Irca
Answering customers in minutes, not days, with the Tastewise MCP
- 2 days → 2 hours
- to build a full market-trend presentation, from data to client-ready slides
- < 2 minutes
- to answer a customer's trend question live in the meeting, saving a follow-up
- Doubled
- internal requests for market-trend studies, from one every two weeks to more than one a week
“Before the Tastewise MCP integration, market trends could easily take me two full days. Now it's a couple of hours, because I can talk with the data. It's a professional game changer.”
Lucia SoaveProject Manager, Marketing Americas, Irca Group
- Industry
- Food ingredients: chocolate, pastry, gelato and decorations
- Region
- Americas · North America and Brazil
- Use case
- Market-trend research, sales enablement and NPD validation via the Tastewise MCP in Claude and ChatGPT
Lucia Soave connects what's happening in the market with Irca's ingredients and innovation, supporting sales, R&D and a marketing team made up of chefs. Customer meetings are often 20 to 30 minutes, and a single market-trend request could take multiple days: find the data, select it, build a strategy, then build the deck.
With the Tastewise MCP connector in Claude and ChatGPT, Lucia now talks with the data directly. She sets the strategy up front, tailors the research to the customer and the time available, and turns requests around in hours, or in minutes when the customer is still in the room.
She also built agents in both tools loaded with Irca's brand guidelines, so one request can return a deck, a one-pager or even an event roll-up banner, ready for light edits.
Challenges
Lucia carried the weight of market insight for the Americas, and every request took days. As demand grew, she needed to deliver at scale without slowing sales down.
Two days per request
Finding data, selecting it, building a strategy and then the materials took up to two full days per trend request.
One person, rising volume
Sales, R&D and marketing all routed requests through Lucia, since getting busy teams onto another platform was slow.
Short meetings, slow follow-ups
Customer meetings of 20 to 30 minutes left little room, and every extra question meant another meeting.
Looking backwards
R&D developed from what was already on the market, and seasonal catalogs were built from what sold last year.
Tastewise’s solution
Tastewise integrated directly into the AI tools Lucia already used, so she could refine strategy up front and get to the right insight faster.
Talk with the data
Ask in Claude, set the business and category context and get tailored insights rooted in Tastewise evidence.
Outputs from prompts
The MCP expedites internal and external presentation building to create one-pagers and decks built from prompts.
Forward-looking decision making
Steer seasonal catalog picks toward where demand is heading, not where it has been.
Insight on the go
Answer customer questions from a phone, mid-meeting, through the Tastewise MCP.
How Irca uses Tastewise: Question in, strategy out
Every request, from a two-minute answer to a full trend presentation, follows the same loop.
01 Ask
A request from sales, R&D or a customer goes into Claude or ChatGPT via the Tastewise MCP.
02 Set the context
Customer type, category and how much time there is with the customer.
03 Build the story
Data-backed insight connected to Irca's ingredients and the chefs' concepts, often ready as slides.
04 Align and act
Sales, R&D and chefs go to the customer as one team, with samples ready.
Results
Faster, sharper insight turned Irca from an ingredient supplier into a partner customers bring in early.
A seat at the customer's table
Customers now look to Irca as a thought leader beyond its core chocolate category, turning to it for insight on areas like premium frozen bakery and sharing projects earlier.
“Before, they were thinking Irca equals chocolate. Now it's: hey Irca, do you know what's happening in premium frozen bakery?”
From days to hours
A full market-trend presentation now takes a couple of hours instead of two days, and insights plus slides reach sales in a day instead of a week.
Demand doubled
Internal requests for trend studies went from one every two weeks to more than one a week, and colleagues now flag trends to Lucia themselves.
R&D moves ahead of the market
R&D now asks for trend data before innovation starts, for example trending flavors for ice cream inclusions. When requests for popping candy came in, the data showed it rising and R&D kept developing new samples.
Seasonal catalogs built on what's next
Catalog selections for chocolate and sugar decorations used to repeat what sold last year. Now items that are early today but backed by data for spring/summer stay in, instead of being delisted.
| Challenges | to | Solutions |
|---|---|---|
| Market-trend work took up to two full days per request | Talk to the data in Claude and ChatGPT; full presentations in a couple of hours | |
| Customer follow-ups meant another meeting and another week | Live answers in the room, in under two minutes | |
| R&D reacted to trends already on the market | Trend data in hand before the innovation starts | |
| Catalogs rebuilt from last year's sales | Seasonal selections backed by forward-looking data | |
| Customers turned to Irca mostly for chocolate insights, limiting potential | Brought into customer projects earlier, expanding thought leadership and broader category influence with customers |
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