The AI Behind NotCo’s Plant-Based Food Products Not Company SpA has concocted some innovative recipes for its meat and dairy alternatives, with the assistance of an artificial intelligence platform named Giuseppe. Among the ingredients in NotMilk —NotCo’s plant-based milk—are pineapple juice, cabbage juice, and pea protein. Its NotBurger contains […]
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Not Company SpA has concocted some innovative recipes for its meat and dairy alternatives, with the assistance of an artificial intelligence platform named Giuseppe. Among the ingredients in NotMilk—NotCo’s plant-based milk—are pineapple juice, cabbage juice, and pea protein. Its NotBurger contains beet juice powder, pea and rice proteins, bamboo fiber, and chia protein concentrate. But Giuseppe’s work is never done, and the war in Ukraine is disrupting supplies of a key component in both products: sunflower oil.
Food scientists at the startup in Santiago have asked Giuseppe to find a replacement that can mimic the neutral flavor and other prized traits of sunflower oil, an ingredient in more than one-third of all plant-based burgers, nuggets, sausages, and other meat alternatives, according to the Good Food Institute. The stand-in could include a combination of different kinds of fats, but not unsustainable palm oil, says Matías Muchnick, the company’s 33-year-old co-founder and chief executive officer. “What NotCo is trying to do is offer a solution to the entire industry,” he says.
The AI platform, which has previously made recipe adaptations to enable NotCo to cope with a shortage of pea protein, gives the company an edge as the growing industry grapples with constraints. More than 800 factories will be needed globally to meet plant-based protein demand by 2030, with construction and operating costs to top $27 billion, according to GFI estimates. “We need to be doing these things yesterday, being able to look through the supply chain and figure out what bottlenecks might be happening,” says Priera Panescu, a plant-based specialist at GFI. “This type of technology can help out with that a lot.”
Backed by investors including billionaire Jeff Bezos, restaurateur Danny Meyer, and world champion Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, NotCo was valued at $1.5 billion after a funding round in July 2021. It has partnerships with Burger King, Shake Shack, and Starbucks, and it will soon introduce a joint venture with the Kraft Heinz Co. to develop plant-based, co-branded products. Since it was founded in 2015, NotCo has expanded throughout much of Latin America, as well as Australia, Canada, and the US. This year it’s planning to release products in Asia and Europe. In Chile, NotCo has captured a 5% share of the market for all burgers, according to the company.
NotCo’s goal is to create sustainable food products efficiently. “When you take the animal out of the equation and you replace it with plants, everything gets way more efficient, exponentially,” Muchnick says. Giuseppe has a vast database that allows it to produce a formula to make a plant-based version of an animal product, considering things like texture, flavor, color, and nutritional profile, says Chief Technology Officer and co-founder Karim Pichara. “All those problems need help from AI because without it, it could take years to come up with that formula.”
