Barry Callebaut and NotCo AI have entered into an agreement to explore implementing artificial intelligence in chocolate recipe development. This strategic partnership merges Barry Callebaut's century-long chocolate expertise with NotCo's cutting-edge AI capabilities, aiming to accelerate innovation and deliver faster, more tailored customer experiences. By exploring new frontiers in taste, texture, and sustainability, the collaboration promises richer, more chocolate solutions to meet evolving consumer expectations.
Together, the companies are exploring to build a new framework for chocolate innovation: one that is smarter, faster, more sustainable, and fully scalable to meet evolving customer and consumer needs. The project aims to explore the development of the next generation of chocolate, potentially setting a new standard for how food companies innovate. By testing AI-driven formulation processes, the collaboration seeks to shorten development cycles, improve hit rates, and digitally empower every scientist and chef to create with unprecedented speed and precision, delivering exceptional taste while advancing sustainability goals.
The initiative forms part of Barry Callebaut's multi-year digitalization agenda, where Barry Callebaut is pioneering the chocolate industry by entering into the AI era and reinforcing the company's commitment to deliver breakthrough innovation and its position as the trusted partner for chocolate solutions and one of the biggest chocolate suppliers worldwide in the food and beverage industry. Climate pressure, ingredient shortages and rising cocoa costs have forced the chocolate industry to reformulate products and deploy substantial R&D budgets to address supply chain disruptions. NotCo's technology is the first vertical-specific model stack trained on a decade of high-fidelity data corpus that's revolutionizing the way the Consumer Industry leaders innovate, formulate, and grow making the development process faster, better and more effective than ever before.
The end-to-end AI platform treats food innovation as a data problem. It synthesizes ingredient chemistry, formulations, sensory readouts, manufacturing parameters and consumer data into a single decision-making engine that accelerates product development cycles and eliminates traditional R&D bottlenecks at a lower cost. This unique "creative intelligence" allows enterprises to generate entirely novel concepts and identify unexplored market opportunities.
NotCo has leveraged this technology to drive transformation for seven of the world's top 20 CPG companies, including a joint venture with Kraft Heinz (The Kraft Heinz Not Company).
