After a sluggish year for innovation in 2024, the food and beverage industry is showing signs of renewed energy. For R&D and innovation leaders, this reset offers a chance to rethink how they approach new product development.
At Mattson, we’ve spent nearly five decades helping clients of all sizes and stages develop innovative products with staying power. If your team is ready to jumpstart its innovation engine, here are five ways to reinvent your process.
A Deep Dive into the Future of Food & Beverage
Look outside the aisle: Many innovation initiatives start with a store walk. But if you’re only walking your own aisle—or your own category—you’re already behind. Our advice? Leave the grocery store entirely.
Trends often get their start in foodservice. If your team is stuck circling the same few ideas, take an inspirational tour of cutting-edge establishments in your area. Whether it’s a fine dining restaurant, a killer bakery, or a hole-in-the-wall dive bar, foodservice finds can be a great jumping off point for breaking the mold.
We took this approach with Rao’s Homemade in 2019. Rao’s was already a beloved premium sauce brand when we partnered to create their first frozen entrees. To develop a gold standard, we skipped the frozen aisle and studied real restaurant dishes—including those at Rao’s in Las Vegas. When Rao’s frozen entree line launched, they weren’t competing against the incumbents in the aisle; they were bringing restaurant-worthy meals to the home freezer.
Not all pain points are worth solving: Innovation often starts with identifying a consumer pain point. But the real question is: how painful is it?
If consumers are 95% happy with an incumbent product and just want a minor tweak, they’re unlikely to take a chance on something new—especially from an unknown brand. The best opportunities solve problems that consumers actually care about.
Take UNREAL. The founder we worked with saw a major gap: candy lovers wanted clean-label alternatives of their favorite candies that didn’t sacrifice taste. That pain point was meaningful enough to prompt trial, and the taste was good enough to earn repeat.
Fourteen years after its initial launch, UNREAL is still delivering because their desire for a lower sugar, clean-label alternative was a real and substantial need. That’s the power of solving a pain point that matters.
Take a step back: When you live and breathe a brand, you stop seeing it the way outsiders do. If your team can recite your positioning in their sleep, it’s probably time to get input from someone who’s never thought about your brand at all.
That outside perspective is powerful. It cuts through internal assumptions and exposes opportunity. When we worked with Century Snacks to build a new product lineup for its Snak Club brand, we knew that the classic tools in the trail mix and snack mix toolbox couldn’t deliver the breakthrough innovation we were seeking.
We conducted an AI-enhanced ideation to brainstorm unconventional sources of craveable snacking, and we realized that crunchy ramen pieces could be a standout source of textural contrast. The resulting product, Snak Club’s Ramen Flavored Snack Mix, won the 2025 Sweets & Snacks Expo’s Most Innovative New Product award.
Do research that reflects reality: Concept tests are everywhere in innovation and for good reason. They’re a great tool for comparing many possible directions. But they rarely reflect how consumers actually make decisions. After all, consumers don’t have time to read a two-paragraph concept statement in the six seconds it takes for them to make an in-store purchase decision.
That’s why we encourage teams to use research methods that mirror the most relevant real-world behaviors. For value-sensitive categories, a conjoint analysis helps prioritize the features that matter most. For product lines with multiple SKUs, a TURF analysis can show you how to maximize your total impact by considering incrementality.
If you’re launching something that requires prep, test it with consumers who are actually cooking—not in a central location test with professionals doing the work. And if your product is ready-to-eat? Get it into consumers’ hands early. As a food and beverage professional, you are probably not your target audience.
When we partnered with Dole to create their “Chopped!” salad kits, we conducted taste tests of each variety with consumers before launch. Surveys would have been cheaper, but we needed real consumer reactions, not theoretical ones. The line went on to win one of Circana’s New Product Pacesetter awards and proved that testing products in a real world context pays off with real world results. Twelve years later, the line includes 20+ SKUs and is still going strong.
Build for scale from day one: In many companies, innovation begins with product development and is eventually tossed over the fence to operations.
Based on our experience, we recommend an alternative approach: integrate commercialization from the start. Some benchtop techniques simply don’t scale well, but when your commercialization team can provide ongoing input, product developers can formulate with real-world constraints in mind. This approach saves time and money, plus it makes it more likely that your prototype will maintain its point of difference as it scales.
Sometimes, the production method itself becomes the innovation. That’s how we helped Blue Bottle translate their signature New Orleans iced coffee into a ready-to-drink product. We partnered with local dairies and developed a scaled process using their specific cold-brewing method, which helped preserve the fresh in-store experience. The product’s success wasn’t just in the flavor; it was in the operational ingenuity that made it possible. This delicious, built-for-scale Blue Bottle product is still delivering returns to its owner, Nestlé.
The best time to rethink your innovation playbook is before you hit “go.” With the right mindset and the right tools, 2026 can be the year your innovation doesn’t just launch—it lasts.
