AKA Foods secures Fi Europe award as African ingredients firm adopts AI platform

AKA Foods has won the Fi Europe 2025 Future Foodtech Innovation Award for its Intelligence Platform for Application Development, with the recognition followed immediately by a major partnership announcement signaling growing industry adoption of AI-enabled product development. 

The Netherlands-based company secured the award at the Fi Europe ceremony in Paris on 2 December, competing against Amano Enzyme’s Plants Unlimited enzymatic bioprocessing platform and Tetra Pak’s whole oat beverage lines in the Future Foodtech Innovation Award category.

Days after the award recognition, AKA Foods announced that Technology Driven Concepts, one of Africa’s most advanced ingredient solutions companies, has signed a multi-year agreement to adopt AKA Studio. The platform enables food companies to create, optimize, and launch products faster through centralized knowledge management and AI-ready infrastructure.

Addressing knowledge retention gaps

The platform addresses a persistent challenge for experienced food technologists: accessing decades of accumulated knowledge across hundreds of projects.

At the show, Tomer Green, from AKA Food, told Food Ingredients First that experts with 30 years of experience have completed around 300 projects across different areas, but struggle to recall past failures or successes.

David Sack (founder & CEO at AKA Foods), Chris Botha (R&D director at TDC) and Saul Abrahams (VP of Business Development at AKA Foods).“If you have 30 years of experience, you don’t remember what failed three years ago on another formulation that you did,” he said. “But if you had a very easy way to map your knowledge and you can access the previous history just by searching — what similar projects did I already do? What did I fail there, and what worked there? — it really removes the cold start, even for the experts.”

Green highlights a generational divide in food technology workflows. “The young and coming food technologists are eager for something new, for these AI tools,” he says. “They use GPT, they are trying and playing around with a lot of AI, and they are asking themselves, why am I using GPT for everything? But for my work, I’m using Excel and something that is like in the 70s. It’s an industry waiting to be disrupted.”

TDC partnership signals AI strategy shift

The partnership with TDC, which serves leading consumer packaged goods companies, retailers, and a global fast food restaurant chain, makes it one of the first companies globally to formalize a long-term strategy for AI-enabled product development.

“AKA Studio gives our developers something we have never had before — the ability to see and use all of our knowledge in one place,” says Chris Botha, R&D director at TDC. 

“It strengthens how we respond to customers, how we innovate across categories, and how we make decisions. With its structured system ready to support food-specific AI as capabilities mature, AKA Studio helps future-fit TDC for the next decade of product development.”

Platform differentiation

According to the company, AKA Studio differs from generic tools by understanding the full context of food development, maintaining confidentiality in a fully siloed, private cloud environment while guiding developers with insights that accelerate decision-making.

“Food companies are under pressure to innovate faster, respond to shifting customer needs, and control rising input costs,” says Saul Abrahams, VP of business development at AKA Foods. “Yet most R&D teams still rely on fragmented systems — isolated formulation files and unstructured project histories that slow down decision-making and lead to repeated work.”

“TDC is a fast-moving, multi-category innovator, and their commitment is a powerful validation of what AKA Studio is built to do,” he says. “They helped shape the system, they tested it against real R&D challenges, and they proved its value in day-to-day work.”

Abrahams says the partnership confirms the importance of building strong digital foundations so companies can benefit fully from emerging AI capabilities. "Such technologies also serve South Africa as the leader in food science and technology in Africa.”

The award recognition and TDC partnership signal growing momentum for AI adoption in food R&D, with industry pressure mounting to accelerate innovation cycles while managing cost pressures and shifting consumer demands.

Fi Europe 2025 concludes today in Paris, where F&B suppliers, R&D experts, and production specialists from across the global ingredients sector have gathered at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles.