Manmit Shrimali is CEO & Founder of Turing Labs, helping food and beverage companies modernize R&D and get better products to market faster.gettyFor decades, large players won through distribution muscle and brand dominance. That model is broken. Private labels are claiming shelf space that once seemed untouchable. According to BCG, food innovation is significantly underinvested relative to its potential: M&A exits run 20% lower, IPOs are 40% lower, and late-stage capital lags comparable sectors by 40%.At the heart of this failure is a stubborn misconception that innovation is primarily a technical challenge, best solved by scientists operating at a distance from the consumers they serve. AI has compressed concept-generation timelines, but the speed of ideation isn't the bottleneck. The real challenge is execution—getting the right product to market faster than private labels and emerging brands without sacrificing profitability.The industry's innovation problem is structural. It stems from how organizations are designed, how decisions are made and how culture either enables or suppresses new thinking.​Start With The Consumer—AlwaysWinning growth strategies start with the consumer, full stop. The advantage lies in a precise, granular understanding of real needs, pain points and the unmet opportunities competitors overlook.Taste, product performance and real-life functionality are the true battleground—what consumers experience, judge and return for. The obstacle is rarely a lack of scientific or technical capability; most CPG companies have world-class resources. The problem is disconnect. Technology is developed in isolation, consumer insight arrives too late, and manufacturing constraints enter the conversation after formulation is already set. There's often a bias toward technical solutions never anchored to consumer preferences.By the time everything converges, the original opportunity has been diluted by handoffs rather than sharpened through genuine collaboration.The companies getting this right ensure that marketing, R&D and operations work from the same consumer truth at the same time so that what consumers need and what the business can brilliantly deliver are answered together, not in sequence. Critically, they build structured learning cycles that prevent the organization from repeating costly mistakes.​When R&D Can't Sell Its Ideas, Everyone LosesCorporate R&D has a capability crisis that rarely surfaces in conference presentations because naming it feels disloyal. R&D professionals are trained to be excellent scientists. They're not trained to navigate organizations. In large CPG companies, the gap between those two skill sets is costing the industry dearly.Translating complex science into language that CFOs or marketing directors can act on is a survival skill that R&D culture has never prioritized. In environments where resources and strategic relevance are contested across budget cycles, that silence is expensive—not just in budget lost but in influence forfeited and decisions made without the right expertise in the room. When a project passes through five teams before reaching the consumer, accountability diffuses, institutional knowledge fragments, and speed becomes impossible—costing months of development time, on repeat.​​Eight Weeks, Two Years Of Failure, One Mindset ShiftOne client, a decades-old international food company, came to us after more than a year of failed attempts to reformulate a best-selling product—the goal being cost reduction without sacrificing quality. Traditional approaches hadn't worked. Consumer panels had stalled. The team was stuck; data was outdated, testing capabilities were limited, and without the ability to model ingredient interactions, every decision defaulted to instinct over evidence.What struck me most was the mindset barrier. They weren't sure how to even think about AI, especially compared to the methods they'd relied on for decades. The turning point came when they realized they didn't need a massive data transformation before benefiting from it. Working with what they had, we solved a two-year reformulation challenge in eight weeks, delivered double-digit cost savings and exceeded consumer testing benchmarks against their existing in-market product.​That result came from rethinking how decisions get made and who gets to make them.​​The Mittelstand Insurgency: Europe's Quiet Innovation Engine​I believe agile, legacy-minded midsized players—the Mittelstand—will write the next decade of European food innovation. They never had the luxury of bureaucracy and are now turning that constraint into a competitive edge.According to FoodDrinkEurope, the EU food and drink industry generates 1.5 trillion euros in turnover and employs 4.8 million people—making it Europe's largest manufacturing sector. SMEs account for more than 99% of food and drink businesses and generate nearly 39% of total industry turnover and over 41% of employment. Thousands of family-owned companies that are deeply rooted in their categories and serious about long-term legacy are holding up the industry.These companies are stepping up because they're unburdened: no layers of committees, genuine category depth and the ambition to act. Only 24% of food and drink leaders see improvement in Europe's business environment—a 38% drop year on year. Midsized players face the same headwinds; they're just moving faster.​Three Hard Resets For Future Growth​​• Put the consumer at the center of everything. Innovation funnels must be built from consumer needs outward, not from technology or category capability inward. R&D, marketing, finance and supply chain must operate as an integrated system around that shared starting point. Companies that treat consumer insight as validation rather than strategy will keep missing.• Build the entrepreneurial operating system into the organization. Fast learning cycles, genuine tolerance for failure, real empowerment and leaner handover structures are competitive differentiators. Midsized companies already operating this way aren't waiting for permission. Large ones can't afford to keep asking for it.• Move AI from experiment to strategic commitment. The question is no longer whether AI belongs in food R&D. It's whether your organization will lead that shift or spend the next five years catching up.The innovation potential inside this industry is real. The talent and science are there. The consumer opportunity is large. What remains is the organizational courage to stop building systems that contain good ideas and start building ones that release them.​Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?