Shampoo and Cookies Get an AI Makeover as Consumer Giants Rewire Their Labs
Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and Mondelez are using AI to formulate products and steer campaigns, compressing timelines that once ran into years.
July 6, 2026 – 8:38 am
The AI story has mostly been told through chips, data centers, and the companies building the models. Now, it’s being told through the shampoo aisle. The world’s largest makers of everyday goods, the businesses behind the bottles and packets in most kitchens and bathrooms, say they are using artificial intelligence to design products and run campaigns that sell them, turning a technology associated with software into a fixture of the consumer-goods lab.
It is the same wave of enterprise adoption that has pulled AI tooling into corporate software stacks, arriving now in categories as unglamorous as body wash and biscuits.
Procter & Gamble offers the clearest example of what this looks like inside research and development. The company says it used AI to screen tens of thousands of peptides in developing a formula for a Pantene product, drawing on an internal database of more than 8,500 formulations to predict how a mixture would feel on skin or hair before anyone mixed it.
The point is not novelty for its own sake. It is time. Steps that once required rounds of physical testing can be narrowed down computationally, which pushes candidates toward consumer trials faster.
Mondelez, the snacking company behind a long list of familiar biscuit and chocolate brands, describes a similar shift on the food side. It says an AI product-development tool has helped it generate dozens of new formulations, and that the software lets developers move between two and five times faster than conventional methods.
The same generative systems are being pointed at marketing, producing personalized images, text, and video at a pace traditional studios cannot match.
Unilever has leaned hardest into the campaign side. Its Dove brand ran a cookie-scented body-care line in partnership with Crumbl, with AI involved across the effort, from product direction to the selection of influencers and the creative itself. The company reported the campaign drew billions of impressions and brought a large share of new buyers to the brand.
Whatever one makes of a cookie-scented soap, the mechanics are instructive: a single AI-assisted pipeline running from formulation to feed.
What ties the examples together is compression. In consumer goods, the traditional cost of experimentation is measured in months of lab work and test batches, and the traditional cost of a campaign is measured in agency hours. AI attacks both. Reformulation becomes a search problem over known ingredients, and content becomes something generated and varied on demand, an approach that mirrors the advertising ambitions on display when OpenAI pitched AI-made ads at Cannes.
The claims deserve some caution. Most of the specific figures come from the companies themselves, and consumer giants have every reason to present their AI programs as further along than they are. Product development still ends with human tasting.