Food Is Entering Its Health-Design Era. Most Product Teams Aren't Organised for It.

Twelve grams. That' s the daily amount of native chicory inulin a food must provide before an EU brand can say "Chicory inulin contributes to normal bowel function by increasing stool frequency."

Now try getting that into a drink people will actually enjoy. At that dose, inulin starts to change the taste and thicken the mouthfeel, and a fair share of people will feel bloated by mid-afternoon. The cost per serving goes up. The front-of-pack line that marketing sketched in the first meeting quietly falls apart.

Switch to oat beta-glucan and you get a different problem. The cholesterol-lowering claim requires 3 g a day, with at least 1 g per quantified portion, and beta-glucan is viscous. That viscosity is part of why it works. Push the dose too far and your drink starts to feel like thin porridge. Resistant dextrin behaves much better in a bottle, but it has no comparable authorised claim behind it.

So a conversation that started as "let' s add fibre" becomes one about what the drink is for, who it' s for, and what the team is willing to give up to make it work.

That' s the reality of functional food development now, and I think a lot of teams are still set up for an older one.

The older route went roughly like this: spot a trend, pick a format, find an ingredient that fits the story, make it taste good, and sort out the health wording at the end. Good teams were never quite that sloppy, but the org chart often still works that way. Marketing owns the promise, R&D owns the formula, and regulatory sees the wording a fortnight before it goes to print. Everyone does their job well, and the product still doesn' t hang together.

More ingredients and more published research haven' t solved this. They' ve arguably made it worse, because there are now thousands of ways to build a concept that sounds plausible in a deck and falls over on the plate.

By a health-design era, I mean something fairly simple. If health is part of why a product exists, it has to shape the product from day one. The order matters:

1.        Who eats this, and on what occasion? A drink someone has twice a month is a different product from one you want in their fridge every day.

2.        What benefit could it reasonably support, and how strong is the evidence: an authorised claim, promising trial data, or mostly a good story?

3.        What dose does that take, per portion and per day?

4.        What happens to taste, texture, tolerance and cost at that dose?

5.        Will people enjoy it enough to buy it a second and third time?

Written down, it looks tidy. In practice, each step pushes back on the one before. The dose breaks the texture, the texture forces a new format, the format changes the occasion, and you' re back at step one. That loop is the actual work of product development.

This is where I think culinary thinking is underrated. A food scientist knows how an ingredient behaves. A nutrition scientist can tell you whether the evidence holds up. A regulatory specialist can tell you which words you can' t print. Someone still has to ask whether anyone would want to eat the thing. That' s usually treated as the soft question, and I'd argue it' s the hardest one on the list. People don' t experience a product as an ingredient deck or a study abstract. They experience it at 11am at their desk, or in the car after the gym. If it asks them to accept a noticeable compromise today for a vague benefit years from now, clever formulation won' t save it.

That' s why I see an opening for culinary schools. Their graduates already know how to make healthy food taste good. The next step is giving them the confidence to question the health idea itself: what the product asks people to believe, whether the dose adds up, and whether a less enjoyable version really counts as an improvement. And they need to be in the room while the big decisions are still open.

My bet, and it is a bet, is that the functional foods that do well over the next few years won' t be the ones with the most impressive ingredient list. They' ll come from teams disciplined enough to drop an ingredient, narrow a claim or change the format when the first idea didn' t survive a real person and a real plate.

Designing food around health is worth doing. It still has to work as food.