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Start free trial →The Startup CPG Podcast · Alternative Proteins · November 2026
Pankey, a veteran food product developer, and the host were discussing food trends. He offers this view of what product development really is.
Yeah. Yeah. Why is that safe? And why is that acceptable, but not otherwise? Also, in the holiday season, butter will be shelf just stacked in the aisleways for sale. I remember as a kid, I grew up working at a grocery store. And to this day, I love grocery stores. I love walking through.
Yeah, that's one of my favorite things to do.
What's out there? I always kind of say all food has already been created. You're never going to come up with something completely innovation, completely brand new. What you're doing then is you're taking a type of food and you're morphing it into a different format, all right, which is interesting. Or you're doing different combinations or you're doing different packaging and presenting it to the consumer so that they can take it in different ways. Yeah,
I think that's a good point. One of the things I always say to people is like, the consumer can only handle so much change. And you'd be surprised just how little you have to really innovate because you need to capture that kind of familiar market share too. Retailers know this specifically. They…
Right. And I think some products struggle with that. It may be an excellent product, but people are like, I don't understand this. Well, how does this work? Or why would I want that? Why would I buy that instead of just buying it this way? And so you're right. That's a challenge and something to…
Yeah. I think this is really important because I had a co-founder who had a nutrition company and he said his top flavors for nutritional shakes was vanilla and chocolate. Yeah.