Under fake pink cherry blossom, guests sipped House of Suntory cocktails and picked at plates of chicken karaage, prawn gyoza and cauliflower tempura from a kaitenzushi-style conveyor belt … This was the London launch of Waitrose's new Japanese range. But without knowing it, and even if you live hundreds of miles away, your food choices may have had a hand in shaping the supermarket's 26-dish Japan Menyū range. That is because it was developed with input from Tastewise, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that analyses menus, social media and online recipes to pinpoint food trends. While many businesses and individuals are concerned that AI is going to eat their lunch rather than set the menu, the technology is becoming more prevalent in the food industry, with its use doubling since 2017, according to McKinsey's 2022 Global Survey on AI. This is probably because it offers under-pressure retailers and food manufacturers an understanding of what fickle shoppers will want to buy in the future. It takes a year to perfect a new food project, but even so most of them miss the mark, and in recent times, companies have instead been forced to play catch-up with trends that have exploded on social media.

Tastewise, an AI-powered market intelligence platform for the food and beverage industry, has launched its latest generative AI solution called TasteGPT. This new product is designed to provide speedy and contextual insights into infinite product ideas and help brands make decisions that are right for them. TasteGPT leverages Tastewise's proprietary AI and the largest dataset available on food consumption to provide speed, productivity, and increased new product success. It can shorten months of research and answer business-critical questions such as which product ideas are the best fit for Gen Z consumers, where to launch a new beverage product, and what the focus of the next marketing campaign should be. Traditional market research methods such as surveys, focus groups, and syndicated industry reports typically report data around 13 months late, missing significant behavioral shifts and making them unreliable in the current fast-moving consumer world.

Food is one of the most essential necessities of human life. Many businesses, such as restaurants, revolve around food, which is almost a guaranteed profit. However, there is always room for improvement, whether it's enhancing the qualities of one's business or branching out to reach a mass audience. That's where technology comes into play. Nowadays, many companies are providing technology to perfect the food industry, from enhancing the quality of delivery services to improving food planning.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a valuable tool for food and beverage makers looking to bolster front-end innovation. Manufacturers, restaurants, ingredient suppliers, flavor houses and more are leveraging insights from machine learning to get closer to consumer trends and market more nuanced propositions. New food and flavor concepts traditionally have been ascribed to culinary experts, chefs and product developers, said Ron Harnik, vice president of marketing at Tastewise, an Israel-based AI food and beverage platform. Translating an idea into a finished product can take months or even years. "The processes that are set up to take products to market simply aren't built to be quick and accurate enough to reflect how fast consumers are changing," Mr. Harnik said.

Where does your enterprise stand on the AI adoption curve? Take our AI survey to find out. If you imagine how a food and beverage company creates new offerings, your mind likely fills with images of white-coated researchers pipetting flavors and taste-testing like mad scientists. More and more, companies in the space are tapping AI for product development and every subsequent step of the product journey. At PepsiCo, for example, multiple teams tap AI and data analytics in their own ways to bring each product to life. It starts with using AI to collect intel on potential flavors and product categories, allowing the R&D team to glean the types of insights consumers don't report in focus groups.

What would you do if you saw a sharp, sudden spike in demand among for sauerkraut? Wrong, says Alon Chen, the CEO and founder of Tastewise, a start-up that uses AI and machine learning to provide real-time insight into people's food tastes. Far better to identify the trend behind the trend. "Sauerkraut is fermented food, and fermentation is highly associated today with gut health and brain health, " Chen explained. So sauerkraut is an example of a demand for a traditional ingredient being driven by a new concept.

Have you ever tasted – or even heard of – zhoug, Spam musubi or ube? Have you ever topped pizza crust with hazelnut-and-cocoa spread? If you're in the $5.75 trillion food business, you need to know about these and other up-and-coming trends if you want to give your customers what they crave. A new Israeli startup, Tastewise, leverages the power of data to bring fresh info on food trends to the folks responsible for determining which dishes or products to serve next. "When I started talking with executives in the food-and-beverage industry, both large brands and restaurant owners, I found a huge gap of data and tools to help make decisions based on data," says Tastewise CEO and cofounder Alon Chen, formerly Google's chief marketing officer for Israel and Greece.