We help food and beverage companies find, check, and choose the technologies, ingredients, and partners behind their next product - searching patents, science, startups, and suppliers worldwide.
Food R&D teams rarely lack ideas. What's missing is a fast, defensible way to tell a durable opportunity from a well-marketed one - before budget, headcount, and a year of development go into it. That's the gap we close.
Fermentation, functional beverages, GLP-1-driven reformulation - new ones show up every month, and most food R&D teams have no fast way to tell which ones are backed by real movement versus which ones are just well-marketed. We check three things before calling anything a trend worth acting on: is anyone patenting around it, is there published science behind it, and is the supply chain actually shifting to support it. If only one of those is true, we tell you that too - so you're not building a stage-gate case on a headline.
Most food innovation consultancies stop at recipe and concept work: sensory panels, product testing, launch support. We start earlier, in the patent filings, and answer a specific question: has someone already locked up the ingredient, process, or formulation your team is about to spend six months developing? You get a clear map of what's already claimed and what's genuinely open, so R&D time goes into ideas nobody else owns yet.
Rules like PFAS restrictions, the EU's ESPR, and shifting allergen labeling requirements don't appear overnight - they show up first in draft legislation, comment periods, and scientific advisory reports, usually 12–18 months before they're enforced. We track that early activity and translate it into a specific question for your team: what should we reformulate now, so we're compliant and already in-market before competitors are forced to react.
Every major R&D investment eventually has to survive a room of people asking "how do we know this will work." We build that answer before the meeting: which patents exist in the space, what the published science actually shows, and where suppliers are already moving. You walk in with a brief that names specific filings, specific studies, and specific supply signals - not a curated list of trend words.
By the time a competitor announces a new product, that decision was made over a year ago. What tells you where they're headed next is what they're filing patents on, what their scientists are publishing, and who they're partnering with right now. We track that activity so your team is planning against where competitors are going, not reacting to where they already arrived.
Generic food and beverage trend reports treat the whole category as one market. It isn't. What counts as a durable opportunity in functional beverages looks nothing like what counts as one in pet food or plant-based dairy. Our research is built sub-sector by sub-sector, so the ideas we bring your team are specific to the category you actually compete in.
Product development firms make the product. Ingredient suppliers sell their own catalogue. Trend agencies read the market. We sit before all three - and these four things are why our answers hold up when yours are questioned.
Patent intelligence is GreyB's core discipline - the work we have done for two decades across every technical industry, now pointed at food. Our analysts read filings the way your team reads a spec sheet.
That means we can rebuild a competitor's formulation from its patents: what is in it, how it is made, and where the company is heading next. Very few food research partners can do this at all, and fewer can do it at scale.
When food runs out of answers, the answer usually already exists somewhere else - in pharma, cosmetics, materials, or agriculture. Finding it is the easy half. Knowing which one to back is the hard half, and that is what our framework settles.
Every candidate is placed on two axes: how much work it takes to adapt it to food, and how much advantage it gives you over competitors. Where it lands tells your team what to test now, what to develop and watch, and what to leave alone.
Most scouting reports stop at the pitch deck. We do not. Shortlisted technologies go through real performance checks that we film, and the founders behind them sit down with us for a recorded interview.
You see the evidence yourself rather than taking our word for it - and so does everyone you have to convince internally.
We built SLATE because no off-the-shelf tool searched everything we needed at once. It covers patents, journals, clinical trials, startup databases, and local-language sources that English-only searches never reach - and lets your teams anywhere in the world work the same landscape live.
It is the reason a focused team can cover ground an internal group would need months to staff.
Most food companies are not short of AI options. They are short of a way to decide which workflow to start with, whether to build it or buy it, and how to tell a good platform from a good demo. That is the part we handle.
We map how your teams work today - recipe and spec documents, supplier data, quality records, label compliance, consumer feedback - and rank the workflows where AI saves real hours.
For each workflow: what building costs in time, people, and upkeep, against what buying costs in fit and lock-in. You get a recommendation and the working behind it.
Every vendor demo looks the same. We shortlist against your criteria, run the evaluation with you, and ask the questions that separate a working product from a polished one.
We put shortlisted platforms through a test on your documents and your process, so the decision rests on what it did for you - not on a reference customer in another industry.
Hands-on workshops for R&D, quality, and operations teams: what these tools can and cannot do, how to prompt them, and where a human still has to check the output.
We agree what success means before the pilot starts - hours saved, errors cut, cycle time - so you can defend the rollout internally, or stop early without a sunk budget.
Start with everything that exists, cut it down with reasons you can repeat, and hand over answers that hold up in a board room.
A leading food manufacturing company was exploring a new application for a specialized food texturizer. Led by its R&D and Open Innovation team, the initiative aimed to identify external partners for ingredient supply and collaborative product development. The need was highly specific due to stringent regulatory standards requiring extremely low impurity levels in the ingredient. It had to meet strict specifications for nitrogen content, ash levels, contaminants, purity, gel strength, and binding capacity, which significantly limited the pool of potential suppliers.
Read the full case study →The procurement team of a leading consumer goods company wanted to identify sustainable alternatives to cocoa for food applications as the global cocoa supply chain came under increasing pressure. Climate-related disruptions, heavy reliance on West African production, rising ESG expectations, price volatility, and supply uncertainty were making traditional cocoa sourcing less reliable.
Read the full case study →These questions come up in every category, from dairy to snacking to beverages. If yours is on this list, we have almost certainly mapped the landscape around it.
The people leading our food and operations work bring patent intelligence, food science, and AI experience to every project.
The in-house software let us find specific bits of information in huge volumes of literature very efficiently - the speed and quality stood out.
They flexed with us mid-project instead of clinging to the original brief, and adjusted to get us the outcome we actually needed.
The recommendations weren't a data dump. Pros and cons on every option meant we could take a decision to the board with confidence.
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No commitment required • Custom proposals • Trusted by Fortune 500 companiesIf yours isn't here, ask us directly - we answer scoping questions before any commitment.
