African Ingredient Company TDC Adopts AKA Foods' AI-Ready R&D Platform
December 4, 2025
Dutch company AKA Foods has signed a multi-year agreement with African ingredient solutions firm Technology Driven Concepts (TDC) to deploy AKA Studio, an AI-ready platform for food R&D and knowledge consolidation.
The goal: faster product cycles, tighter customer response, and better decision-making. TDC serves leading CPGs, retailers, and a global fast food chain. As an early design partner, TDC helped shape the platform and is now among the first to formalize a long-term plan for AI-enabled product development.
What product teams get
AKA Studio centralizes the full context of food development-formulations, process steps, sensory outcomes, cost drivers, and historical project patterns-in one environment. This reduces duplication, shortens iteration loops, and brings data to the decision table earlier.
"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 ability to centralise years of development knowledge in a structured system that will support food-specific AI as it becomes available, AKA Studio helps future-fit TDC for the next decade of product development."
Why this differs from generic tools
The platform is built specifically for food R&D, not general project or document management. It organizes technical, sensory, and commercial variables together, then surfaces patterns developers can use without exposing sensitive data.
Everything runs in a siloed private cloud, maintaining confidentiality while enabling future AI capabilities. For clarity on what "private cloud" means, see the NIST definition.
Funding and external validation
The agreement follows AKA Foods' $17.2 million seed round to support the launch of AKA Studio, led by AI specialists Alex and Michael Bronstein.
"TDC is a fast-moving, multi-category innovator, and their commitment is a powerful validation of what AKA Studio is built to do," said Saul Abrahams, VP of Business Development at AKA Foods. "They helped shape the system, they tested it against real R&D challenges, and they proved its value in day-to-day work. This partnership confirms the importance of building strong digital foundations so companies can benefit fully from emerging AI capabilities. Such technologies also serve South Africa as the leader in food science and technology in Africa."
Practical moves for product development leaders
- Inventory your knowledge assets: formulations, sensory data, pilot results, and cost drivers. Flag duplication and gaps.
- Standardize taxonomies for ingredients, process steps, sensory lexicons, and cost levers so data can be linked and reused.
- Pilot in a siloed workspace with clear permissions. Track cycle time from brief to first-pass prototype, iteration counts, and COGS visibility.
- Turn learnings into reusable templates, design patterns, and decision checklists tied to outcomes.
- Prepare for AI by capturing clean, structured, and connected data-before you add models.
If your team is building skills for AI-ready product workflows, explore relevant programs by role here: AI courses by job.
Image courtesy of AKA Foods
© AKA Foods
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