Barry Callebaut and NotCo AI target next-gen chocolate innovation

Barry Callebaut has partnered with Chile-based NotCo AI to integrate AI into chocolate recipe development, accelerating innovation in taste, texture, and sustainability. The technology helps the chocolate and cocoa product manufacturers offer “richer, more chocolatey solutions” that meet evolving consumer expectations.

The collaboration will combine Barry Callebaut’s ingredients data, global manufacturing, supply chain, and distribution infrastructure with NotCo AI’s AI platform to develop an end-to-end AI innovation hub.

The agreement will boost chocolate innovation and speed to market, says Barry Callebaut CEO Peter Feld.

“By combining our deep chocolate expertise and global reach with NotCo’s advanced AI capabilities, we’re aiming to unlock speed for breakthrough recipe solutions — from health-forward formulations to functional ingredients and Nutri-Score-friendly options.”

The initiative is part of Barry Callebaut’s multi-year digitalization agenda to support the formulation of what the company describes as “the next generation of chocolate” — potentially setting a new standard for how food companies innovate.

It will involve testing AI-driven formulation processes, aiming to shorten development cycles and improve hit rates. The move will also “digitally empower” scientists and chefs to support faster, more precise formulations while focusing on taste and sustainability goals.

Addressing cocoa challenges

Climate change, supply shortages, and rising cocoa costs have incentivized chocolate manufacturers to reformulate their products and invest heavily in R&D to mitigate supply chain challenges.

From developing yeast-based ingredients to reduce cocoa powder usage to using the full cocoa fruit for boosting extraction yield, the industry is making strides in dealing with lower yields and higher production costs.

Barry Callebaut recently partnered with Planet A Foods, which develops cocoa-free, sunflower-based chocolate alternatives (Image credit: Planet A Foods).Barry Callebaut recently partnered with German fermentation specialist Planet A Foods to explore alt-cocoa innovation. Besides expanding its range of cocoa-free chocolate solutions, the move is expected to boost the company’s mixed fiscal results, which showed higher revenue but falling sales volumes.

Barry Callebaut and NotCo aim to provide a “resilient future” for chocolate innovation to maintain taste and quality regardless of volatile agricultural conditions.

“With the pace of change across the industry and the cocoa market, our customers’ needs are evolving rapidly. This collaboration enables us to test how AI can enhance process efficiency and scale our innovation efforts to meet future demands, and allows us to accelerate our ways of working to deliver the best possible customer experience,” says Feld.

Boosting food innovation

NotCo AI is a food tech firm that aims to speed up the F&B CPG industry’s time-to-market through its proprietary Giuseppe AI platform.

The platform treats food innovation as a “data problem” and develops ingredient chemistry, formulations, sensory readouts, manufacturing parameters, and consumer data into what the firm calls a “single decision-making engine.” The process accelerates NPD cycles and tackles traditional R&D bottlenecks at a lower cost.

“Our high-fidelity data corpus collected for the past 10 years has become the most fundamental value proposition for the next generation of CPG and ingredient companies of the future,” says Matias Muchnick, co-founder and CEO of NotCo AI.

He emphasizes that integrating Barry Callebaut’s chocolate knowledge with the company’s general purpose approach platform will help the teams create a “personalized and unique innovation engine that will set a new standard for the entire industry.”