Givaudan harnesses AI to develop “futurescaping platform” to forecast future food

23 May 2023 --- Givaudan is launching Customer Foresight, marketed as a proprietary futurescaping platform built in-house at the company’s Digital Factory in Paris, France. The platform leverages Givaudan’s human expertise, big data and AI to anticipate F&B challenges, foresee consumer expectations and develop food experiences.

Customer Foresight can identify early indications about impending future shifts that will impact the food and beverage industry.

According to Givaudan, it is designed to support customers in understanding, planning for and addressing disruptive changes in consumer desires, guiding strategic planning, and leading to co-creation opportunities.

As it becomes smarter through AI, Customer Foresight will be able to anticipate what’s next a decade from now and even further into the future.

“We’re dedicated to helping our customers understand and unravel the complexities of consumers’ evolving needs and expectations. I’m truly excited about the limitless applications and use-cases that Customer Foresight will provide,” says Louie D’Amico, president of Taste & Well-being, Givaudan.

“Our experts are able to gain insight and foresight into any future food or beverage opportunity. Their foresight can include anything from customizable and transversal future scenarios to visualized target personas brought to life virtually.”

Data-driven foresight
The company announced its development of Customer Foresight during the first half of 2022 and has been working with a select group of customers in different markets, testing it from end-to-end. The powerful results from the pilot led to forward-thinking, new experience concepts based on data-driven foresight and futurescaping prowess. “For our customers, understanding potential futures in a category, particular market, and for a specific target consumer can be a game-changer. In our recent pilot program, we supported a customer in turning around declining growth in their carbonated soft drinks category in an important emerging market,” explains Nandita Prabhu, Givaudan’s customer foresight director.

“Customer Foresight considered every aspect of the market - the region, country, segment, category, and brand dynamics, as well as related or adjacent consumer and product attributes and movements.”

“From there, AI refined, sorted and clustered this mass of data into clear patterns of weak signals and drivers of change, which ranged from demographic and social to economic and environmental.”

“Our foresight experts, known as ‘futurescapers,’ then mapped these patterns and created potential scenarios, leading to specific ideas for new product experiences. The result was true, actionable foresight that - in a fast and entirely new way – guided high-value concepts fit to address a complex issue such as declining growth. This really is an industry first,” Prabhu continues.

“Customer Foresight has now been rolled out to Givaudan futurescapers globally for selective use on key opportunities that meet certain thresholds. Givaudan’s exclusive AI-enabled capability will continue to evolve through data enrichment and deep learning to create unique and disruptive innovations as it anticipates what is to come in the years ahead.”

Edited by Gaynor Selby

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