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AI Businesses Technology

The World's Biggest Spice Company is Using AI To Find New Flavors (cnn.com) 138

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
After 130 years, it can be hard to come up with new flavors, so the world's largest spice company is becoming the latest food producer to turn to artificial intelligence for help. From a report: McCormick -- the maker of Old Bay and other seasonings, spices and condiments -- hopes the technology can help it tantalize taste buds. It worked with IBM Research to build an AI system trained on decades worth of data about spices and flavors to come up with new flavor combinations. The Baltimore, Maryland-based company plans to bring its first batch of AI-assisted products to market later this year. The line of seasoning mixes, called One, for making one-dish meals, includes flavors such as Tuscan Chicken and Bourbon Pork Tenderloin. Hamed Faridi, McCormick's chief science officer, told CNN Business that using AI cuts down product development time, and that the company plans to use the technology to help develop all new products by the end of 2021.
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The World's Biggest Spice Company is Using AI To Find New Flavors More

The World's Biggest Spice Company is Using AI To Find New Flavors

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  • Slurm? (Score:2)

    by Zorro ( 15797 )

    It's Highly Addictive!

    • It's Highly Addictive!

      FYI Slurm is a fictional soft drink in the Futurama multiverse. It is popular and highly addictive.

      • Yes, but it was a pariody of Surge from Coca Cola. A popular drink during the late 1990's with a high caffeine and sugar amount, meant to exceed Mountain Due.
        It was rather addictive to the EXTREME!!!!!!11!! culture of the time.
        Man the 1990's was such a miserable era, when I take off my nostalgia glasses.

      • FYI Slurm is a fictional soft drink in the Futurama multiverse. It is popular and highly addictive.

        And it comes out of a giant worm heinie.

    • Re:Slurm? (Score:4, Funny)

      by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @10:44AM (#58073406)

      Strange . . . with AI I thought of robots, and thought that AI's favourite flavour would be:

      Bender's Shiny Metal Ass

  • The spices must flow! (Score:5, Funny)

    by xleeko ( 551231 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @10:50AM (#58073446)

    AI though?!? Really, a company that deals in spice should know the Butlerian prohibition on thinking machines.

    • He who controls the spice controls the universe.
      If you control the Universe who cares on what the Butlerians point of view is.

      • How long until they name a cinnamon-y spice with psychoactive effects "melange"?

        • It's called buttery cinnamon cake laced with LSD.

          Frank Herbert was most likely eating them while watching Lawrence of Arabia and hallucinated himself the whole Dune universe. Note the uncanny resemblance between Dune and Lawrence of Arabia.

    • Re:The spices must flow! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @12:28PM (#58074002)

      AI though?!? Really, a company that deals in spice should know the Butlerian prohibition on thinking machines.

      Thinking machines, what do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking — there's the real danger.

      -- Leto Atreides II, God Emperor God Emperor of Dune

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by xleeko ( 551231 )

        “what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present. No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward. Should not that movement be jealously watched, and checked while we can still check it? And is it not necessary for this end to destroy the more advanced of the machines which are in use at present, though it is admitted that they are in themselves harmless?" -- Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 1872

  • Corporate America's way... (Score:3)

    by Type44Q ( 1233630 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @11:03AM (#58073522)

    Corporate America's way of admitting that they've run out of ideas.

    • What they really will do is heavily engineer new combinations of existing flavors to make their products more addictive, but not in the dysfunctional way that drugs are addictive. McDonalds is a good example of this. Their products have a very unique flavor. A very engineered flavor*. It's convenient. It's cheap. It is an example of the corporate dystopia of food-like products. But it is not the only one.

      *see the Super Size Me documentary, the "artificial flavor" in strawberry shake is a list of 4

      • Re:Corporate America's way... (Score:5, Informative)

        by bws111 ( 1216812 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @11:47AM (#58073762)

        How many chemicals that 'would not sound nice...' do you suppose are in a strawberry? Way more than 42. Or are you one of those Food Babe reading dopes (since you reference Suprer Size Me I guess that could be) who believes that 'natural' molecules are different from 'artificial' molecules?

        • They're pics so I couldn't copy the text, https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com], the scroll down a couple for Strawberries.

