Liz Glenn - Consumer Advocate

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Liz Glenn is a Sr. Sensory Scientist in the Consumer Product Intelligence Team at Land O’Lakes, Inc. The team’s mission is to translate human perception and consumer insights into product experiences that delight consumers. Liz leads product guidance research for both innovation and established products for the butter & spreads business. Working for a farmer-owned food & agriculture cooperative celebrating its 100th year presents intriguing product development challenges—how do you improve upon butter? A born foodie and lover of people, Liz revels in the intersection of applied science, statistics, psychology, and food research. Sensory Science is the perfect blend of all four!

Liz has an MS in Psychometrics & Quantitative Psychology, a BS in Environmental Studies, and a Post-Baccalaureate Certification in Forensic Science.

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Transcript (Semi-automated, forgive typos!)

John: So, Liz, welcome to the show.

Liz: Thank you so much, John. I'm excited to be here.

John: Oh, it's great. Well, I love talking to you and I think we've been friends for more than a decade. Probably sounds like Pangborn 2011 or something like that.

Liz: Somewhere around there. Yeah.

John: Yeah, and we've always had great conversations, oftentimes over really good meals. So it's a shame that we can't have some food to go with this. But actually, we'll get to one of the topics that I do want to talk about, which is the sharing of chemical senses through communication technology. We'll see if that comes up. So for people who haven't had the pleasure of meeting you, I think it'd be good for you to kind of take us to the story of how you got into sensory and consumer science. I think everybody has their own path into the field, one of the strengths of the field that we have so many different backgrounds so nice to hear your stories though.

Liz: Agreed. Yeah, and I have kind of a fun story. I feel like everybody has kind of non-traditional past and I am certainly no exception. So I started out, I said I'm a born foodie, so I actually remember creating restaurant concepts when I was in middle school and boarding class and so I was always interested in food and the business of food and things like that. But I jokingly say that I wish the University of Minnesota did a better job advertising their sensory and food science programs because I didn't know sensory was a field, let alone food science.

John: Right.

Liz: And so when I was an undergrad, I did an undergrad in environmental studies. And then as I was finishing that up, I found forensic science, actually, which was fascinating to me, and ended up doing a program in forensic science. So definitely had a scientific background, but still really, really loved working with food. And all through my undergraduate degree and my forensic science certification, I was working in catering and I worked with a professional chef doing private parties. And then I also worked at a cheesecake company doing product development and standard operating procedure development training and things like that. And so then when I was looking for something where I could actually leverage my scientific training, I had a couple of different versions of my resume on like CareerBuilder or something like that. And I ended up getting an interview at Land O'Lakes and it was a contract position in the sensory lab and I was like, what is a sensory lab? That sounds fascinating and I'd read the job description and applied and got the interview and they called me back. I think it was like the next day or something really fast and said we would love to have you on board. And the rest, as they say, is history. Now I'm starting my 15th year and really worked my way up with very lucky to work with some fantastic folks there. And they were kind enough to answer all of my inquiries and questions about, well, how does this work? And why do we do it this way? And how do you set up the experiments to get at the specific questions that you guys are trying to answer? And ultimately, they told me, like, Liz, go get a degree, go get a master's degree and so I did. Ultimately, that took me a while to get convinced to do that. But I did pursue my master's degree in Quantitative Psychology online, actually, as I was working full time which was a lot, but something that I think was very valuable and continued to take on project management jobs inside and got promoted and have had a really lucky and fortunate kind of history with Land O'Lakes, because I actually started working on our contract research business unit. And nothing can prepare you for doing contract research, like just jumping in and getting your feet wet and had a really good time doing that because I got to work with a whole range of companies, some big CPG companies, some tiny little startups who are really just getting their feet under them as far as trying to figure out what their product offerings were really big studies trying to figure out very small kind of main effects of different interaction models and things like that. So I got to work on a whole host of things as I was kind of coming up as a young sensory person technologist and scientist, and so that was kind of my background and how I got into the field, and I always tell people that I'm very fortunate that I kind of stumbled into a dream career because I can't imagine doing something else now. I love working in the food industry. I love that confluence of the human side of science, applied science. I definitely love applied science. And I feel very, very lucky to be at Land O'Lakes now, even after all these years.

John: Yeah, that's awesome. I totally share your enthusiasm for sensory, I think it's a great field. And I am curious about your forensic science background. I mean, it's funny because we are investigators of sorts.

Liz: Exactly.

