AKA Foods wins Fi Europe award as African ingredients firm adopts AI platform
- AKA Foods takes the Fi Europe 2025 Future Foodtech Innovation Award for its Intelligence Platform for Application Development.
- TDC signs a multi-year agreement to adopt AKA Studio, formalizing a long-term AI strategy for food product development.
- The platform centralizes formulations, experiments, and project data to replace scattered spreadsheets and accelerate decisions.
AKA Foods secured the Future Foodtech Innovation Award at Fi Europe 2025 in Paris, edging out Amano Enzyme's Plants Unlimited platform and Tetra Pak's whole oat beverage lines. The Netherlands-based company's win comes as adoption of AI-enabled product development begins to move from trials to multi-year commitments.
Days after the ceremony, Technology Driven Concepts (TDC) - a leading African ingredient solutions company - signed a multi-year agreement to adopt AKA Studio across its R&D organization. This makes TDC one of the first to formalize a long-term AI strategy for food development.
Why this matters for product development teams
Most R&D groups still work across isolated formulation files, legacy LIMS add-ons, and one-off project notes. The result: repeated work, slow decisions, and lost context. AKA Studio tackles this by unifying formulations, experiments, and project history in a single, AI-ready system that keeps data private and fully siloed.
"If you have 30 years of experience, you don't remember what failed three years ago on another formulation," said Tomer Green from AKA Foods. "But if you can map your knowledge and search past work - what was similar, what failed, what worked - you remove the cold start, even for experts."
Green also pointed to a shift in expectations among younger technologists. They use GPT and other AI tools daily, yet still build products with spreadsheets. This gap is where structured, searchable knowledge systems are starting to replace manual workflows.
TDC's move: from experiments to a long-term AI strategy
TDC serves major CPGs, retailers, and a global fast food chain. "AKA Studio gives our developers something we have never had before - the ability to see and use all of our knowledge in one place," said Chris Botha, R&D director at TDC. "It strengthens how we respond to customers, how we innovate across categories, and how we make decisions. With its structured system ready to support food-specific AI as capabilities mature, AKA Studio helps future-fit TDC for the next decade of product development."
Saul Abrahams, VP of business development at AKA Foods, added that food companies face tighter timelines, shifting customer needs, and rising input costs while still relying on fragmented systems. He described TDC's commitment as a strong validation after testing the system against day-to-day R&D challenges - and a signal that companies need solid digital foundations to benefit from emerging AI capabilities.
What sets the platform apart
- Context-aware for food development: captures formulations, trials, sensory notes, supplier changes, and outcomes in one place.
- Private by design: fully siloed, confidential cloud environment.
- Faster decisions: guided insights and historical retrieval reduce repeat experiments and shorten iteration cycles.
Practical next steps for R&D leaders
- Run a 90-day pilot on a high-churn category (e.g., beverages or snacks) to benchmark cycle time, first-pass success rate, and rework cuts.
- Standardize data capture: define a shared schema for formulations, trial metadata, and learnings to make search and comparisons reliable.
- Create a "known failures" library: tag every blocked experiment with cause and conditions to prevent repeats.
- Set guardrails: decide what lives in private silos vs. shared views to protect IP while enabling collaboration.
- Track impact: measure time-to-first-prototype, iteration count per launch, and cost variance from target BOM.
Signals of momentum
Fi Europe 2025 wrapped in Paris with suppliers, R&D specialists, and production leaders converging at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles. Interest in AI-driven product development is shifting from curiosity to implementation, with wins like AKA Foods' award and TDC's multi-year commitment pointing to where teams are placing bets.
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