Tastewise CEO and co-founder Alon Chen looked around the crowded ballroom at Future Food-Tech’s San Francisco conference this spring.
The room was full of companies showing off new advances in food tech. There were different variations of plant-based meats and sauces. Ingredients made from unconventional plants, grains and legumes. Technology to improve and enhance cell-based meat growth. All sorts of products made through fermentation. He spoke matter-of-factly.
“If you look around us, nine out of 10 of the presenters are going to fail, which is a shame, right?” he said.
Chen said that startup failure has nothing to do with a company’s idea or how much the product is needed. It has more to do with the way those products are executed, what attributes they highlight, and how well they fit what consumers are looking for at the moment.
Tastewise’s goal is to turn that trend upside down.
“We’re trying to get from a 90% failure rate to a 100% success rate,” he said.
The Israel-based company has a unique value proposition, and Chen says it has succeeded in work with food businesses of all sizes. Basically, Tastewise has a sophisticated artificial intelligence system that sifts through massive amounts of data online — the company estimates it accesses more than 22 billion social media interactions, more than 5 million home recipes and more than 1 million restaurant menus — to find what’s trending right now. And its co-founders know exactly where to look and how to mine that data. Chen is a former Google executive, and Chief Technical Officer Eyal Gaon has worked with several Israel-based tech companies.
The company, which got its start in 2017, works with an array of food makers including Nestlé, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, Campbell Soup and Eat Just. It’s quickly tripled its revenues, the company said in a statement. In March, it received a $17 million Series A investment, led by Disruptive AI. The company, with total lifetime funding of $21.6 million, has plans to expand its coverage to help capture the up and coming trends in new markets including Canada, Germany, France, Australia and India.
“If you do a really large survey, you’ll usually be talking to like 200 people. We observe 10 million consumers every single moment, and what we basically allow you to see actually is way more statistically significant and meaningful in real time.”
Alon Chen
Co-founder and CEO, Tastewise
Chen said the data that Tastewise can provide is much more significant and useful to food companies than traditional information. Historically, food companies relied on point-of-sale data — which takes some time to compile and only can record what a consumer buys, but provides no information about the decision-making process or the reasons behind a purchase. And consumer polls — another traditional source of information — are full of inaccuracies, Chen said. Consumers are not always truthful about the products they are looking for and why, or what they are hoping for in the future.
“We basically look at behavior and we analyze that,” Chen said. “And we look at a much higher scale. In a survey, if you do a really large survey, you’ll usually be talking to like 200 people. We observe 10 million consumers every single moment, and what we basically allow you to see actually is way more statistically significant and meaningful in real time.”
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Source: https://www.fooddive.com/news/tastewise-food-trends-artificial-intelligence/628677/