There is no question that R&D teams need to move faster. Food and drink manufacturers are operating in an incredibly challenging environment, with continued cost pressures, rapidly proliferating competitor activity and consumers who have never been more informed about the products they buy, while simultaneously navigating an extraordinary amount of information, choice and competing advice.
Having spent much of my career inside R&D teams, and now working alongside them, I recognise the pressure this creates. There is always another retailer window, competitor launch, factory trial or leadership review, where new prototypes are critical. And while speed to market is important, if we want R&D to deliver stronger commercial returns, speed cannot come at the expense of product quality. We must find ways to move faster while simultaneously going deeper with consumers, with a more precise understanding of the problems and opportunities ahead.
The hidden commercial cost of rework
Successful innovation is difficult, and while we recognise that universal innovation ‘failure rate’ definitions vary enormously, McKinsey continue to find that only 25% of new brands and disruptive innovations launched by large CPG companies in its packaged-food analysis are still on the shelf four years later.
As innovation teams struggle to create sustained commercial impact, the understandable response is often to demand more projects and greater speed to market. Yet some of the greatest losses of speed and drivers of rework I have experienced happen because we haven’t gone deeply enough at the beginning.
We have probably all sat in multi-functional meetings where everyone is working incredibly hard, yet several weeks into a project we realise R&D, marketing and consumer insights have each been working towards a different brief as the consumer need and business objectives are frequently too ambiguous.
The result of this ambiguity is often loops of additional research, reformulation, prototypes and rewritten concepts, consuming R&D and multifunctional resources that could have been working on the next growth opportunity. More importantly, every unnecessary iteration can push revenue further into the future, missing critical retailer windows, and allowing competitors to acquire first mover advantages.
We are also noticing that hybrid working can make these critical multi-functional connections and alignment harder, further exacerbating the rework risks. Research at Microsoft found that remote working made collaboration networks more siloed, with cross-group collaboration time falling by around 25%; therefore, we increasingly need innovation tools and frameworks to help facilitate cross functional work more effectively.
Making smarter bets
Most R&D teams aren’t short of data, if anything these days teams continue to articulate that they have more data than they know what to do with. And while quantitative research is incredibly valuable for understanding what is happening: what consumers are buying, which behaviours are growing, and how large an opportunity might be, future innovation also requires us to understand why something is happening, what consumers wish could be different and where their expectations might go in the future.
These qualitative steps are frequently skipped for the sake of speed, but we feel that they are incredibly important. Observational research can reveal the ‘say-do gap’ between what consumers tell us and what they actually do, and diary studies help us understand products in the context of real lives and routines, including what consumers love today and what they wish could be better.
Projective techniques can uncover functional and emotional needs people struggle to articulate, while analogy exercises can reveal gold-standard experiences in adjacent categories that provide unexpected stimulus for R&D. Cultural and semiotic analysis adds another lens, helping us understand how the meanings and expectations surrounding a category are changing.
There is a commercial prize for this type of deep consumer and cultural understanding. Ipsos, drawing on more than 200,000 innovations, reports that ideas untapping unmet needs are 2.5 times more likely to succeed, therefore if deeper understanding helps us place better bets earlier, we have the potential to improve the return on investment in our innovation pipelines.
Define the problem before developing the answer
We recognise how easily teams can jump towards solutions because we have lived under this pressure ourselves. When a product brief lands the immediate instinct is to start developing a prototype, yet some of the most valuable hours we can invest are at the beginning, interrogating what we are really trying to solve. What is the consumer trying to achieve? What prevents today’s products from delivering that brilliantly? What are the functional and emotional jobs involved? What would the ideal experience look, smell, taste, feel or even sound like, and what technical mechanisms could deliver it?
Some of the strongest teams I’ve worked with succeed because different functions bring their expertise together around these early starter questions:
- Consumer insights bringing depth about people’s behaviours
- Marketing understanding the category and commercial opportunity
- R&D translating deep user needs into product attributes, mechanisms and technical choices
The magic is in the connections between these perspectives.
We can see the commercial potential in market
There are some great food examples of a clear consumer need translating into tangible R&D product choices, and what I like about examples such as these is the clear connection between consumer need, desired product experience and the technical choices required to deliver it.
For example, M&S Food’s recent cereal redevelopment responded to consumers seeking recognisable, whole-food ingredients by reviewing products ingredient by ingredient, introducing a greater diversity of fruits, nuts and seeds and removing more than 40 tonnes of sugar across the upgraded range. More broadly, M&S reported that sales from new product development grew 19% in the first half of its 2025/26 financial year.
Jason’s Sourdough is equally interesting because going deeper doesn’t necessarily mean making innovation more complicated. Its success combines the quality and authenticity cues of sourdough with the everyday convenience consumers need from bread. Jason’s has become the UK’s third-biggest bread brand, with sales rising 114% to almost £80m in 2025.
Making faster and deeper a systemic approach
The bigger opportunity for R&D leaders is to make this way of working systemic. Improving one project is valuable; giving an entire R&D organisation a consistent way to define problems, interrogate consumer understanding and make better decisions has the potential to compound across the entire innovation portfolio.
That thinking has shaped our upcoming Innovation Gym, which turns decades of FMCG R&D experience into guided digital tools that teams can apply to live projects, helping them go faster and deeper in a more consistent, systemic way. The ambition is to make it easier for R&D and innovation teams to do brilliant work, with shared approaches that reduce rework and help expertise travel across projects, teams and experience levels.
And AI can be a valuable speed assistant within this. Consumer research, cultural learning, technical reports, patents, previous project knowledge and competitor information can quickly become overwhelming, and AI can help teams streamline and interrogate that deep data, synthesise multiple sources and surface unexpected connections.
But R&D must remain firmly in the driving seat: defining the problem, understanding the consumer, applying technical expertise and making the decisions. Used this way, AI helps experienced teams go deeper, faster, rather than outsourcing the curiosity, judgement and technical expertise great innovation requires.
After years working inside R&D and now alongside R&D teams, we are convinced we shouldn’t have to choose between speed and depth. We need both, and increasingly we need both to become systemic because the commercial prize isn’t simply a better innovation process.
If we can identify stronger opportunities, develop better products, reduce avoidable rework and get products into market sooner, we significantly improve R&D productivity while accelerating the revenue it creates. Ultimately, faster and deeper R&D will result in better products, stronger innovation returns and more significant business growth.
About the author
Deirdre Walters is one of the founding partners of Untapped Innovation, a global agency helping R&D teams at companies like PepsiCo, P&G, Unilever, and Reckitt create breakthrough products and compelling product stories. She is also co-author of ‘Untapping Innovation: An R&D playbook for products and stories to sell’.
With over 15 years at P&G across R&D, marketing and manufacturing, she understands how to turn technical potential into tangible market-ready success.
A chemistry graduate with a CIM marketing diploma, she helps teams bridge R&D and business functions. She also created the influential ‘Technical Product Story’ framework while at P&G and champions inclusive innovation as a STEM charity co-founder and angel investor.