Kevin Leland on Innovation Trends and Discovery Habits
Halo is reshaping how the food and agriculture industry discovers breakthrough innovation. As R&D teams face growing pressure to find solutions faster and from a broader range of disciplines, Halo’s platform is emerging as a powerful tool to connect industry leaders with scientists, startups and suppliers worldwide. Ahead of Future Food-Tech San Francisco, we sat down with Kevin Leland, CEO and Founder of Halo, to explore the trends shaping the innovation landscape and the habits that help R&D teams stay ahead.
Halo has become a well-known name in innovation in food and agriculture circles, but for those less familiar, what is Halo?
Halo is a global network of real innovators with real solutions who are actively looking to collaborate with the food and agriculture industry. You can think of it as a LinkedIn for R&D partnering.
Our innovators include scientists, startups and suppliers working across the full R&D spectrum, from early-stage research to commercialization. On the industry side, our community includes R&D, innovation and product development teams from major players like Pepsi, Kraft Heinz, Bayer, BASF and Cargill.
Historically, Halo has been free for innovators but a paid platform for industry. We’re excited to announce that from this conference onward, anyone working in R&D can now join Halo for free, discover solutions and connect directly with the innovators behind them.
When you look across the food and ag landscape, what categories of innovation are generating the most momentum on Halo’s platform, and what does that signal about where the industry is heading?
Interest spans the entire food and ag value chain and mirrors the priorities of companies attending Future Food-Tech and World Agri-Tech.
Popular categories include:
- Precision fermentation
- Functional ingredients
- Flavor and sensory modulation
- Sustainable packaging
- AI, predictive modeling and digital twins
We’re also seeing innovators tackling edible coatings, ingredients supporting weight management, processes for stabilizing proteins, moisture barriers for packaging, new seed treatment technologies and approaches to preventing trait expression or applying genome editing.
What blind spots do you think R&D teams still have when it comes to sourcing breakthrough innovation?
There are many. Traditional search breaks down quickly in an R&D context. Academics, startups and companies all use completely different language to describe the same underlying technology. Different industries do too.
As a result, keyword-based search mostly shows you solutions in your own field, reinforcing what you already know. But many of the most impactful solutions come from adjacent industries or unexpected disciplines. Traditional search isn’t designed to surface these.
Halo uses AI to understand the intent and meaning of each solution, so we can match companies with relevant innovations they may not have known to look for. And because our solutions are actively submitted and maintained by researchers, startups and suppliers, we’re not scraping the open internet. We’re matching real, current solutions to real industry needs.
If you were advising another R&D leader attending Future Food-Tech, what’s one habit they should adopt after the event?
Don’t let discovery and partnering become a once-a-quarter scramble. If you wait until your CTO says “find me a technology that does X,” it’s too late to build the relationships needed for a perfect match.
Innovation is a long game. It requires nurturing relationships, keeping tabs on what’s emerging and regularly exploring new ideas. Make it a weekly habit: block 30 minutes to browse new innovations, share one finding with your team or reconnect with a researcher or startup you met at a previous summit.
Innovation rewards teams who stay close to what’s changing and keep their pipeline warm. The best partnerships don’t happen by accident.
Register for Halo’s free platform to start discovering emerging technologies and connecting directly with innovators across food and agriculture. Everyone who signs up will receive £250 off your delegate pass for Future Food‑Tech San Francisco. Join Halo today and get your code.
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