We help FMCG innovation and sustainability leaders embed sustainability into innovation strategy, so sustainability performance and innovation performance move forward together, with better ideas and stronger in-market impact rather than a constraint added at the end.
Our Impact via Innovation work connects sustainability goals to the innovation engine: finding the opportunities where resilience, risk reduction and growth meet, and building propositions that can scale commercially.
Mangrove POV
We see innovation as one of the most practical levers to translate sustainability ambition into value, accelerating belief, adoption, and understanding by embedding it in real, customer or consumer-facing work.
Sustainability should be embedded into the innovation strategy and model itself, as a driver of better ideas and greater in-market impact. Long-term strategic innovation challenges for FMCG businesses are increasingly sustainability-linked. Health, nature and climate have become hard commercial realities rather than abstract ESG concerns, from the boom in appetite suppressants, pressure on ultra-processed food, and climate strain on supply chains. Reframed, these challenges can become rich innovation briefs.
Our work with multinational CPG companies shows that the most powerful opportunities sit at the intersection of resilience, risk reduction, and growth. Done well, this creates a clear triple win. These tend to concentrate in three areas: planet, people, and product.
Planet
Reducing carbon, resource intensity and raw material resilience by designing for a constrained supply base.
People
Meeting social needs through access and format - building dietary-need and accessibility into the product's core positioning, lowering social risk and improving outcomes across supply chains.
Product
Enabling better nutrition and new functional needs.
The challenge for healthier, more sustainable products isn't generating the ideas but scaling them commercially. We know that the performance of the innovation engine is driven by the systems around it.
For too many businesses the prevailing view is to still see sustainability through a defensive lens, a 'bad news story', and only about looking to manage the downside risk, cost, problems. The bigger unlock is reframing it as an innovation and growth opportunity rather than a cost centre.
Done well, sustainability can be a 'beautiful constraint', turning limitations into a driver of inventive thinking. When all functions across a business collaborate early, it drives creativity rather than compromise.
of a product's environmental impact is determined at the design stage. European Commission Circular Economy Action Plan
This is the founding premise of the EU's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), in force since July 2024. The biggest gains come from designing in up front, not trying to fix it at the end.
"The world is changing faster than innovation engines can tolerate, and running incremental NPD against these structural shifts produces margin-dilutive launches and shrinking average project size."
We connect sustainability goals to Mangrove's core innovation offer, so sustainability becomes part of how the innovation engine works rather than a separate workstream.
Innovation Remap
Innovation Strategy & Performance
Building sustainability into innovation strategy, portfolio choices and measures of success, so it shapes which projects get backed.
Opportunity Blueprints
Opportunity Identification
Identifying innovation opportunities aligned to sustainability goals, where real consumer need, commercial potential and resilience meet.
Game-Changing Propositions
Proposition Development
Turning sustainability-led ideas into propositions that are commercially credible and built to scale.
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Innovation is where Mangrove started
We bring more than 25 years of FMCG innovation experience to sustainability-driven innovation, so ideas are built to succeed in market, not just to test well.
We design it in up front
With up to 80% of a product's environmental impact determined at the design stage, we bring sustainability into the strategy and the brief, not the final stage gate.
We look for the triple win
The opportunities worth backing deliver resilience, risk reduction and growth across planet, people and product.
We focus on scaling, not just ideas
Healthier, more sustainable products rarely fail for lack of ideas. We look at the whole innovation engine around them, so they can scale commercially.
In a world of rapidly accelerating sustainability legislation, we’ve been reminded that it’s still the consumer who holds most of the cards. Recent events in dairy and automotive show what happens when brands push change faster than consumers are willing to follow.
Apple’s annual iPhone launch cycle is a masterclass in confusing consumer wants with consumer needs. Their latest Product Environmental Report looks good on paper, but it completely ignores the environmental cost of the cycle itself.
Benchmarking is rarely an uplifting experience. But this week we were reminded of something more specific: how easy it is to draw completely the wrong conclusions when you’re not comparing apples with apples.
Sustainability has slipped down the CEO priority list as AI takes centre stage. But the real opportunity isn’t to choose between them – it’s to bring them together. The potential wins for sustainability from smart AI application are enormous.
There’s a growing view that businesses have been chasing the wrong sustainability goal. Being sustainable – doing less harm – may no longer be enough. The new ambition is to become regenerative: actively restoring people, places and the planet.
Is that EV charging in the garage really better for the environment? What about that mattress you’re lying on? As sustainability-driven innovation uncovers more uncomfortable truths, brands face a tricky question: how much should you tell consumers before you’ve fixed the problem?
If you want sustainability to drive better ideas and stronger in-market impact, we can help you find the opportunities worth backing and make them work commercially.
