CHICAGO — With trends and challenges accelerated in the past four years, the food and beverage industry faces disruption and rapid transformation to address those challenges and keep up with the trends. René Lammers, executive vice president and chief science officers, PepsiCo, Purchase, NY; Quincy Lissaur, executive director at SSAFE; Sarah Reisinger, chief science and research officer at DSM-Firmenich; and James Gratzek, faculty and director, Food Science & Technology, Food Product Innovation & Commercialization Center at the University of Georgia, Athens, Ga., addressed four main themes driving the food and beverage industry today on a panel at IFT FIRST, held July 15-17 in Chicago. Saharah Moon Capotin, executive director at the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research, moderated the discussion. 

The panelists discussed four main topics deemed most critical to the food and beverage industry today: sustainability, digitalization, consumer-centric innovation and diversity. For sustainability, all the leaders onstage emphasized a holistic approach, evaluating every aspect of the business and product development with the lens of its impact on the environment and people. 

“Sustainability is at the heart of what we do, so every move you make as a consumer-centric company, always start with the sustainability angle,” Lammers explained. “For every part of our value chain — agriculture, processing, product and packaging — we have very specific goals that you can see on our website and in our ESG report.” 

A holistic approach that considers the entire value chain or supply chain is critical because as Lissaur pointed out, sustainability is very complex, encompassing environment, social responsibility and economics. 

“I’ve been working in the sustainability space for close to 20 years, and one thing that is very clear is that if you adjust a dial here, it screws up a dial over there,” he said. “So there are contrasting consequences that can occur as you try to fix something in one place and have unintended consequences in another.” 

As technology improves, digitalization has also taken center stage as a way to address many of the challenges facing the food and beverage industry, whether its sustainability, labor or product development. As companies incorporate more digital technologies, whether that’s augmented or virtual reality, block chain or artificial intelligence, Lissaur encouraged them to develop a company-wide strategy before diving in as every company will use these technologies differently. 

“Our recommendation to a lot of companies is to develop an effective strategy for your business around what to do around digitalization and innovation within your business,” he said. “Do that through a multi-disciplinary team because one of the challenges that we’ve seen is that the tech guys will develop something, but they forgot to talk to the food safety team or the risk team or the finance team.” 

Reisinger noted that digitalization tools can be helpful to food scientists as they try to keep up with the ever-increasing speed of innovation. AI has been a powerful tool for DSM-Firmenich in co-creation of new solutions for customers by using the company’s historical data to optimize solutions for taste, mouthfeel and other parameters.

“I think about digital and AI tools as, one, how do we do things better and faster with respect to innovation but then also new innovations?” she said. 

Lammers echoed Reisinger’s point that the latest digital tools can help product developers predict how a flavor change, for example, can impact the rest of a product formulation or even be accepted by consumers. 

“A flavor change is actually a chemistry change, and we should be able to predict using the latest tools, whether that’s predictive analysis or AI, what that will do to product texture, taste, etc.,” he said. “We should be able to predict whether the consumer will accept it or not. We should be able to predict if we put it in a new package whether it can survive the supply chain. What I’m trying to describe here is that part of our innovation process will become entirely virtual at first, and that’s the model and framework that we’re trying to develop.” 

Diversity rounded out the panel discussion as an important pursuit as food and beverage companies try to win over an increasingly diverse consumer population. 

“How can we innovate successfully if our workforce doesn’t look like what the world looks like?” Lammers asked.

Gratzek shared how the University of Georgia is acknowledging its own shortcomings in representing the diversity of its state’s population in both the student and faculty. The university is aiming to change that by actively recruiting students and staff that better represent Georgia’s diversity.

Collaboration and technology will be key as the food and beverage industry tackles all of these themes, the panelists agreed. 

“Collaboration will be fundamental to try to address all the challenges we’re facing today,” Lissaur said. “As we feed the world, we have to try to meet what consumers want and what they need. …The private sector can meet that particular challenge and then couple that with a regulatory system that is fast enough and effective enough to meet those demands and needs going forward. The only way we can do that is if the public sector, private sector, academia, IGOs, NGOs all come together and actually talk about it and figure out solutions going forward.”

Lammers was optimistic, with a declaration that with today’s technology and industry collaboration there was no challenge the food and beverage industry could not solve. But that requires having the right people in your organization and embracing radical transparency in the industry. 

“The old-style of silos and sitting on your IP and only sharing what you want, that’s not the future anymore,” he said. “Radical transparency, great talent working for you and making sure everyone has a common goal is the challenge going forward.”