Oreo Maker Says It’s Using AI to Create New Snacks

Every company seems to have an AI angle these days, even those in very analog businesses. Mondelez, the snack conglomerate that owns everything from Chips Ahoy to Clif bars, says it has been using a proprietary AI tool to quickly generate ideas for new snacks.

The Wall Street Journal in a piece about Mondelez’s AI explains the company began development of the tool back in 2019:

Food scientists there use the AI tool to create optimal recipes by specifying desired characteristics, including flavor (“buttery,” “in-mouth saltiness,” or “vanilla intensity,” for instance), aroma (“oily,” “egg flavor,” “burnt,” among others) and appearance (“amount of chips,” “roundness,” “chip edges” are considerations). The tool also considers parameters like the cost of ingredients, their environmental impact and their nutritional profile.

Nobody thinks eating rocks or putting glue on pizza is a good idea—Mondelez isn’t using generative artificial intelligence here, but rather machine learning, a more traditional form of AI that isn’t prone to hallucinating in the same way because it is optimizing outcomes rather than trying to create entirely new things. The same way Waze might use machine learning to optimize a route from A to B, Mondelez’s tool is simply looking for the correct mix of ingredients to attain desired characteristics.

It still had some problems in the early days, however:

Earlier iterations of the tool that weren’t given as much data made some unhinged suggestions.

“Because [baking soda is] a very low-cost ingredient, it would try to just make cookies that were very high in baking soda, which doesn’t taste good at all,” said Wallenstein, the biscuit digital R&D section manager.

Mondelez told the Journal that the AI is trained on the “essence” of different products, like Oreos, so that it doesn’t stray too far from what consumers might expect. And recipes of course are still taste-tested. But Mondelez claims that whereas it previously developed new recipes through simple trial-and-error, having an AI come up with detailed recipes has allowed new products to reach production trials 4-5 times faster.

Based on the investor frenzy for AI-related companies these days, we expect Mondelez’s stock price to soar following this Journal article.