John: And so what are some of the tools? I mean, did you feel it was it a mindset? Is there anything in particular like when you're doing a research question, do you find yourself kind of reconnecting with some of the forensics training?

Liz: I have a kind of a funny just random aside for that. So when I first started at Land O'Lakes, I had just finished up a program, the sensory or the forensic science program. And one of the classes that I taken was on the questioned document analysis. So QDA the abbreviation for that, obviously and I think sensory scientists certainly know it is something else. Right? Quantitative descriptive analysis. And so it took me a long time to be able to kind of switch back and forth between those things. But returning to your question, like forensic science, for sure, you know, you don't know what it is, you're not investigating things for an unknown outcome, right? We're not trying to explore things to find innovation, potential or things like that. In forensic science, you kind of know what happened and you're just trying to piece together the story and figure out how to understand what happened. Right? To solve the mystery. So you already have the endpoint and you're trying to figure out how it happened. And we kind of do the opposite. We're trying to figure out what the end goal is by putting together different pieces of evidence. So it's a different take on how we approach the research.

John: That's interesting. Yes, I suppose that if there were a lot of complaints coming in about a product, it might be forensic science. Yeah, so that's actually very interesting. Okay, well, let's get into something else which I think is very relevant given your position at Land O'Lakes. And of course, we have to avoid anything that would be at all confidential or sensitive. So we're more interested in just your general advice about innovating in a mature product category. I think that a lot of our listeners are working and, you know, maybe they're working tomato soup or cranberry juice or something where for the most part, the products are pretty well optimized for the most part. Maybe if you're going to greatly increase the price point, then the products can be improved. But to a large extent, we're looking for innovations in kind of new ways. So maybe if you can talk about some of the tools that you would recommend, things that you think are useful, whether it's the focus should be on improving the product or looking for new applications or new combinations. Just general thoughts on innovating in a mature product category.

Liz: Yeah, definitely presents a unique challenge, especially when you've got a brand that's almost 100 years old. It'll be one hundred years this coming August. And it's something that we spend a great deal of time trying to figure out how to maintain our brand position and really understanding what the consumer's evolving needs are. Right? Trying to make sure that we are relevant, especially with younger consumers, because we do have this kind of heritage halo around us and understanding what new and emerging market consumers might be interested in. So we try to leverage a lot of things. I think sensory scientists tend to be famous for saying, well, what kind of tools in our toolkit are available to us and what questions are we trying to answer? And so as we're looking from in an innovation perspective, we still employ some of the old standards trying to really get in there from an ethnographic perspective and understand our consumers in their own environments. So really just trying to uncover the consumer pain points and figuring out having empathy for our consumers and what it is the challenges that they're facing, right? So one of the things that I think the pandemic has really uncovered for all of us is that we are still all human, regardless of what happens on the zoom cameras. We see the cats coming in on the screens and we see the kids interrupting like we just that's why we had to take a quick pause and things happen and we know that our consumers are facing the same challenges that we are in many ways, and some of them more acutely than we are and trying to understand how to make sure that we're maintaining that sense of empathy and understanding so that we can provide products that are really of high value to our consumers. That is something that we try to do and I know we're talking about technology, but in some ways, we're really trying to be a countervailing force because we know that consumers are dealing with, you know, a lot of complexity in their lives and trying to figure out how we can provide things that will make things easier for them. Just talking at a very high level. Right? And trying to figure out how to solve those problems. And so a lot of the types and tools and techniques I think we've all been hearing about at SSP and you know, the Smart Speaker surveys to make it easier for them to answer questions as we are collecting data from them, whether it's figuring out how to provide ways for them to interface with us, whether it's their smartphone surveys or things like that. Implicit methods, we've talked about that. I know you guys have talked about that. And we're trying to pursue a lot of the different techniques, but also trying to make sure that we are not getting too far away from the human side of the equation. And sure that when we're innovating is going to be really fruitful and not just productive from a business standpoint.

John: Right. Now, I think that's really, really important when just said there I mean, like yesterday, I actually just had a guest on the podcast, Jozef Youssef. He's a famous chef in the UK. Yeah, he was really I mean, I really enjoyed talking to him and he talked about the shift in his mindset where early in his career as a chef, he was interested in the food and trying to make the food in some absolute sense as good as possible. And then at some point, there was a transition where he realized, no, it's really about the experience. And it sounds very similar to what you're saying, where, okay, maybe butter to a large extent is butter, but the people are changing and the people's experience and the way they're using butter and all of that is changing and their perception of your brand. And so I think that's interesting that there has been definitely this chef that I really think about the evolution of sensory science. It's started with sensory evaluation, that sensory science and it became sensory and consumer science. I feel like you have that for that reason, that it isn't enough to just do food science for our purposes. We need to also understand the consumer experience. And now I think it's becoming computational, sensory and consumer science. It's like, you know, keeps you going.

