Why Food & Beverage R&D Won’t Quit Excel: and the Price You’re Paying for It

Walk into almost any food or beverage R&D department and you’ll see the same setup: Excel open on one screen, Genesis or another nutrition tool on the second, and a folder full of PDFs and spec sheets buried somewhere else on a shared drive.

For an industry that lives on innovation – new ingredients, new claims, new formats – the underlying tools are stuck 30 years behind. Excel has quietly become the default formulation system for most brands. It’s flexible, it’s familiar, and it’s increasingly a liability – but the reality is that it’s holding teams back more than they know

This isn’t a pitch for the latest software. It’s a reality check that the “Excel era” is holding your team back, and the symptoms show up long before a recall or delayed launch exposes them.

How Excel Became Your Unofficial Formulation System

Excel was never designed to manage regulated, multi-stakeholder product development. It was built for accountants. But over the last two decades, R&D teams have used it to fill every gap that other systems haven’t been able to cover.

A typical setup looks like this:

• One workbook for master formulas
• Another for trials and reformulations
• Separate sheets for ingredient specs and suppliers
• A tab that approximates nutritional panels
• Additional email threads and shared drives to move versions around

This process works, until it doesn’t… 

As portfolios grow, teams add more tabs, more workbooks, more macros, and more manual checks. What started as a simple tool becomes a fragile web of spreadsheets that only a few people truly understand.

If those people leave, get sick, or are pulled into another priority, the whole system starts to wobble, and historical data that your team might need is quickly lost.

Five Warning Signs You’ve Outgrown Spreadsheets

If you’re wondering whether Excel has quietly become a bottleneck, start with the symptoms, not the software. Here are 5 warning signs I see again and again across food and beverage R&D teams that are holding them back from their full potential.

1. Version Chaos Is Your Daily Reality

Formulas live in files named things like:

Chocolate_Protein_Bar_v7_final_FINAL_(Mary_edits).xlsx

In the absence of consistent naming conventions and consistent tracking of changes, no one is ever 100% sure which version is approved, which one was used for the last pilot run, or where the validated nutrition numbers live. 

 A simple request like, “Can you send me the latest file?” turns into a tedious hunt instead of a quick search in one centralized system.

2. You Don’t Fully Trust Your Own Numbers

One broken cell reference or hard-coded value can throw off an entire nutritional panel. Just imagine you have an intern who drags a formula down one row too far, or someone copies data between workbooks. 

Now your sodium values are wrong, and no one catches it until QA- or a retailer flags the inconsistency. By the time this issue is brought to the surface, it is likely too late, and your team is faced with recalls or other consequences.

3. Compliance Lives in a Separate Universe

Label checks, allergen reviews, and claims validation all happen outside the spreadsheet – often days or weeks after a formula change. Without tracking in place for these changes and updates, R&D moves ahead, assuming the label is fine. 

Fast forward, you then have compliance come back later saying, “We can’t say that,” and suddenly you’re back in reformulation. These small back-and-forth exchanges add up, sucking up valuable time your team should be spending innovating and improving products for your customers. 

4. You Depend on “Spreadsheet Heroes”

In every company, there is always one or two people everyone goes to when a workbook breaks. They know which tab feeds which, how the macros work, and where the “real” data lives. When they’re out, projects stall. That isn’t a process; it’s institutional fragility.

5. Launches Feel Like Fire Drills, Not Controlled Routines

As launch dates get closer, teams that are not working off a single source of truth are likely scrambling to reconcile formulas, labels, and specs across multiple files and systems. 

During this process, you or someone else may notice that the label copy doesn’t match the latest formula. Ops then ask, “Which version are we running?” and the answer is, “Give me a minute to check…”

If three or more of these feel uncomfortably familiar, you’re not just “using Excel.” You’re running your business on a system you’ve already outgrown.

4 Hidden Costs Your P&L Doesn’t Show

Most leaders know that spreadsheets are clunky. What they underestimate is the real cost of keeping them at the core of R&D.

