Nielsen has found that around 85% of new consumer packaged goods in the US fail within two years of launch. According to the report, this figure is widely cited across the food industry. It is a fact that a large share of failures have surprisingly little to do with the idea itself, and almost everything to do with how the product was developed, validated, and brought to market.
Some products do fail on concept — the wrong flavor, the wrong price, a market that wasn’t there. But plenty of genuinely good ideas die in execution: they reach the shelf too late, launch with errors that erode trust, or get tripped up by a compliance issue no one caught until the end.
Execution Traps
Those failures are avoidable, and they tend to share the same root causes. Erika Redaelli, Global Head of Solution Management, Regulatory and Scientific at Trace One, notes that execution traps can sink launches. These traps include being too slow to market, product data chaos, compliance caught too late, supplier and ingredient surprises, and teams working from different versions of the truth.
When product development runs on manual hand-offs and disconnected tools, weeks disappear that the calendar didn’t have to give. Every version mismatch becomes rework, and rework becomes delay. An undeclared allergen, an unsupported claim, or a market-specific labeling rule discovered near launch forces relabeling — or pulls the product entirely.
Connected Infrastructure
The manufacturers who beat the odds tend to develop products on connected infrastructure rather than a patchwork of documents. A single source of truth for formulation management means every specification, claim, and label draws from the same master record, so a change made once flows everywhere it needs to.
A product lifecycle management (PLM) platform extends that across the whole journey, connecting R&D, procurement, regulatory, and marketing, surfacing regulatory compliance issues early instead of at launch, and keeping supplier data validated at source. The result is fewer failures and faster, more confident launches.
Pressure-Testing Your Process
A practical way to pressure-test your own process is to consider the following factors before your next product goes to market. It is essential to have a single source of truth, one current record of the product that every team draws from, rather than parallel copies. Compliance issues must be seen early, allergen, claim, and labeling issues should be flagged in development, not days before launch.
Supplier data must be validated up front, ingredient specs, costs, and availability should be confirmed before the concept is locked. Teams must be aligned, R&D, regulatory, procurement, and marketing should work from the same data. Speed to window is also key, it is necessary to move from concept to launch fast enough to hit the retailer and seasonal windows you’re aiming for. Any weakness in these areas is a place where a promising product can quietly become a statistic.
New-product failure isn’t only about taste, timing, or luck. A large share of it is the avoidable kind, the product-data and process kind. The manufacturers who treat product development as connected infrastructure, not a relay race between disconnected tools, fail less often, waste less when they do, and get their best ideas to the shelf while the window is still open.
Erika Redaelli leads the regulatory and product teams at Trace One, whose AI-native PLM platform is built for formula-based product development in food and beverage and consumer goods, serving both manufacturers and retailers.