Liz: I know, keeps expanding, right?

John: Right. Exactly. But it is interesting that at the same time. Our job is to simplify for the consumer, right? To provide to have lower friction data collection and have lower like make it easy for people to have the experiences that they enjoy and actually improve their lives. So, yeah, I think this fascinating. So do you have a particular let me say, I do want to get in, there's so many things I want to talk to you about, Liz. If we can talk just a little bit about kind of do you have any favorite methods? Are you more fan of design experiments or are you more someone who likes kind of observationally collected data? Or do you feel like, you know, each kind of has a place? What is your take on this kind of you know?

Liz: I don't think I can choose. I think, you know, it's one of those classic sensory responses. It depends. Right? So what is the objective of the research? What's the question that we're trying to answer? Because if you're at the fuzzy front end when you're really just trying to do some exploration, I love being able to just have one on one conversations like we are and really to explore and get at the human side of the equation and really, to me, there is no better way to do that than through conversation and one on one interaction because we get at the richness and the emotion of how people are responding in a way that just isn't as natural and easy, even with sophisticated techniques like implicit or other things like that. Neuroscientific measures sometimes that just it's easy enough to just talk to people and see how they're responding to things and have conversations. And then when you're doing something where you're trying to cost optimize a product or something like that or, you know, things that sensory scientists are tasked with doing, especially if you work in industry doing design experiments and figuring out how to get the best bang for your buck and all of those questions answered for your research dollars, I think that has its place, too. So I think using the full spectrum of tools is something that I think all of us, I think probably welcome.

John: Right.

Liz: And it also makes my job and my career so much more fun and interesting that I can do all of those things, right? I don't just have to be an analytical sensory person and I don't just have to be a qual sensory person.

John: Right. Well, that kind of leads into, so I would be curious about your experience during the pandemic, doing the research and how that's evolved and then kind of going out of that the things that you're kind of most excited about. The things you think that we should keep. You know, I feel like there's actually been I mean, the pandemic has been an obviously great tragedy. So you have to be like, the pandemic has been something that we probably would have all been just like if we had not if it had not happened and we had not known, you know, I mean, I think that it is what it is but that doesn't mean there has been some progress. And I feel like there's actually been is routine now. You know, we have phone calls all the time. Well, sometimes multiple continents. Actually, in any given day, I might talk to as many as ten different countries, right? Like, it's just all over the world. It doesn't even matter, you know. Yeah. So how has your research kind of evolved during the pandemic? And what are some of the tools that you see yourself continuing to use, some of the insights that you're going to be bringing into the future ways of working, you know, things that you want to make sure you keep even if we have the freedom to just go back to whatever life you know, I feel like there still will be things that we will continue to do.

Liz: Yeah, it's actually been really interesting. I think you and I both had small children around the same time. So I was coming back from maternity leave or actually went out on maternity leave right around the time that the pandemic was just starting up. And so our team, we have a wonderful team of people who work in the consumer product intelligence team at Land O'Lakes. And they did a great job trying to figure out how we could continue to do the research that we needed to do to answer the business questions and drive our business forward. So we started doing some remote testing where we would have people pick up products from locations and then use the electronics sensory software and be able to respond in their own home. So we started doing what we jokingly call the heat test, the home-employed substance testing for some kind of smaller project. And those are things that I think we will continue to do at some level once we get back into being able to have onsite testing or central location testing capabilities. Some other things that we've been doing is leveraging technology to be able to do assessments of regional products and things like that with consumers in all sorts of different places, in different ways than we used to. So rather than just specifically engaging with particular vendors to go after large samples, we might do that in different ways where we're tapping into some of our existing databases from consumers who we know are already users of our products. And so contacting people in slightly different ways so that we know that they're already engaged.

John: Right.

Liz: Being a little bit scrappier about the way that we approach, the way that we answer the questions and doing the social distancing, and all of those things to keep people safe, especially with our trained panelists. We've had to figure out how to do that differently. And in some ways, I think we have been very forced into being very, very mindful about how we work with our participants and not that we weren't before, I want to be clear about that. But, you know, just working in different ways to make sure that I mean, when we're talking about human-centered design and I'm trying to think of the word.

