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Ines Rosales Olive Oil Crackers
How Ines Rosales Turned Three Studies Into One Clear Line Strategy
3 SKUs tested + Market Opportunity Audit · 275+ expert reviews · From directionless to a clear line strategy
About
Ines Rosales is a Spanish heritage brand, baking olive oil tortas from a 1910 family recipe outside Seville and now sold in 30+ countries. This engagement covered its newer olive oil cracker line: Sesame Sea Salt, Aged Spanish Cheese, and Cocoa & Cayenne Pepper.
The Goal: The Data to Fix the Product
The Ines Rosales team believed in its cracker line and had a strong hunch about what was holding it back. But a hunch doesn’t move a company. They needed objective, third-party data they could take to leadership to justify actually changing the product. They came to us with three questions to answer:
Is this an attraction problem or a repurchase problem? Are people not picking it up, or not buying it again?
Is the issue the product, the positioning, or the price?
Where’s the gap between what shoppers expect and what the product delivers?
Success looked like a clear, data-backed direction credible enough to bring upstairs and act on.
How We Delivered
Three sampling studies by The Product Lab, one per SKU (about 90 industry experts each), plus a full Market Opportunity Audit spanning category, competitor, and shelf analysis. Each study was built to answer their exact questions across packaging (attraction), product (repurchase), positioning, and price.
What We Learned, and Told Them
Attraction vs repurchase: it’s mostly repurchase. The packaging attracts (the premium heritage cues land), but the eating experience under-delivers on the crisp-cracker expectation, so trial doesn’t convert to repeat. Fix the repeat, not the shelf appeal.
Product vs positioning vs price: the product is good and the price holds, the levers are texture and positioning. Experts expected a crisp, snappy cracker and got a softer, denser, pastry-like torta. It’s an expectations gap as much as a product one, so set the texture expectation on-pack (or add a crispier companion SKU), rather than abandoning the signature style.
The lane to own: premium entertaining, not everyday. Every SKU over-indexed on charcuterie, hosting, and holidays. Position and merchandise it near cheese and deli, not fighting center-store crackers on price.
Per-SKU roles, clarified: Sesame Sea Salt is the versatile everyday-and-entertaining hero, Aged Spanish Cheese is the charcuterie staple once the cheese flavor is dialed up (many felt it didn’t taste cheesy enough), and Cocoa & Cayenne is the distinctive, polarizing holiday and novelty play.
Packaging: lead harder with the Spanish heritage, simplify the pack. The origin and founder story earned real premium love, but too many fonts and cluttered imagery held back shelf impact.
The Direction They Walked Away With
Ines Rosales went from a hunch to hard evidence: a clear line strategy, plus the credible, third-party data to take to leadership and get the fixes made. Which SKU to lead with, how to position the whole line, what to fix first (texture expectations and cheese intensity), how to simplify the packaging, where to merchandise, and how to price.
“Significantly better than almost any other cracker. You can really tell the high quality.”
— Industry expert, Ines Rosales sampling study
“The crackers were thicker and softer than I expected. My first bites were disappointing, but the flavor won me over.”
— Industry expert, Ines Rosales sampling study (the texture-expectation gap the studies flagged)
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