As if being caught in a vicious cycle of destruction isn’t enough, the food and beverage (F&B) industry is also currently grappling with a number of other challenges. For example, the need for cradle-to-grave traceability and transparency is increasing as consumers and regulators demand ethical practices. Additionally, producing successful F&B products is more complex than ever as consumers prioritize sustainability and health.
What do all these changes mean for your F&B brand? Building durable, responsive, and adaptable supply chains has gone from “critical” to “essential.” Your supply chain is tied to your mission: delivering value, building trust and loyalty, and maintaining standards.
Old sourcing approaches won’t solve your problems
Just a few years ago, you could source materials and ensure quality through your company’s network of carefully selected suppliers. If this connection doesn’t work, Google can point you to an alternative. It may take days or weeks to get the samples needed to determine if an ingredient is effective, but the process has kept up with the pace of innovation at the time.
But today, traditional sourcing approaches are too slow and inefficient for an industry as rapidly changing as F&B.
“If you wait for someone to call you back, locking up supply and negotiating favorable prices while your competitors are already there, you’ll never get a call back,” points out Paul Bradley, senior director of product marketing at TraceGains.
AI: An Alternative to Traditional Sourcing Methods
Carefully applied artificial intelligence (AI) can accelerate F&B innovation by helping companies connect with suppliers and ingredients they may never have explored in their proverbial Rolodex.
“Artificial intelligence can play a critical role in identifying opportunities that even experienced procurement professionals might miss,” says Bradley. “We can pinpoint broader industry sourcing trends, make connections between product ideas, and find alternative solutions that may not be obvious.”
You can also integrate information in new ways to discover risks. Empower your teams to source, validate, and put new materials into production faster. Add sustainability insights to your processes. This moves product development from a siled workflow to a cross-functional discipline.
“F&B data streams have traditionally been segregated by department,” says Bradley. “Procurement does it here, quality does it there, and compliance does it at headquarters. AI looks at that information, normalizes it, figures out what’s important in one of those areas, and finds ways to expand collaboration around that and ensure visibility into that.”
This allows F&B brands to quickly respond to changes in consumer demand, markets, and sourcing environments. And companies that move faster gain a competitive advantage.
For example, AI can help R&D teams determine potential outcomes before production begins. Professionals can use this technology to model product variations and simulate product development to better understand the impact of material changes or manufacturing process adjustments before they go to the bench, saving time and resources.
Remember: You need good data
AI’s intelligence depends on data. The provenance and accuracy of that data can determine the performance of AI.
Case in point: When you ask ChatGPT for an ingredient solution, you’ll be leveraging data that could set your company back instead of moving it forward. Most data collected from consumer blogs, social media posts, and Reddit strings does not apply to the commercial development of F&B products. But, says Bradley, “it will still give the wrong response with global confidence.” .
Instead of relying on data provided by consumers, F&B companies must rely on AI platforms powered by industry-specific data, i.e. information provided by a verified global network of F&B suppliers, brands and manufacturers.
“It grows organically as more information is added to the network, creating a more robust and sophisticated baseline of industry-specific data that AI can use,” explains Bradley.
Now is the time to decide. Will the rate of adoption be slow or the rate of innovation be fast?
AI now has these capabilities, but F&B is known as an industry slow to adopt new technologies. Instead of being on the cutting edge, many brands have found it easier to wait while others dip their toes into the water first.
However, this approach no longer serves F&B companies. “Things are moving so quickly, especially in terms of technological developments related to artificial intelligence, that we cannot afford to wait any longer,” Bradley emphasizes. “The idea that we can wait another five or 10 years for the technology to stabilize is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world of technology currently works.”
A company’s willingness to adopt new sourcing approaches will determine how efficient it is to try out concepts, test products, fail quickly (and cheaply), and try again. “Companies that cling to old approaches are likely to lose out to those looking for new ways to move faster,” says Bradley. “The forward-thinking brands will be those that think about how to break away from this traditional way of thinking.” says:
Visit to learn more about how to leverage AI and overcome the most common challenges in NPD. TraceGains.com.
