Best of 2025: Omnivore's Must-Listen Insights for Product Developers
The AI era isn't knocking-it's already in your lab, in your briefs, and in your timelines. This "Best of 2025" episode of Omnivore distills the year's sharpest thinking on AI, innovation pressure, and the regulatory shifts that will hit formulations and labels first.
If you build products, this episode gives you a clear edge: how to move faster, reduce risk, and ship what shoppers actually buy.
AI Now and Next with Steve Brown
Steve Brown, a former executive at Google DeepMind and Intel and author of The Innovation Ultimatum, makes a simple point: AI is a force multiplier for every step of product development. Curiosity beats fear-teams that experiment early get compound gains in speed and learning.
- Use AI to pressure-test concepts before you brief R&D. Rapidly cluster ideas, spot gaps, and rank by demand signals.
- Run lightweight formulation simulations to predict stability, cost, and nutrition trade-offs before bench work.
- Automate sensory notes and consumer verbatims into clean themes for faster iteration cycles.
- Build prompts and decision trees that reflect brand guardrails, claims policy, and regulatory red lines.
If you or your team need a structured way to skill up, explore practical AI training paths by job role here: Complete AI Training - Courses by Job.
Innovation Pressure on Legacy Brands with Sally Lyons Wyatt
Circana's Sally Lyons Wyatt is blunt: incumbents can't coast. Private label has closed the quality gap, and shoppers reward relevance, value, and clear outcomes.
- Shorten concept-to-shelf with tight test-and-learn sprints. Smaller bets, faster reads, bolder learnings.
- Design for value ladders: good/better/best architectures with pack-size and format flexibility.
- Treat sustainability as a benefit, not a slogan. Tie it to freshness, waste reduction, or cost savings consumers feel.
- Watch emerging categories as feature feeders. What starts niche can inform your core refreshes.
Regulatory Shifts: The MAHA Agenda with Martin Hahn and Maha Tahiri
Regulatory attorney Martin Hahn and nutrition/regulatory strategist Maha Tahiri outline how the MAHA agenda could alter the ground under your feet-formulation, labeling, and ingredient safety will all feel it. Translation for product teams: build compliance in from day one, not at the artwork stage.
- Bring regulatory into concepting and feasibility, not just final review. Rework later is the tax you can't afford.
- Tighten documentation for ingredient safety and intended use; expect closer scrutiny of novel inputs.
- Clean, comprehensible labels win. Claims must map to evidence your legal team can defend.
- Track cross-border differences early if you plan multi-market launches.
Refresh your team's grasp of safety frameworks such as GRAS: FDA: Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS).
Tool to Watch: CoDeveloper (Sponsor)
This episode is brought to you by CoDeveloper from IFT-an AI-powered co-scientist built by food scientists for food scientists. It taps into decades of science to accelerate R&D and help you solve tough formulation and process challenges. If AI is on your roadmap, this is worth a look.
Your 7-Step Action Plan
- Audit your workflow for the 3 slowest steps (briefing, iteration, or claims review). Pilot AI where cycle time hurts most.
- Stand up a small, clean dataset (past concepts, sensory notes, claims approvals) to improve AI relevance for your brand.
- Create a "regulatory first pass" checklist for PMs and scientists-claims, ingredient status, intended use, and target markets.
- Adopt biweekly consumer pulses (qual + social + reviews) to steer tweaks before scale-up.
- Revise supplier briefs: documentation expectations, variability limits, and substitution rules spelled out upfront.
- Align with finance on two innovation KPIs that matter this year: trial velocity and early repeat rate.
- Upskill the team. Pick one AI use case per function (R&D, insights, packaging) and train to competence within 60 days.
Guests Featured
- Steve Brown - Former executive at Google DeepMind and Intel; author of The Innovation Ultimatum. Keynote speaker for "AI Now and Next: Getting Ready for the Future of AI."
- Sally Lyons Wyatt - Executive Vice President at Circana; expert in CPG and foodservice, known for consumer and category insights.
- Martin Hahn - Partner at Hogan Lovells; food law specialist advising on ingredient approvals, labeling, and compliance.
- Maha Tahiri - CEO, Nutrition Sustainability Strategies; veteran executive translating science and consumer needs into growth strategies.
Listen
Find the Omnivore podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. New episodes drop every other Monday and mix product innovators, researchers, policy voices, and industry leaders.
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