoppers. But a term that makes perfect sense to its founders can leave a bread buyer scratching their head. Wildfarmed used Vypr to test which messages people understood, which appealed and how to turn an environmental mission into something that fitted on the pack.

That is a useful introduction to Vypr. The Manchester company sells access to consumer judgement while a product is still negotiable. A name can change. A claim can disappear. A packaging idea can be quietly retired before anyone has ordered a warehouse full of it. Its customers include food brands, retailers and businesses selling things as different as greeting cards and drinks.

Wildfarmed used the platform to segment bread buyers by demographics, values and shopping habits, then test messages and inform product briefs. Feedback arrived within hours, according to its case study. The lesson is easy to miss: caring about sustainability and understanding the word “regenerative” are separate questions. A brand needs answers to both.

A supermarket buyer’s unfinished business

Founder Ben Davies came to the problem through groceries. His first corporate job was buying for Sainsbury’s, where he developed an interest in how new products reached the market. He later described seeing flaws in food and drink innovation and wondering whether technology and data could improve the process. This was a buyer looking at the machinery behind the shelf.

He also knew the less cheerful side of entrepreneurship. His earlier food brand, Crumbs, went bust during the 2008 credit crunch. In a 2023 interview, Davies said the experience taught him about pressure, risk and coping with failure. That failure belongs to his earlier venture; it gives his subsequent interest in product risk some personal weight.

Vypr began in 2013. Its founding idea borrowed from software development: test small elements repeatedly, introducing consumer evidence throughout the work. Davies’s outside interests are less spreadsheet-shaped. In the same interview, he described collecting early-to-mid-1990s hip-hop records and DJing since the mid-1990s. Apparently, the man interested in product selection also has strong feelings about record selection.

The question is the unit of work

Vypr calls an individual research question a “steer”. A brand uploads a question or product stimulus, chooses an audience and sends the test to consumers through a mobile app. Responses come back to the platform for analysis. The practical attraction is that a team can investigate a specific decision without waiting to assemble one enormous research exercise.

The work can cover a proposed flavour, a pack design, a product name or a price. Quantitative answers help compare options; text and video responses add explanation. Product development, category, marketing and insight teams can all use the results. Vypr’s specialist staff also help customers shape research and interpret more complicated projects.

Its methodological emphasis is on short questions and quick reactions. Vypr says its platform was created with behavioural scientists from the London School of Economics. It draws on the distinction between fast, instinctive decisions and slower, deliberate thought. The aim is to get closer to the way people choose everyday products, with less fatigue from answering long questionnaires.

There is an obvious appeal in that approach for a busy product team. There is also a boundary worth remembering: an answer about a product remains an answer about a product. Treating it as a guaranteed future purchase would give the research a job it cannot perform on its own.

Birthday cards meet the evidence

Hallmark offers an example beyond the grocery aisle. Greeting-card design involves taste, tone and a guess about somebody else’s relationship. Vypr’s account describes Hallmark seeking more consumer feedback to support new designs, targeting relevant demographics and using the results to reduce subjectivity inside its teams. Decisions could be informed within 48 hours.

“VYPR has been an invaluable tool that has enabled us to change conversations with customers”

Rachel Goodman
Product and Creative Director, Hallmark

That observation gets at a second use for research. It helps a supplier explain a choice to a retail customer. A design preference becomes something that can be discussed with evidence attached. The value travels from the creative meeting into the sales meeting.

Fortitude Drinks had a related problem when relaunching Cactus Jack’s. It needed to identify its audience, connect with 18-to-24-year-olds and test flavours and packaging quickly. Internal stakeholders had opinions. Consumer tests exposed differences across age and gender, helped remove weaker ideas and sharpened the retail selling story, according to the customer account. That is a concrete example of what changed minds: outside responses complicated the assumptions already in the room.

M&S used another part of the offering. Its food team gathered targeted consumer videos around themes including the cost of living and changing eating routines. Those voices went into a digital trends report for internal teams working on a three-to-five-year innovation horizon. Here, research helped people understand the lives behind the numbers.

The subscription needs a busy calendar

Vypr’s published prices make its business model tangible. At the time of this profile, Starter costs £25,000-£35,000 annually, Pro £35,000-£60,000 and Enterprise £60,000-£100,000. The tiers add research credits, market coverage and different levels of support. Enterprise includes professional services and coverage of up to ten markets.

Credits pay for research according to factors including methodology, market and response volume. A credit should therefore not be read as one question or one completed project. The economics depend on what a customer actually runs.

For a buyer, the useful calculation begins with the decisions on the calendar. A team repeatedly choosing names, claims, packs and prices has many opportunities to use a subscription. A business with one occasional question has a different calculation. The relevant saving could be research time, avoided redesign or an abandoned weak concept, but each business has to connect that saving to its own spending.

Bells of Lazonby shows the commercial setting. The bakery used Vypr to validate a cinnamon cake slice concept, giving Tesco evidence of consumer appeal and securing an exclusive launch, according to the case study. Research became part of the argument for a listing. For a supplier, that can be a useful outcome well before any long-term sales verdict arrives.

Fast answers need slow-looking checks

Vypr’s community page reports more than 100,000 participants. It says owning the panel lets it control recruitment and sample design. For an individual project, though, the relevant group matters more than the headline community size. A large audience is useful only if enough of the right people can answer the question.

The company’s VySafe system addresses another problem: unreliable respondents. Vypr describes a 120-step quarantine for new joiners, bot protection, checks for duplicate accounts and scrutiny of free-text answers. Participants are then scored weekly using more than 28 checks, with those below its threshold removed. These are company-described controls, and they explain why research software needs an operational team behind it.

Vypr Predict, launched in September 2025, adds AI-assisted themes, sentiment analysis and recommendations for further research. Its current homepage also advertises AI help with setting up and analysing tests. Those tools can make a pile of answers easier to navigate. They make the quality of the original answers, and the wording of the question, more consequential.

A crowded market, a recognisable habit

Vypr occupies the space between self-service software and supported consumer research. Its combination is specific: small tests, a consumer community, behavioural methods and people who help clients use the results. There are other ways to buy that work, including commissioned agency projects and survey tools paired with respondent recruitment.

Zappi is a closer software alternative. It also offers iterative consumer testing for innovation, with packaging, pricing and concept tools, alongside advertising and brand research. Frequent testing and AI therefore cannot serve as exclusive claims for Vypr. Buyers have to compare audience access, methods, support and the questions their organisation needs answered.

The habit readers can borrow is straightforward. Identify a decision before it hardens into a commitment. Ask the people it affects. Look at differences within the audience. Change something while changing it remains practical. That last condition matters: a research result arriving after every specification is fixed has little room to help.

Taking the test overseas

Investors have funded the expansion. YFM backed Vypr with £2.5 million in 2021; a £3.4 million round followed in 2022. April 2025 brought another £5 million, including £4 million from YFM. The investor reported annual recurring revenue above £6 million and compound annual growth above 40%. ARR describes recurring business at a point in time; it is distinct from a full year’s booked revenue.

The next chapter includes Australia. In April 2026, Vypr announced a partnership with Monash Food Innovation. Students on Monash’s Master of Food Science and Agribusiness were already using the platform for final projects, and Predict became available through MFI’s industry offering. For Vypr, it puts its method where future product developers learn to work.

Inside the company, published working practices leave teams flexibility while preserving office contact days. Panel operations, engineering and customer intelligence sit alongside commercial staff. That mix suits the job: keep the software working, keep the respondents credible and help a brand understand what to do next. Somewhere at the end of that chain is a bread bag, a birthday card or a bottle awaiting a decision.