"AI Tastes It" Japanese Sauce Company Launches AI for Seasoning Development

Otafuku Sauce Partners with IHI to Develop 'Taste Discrimination AI'
More Accurate Analysis Than Human Developers... Plans to Expand Scope

A famous Japanese sauce manufacturing company has announced that it will introduce artificial intelligence (AI) in the development of new seasonings, attracting attention. Until now, the development of new seasoning products has been judged by veteran employees trained in taste for decades, but now AI will replace this role. The AI that discerns taste can detect subtle differences in flavor that humans cannot perceive, and it is expected to bring significant changes to the entire food industry.

On the 11th, Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei) reported that Japan’s Otafuku Sauce will utilize AI in the development of seasonings such as okonomiyaki sauce. Otafuku Sauce is known in Korea for imported yakisoba sauce and other products, and it is a 100-year-old company that started in 1922 as a brewery producing soy sauce and sake.

Officials at the Otafuku Sauce factory are checking the taste of the sauce. (Photo by Otafuku Sauce official website)

Although it is a company with a 100-year-old sauce recipe tradition, future new product development will be handled by AI instead of humans. To this end, Otafuku Sauce partnered with the Japanese engineering company IHI to develop a discerning program. The sauce data is converted into numerical values and trained by AI, which deep learns from 15,000 data points of Otafuku Sauce’s existing products and competing products on the market. After quantifying taste into data, AI can combine flavors to achieve the target taste of new products.

An Otafuku Sauce representative explained the development purpose, saying, "The goal is to efficiently develop new products without relying on the sensory differences of individual developers." Originally, when developing a "new product spicier than existing products," samples were prepared and ingredients measured, but the evaluation of taste and aroma was the responsibility of human developers. Human developers would taste, recall related data from existing or past prototypes, and repeatedly improve based on that to create new products, which was the conventional practice.

New products developed by Otafuku Sauce. (Photo by Otafuku Sauce official website)

However, Otafuku Sauce explains that the time taken to recall similar tastes varies depending on the developer’s experience, and there are individual differences in taste and aroma evaluation. Only a very small number of employees can grasp and remember the vast range of flavors. Since it takes a long time for human developers to learn this data, the company judged that it is suitable to train AI with it.

Accordingly, Otafuku Sauce and IHI have been working since 2019 to quantify product salinity, sweetness, and other factors to build a database. IHI developed technology that measures how much light wavelength is absorbed by shining light on the sauce, and created a search AI that can search for target tastes. These systems and devices were jointly patented by the two companies.

Otafuku Sauce emphasized that with the introduction of this AI taster, tasks that human developers used to spend days on during product development are now completed instantly. Currently, the AI developer working only on sauces plans to expand its scope to vinegar and seasoning sauces soon.

Otafuku Sauce also decided to utilize AI in selecting product package designs. Nikkei added, "AI can greatly reduce costs and time, and AI will bring efficiency across a wide range of fields from taste to packaging."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.