➥ The Day of Chocolate
Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, and I will be honest with you…. chocolate has always been personal for me.
Did you know, I designed a chocolate brand called Good Karma Chocolate? We even won 2nd place in a worldwide chocolate competition in California.
As a (semi-) certified “supertaster”, to me, chocolate is not just a category. I taste every hint of bad bitterness.
(Hershey’s chocolate kills me ☠️)
That’s why I sourced single-origin chocolate and hand make every batch. This isn’t a sales pitch, but if you’re into really good quality chocolate… check it out.
Anyways, from building my own chocolate brand, I truly realize from dozens of real, human-led trials… taste is KING 👑
➥ Food News
What's New in the World of Food?
Beetroot and spirulina go mainstream as the FDA swaps out synthetics
New research shows how "contrast-based" menus stop you from over-ordering
Why agile brands are winning the shelf war
My honest thoughts on AI + Proposals
➥ Small Bites
How Spoonshot Powers Food Innovation Research
We're at the end of our series on AI tools reshaping food and beverage product development.
Last week we reviewed IFT’s Co-Developer, which embeds an “AI-Assistant” in your product development workflow.
This week, we’re going over: Spoonshot.
Spoonshot turns billions of data points into a prediction machine, able to identify what consumers will want (before they know it themselves).
What if you could predict the next big food trend before your competitors even see it coming?
Every product team wants to know the same thing:
What will consumers want to eat next year?
That’s the promise Spoonshot is built around. Their data is built on 2,900+ data sources—and that’s just the source we’re talking about. ONE of these sources is online recipes, with 2 Million data points!
It’s a platform designed to scan massive amounts of food language data and surface early signals before they become obvious trends.
Spoonshot’s AI #foodbrain gives product teams all the data they need to develop a new product in a crowded market.
What Spoonshot Is Actually Good At
Spoonshot’s strength is pattern recognition at scale. It analyzes millions of product descriptions, menus, recipes, and consumer conversations to understand how ingredients, benefits, and claims are evolving together.
Where it shines:
Early trend detection: Flags emerging ingredients, flavors, and claims before they peak by using long-tail and local authentic data as leading indicators.
Concept language analysis: Shows how products are being described, not just what ingredients they contain by using AI techniques, like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision, to build organized information from unstructured data.
Competitive analysis: Helps teams see how fast a space is filling up and where it’s still open by accessing the web 24/7 to find the latest food product data.
Idea inspiration: Finds new angles on familiar ingredients, useful for pressure-testing early concepts. Conducts ad-hoc research, where it can identify both strategic innovation opportunities as well as specific product concept recommendations.
For innovation teams, Spoonshot works best at the front end of the funnel, when you’re asking: Is this direction worth pursuing at all?
The Real “Aha” for Product Developers
The key insight Spoonshot makes clear is:
Most food trends grow quietly through human language.
Before consumers buy a product, they talk about it. They search for it. They describe it in slightly new ways. Spoonshot captures those shifts early, which can help teams avoid betting on ideas that already feel tired by the time they hit the shelf.
As someone who has watched “hot” ideas collapse during scale-up, this matters.
Timing is often the difference between a smart launch and an expensive miss.
Unique Use Cases of Spoonshot
Spoonshot’s secret sauce is in their data processing.
Most food data processors use top-down approaches to data analysis.
This means that Spoonshot differs by predicting signals through, what they call, “unintuitive intelligence.” Many other industries call this Predictive Intelligence.
These are practical ways it fits in real workflows:
Trend vetting: Get 12-month predictions for every trend and track innovation efforts of competitor brands.
Novelty and Flavor scores: Allow you to discover potentially unintuitive flavor groupings and predict how a concept may work in practice.
Consumer-perception mapping: Understand which ingredients consumers are responding to, and how they talk about them. This helps brands learn what exact vocabulary to use in marketing!
Portfolio planning: Spot overlaps or gaps across categories before R&D dollars are committed.
Creative direction: Inform how concepts are framed, named, and positioned early on.
That said, Spoonshot doesn’t replace formulation work, sensory testing, or manufacturing reality. It helps you decide where to aim, not how to build.
The Bigger Picture
Food development is slowly moving away from guessing and toward forecasting. Spoonshot is part of that shift. It gives teams a clearer view of what’s forming beneath the surface, so innovation can start earlier and with more confidence.
Not every signal should become a product. But the teams that win are the ones who see signals early, test them thoughtfully, and bring real-world constraints into the process fast.
That’s how trend awareness turns into products that actually survive the journey from idea to shelf.
➥ Know Your Food
Food Science Tip of the Week
That satisfying crunch in your snack bar or the way a hard candy stays glassy instead of sticky? That is glass transition temperature doing its job — and when you ignore it, your product turns into a soft, clumped-together mess on the shelf.
Every amorphous ingredient has a Tg — the point where it shifts from rigid and stable to rubbery and unpredictable. Add a little humidity, change your storage temp, or tweak your sugar profile, and you have just moved that line without realizing it.
Inspired to develop a new product? Let's chat!
By the way, are you a fellow chocolate lover and want to partner up with my company Good Karma Chocolate? Reply here and let’s chat!
Always love to collab with fellow brands.
