AMSTELVEEN, THE NETHERLANDS — AKA Foods, a European-based food technology company, is integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into product development processes with the launch of its AI-powered platform, AKA Studios.
The platform is intended to shorten the product development cycle by consolidating existing research and sensory data into an organized database, providing ease of access to the information. The platform also provides an AI agent that can aid developers in product research and reformulation, such as a shift to a clean label, ingredient reductions or elevated sensory elements.
The platform also can make the product development cycle more affordable, according to the company.
David Sack, founder and chief executive officer of AKA Foods, said the platform was launched after noticing how “in shambles” data organization was within food companies.
“The common thing we’ve seen across (consumer product goods) companies that we’re speaking to, from biggest to smallest, is that the most sophisticated tool they’ve got is Microsoft Excel or PDFs that they’re using, or actual notebooks in their product development labs,” Sack said.
Shahar Rosentraub, chief product officer for AKA Foods added that, when companies face a problem in product development stages, the solution is typically hidden within the company’s existing data but often is overlooked or difficult to track down. Another complication hindering product development is the exit of company executives that take the knowledge of past projects with them.
In response to the issues, the platform provides an avenue to retain and keep track of past knowledge and efficiently blend it with current research and development.
“The knowledge is hidden in so many different silos, so that companies often can’t get to it in time,” Rosentraub said. “The food industry is just now discovering what other industries already have known — that they’re not fast enough to keep up. Smaller companies don’t have the 300 years of background that larger companies do, and the only way to win is to use AI tools to give them solutions to keep up.”
Rosentraub compared the food industry to the pharmaceutical industry, claiming that, although it took some time to fully integrate, AI is now cemented within the industry. He predicts that the food industry is on its way to fully adopting the technology.
With the speed that AI offers, the food development timeline can be expedited exponentially, according to the company. The expedited food development timeline allows companies to keep up with an industry’s constantly changing trends.
“The pains of the industry are regulations,” Sack said. “They are always changing, and you always need new iterations of a (stock-keeping unit) to meet regulations. These are problems AKA Studios can solve.”
The AI-powered platform is secure and does not share data to train models, according to the company. Users of AKA Studios maintain full ownership of their data.
While incorporating AI into the product development process has its perks, the company recognizes that AI-powered technology is not perfect. Rosentraub said AI sometimes produces “hallucinations,” or false data, so factchecking is mandatory. He added that AKA Studios can eliminate the hallucinations, especially as AI continues to improve.
“We try to take the good things that ChatGPT and the likes can give, which is mostly how they look at data very quickly, how they connect between different dots and insights of data,” Rosentraub said. “Then, we try to compensate on the things that these types of models don’t have, which is how to actually utilize real resources, like reducing hallucinations or solving math problems which are relevant in a very accurate way.”