John: Human factors type of research?

Liz: Inclusive design, I think is the word is inclusive design is trying to figure out, you know, the way that we design our research to make sure that is inclusive.

John: Yes. And I think it's much more inclusive now. I think, for one thing, we don't just have people who can come to a location in the middle of the day, right? That was always in our data. You know, you're in someone's natural environment. I honestly think that we are in a much better place, as you know, as a field now, thanks to programs. So very quickly, I just want to talk because I know that there are just some thoughts on sustainability plant-based as much as you can talk about that. I know that you're exciting time in the agricultural world. There's also Agritech, which I think is a fascinating topic. Just some quick thoughts on that and then I know you have some questions for me, so I want to give you a few minutes to get to that. You're the only person we've interviewed for AigoraCast who could ask me some questions.

Liz: I can't help myself.

John: So go ahead and if you can, just some quick thoughts on maybe sustainability, like some of these new trends that you see that maybe you're a little bit outside. I guess plant-based research, of course, is relevant to us, but things that are, you know, new trends in agriculture and food science that you see that you think are interesting and exciting.

Liz: Yeah. So Land O'Lakes being a farmer-owned cooperative And we are going to be celebrating our 100th anniversary in August. I think I already mentioned that. We are definitely focused on that. And it's something that I think our consumers have been asking for and something that our farmer-owners have been pushing towards as well. We do have some initiatives at Land O'Lakes that are kicking off right now trying to figure out how we can meet some of our sustainability goals, along with some of our key customers being kind of literally farm to fork as a company gives us the capability to do that at scale in a way that I think a lot of other companies wish they had the opportunity. And we have been working not only with our farmers but also obviously our supply chain partners and things like that to come up with solutions to meet some of our sustainability goals. I can't get into a whole lot of specific details around that. And some of those are not public yet, but we're definitely working on that. And then as far as plant-based, we are just launching a product in April of this year that is a plant-based product, because I think you and I have talked about in the past, you know, having the role of not only listening to our consumers and meeting what they're interested in but also being advocates for them. And so taking kind of things that they might want from a product perspective, including some of the things that they value and plant-based, we do know, is something that consumers are interested in. And in order to maintain that sense of relevance for some of these consumers and have offerings that they're interested in, that is something that we have had to have some kind of tough conversation sometimes because we do have a fair number of dairy farmers as board members. And so we've had to have some conversations, but kind of broadening that brand and that conversation of understanding like we are in egg culture cooperative. And that means that there's plenty of other stakeholders as well beyond the dairy farmers that we know and love. And so, yeah, we've been just launching that in the near future and dipping our toe in the water. But something that we've definitely been hearing from both our consumers and our customers that they're interested in it. And actually, another fun thing that we're just launching is a product and I don't want to turn this into an ad, but there's a fun product that we've just launched as well, which is we affectionately call it Project five, which is a butter with grains and seeds. It's got chia and flax seeds in it because we were going after the five senses, right? And that's kind of fun.

John: Okay, well, I'm going to go buy that. That sounds great.

Liz: It is. It's delicious.

John: Okay, is that available in stores right now?

Liz: It will be shortly. Yep.

John: Okay. Well, that's why you should listen to AigoraCast. To find out exciting new product. Okay, Liz, we have just a few minutes here. I know you had some questions for me.

Liz: Sure. Yeah. Now, I want to kind of flip the metaphorical camera and because I know I've been really enjoying listening to the interviews that you've been having with some of the luminaries in our field. And I thought it would just be fun to kind of hear for your listeners too, you know how you got into starting your own company, Aigora, and then certainly founding the AigoraCast.

