Coffee Analysis Using Pattern Recognition

Used to be in the coffee blend analysis and optimization space, so this was interesting.  Nicely done.  We did some similar things with classical optimization and statistical systems.  Below an intro, link takes you to more detail exploration and to the data and technical details.  Also a good example of this kind of pattern recognition problem.   See my 'Coffee' tag below for many mentions of our work and related research.

Comparing Coffee using Pattern Recognition

Exploring coffee similarities using cupping grades and flavors

By Robert McKeon Aloe   in Towards Data Science

After trying a variety of coffees from around the world, I have often wondered if coffee grades or flavors could tell me which coffees were similar to each other and which were different. I am particularly interested if such comparisons could be used to help determine the best blends by increasing my understanding of how coffees relate to each other. Luckily, I found some data to investigate just that question.

I have looked at two databases with coffee grades, and previously, I’ve used the CQI database to investigate similarities between coffees. I’m applying the same techniques here.

I amended one of the databases from Sweet Maria’s. I previously pulled their Q-scores, but they also had flavor ratings for each coffee. So I went back, and I pulled flavor ratings for all the beans. I ended up with a slightly larger database than previously at 407 coffees. ... "

Deriving Scent from DNA?

Way back when we were looking at scent  and flavor in consumer products, we talked to scientists about the possibility of extracting these measures from DNA of component natural plants and flowers.    Were told no it was not possible.  It seems not to be there yet today, but some interesting advances taken towards doing this.   Some clear commercial possibilities as well as understanding our natural world

Science has brought back the scent of a long-dead flower in Engadget By Nick Summers, @nisummers

Well, sort of.

We've lost some parts of our natural world. Swathes of plants and animals have been consumed by evolution, shifting climates or the often-damaging expansion of humankind.

For a moment, though, London's iconic Barbican center will let you smell a fragment of our lost history. In the corner of a new AI exhibit, a cuboid hood dangles from the ceiling. Inside are four nozzles that slowly release carefully-chosen fragrances into the air around you.

Bark. Pine. Mint. I'm no smell expert, but these are the words that sprang to mind as I slowly inhaled the odors.

The artificial blend is, for now, our best guess at what Hibiscadelphus wilderianus, a tree that once stood on the Hawaiian island of Maui, used to smell like. A small rock sits to the right of the nozzles, hinting at the ancient lava fields where the last specimen was plucked from in 1912. It's a modest visual aid, which is why some virtual environments are included in a short documentary that plays on a loop nearby. Taken as a whole, the installation is powerful enough to drown out the rest of the exhibit and, for a brief moment, transport you to another time and place entirely.

The project was a multi-year collaboration between, among others, Ginkgo Bioworks, a company that specializes in made-to-order microbes, the International Flavors & Fragrances Inc. (IFF), Sissel Tolaas, a prolific smell researcher, and Dr. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, a multidisciplinary artist and synthetic biology researcher. As Scientific American explains, it all started when Jason Kelly, the CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks, heard about Scent Trek, an initiative by flavor and fragrance giant Givaudan to capture the molecules around exotic flowers and fruits.   ... "

Cyber Agriculture

My own strong interest and background in botany makes me consider this closely, consider the implications.  In particular have been experimenting with basil flavors for years.   While the smells of basils can be considerable, they often do not perform as distinctly in dishes.   Can we program in robust flavors?  Following.

MIT’s ‘cyber-agriculture’ optimizes basil flavors   By Devin Coldewey @techcrunch

The days when you could simply grow a basil plant from a seed by placing it on your windowsill and watering it regularly are gone — there’s no point now that machine learning-optimized hydroponic “cyber-agriculture” has produced a superior plant with more robust flavors. The future of pesto is here.

This research didn’t come out of a desire to improve sauces, however. It’s a study from MIT’s Media Lab and the University of Texas at Austin aimed at understanding how to both improve and automate farming.

In the study, published today in PLOS ONE, the question being asked was whether a growing environment could find and execute a growing strategy that resulted in a given goal — in this case, basil with stronger flavors.

Such a task is one with numerous variables to modify — soil type, plant characteristics, watering frequency and volume, lighting and so on — and a measurable outcome: concentration of flavor-producing molecules. That means it’s a natural fit for a machine learning model, which from that variety of inputs can make a prediction as to which will produce the best output.

