Oreo Manufacturer Announces Employment of AI to Develop Novel Treats
It appears that nowadays, every organization seems to have an AI focus, even those operating in traditional, non-digital sectors. Mondelez, a corporation renowned for producing snacks such as Chips Ahoy and Clif bars, has been utilizing a exclusive AI system to speedily generate concepts for innovative snacks.
In a report by the Wall Street Journal about Mondelez's AI, it's mentioned that the company started developing this tool in 2019.
Food technologists at Mondelez use this AI tool to formulate optimal recipes by stating specific characteristics, such as taste ("buttery," "saltiness in the mouth," or "vanilla intensity"), aroma ("oily," "egg flavor," "burnt," etc.), and appearance ("quantity of chips," "roundness," "chip edges"). The tool also takes into account factors like the price of ingredients, their environmental footprint, and their nutritional profile.
People wouldn't dream of consuming rocks or gluing pizza—Mondelez isn't employing generative artificial intelligence here, but rather traditional machine learning, which avoids hallucinating due to its focus on optimizing outcomes rather than creating something entirely new. Just as Waze might use machine learning to optimize a route from A to B, Mondelez's tool simply searches for the ideal combination of ingredients to achieve the desired characteristics.
However, these tools faced challenges during the early stages:
In its initial phases, when it was not fed enough data, the tool suggested some bizarre suggestions.
As Wallenstein, the head of digital R&D in the biscuit sector, stated, "Since baking soda is a cheap ingredient, it would suggest cookies consisting mainly of baking soda, which is absolutely foul."
Mondelez informed the Journal that the AI has been trained on the "essence" of different products, such as Oreos, so it doesn't veer too far from consumers' expectations. Recipes, of course, continue to undergo taste tests. Mondelez asserts that while it previously developed new recipes through trial-and-error, having an AI propose detailed recipes has enabled new products to advance to production trials 4-5 times faster.
Given the current investor enthusiasm for AI-related companies, we anticipate Mondelez's stock price to surge after this Journal article.
In the realm of technological advancements, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in various sectors is becoming commonplace, with tech giants like Mondelez leveraging AI for innovative product development. Mondelez's use of AI in its food technology has significantly sped up the development of new snack recipes, reducing the time from concept to production trials by approximately 4-5 times.