        • You're making a lot of assumptions. I don't know what a Food Babe is. Yes, real strawberry is an organic molecule and made of cells (even if not living), long chain hydrocarbons, etc. How would natural and artificial molecules, of otherwise identical structure, be any different? In fact at some level what is 'artificial'? Are smartphones all natural because humans are a part of nature? But I digress . . .

          My point is that the 42 chemical artificial flavor is, as I said, heavily engineered. Not that

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by bws111 ( 1216812 )

            So are you trying to claim that this food is actually addictive (physcially and mentally dependant on the product, unable to stop without adverse effects), or are you just complaining that they make food that tastes good so you want more? You have offered up no proof of the first, and the second is the goal of every cook and chef (and they really want to make the 'can't get it anywhere else' recipes).

            • I doubt it will ever be physically addictive. But even if it were, I don't think that would stop corporations from doing it. But they might engineer tastes that are very mentally addictive.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by bws111 ( 1216812 )

                So we're back to 'it tastes good' but isn't healthy. Do you go to bakeries and accuse them of 'engineering food' to be 'addictive'? Do you complain when a chef at a nice restaurant prepares you a delicious meal that has 2500 calories? Or is it just plain old 'corporations...eeeeeeebil'?

        • Some people at the spice shop downtown were trying to sell me "organic salt" one day. Yes, NaCl. She assured me that the regular Morton variety is processed with dangerous chemicals, etc. I laughed. It's mined, in case you're wondering.

      • I'd argue that McDonalds - and the like - are very much addictive in the dysfunctional way that drugs are addictive.

        • Not in the sense I'm thinking where people on certain drugs will do anything, commit crimes, etc in order to get their next fix. I don't think McDonalds has this effect. But I certainly believe that even if it did have this effect, that would not stop corporations from doing something this destructive.

      • a list of 42 chemicals that would not sound nice

        Gentlemen, I present to you the stupification of our population. These people should stop taking all forms of di-hydrogen monoxide (hydrogen is highly explosive isn't it!!!! woooo scaaaarrrrryyyyy) and maybe Darwin help our species out of this mess.

    • Corporate America's way of admitting that they've run out of ideas.

      Nonsense. It's corporate America's way of dick riding. It was blockchain, but now that bitcoin is being revealed to suck rocks, it's "AI". And when it's revealed that AI isn't AI, it will be something else. No spice company needs "AI" to come up with Tuscan Chicken or Bourbon Pork. Those are already well-established seasonings. A person selected them from a list, even if that list was somehow machine curated, and more humans were involved in the vetting approach — both working in the marketing departm

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      Not so much ideas, but people want cheaper spice. Most people, for instance, are happy with fake cinnamon which for all intents and purposes is the same as real cinnamon.

      So by making task specific spice combinations, and minimizing for costs, commodity spice companies such as this can offer value products.If you look at the ingredient, the real challenge for AI is figuring how much salt and pepper can be added to a spice pack and still have the consumer believes that it contains spices other than salt an

    • Ideas, and probably pants.

  • AI for subjective truth? Bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @11:43AM (#58073740)

    Taste is a very subjective thing. What you like, I may not, what you think tastes unique may be totally blah for me.

    Assuming you've worked out how to accurately get some electronic devices to "taste" something, how do you figure you are going to train some AI to come up with things that "taste" good to people?

    AI is good at a lot of things, but fishing for subjective evaluations of things is not one of them. AI can evaluate and decide things for which there is an objective way to measure what's right, some times it can even make such decisions on less than what seems to be enough information. But how can you decide AI has created something good that is judged by subjective tests like how it tastes? Maybe your time would be better spend in the kitchen trying stuff? Oh that's right, AI let's you fire those folks with the promise that it can do everything they do, only cheaper.

    If this goes too far and McCormick fires its test kitchen staff and army of tasters, it might be time to seriously consider shorting that stock.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Ksevio ( 865461 )
      Might be able to get some good options for humans to test though. If the AI knows A+B+C is good and B+C+D is good, it might suggest A+B+D. The human test subjects can try it and give feedback to the AI

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by eth1 ( 94901 )

      Taste is a very subjective thing. What you like, I may not, what you think tastes unique may be totally blah for me.

