Two Years Ahead of the Curve: How NLP Predicted the Oat Milk Boom Before It Happened

The Challenge: Staying Ahead of Customer Demand

TIC Gums is a food ingredients manufacturer specializing in natural gums and thickeners used in beverages, dairy, and food production. In an industry where product development cycles take months, the company faced a critical challenge: how to identify the next major market trends before competitors even realized they existed.

The company had a goldmine of data — thousands of customer feedback submissions in their Salesforce CRM from support forms, emails, and direct inquiries — but no systematic way to extract actionable trends. The volume was too large for manual analysis, and their existing product roadmap was driven by intuition rather than data. TIC needed a way to listen to what customers were actually asking for.

In the food ingredients industry, being late to a trend doesn’t just mean missed revenue — it means watching competitors lock in the customer relationships and formulation expertise that take years to build. By the time a trend is obvious, the first-mover advantage window has already closed.

The Solution: NLP Unlocks Hidden Patterns

Trust Insights conducted a comprehensive exploratory data analysis (EDA) of TIC’s Salesforce CRM, extracting and analyzing customer support feedback from forms and emails. Using machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), the team built an unsupervised learning model to cluster unstructured text into meaningful product categories.

The process began by identifying keywords related to TIC’s existing product portfolio — thickeners, beverage applications, dairy systems — then allowing the machine learning algorithm to automatically group similar feedback and surface emerging topics. The results were striking: two categories emerged with unusual frequency and growing intensity that didn’t fit neatly into TIC’s traditional product lines: oat milk and hemp milk.

The Transformation: First to Market with the Right Product

Armed with this data-driven insight, TIC’s product development team began formulating solutions specifically for non-dairy milk applications. They launched their oat and hemp milk ingredient lines before the broader market had even recognized the trend as significant.

When the oat milk category exploded across retail shelves in 2023-2024 — with major brands and startups racing to capture market share — TIC was already established with existing customers and proven formulations. The two-year head start translated directly into revenue: TIC had locked in customer relationships, refined their product offerings, and built a track record while competitors were still formulating. In an industry where product development cycles take 12-18 months, a two-year advantage meant TIC captured the first wave of demand that latecomers could only watch from the sidelines.

Services Used

Natural Language Processing
Exploratory Data Analysis
CRM Analytics
Machine Learning