1. Slower Innovation Cycles

As new briefs are built, each one has to be translated across R&D, Regulatory, QA, and Operations via email and attachments. Additionally, every reformulation requires copying and pasting, recalculating, and revalidating in multiple places.

Individually, these delays look minor – an extra day here, a week there. Although when added up across an entire pipeline, they add up to months of lost market time every year.

2. Elevated Compliance and Recall Risk

A mislabeled allergen or outdated nutrition panel isn’t a theoretical risk. It’s a recall, a retailer conversation, and a brand hit.

Spreadsheets make it far too easy for “small” changes – swapping a supplier, adjusting inclusion levels, changing a flavor system – to slip through the cracks without triggering the right downstream checks.

3. Wasted Talent

Food scientists are hired for their ability to formulate, solve complex technical problems, and create products consumers love. Yet many spend a shocking percentage of their week on:

• Fixing broken files
• Rebuilding lost calculations
• Reconciling data between R&D, Regulatory, and Ops

That’s not “just admin.” It’s a structural way of burning out your best people, people you need to make your business run smoothly, while staying ahead of competitors.

4. Bad or Late Decisions

When data is scattered across spreadsheets, decisions get made on partial information:

• Marketing updates a claim without realizing it invalidates the current formula.
• Procurement switches a supplier and doesn’t see the impact on allergens.
• R&D tweaks a flavor system and doesn’t realize the sodium just pushed you over a retailer threshold.

No one is trying to make bad calls. Disconnected systems and siloed workflows simply hold teams back from seeing the entire picture they need to make informed decisions. 

Why Teams Haven’t Moved On (Yet)

If the pain is this obvious, then why is Excel still everywhere? A few honest reasons:

• Familiarity: Everyone already knows it. No training, no onboarding, no change management – until something breaks.
• Perceived flexibility: You can make Excel do almost anything once. The problems start when you need it to do that thing reliably, at scale, for years.
• Underwhelming alternatives:  Many legacy PLMs were built for manufacturing or generic product data, not for the realities of modern food & beverage formulation. R&D teams reasonably concluded, “Excel is painful, but at least it’s mine.”

This is how outdated tools persist- not because people love them, but because the alternatives never felt worth the disruption.

What “Healthy Change” Starts to Look Like

This stage of the journey isn’t about picking a vendor; it’s about getting clear on what a healthier system would look like.

In high-performing R&D organizations, you see a few common patterns:

• A single source of truth for formulas, specs, and labels. Time spent hunting across drives to figure out which file is current is now spent on innovation and driving positive change.
• Live links between changes and compliance. When formulas are adjusted and changes are made, cross-functional teams can immediately see the impact on nutrition, allergens, and claims.
• Built‑in traceability across all teams and functionalities. With such features in place, everyone can see who changed what, when, and why – without digging through emails and spreadsheets.
• Collaboration in one environment. This means R&D, Regulatory, QA, and even Commercial teams are all working off the same data, not their own copies of a spreadsheet.

Notice what’s not on this list: “another giant spreadsheet with better naming conventions.” The fix isn’t a tidier version of the old system. It’s a different way of working, a systematic change.

Changing The Game in Food & Beverage R&D

If you’re leading R&D, Regulatory, or Product, the question isn’t, “Is Excel bad?” – because you already know its limits.

The real question is,  “At what point does the risk, drag, and the frustration of staying in spreadsheets outweigh the pain of changing?”

For many food and beverage brands, that tipping point has quietly arrived: larger portfolios, tighter regulatory scrutiny, ambitious innovation targets, and smaller teams expected to do more with less.

In the next article in this series, we’ll dig into what a modern, connected formulation environment actually looks like – and how teams are making the shift without bringing R&D to a halt.

For now, start with an honest audit: How many critical decisions in your business still depend on a file named final_final_v9.xlsx? That answer will tell you a lot about your real risk profile – and your true capacity for innovation.