Barry Callebaut Partners With NotCo AI to Unlock Next-level Chocolate Innovation

Barry Callebaut, a leading manufacturer of high-quality chocolate and cocoa solutions, has formed a partnership with NotCo AI, the first foundational AI platform for the consumer goods industry. This collaboration is set to explore the integration of artificial intelligence in chocolate recipe development, merging Barry Callebaut’s extensive chocolate expertise with NotCo's advanced AI capabilities. The goal is to accelerate innovation and enhance customer experiences by creating richer, more chocolatey solutions that cater to evolving consumer demands.

This partnership marks a significant milestone as the first AI-powered integration in the food industry, combining Barry Callebaut's data on high-quality ingredients with NotCo AI’s technology to establish an end-to-end innovation hub. The initiative aims to create a new framework for chocolate innovation that is smarter, faster, more sustainable, and fully scalable to meet the changing needs of customers and consumers.

“This agreement marks an exciting step forward for Barry Callebaut and for our customers,” stated Peter Feld, CEO of Barry Callebaut. “It reflects our commitment to creating the 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 aspires to redefine chocolate development and set new standards for food innovation. By utilizing AI-driven formulation processes, the partnership aims to shorten development cycles, improve hit rates, and empower scientists and chefs to innovate with unprecedented speed and precision, all while advancing sustainability goals.

“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,” remarked Matias Muchnick, Co-Founder and CEO of NotCo AI. “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.”

This initiative is part of Barry Callebaut’s ongoing digitalization agenda, paving the way for the chocolate industry to embrace AI while solidifying the company’s position as a trusted partner for chocolate solutions and a primary supplier in the global food and beverage sector.

With climate pressures, ingredient shortages, and rising cocoa costs challenging the chocolate industry, this partnership aims to formulate resilient solutions that maintain taste and quality despite agricultural volatility. By combining Barry Callebaut’s expertise with NotCo AI’s technology, the two companies are working to create a sustainable future for chocolate innovation.

NotCo AI’s platform has already facilitated numerous successful product launches for major food and beverage brands. Its technology, honed over a decade of data collection, is evolving into a powerful foundational model for the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry.