AKA Foods - a shared language for food development

Food manufacturers typically spend years bringing a single product to market, a timeline shaped less by scientific complexity than by fragmented systems that keep sensory data, regulatory files, and ingredient specifications in separate silos.

AKA Foods (Netherlands, founded 2021) was established by CEO David Sack and Chief Scientist Professor Alex Bronstein with the goal of developing a vegan pizza cheese. The process exposed broader inefficiencies in food product development, leading the company to build AKA Studio, a secure, SaaS-based AI platform that consolidates a manufacturer's formulations, sensory evaluations, and research outputs into a single unified system.

The platform integrates sensory data on texture, aroma, and taste with AI-driven formulation guidelines through what the company describes as a "language for food", a domain-specific framework it states generic AI models cannot replicate. AKA Studio claims to reduce ingredient costs by up to 15%, cut reformulation cycles by 50%, and accelerate product development by a factor of three through data-based decision-making.

The platform supports clean-label reformulation, sugar and fat reduction, and supply chain resilience, priorities referenced under the EU Farm to Fork Strategy.

AKA Foods raised $17.2 million in seed funding, seeing the participation of Michael Bronstein. The capital will fund the global rollout of AKA Studio to enterprise customers and support the company's expansion into adjacent sectors, including flavours, fragrance, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals, where sensory precision plays an equivalent role to food product development.

Sources: AKA Foods, EU Farm to Fork Strategy, Innovation Origins