Question 1

What is CPG Canary?

Accepted Answer

CPG Canary is an intelligence platform for food and beverage products that provides cross-functional visibility for product decisions. It surfaces what finance needs to approve, what sales will face on shelf, what operations can deliver, what regulatory will flag, and who's already in the category. Enter a product, get a full risk assessment, then use the strategy chat to go deeper.

Question 2

Who is CPG Canary for?

Accepted Answer

CPG consultants and agencies, emerging and established brands, innovation teams, investors, and distributors or brokers evaluating which products are worth their time. Whether you're validating a new product, launching, expanding distribution, transitioning DTC to retail, or diagnosing an underperformer.

Question 3

How long does the CPG Canary analysis take?

Accepted Answer

The initial analysis typically takes 5-8 minutes. Follow-up questions in the strategy chat take 1-2 minutes each.

Question 4

What's in the CPG Canary initial report?

Accepted Answer

A full risk assessment including risk flags for pricing gaps, positioning mismatches, and timing issues. Competitive positioning with actual shelf pricing and percentile rankings. Cost and margin analysis. Reality check table comparing your concept to market benchmarks. Operational risks including regulatory issues, trade spend, supply chain feasibility, and channel translation. Private label threat breakdown by retailer. Strategic direction with kill criteria and recommended path forward.

Question 5

What can I ask in the CPG Canary strategy chat?

Accepted Answer

Anything about your product, category, or path to market. The system retains full context from your analysis. Model margins at different price points, build retailer pitches, identify co-packers, calculate MOQs, find category whitespace, create launch roadmaps, get COGS breakdowns, trade spend math, reformulation strategies, and broker recommendations. If it's a decision a CPG leadership team would make, you can pressure-test it here.

Question 6

Where does CPG Canary data come from?

Accepted Answer

Three layers: Real shelf data from licensed retail APIs showing actual prices and category positioning. Pattern intelligence from documented product launches—products that scaled, stalled, or failed. Live market research pulling current category trends, competitive movements, economic indicators, and regulatory updates. Cost benchmarks, trade spend data, and velocity thresholds come from structured knowledge bases built on real category economics.

Question 7

How is CPG Canary different from ChatGPT or other LLMs?

Accepted Answer

Generic LLMs are trained on stale data and optimized for agreeableness—they validate your ideas instead of pressure-testing them. CPG Canary combines real-time shelf pricing data with a proprietary knowledge base of historical failure patterns. It retains the full mathematical context of your product across the conversation. It tells you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear.

Question 8

Is my data private on CPG Canary?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Your concepts are never used to train models. CPG Canary uses local-first storage—your project history lives in your JSON export, not a centralized cloud database. This eliminates server-side data breach risk. Live submissions may be viewed by administrators solely for quality and safety monitoring.

Question 9

Who owns the IP of concepts entered into CPG Canary?

Accepted Answer

You do, 100%. CPG Canary claims no ownership over your inputs or the strategy reports generated. Your sessions are private and encrypted, and your concept data is never used to train public models or shared with other users.

Sample Report

Below is an example of what a user would key into CPG Canary's fields and submit to the system for analysis. This sample report also showcases the strategy chat feature below the analysis.