AI predicts new food and drink pairings

Robot gourmands are imminent, it seems, and they might someday craft recipes just as delicious as those from their human counterparts. In a newly published paper on the preprint server Arxiv.org They say that it's not only able to suggest complementary food pairings and to uncover novel ingredient combinations, but that it outperforms other baseline models by a wide margin. "Many chefs, gourmets, and food-related researchers have focused on studying food pairing for decades," wrote the paper's coauthors. "Since food pairings are made based on the experiences of experts, food pairing itself is subjective and difficult to quantify. In this work, we introduce KitchenNette, which … predicts the scores of unknown pairings consisting of food ingredients that have infrequently or never been used in recipes."