With Utter Self-Seriousness, Maker of Oreos Admits It’s Using AI To Create New Flavors, Even Though Machines Cannot Taste

I have no mouth and I must eat.

Flavor Discovery

The company behind Oreo cookies has, by its own admission, been quietly creating new flavors using machine learning.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, Mondelez — the processed food behemoth that manufactures Oreos, Chips Ahoy, Clif Bars, and other popular snacks — has developed a new AI tool to dream up new flavors for its brands.

Used in more than 70 of the company’s products, the company says the machine learning tool is different from generative AI tools like ChatGPT and more akin to the drug discovery algorithms used by pharmaceutical companies to find and test new medications rapidly. Thus far the tool, created with the help of the software consultant Fourkind, has created products like the “Gluten Free Golden Oreo” and updated Chips Ahoy’s classic recipe, per the WSJ.

Mondelez’s research and development AI was, it seems, trained to optimize certain sensory factors. The tool was told to dial up scent characteristics like “burnt,” “egg-flavored,” and “oily,” as well as flavor factors like “buttery,” “in-mouth saltiness,” and “vanilla intensity,” among others.

It’s unclear how nuanced the AI’s perception of these flavors really is, since machines lack taste buds or noses, though the company does employ human taste testers to check it all out — and as “biscuit modeling” research and development manager Kevin Wallenstein indicated to the paper, Mondelez is very thorough with that aspect of its flavor creation process.

“The number of tastings we have is not fun,” the biscuit baron told the WSJ. “I used to work in Sour Patch Kids, and if you did a tasting every day for a week, it was a nightmare.”

History Matters

Though the company didn’t indicate how long it had been using the flavor discovery tool, it told the WSJ that the machine learning algorithm had been in development since 2019, a timeline that jibes with a 2023 interview in which Mondelez R&D exec Joe Manton teased the tool’s existence to the magazine Just Food.

As Manton suggested when speaking to the industry magazine, Mondelez’s R&D team used historical recipe and ingredient data when creating the AI. In that same interview, he added that new flavors “go through a series of internal and external consumer testing” as well.

In the more recent WSJ article about the tool, Wallenstein admitted that in its earlier days, the AI would offer unhinged suggestions.

“Because [baking soda is] a very low-cost ingredient,” he said, “it would try to just make cookies that were very high in baking soda, which doesn’t taste good at all.”

By bringing in human “brand stewards” to oversee the process, Mondelez seems to have fine-tuned its machine-learning tool. Much like pharmaceutical drug discovery, it’s an undeniably fascinating — if not admittedly bizarre — use of AI.

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