Powered by IBM Watson, Kerry Trendspotter analyses and detects food trends on time in response to consumer needs
Kerry Group and IBM has launched predictive artificial intelligence (AI) tool – Kerry Trendspotter – to forecast future trends in food and beverage, and guide the development of winning consumer-preferred products.
According to Nielsen, rapidly shifting consumer preference contribute to the failure of 85% of new food and beverage products within two years of launching.
Designed to reduce the risk of costly failures and increase the probability of success, Kerry Trendspotter enables organisations to use large scale unstructured data to understand consumer behaviour and anticipate future consumer needs.
Avinash Lal, market research and insights director, Kerry APMEA, said, “Through the Kerry Trendspotter tool, our objective is to support our APMEA customers with a platform designed to read and analyse millions of data points to extract and surface F&B items that resonate with consumers and are likely to become breakout trends. The tool uses custom AI and Natural Language Processing in combination with predictive algorithms to generate results which are more accurate and remove subjectivity from decision making. All this is in a fraction of the time it would take to do primary research, thus reducing customers product development time.”
Parth Patel, vice-president, marketing and strategic planning, Kerry APMEA, added, “With AI tools such as Kerry Trendspotter, our aim is to help our strategic customers to focus on those emerging F&B trends which have a greater chance of success in the markets that they operate.”
Hosted on the IBM public cloud, the solution enables the analysis of food-related social media content by digesting vast amounts of textual data “quickly and securely” through a number of Watson portfolio services such as Watson Natural Language Understanding as well as Watson Studio models. IBM Cloud infrastructure powers the processing, automatically reading and processing millions of consumer-related posts on social media, extracting food items and cataloguing food-related combinations then used to predict the trending food, ingredient and flavour candidates likely to go mainstream in the near future.
By identifying and detecting food trends at their genesis, Kerry’s chefs, food scientists and flavour experts can collaborate with customers to craft differentiated yet relevant solutions as well as launch first-to-market products with less lead time, capitalising on trends before their competitors via Kerry’s integrated sourcing and development capabilities.
Guna Chellappan, general manager, cloud and cognitive software, IBM Singapore, concluded, “Delay in innovation or speed to market can be the difference between winning big and losing market share. IBM Watson’s ability to analyse data from Kerry’s various sources, and predict the consumer trends to increase profitability while reducing wastage is a huge differentiator for F&B brands as well as the whole food industry.
“Through the use of Watson on IBM public cloud, the brands get greater insights into consumer trends and respond to surge in demand with speed. Running on the IBM public cloud offers significant technical advantages, and will enable enterprises to modernise and build big data business applications on the cloud without jeopardising security and control.”
