The Future of Responsible Food Innovation

Speaker A: You're listening to Food Tech Talk Supply chain insights from Farm to Fork. A, uh, podcast discussing the latest trends in technologies in the food and supplements industries. Brought to you by TrustWell. Featuring Conversations with regulatory experts, quality and safety champions and thought leaders across the industry. I'm your host, Katie Jones, CEO at TrustWell. If you're loving the conversation, don't forget to subscribe. And stay tuned to the end of the episode where you'll hear our guests tell us their key food industry predictions for the next 12 months. All right, let's jump right in. We are delighted to welcome Michael Robbins, certified MasterChef food innovator and founder of Integrated Culinary Systems. Michael became the youngest MasterChef in America at just the age of 26 and has since built a remarkable career at the intersection of culinary excellence, product development and commercialization. Today, we'll explore what it truly takes to create crave worthy foods that are both respons and commercially successful. Welcome to the podcast, Michael. Now, you mentioned crave appeal and you also talk about needing products that uh, balance both that crave appeal and responsibility. You used that word earlier. How do you define that balance in your career and then now for your clients? When developing new food concepts, the goal

Speaker B: really is crave appeal and the culture is responsible. So that's really how we kind of balance that. So we have to be responsible in everything that we do and we're constantly striving to build krave appeal. If we're building a product and we have room where we could up the sodium, but do we need to? Maybe it's okay to not do that. Maybe it's better to be more responsible. It's an added bonus for the consumer to have something that's delicious with krave appeal and then go, oh, wow, look at the benefits of this product as well.

Speaker A: So from your experience, where do most brands misstep when they're trying to make better for you foods taste indulgent or have that crave appeal.

Speaker B: I don't know if misstepping is the way we'd frame it, but I think we're the conscience for a lot of our clients. Uh, when we develop, we try to guide them through that process to avoid mistakes. We try to get those guardrails in place early so that we can prevent missteps, which results in a lower go to market cost, which is good for everybody.

Speaker A: Looking to improve your supply chain at TrustWell, we've been connecting the dots between food industry and data for over 40 years to give you more control and visibility. Our comprehensive Food Logic platform sets a new standard for compliance, transparency and quality in the food industry. Request a free demo. The link is in the show notes. We're joined by Charlie Chappell, former Vice President of Innovation and global R and D at the Hershey Company. With a career spanning over 25 years across Hershey and Procter and Gamble, Charlie has led large scale transformation efforts at the intersection of innovation, marketing and science. Today we'll explore how reformulation can be more than just compliance. It can be a powerful engine for growth, trust and long term brand relevance. Welcome to the podcast. Charlie. Was there a moment in your career where you saw reformulation that shift from being maybe a bit of a challenge to more of an opportunity? Hey, we can actually grow the business through reformulation.

Speaker C: You're always taught to look at, uh, when a change comes your way, don't look at it as just a challenge, but an opportunity. Sometimes if you're a first mover or an early mover and you're ready before everybody else, then you can win at the shelf because maybe it's the type of thing where other people aren't moving as fast or they're not able to find the solution as fast and they can't get the product to shelf and you can do that.

Speaker A: So from your perspective, how do you decide which products to reformulate versus just innovate from scratch?

Speaker C: Sometimes when you do innovation and you're coming at it from that angle, here's something that consumers want, they're not happy with their solutions today. I can bring them something. Sometimes what you can bring them, you already have from a formulation standpoint. You just need to repackage it or reformulate it differently. So sometimes when you're doing innovation, you're actually doing reformulation and you don't even realize it. It's really important that your teams have roughly the same organizations working both on the reformulation and the innovation. If you keep those two groups siloed and apart from each other, you'll never get that synergy.

Speaker A: So from your perspective, how can AI accelerate reformulation while still maintaining that specialness of R and D? And then obviously you know product quality as well.

Speaker C: I'm in food. Our, um, ultimate driver is taste. And taste is subjective. I said I need an LLM for the tongue, which doesn't exist and I can load in all this data. But taste is subjective, so it's not something a model can predict very well. So I think that's one of those things, when you get into food safety is where can you use it to Speed things along that are based on objective and well known science. It's getting rid of non value added repetitious work that ah, frees up people's time. But then make sure that you have subject matter experts watching the results of it so they can spot the flaws in the AI.

Speaker A: We're excited to welcome Zoe Richards, Business Solutions Director at trustwell. With over two decades of experience in fast moving consumer goods, Zoe brings a global perspective on food safety, quality and regulatory compliance with a strong focus on on consumer centric science based risk management. Today we're going to talk about HFSS regulations in the uk, specifically the regulations surrounding foods that are high in fat, salt and sugar. Welcome to the podcast, Zoe. So when you think back on your career, was there a defining moment that solidified your focus on that consumer focused risk management, the risk reduction as a part of the food industry?

Speaker D: When horse meat scandal hit, I think that really was quite a defining moment for a lot of us. What was striking about that situation was it wasn't the traditional food safety issues that we sort of tried to mitigate every day. It was around fraud, transparency and trust. And products that consumers believed were beef turned out to contain horse meat. For me personally it cemented that idea that effective risk management had to be consumer centric because even if something meets of technical or regulatory criteria, if it violates that customer trust, it still presents a significant risk.

Speaker A: So let's shift into a very hot topic in the UK right now, the HFSS regulations. Uh, can you tell us a little bit about this regulation and what's the core intent behind these policies? Both, uh, from a public health perspective and a regulatory standpoint.

Speaker D: The main driver actually around HFSS was addressing the global challenge of diet related disease, particularly obesity. The UK government launched their obesity strategy and HFSS was just one initiative within that they recognised that the food environment, so how we're shopping and what we're exposed to is influencing the consumer behavior. Product placement, price promotions, advertising, tv, radio, et cetera, all having such a big impact on what people are buying.

Speaker A: This is a big closing question, but if you could change one thing about how the food industry approaches compliance today, what would it be?

Speaker D: It's about how companies are managing and sharing product data internally. We've got companies who have critical information about their ingredients. The nutrition of those ingredients and product specification are all sitting in separate systems or in their departmental silos. The real challenge in food compliance isn't understanding regulations, it's managing the data that sits behind every product.

Speaker A: So what's your food industry prediction for the next 12 months?

Speaker B: I think fiber. I think that's going to be important. We've got some regulatory stuff to get through with colors and things and just increasing responsibility. The consumer is getting more educated, so it's going to be a lot more of that.

Speaker A: If you could give one piece of advice to companies navigating reformulation today, what would it be?

Speaker C: I would say build up a culture and a set of expectations within your organization that you give people freedom to pursue novel solutions. Because if you use the same formulaic approach that you always have been, you're always going to be reactionary, falling behind, and you're always going to feel like you're chasing your tail.

Speaker A: What excites you most about the future of food regulation and its impact on consumer health?

Speaker D: The shift towards more proactive data driven food regulation. So not just collecting data and storing it and never looking at it again, but actually using that to help shape that overall food environment rather than reacting to individual safety issues I think is really exciting.

Speaker A: Thank you for joining us for another bite sized nugget of food tech talk supply chain insights from farm to fork. Make sure to subscribe and if you love the podcasts, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Music, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast to learn more about TrustWell and request your free demo of our technology platform that connects food formulation products, nutrition analysis and compliant labeling with traceability, recall, readiness and supply chain transparency. Please Visit us at www.trustwell.com and click Get Started or click the link in the Show Notes to learn more. Thanks for listening.