Digitizing New Food Product Development
Developing, marketing and selling new food products is one of the most challenging and uncertain aspects for food companies, big and small. Developing a new food product, from ideation to commercialization, involves a multitude of considerations including consumer research, product experimentation & formulation, marketing, regulatory hurdles, packaging considerations and many others.
In addition, consumer product preferences are changing faster than ever. New generations of consumers are more in touch with smaller food brands, have closer ties to a digital native experience and are make purchasing decisions more closely tied to health, nutrition and social preferences. For large food companies in particular, these changes amplify the importance of staying up to date on trends and to incorporate more data into their product development cycles.
Food companies are awakening to their current challenges, and new technologies are coming online to help bring data into the product development cycle, from understanding customer data & trends to quantifying sensory information to automation of product formulation. With these advances, can food product development become more science than art?”
Additional Resources
- Get better products faster with a new and improved R&D formula
- The new model for consumer goods
- Here’s what happened when MIT students used A.I. to make pizza (Hint: It involved shrimp and jam)
- How Artificial Intelligence is Revolutionizing Food Processing Business?
- Interview with Robin Lougee of IBM on AI in flavor and food product development
- Specialty food sales growth outpaces all food in US retail 3 to 1
- How the ‘natural’ food category exploded from a simple 1960’s fad
- The Unexpected Reason These Food Companies Are Exploding in Popularity
- The future of flavor discovery & development: Big food data and AI
- McCormick taps IBM's AI to develop new flavors, food products
- McCormick turns to artificial intelligence to spice up product development
- Google's 10 Most Searched Foods in 2018
- There’s a little science to predicting food trends — but there’s a lot of guesswork, too
- Why Most Product Launches Fail
- Finding a Quicker Path to Commercialization
- 3 Formulation Development Challenges and How To Face Them
- A feel for texture: Responding to clean label demands creates formulation challenges, suppliers say
- Methods for Developing New Food Products: An Instructional Guide (PDF)
- 9 food and beverage experts identify the industry's biggest challenges in 2017