Track I: Consumer & Market Trends
- Innovation – who decides?
Dr. Ian Noble, VP R&D - Mondelēz International
Innovation is vital for a company’s success, ensuring that products appeal to consumers, are valuable for customers and have sources of commercial advantage. Much has been and will be written on innovation given its importance but essentially it’s simple: identify areas of opportunity through insights that deliver a consumer benefit, they can be built from combinations of consumer trends, advances in technology, reconfiguring business processes and many others. The resulting innovations can be built in many ways: in-house or in-partnership, built on successes in other markets / sectors or acquired but the ultimate arbiter of success is always the consumer and the moment that they chose to purchase the resulting product.
- Decoding Desire: Data, Emotion, and the Dairy-Free Evolution - Dr. Caroline Cotto, NECTAR at Food System Innovations (FSI)
Taste is now the turning point for dairy-free adoption—and the data proves it. In this session, Caroline Cotto will unveil key findings from NECTAR’s Taste of the Industry 2026 report, and reveal the more than two dozen dairy-free products that are meeting consumer taste expectations against dairy benchmarks. Cotto will also share where R&D must go next: significant opportunities remain in cheese, yogurt, and ice cream. This presentation explores what “taste parity” really means, why it matters emotionally to consumers, and how emerging AI tools are enabling cleaner, better-tasting dairy-free innovation.
- Building a Highway to Scale - Matching Innovation, Investment and Consumer Needs - Kim Anders Odhner, Unovis Asset Management & Ferry Kamp, Remagine Food
