Food Matters Live Podcast

Consumers say they want natural. But do they want it enough to accept a less vibrant colour, a shorter shelf life, or a higher price? And when regulation forces the change anyway, how do you bring consumers with you when they weren't asking for it in the first place?

Clean label means something very different to a Michelin-trained chef building a fermented meat alternative from scratch, to a bakery NPD manager reformulating existing lines away from artificial colours, to a global consumer science director at one of the world's largest confectionery companies navigating the cocoa crisis. 

What all three have in common is the same uncomfortable truth: natural is harder, less stable, more expensive and less forgiving than artificial - and the consumer rarely gives you credit for it unless you tell them.

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded at our London Olympia event, our expert panel dives into the world of clean label, from the practical realities of moving from artificial to natural colours, allergen considerations, shelf life constraints, and why consumers may accept a dimmer colour once you explain the reason.

If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com

Only 4% of UK adults meet the recommended 30 grams of fibre per day. The average intake is 16 grams, which is barely half the target. And this isn't a new problem. It's been consistent for years, across every age group and demographic, with no sign of closing.

What makes that statistic more troubling is what sits behind it: most people don't even know what the recommendation is. 

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded at our London Olympia event, a panel of specialists look at the fibre gap from every angle: policy, science, product development, supply chain and consumer behaviour.

We hear from a nutrition researcher from the Danish Agriculture and Food Council, who explains how Denmark's Whole Grain Partnership drove consumption to 63 grams within four years.

And we learn why fibre reformulation is technically more complex than it looks.

If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com

A chilli con carne for four people carries a carbon footprint of 6kg. The same meal, made with upcycled sunflower protein and plant-based seasoning, comes in at seventy grams. 

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded at our London Olympia event, Frank Lantz describes how he came to food innovation from Michelin-trained fine dining.

His view is that the food industry is sitting at one of its biggest inflection points in a century, that the conversation about how we grow, cook and eat is overdue, and that chefs who understand flavour from the inside out are better placed than most to solve for it.

He talks about the moment he decided to step out of restaurant kitchens and into food innovation, why organic is a proof of concept rather than a marketing badge, and why he believes the brands that make the most sustainable products, without asking the consumer to sacrifice anything, will be the ones that win.

If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com

Salted caramel spent roughly 50 years travelling from a Parisian chocolatier to a British supermarket staple. Nduja took a decade. Kimchi felt like an overnight success, but it wasn't. So when a flavour trend lands on a developer's radar, how do you know whether you're early, right on time, or already too late?

The answer, our expert panel suggests, is rarely found in data alone. It lives in the gap between what a trend tracker can tell you and what a developer's gut tells them. And knowing how to triangulate the two is one of the most underrated skills in food innovation.

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded at our London Olympia event, we explore how both a major retailer and a multi-brand manufacturer approach the now, next and future framework for flavour trend tracking.

Our panel debates the cuisines that have genuinely crossed over and the ones that are still waiting.

And they dig into the tension between authenticity and accessibility, the power of the silent ingredient, and why calling something a tortilla instead of a Spanish omelette can be the difference between a product that flies and one that sits.

If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com

Global demand for protein has been rising for sixty years and shows no sign of stopping. But the way we're producing it is running into hard limits, environmental, ethical and economic, at exactly the moment that consumers have decided protein is the most important thing on the label.

So where does that leave manufacturers, retailers and innovators trying to navigate a market that wants more protein, cheaper, more sustainably, and still delicious?

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded at our London Olympia event, three experts try to answer that question.

They discuss overgrazing, marine over-exploitation, and the opportunity in novel proteins.

They also talk about how constraints on animal protein are opening a window for plant-based innovation that the industry hasn't had before.

And they discuss the future of soy protein, all with one thing front of mind - the products produced need to be attractive to consumers.

If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com

What's the next Dubai chocolate? And more importantly, how do you know whether to back it before it's mainstream, or whether it will ever get there at all?

The speed at which flavour trends now travel has fundamentally changed the job of everyone in NPD. What used to take decades can now arrive, peak and fade within a single season. 

Social media accelerates trends and creates consumer expectations about flavour before a product even hits the shelf.

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded at our London Olympia event, five flavour and innovation specialists debate what all of this means in practice. 

They unpack why flavour is still king, and why the days of designing something that appeals to everybody are effectively over. 

And they wrestle with the most loaded question in innovation: is the era of the perennial core flavour over, or will the industry always find new ones?

If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com

How is AI influencing innovation in the food industry? 

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded live at our event at Olympia in London, we try to map out the full picture.

Our guest speaker is Alberto Prado, former Global Head of R&D Digital & Partnerships at Unilever.

Alberto believes the food industry is facing the most volatile, fast-moving, expensive and demanding environment it has ever operated in. But, he argues, the tools it's using to respond are largely unchanged since the 1980s.

He maps out the full picture - what AI is already doing inside large FMCG organisations, the five barriers he believes are getting in the way, and why he argues companies that treat AI as infrastructure rather than a feature, will be shaping this industry for the next decade.

His argument is that most food businesses are using AI to write better emails and build slightly faster dashboards, while mistaking that for transformation.

If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com

When a female consumer walks into a shop asking for help with their hormones, their sleep or their fertility, how confident can they be that what they're sold is actually backed by evidence?

It's a question a growing wave of informed, sceptical consumers is now asking louder than ever.

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded at our London event in 2026, we have a frank conversation about women’s health and what evidence-based retail actually looks like from the inside. 

We hear the case made for personalised nutrition - not as a premium niche, but as a genuine public health opportunity - and learn about one of the most quietly significant shifts in women's supplement science: the move from folic acid to methylated folate in prenatal products.

If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com

In this episode, we enter the Flavour and Colour Lab at Food Matters Live London 2026.

Five conversations with the companies shaping what food tastes, looks and feels like. From raw material shortages and botanical extracts, to a Dragon's Den success story built on TikTok trends and a bath bomb-shaped meal base that's found its way into Ocado.

We find out how the raw material pressures reshaping the flavour industry right now are leading to new product developments.

We get the full story behind the bath bomb-shaped meal base that started on TikTok, appeared on Dragon's Den, and just launched in a major supermarket. 

And how a baking powder that's been around for 175 years, is re-inventing itself.

If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com

We would like to clarify that, due to an internal communication error regarding session timings, Tina Faghihi-Hallam from Flavour Bombs was unable to join the live panel discussion at Food Matters Live as scheduled. Tina was present at the event and ready to participate, and her absence from the stage was not due to any fault on her part. 

Recorded live on stage at Food Matters Live, at London's Olympia London, this is the session that opened the whole event, and it set the tone perfectly.

Food historian Annie Gray and Rob Lowery, VP of Marketing at PepsiCo UK, Ireland and Europe, sit down for a wide-ranging fireside conversation on where consumer food culture has come from, where it's heading, and how to tell the difference between a genuine trend and a flash in the pan.

They cover how the health concerns driving food choices today, from protein to gut health, are less new than we think, and what that tells us about what's likely to stick

Why personalised nutrition is still accelerating, and what GLP-1 medications are doing to consumer habits and food industry priorities

And how fragmented eating patterns, demographic shifts, and the rise of remote working are reshaping the occasions food is designed around

Find out about upcoming events at foodmatterslive.com.