What’s New—The Product or the Package?

How much of new food product development today is new product and how much is new packaging? And how much is ho-hum, and how much is convenience? Others may define and count, but at the risk of oversimplification, why not just select a random list from recent Innova Database (www.innovadatabase.com) citations of new food and beverage products?

In these choices, I do not refer to new graphics—which appear on almost all new packages—as distinguishing attributes. One of the recurrent theses in the b…