Gulfood Manufacturing 2022
“Taste testing taps into the modernized speed of artificial intelligence” IBM gained notoriety after its artificial intelligence supercomputer Watson crushed its human competitors on the question and answer game show Jeopardy! more than a decade ago. But now the 111-year-old technology company is hoping to answer a tough question of its own: Can it give computers a sense of taste? Four years ago, researchers at IBM set out to answer this question, starting first with a liquid that is largely free of taste and can be difficult for a human to tell apart: water. After the computer became familiarized with different water samples that had slight variations in composition due to their mineral content, it was put up against human competitors to see who could better identify a water sample it had seen before. The computer won. "The [artificial intelligence] system was better than our human tasters at distinguishing specifically four different kinds of mineral water," said Patrick Ruch, the March - April 2022
lead researcher on IBM's artificial intelligence-assisted e-tongue technology called Hypertaste. The circular-shaped disk undergoes its "taste test" by creating a digitized chemical composition of a liquid it has sampled. The "fingerprint" is then compared with other liquids in a database using artificial intelligence — a process that takes less than a minute — to identify a match. While Hypertaste is still a few years away from widespread commercial use, IBM is working with industry partners on different applications for it. These include collaborating with food and beverage companies to capture and predict different kinds of flavors, and to quickly identify coffee, soft drinks and other offerings that would resonate with consumers. Hypertaste is not meant to replace human experts, Ruch said, but rather to offload some of the most mundane or difficult tasks, like repeated taste testing of a
product, to ensure quality remains the same from batch to batch. It also can be used to ensure authenticity, such as sussing out counterfeit wines or whiskeys, or to assist in product innovation by discovering new and different flavors. Future applications for the technology could include finding contaminants in drinking water, tracing raw materials throughout the supply chain and checking for the presence of foodborne illnesses. "The more people that are using it and can benefit from it and feed the data back into it, the better the technology will get," Ruch said. Artificial intelligence is an increasingly popular tool for food companies. With countless bits of information and pressure to innovate and get products to market faster, companies are no longer just relying on traditional methods of R&D and testing. 51