John: Okay, well, as far as I starting Aigora. I mean, that goes back I guess, to 2015 or so. I was doing statistics for regulatory engagement and the sheer volume of the, you know, the number of tests, the size of the data, et cetera, just make it impossible to get the work done. And so I discovered data science. And so it was because I was using R for statistics, but I found, you know, kind of basic data science, so I think it was maybe 2017 or 18, I found the book R for Data Science Hadley Wickham which I recommend to everybody. The book is like my Bible. I have an autographed copy of it, actually. And yeah, I mean, it's data science is something that I think all scientists should have at least some passing familiarity with ideas about reproducible research, how often you have a report and no one really knows what happened. First off, I wasn't clear which data set was analyzed to get to the report because there's like B1, B2, B3. But having like, this chain of custody, what happened? I mean, some of this is forensics, right? Like we had the states that we have this report? Where it comes from? What are the steps that led? Like, who did it, you know, so the reproducible research starting from the data set to the report in a fully reproducible way, that's a very powerful idea. Recyclable tools having scripts that you can use on other projects or you can put inside loops. There's a lot of things like that, that I think are really helpful to us that is important. And I've always been interested in technology, you know, especially, yeah, I mean, it just kind of concurrent with my interest in data science. I kind of increasingly got interested in the problems of data engineering. Right? This is a big deal. You know, we were talking before the show about how, you know, Google is working with different companies now to work on recipes or whatever, you know. But there's going to be one thing to go through recipes where it's fairly consistent, you can pull out the information, however, pulling out lots of data from all the data sets that you have. It probably tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of data sets and all different formats. Getting that organized in a way that's useful is a really interesting problem and challenge. And I think finding the right technology, I'm a big fan of graph databases. Learning about graph databases to connect everything together is very powerful building simulators. That's something else that I think is fascinating, that you can get your historical data together and then in a product category, build a simulator. So product developer now it could be underneath the hood, could be all sorts of different computational tools. Maybe Bayesian network. Maybe you've got some machine learning model that's going to try to predict liking or some other target of interest. But this computer-aided design for product development is like a really fascinating concept. You know, the idea that you would have this way of creating virtual prototypes where you can turn the knobs and you can see the attributes change and you can get a prediction and you get an idea or you can have 20 prototypes and you feed them into the simulator, you get predictions, let's say, okay, these five are going to take forward to testing. That sort of stuff can really speed up and it's a great way for large companies to have a lot of data to get an advantage back from a lot of these, you know, food tech startups that, you know, are fast and quick. Well, the advantage of the big company has is they have a lot of data and so they know a lot about the category. And, you know, you're talking about all you know, all the information in your brain. It's a bit it really is a graph database it's in your head as much as we can get that into a machine so a product developer can have access to it. So then you can be freed up to do more creative work, you know, to be able to do experiments or have conversations with consumers or, you know that it's there's a lot of ways that computers can help us.

Liz: And that to me, is really the fascinating thing about AI and things like that, because I think we've all heard conversations about, yeah, leverage the data to do the things that the human being can't do. Right?

John: Yes. The data and the machine. Yeah. That it should be like there's this idea of a system intelligent, you know, like augmented intelligence instead of artificial intelligence. Computer is helping you. I mean, it should be technology is always in the long run, but a net creator of jobs it's made us given us more capability As long as there are problems to solve, there will be jobs to do. Right? So I would say that I'm very optimistic about how technology can help us to make better products for our consumers that meet their needs and that, you know, are at price points that are acceptable to them. So I think we can really enrich the world. And then the last thing it's just I'm really interested in like the kind of decentralization that's going on. I mean, you know, my interest in smart speakers I think is fascinating. But that's just a piece of a larger thing, which is, you know, this augmented experience that we're all moving into where we can, like, interact with computers in a kind of seamless way. And right now, I'm super passionate about the merger of UX from like the tech world with sensory that I think you've got like sight and sound. A lot of things have been studied from a design standpoint in UX. And there are a lot of things we've studied, especially the chemical senses in sensory, bringing that together and getting to a place where I mean fragrances, the original augmented reality, like two or three thousand years ago, they were augmenting the reality with perfumes or whatever.

Liz: Right.

John: That is augmented reality. It's just augmenting different senses. We have this big bias towards vision when we think about augmented reality and a little bit of sound. But there's no reason why we can't think of fragrance as also augmented reality. So I think it's time for those things to come together. I think that the idea that you would take a picture and it would capture the smell as well as that look, and then you could say, hey, check out this awesome meadow, I was on this hike. It was amazing. And someone can play the experience and share the experience, not just the way it looks, but like the more complete experience.

Liz: Right. How many times have we seen Instagram posts of people sharing their meals, right? And where you're like oh my gosh, I want one of those cookies, at least you could share the fragrance.

