Roxana Yglesias, Ph.D.
Founder & Principal Researcher, SenseSights
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.
Cargill
Led 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.
Tyson Foods
Set 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. Jude
Motivational 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 Training
Co-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
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: the rigor I brought to McDonald’s and Tyson, at a price a growing brand can pay, using a panel that’s already in the building.
Credentials
Education
- Ph.D., Behavioral & Food Science — University of Nebraska
- M.Sc., Food Science — University of Nebraska
- B.S., Food Science Engineering — University of Costa Rica
- MBA in progress — University of Arkansas, 2026
Recognition
- U.S. Patent — co-extruded food products
- Cargill Achiever Circle Award
- Tableau BI Analyst certificate
- Human-Computer Interaction — Georgia Tech