Protein Became a Design Requirement. Did Your Leadership Team?

Why the hardest part of reformulation in food and ingredients isn’t the science.

It’s the person you’ve put in charge of it.A managing director of a mid-sized ingredients business called me a few weeks ago, frustrated.

His R&D function was good. Genuinely good.

He’d backed it properly. Hired a strong technical lead the year before, kitted out the applications lab, signed off the budget for the new protein and fibre work.

And still, the reformulation pipeline was crawling.

Projects that should’ve taken months were taking years. Promising prototypes kept dying somewhere between the lab and the launch. His commercial team was quietly furious. His biggest customer had started asking why a competitor got to shelf two quarters ahead of him.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “I’ve got the science. Why can’t I get the output?”

I’ve had some version of that conversation a dozen times in the past year.

And the answer’s almost never the science.

Reformulation stopped being a project

For most of my time in this sector, reformulation was something a business did now and then. A sugar reduction here. A clean-label swap there. A reaction to a new regulation, or one big retailer leaning on you.

It was a project. It had a start and an end. You pulled a team together, you did the work, you went back to business as usual.

That world’s gone.

GLP-1 has rewired what people want on a plate. Protein’s gone from a claim to a baseline expectation. Kerry called it a “design requirement” rather than a trend at CAGNY this year, and the phrase stuck with me, because it’s exactly right. Layer on the pressure to pull out sugar, salt, additives and synthetic colours, the march towards clean label, and the regulatory noise coming off both sides of the Atlantic, and you’ve got a sector where reformulation isn’t an event anymore.

It’s the day job.

Most food and ingredients businesses are now reformulating something, somewhere, all the time. Continuously. In parallel. Right across the portfolio.

And here’s the problem.

The businesses doing all this are mostly still run on structures built for the old world. The one where reformulation was occasional.

The messy middle

When reformulation was a project, you needed a good technical team and someone to run the project.

When it’s continuous, you need something rarer. You need a leader who can run it as a permanent capability, and that’s a very different animal.

Think about what continuous reformulation actually involves.

R&D wants time to get it right. Commercial wants it on shelf yesterday. Procurement’s watching the cost of every new ingredient going into the spec. Regulatory’s making sure none of it lands you in front of an enforcement body. Operations has to make the thing at scale without rebuilding the line.

Every single reformulation decision is a negotiation between those five.

Get the protein up without turning the bar chalky. Take the sugar out without the bitterness creeping in and needing a masking agent to chase it. Hit the clean-label spec without blowing the margin. Do it fast enough to matter, and safely enough to sleep at night.

That’s not a technical problem.

That’s a leadership problem.

I’ve started calling it the messy middle. The space where R&D, commercial, procurement, regulatory and operations all collide, and where every interesting reformulation either gets made or quietly dies. The science usually works. The ingredients usually exist. It’s the middle that kills things.

And the messy middle needs someone running it. Someone who can sit between all five functions and make the trade-off calls. Fluent enough in the science to push back on the lab, commercial enough to know which compromises a customer will actually notice.

Most businesses haven’t got that person.

They’ve got a brilliant technical lead who can’t win the commercial argument. Or a sharp commercial leader who doesn’t see why the science takes as long as it does. Nobody owns the middle. So the middle is where the pipeline goes to die.

Why the technical hire often fails

The MD who called me had done the obvious thing. Hired a great scientist, assumed the output would follow.

It’s the most common mistake I see.

A strong technical hire is necessary. It’s rarely enough. The bottleneck usually isn’t the quality of the science. It’s the orchestration around it. The translation between the lab and the P&L. The authority to make a call when R&D and commercial both dig in, and the trust on both sides to make that call stick.

That’s a leadership profile, not a technical one. And it’s genuinely scarce.

The people who do it well have usually spent years in the sector, moved sideways across functions rather than straight up one silo, and earned credibility with the scientists and the board at the same time. In any given category, you can count the strong ones on not many fingers.

They’re also almost never on the market.

What this means if you’re building a team

If reformulation’s now permanent in your business, and for nearly everyone reading this it is, a few things follow.

Your org chart probably needs to change before your hiring does. Someone has to own the messy middle end to end, with real authority across the functions, not a technical lead bolted onto an R&D box and left to fight for influence they were never given.

The profile you’re hiring for is a translator, not just a specialist. Science, plus commercial instinct, plus the temperament to broker a trade-off and then hold the line on it. If a CV is all depth in one function, it’s probably not your person.

And you want to be thinking about who that person is long before you need them. The leaders who get this right have usually been quietly tracking the right names for years. By the time the role opens, they already know who they want. The search just confirms a decision that’s been forming for months.

That last bit matters more than it sounds. Because the people who can run the messy middle are exactly the ones who don’t answer job ads. They move through conversations. A quiet word at Fi Europe, a former colleague putting a name forward, a reputation that travels ahead of them. You don’t find them by posting a role. You find them by already knowing them, or knowing someone who does.

And if you’re on the investing side of this, the same gap shows up differently. But it’s the same gap.

Most value-creation plans I see written into a deal quietly assume reformulation will just happen. Good science, a healthy NPD budget, a roadmap. On paper it’s fine. Then twelve months in, the launches haven’t landed, the margin story’s slipped, and nobody can quite say why.

It’s the messy middle again. Nobody owned it. The thesis needed continuous reformulation, and the team was built to run the occasional project.

It’s one of the cheaper risks to fix and one of the easiest to miss. The right single hire, sitting in the middle with real authority, can be the difference between a plan that compounds and one that stalls. Worth knowing, before you complete, whether the business you’re backing has that person. Most don’t.

The real shift

The industry keeps talking about reformulation as a science story, or a marketing story. Better protein. Cleaner labels. Sharper claims on the front of pack.

I’d gently suggest it’s become a leadership story.

The businesses that win the next few years won’t be the ones with the cleverest single ingredient. They’ll be the ones who built the leadership to reformulate continuously. At speed, on margin, without the whole thing falling over every time R&D and commercial disagree.

The science is mostly solvable. The ingredients are out there. The technology’s out there.

The person who can hold the messy middle together is the scarce part.

So if your pipeline’s crawling, there’s a harder question than “have I got the right science?”

Here’s the one I’d put on the table at your next leadership review. Who owns the messy middle, and do they have the authority to actually run it?

If you can’t answer that cleanly, you’ve found your bottleneck. Nine times out of ten, that’s where it is.

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This is part of my “Behind the Scenes” series, where I share what I’m picking up from conversations with the leaders, founders and operators shaping the future of food. If something here landed, I’d like to hear how you’re seeing it.

Mike Meyrick is Founder and CEO of Meyrick Consulting, an international executive search firm operating across the food and food ingredients sector.