This is Tye. Today I get to dive into Prodeen Foods taking on the role of a team member in Regulatory at Prodeen Foods. I am with Gabriel, who returns to his roots as a R&D Food Scientist. Time to get reacquainted with Aura Chewing Gum.
In August 2025 we introduced Aura, a Yuzu and Green Tea chewing gum, and put it through a multi-market compliance check. Brazil and Canada passed. The EU did not: carnauba wax at 4,000 ppm against a limit of 1,200 ppm. Aura failed gate 1 and went back to R&D.
A lot has changed in Prodeen since then. Over the past year we have moved from single-task agents to a platform where whole teams work together: shared projects that hold a product's research, briefs and formulations; comment threads where colleagues discuss the work and bring in @Prodeen; research reports written as documents with full version history; and live Outcomes that turn the work into a view any stakeholder can review.
Everything in this post was done in Prodeen as it is today. It is the multi-team process our users can run now.
Aura's gate-1 failure, like most, did not come from missing information. It came from timing: R&D builds the concept, Regulatory sees it at the gate, and the problem arises after a lot of the work has been done. This time we ran Aura differently. R&D and Regulatory worked in the same Prodeen project from the start, debated in the same document, and brought Prodeen into the conversation when we needed evidence. This post walks through how that went.
Since gate 1, R&D has worked with Innovation and Marketing on a new direction. Consumer demand is moving toward products that help people unwind, and our recent viewpoint on 2027 consumer trends shows the same reality. It also shows that calm and relaxation claims are among the hardest to make. That tension is exactly why Regulatory needed to be involved early.
Aura is now positioned as a small ritual to unwind, for four markets: Brazil, the United States, Canada and the EU.
Gabriel used Prodeen to create an updated brand brief and formulation in the Aura project. Two changes matter most. Carnauba wax is gone, replaced by candelilla wax at 0.10% as the glazing agent. And chamomile flower extract at 0.20% joins yuzu and green tea.
The brief also proposed cornerstone claims, including "Your moment to unwind" and "Yuzu & Green Tea, with a gentle touch of chamomile."
Gabriel did not send me as the regulatory lead an email with an attachment. He created an event in the project Inbox, "New Aura Formula," that opened the approval process. It landed in my Prodeen Inbox with everything I needed in one place: why Aura was being reformulated, a before-and-after table of every changed ingredient with the reason for each change, and the updated brief. The event states plainly that it is awaiting review and does not constitute approval.
Gabriel added a note in the event's comments asking me to check ingredients and claims across Brazil, the US, Canada and the EU, with candelilla and chamomile as his main questions. I replied saying I would and already raising a first concern about chamomile beyond its use as a flavouring.
In the same project, I built a four-market ingredient table for the two new ingredients, with the permission, limit, conditions and linked regulation for each. Candelilla wax is permitted as a glazing agent in all four markets, so the problem that sent Aura back to R&D is resolved. Chamomile was more nuanced: acceptable as a flavouring everywhere, but not cleared anywhere as an ingredient used for a relaxation effect.
I then reviewed each proposed claim in each market against regulation and enforcement precedent, including an ANVISA action against a chamomile tea marketed as inducing relaxation. The result was a claim-by-market risk rating, with sources at the point of use.
This is where single-player tools fall short. The question was not what the regulation says. It was what chamomile is doing in this product, and R&D and Regulatory saw it differently.
I left a comment on the chamomile line in Gabriel's brand brief, which described it as a botanical supporting the unwind story:
Both points are fair. While we discussed it, Prodeen stayed out of the thread. It recognises when colleagues are talking to each other.
Then I mentioned @Prodeen in the thread and asked it to summarise the current risk of each claim that relies on chamomile, based on my claims review. Prodeen picked up the context of the document and came back with a claim-by-market view:
In the end, we came to a joint conclusion with everything captured in one location:
Not everyone who needs to act on this work should have to read four regulatory reports and a comment thread. So we turned the project into a live Outcome: "Aura – Reformulation Review for Decision."
It is an interactive page built from everything in the project. A status panel at the top shows where Aura stands: the record, the review status, the four markets and the date of the sources. Below it, the Outcome walks through the formula changes, the status and risk of all 13 ingredients in each market, and the risk of each claim with recommended wording. "Pause. Chew. Relax." becomes "Pause. Chew. Enjoy." Every finding links back to the regulation and the project research behind it.
The section that matters most to a manager is the last one: decisions, split by role. Marketing chooses the claim wording, with claim 3 as the lead. Regulatory completes the remaining ingredient checks. And the business owner chooses the development route: a flavour-led gum now, or further investment in a functional version.
Here you can see the Claim risks ready for a decision maker to weigh in:
Once I locked the version as the approved record, it is ready to go. Any stakeholder going forward can view and comment but cannot change the work.
Most AI tools are single-player: one person, one chat, and an answer that stays on that person's screen. Product development does not work that way. R&D, Regulatory, Marketing and leadership each hold part of the answer, and the costly mistakes happen in the gaps between them.
In this run, the gate-1 problem was solved before the gate, the riskiest claims went back to Marketing before anyone designed packaging around them, and the reasoning is recorded where the work lives. Prodeen did not make the call. It brought the evidence into the conversation at the moment we needed it.
Open a document in one of your projects and leave a comment for a colleague. When you need evidence, reply in the same thread with something like: "@Prodeen summarise the regulatory risk of this ingredient in each of our target markets, based on our project research."
Thanks for reading!
Tye & Gabriel