Tech Bro Wants to Disrupt How You Think About Flavor

While terrifyingly sophisticated robots a la Westworld are still a long way off, artificial intelligence technology has found plenty of applications in the food and restaurant sphere -- from making restaurant recommendations and reducing food waste to recognizing customer's faces and ensuring pizza toppings are evenly distributed. And one startup believes that A.I. holds the key to the future of flavor: As the New Food Economy reports, NYC-based Analytic Flavor Systems envisions a future in which food is hyper-customized for people's individual tastes -- "a day when we'll each have a Doritos of our own." Mass-market snacks and drinks are designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, resulting in what CEO Jason Cohen believes are "endless shelves of products that most people like, but few people really love." His company has created an AI platform called Gastrograph -- a free version can be downloaded via the iTunes App Store -- that collects highly specific data from individual users, with the goal of "giving food and beverage companies the information they need to develop products optimized for more and more specific sensibilities." The app's central feature is a wheel with 24 spokes, where each sliver represents a discrete category of sensory experience--such as "meaty," "bitter," or "mouthfeel."