Head of R&D
How do you deliver more with less — and beat private label on more than price?
The 2026 Benchmark · N=300 · US + Western Europe
Beaten both ways.
94% of CPG teams compromise on product — so they win on neither price nor difference. Private label takes the value shopper. Disruptors take the premium one. The brand in the middle loses the shelf.
FROM THE DESK OF CEO MANMIT SHRIMALI
Dear Friends,
GLP-1 is disrupting portfolios. AI is rewriting how adjacent industries develop and ship products. Margins are compressing from both ends — yet 97% of R&D effort is consumed defending what already exists, and only 1% of organizations consistently deliver on taste, cost, nutrition, and claims simultaneously.
The companies that compound through this decade will treat R&D as a strategic asset, set an explicit number for offense versus defense, and hold AI investment to commercial outcomes — not pilots. Only 19% are there yet.
I built Turing Labs because domain intelligence trained on how food and beverage products actually behave already exists — and is already helping the world’s largest CPG companies absorb these shocks in weeks rather than years. If this report gives you the language to act, it has done its job.
Warm regards,
Manmit Shrimali, Co-Founder & CEO, Turing Labs
01 The Stakes
You ship more than ever, and still feel like you're catching up.
The product hits shelf. A competitor's near-identical version got there first, so the buyer asks for a discount instead of a premium. Three months later, a reformulation memo lands. And the AI pilot the board funded last year still hasn't left the lab. 70% of teams get beaten to the shelf; new launches are reformulated 52% of the time within 12 months.
For the CPG executives asking why your R&D isn't moving faster.
If your R&D function is absorbing more reactive work each year, falling behind on speed, or struggling to translate AI investment into real outcomes, this report names exactly why — and what it is costing you.
It gives you the data to diagnose what is happening inside your organization, the language to make the case for change internally, and a clear view of where the industry stands heading into the second half of this decade.
Chief Executive Officer
Is your R&D function built for the market you are in — or the market you were in five years ago?
Chief Financial Officer
What return is your R&D budget actually producing?
Chief Marketing Officer
Are you launching the right things faster than competitors?
The 19% who already run AI as a daily workflow aren't waiting for the perfect tool. They're compounding the lead every quarter — and the gap to everyone else is widening, not closing.
02 The Index
The CPG Innovation & AI Maturity Index
Eight questions. Four minutes. One honest read on where your team stands against 300 of your peers — before anyone asks for your email.
Select your role
Start
First — who are we benchmarking for?
The read flexes to your seat at the table. Which is yours?
03 What the Data Says
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01
You call R&D strategic. It's structured to play defense.
Nearly every leader calls R&D a strategic growth driver. Then 78% spend more than half their effort on defensive optimization, and just 3% put most of theirs into offense — new categories, new claims, first-to-market. The mandate says growth; the calendar says survival.
78% play mostly defense; only 3% put most of their effort into offensive innovation.
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02
Your problem was never the science.
62% of R&D time goes to iteration, troubleshooting, and reformulation. When asked for the top performance lever, leaders didn't ask for more people. They asked to stop deciding blind.
77% name better data and data-driven decisions as the top lever; only 21% want more resources.
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03
Everyone adopted AI. Almost no one got value.
Adoption is universal and impact is not. 57% say GenAI recommendations are too generic and need heavy manual trialing. Of internal AI builds, most were abandoned, never implemented, or live with no measurable impact.
Only 18% of AI use is transformational; just 39% of internal AI builds delivered measurable business impact.
04 Where the numbers come from
An independent survey of 300 leaders.
The study wasn't ours to shape — it was designed and run by an independent research agency. Turing Labs commissioned and published it. We build AI that helps food & beverage teams develop better products, faster, and we wanted the industry to have a real number to measure against.
300 senior leaders surveyed across the US and Western Europe
- n=300 senior CPG leaders
- 1,000+ employees
- 2026 Feb–Mar
The 1:1 Readout
Know exactly where you stand — and why.
Book a 30-minute benchmark readout. We'll walk your scores against the 300, by region and by peer set, and show you the two moves that separate the top quartile.
05 Methodology
Methodology
We surveyed 290 senior R&D leaders from CPG companies across the United States and Europe, including the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and The Netherlands. All respondents worked within the R&D function at organizations with 1,000 or more employees that formulate and manufacture food and beverage products. The respondent group included senior decision makers across multiple leadership levels. The survey was designed to capture perspectives from organizations directly responsible for bringing food and beverage products to market, reflecting both strategic and operational realities within modern CPG R&D environments. The survey was conducted between February and March 2026 in collaboration with Global Surveyz, an independent survey company.
The Report
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