AI Reshaping Brand Experiences In Food Industry

AI is making inroads into our homes in various ways – from smarter electronic equipment to even providing culinary experiences. Food, beverage, and snack brands are increasingly utilising artificial intelligence (AI) to transform consumer experiences, offering innovative and personalised culinary journeys. 

Delving deeper, AI is reshaping the way brands interact with consumers, from crafting unique flavour profiles to delivering highly personalised recommendations based on individual tastes. For instance, AI-driven platforms analyse vast data sets on consumer preferences, allowing brands to predict emerging flavour trends or customise product offerings to meet specific demands.

AI is also enhancing the customer experience in real time. Virtual assistants and chatbots offer on-demand food and drink pairing suggestions, while smart kitchen devices, integrated with AI, can guide consumers in preparing restaurant-quality meals at home. This technology is helping brands create immersive experiences, from personalised meal kits to interactive, AI-powered recipe recommendations tailored to dietary preferences.

In-store, AI-enabled technology, such as virtual tasting stations or interactive displays, allows consumers to explore new products and flavours in a more engaging and informative way. 

The most recent example of the usage of AI by a brand in transforming culinary experiences is the way Britannia, in collaboration with Google Cloud and WPP’s media services company Mindshare and global creative company VML, has unveiled Britannia BourbonIT, a first-of-its-kind platform employing Generative AI (GenAI) technology to transform recipe creation and culinary experiences in India. 

Britannia BourbonIT is not just a new platform; it’s a demonstration of how technology and creativity can come together to enhance consumer engagement. Going into the details, the application utilises Google Gemini’s multimodal capabilities to add a creative twist to traditional recipes, generating visually appealing and unique culinary creations. The platform has been designed to ensure a smooth user experience, with APIs developed using Google Cloud Functions to handle various input formats efficiently. A profanity filter has also been integrated to maintain content quality and brand safety.

For users, they can submit recipes in various formats such as YouTube videos, HTML links, images, or text through the platform. BourbonIT, with the help of Google’s Gemini Flash, adds a unique Bourbon twist to each recipe.

Everything Experiential spoke to industry experts, about how food, beverage and snack brands can ride the AI wave and look at altering experiences and creating distinct experiences through AI - as part of elevating, enhancing and transforming culinary experiences.

Multi-sensory experiences

Jagdeep Kapoor, Brand Guru & Founder, Chairman and Managing Director, Samsika Marketing Consultants notes that as AI and generative models get smarter and better trained on images and content, they will start producing output across industries, including for F&B brands. But they should be used by FMCG brands to provide a superior experience, not just as a gimmick, he states. 

“Food, beverage and snack brands could use AI models to infuse creativity into the consumer experience. Today, an FMCG product doesn’t just mean something you eat or drink. It is something you interact with before and after consumption too. These are almost turning into ‘Smart FMCG’ products. AI is a tool to help take some mental effort and decision-making out of the equation for a consumer,” he outlines. 

As per Kapoor, AI in FMCG experiences can add:

1. Recipes: Generate recipes out of items already at home, to match their brand. For example, a Maggi AI could scan the groceries in your kitchen and suggest a Maggi recipe to match what’s already at home. 

2. ⁠Nutrition: Help check the nutritional value of food and beverages being consumed, especially for health-conscious brands who want to nudge consumers to use their brands instead of existing ones. For example, a Yoga Bar or The Whole Truth AI could scan what current protein or energy bars you consume, and explain the benefits of low sugar or high fibre in their brand’s product, versus what you are currently consuming.

3. ⁠Refills: An AI model of food, beverage or grocery ordering app like Swiggy Instamart or Zepto could scan your kitchen or grocery cabinet and suggest refills for items soon going out of stock.

He highlights the privacy aspect, though, “In short, a well-trained AI can be a sous chef, nutritionist, pantry manager - all rolled into one. But companies should be careful to protect the privacy of consumers while giving AI access to their personal information and images, so consumers continue to trust the brand.”

