TDC Adopts AKA Studio for AI-Ready Food R&D: What Product Developers Should Know
Technology Driven Concepts (TDC) has signed a multi-year agreement with AKA Foods B.V. to roll out AKA Studio, an AI-ready platform built for food R&D and knowledge consolidation. The move gives TDC a single system to capture formulations, experiments, sensory insights, costs, and tacit know-how - the stuff that usually gets lost in spreadsheets and inboxes.
For product development teams, this means faster iterations, fewer repeat experiments, and tighter customer response times. TDC is among the first companies globally to commit to a long-term strategy for AI-driven product development in food.
Why this matters for product development
- Single source of truth: All formulations, trials, and learnings live in one place - searchable and reusable.
- Speed: Teams can pull relevant past work instantly and avoid re-running similar tests.
- Decision clarity: Sensory data, cost drivers, and process notes sit side by side, so trade-offs are obvious.
- Customer focus: Better answers, faster proposals, tighter timelines.
- Security: Confidential work remains siloed in a secure cloud environment.
What AKA Studio adds to TDC's workflow
AKA Studio is built for food dev work, not generic project tracking. It organizes formulations, processes, sensory results, cost inputs, and historical project patterns inside one system that mirrors how developers actually build products.
According to TDC, the platform reduces duplication, makes past learnings usable, and sets the stage for AI features as they mature.
Chris Botha, R&D Director at TDC: "AKA Studio provides our developers with an invaluable resource: the ability to access and utilize all of our knowledge in one central location. It enhances our customer responsiveness, facilitates innovation across categories, and strengthens decision-making processes. By consolidating years of development knowledge into a structured system, AKA Studio positions TDC to leverage food-specific AI as it evolves. This platform future-proofs TDC for the next decade of product development."
He adds: "With AKA Studio, our teams will instantly access relevant past work, minimize duplication, and deliver more confident customer responses. It lays the groundwork for us to activate AI capabilities as they advance within the platform."
From pilot to multi-year rollout
The agreement follows a successful collaboration where TDC acted as an early design partner, pressure-testing the system on real projects. That work demonstrated how AKA Studio consolidates formulations, experiments, sensory insights, costing data, and tacit knowledge into a practical workflow for food developers.
The partnership benefits top CPGs, retailers, and a global fast-food chain served by TDC - giving them faster development cycles and clearer visibility into cost, quality, and time-to-market.
Industry context
R&D teams are under pressure to deliver faster while input costs and customer expectations keep shifting. Many teams still rely on scattered files and unstructured histories that slow decisions and increase rework. Platforms like AKA Studio address that bottleneck by making institutional knowledge usable.
Saul Abrahams, VP of Business Development at AKA Foods: "The pressure on food companies to innovate quickly, adapt to changing customer demands, and manage increasing input costs is mounting. Yet, many R&D teams still rely on disjointed spreadsheets, isolated formulation files, and unstructured project histories, which hinder decision-making and lead to redundant work. TDC is a dynamic, multi-category innovator, and their commitment to AKA Studio is a strong endorsement of the platform's potential. TDC helped shape and test the system against real-world R&D challenges, demonstrating its practical value. This partnership underscores the importance of building digital foundations to fully harness the power of emerging AI technologies. Moreover, it highlights South Africa's leadership in food science and technology across Africa."
For additional context on how AI can speed concept-to-launch, see McKinsey's analysis on product development acceleration with generative AI here.
What product teams can do now
- Audit where your data lives (formulations, trials, sensory, costs) and decide what becomes your single source of truth.
- Define naming standards and metadata so future search actually works.
- Migrate the high-value 20% of legacy experiments first - the ones you reuse most in briefs and customer work.
- Set clear permissions and confidentiality rules by customer and category.
- Establish response templates that pull past work into customer answers in minutes, not days.
- Plan a phased rollout: start with two categories, measure reuse and cycle time, then scale.
Level up team capability
If you're building AI skills across your product org, explore curated learning paths by role here.
Key takeaways
- TDC's multi-year commitment signals a shift to data-driven food R&D with AI in mind.
- AKA Studio consolidates scattered knowledge into a usable system that speeds decisions.
- Early design-partner work proved real-world fit and value on cost, speed, and reuse.
- The next edge in food R&D: make your knowledge base work like a product - searchable, secure, and actionable.
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