From a very young age, Ian Noble was interested in how things work.
“I remember taking apart so many things that strangely never went back together again,” says the Mondelēz International VP for R&D.
It was this interest that drew him, as an adult, to his current career. The role contains the opportunity “to create things that are new to the world”.
Now, Noble is in the position where he’s able to influence how things work on a grand scale. Overseeing research and analytical sciences for Mondelēz, as well as tech-focused accelerator programme CoLab, he has a lot of influence over how one of the world’s biggest food companies decides to innovate.
Yet Noble approaches his work with an optimism that is rare in someone of his level and this is clear in the way he talks about it. Throughout our interview, he speaks with a zeal that makes the innovations he mentions seem even more exciting.
His fixation with “new ideas and new possibilities” is something he admits is “agnostic to the subject area”. For him, innovation is valuable in and of itself. Innovating is not about addressing pain points, but embracing “joyful opportunities”.
With a vast remit, stretching from regenerative agriculture to AI to technology start-ups, Noble has plenty of such opportunities.
Climate R&D is central
While Mondelēz’s innovation agenda stretches far and wide, much of it is unified under the banner of sustainability. The company aims to utilise a wide range of new technologies in order to boost sustainability and remains committed to it even as it falls down the news agenda.
The food supply chain is at the heart of this. The company wants change from source to retailer, pushing for “the evolution of the supply chain on an end-to-end basis”, says Noble.
“Moving the company to net zero is one of the jobs that I recognise as the biggest thing I have to do, but also one of the most rewarding.”
Ian Noble, VP for R&D at Mondelēz International
All aspects of this supply chain are important, he says. The company aims to strengthen not only its environmental credentials, but its social and economic credentials as well.
It is focused on ingredients, agricultural systems and packaging, with innovation a core part of each.
Noble stresses the importance of different considerations. “How do we use different energy sources? How do we make sure that we’ve basically got no waste in the system?”
Climate and sustainability is central not only to R&D but to Noble’s own role and his motivation within it. “Something like three quarters of our carbon footprint as a company is in the ingredients that we use,” he explains. “And moving that to net zero is one of the jobs that I recognise as the biggest thing I have to do, but also one of the most rewarding.”
Regenerative agriculture
When it comes to innovation, says Noble, the first half of the 20th century was the heyday of physics. In the second half of the 20th century, innovation in chemistry had its time in the sun. Now, in the first half of the 21st century, he believes it’s biology’s turn to shine.
The understanding of systems biology in particular, the sort of biology that takes entire natural systems into account, is coming to fruition. This is where regenerative agriculture comes in. Work in systems biology ties into the company’s efforts to introduce more regenerative agriculture into its supply chains, Noble explains.
The company has been embracing this. Recently, along with 39 other food companies, Mondelēz committed itself to regenerative agriculture, and specifically the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI)’s ‘regenerating together’ framework.
Such large-scale agricultural changes require new technologies and new ideas, Noble points out.
While the specific nature of the technologies that Mondelēz is working on in this area is under wraps, he stresses that regenerative agriculture “needs new science” to reach its full potential.
Scalability is vital in such practices. Regenerative agriculture “comes to life when you get it to scale”.
Most importantly, Mondelēz must be able to demonstrate to farmers that these technologies work. At the end of the day, says Noble, farmers are small businesspeople. “If we want them to adopt a technology, we’d better be ready to show them that it works and have proven that it works.”
Sustainable packaging balance
Sustainable packaging is a key preoccupation of Mondelēz – but it’s not as simple as ‘plastic bad, alternatives good’. Instead, the pros and cons of each material must be balanced. Much of the R&D in this area is about accentuating the positives of a given material, while reducing the negatives.
Fibre-based packaging, which includes packaging made out of paper and cardboard – “trees, essentially” – is a prime example of this. “There’s a lot of innovation happening in that space,” says Noble.
If fibre-based packaging is to be a credible alternative, it must meet several criteria. At the most basic level, the question is “is it genuinely sustainable and more sustainable?”, says Noble. This isn’t always guaranteed – turning a tree into paper is extremely energy-intensive.
