Aligned with the company’s 2025 strategy, the company said the tools open doors to creative development and are able to cut the time to market for new products.
ATOM uses artificial intelligence (AI) and data science techniques to minimize trial and error in the process. The tools identify positive and negative flavor drivers and explore ingredient synergies, to generate new options and insights aligned with consumer preferences.
Fabio Campanile, Givaudan’s head of global science & technology, Taste & Wellbeing, said, “ATOM strikes the right balance between AI and human intuition, complementing the work of our expert flavorists and developers.
“Tools such as ATOM enable us to help our customers to go beyond consumer expectations, using insight, collaboration and innovation. Implementing what we call ‘wide-eyed thinking’ allows us to use these insights to leverage our curiosity and deep ingredient knowledge to accelerate new product development and create the food experiences of the future.”
ATOM was recently used in a project to reduce salt in cheese snacks. Narrowing down the blend of ingredients would normally take extensive trial and error, but Givaudan said it was able to quickly identify the ideal recipe, delivering a 33% reduction in salt, from a much smaller range of options predicted by ATOM. In blind taste testing, the reduced-salt recipe scored as highly as the original full-salt snack. The process has also proved successful for sugar reduction, vanillin replacement, and meat-alternative projects.