NotCo’s AI is Revolutionising the Food Industry – And Big Brands Are Eating It Up

Chile’s NotCo pioneered the use of AI in food. Its co-founders explain why they’re doubling down on the B2B business, which is growing by triple digits.

Karim Pichara has been working with artificial intelligence (AI) his whole life. “I always knew that AI was going to be a great thing – [but] not necessarily in the food space,” he says.

The CTO of NotCo, the Chilean food tech startup he co-founded with CEO Matias Muchnick a decade ago, is sitting in the company’s office in San Francisco, speaking to Green Queen on a Zoom call in late February.

“Back in 2015, I had this conversation with Matias,” he recalls. “He brought me this question: ‘Have you ever imagined what would happen if we create an AI technology, especially to formulate food?’ And I say: ‘How’s that? How do you actually formulate food?’ And he started telling me about what it takes to create a full formulation.”

The two realised this was an empty space ripe with opportunity. Pichara went away to build some algorithms and scrape (some totally unused) data from the web. “My main assumption there was that all that data could be a proxy for flavour and texture. So I just created the first version of the algorithm that would generate these formulations,” says Pichara.

“That was a generative AI for actual food formulas, without having any prior experience in the food space. And I think that was a good thing, because it was totally unbiased,” he adds. “We started producing those formulas [on a] kitchen-scale, and we liked the results: very crazy colours and flavours. And we said: ‘Well, we have something here.’”

Fast-forward to 2025. NotCo is a unicorn with $400M raised from investors including Jeff Bezos. It’s a global leader in AI-formulated food tech, with a CPG division that makes everything from meat-free burgers and eggless mayos to plant-based milk and vegan protein bars.

It is perhaps most well-known for its joint venture with The Kraft Heinz Company in the US and Canada, which has borne animal-free alternatives to classics like the blue-box mac and cheese, and Oscar Mayer hot dogs.

As AI’s influence over our lives deepens, NotCo is doubling down on its pioneering work with the technology. Pichara outlines that this is not a food company; it’s a tech firm. And its path to profitability lies in providing AI-led solutions to food manufacturers across the world, including some of the biggest names in the space.

Why AI can change the game for food product developers

Pichara notes that while traditional CPG companies would let the marketing and innovation teams decide what the next product should be, this can be a “very limited” approach.

“What if you had an AI that would explore all the data in social media, all the products that are available out there, and could tell if we found a white space [if] there is a need for this type of product that is not available out there?” he posits.

NotCo’s platform can generate innovative concepts and help humans decide what products to launch. “Let’s say the AI-assisted you in creating the concept of a very innovative product. Now you need to create a formula for that. And if you were just a human without any help or tools, you would have to go and try whatever you know from your experience,” says Pichara.

“That is a super biased approach, because, in general… you might have a few 100 formulations of possible products that might be similar to the one you need to do.”

The number of available combinations is “more than grains of sand on the Earth”, he says. This is where AI can do wonders, helping companies find the ideal formula for product development.

“Imagine that you have the prototype and you need to scale it up. You need to make it functional again, you need to optimise the process. You need to rebalance ingredients. You need to change some of the ingredients, add some proteins, decrease sugar, and so on,” adds Pichara.

“As a human, you would try to go step by step. But in general, it’s a multi-dimensional product that needs to be solved at the same time, because in food, if you decrease the sugar, you screw that flavour and texture,” he says. Likewise, finetuning the taste and texture could mean a shift in ingredient use and nutritional quality. AI, he explains, can help avoid this cycle and fast-track product development.

How does NotCo’s AI platform work?

Pichara and Muchnick have dubbed their AI platform ‘Giuseppe’, after the Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who painted human faces using vegetables.

“Initially, the purpose of the technology was to create plant-based formulations that would mimic the flavour of animal-based ingredients,” says Pichara. “We felt like there was a lot of resonance between the artist and what we were trying to do.”

NotCo’s Giuseppe is an AI system that complements the work of food scientists, chefs, product developers, from concept creation all the way to the final version of the formula. “[Ingredient] combinations are almost infinite, right? So you need an AI that guides you through the process of creating the prototype of the formula,” he says.

When you’re trying to scale up, you quickly discover that processes that work well in the lab don’t necessarily perform the same way on a larger scale. “You need to take into account all those factors, and at the same time, you need to usually add or make sure that your prototypes have some functional properties,” outlines Pichara.

If you’re making a milk alternative, for example, you’d want it to work in both hot and cold beverages, and sweet and savoury dishes. It needs to have a certain nutritional profile. The texture needs to be on point too.

