R&D Without The D

We all have a few bits of advice that stick with us over the years, even if they seem a bit ridiculous at the time. Early in my career as a development chef, I got such a piece of wisdom. I was working for one of the UK’s largest food manufacturers, and occasionally had to present new products and concepts to our Chief Executive as part of a monthly innovation showcase. He was something of a character, known for being jovial and terrifying at the same time, but he particularly liked to engage with the chefs and often requested we were part of these presentations. This caused a good deal of tension with the more senior members of the Research & Development (R&D) community, who worried that we would undermine them, or create unrealistic expectations.

‘Bollocks, don’t listen to them’ the Chief Exec would insist, when we tried to explain that the R&D team considered some of our more elaborate culinary ideas unrealistic.

‘I don’t need you to show me stuff that’s easy to fucking to make. I’m not interested in stuff that’s fucking easy…’

(He was well known for his colourful language, which might have explained why he liked the chefs so much)

‘…because if it’s easy for us, it’ll be easy for every other fucker. And they will just fucking copy us’.

‘I need you to show me stuff that’s really fucking difficult. That’s what I pay chefs for. I have a building full of people with PhDs who can work out how to fucking make it. I pay them a shit load of money, and they’ll just do what’s easy if we let them. I need chefs to fucking challenge them.’

And yes, he really did swear that much.

I took this advice with me throughout my career, and although it didn’t always win me friends, I do believe it drove the development of better food products. More experienced product developers would frequently tell me how wrong I was. ‘You should only show what is realistic’. ‘Anyone can make something taste nice if they don’t have to worry about cost and process’. ‘If you show kitchen produced samples to the board, you are setting R&D up to fail’.

These are common mantras that have some merit, but they are the mantras of development. R&D has a more challenging side, and that is research. It is research that looks into a delicious chef-made recipe and determines the whats and whys that make it so good. It is research that finds new ways to match the quality of those recipes in consumer products. Research might deliver new types of emulsion that provide a creamier mouthfeel, or find new ways of heat processing that preserve freshness. Research can discover vegetable fats that melt like butter, or create packaging that releases encapsulated flavours the moment it is opened. It is true that great development will make excellent products that consumers will love. But if it those products are easy to make, then there’s nothing stopping every other fucker from doing the same. Research can change that.

Give enough time to the R part of R&D and it will make it much harder for others to copy your work. Base your research on creating products closer to chef-created culinary benchmarks, and you will outshine the competition. Create Intellectual Property (IP) from that research, and there’s a chance you might make something that’s impossible for others to recreate.

Research is the hardest part of R&D but has the potential to yield the greatest rewards. It will give your company a clearly defined future and provide a genuine competitive advantage for your brand. So, what’s stopping you?

Probably lots of things. In fact, readers with experience in this area have probably rolled their eyes so far back they are currently staring at their brain. The suggestion that we should all be doing more long-term research is certainly not a new one. Most people working in food innovation want to be part of creating breakthrough, game changing technologies. We all want to develop IP and deliver true competitive advantage. But if we are realistic, the demands of the other side of R&D tend to get in the way. The endless briefs to tweak recipes, create seasonal variants, co-manufacturer for another brand, nutritionally improve core lines, swap out an ingredient, or squeeze some cost out of a formulation. The retailer demands to keep things fresh, the lack of a clear commercial prioritisation strategy, and a dozen angry people believing that their little project is the most important one in the business. Too often, there is a complete lack of division between research and development, leading senior team members to believe that their R&D spend should be creating earth shattering breakthroughs, when in reality it is barely enough to cover the five-dozen internal cost reduction initiatives.

The R is frequently forgotten. Chefs and technical teams employed to deliver long-term innovation initiatives are pulled in to support short-term development, leaving important projects under-staffed. As margins are further squeezed, true innovation becomes near impossible. Now I work as a consultant, it is a story I hear hundreds of times from across the industry. The only road to genuine innovation seems to be the acquisition of the latest food tech start-up, even though the same thing could have been achieved for a fraction of the cost by investing in research.

Is there an answer? True innovation is sometimes possible within the largest multinational companies, where longer-term research can be genuinely ring-fenced. Anywhere smaller, product development becomes swollen by internal demand for more and more projects, sucking resource from research until it can no longer function effectively. So, does that mean that true research, and so genuine innovation, is the preserve of high risk start-ups and a handful of global giants?

Perhaps not. There are cost effective and successful ways of outsourcing research projects that ensure innovation resources are ring-fenced by design. I currently work with several UK Universities, helping them engage with large and small food companies to deliver long term strategic innovation projects. There are a wide range of funding solutions and ways of resourcing projects with a combination of high-quality post-graduate students, experienced academics and specialist industry consultants.

Perhaps most importantly, none of those resources can get pulled away to support short-term development. Projects can be targeted to deliver long-term strategy, working independently of the sponsor company’s R&D team. When a company is delivering lots of D and not enough R, this sort of collaboration can transform things, delivering the sort of innovation only usually achievable in the biggest global organisations.

The global food system has a lot of problems right now, both in terms of sustainability and health. The only way out of those problems is innovation. In most large companies, true innovation is incredibly hard, and I strongly believe that collaboration between industry and academia provides the smartest and most effective route to changing the way we produce and consume food.

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https://www.fruitionfoods.com/blog/rampd-without-the-d

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