While possibilities are only limited by imagination in the field of AI, the one field Jagdish Acharya, Founder-Creative Head, cutthecrap finds to be particularly exciting for the food industry is digital olfaction. “It is the engineering discipline that is working in the direction of scent-enabled digital media. Imagine films, games and more laced with the smell that can get you hungry. Using AI to track consumer responses to various parts of food - sensory and non-sensory responses - and using these in turn to enhance culinary experiences completes the cycle. But as I said the possibilities are more - at Cut The Crap we call it AI multiplied by RI - Artificial Intelligence X Real Imagination.”

Having worked on various brands in the snacks and beverages category for decades, Azazul Haque, Group Chief Creative Officer, Creativeland Asia comprehends that the most important aspect of this category is brands offering customers sensorial experiences and it can be a game changer for the former. And there AI can be used intelligently. “Whether it's enhanced sound or sight experience that brands can create through AI, these might help the brand convert desire into demand.”

He is personally not a great fan of the Britannia BounbonIT work. “It's pretty basic given what AI can achieve. But the possibilities are immense, especially for a category where sensorials play a role in deciding purchase.”

Niraj Ruparel, Creative Technology Lead, WPP & Groupm India understands that food, beverage, and snack brands can leverage technologies like Generative AI to create hyper-personalised culinary experiences. Discussing the work done on BourbonIT which has been executed by his fellow teammates, he mentions that AI enabled the brand to offer consumers a more engaging and creative way to interact with the product by generating unique, user-tailored recipes based on their preferences.

“AI can go further by enhancing product development, analysing consumer behaviour, and identifying emerging food trends. By doing so, brands can stay ahead of the curve and innovate faster, while also delivering customised experiences. This could range from AI-generated meal suggestions, unique flavour pairings, or even co-creation opportunities where consumers become part of the culinary process. In essence, AI allows brands to deliver distinct, elevated experiences that are personalised, immersive, and innovative, all while transforming how consumers experience food,” he elaborates.

The Britannia BounbonIT project is implemented by WPP's Creative Technology community in India which has been led by Ruparel.

Human intervention

The evident concern which remains is the involvement of the human element while utilising AI, even in its basic form.

Ambi M G Parameswaran, Brand Strategist & Founder, Brand-Building.com fathoms that food brands can use AI in many different ways but AI cannot taste a good item and tell you the taste of it. However, AI tools can be used to engage with consumers and help them with ideas on what one can try and experiment with. Again we have to be careful lest we add mirchi to an ice cream, he quips.

“AI can be used to create visualisation of food items. And this can be coupled with images of consumers. For example, a consumer can upload a photo and get a brand AI tool to visualise them in the garb of a MasterChef. AI can be fun to use in that sense. But let us keep taste trials in human hands and mouths,” he elucidates. 

KV Sridhar (Pops), Founder & Chief Creative Officer, HyperCollective and Global Chief Creative Officer, Nihilent seconds Ambi’s idea of human participation as part of the AI process. 

In his opinion, “Generative AI is fantastic and gives wings to the human imagination. The additional benefit of having a quick response time will help FMCG brands build on this factor and get quickly on social media. However, inspite of being a brilliant tool for marketers and creative agencies alike, what matters is how one uses AI and the idea to apply it. In my opinion, ideas still reign supreme – ideas can be executed in whichever tool and medium you wish to utilise it in, as the flexibility is there.” 

“The benefit of AI is that it brings a lot of agility, quickness of response and perfection/fine-tuning. What it lacks is imagination – whatever one has thought and created with a bit of experience and prompt, it can be created by a customer or anybody else and it can also throw up loads of UGC, but the basic point remains the same that AI needs to be instigated with an idea that allows and gets it to participate. So it all starts with the idea – which is essentially produced by the human mind,” he sums up. 

By harnessing AI, food, beverage, and snack brands are not only streamlining operations but also offering elevated, personalised experiences that resonate with today's tech-savvy consumers.

Neha Kalra

BW Reporters She is the Senior Editorial Lead at Businessworld and majorly covers pieces on advertising, marketing, branding and experiential marketing. She writes closely for BW Marketing World and Everything Experiential.