John: Right. Yeah. You got to smell it. I mean, now, of course, there's real problems to be solved there. You know, there have been many, many rounds of this and I feel like it keeps getting better because I'm really on the front end. You're talking about an Inose on the back end you're talking about I think it was like did you sense was that one technology there's of course, smell a vision, which is probably the worst brand name for. It just sounds like it's going to be bad, but the idea is good, you know, that, like you would be able to press play and get the experience. Mathematically, it's very interesting because you're talking about dimensionality reduction, just like image compression. We're going to have to fragrance compression because you're going to need to figure out what are the key signals that are needed for people because you don't have to get the fragrance exactly, right? People are actually pretty forgiving. But if you can, especially if you have something to look at and you get sound of all these, your brain will fill in the gaps to an extent on the fragrance. Yeah, but I think those are very, very interesting and exciting questions. And so that's something that I'm really interested in. And then I have a whole other thing with this trade facilitation thing that we're working on that is like a blockchain component. So that's something else we're doing on the side. Yeah, that's a market research thing. So a lot of those things I'm interested in. Well, you asked about AigoraCast. So basically this just began as I love to talk to people in the network and it's fascinating talking to people like you and all that. I mean, it's one of the best things I've done to decide to do this podcast. Even if nobody listened, I would enjoy doing it.

Liz: Personally satisfying.

John: I've learned so much talking to all these people, you know, and I feel like I must be as plugged in as anybody because we're about 80 episodes now, right. About a hundred of these episodes and it's just so great to talk to people and then you can connect people together. And, you know, people like it, too. They send us a message on LinkedIn to say that they really like it. Yeah, so it's been great. Alright, so we do have to wrap up, Liz, thank you very much for asking me some questions. I haven't actually done that before. So just wrap up, your advice that you would give young sensory scientists. What would be your advice to give to someone just finishing the degree, what would you say?

Liz: Yeah, so my piece of advice, I love this part of the show because I do think it is really, really fun, especially for younger career sensory scientists, is to don't be afraid to think about your career as kind of a portfolio of experiences and that's something that I have tried to do throughout my career and certainly even starting in my education is I never wanted to kind of pigeonhole myself. People would ask me, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I'm like, I don't know who knows these things, you know and to not be afraid of that and to really just do some exploring and figure out what it is that is of interest to you. Science was always of interest to me, but so was food and I didn't know that you could blend the two in formal education until I got much further into my career. But thinking about, you know, your life as a portfolio of experiences and figuring out how you can learn from each of those things and then apply those things as you're moving forward into your career and into your life. To me, is just a fantastic way to think about it, because it takes a lot of the pressure off. I think a lot of people get concerned about what their pedigree is going to be or what experience is going to lead to the next bigger title or position or things like that and I don't think there's anything wrong with that per say. But if that is in any way sort of stymying to people to just think about, hey, what can I do in my career now that's going to help me learn and grow and figure something else out that I'm really interested in. You know, I've been lucky enough that even within my career, Land O'Lakes and I've been there for the vast majority of my professional life. I've had a lot of experiences. And like I was mentioning earlier with the contract research and things like that, as well as some of the other things that I was doing while I was finishing up my undergraduate degree. I've had a lot of really interesting experiences that I can then apply, too, business to business, problem solving when we're doing research, having a you know, a food service background has been helpful. When we're doing research, I have a lot of empathy with some of our culinary professionals as we're developing new products for them. And so just thinking about it as a portfolio of experiences and how you can leverage those things is something that I would say is a great mindset to build.

John: Yeah, and I totally agree with that. Always be improving, too. Always be learning new things. I think Carl Jung said life begins at 40. Everything before that is research.

Liz: I would say that it continues. Life is research.

John: Yeah, Now, I totally agree with that. And I would also add to that network, talk to lots of people, tell them what you're interested in because you don't know when you when you're always telling people you're interested in someone might suggest something to you. Right? When you're at University in Minnesota say that Vickers was probably there, you know and so I think that the more that you're reaching out and talking to people, the more you find out what's going on. In sensory one of the things that love everybody so open.

Liz: Right

John: So you can reach out and talk to which brings the last question. If someone wants to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to contact you after the show?

Liz: Yeah, I think I provided my LinkedIn profile. And certainly, I think I also have my email. So go ahead and email me. I'd love to hear from you.

John: Okay, well, put your LinkedIn link in the show notes. We don't put emails so we don't bots to be.

Liz: Yes, good call.

John: Alright, Liz, this has been so really fun. Thanks a lot for being on the show. I've actually learned a lot and the idea of thinking about shifting the focus from studying the product to selling consumer and understanding their experience is something I have fully, you know, I mean, obviously, I was aware that but that was, I think, a very, very helpful for the product category that you have to think about what you're studying. So thank you very much, Liz.

Liz: My pleasure. This has been really fun. John.