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There was enormous warmth in the room, and it was very special to see established colleagues reconnecting while new relationships were being formed. Alongside the celebration, however, there was also a serious and important conversation taking place about the future of R&D. Listening to our keynote speakers, expert panel and the conversations that continued throughout the evening, six themes stood out.

I’ve spent much of my career working in R&D, developing products by understanding people’s needs, exploring the science behind those needs and translating what we learn into products and product stories that perform better in real life. So I always find it interesting to hear how successful founders think about product development, particularly when they have such a close relationship with their consumers.

What I loved about Trinny’s conversation was how naturally she connected consumer understanding, product quality, business strategy and commercial performance. Here are my 10 takeaways.

As beauty becomes more personal, inclusive and community-led, the challenge knowing what is worth developing in the first place. The businesses that succeed are those that connect genuine consumer understanding with scientific rigour, technical capability and commercial judgement, ensuring the people they are developing for remain central to their decisions.

We have access to an extraordinary breadth of consumer, cultural, scientific and commercial knowledge, but future growth will depend on how effectively we translate this understanding into products and experiences that exceed people’s expectations.

For R&D teams, this has a particularly important commercial dimension. Understanding emerging needs helps identify where to innovate, while translating deep user needs into meaningful product performance creates the potential for a compelling reason to try and a sufficiently good experience to encourage repeat purchase.

I spent two days at the Future Food-Tech Conference in London last week, listening to conversations spanning healthier ageing and GLP-1s, climate resilience, novel ingredients, AI, reformulation and the challenge of scaling food-tech innovation.

I had the pleasure of chairing the FMCG stage and here are five things I took away from the day.

Drawing on a conversation with Sally Kemkers, Sharon Powell explores why the most valuable consumer insights often sit beyond what people can readily articulate and how finding them gives R&D better problems to solve.

Untapped Claims & Demos™ builds on the Untapped Product Story™ Arc, helping R&D teams translate user insights and technical breakthroughs into claims and demonstrations that are distinctive, credible and commercially meaningful.

The most successful innovations are those whose value is understood by the people they are designed to serve. By combining technical excellence with compelling storytelling, R&D teams can build stronger propositions, uncover new opportunities and create lasting commercial impact.

It’s healthy to be curious about what’s happening in adjacent categories because consumers don’t think in categories. Consumers don’t wake up and separate their lives into food, beauty, fashion and technology. They’re experiencing all of it, and expectations transfer between categories. It’s happened already in skincare. Next category is we’ve seen it in hair care, like the skinification of hair and we’re now seeing it in food.