      But AI might be good for finding things that taste good to *most* people, which is probably all a for-profit company cares about.

    • Google used AI to design cookies. It worked like this: your AI can generate recipes, you take 20 of them and put them in front of your employees, asking them to submit a rating every time they eat a cookie. These ratings are considered a 'reward signal' and used to train a reinforcement learning agent (like the ones that play games). The agent acts by inventing new recipes and learns by reinforcing the reward. So you could say that the AI needs a large committee of people to work as it's taste buds.

      https [cnbc.com]

      • How is this AI?

        It just boils down to "try all possible combinations" and see what the results are. You may be using a computer to tabulate your results, but it's not AI, at least not anymore than Excel spreadsheets with graphing of your data is AI..

    • I built a hobby app a few years ago for scotch tasting. If you have people rate things they like using an N-dimensional scale (my taste profile mechanism had 8 characteristics) then you can programmatically do comparisons against a database of records to find likely matches based on the characteristics that you liked or didn't like. With enough individual user feedback it can easily get granular enough to provide personalized recommendations. The aggregated data of what people like and don't like can be use

      • And this is what passes as AI in the press? What you describe isn't AI, but something else. Oh the uneducated masses..

        • If you wrap a neural network around it for machine learning, yes.

          The grandparent post was complaining that taste was too subjective to compute. Which is false. Whether or not everything billed as "AI" meets the various definitions of AI is an entirely different discussion.

          • And how do you propose you train that neural net? Neural nets require training and that requires real world data, and quite a bit of it. They don't just work out of the box... You cannot just slap a neural net into some process, expect to get meaningful results without training, and call it AI.

            Just because somebody imagines using AI like tools for automating some decision making, does not mean that it works like you imagine or that it's now magically AI based solution to the problem. AI is only a solution

            • You obviously have people taste things and provide data entry, then refine with more tasting inputs as the system progresses. The whole premise of a neural network is that the more iterations you provide the better it gets. Stop being intentionally obtuse.

  • with a trace of IBM Model 10 cardpunch ribbon on the high note

  • The first time I read that name I parsed it as one of the new flavors.
  • Nothing is the most under-rated approach in so many cases. This is most certainly one where not bothering would yield the benefits of the same end result, and the savings of all the time and effort needed to carry out the project.
  • I am shocked that McCormick has to go so low that they announce to use AI. How about you start selling Garam Masala, Tea Masala, or MSG? How about saffron?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      How about you start selling Garam Masala, Tea Masala, or MSG? How about saffron?

      Garam Masala [amazon.com] MSG [amazon.com] saffron [amazon.com]

  • Now that Badia is all over I will never buy McCormick again. Their prices are outrageous compared to Badia!

  • Why on earth would you buy an entire bottle of “Tuscan Chicken” or “Bourbon Pork Tenderloin” seasoning? 90% of it’s probably going to end up in the garbage, unused.

    I realize spices keep a long time, but how frequently are you going to make one particular recipe?

  • Just don't let it come up with "Pumpkin Spice", that makes everything taste like Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte!

    As a challenge though I dare it to come up with something better than bacon, "Super Bacon" flavor! But sadly I'm expecting something like "Saddle Wood", a cross between eating an old horse saddle and a chunk of wood.

    But as long as it doesn't achieve self consciousness and enslave us all I might just count it as a win.

  • They should try Spice instead of spice.

  • Just what the world needs: A new fucking flavor.

    • I notice that the "new flavors" described in terms of existing real food... I have a brilliant idea, we'll keep cooking real food at my house. Cheaper than processed crap too, despite what some ignorant folk here who don't cook think when they wail how the poor have to eat processed crap because it's cheaper. false. wrong.

  • A single scientist in a McCormick labcoat, on the floor, his back against a door. The only light is from a flashlight. He's scared, fumbling with the camera.

    I'm sorry. (panting) I'm sorry ok? I didn't know what we dealing with. We were just trying to make some money. It was a good excuse to try out TensorFlow. (slams the floor. A jar of paprika rolls into the scene) ...It was supposed to be a good career move.... (SOBS) ...But it's too late for that. The world is going to change. And I'm sorry. I'm so

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