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Breaking News2025 Food and Beverage Trends

AI Ups the Stakes for Faster, Smarter Food & Beverage Innovation

From data-led R&D to demand-driven formulation, new AI partnerships are reshaping how brands develop and launch products

By Prepared Foods Editorial Staff
Brand Logos AI Usage
IMAGE COURTESY OF: The Magnum Ice Cream Co., NotCo, Starday and SPINS
October 8, 2025

Starday, an AI-driven product innovation platform, announced the launch of Starday Innovation, a new strategic partnership offering for food and beverage teams. Starday Innovation brings together AI and data-powered R&D to help teams accelerate decision-making throughout the product development cycle. Designed to reduce risk, shorten time to market, and drive organic growth, the platform equips brands with clear, actionable guidance so teams can move from idea to execution with greater clarity, confidence and efficiency.

Starday offers end-to-end collaboration for its partners – combining AI-powered tools with culinary R&D and deep F&B expertise to equip F&B brands with predictive insights and tailored guidance. From identifying the next demand-driving trend, to designing and launching products that earn shelf placement, drive velocity and repeat purchase, Starday enables faster, smarter and de-risked innovation that aligns with evolving consumer priorities and category dynamics.

“Everyone’s looking to AI to magically solve their problems, but the reality is, AI is a tool. That means that it's only effective when teams are aligned, empowered and know how to use it with clarity and purpose,” Chaz Flexman, CEO and co-founder of Starday, said in a release. “We built Starday’s Innovation platform to address the biggest challenges food and beverage teams face in product development – overwhelming data, chasing misleading signals, and working within rigid, siloed R&D processes. As we built our own brands, we heard the same need across the industry: tools that cut through the noise, deliver actionable insights, and help teams move from idea to execution with more speed and confidence. That's exactly what we've created, and we're excited to share it with industry to help fuel faster, lower-risk product innovation that drives standout growth.”

The tools:

- Trend Exploration: Most trend reports skim the surface. Starday’s digs deep—quantifying cultural relevance, utility, and momentum.
- AI Consumer Content Analysis: Consumers are shouting their needs online—most teams just can’t accurately hear them. This tool turns the chaos into clear, scalable insight.
- Consumer Predictions: Static segmentations miss the moment. Starday models enable flexible segmentations, capture evolving behaviors, and provide topical insights.
- Product Review Insights: Thanks to bots, review data is lying. Starday cuts through bots and bias to surface what actually drives sentiment.
- Retail Product Database: Syndicated data shows what’s on shelf. Starday identifies what’s missing—and where products can win.


SPINS, a provider of data, insights and commerce solutions that power the entire CPG ecosystem, announced two new commercial platforms designed to meet the rapidly evolving needs of brands, retailers and business leaders as they contend with industry disruption, and to position the company for rapid and relevant growth. The company is building on its foundation by extending its expertise into digital marketing (SPINS Journey) and AI enablement (SPINS Foundry).

SPINS’ growth has been accelerated through strategic acquisitions and organic investments over the past two years, adding or enhancing capabilities in digital experiences, shopper engagement, digital product data, and real-time, hyperlocal data to strengthen its ability to help customers navigate this new era.

“SPINS has long been the trusted language of our industry, giving brands and retailers clarity and confidence,” Jay Margolis, CEO of SPINS, said in a release.  “As the CPG industry adapts to the realities of anywhere commerce, purpose-driven consumption, and AI-powered engagement, our new framework, anchored in Foundry, Intelligence, and Journey, provides the tools and insights to navigate disruption and shape the next era of growth.”

By integrating these platforms, SPINS extends its capabilities to be a purpose-built growth partner for the entire CPG ecosystem—equipping brands and retailers to anticipate disruption, adapt quickly, and thrive in a rapidly changing marketplace. 

- SPINS Intelligence: Decode performance and market dynamics. An AI insights platform using leading market data and deep analytics to uncover opportunities, sell with excellence, and innovate the next generation of products
- SPINS Journey: Engage with shoppers. Anywhere. A modern marketing platform designed to orchestrate shopper journeys from discovery to purchase on physical, digital, and agentic shelves.
- SPINS Foundry: Power the digital and agentic shelf. A data platform for applications and agents, powering the way products are surfaced, adapted, and optimized across channels.


The Magnum Ice Cream Company (TMICC), and NotCo AI ("NotCo"), announced a dynamic partnership designed to accelerate demand-driven innovation and growth for the future of the ice cream category in the United States. 

Through this new partnership, TMICC will pilot NotCo’s AI platform to develop new product formats and nutritional profiles, continuing to shape when and how ice cream is consumed, while building on its 160-year legacy as a category leader.

”At The Magnum Ice Cream Company, we believe AI will be a catalyst for unlocking the next generation of food innovation,” Zbigniew Lewicki, chief research, design and innovation officer at TMICC, said in a release. “Partnering with NotCo allows us to explore how advanced AI tools can help us solve complex formulation challenges faster and more precisely, while keeping consumer needs at the heart of everything we do. We believe that the real magic happens when AI, robotics, and human expertise come together, each exceptional on its own, but exponentially more powerful in combination."

As TMICC’s innovation partner, NotCo is using its cutting edge, end-to-end AI platform, Giuseppe AI, to provide AI-guided innovation and product design. Already used by some of the world’s largest food and beverage CPG companies, NotCo’s technology represents the first vertical-specific foundational model for the CPG industry, establishing a new paradigm of domain-specific AI infrastructure. The platform is trained on a unique, high-quality, proprietary dataset of food and consumable properties accumulated over a decade. TMICC will leverage Giuseppe AI’s experience to solve complex, high-value formulation and product development challenges in record time as a means for driving growth through rapid innovation cycles. 

“It's extraordinary that ten years after we first envisioned AI transforming everything, we're now helping, among others, the world's largest ice cream company overcome their most complex growth and innovation challenges,” Matias Muchnick, co-founder and CEO of NotCo, said in a release. “As we look ahead to our next chapter, we’re beyond excited to partner with TMICC and supercharge its innovation roadmap with our AI technology.”

This collaboration reflects a shared commitment to redefining what’s possible in food innovation. By combining TMICC’s consumer-centric approach and deep category expertise with NotCo’s advanced AI capabilities, the partnership aims to unlock new opportunities for smarter, faster product development. Together, TMICC and NotCo are exploring how technology can shape the future of food, delivering better experiences for consumers and driving transformation across the industry.

KEYWORDS: artificial intelligence (AI) Consumer insights consumer research food innovation food product development food r&d food research & development ice cream

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