Who are we? Our history: 1994 - 2024

ABOUT CONSUMERTEC

We started as DETERTEC in 1994, as a private and independent research and development company working in the field of consumer-centred comparative testing of household brands/products. CONSUMERTEC is the new commercial name of DETERTEC since July 2012. After eighteen years of working with the emblematic name of DETERTEC, the new name reflects better and accurately current and future business model and dedication.

Currently, CONSUMERTEC is an independent research and development company with an international-accredited technical competence to conduct comparative testing of consumer brands/products with a consumer-centric approach. To that purpose we have developed unique technologies and tools such us:

Laboratory facilities. Innovative equipments, protocols and materials
Laundry monitors. Dingy and double dingy test monitors
Laundry-VR. A digital tool to transform laboratory washing results into consumer-centric discoveries & insights
VR-Clicks. An on-line quantitative tests to collect consumer's responses on benefits, preferences, and satisfaction in virtual scenarios

CONSUMERTEC's main clients are regional and multinational companies in the consumer industry, and suppliers of raw materials and technologies for domestic products. We are contracted to be part of:

Cost-reduction projects. New balances of formulation's materials focused on incrementing the brand's margin
Brand's promotion projects. Discover and legally support creative brand's promises
Sustainability projects. Inclusion of new alternatives to minimise the environmental footprint, keeping consumer's acceptable benefits
Innovation efficiency projects. Accelerate and improve the efficiency of the innovation efforts with modern digital technologies.

CONSUMERTEC's mission since 1994:
   1. To apply the knowledge of the physical and social sciences, and engineering to consumer realities
   2. To serve other companies' success through respectful mutual benefit relations
   3. To keep the consumer value in actual market scenarios as the main point of reference
   4. To build a balanced financial status oriented to the company and its collaborators prosperity.

CONSUMERTEC's vision:
    "A leading service company in supporting our clients' brands and products through knowledge-based services, based on innovative technologies focused to improve the consumer value in developing markets."

CONSUMERTEC's quailty policy:
We define quality as the conformity between our tests' features and their requirements, determined by our clients and accepted standards. It is our company's policy to prioritise the quality of our tests. It means that our technical competence, i.e. our professional work, supported by the necessary resources, must consistently achieve the best possible conformity between our tests' features and their requirements in each case.

CONSUMERTEC's service policy:
A typical phrase from our high-tech and innovative Clients about CONSUMERTEC's services: "... much more than expected."

HISTORY - LANDMARKS

1994	DETERTEC was established in Quito, ECUADOR, in July of 1994, as an independent contract research company focused on less-developed laundry markets. Thanks to its personnel's previous scientific expertise (more than 10 years) and its ability to develop innovative test procedures and technologies to compare brands and products, and to provide a high-quality services to high-grade customers requirements, in a short time DETERTEC has become the regional leader in this type of highly specialised services and a basic resource for Asian and Latin American detergency technologies.
2000	In the year 2000, DETERTEC started to devote substantial resources and efforts to understand the most advanced topics in the fields of Optical Spectroscopy and Visual Appearance, with the intention to developed a more specialised core competence. Three years later, in 2003, DETERTEC launched a group of very-first technologies to understand colour perception under real visual scenarios, including non-contact micro spectrofluorimetry, to characterise absolute fluorescence of small stained surfaces, and simultaneous spectroradiometry to characterise visual scenarios at relevant market realities.
2004	In the year 2004, DETERTEC based on the new capabilities to characterise actual dingy, soiled and stained garments from households, started offering to the worldwide laundry market a unique set of dingy fabrics, soiled and stained, to conduct physical experimentation with high levels of consumer relevancy. The new dingy test fabrics soon became the preferred test material to mimic and evaluate consumer response regarding cleanliness and whiteness perception.
2008	The year 2008 was the most influential; DETERTEC moved from a testing and research institute to an innovation service company thanks to the implementation of technologies to understand household realities, mainly experiential ethnography applied to the industry focused to understand purchase and repurchase behaviour. In line with this change it expanded its services to the ample consumer industry, including the markets of beauty and personal care, foods and beverages, personal and familiar health, and baby care. DETERTEC soon had come to constitute a product/brands design and innovation company, by combining uniquely two different abilities, a serious ethnographic practitioner and a creative experimentation laboratory, with a highly specialised knowledge and proprietary technologies.
2010	In the year 2010 the company turned out the compass to the biology, physics and chemistry of the human brain, with the intention to understand and model consumer purchase and repurchase behaviours at different market categories. This field, the Neurobiology of Perception and Action, was the most important area of technical development in CONSUMERTEC for more than ten years. Our new motto "Repurchase behaviour specialist" reflected the new north of our proprietary ethnographic and laboratory technologies. Since then we covered more household categories. Home care: laundry, dish-washing, household cleaning. Personal care: hair care, body care, sun protection, baby care (diaper), feminine care (pads). Food & beverages: yoghurt, cheese, cooking oils, margarine, spaghetti, etc.
2016-2018	R&D virtual experimentation has been part of our company for long time. In fact the distinction we received from SAS/JMP Institute in 2006 was due to our internal approach to construct numerical models of consumer responses using JMP scripts. Our in-house software capabilities have been an internal product built to streamline research efforts, ensure reproducibility, and provide greater leverage for our contract research clients. In this years we lunch two breakthrough tools: CLVVR (Consumertec Laundry Visual Virtual Reality) and Laundry-VR (immersive virtual reality head-mounted display), in-line with the industry trend to digitalisation in areas of cleanliness, whiteness and colour-care.
2020	The world changed, and so we did. The pack of digital tools now include Laundry-VR and VR-Clicks. They help to understand, represent, predict and communicate the consumers’ perception of benefits and satisfaction in real market scenarios and are focused on discovering and supporting brand claims and increment product margins with new formulations balances.
2022	It is official! The technical competence of our lab to conduct comparative testing of consumer products is internationally accredited. Following the standard ISO/IEC 17025:2017, a governmental, international inspection-accreditation body provided a formal recognition that our laboratory in Ecuador is impartial, independent and technically competent to conduct comparative testing of consumer products in line with the guide ISO/IEC 46:2017 Thanks to the multilateral recognition agreement (MRA) between more than 90 governmental accreditation bodies serving more than 100 countries, our reports and test data have international recognition. They can be officially accepted in the following regions/countries (in alphabetical order): Americas: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, United States, and more Asia: Australia, China, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and more Europe: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, and much more The Middle East and Africa: Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Iran, Jordan, Morocco, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, and much more South-east Asia: Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and more