The agentic AI platform that reads how the world eats - and tells food brands what to make next.
// Good taste. Wise move.
Most new food products fail. Industry lore puts the flop rate somewhere around eight in ten - a sobering number for companies that spend years and millions bringing a snack, a sauce or a beverage to shelf. Tastewise was built around a blunt question: what if a brand could test an idea against the real appetites of millions of people before committing a single dollar to it?
Founded in 2017 by Alon Chen and Eyal Gaon, Tastewise is an agentic AI platform built exclusively for the food and beverage industry. It stitches together proprietary consumer panels, market trackers and what the company describes as trillions of real-time food signals - restaurant menus, retail data, recipes, social conversations and reviews - then puts AI agents trained on food behavior on top of that data. The result is a system that spots rising trends earlier, validates product concepts, and helps teams win space on both supermarket shelves and restaurant menus.
The company says its tools are used by roughly 80% of the top global food and beverage companies, a client roster that reads like a grocery aisle: Mars, Nestle, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, Campbell's, Givaudan, Kroger and Waitrose among them. When some of the world's biggest food companies develop new products, a growing number of them consult Tastewise first.
For a century, the food industry ran on gut instinct - a chef's palate, a marketer's hunch, a quarterly survey that arrived weeks after the question was asked. That worked when trends moved slowly. It struggles now, when a flavor can travel from a niche menu to a national craving in a matter of weeks, and shelf space is decided long before the wider public catches on.
Tastewise attacks two costs at once: the cost of being slow, and the cost of being wrong. By watching consumer behavior continuously rather than in periodic snapshots, it surfaces demand while it is still rising. By grounding product and campaign decisions in observed behavior, it reduces the number of launches that miss. The company reports that clients have trimmed six to eight months off new-product timelines and saved millions in execution costs.
What makes it different - Plenty of firms sell food-trend reports. Tastewise's wager is that domain beats scale: rather than fine-tuning a general chatbot and calling it food AI, it built agents trained exclusively on how people cook, order and buy. One of its more unusual assets is an observed home-cooking panel - a window into what people actually make at home, not just what they say they eat. That distinction is the heart of its pitch against broader market-research incumbents like Mintel, NielsenIQ and Datassential.
End-to-end GenAI system for F&B: consumer panels, market trackers and food intelligence powering trend forecasting, innovation, competitive tracking and category planning.
A conversational assistant that fuses real-time demand signals, menu data and ingredient trends into decision-ready answers - 24/7 research analysis for food teams.
Food-specific Trends, Marketing and Sales agents that handle trend detection, campaign messaging, retailer sell-in and foodservice workflows.
A no-code tool that lets brands spin up custom food-intelligence agents tuned to their own categories and questions.
Connectors that pipe Tastewise food intelligence directly into Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini workflows.
Available through the AWS Marketplace, with data infrastructure running on Amazon Web Services.
Round figures per public reporting (Calcalist, TechFundingNews, PRWeb). Signal-mix chart is illustrative, not disclosed weighting.
Tastewise sells its intelligence platform and AI agents to food and beverage manufacturers, ingredient suppliers, retailers and foodservice operators as an enterprise SaaS subscription, with tiered access to data and insights and distribution through the AWS Marketplace. The buyers are the people who decide what gets made and how it is sold: innovation, insights, marketing and category teams inside large brands.
Named clients per Tastewise materials and press coverage. "~80% of top global F&B companies" is a company-stated figure.
CEO and co-founder Alon Chen is a self-taught engineer who wrote his first code at 12 and spent years at Google - founding and running its Partners program across 27 markets and serving as Google's CMO for Israel and Greece - before leaving to build Tastewise. His co-founder, CTO Eyal Gaon, brings a background across Israel's technology scene. Together they set out to give an instinct-driven industry the same data discipline that reshaped advertising and retail.
The company's expertise sits at an unusual intersection: machine learning and data engineering on one side, genuine culinary and consumer knowledge on the other. That pairing is deliberate. Tastewise's argument is that food is too specific for generic AI - understanding why a flavor rises requires knowing food, not just knowing statistics.
Alon Chen and Eyal Gaon start Tastewise to bring AI to food and beverage decision-making.
PICO Venture Partners backs the company with $1.5M in seed capital.
Raises $5M led by foodtech investor PeakBridge to expand its trends and intelligence platform.
Disruptive AI joins as investor; tools reach companies like Nestle, PepsiCo and Mars.
Debuts a food-specific generative AI assistant that predicts what and how people eat.
TELUS Global Ventures leads a $50M round; Tastewise rolls out food AI agents and an Agent Builder.
Video links open a search for the relevant official clips.
It provides an AI platform for the food and beverage industry that combines consumer and market data with food-trained AI agents to help brands spot trends, innovate products, win retail placement and automate marketing.
Alon Chen (CEO) and Eyal Gaon (CTO) founded the company in 2017. Chen is a former Google executive.
Large food, beverage and ingredient companies including Mars, Nestle, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, Givaudan and Kroger. The company says roughly 80% of top global F&B firms use its tools.
About $73M in total, including a $50M Series B in June 2025 led by TELUS Global Ventures.
TasteGPT is Tastewise's conversational AI assistant that turns real-time consumer demand signals, menu data and ingredient trends into decision-ready food and beverage insights.
Sources: Calcalist, TechFundingNews, Food Dive, TechCrunch, PRWeb, Retail Tech Innovation Hub, Crunchbase, tastewise.io. Figures marked approximate where third-party estimates apply.