About
Roxana Yglesias, Ph.D.
Twenty years of asking consumers the right questions. I work at the intersection of two things that don’t often sit together: the science of how people perceive food, and the strategy of what a business should do about it.
My doctoral research was on measuring emotion to understand consumer response — still how I think about products. What people say about a food and what actually drives them to buy it are rarely the same sentence.
Four organizations, one through-line.
- CargillLed global consumer insights, sensory science and analytics — eight specialists across Canada, Central America, Belgium, Brazil and China, delivering 300+ studies a year. Built the sensory standards program for McDonald’s, ran duo-trio and tetrad discrimination protocols, and developed a consumer product-matching protocol for meat systems that saved $1 million. Partnered with the Kansas State University Sensory and Consumer Research Center. Co-inventor on a U.S. patent for co-extruded food products; probabilistic shelf-life technique presented at the 10th Pangborn Symposium and later implemented in North American meat plants.
- Tyson FoodsSet enterprise consumer insights strategy across Jimmy Dean and Hillshire Brands on a $4.5M research budget. Applied Jobs-to-be-Done to the snacking division, built a three-year innovation pipeline, and took a new snack line from concept through sensory optimization to market.
- ALSAC / St. JudeMotivational segmentation across 37 million contributors, max-diff and TURF producing 140 message options, and brand tracking through three consecutive years as the most trusted and loved nonprofit brand in the U.S.
- Alloy Personal TrainingCo-owner across three Austin-area territories. Lifted member retention from 70% to 95% by turning Voice of Customer feedback into operational change.
Why SenseSights exists
The rigor of McDonald’s and Tyson, available to any brand with a decision to make.
Running the gyms taught me something I hadn’t seen from inside a large company. Every week I stand in a room full of exactly the consumer food brands spend enormous money trying to reach — adults 30 to 65, actively training, nutrition-literate. In research terms, an extraordinarily expensive panel to build.
Meanwhile I watched small brands make product decisions with no consumer input at all — not because they didn’t want data, but because the quotes started at $25,000. SenseSights closes that gap, and brings the same methods to enterprise QA and R&D teams that need a defensible answer without an eight-week wait.
Education
- Ph.D.Behavioral & Food Science, minor in Experimental Design & Statistics — University of Nebraska. Dissertation: measuring emotion to uncover consumer product choice.
- M.Sc.Food Science — University of Nebraska
- B.S.Food Science Engineering — University of Costa Rica
- M.B.A.In progress, minor in AI Systems — University of Arkansas