“We’re really interested in building networked tools that can take a plant’s experience, its phenotype, the set of stresses it encounters, and its genetics, and digitize that to allow us to understand the plant-environment interaction,” explained MIT’s Caleb Harper in a news release. The better you understand those interactions, the better you can design the plant’s lifecycle, perhaps increasing yield, improving flavor or reducing waste.  .... " 

Complexity of Taste Expertise

Learned the complexity of this in the favor space for roasted coffee.  Some people just cannot do it.  How do you make machines do it?

Learning to Become a Taste Expert
by Kathryn A. Latour and John A. Deighton in HBS Working knowledge

OVERVIEW — How should we learn to discriminate a fine wine or chocolate? Tradition says use a flavor wheel and map the taste into vocabulary. We find that works for novices, but, beyond a point, it is counterproductive. Enthusiasts perform more like experts when they abandon language and just “draw the shape” of the taste.

AUTHOR ABSTRACT
Evidence suggests that consumers seek to become more expert about hedonic products to enhance their enjoyment of future consumption occasions. Current approaches to becoming an expert center on cultivating an analytic mindset. In the present research the authors explore the benefit to enthusiasts of moving beyond analytics to cultivate a holistic style of processing. In the taste context the authors define holistic processing as non-verbal, imagery based, and involving narrative processing. The authors conduct qualitative interviews with taste experts (Master Sommeliers) to operationalize the holistic approach to hedonic learning, and then test it against traditional analytic methods in a series of experiments across a range of hedonic products. The results suggest that hedonic learning follows a sequence of stages whose order matters and that the holistic stage is facilitated by attending to experience as a narrative event and by employing visual imagery. The results of this multi-method investigation have implications for both managers and academics interested in how consumers learn to become expert in hedonic product categories.   ... "

Big Data Results from Coke Freestyle

Now about eight years ago, we saw an early demonstration of Coke 'Free Style', a machine that would allow you to construct your own flavors.   Among millions of possibilities.  Late stage differentiation possibilities.  This kind of 'big data' could lead you to understand trends and directions, as well as pointers to supply chain needs driven directly by consumer choice. The machines are now fairly common, and their trove of data is being used.  But is this better than using the insight of human flavor research?   Focus groups?  Here some early, perhaps for now trivial, results:

Coke Let People Make Any Flavor They Want, The People Demanded Cherry Sprite  ... 
Thanks to new machines that let customers flavor their drinks however they want, Coca-Cola discovered that what people really wanted was Cherry Sprite. ....  "
by Venessa Wong in Buzzfeed

Data Based Spicy Trends

A trend area we examined, based on data, now blooming in full gear:

" .... Restaurants and food retailers are feeding a growing demand for heat, with jalapenos, chili peppers, cayenne and cinnamon spicing up everything from vinaigrettes to cocktails. Spicy flavors made Technomic's 2016 trends list, which called for chefs to expand beyond sriracha to hot spices from regions including India, Korea and North Africa  ... " 

Not long after we left the food business.  Other social ways to find hidden trends?

Pepsi and Design Thinking: Pepsi Spire

From CGT: PepsiCo CEO Turns Design Thinking into Strategy
Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo's CEO, is ranked No. 15 on Forbes list of The 100 Most Powerful Women. In an interview this week, Nooyi speaks about making PepsiCo more design driven, the challenges in changing a culture, and her proudest achievement. .... " 

Let's take Pepsi Spire, our new touchscreen fountain machine. Other companies with dispensing machines have focused on adding a few more buttons and combinations of flavors. ... Our design guys essentially said that we're talking about a fundamentally different interaction between consumer and machine. ... We basically have a gigantic iPad on a futuristic machine that talks to you and invites you to interact with it. It tracks what you buy so that in the future, when you swipe your ID, it reminds you of the flavor combinations you tried last time and suggests new ones. It displays beautiful shots of the product, so when you add lime or cranberry, it actually shows those flavours being added; you experience the infusion of the flavour, as opposed to merely hitting a button and out comes the finished product   ... " 

IRI on Private Label and National Brands

In Retailwire:  And discussion.

" .... IRI in their latest Times & Trends report offers this advice: "Ensure that price is a lever that creates demand without diminishing margin." In the previous Business Tip, we discussed factors other than price that make up consumers' definition of "affordability" including preferences for flavors, favorite brands and household appeal. But in IRI's research, "good value for the money" still weighs heaviest as an "affordability" factor.