Fibre-based packaging also has disadvantages when it comes to recyclability. It can only be recycled a certain number of times – usually between three and five – before the cellulose fibres are too short to use, Noble explains. “It’s not one of these ones that you can recycle forever.”
There’s also the problem of barriers. “Plastic materials are very good at keeping things separate,” he says. Stopping oxygen or water getting into packaging, for example. This is currently something that fibre-based packaging is not so good at.
And as well as having better barriers, plastic is often linked to lower greenhouse gas emissions than alternatives such as paper.
However, the difficulty is ensuring that it is recycled. “The key behaviour there is probably to help drive that mindset of recycling,” says Noble.
The future of cocoa
Like many confectionery giants, Mondelēz is leaning into alt-cocoa. The company recently partnered with tech start-up Celleste Bio to create a chocolate bar using cell-cultivated cocoa butter.
But this does not represent the future of cocoa, stresses Noble. The global supply of cocoa will remain, on the whole, firmly conventional.
“Are we active in the lab-grown space? Yes we are. But the way I look at is, you’re going to be doing well to beat good old-fashioned agriculture.”
Cocoa grown traditionally will still make up the vast majority of global output, he stresses, even while cultivated cocoa provides a window into how technology can ease demand.
“The ability to understand what’s possible from a lab-grown or fermentation point of view is really important. That science needs to be advanced and that capability needs to be advanced.” The choice of cultivated cocoa, he says, should be made available to consumers.
Nevertheless, the most significant innovation in the cocoa space will instead, he believes, be in agriculture itself; in the production of new disease-resistant varieties through plant-breeding and in the improvement of agricultural practices to boost yields.
“It may not be as sexy or as exciting, but I think we’ll see much more volume progress there.”
Mondelēz links with start-ups
As seen above, Mondelēz is focused on breakthrough technologies, building resilience into its supply chain, and making packaging more sustainable.
Many of these themes are coming to fruition in Mondelēz‘s CoLab initiative, an R&D accelerator programme that looks for start-ups to invest in and, eventually, incorporate into the company.
Mondelēz partners the start-ups that are participating in the programme with R&D technical leads within the company that have a need for their technology, explains Noble. This helps the snacking giant understand how a start-up’s technology works, how it fits into the company’s own planning process and how it can be commercialised.
Bringing start-ups into the company, he says, has led to a significant cultural change.
When start-ups are brought into a team, it builds a “culture of innovation”, and the wider mindset shifts. When working towards something, teams begin asking themselves: “What needs to be true to make this happen?”
“Staying still is not an option. The moment that you lock yourself in and think ‘this is it’, it’s almost the beginning of the decline.”
Ian Noble, VP for R&D at Mondelēz International
However, placed as he is on the bridge between ideas and application, Noble must sometimes explain to ambitious start-ups that regulations can get in the way of their ideas.
“Occasionally you get people that haven’t really realised that they’re working in food,” he says, and that because of this, regulations must be taken into account.
Ideas like this will often be based on “beautiful science or technology”, but are simply not feasible from a regulatory point of view.
Innovate or decline
It is vital for Mondelēz to remain connected to innovation in food and beverage, says Noble.
“Staying still is not an option. The moment that you lock yourself in and think ‘this is it’, it’s almost the beginning of the decline.”
Businesses must continue to innovate, he stresses. One side of this is in consumer-facing products – fulfilling consumer needs through innovation.
But innovation is like an iceberg – much of it happens beneath the surface. It is not just about NPD, but efficiency and competitiveness and pricing. Businesses must stay competitive on all levels to survive.
“You need to continue to lead in your spaces because it’s a continual race,” says Noble. “Every day, you’ve got to stay in the race.
“And innovation does that, whether it’s innovation for a brand new product, which is just amazing, or whether it’s innovation that actually enables you to make things in a more efficient way, to capture carbon as you’re growing the crops, to minimise the waste in the factories to zero. They’re all innovations, but they have different roles to play.”
