Untapped Thinking

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.

A clear Product Story provides the thread that holds the innovation together. It helps R&D, Marketing and commercial teams understand the user problem being solved, the role the technology plays in solving it and the experience the product is ultimately designed to create. When the Product Story is developed early, products become easier to explain, easier to remember and, importantly, easier for people to act on.

The conversation around innovation has become increasingly dominated by speed. Every organisation is looking for ways to shorten development timelines, reduce time to market and increase the return on every pound invested in innovation. Consumer expectations continue to evolve, retailers expect innovation to work harder than ever before, and R&D organisations are being asked to deliver more with the same, or fewer, resources. McKinsey recently described the challenge facing consumer goods companies as one of restoring product superiority while also rebuilding brand relevance, highlighting just how central successful innovation has become to sustainable business growth.

Dr. Chad McAllister and I do not come from the same world. He has spent his career in software and product management, and hosts the Product Mastery Now podcast. I have spent mine in FMCG, working inside R&D teams developing everything from antiperspirants to toilet tissue to skincare. When we sat down to record a podcast together, I was super curious to see how much overlap there would actually be.

Quite a lot, as it turned out. Three things in particular kept coming up from both sides, and we felt they are worth sharing because they hold across industries, not just in consumer goods.

The beverage industry is being fundamentally reshaped. Consumers no longer expect drinks simply to refresh them. They increasingly expect beverages to hydrate, energise, calm, support digestion, provide protein, replace alcohol or fit a healthier lifestyle. Taste remains essential, but function has become a core purchase driver. For R&D teams, this means innovation can no longer start with ingredients or technologies, it has to start with understanding the consumer need first.