In that regard, private label products still generally offer meaningful savings versus their national brand counterparts — about 28 percent, on average. That gap broadens to 50 percent in 19 percent of categories studied by IRI. And yet in 25 percent of categories, there is less than a 10 percent differential. ... " 

Cognitive Cooking Book: Creativity?

I note that this book is now available, on order, I am a cook and was a Beta user and found the system useful, but not necessarily better than  using one of the many recipe systems out there.   It does provide an interesting template for other knowledge based systems. It also inserts the idea of creativity, not commonly included in AI.   What is creativity?  Knowledge and experience filtering an element of randomness?  I was hoping to use Chef Watson for a recent group dinner to get real feedback, but that did not work out.   Like to get other input as to its value.

Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson: Recipes for Innovation  from IBM & the Institute of Culinary Education Hardcover 

Take Your Cooking to a Whole New Level with Chef Watson and the Institute of Culinary Education!

You don't have to be a culinary genius to be a great cook. But when it comes to thinking outside the box, even the best chefs can be limited by their personal experiences, the tastes and flavor combinations they already know. That's why IBM and the Institute of Culinary Education teamed up to develop a groundbreaking cognitive cooking technology that helps cooks everywhere discover and create delicious recipes, utilizing unusual ingredient combinations that man alone might never imagine.

In Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson, IBM's unprecedented technology and ICE's culinary experts ... "

API Innovation from McCormick

More innovation from the spice giant.   " ... the company introduced FlavorPrint, a service that allows customers to create a personal profile and enter information on a Website and receive relevant ideas and recipes through McCormick's Website, as well as mobile apps offered by grocery store chains. The company turned to API management and analytics firm Apogee to extend data and touch points to business partners and other outside sources.  ... "

More on Flavorprint in this blog.

This kind of knowledge and loyalty play can work well in their business, especially in an area where people need direct advice, as McCormick extends their business to more complex solutions.

Chef Watson as an Advisor

Just received early access to IBM's Chef Watson Beta this past week.  I have been testing, not for recipe development, but with an eye to how it's structure could be adapted to other advisory systems. Also, how it really differs from other search style systems.  How does, it adapt, learn, and support creativity? Still trying to understand those dynamics.  Also, how this form of expert system is different, and makes it more likely to be  successful than those of the 90s.  Click the Chef Watson tag for more I have written and will write about this topic.

 IBM writes about how it is different:

    " ... In contrast to a search engine that simply sifts through existing data to serve up a list of already published recipes, Chef Watson is not programmed to come up with a defined answer to a defined question - it understands, learns, and considers not just the data behind recipes and flavor compounds, but also human perception to design highly creative recipe ideas.

Using the app, users can create novel recipes by selecting ingredients, dish type and dish styles, as well as any ingredients to exclude in the final recipe. Once the user has entered in their choices, the app will generate a list of never before seen recipe suggestions.  .... " 

Fake Tongues and Taste in Virtual Reality

An article in the New Yorker looks at an extension of the 'Rubber Hand Illusion", which realisticaly fools the brain into thinking that a fake hand is their own.    Called the 'Butcher's Tongue Illusion'  this extends the same kind of sensory illusion idea to the tongue. Good article provides the background.   The implications and practical applications?

" ... The results of the butcher’s-tongue illusion suggest that, with further testing, it might be possible to one day enjoy out-of-body flavor experiences. To a person wearing Michel’s box, a Slim-Fast shake could be made to taste like a chocolate-fudge sundae, delivering a fraction of the calories and a great deal more pleasure. It’s the holy grail of dieters: a virtual-reality headset that makes those undressed salad leaves you’re dutifully eating taste like French fries or dark chocolate. At last, we could have nutritional restraint combined with sensory decadence, with no sacrifice  ... " required.

