Commercializing Innovative Agri-Food Products: An Integrative Review of Marketing Challenges and Strategic Responses

Bringing agri-food innovation to market requires more than demonstrating technical superiority. Consumers, firms,retailers, and institutions must interpret unfamiliar production methods, assess claims that are often difficult to verify, manageuncertainty about product experience, and justify higher monetary or behavioural costs. This article examines the distinctivemarketing conditions surrounding innovative agri-food products and identifies responses suited to the barriers that arise duringcommercialization. A structured integrative review synthesized 41 peer-reviewed analytical studies, together with 10 foundational ormethodological works and two authoritative institutional sources. The evidence was selected using explicit eligibility criteria, verifiedthrough publisher or DOI metadata, appraised for relevance to the synthesis, and coded across innovation type, consumer evaluation,communication, trust and risk, value, sensory experience, distribution, firm capabilities, and institutional context. The findingsidentify six defining characteristics of innovative agri-food marketing and organize commercialization barriers across consumer,product, communication, firm and market, and institutional and societal levels. The resulting challenge–response matrix and markettranslation framework show how benefit translation, credible assurance, product trial and co-creation, value-based pricing, layeredcommunication, staged channel development, and multistakeholder collaboration can transform innovation into understandable,trustworthy, accessible, and commercially viable consumer value.