How IANSA & Talio Cut R&D Time 50% With AI Pilots
Empresas IANSA partnered with Plug and Play to explore new growth opportunities, make better use of internal resources, and reduce the risk of bringing new solutions into the business through open innovation. By leveraging PNP’s global network and pilot execution protocols, IANSA screened over 1,180 startups across strategic focus areas and ran two targeted proofs of concept (POCs) with Talio, an AI market intelligence platform and our portfolio startup.
This is the story of their collaboration.
Case Study Results
R&D formulation time
R&D formulation time
qualified B2B export accounts
qualified B2B export accounts
decision-maker leads
decision-maker leads
Partner
Empresas IANSA is a Chilean food and agriculture company serving retail consumers and industrial ingredient buyers in domestic and export markets.
Startup
Talio is an AI market intelligence platform that uses real-time agents to turn retail shelf data, social signals, and consumer trends into commercial playbooks for food and beverage companies.
Facilitator
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Plug and Play is a global innovation platform connecting startups, corporations, investors, governments, and universities.
IANSA Business & Innovation Priorities
In IANSA’s retail division, changing food-labeling requirements, including Chile’s front-of-pack warning labels, meant the team needed to review product formulations and explore alternative ingredients. The goal was to find options that met regulatory requirements without compromising consumer preferences, product quality, or taste.
At the same time, IANSA wanted to speed up its innovation process. Developing and launching a pilot could take up to 12 months, making it harder to test new ideas quickly.
For its industrial division, Patagoniafresh, the priority was finding new buyers for tomato paste in export markets. Many potential customers, such as industrial food manufacturers, were difficult to identify through conventional trade directories.
Traditional market research added another challenge. Quarterly reports could be outdated by the time they reached the team, limiting their usefulness when identifying new opportunities. IANSA needed a more practical way to access up-to-date market insights, test external technologies, and explore new opportunities while reducing the time, resources, and risk involved in experimentation.
How PNP Connected IANSA With Talio
PNP began by working with IANSA’s cross-functional teams to identify business challenges and prioritize opportunities for innovation.
During a strategy and foresight workshop, the team developed potential innovation opportunities and prioritized the areas where new technologies could deliver the most value. Plug and Play then launched a global startup scouting initiative through its Food & Beverage program, giving IANSA access to relevant solutions and targeted sessions with shortlisted market-intelligence startups.
One of the startups was Talio, a PNP’s portfolio company that uses AI agents to turn retail data, consumer signals, and market trends into actionable insights. Talio stood out for its ability to analyze these different data sources and adapt its platform to IANSA’s specific business needs.
Hear from the partner:
“The structured methodology provided by Plug and Play allowed us to move from strategy to execution with absolute clarity. We addressed complex regulatory requirements in half the time while discovering new commercial export channels.”
— Pablo Sanhueza, SVP of Innovation & Operational Excellence, Empresas IANSA
IANSA & Talio Pilot Projects & Execution
- Extended Development Cycles: The average timeline from initial idea to pilot execution was up to 12 months.
- Resource & Budget Constraints: Unfunded pilot concepts lacked dedicated, agile frameworks, risking project stagnation.
- Regulatory & Market Urgency: Tightening domestic regulations created an immediate challenge for retail product formulations, putting core products under temporary pressure. Additionally, several international opportunities could be accelerated, but traditional market intelligence was only available quarterly and was already stale by the time it landed.
- Reading the Shelf: The agent analyzed 5,100 SKUs across 15 retailers in the domestic market and two international markets (home, regulatory comparable, and trend-setting), identifying how products were actually formulated based on ingredients, not just category placement.
- Reading the Conversation: Analyzed over 9,600 live social signals, matching consumer criticism to exact ingredients to mitigate taste and trust risks prior to formulation selection.
- Scoring Against Regulation: Regulatory status was embedded as a live scoring criterion, successfully finding natural ingredient whitespace completely outside the regulated lists.
- Opportunity Map: Ranked set of natural ingredient directions outside regulated lists.
- R&D-Ready Test Plan: Accelerated compliant formulations, cutting standard R&D development timelines by 50%. The team had a validated plan to execute on day one.
- Consumer Signal & Benchmarks: Clear retail and consumer data evidence backing each candidate combination to de-risk market entry.
- Sales Agent: Continuously analyzed retail, trade, and social signals to locate manufacturers matching Patagoniafresh’s specific formats, ranking accounts, mapping verified routes to buyers, and drafting precise outreach.
- Innovation Agent: Mined claims, ingredients, and whitespace data to understand the contextual attributes buyers cared about, ensuring outreach was highly differentiated.
- Opportunity & Decision-Maker Maps: Unlocked 50+ qualified B2B accounts and 100+ named decision-maker leads across procurement, quality, and R&D in the selected export market.
- Sales Playbook & CRM-Ready Data: Delivered evidence-backed sales narratives and individual account sequences formatted for direct CRM import.
The Opportunity
IANSA faced common structural barriers to rapid experimentation:
Plug and Play guided both teams through its structured 12-week proof-of-concept methodology. This gave IANSA a clear process for testing Talio’s technology against real business needs, evaluating the results, and determining the next steps.
“Before implementing a structured pilot framework, moving from concept to execution was a lengthy process. We needed a reliable protocol to test emerging solutions without risking capital or overextending internal teams.” — Pablo Sanhueza, SVP, Innovation & Operational Excellence, Empresas IANSA
B2C Retail Division Pilot (Label Change Innovation)
Facing a proposed change to food labeling that would place warnings on packs containing certain regulated ingredients, one of IANSA’s core products was exposed. Talio deployed its innovation agent, along with market intelligence and quality and compliance modules, executing over three sprints.
The Results & Takeaways
B2B Industrial Division Pilot for Patagoniafresh
High-potential export markets often hold significant industrial demand, yet key B2B buyers, such as commercial food manufacturers and contract packers, remain largely unlisted in standard trade directories. To address this, Talio deployed its sales and innovation agents concurrently on a single platform:
The Results & Takeaways
Furthermore, based on IANSA’s operational feedback during the pilot, Talio integrated document-upload capabilities directly into its upcoming global platform release.
Hear from PNP:
“The level of customization and responsiveness shown during the pilot was exceptional. Delivering actionable outreach leads while adapting the platform to IANSA’s team’s workflows created immediate confidence across their business units and a valuable business strategy.”
— Jackie Hernandez, SVP of Global Partnerships, Plug and Play
October 2025
In-person foresight workshop and innovation roadmap co-design.
January 2026
Sourcing and pitch sessions with shortlisted AI intelligence startups.
February 2026
Final selection of startups for pilot projects.
April–June 2026
Preparation and execution of parallel pilots (Retail & Industrial) with Talio under PNP’s PoC framework.
July 2026
Delivery of final sales playbooks, R&D test plans, ingredient shortlists, and pilot evaluations.
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