McCormick Uses Artificial Intelligence to Unlock New Flavors

The American food manufacturing company McCormick & Co has partnered with the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) to create an artificial intelligence system (AI) that will help discover more tastes and flavors to satisfy American palates.

IBM’s machine intelligence will help analyze McCormick & Co’s 40 years of sensory science and taste data to predict flavors that will meet new market demands and trends in the food manufacturing industry.

“By combining McCormick’s deep data and expertise in science and taste, with IBM’s AI capabilities, we are working together to unlock the bounds of creativity and transform the food and flavor development process, ” said the VP, Industry Research IBM Kathryn Guarini.

According to the company product developers are inclined to choose similar ingredients limited to a select group of food substances. The software will help them unlock new flavor territories they may not have been able to discover on their own.

“We’re able to explore the flavors in a way that is perhaps a little bit more broad then they would have because it’s impossible for them to know the thousands of ingredients that McCormick has available and be familiar with them,” Robin Lougee, a research scientist at IBM said. “There is so much data that a human can’t read all of it.”

McCormick plans to showcase it’s first three Al-enabled products sometime this spring, with a combination of flavors that include, Tuscan Chicken, Bourbon Pork Tenderloin, and New Orleans Sausage. The companies Chairman, President, and CEO Lawrence Kurzius says they are currently adopting other technological advancements within their business to accelerate production.

“McCormick’s use of artificial intelligence highlights our commitment to insight-driven innovation and the application of the most forward-looking technologies to continually enhance our products and bring new flavors to market,” said Kurzius “This is one of several projects in our pipeline where we’ve embraced new and emerging technologies.

The software is known as “One platform” and has helped accelerate the speed of the product development process by up to three times. McCormick plans to scale the technology to its global franchises by 2021.