“With AI, you need to pose a new question where you’re saying: ‘I have this current formulation, and I need to achieve all these new properties,’” he says. “And you put them all together in the platform. Then you say: ‘Help me achieve those results,” and the platform will help you find the variables, optimise the process, rebalance ingredient proportions, [and] bring in new ingredients… to have the product at the level you need.”

Costs can be lowered, but that’s not the end game

Does the use of AI bring in cost savings and better returns on investment? “I think you need to extend the entire development time for every single process and project. So every single development would have cost exponentially higher. And on top of that, [it’s] very likely we will never reach a solution,” explains Pichara.

“We haven’t compared what it would have been doing an entire journey without AI, because we were, by design, an AI company from the very beginning,” he adds. “I don’t think a number can capture what would have happened if we were without [AI], because all our work streams were connected to the technology.

“More than cost, it’s about the possibility of discovery. For example, when we launched the NotMilk, it was with pineapple and cabbage. If we didn’t use [the] technology, maybe we [would have] never ended up with that formulation.”

Pichara further notes that NotCo wouldn’t have any business in the B2B domain if it weren’t for AI, which it uses to find product solutions for other companies. “It’s a binary thing: you don’t have the technology, you don’t have a business,” he says.

Industry giants using NotCo’s AI for better products

Speaking of the B2B business, this is one of NotCo’s main areas of focus. “Today, we are working with most of the big players in the CPG industry, and all these companies need product improvement,” says Pichara. Among these are Mars, Mondelēz International, Nestlé, and, of course, Kraft Heinz.

“Usually, they need better nutritional labels, [and] more cost-efficient formulations. Regulations are changing all the time. Governments are pushing towards having better products from many aspects. That’s great for us, because these companies need to improve and renovate their portfolio,” he says.

These companies’ traditional R&D process can take three to five years to update products- NotCo’s tech cuts that time to just three to four months.

“Now, we have several projects with all these companies that are related to reformulation and end-to-end product creation. So we have a few products with some companies in Latin America, and also in the US and in Europe, where we are building entirely new concepts for them,” Pichara says.

Submerging its AI tech in other companies is a “great vehicle” to grow its impact, since it isn’t just constrained to NotCo’s own consumer brand. “We’re doing that in two ways. Some companies are just coming to us and saying: ‘You just develop this product entirely, or you just take care of improving this, and we are not using your technology,’” he suggests.

“But we’re also offering the possibility to other companies to directly adopt our technology within their R&D processes, so they can improve their products.”,

More products in development with Kraft Heinz

While NotCo’s B2B business is seeing triple-digit growth globally, it’s just one part of its expansion plan. The company has its sights on its Latin American CPG division. “We are already the biggest player in the continent in the alternative protein category,” Muchnick tells Green Queen via email. “We are expanding into the snacking category, launching a fast-growing platform of functional snacks.”

The other growth focus is the joint venture with Kraft Heinz. NotCo handed over its CPG business in the US and Canada to the food conglomerate last year, with products like NotMilk now only available online. In these markets, NotCo’s retail presence now occurs in the form of the co-branded products with Kraft Heinz.

“Leveraging Kraft Heinz’s amazing capability to operate at scale is unmatched. Therefore, hopping on this operating system made total sense for our business and theirs,” explains Muchnick.

“The Kraft Heinz joint venture was able to launch eight categories of superior plant-based products (the timeframe from brief to prototype was three to six months),” he says. “We are working on some new products in the pipeline, but the immediate focus is on continuing to grow the eight categories we launched in less than two years.”

He adds: “Similar to other unicorns like Mercado Libre, Uber, and Airbnb, the focus is now on growing profitably across all our business units.”

As an example of its capabilities, Muchnick last week unveiled a new GLP Booster powder for people who have weaned off Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs, or those who can’t or don’t want to use them.

NotCo teases new versions of ‘iconic, famous products’ this year

Pichara, the CTO, spotlights the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model as one of the most important growth areas. “We deeply believe that companies are going to benefit [from] that technology if they adopt it internally,” he says. “We have a few companies, but now we want to expand that business by reaching out to more companies and rolling our technology within their R&D.

“There are several products – very iconic and famous products – that are going to be rolled out this year with a newer version, and we were the ones that reformulated those.”

Many alternative protein companies face uncertainties in the US, thanks largely to comments and policy proposals by health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. Since NotCo isn’t solely focusing on alternative products, this may not directly affect its business.

“Today, our services are around any product improvement you need to do,” says Pichara. “You can improve a product in so many aspects, like process, cost-effectiveness, ingredient replacement, sugar reduction, cocoa reduction – because maybe their price is too high, [or] some of them want to… change the protein.

“But as far as there is an opportunity to make products better for people, we are going to have a business.”