As food and beverage companies pack more protein, fiber, and functional ingredients into their products, some of those ingredients are proving harder to run than others. Protein sits at the top of the list.
According to PMMI’s The Formulation Effect: Impacts on Food & Beverage Production white paper, whey and dairy proteins are the most commonly cited challenging ingredient category, identified by 51% of end users. The report links the difficulty to a cluster of behaviors that dairy proteins bring to the line: solubility, foaming, heat sensitivity, viscosity, and demanding equipment cleaning.
One end user traced how a single ingredient’s requirements ripple downstream. “There’s specific heating requirements, pasteurizing requirements. Once it’s pasteurized, it needs to be cooled and then packaged, filled and packaged,” a project engineer says. “And that can create some challenges for the specific packaging chosen.”
Fibers and prebiotics rank second as a source of production challenges, cited by 36% of end users, followed by multi-ingredient formulations and blends at 31%. That third finding points to a different kind of problem. Here the difficulty comes from combining several functional components, which can introduce competing processing requirements, interactions, or incompatibilities that add complexity beyond handling each ingredient on its own.
A vivid example came from one engineering leader weighing whether to add fruit pieces to a yogurt. “So what if I put those diced peaches in the yogurt? Well, that would be great. That would be cool,” a director of engineering and innovation said. “But that size piece probably doesn’t fit through the nozzle in the yogurt filler, and it may tend to plug, or it might be hard to clean.”
The challenge extends across a long tail of ingredients. Sugar alternatives (27%), plant proteins and gums/stabilizers (26% each), and probiotics (25%) were also cited as creating production difficulty, reflecting how broadly enhanced formulations are reshaping what equipment has to accommodate.
For OEMs and suppliers, the pattern points to where the hardest problems concentrate. Capabilities that address protein behavior—solubility, thermal handling, and cleanability—and equipment that can manage the interactions of multi-ingredient blends speak directly to the formulation challenges end users report most often.
SOURCE: 2026 The Formulation Effect: Impacts on Food & Beverage Production, Equipment and Investment
For more insights from PMMI’s Business Intelligence team, find reports, including The Formulation Effect: Impacts on Food & Beverage Production, Equipment and Investment, Robotics in Packaging & Processing, and Managing Obsolescence at https://www.pmmi.org/business-intelligence.
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