Manufacturing
products should be shipped to stores. AI helps to organise huge amounts of data that no human or team of humans could make sense of in a timeframe necessary to take meaningful action. PepsiCo can now get insight from millions of data sets to tailor its products to the needs of its customers. Furthermore, the product innovation cycle has become significantly shorter, as the company can see what customers are talking about and searching for online. Then there are companies like Danone, perhaps best known for its yoghurt products, that are utilising AI to link the latest scientific research to an in-depth analysis of customer demand. The company’s deputy CEO, Juergen Esser, recently noted that: “The long- term business strategy of Danone is very much about turning around dairy, and everything about bringing the right ferments, the right health benefits and making it shine to the consumer is critical.” To that end, Danone has developed a range of experiments and analyses based on parsing vast quantities of data and the latest research into gut health. Having invested $100m in a new research laboratory near Paris that opened earlier this year, the company has created an artificial stomach replicating the human gut to test new formulations based on parameters defined by patient samples and health profiles analysed by AI systems and track the performance of probiotics. The stomach simulates the human digestive process and AI systems defines the data component. The company hopes this initiative will be pivotal to the success of its next generation of health-promoting dairy products.
At Mars, Incorporated – which brings the world Skittles and Snickers, among a host of popular products – AI is being used to improve nutrition. The Mars
Advanced Research Institute recently announced a multi-year agreement with AI company PIPA to increase the speed of discovery of new plant-based ingredients. The company’s LEAP platform brings together AI, knowledge graphs and bioinformatics to define links between food, compounds, microbes and health states. At Mondelez International, the company behind brands such as Cadbury and Oreo, AI is being deployed in the development of new products and flavours, fuelling the creative process with data analysis and enabling the product prototyping process to pick up speed. The vital ingredient here is the ability to rapidly understand how customers are responding to new products.
A steep investment curve Seemingly able to improve every aspect of the food industry from logistics to product development, AI is unsurprisingly a hot topic and a key focus for investment. There are, however, some lingering concerns about its use. The high cost of AI could be a stumbling block, though the potential efficiency gains across a food manufacturer’s business seem to hold more than enough potential for this concern to be overlooked. Ethical concerns about the safe use of AI pervade every industrial application, and there are always fears that smart algorithms could increasingly replace humans in food production. If an industry that feeds billions of people every day becomes overly dependent on AI, there could be risks to the global supply chain.
Nevertheless, it seems the industry is sold on AI and its benefits, so investment is likely to ramp up sharply. The key will be for food manufacturers to ensure that those benefits do not come at too high a cost. ●
PepsiCo uses AI to help growers calculate the optimum seed to use, the best time and position to plant crops.
Ingredients Insight /
www.ingredients-insight.com 81
MiniStocker/
Shutterstock.com
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