Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show · Ira Pastor

The Science Behind The Future Of Snacking - Norberto Chaclin - Executive Vice President, Chief Research & Development Officer - Mondelēz International

March 19, 2026·41 min·3 clips

How many 29-cent bags of chips must sell before a snack R&D leader earns an hour's pay?

Chocolate can melt before anyone eats it, and that plain problem opens the episode nicely. Ira Pinister uses it to pull Norberto Ciaclin away from the easy answer, which would be new flavors and fun shapes, and into the less flashy work behind global snacks. Ciaclin describes R&D as the job of making products behave the way people expect them to behave. Flavor matters, sure. But so do quality, product design, packaging, store conditions, and the local habits around buying and carrying food. Heat changes everything. A chocolate product sitting in a very hot market, especially where shops are not air conditioned, creates a different problem than the same product in a U.S. or European supermarket. The wrapper is not just a wrapper in that situation. It is part of whether the snack survives the shelf or a few hours in a purse before it reaches the buyer. The episode keeps coming back to that sort of practical detail. Products can differ across markets because the environment and expectations differ too. Pinister does a useful job of turning the corporate language into everyday stakes: why does the product still taste and feel like itself by the time someone opens it? The brand list gives the conversation its size. Oreo, Ritz, Clif Bar, and Tate's Bake Shop are not dropped in as trivia. They show how much R&D has to hold together when familiar snacks move through different markets. By the end, the point is simple enough: snack development is partly delight and nutrition, but it is also a lot of quiet engineering.

As heard by us

A grounded look at the science that keeps everyday snacks consistent, local, and workable.

This episode stays focused on the engineering behind snacks that usually get treated as simple. It looks at what keeps chocolate from melting in hot markets, how a familiar product lands the same way in different places, and why the real work often sits with consistency,…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Hear how food R&D turns heat, packaging, and consistency into product design.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show