ABOUT FIS GROUP | OUR STORY

Four decades of food and drink specialism, now under one unified brand

FIS Group is the unification of three specialist heritage firms with deep roots in food and drink: Cambridge Market Research (founded in the 1980s), Good Sense Research (also 1980s), and FIS (founded in 2010 to drive innovation specifically within food and beverage). Each brought decades of category specialism into what is now a single integrated group. Here is the story of how that came together.

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The story is the credibility

Most consultancy “about” stories skip over the heritage and jump to a current capability slide.

We take the opposite view. Four decades of specialist food and drink experience is not background detail. It is the reason the work lands differently when you commission a project from us rather than from a generalist firm that runs the same playbook for every sector.

The story below covers nine milestones from the 1980s to today,
plus a short note on where the group is now. Read it as the long version of why FIS Group is the specialist it is. Read it for the architectural moves that built the integrated insight and innovation model. Or just read it to understand who you are working with
before you commit to a brief.

The roots: Cambridge Market Research and Good Sense Research founded

Two specialist research firms launch in the 1980s with food and drink as the focus from day one. Cambridge Market Research and Good Sense Research build their reputations over the following decades as the specialist UK consumer research operations that retailers and manufacturers trust for category and shopper work. Both firms operate independently for the first twenty-plus years of their lives, accumulating the kind of deep sector experience that is impossible to manufacture quickly.

Where the story leads

FIS Group today operates as the unified specialist food and drink consultancy, headquartered at Mission Kitchen in London. Strategic insight, innovation and product consultancy run as an integrated model under one senior team, with the cumulative experience of four decades of specialist food and drink work behind every project.

Dedicated fieldwork operations run under our NOTED Fieldwork sub-brand, with purpose-built facilities at Bury St Edmunds (East of England) and Birmingham (Midlands). NOTED Fieldwork delivers the recruit, viewing, kitchen and group infrastructure that supports both FIS Group projects and direct fieldwork clients. The Fieldwork Division established in 2012 evolved into the dedicated NOTED Fieldwork brand operating today.

Together, FIS Group and NOTED Fieldwork form the operational structure that delivers the work today. The strategic and innovation engagement runs from London. The fieldwork at scale runs from Bury St Edmunds and Birmingham. Everything connects under one integrated model, with senior food and drink specialists running every project from brief to readout.

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Heritage built the model

Four decades of category-specific specialism, three heritage firms with deep complementary capabilities, and a deliberate architectural choice in 2020 to run insight, innovation and product work as one integrated model rather than as separate departments. That is what the timeline above produced.

The integrated insight and innovation model is what makes a FIS Group project feel structurally different from a generalist research engagement. Strategic insight feeds innovation, innovation feeds product work, and product work loops back into the next round of strategic insight. The senior team running each capability is the same team that scopes the brief, runs the project and presents the readout. The work does not get handed between departments because the departments are not separate operations.

More of the About section

Six more ways into FIS Group, depending on what you want to know next.