Kellogg's is perhaps best known for its breakfast cereals from its Corn Flakes to Frosties to Fruit Loops and more, and before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the APAC region, its dominant positioning was within the quick prework/school breakfast consumption occasion. But with the onset of the pandemic and most consumers having to stay home for both work and school, this consumption occasion became less attractive, and the company rightly realised a need to interpret consumer behaviour in a new light to pivot and operate accordingly. "We saw a big transformation where most consumers started to increase their at-home consumption significantly, which also included a lot more cooking at home as many found their inner chef – so we wanted to find a way to offer them more options to use our products in a way closer to their culture and habits," Kellogg's South East Asia Chief Marketing Officer Sanjib Bose told FoodNavigator-Asia. "Before COVID-19, we would have done this via normal interviews with consumers but realised this was now not possible, and we also wanted to go deeper to understand them better by finding out what they wanted directly from conversations they were leading online. "We felt that AI technology was a good way forward for this as it also helped us solve challenges such as language barriers, as most consumers will post on social media in different languages especially in Asia where there are so many different languages; and also to make sense of the huge volume of data from all of these online conversations." Kellogg's partnered with AI-specialist firm Ai Palette to do this, and apart from the use of AI to process data, the firm's technology is also language agnostic, which allowed it to help with the language challenge. "Our language agnostic model allowed us to gather and process data from various locations and across various diverse languages such as Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Melayu, whereas image analytics also helped to accurately identify data relevant to Kellogg's," Ai Palette CEO Somsubhra GanChoudhuri told us. "The big data found that now new consumption occasions for cereals have gone beyond breakfast – these are being used in proper recipes for cooking and baking, as a result of increased interest in home cooking and home baking during the pandemic.

Developing new packaged foods and consumer goods can take a couple years as companies research, prototype and test products. In a society that runs on social media, however, people expect to see trends land on store shelves much more quickly. Founded in 2018, Ai Palette uses machine learning to help companies spot trends in real time and get them retail-ready, often within a few months. The startup, whose clients include Danone, Kellogg's, Cargill and Dole, announced today it has raised an oversubscribed $4.4 million Series A co-led by pi Ventures and Exfinity Venture Partners. Both will join Ai Palette's board.