Packaged food grew 2.2% in the first half of this year.

Packaged food grew 2.2% in the first half of this year. Volume was flat.

The ingredients replacing its ingredients are forecast to grow 6 to 9.

That gap reframes everything. Reformulation keeps getting filed as a compliance line, absorbed quietly by legal and R&D ahead of a deadline. In a category growing two percent, it is the only part of the business compounding faster than inflation.

So the question is not whether. It is when.

The answer is now, and not because of the deadline. Because of the crowd behind it. Every brief in the industry lands in the same window, and application labs, extraction capacity, and qualification slots are finite. Teams starting in 2026 get a lab that answers the phone. Teams starting in late 2027 get a waiting list.

The expensive part was never the bench work. It is the searching that comes first. Weeks spent deciding what is even worth testing, then learning at pilot scale that it fails on heat, or pH, or shelf life, or was never authorized for that application.

That is the part I built DyeConverter to delete. SKU-level ingredient intelligence, so a team walks into the first bench run already holding the short list, the tradeoffs, and what has already failed for someone else. It does not replace the food scientists doing this work. It gives them their weeks back.

There is no prize for being last through a crowded door.

For anyone in the middle of this: which half is actually your bottleneck, finding candidates that hold up, or qualifying them once you have them?