A response to recent media coverage and what's really happening in CPG tech
Last week, CNBC published an article titled "AI startups want to crack open the recipe book in Big Food's test kitchens," positioning Journey Foods alongside companies developing "virtual sensory" systems and AI-powered recipe testers. While we appreciate the coverage, it misses the fundamental challenge that's actually keeping CPG executives up at night.
Big Food doesn't need AI to predict if chocolate chip cookies taste good - we love a human feedback loop. They need AI to navigate the chaos of modern supply chains with flavor and texture as guardrails. It's like wrapping an ethics layer on legal or therapy AI. It is more than necessary.
The real question isn't "Will consumers like this flavor?" It's "Can we source these ingredients reliably at a price point that works when our supplier in Southeast Asia faces climate disruption, when trade policies shift overnight, and when consumer demands for sustainability credentials evolve faster than our reformulation cycles?"
That's the problem Journey AI—and our flagship subsidiary Journey Foods—actually solves.
Here's what a typical product development cycle looks like at a major CPG company today:
The result? Products that take 18-24 months to launch, with failure rates above 70%, and supply chain surprises that evaporate margins overnight.
This isn't a recipe problem. This is an operations intelligence problem that spans the entire human consumption supply chain—from food and beverage to personal care, supplements, and beyond.
When we say Journey AI provides "supply chain intelligence," we're talking about a fundamentally different approach to CPG innovation. Our platform processes over 60 billion data points from 22,000+ sources to give product teams real-time answers to questions like:
We've built what we call an Operations Scientist™—an AI system with 1,368 base tags that expand to over 5,000 combinatorial features across nutrition, cost, sustainability, regulatory compliance, and supply chain stability.
This isn't about predicting sensory outcomes. It's about giving enterprises the intelligence infrastructure to make better decisions, faster, with complete visibility into the trade-offs across their entire product portfolio.
Let me show you what this looks like in practice.
A major food manufacturer came to us in Q3 2024 planning to launch a plant-based product line in early 2025. Their formulation relied heavily on a specific pea protein isolate from a primary supplier in Europe.
Our platform flagged three critical issues their internal teams hadn't caught:
Instead of discovering these issues during scale-up (the usual pattern), they had 4 months advance warning.
Here's what they did with that intelligence:
The result? A successful launch with 34% lower ingredient costs than originally projected, zero supply disruptions in the first year, and a product positioned for long-term stability.
That's not recipe testing. That's operations intelligence.
What started as Journey Foods—solving supply chain intelligence for the food industry—has evolved into Journey AI, a comprehensive platform for human consumption supply chains.
Why the evolution? Because the fundamental challenges we solved in food exist across every category of consumer packaged goods:
Journey Foods remains our flagship subsidiary, focused on food and beverage innovation. But Journey AI's platform now serves the broader human consumption supply chain ecosystem—anywhere ingredients meet consumer products.
The media loves the narrative of AI "creating new recipes" because it's tangible and consumer-facing. But enterprise CPG companies already have talented R&D teams, sensory scientists, and decades of institutional knowledge about what tastes good.
What they don't have is:
This is why our customers include major CPG manufacturers and we've established partnerships with retailers like Kroger and Whole Foods. They're not coming to us for better recipes. They're coming for better data.
Our pilot programs in Georgia, North Carolina, Hong Kong, and Ghanag with food manufacturers have demonstrated:
These aren't incremental improvements from slightly better recipes. These are structural efficiencies from having the right intelligence at the right time.
And these results translate across categories—the same supply chain intelligence that optimizes a food formulation also optimizes a shampoo formulation or a vitamin supplement.
As the industry faces unprecedented pressures—climate volatility, regulatory complexity, sustainability mandates, supply chain fragility—the competitive advantage won't come from who has the best recipe algorithm.
It will come from who has the best operations intelligence.
The future of CPG innovation looks like:
This requires treating CPG innovation as a data infrastructure challenge, not just a creative exercise.
We recently closed $5.3M in funding at a valuation over $38M because investors understand what the media sometimes misses: the future of the $3 trillion packaged goods industry isn't about AI recipe generators.
It's about giving enterprises the intelligence infrastructure to compete in an era of unprecedented complexity across all human consumption supply chains.
When CNBC or other outlets position us as "virtual sensory" companies, they're seeing the surface-level application and missing the fundamental transformation happening underneath. Recipe optimization might be one output of our platform, but the real value is in the operational intelligence that makes every decision better—from sourcing to formulation to scale-up to market, across food, personal care, supplements, and beyond.
Big Food doesn't need AI to know cookies should taste good. Personal care brands don't need AI to know shampoo should lather well.
They need AI to navigate:
Across 23 countries, through partnerships with academic institutions through Journey Labs, serving enterprise customers who manage billions in ingredient spend—Journey AI is building the operations intelligence platform the CPG industry actually needs.
Better recipes through Better decisions.
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