Ingredients That Do More
What ingredient challenge keeps your innovation team up at night?
From effective ingredients that boost immunity to plant-based proteins, novel health and wellness ingredients or food labeling requirements, we can help you solve your challenge.
Our clients’ needs vary. Yet they share a primary concern. They want to know if a particular ingredient meets their needs, and which are effective ingredients. And that’s where we come in.
We help clients uncover scientific evidence that highlights an ingredient’s efficacy. And we clarify how ingredients work. Or, we find alternatives to existing ingredients.
Are you looking for ingredients that
- are consumer friendly?
- have proven benefits based on scientific studies?
- provide a safe alternative to sugar, salt, or animal based?
- have a robust supply chain to ensure a steady, reasonably priced supply?
We uncover insights that help you create the products consumers want.
Impact Stories
Uncovering Natural Sources of Ingredients
Are you a food manufacturer that’s overhauling your formulations? In doing so, is your goal to create flavors, colors, and textures with ingredients that represent the natural world’s inherent simplicity and ingenuity? We help clients identify natural sources of ingredients to replace traditional, often synthetic, ones.
Accelerating New Product Development
How can ingredient suppliers and food manufacturers accelerate the development and delivery of plant-based foods to meet the consumers’ desires for protein alternatives?
We ensure clients incorporate innovation, technology, and foresight into their new product development strategies – and outpace trends.
The Microbiome and Food Innovation
Does your food group need to understand the scientific relationship among food, the microbiome, and health? Do you need help translating scientific findings into meaningful information, and the esoteric language into digestible, actionable insights? Learn how we can help.
Managing Energy and Mood Through Food
What do consumers want from the foods they buy? Increasingly, they want health and wellness benefits that are traditionally associated with supplements and medications.
We help our food and beverage clients understand ingredient options that address consumers’ interest in energy and mood management.
What’s Feeding Interest in Plant Proteins?
As plant proteins gain market traction and as innovation drives supply chain efficiencies and improves sensory and functional characteristics, we help fast-moving consumer goods companies evaluate strategies and seize opportunities in space. We assess technical aspects, including impacts to labeling, consumer perception, regulatory status, supply chain, and product development. We ensure clients align their efforts and allocate their resources to opportunities in the plant protein market.
Signals
Are you struggling to resolve the hurdles of using plant-based ingredient in your portfolio? What’s the impact to consumers of inconsistency in plant-based ingredients? Does the emerging science complicate new product development with these ingredients? And is it important to have multiple stakeholders involved as you look for solutions to the challenges of plant-based ingredient use? Read on for answers.
Nobody knows everything about ingredients, processes, products, packaging, and markets. Figure out what you know and add to your team people who know what you don’t. That’s just one of Susan Mayer and Lawrence Blume, Ph.D.’s tips to position food innovators and food investors for success. What are the other tips?
In this two-part series, Innovation Advisors Susan Mayer and Jamie Pero Parker, Ph.D., review sugar’s role in foods and introduce the Design Thinking framework of desirability, feasibility, and viability (DFV). They take a closer look at how the DFV framework can be used to consider sugar in products and lead to more focused sugar reduction strategies.
Our Expert Team
Susan Mayer, Food Industry Lead
With great problem-solving, strategic, and communication skills, our clients rely on Susan Mayer's experience in product development, product lifecycle management, and public-private food industry partnerships. Applying that expertise, Susan helps organization understand how technology, research, and the right suppliers can create innovation opportunities. Susan has an M.S. in Food Science and a B.S. in Foods from the University of Maryland, College Park, and is a Certified Food Scientist
Lawrence Blume, Ph.D. Food Industry Co-Lead
Lawrence Blume, Ph.D., is passionate about collaborative partnerships that bring innovative solutions to challenging research and development roadblocks. He helps life science, food & beverage, and consumer goods companies develop technical insights and business models that unlock and yield disruptive innovation in core products and markets. He received a Ph.D. in Physiology & Pharmacology from Wake Forest School of Medicine and a B.S. in Biology with a minor in Biochemistry from Duquesne University
Tawanda Muzhingi, Ph.D.
Food scientist, nutritional biochemist and international development expert Tawanda Muzhingi, Ph.D., has over 20 years’ experience supporting innovation initiatives for food and agriculture companies and foundations. He's worked in international food business, food science, food policy and agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the US. Dr. Muzhingi received his Ph.D. in Biochemical and Molecular Nutrition and M.S. Food Policy and Applied Nutrition from Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, and his B.S. in Nutrition from the University of Zimbabwe in Harare, Zimbabwe. In 2018, he received the IFT Emerging Leaders Network Award.
Jacob Smith, Ph.D.
Jacob Smith, Ph.D., leads research efforts for technology scouting and landscaping, partner identification and assessment, and technology commercialization assessment. Whether evaluating a next-generation propulsion technology for commercial potential or landscaping high barrier enabling coatings for more sustainable food packaging, Jacob collects, organizes, analyzes, and delivers research and results clearly and enables clients to easily evaluate the big picture and drill down to investigate the details. Jacob received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Chemistry and Spanish from Austin College.