Consumer goods giants use AI to slash product development time from years to months

From shampoo to cookies, consumer products get an AI makeover

VIENNA, July 6 (Reuters) - French cosmetics company L'Oreal (OREP.PA), opens new tab has used AI to identify molecules in its skincare products that can be repurposed for use in shampoo and can now create products four times faster than before, a senior executive told Reuters. Consumer companies, including Nescafe owner Nestle (NESN.S), opens new tab, Sensodyne toothpaste maker Haleon (HLN.L), opens new tab and chocolate maker Mondelez (MDLZ.O), opens new tab, are using AI in product innovation, helping them in some cases test ingredients faster, generate recipe ideas and address supply chain vulnerabilities, executives said. The push to integrate AI into product development ⁠comes as consumer goods companies face pressure to innovate faster and cut costs amid shifting consumer tastes. L'Oreal, which started using AI in its labs four years ago, has identified new molecules for beauty products by predicting the effect they will have on skin and hair, said Fabrice Megarbane, president of its consumer products unit. L'Oreal's recent innovation was repurposing molecules used in skincare products for a shampoo that uses collagen to add lift and fullness to hair, Megarbane said. "You can really go much faster by imagining ... new associations of molecules and new benefits of molecules," Megarbane said at the Consumer Goods Forum's Global Summit in Vienna in late June. L'Oreal CEO Nicolas Hieronimus launched ⁠a "beauty stimulus plan" last year to spur innovation after L'Oreal posted its slowest group sales growth in years. AI COMPRESSING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT Human product innovation augmented by AI is a "game-changer" at chocolate maker Mondelez, Chief Information and Digital Officer Filippo Catalano told Reuters. The technology has helped the Cadbury and Toblerone owner speed up processes and reimagine recipes. The firm said AI can create ⁠recipes, including "out-of-the-box" ideas, which a human expert assesses. "You can optimise how you develop your recipes," Catalano said, pointing to the possibility for reduced dependency on single sourcing in supply chains and the ability to adapt formulas to respond to changing consumer tastes. Mondelez's ⁠AI tool is reducing the number of samples typically generated through innovation, he said. It helped develop its Gluten Free Golden Oreo cookies and a refreshed recipe for Chips Ahoy cookies, the firm said. In the ⁠biscuit category, 60% of recipes produced using its AI tool performed better in areas such as nutrition, sustainability and cost. "(AI capabilities are) accelerating things you could do already, but compressing the time from months to weeks or years to months," Catalano said. Reporting by Alexander Marrow; Editing by Adam Jourdan and Rod Nickel Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Artificial Intelligence Alexander Marrow Thomson Reuters Alexander covers European consumer goods from London, focusing on the corporate strategies of companies including Nestle, Unilever, Danone and Reckitt, as well as on how their products impact consumers' daily lives. Alexander previously covered Russia's economy and companies from Moscow, reporting on the fallout from Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the Western corporate exodus that followed.

Shampoo and cookies get an AI makeover as consumer giants rewire their labs

Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Mondelez are using AI to formulate products and steer campaigns, compressing timelines that once ran into years. The AI story has mostly been told through chips, data centres, and the companies building the models. It is now being told through the shampoo aisle. The world's largest makers of everyday goods, the businesses behind the bottles and packets in most kitchens and bathrooms, say they are using artificial intelligence to design products and run the campaigns that sell them, turning a technology associated with software into a fixture of the consumer-goods lab. It is the same wave of enterprise adoption that has pulled AI tooling into corporate software stacks, arriving now in categories as unglamorous as body wash and biscuits. Procter & Gamble offers the clearest example of what this looks like inside research and development. The company says it used AI to screen tens of thousands of peptides in developing a formula for a Pantene product, drawing on an internal database of more than 8,500 formulations to predict how a mixture would feel on skin or hair before anyone mixed it. The point is not novelty for its own sake. It is time. Steps that once required rounds of physical testing can be narrowed down computationally, which pushes candidates toward consumer trials faster. Mondelez, the snacking company behind a long list of familiar biscuit and chocolate brands, describes a similar shift on the food side. It says an AI product-development tool has helped it generate dozens of new formulations, and that the software lets developers move between two and five times faster than conventional methods. The same generative systems are being pointed at marketing, producing personalised images, text, and video at a pace traditional studios cannot match. Unilever has leaned hardest into the campaign side. Its Dove brand ran a cookie-scented body-care line in partnership with Crumbl, with AI involved across the effort, from product direction to the selection of influencers and the creative itself. The company reported the campaign drew billions of impressions and brought a large share of new buyers to the brand. Whatever one makes of a cookie-scented soap, the mechanics are instructive: a single AI-assisted pipeline running from formulation to feed. What ties the examples together is compression. In consumer goods, the traditional cost of experimentation is measured in months of lab work and test batches, and the traditional cost of a campaign is measured in agency hours. AI attacks both. Reformulation becomes a search problem over known ingredients, and content becomes something generated and varied on demand, an approach that mirrors the advertising ambitions on display when OpenAI pitched AI-made ads at Cannes. The claims deserve some caution. Most of the specific figures come from the companies themselves, and consumer giants have every reason to present their AI programmes as further along than they are. Product development still ends with human tasting panels and dermatological testing, and a formula an algorithm likes is not the same as one a shopper buys twice. The industry's own researchers have flagged that AI-generated marketing often drifts toward the generic, missing the brand-specific character that makes a campaign land. Still, the direction is consistent across firms that rarely agree on much. The reallocation of enterprise budgets toward AI agents and tooling has become a general feature of large companies, from Tencent's enterprise agents to the consumer-goods R&D described here, and the packaged-goods sector is not sitting it out. For shoppers, the visible result will be mundane: more variants, faster refreshes, scents and textures that arrive and vanish more quickly than they used to. The machinery behind the shelf is changing even where the products look the same. A bottle of shampoo is, increasingly, the output of a search.