McCormick Flavorprint

In Consumer Goods Technology:

Exclusive Video: Learn How McCormick Leveraged Marketing/IT Collaboration to Develop FlavorPrint
As marketers look to leverage digital innovation to reach consumers, collaboration often plays a role as partners work together to achieve success. In this video from the 2013 Consumer Goods Business & Technology Leadership Conference, CIO Jerry Wolfe and Digital Marketing Manager Colleen McClellan of McCormick discuss one such collaborative initiative – FlavorPrint, a new technology that helps consumers discover flavorful foods they'll love based on their flavor profile .... " 

During the session, Wolfe and McLellan explore how multiple internal cross functional teams at McCormick, from marketing to IT to sensory scientists, joined forces on the FlavorPrint project. Additionally, they discuss how McCormick worked with its external agency and retail partners to deliver this unprecedented service. ... " 

This has similarities to work we did to determine and model taste preference profiles for coffee blends.

Previously in this blog about delivering Flavorprint.

View Video in Consumer Goods Technology.

Also see McCormick's Flavorprint Site.

Flavor Delivery

A classic problem, can flavor be delivered with digital stimulation?   Research has been going on for a long time.    Getting to the Bottom of a Digital Lollipop - NYT Bits   " ... While it might sound complicated, the technology is relatively simple. When the lollipop, which is made of a silver electrode, touches the tip of the tongue it reproduces four well-known tastes: salty, sweet, sour or bitter. Together these flavors can create different simulations close to the real thing. ... "

Printing Food

In the NYT:   At very least the form of the food, or perhaps also adding the intermixing of flavors as well.  Another example of the rush to 3D printing.  Still appears to be an artsy and niche angle. We looked at the remote delivery of other sensory, such as aroma and flavor, but the technology was too imprecise.

5th Screen and McCormick

I had mentioned a company we worked with in our innovation centers: 5th Screen.  Had reason to look at some of the work they have done with McCormick spices in the innovation and retail spaces. Check out a description of their work here.   Includes a video.  Of particular interest to me the interaction of flavor and innovation.

" ... FlavorPrint is designed to provide a profile for a person’s tastes giving them a fun personality to walk away with.  This evokes the emotion “Self-Creation”. This is an emotion that reveals itself through creating, enhancing and expressing one’s identity by stimulating self-reflection, status, bragging rights and values.

Looking at the personas of 12 different “Flavor Personality” types, this interactive engagement leads the viewer down a path of engaging choices from food pictures.

The user will select their favorite food dishes and the FlavorPrint Analyzer will determine their personal FlavorPrint based on their choices.  Ultimately users are given a personality flavor name. This is represented by an ICON with slogan.  Some users give answers that provide insight to secondary likes. They are given a second FlavorPrint when appropriate.... " 

Gary Cokins on EPM Analytics

A piece that overviews some of Gary Cokin's view on analytics.  Have  read and passed a few of his columns.  Well done.  He talks about Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), not a term we used:  " ... Think of EPM as an umbrella concept. EPM integrates operational and financial information into a single decision support and planning framework. These methods include strategy mapping, balanced scorecards and dashboards, customer profitability analysis (using activity-based costing principles), forecasting, driver-based budgeting with rolling financial projections, and resource capacity requirements planning. Most of these methods have been in existence for decades, and many even before there were computers. What makes them relevant now is the need to integrate them for faster decisions to more complex problems and opportunities. The EPM methods in turn fuel other core solutions, such as customer relationship management, supply chain management, risk management, and human capital management systems, as well as lean management and the Six Sigma initiatives. It is quite a stew, but they all blend together. Embedding analytics of all flavors into EPM methods – such as correlation, clustering and segmentation analysis – enriches each of EPM’s many methods. .... " 

Making Internal Collaboration Work

McKinsey Quarterly interview with Don Tapscott:   " .... The author and strategist describes why effective knowledge management within enterprises requires replacing e-mail with social media. ... "   But I add it does have to be more than the current flavors of social media.  Here is one advanced option, called Zakta. 

Testing Flavors Online

Testing flavors online .. Not quite what it seems reading the headline.  Reminds me of our own digital scent work.   True virtualization of non-sight sensory  interaction at a distance will be a big deal.

Social Technology and Snacks

In NYT Technology:   Snack foods are a natural intersection place between social technology and people.   This article addresses work underway and how retailers and manufacturers are participating.    Also how consumer research can be done in the same space  " ... Frito-Lay is using a Facebook application to develop ideas for potato chip flavors. Users are asked to submit flavor suggestions and click an "I'd eat that" button to register support for other users' proposed flavors. "It's a new way of getting consumer research. We're going to get a ton of new ideas,” says Ann Mukherjee, marketing chief at Frito-Lay North America. ... "