If sustainability innovation is growing, why does adoption remain difficult?

The food and beverage industry has no shortage of sustainability ideas. Companies are investing in new ingredients, packaging materials, carbon measurement tools and product development strategies designed to reduce environmental impact. Innovation is happening at nearly every stage of the value chain.

Yet innovation alone does not guarantee adoption.

Many sustainability concepts generate excitement in the early stages of development but struggle to achieve meaningful scale in the marketplace. Others become trapped in pilot programs, niche applications or limited launches without ever reaching their broader potential.

The challenge is not necessarily the quality of the innovation; more often, the challenge is whether sustainability has been translated into value that consumers, customers, retailers, operators and manufacturers recognize and are willing to act upon.

Understanding how to create that value is becoming one of the industry’s most important innovation challenges.

Why sustainability alone rarely drives decisions

One of the biggest misconceptions about sustainable innovation is that greater environmental benefits automatically lead to greater adoption.

Consumer research suggests sustainability is often one of several competing purchase considerations.

Research consistently shows that sustainability matters to many consumers. However, when individuals are making real-world purchasing decisions, factors such as taste, price and convenience often carry more weight. In the 2026 IFIC Food & Health Survey, environmental sustainability ranked below several other purchase drivers, including taste, price, convenience and healthfulness.

However, this does not mean consumers are completely rejecting sustainability.

In many cases, the gap between sustainability intentions and purchasing behavior is not caused by indifference. It is caused by friction.

The more friction consumers encounter, whether through cost, performance, uncertainty or inconvenience, the harder adoption becomes.

Moving from persuasion to design

For years, sustainability efforts often focused on changing consumer behavior. The goal was to persuade people to make different choices.

Today, a different approach is gaining momentum.

Rather than asking consumers to prioritize sustainability over other factors, innovators are increasingly focused on designing sustainability into products and experiences from the start.

This shift changes the conversation.

Instead of asking, “How do we get consumers to care more?” the question becomes, “How do we create solutions that align with what consumers already care about?”

For consumers, that may mean delivering desirable taste, texture, convenience or nutrition. For food and beverage brands, it means solving a different set of challenges. Companies need confidence that innovations will perform as expected, integrate into existing operations, support commercial objectives and withstand increasing scrutiny around environmental claims.

The innovations most likely to scale are those that align these priorities rather than forcing trade-offs between them. When sustainability delivers value for consumers, brands and the broader food system, adoption becomes easier and impact becomes possible.

Why credibility is becoming a competitive advantage

While consumers evaluate products through experience, manufacturers increasingly evaluate them through evidence.

Regulatory expectations are evolving. Sustainability reporting requirements are expanding. Customers, investors and other partners are requesting more transparency than ever before. As a result, sustainability conversations are shifting from broad commitments toward measurable outcomes.

One reason for the shift is that organizations increasingly need sustainability data that is both credible and actionable. Historically, companies often relied on resource-intensive life cycle assessments or generalized databases that could be difficult to scale across large product portfolios. Today, new tools are helping bridge that gap by making environmental and social insights more accessible throughout the innovation process. HowGood, for example, enables companies to evaluate product environmental footprints with a level of speed, specificity and scale that can support day-to-day product development and decision-making.

At Ingredion, sustainability intelligence from HowGood helps connect environmental performance to broader customer value. Rather than treating sustainability as a separate reporting exercise, teams can use data to identify opportunities, understand tradeoffs and support customer conversations with greater confidence. In doing so, sustainability data becomes more than proof of impact. It becomes a tool for building solutions that deliver measurable environmental benefits while supporting business goals, product performance and consumer expectations.

This is creating new demand for data-driven decision making throughout product development.

When companies have access to credible environmental data earlier in the innovation process, they gain greater visibility into trade-offs, opportunities and potential impacts before products reach the market.

Organizations that use sustainability insights to guide innovation, rather than simply report on outcomes, may be better positioned to create solutions that scale.

What sustainability innovation looks like in practice

While sustainability can take many forms, successful examples often share a common characteristic: they create value beyond the sustainability of the action itself.

Consider reformulation. Ingredion's Hawaij Latte Pudding Cake concept demonstrates how reducing dependence on traditional egg ingredients can help address sustainability and supply resilience challenges while maintaining the taste and texture consumers expect.

Similarly, an oil-reduced mayonnaise prototype reduces oil content from 78% to 15%, delivering a 67% reduction in CO₂e emissions while preserving texture, stability and commercial affordability.

Innovation can also come from rethinking how resources are used. Ingredion's Super Juicy Vibe Lush Refresher incorporates upcycled citrus fiber derived from citrus processing side streams, transforming an overlooked resource into a functional ingredient that supports a full-fruit experience, clean-label appeal and reduced sugar content.

The same principle extends beyond the product itself. Through our partnership with UPM Specialty Papers, Ingredion is working to develop recyclable packaging solutions using plant-based coating technologies. The goal is not simply to create a more sustainable package, but to develop solutions that also meet the performance, manufacturability and economic requirements needed for adoption at scale.

The next phase of sustainability innovation is value-led

As sustainability becomes more deeply embedded within food and beverage innovation, differentiation may come less from making sustainability claims and more from creating solutions that connect environmental benefits with tangible value.

Successful innovations will likely balance several priorities at once:

• Consumer desirability
• Business feasibility
• Credible evidence
• Operational scalability
• Environmental impact