It seems that every company today has artificial intelligence, even those engaged in analog business. Mondelez, a snack food conglomerate, uses its own AI tool to quickly generate ideas for new snacks.
The Wall Street Journal explains in an article about Mondelez AI that the company started developing the tool in 2019:
“Food scientists use the AI tool to create optimal recipes by specifying desired characteristics, including flavor (‘buttery,’ ‘salty in the mouth,’ or ‘vanilla intensity,’ for example), aroma (‘buttery,’ ‘eggy,’ ‘burnt’), and appearance (‘number of chips,’ ’roundness,’ ‘chip edges’ are considerations). The tool also takes into account parameters such as the cost of ingredients, their environmental impact and nutritional value.”
No one thinks eating rocks or putting glue on your pizza is a good idea: Mondelez is not using generative AI, but machine learning, a more traditional form of AI that is not prone to hallucinations because it optimizes results rather than trying to create entirely new things. Just as Waze can use machine learning to optimize a route from point A to point B, Mondelez’s tool simply looks for the right combination of ingredients to achieve the desired characteristics.
Mondelez told the magazine that the artificial intelligence is trained on the “essence” of different products, such as Oreos, so that it doesn’t stray too far from what consumers expect. And the recipes, of course, are still being tested for taste. However, Mondelez claims that if they used to develop new recipes by simple trial and error, then thanks to AI developing detailed recipes, new products are tested 4-5 times faster.
Given the strong investor interest in AI-related companies, we expect Mondelez’s share price to rise sharply after the publication of this article in the journal.
