Dive Brief:
- Bear Naked, a granola and snack manufacturer, has partnered with IBM to use its Watson cognitive computing technology to create Bear Naked Custom Made Granola.
- Bear Naked is the first consumer brand to produce foods inspired by Chef Watson, which enables consumers to use personal flavor preferences to create customized granola varieties. Chef Watson filters thousands of potential flavor combinations to match consumer tastes.
- Chef Watson could also be used by commercial partners to identify exotic flavor combinations manufacturers can use in new products.
Dive Insight:
Technology like Chef Watson has the potential to take R&D to the next level for food and beverage. Chef Watson synthesized data about the chemical composition of hundreds of ingredients and the components of 10,000 recipes from Bon Appetit to determine seamless pairing combinations for up to four ingredients.
With this technology, manufacturers could bring Big Data into the food and beverage R&D process. By identifying new data-backed flavor combinations that resonate with consumers, ingredients producers and their manufacturing customers could be at the forefront of new flavor trends that spread quickly across the industry.
A computer equipped with Chef Watson technology would be able to analyze and determine a huge amount of possible flavor combinations in a shorter period of time than a manufacturer could with an employee-based R&D team. It's not necessarily that Chef Watson would replace these R&D teams, but the technology could enhance their productivity and the success of their contributions.