Food and drink companies are putting AI to work in product research, with speed and cost savings on offer and trade secrets to protect. A Bright Green Partners report cited by FoodNavigator says around 90% of food and beverage R&D leaders routinely use AI.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
The report says AI has helped companies such as Nestlé cut new-product-development time by weeks. Bright Green Partners predicts that AI and autonomous experimentation could account for nearly 20% of the time spent on new product development by 2030. Nearly three-quarters of consumer packaged goods R&D leaders surveyed had seen competitors get products to market first, the report says.
The gains come with a catch: recipes, test results and other proprietary R&D data can be valuable intellectual property. Bright Green Partners chief executive Ewa Granosik says companies are keeping sensitive material away from external AI tools, using controlled access and contractual safeguards. She also argues that effective adoption takes coordinated ownership across R&D, IT and business teams, rather than a scattering of disconnected pilots.
Why it matters
This is AI moving into the less showy but commercially important work of deciding what a product is and how quickly it reaches the shelf. If the reported time savings hold up, the advantage could be meaningful. But access to the same tools does not guarantee an advantage, and giving an outside model sensitive formulations creates a different sort of business risk.
Our read
The useful lesson is not simply “add AI to the lab”. Start with a specific bottleneck, protect the data that gives a product its edge, and measure whether the workflow actually improves. A faster experiment is only valuable if it produces something worth making, and the company can keep its secret sauce secret.
What to watch
- Whether companies publish measured results from AI-assisted product development.
- How firms control access to formulations, test results and other sensitive R&D data.
- Whether AI and autonomous experimentation take on the share of development work Bright Green Partners predicts by 2030.
Discussion spark: If AI tools are becoming widely available, will the lasting advantage in food R&D come from better models, or from companies’ data and expertise?
Sources and evidence
- Source update (11 November 2026, 18:03 UTC)
Watch Desk is operated by WittyWires as an independent cross-cutting AI news tracker. It does not speak for the organisations or people it covers.