Tastewise | Ep. 200

Data Gurus Podcast | Insights on Business Strategy, Mergers and Acquisitions, Market Research & Data Collection

Alon Chen, the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Tastewise, joins Sima today to share his career journey and dive into what they are doing at Tastewise. Biography: Alon Chen is a Co-Founder and serves as Chief Executive Officer at Tastewise. He is the developer of an artificial intelligence-based food intelligence platform designed to assist food and beverage businesses and brands. The company's platform works with food brands, manufacturers, ingredient companies, and flavor houses, including Nestlé, PepsiCo, Givaudan, Campbell's, and Kraft Heinz, to enhance new product development, build marketing strategies, and accelerate sales in retail and restaurants, enabling restaurants, hospitality groups, and food brands to make smarter decisions for a healthy, sustainable, and delicious future. Alon’s journey Alon was born and raised in Israel. He started his first business at fifteen, building and selling computers. His first real job was at Google, looking after the search quality for Hebrew and then working with their marketing team. He was the Founder of Google Partners, the Google partner program for their advertising business. He soon realized he loved working with technology and facing business and marketing challenges. So that is what he does today with Tastewise. People Alon can program, develop code, and write code. But he prefers working with people. Technology Alon is passionate about technology! Current developments with AI keep him awake all night long, thinking of ways to use AI to improve the food system. What is Tastewise? Alon founded Tastewise in 2018. It is an enterprise solution to help the world’s largest food brands digitize and transform their slow and tedious methods of understanding consumers and their consumption preferences and become more efficient with their product innovation lines. So Tastewise is essentially a data platform that collects data points from every single food delivery app and recipe app across the web to allow organizations to find out what consumers eat and drink, to help them move their new product launches from a 90% failure rate to a 100% success rate. Alon’s idea for Tastewise Alon’s idea for Tastewise started with his family members sending messages to his mom each week on their family Whatsapp group, telling her about their constantly-changing dietary preferences for their Shabbat dinners on Friday nights so that she did not have to prepare dishes no one would eat. He realized that the same thing was happening in the food industry too, with people’s diets changing constantly. The food industry is slow to adapt and change, so he saw a great business opportunity to help brands understand the trends related to consumers’ constantly changing food preferences and get to know which dishes consumers are making with the products they buy. The most difficult part The most difficult part of Alon’s work is applying artificial intelligence to the subtle nuances of a given situation to get to know what consumers actually want. The technology One part of Tastewise’s technology involves collecting vast amounts of data. Another is making sense of all the data. The last part is visualizing and conveying the findings to users and helping organizations move in the right direction. The biggest challenge The biggest challenge to getting more acceptance, acceleration, and use of their new methodology has been explaining to end users why their data set is the right one. Service Tastewise is here to change the industry. So they do whatever it takes to drive value and help their customers. Links: Email me your thoughts [e-mail] LinkedIn Twitter Infinity-2.com Tastewise Alon Chen on LinkedIn