Startup CPG Puts Founders and Formulators at One Table
Great branding and a signed distributor will not save a product that is not actually good. That premise drove Startup CPG’s first-ever Founders and Formulators event, held July 12 at the historic Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, the day before IFT FIRST 2026 (the Institute of Food Technologists’ annual expo) opened its show floor.
TLDR
- Startup CPG hosted its first Founders and Formulators event in Chicago on July 12, timed to IFT week.
- The format was structured speed-dating: 1:1 sessions between emerging brand founders and veteran food formulators.
- Formulators could taste and evaluate real products in person, not over a cold call.
- The afternoon was sponsored by Applied Food Sciences, with the Chicago Section of IFT.
- Attending formulators spanned decades of research and development, commercialization and clean-label expertise.
Speed-Dating for the Formulation Gap
Finding the right formulator on your own usually means months of cold outreach, dead-end calls, and guessing whether someone’s expertise even fits your product. Founders and Formulators compressed that into an afternoon of structured one-on-one sessions, giving founders face time with several experts at once. A formulator could taste a product, evaluate a formula in person, and hand back insight no introductory phone call can match. Founders still in development came looking for a partner; founders already on shelf came to have their formulas critiqued.
Who Was in the Room
The formulator bench was deep. Among those in attendance: Rachel Zemser, owner of A La Carte Connections and author of The Food Business Toolkit for Entrepreneurs; Kelly Anderson, a 15-year big-food research and development professional and founder of DyeConverter, which builds deep ingredient intelligence for clean-label formulators; and Mark Smoler of The Smoler Group, a 30-year veteran of distribution and commercialization. The roster reflected the event’s real thesis: the scarce, hard-won expertise that turns a promising idea into a product able to survive contact with a shelf.
Why It Matters
The hardest bottleneck in better food is rarely the idea; it is access to the people who know how to build it. Formulation talent is scarce, expensive, and usually locked inside large companies or booked solid as independent consultants. An event that puts that expertise within arm’s reach of early founders, and lets the experts handle the actual product, quietly attacks the exact gap that sinks most good intentions. Startup CPG also maintains a free, searchable directory of vetted formulators for founders who cannot make it to Chicago. Great branding still will not save a bad product; afternoons like this make the good one a little more likely.
Source: Startup CPG.