Barry Callebaut & NotCo AI partner to unlock next-level chocolate innovation

Barry Callebaut, the world’s leading manufacturer of high-quality chocolate and cocoa solutions, and NotCo AI ("NotCo"), the first foundational AI platform for the consumer goods industry, have entered into an agreement to explore implementing artificial intelligence in chocolate recipe development. This strategic partnership merges Barry Callebaut’s century-long chocolate expertise with NotCo’s cutting-edge AI capabilities, aiming to accelerate innovation and deliver faster, more tailored customer experiences. By exploring new frontiers in taste, texture, and sustainability, the collaboration promises richer, more chocolatey solutions to meet evolving consumer expectations.

The partnership marks the first AI powered integration in the food industry and aims to merge Barry Callebaut's high-quality ingredients data, global manufacturing, supply chain, and distribution infrastructure with NotCo AI's advanced platform to create an end-to-end AI innovation hub. Together, the companies are exploring to build a new framework for chocolate innovation: one that is smarter, faster, more sustainable, and fully scalable to meet evolving customer and consumer needs.

Peter Feld, CEO of Barry Callebaut, said, "This agreement marks an exciting step forward for Barry Callebaut and for our customers. It reflects our commitment to creating best customer experience by boosting innovation and speed to market. By combining our deep chocolate expertise and global reach with NotCo’s advanced AI capabilities, we’re aiming to unlock speed for breakthrough recipe solutions - from health-forward formulations to functional ingredients and Nutri-Score-friendly options. With the pace of change across the industry and the cocoa market, our customers’ needs are evolving rapidly. This collaboration enables us to test how AI can enhance process efficiency and scale our innovation efforts to meet future demands and allows us to accelerate our ways of working to deliver the best possible customer experience."

The project aims to explore the development of the next generation of chocolate, potentially setting a new standard for how food companies innovate. By testing AI-driven formulation processes, the collaboration seeks to shorten development cycles, improve hit rates, and digitally empower every scientist and chef to create with unprecedented speed and precision, delivering exceptional taste while advancing sustainability goals.

Matias Muchnick, co-founder and chief executive officer of NotCo AI, said, "Our high fidelity data corpus collected for the past 10 years has become the most fundamental value proposition for the next generation of CPG and ingredient companies of the future. By integrating Barry Callebaut's unparalleled chocolate knowledge with our general purpose approach platform, we're creating a personalized and unique innovation engine that will set a new standard for the entire industry."

The initiative forms part of Barry Callebaut’s multi-year digitalization agenda, where Barry Callebaut is pioneering the chocolate industry by entering into the AI era and reinforcing the company's commitment to deliver breakthrough innovation and its position as the trusted partner for chocolate solutions and one of the biggest chocolate suppliers worldwide in the food and beverage industry.

Climate pressure, ingredient shortages, and rising cocoa costs have forced the chocolate industry to reformulate products and deploy substantial R&D budgets to address supply chain disruptions. By combining Barry Callebaut's category expertise with NotCo's AI technology, both companies are proactively building a resilient future for chocolate innovation that maintains taste and quality regardless of volatile agricultural conditions.

NotCo AI’s platform has already powered hundreds of successful product launches for some of the world's largest food and beverage companies. NotCo AI’s technology - trained on a unique proprietary dataset of food and consumable properties accumulated over 10 years - has been quickly evolving to become the most powerful foundational model for the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry.