Chief Financial Officer
What return is your R&D budget actually producing?
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.
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 shelf; 52% reformulate within 12 months.
Chief Marketing Officer
Are you launching the right things faster than competitors?
Head of R&D
How do you deliver more with less — and beat private label on more than price?
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 a strategic growth partner. The org agrees on paper.”
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 scientists are good. The science is not the bottleneck.”
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 headcount.
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03
“Every team has adopted AI. The board has seen the slide.”
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.