Specialty Food Magazine

AI Tools for Food Companies: Q&A With The Spoon's Michael Wolf By Mark Hamstra Artificial intelligence is fast becoming ubiquitous in the food industry, and for good reason, says Michael Wolf, founder of The Spoon, a content hub focused on food technologies. He will lead a session called "FoodGPT: How Specialty Food Makers Can Leverage AI for Business Growth" at 3 p.m. on Sunday, June 23, on the Main Stage at the Show. The session will examine some early lessons from food brands using AI and generative AI to discover new recipes, optimize operations, connect with customers, and more. He spoke with Specialty Food about the opportunities that AI offers companies in the specialty food industry. What are some of the ways that food companies are having success with AI? Some of the larger CPG brands are starting to use it in next-generation recipe development, looking for new and novel types of inputs, whether that's new proteins or fats. The reason a lot of them are looking at this is that it's a much quicker way to move through discovery and help find potential candidates for new sweeteners, for example, or other inputs. It's not necessarily a muscle that has been built. Usually, brands don't have AI experts on staff, so sometimes they're doing this through partnerships. There are a bunch of startups that are either building AI platforms for this type of discovery or they are using it to develop their own consumer-facing CPG brands. At smaller food brands, like a lot of the companies at the Fancy Food Show, it's often individual employees within the company who are using AI in various ways, whether it's simply using ChatGPT or Bard to automate marketing, or create marketing images, or using a tool to optimize their supply chains or just help them run more efficiently. These companies often move more slowly because they're running lean, and they don't have a technology department, and they don't have a need for AI specialists. But there are a lot of turnkey subscription software tools that they can start to deploy in various parts of their business that can help them. How would you suggest that small food companies get started with AI? Like many people have done in their personal lives, small companies can start playing with some of the generative AI tools to see what they can do. Can they use it to create interesting marketing copy? Can they use it to create a cool marketing graphic? Most smaller operators that are running lean don't have in-house graphics departments, so maybe they can play around with that. It oftentimes just depends on their technical aptitude, but there are lots of ways to start to integrate AI and create automations around online sales or in their supply chains. There are also custom-built AI tools, or if they're using off-the-shelf software tools like Shopify or HubSpot or Salesforce, or the Microsoft Suites—and we're starting to see it with Slack as well—they're all starting to implement AI tools to automate and make things easier. So, it's almost unavoidable at this point. Small food operators are busy doing lots of different things, but if they can just focus on what they do really well—like creating food recipes and thinking about product development—they could spend more of their time on that and then start to automate and outsource some of the things they don't like doing. AI can help them with that, and then on the sales and marketing side, it can help them optimize their supply chains and connect with their partners. What are some of the key takeaways that you hope attendees will come away with from your session? Using AI today is not only for people who are in the technology industry, or who are super proficient with technology. It's for pretty much anyone who wants to get an advantage in their business, save money and do more with less, because you can automate a lot of your business using some of the AI tools. It's not just for computer scientists anymore. Experiences: Costa memorable Create Together. physical need with discuss this Northgate "Retail's Place" on the about his creating right. the and or other need to they other discovery, where desirable over 60 SPECIALTY FOOD SPECIALTYFOOD.COM Mark Hamstra is a regular contributor to Specialty Food and SFA News Daily.

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