2025 R&D Teams of the Year: Dole Packaged Foods

They call themselves “fruit engineers,” and that’s a good thing considering every product they develop must be based on fruit.

Instead of a restriction, fruit offers a wonderful and wide-ranging palette to work in, says Kimberly Galante, global head of product development and innovation at Dole Packaged Foods – winner of our R&D Teams of the Year poll in the medium-sized company category.

“Fruit is a great ingredient, a great medium. It can be the hero or the complementary flavor,” she says. “It’s a differentiator. It provides natural sweetness, some acidity, nutrition and an emotional element.

“If you look at a spectrum, fruit can be all the way to the left side, where it’s the hero -- all about the naturalness of the fruit, with fewer ingredients in the product. Then you can go all the way to the right, where you’re creating an indulgent experience and fruit is complementary to that indulgence.”

And Dole Packaged Foods has indeed gone to both ends of that spectrum.

What used to be a singular Dole company began to split in 2013, with Dole Packaged Foods being acquired by Itochu, a large Japanese trading company. Eight years later, the produce side of Dole merged with Total Produce Plc of Ireland to create Dole Plc, based in Ireland.

The roots of both Doles go back to 1901 as Hawaiian Pineapple Co. “Pineapple is the foundation of Dole; it’s our heritage,” says Galante. Despite that nostalgia, the company proclaimed 2025 “the year of the mango,” symbolic of its move into other fruits and other flavors.

Back in 1901, Dole’s packaged foods/value-add business was simply fruits in cans or made into beverages. Single-serve Dole Fruit Bowls, debuting in 1999, were a first step into the convenient snacking category. A logical follow-up was frozen fruits in 13 varieties.

Innovation kicked into high gear with the dawn of the 21^st Century, as Dole’s fruits, particularly pineapple, found their way into a portfolio of indulgent treats, beverages, even frozen foods - all under the Dole Packaged Foods portfolio.

Those early fruit bowls recently were augmented with Fruit Parfaits, still fruit-forward but with crème, in apples & crème and peaches & crème. Dole Whip is another dessert/snack. A longtime favorite of overheated Disneyland visitors, the cross between a sorbet and soft-serve ice cream finally made it into grocers’ freezer cases April 2023, and in the past year was reformulated based on consumer feedback. Just relaunched this June, it comes in pineapple, of course, but also mango. Another frozen snack is Smoothie Bowls.

Our other 2025 R&D Teams of the Year:

Large-company R&D Team of the Year: Campbell's V8 team

Small-company R&D Team of the Year: Bitchin' Sauce

The R&D team developed its own, unique drying method in March 2023 to create Good Crunch, dried fruits in pineapple, pineapple & chili and banana. The canned juices got a jolt of energy with Energy Delights (with vitamins B6, B12 and C and 80mg of caffeine); others help the gastrointestinal tract with Digestive Bliss (50% fruit juice, vitamin C and 4g of plant-based fiber).

The “fruit engineers” – the formal name is Product Development Innovation Team -- number 30 across the globe. Fourteen, most with backgrounds in food science, are in Dole’s Westlake Village, Calif., headquarters – although they moved into a new building this past January. Offices and labs are functioning but a test kitchen, to the delight of their resident chef, should be ready by the end of this year.

Sixteen more team members are elsewhere in the world, primarily in manufacturing plants in Thailand and the Philippines. “Once we figure out the benchtop work, we’ve done that iterative cycle of formula work and we’re ready to scale it up, that’s when our factory team helps – making sure what we developed on the bench can actually come to life in a factory,” says Galante.

Their process is Stage Gate. “It begins with a start gate, concepts validated by consumer pre-work. Marketing is closely involved in the process. Then we prioritize. There are numerous gates and check-ins all along the way. We give updates to leadership. The whole team hears progress reports at each of the gates. Eventually we get final approval and execute.”

The length of any project depends upon the product, but most simple new products, such as flavor extensions, take 9-12 months, Galante estimates. A real breakthrough product could take 1-2 years, she says.

Dole Fruit N Crème Dessert is an interesting case. It actually was created more than 20 years ago, “the first innovation I launched after arriving at Dole,” Galante says. “It was the first time we started exploring indulgent offerings.”

There have been a few launches that didn’t work out but were interesting attempts: Wiggles fruit juice gelatins, fruit-based vitamin chews and probiotic fruit sodas. All fruit-forward and gallant tries.

How much further could Dole Packaged Foods take its fruits while staying within the business’ mission – accessible fruit nutrition? They were sampling coffee with pineapple juice at Natural Products Expo West in March – although no such product is on the launch pad. “There are possibilities, for sure. We’re constantly looking at the white space and figuring out what consumers want.”

The white space? “We’re always looking at the competitive landscape in different categories –snacks, cans and beverages are where we’re strong. A lot of it is listening to our consumer base, how Dole can answer people’s cravings but also provide better nutrition through the goodness of fruit. Our R&D team always has their ear very close to the ground to push the product portfolio forward.”