618: Are food industry innovators making the most of AI?

618: Are food industry innovators making the most of AI?

How is AI influencing innovation in the food industry?  In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded live at our event at Olympia in London, we try to map out the full picture. Our guest speaker is Alberto Prado, former Global Head of R&D Digital & Partnerships at Unilever. Alberto believes the food industry is facing the most volatile, fast-moving, expensive and demanding environment it has ever operated in. But, he argues, the tools it's using to respond are largely unchanged since the 1980s. He maps out the full picture - what AI is already doing inside large FMCG organisations, the five barriers he believes are getting in the way, and why he argues companies that treat AI as infrastructure rather than a feature, will be shaping this industry for the next decade. His argument is that most food businesses are using AI to write better emails and build slightly faster dashboards, while mistaking that for transformation. If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com [http://foodmatterslive.com/]

617: Women's health - what does evidence-based retail actually look like?

When a female consumer walks into a shop asking for help with their hormones, their sleep or their fertility, how confident can they be that what they're sold is actually backed by evidence? It's a question a growing wave of informed, sceptical consumers is now asking louder than ever. In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded at our London event in 2026, we have a frank conversation about women’s health and what evidence-based retail actually looks like from the inside.  We hear the case made for personalised nutrition - not as a premium niche, but as a genuine public health opportunity - and learn about one of the most quietly significant shifts in women's supplement science: the move from folic acid to methylated folate in prenatal products. If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com [http://foodmatterslive.com]

616: Swicy, clean label, and the TikTok effect: Inside the Flavour & Colour Lab at Food Matters Live

In this episode, we enter the Flavour and Colour Lab at Food Matters Live London 2026. Five conversations with the companies shaping what food tastes, looks and feels like. From raw material shortages and botanical extracts, to a Dragon's Den success story built on TikTok trends and a bath bomb-shaped meal base that's found its way into Ocado. We find out how the raw material pressures reshaping the flavour industry right now are leading to new product developments. We get the full story behind the bath bomb-shaped meal base that started on TikTok, appeared on Dragon's Den, and just launched in a major supermarket.  And how a baking powder that's been around for 175 years, is re-inventing itself. If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com [http://foodmatterslive.com] We would like to clarify that, due to an internal communication error regarding session timings, Tina Faghihi-Hallam from Flavour Bombs was unable to join the live panel discussion at Food Matters Live as scheduled. Tina was present at the event and ready to participate, and her absence from the stage was not due to any fault on her part.

615: Food Historian Annie Gray and PepsiCo's Rob Lowery on trends, health and the modern consumer

Recorded live on stage at Food Matters Live, at London's Olympia London, this is the session that opened the whole event, and it set the tone perfectly. Food historian Annie Gray and Rob Lowery, VP of Marketing at PepsiCo UK, Ireland and Europe, sit down for a wide-ranging fireside conversation on where consumer food culture has come from, where it's heading, and how to tell the difference between a genuine trend and a flash in the pan. They cover how the health concerns driving food choices today, from protein to gut health, are less new than we think, and what that tells us about what's likely to stick Why personalised nutrition is still accelerating, and what GLP-1 medications are doing to consumer habits and food industry priorities And how fragmented eating patterns, demographic shifts, and the rise of remote working are reshaping the occasions food is designed around Find out about upcoming events at foodmatterslive.com [https://foodmatterslive.com/].

614: 'Food tech Is the new fintech' - and other things we heard in the NPD Discovery Zone

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, we explore the NPD Discovery Zone at Food Matters Live in London's Olympia. It's the section of the show floor where the next generation of food ingredients and technology is being shown for the first time.  Through four conversations with four companies, we try to answer one question: where will the food of the future actually come from? We learn about turning CO₂ directly into food ingredients, recovering high-protein, high-fibre ingredients from the side-stream of the brewing industry, an automated harvester that recovers broccoli stems left in the field after harvest, and we meet the people behind a food lifecycle management software that brings NPD, finance, and technical teams onto one platform from concept to launch.  Food Matters Live brings together the food and drink industry's brightest minds across innovation, sustainability, health, and technology. Find out more and register for upcoming events on our website.