“This agreement marks an exciting step forward for Barry Callebaut and for our customers,” says Peter Feld, CEO of Barry Callebaut. “It reflects our commitment to creating the best customer experience by boosting innovation and speed to market. By combining our deep chocolate expertise and global reach with NotCo’s advanced AI capabilities, we’re aiming to unlock speed for breakthrough recipe solutions—from health-forward formulations to functional ingredients and Nutri-Score-friendly options. With the pace of change across the industry and the cocoa market, our customers’ needs are evolving rapidly. This collaboration enables us to test how AI can enhance process efficiency and scale our innovation efforts to meet future demands and allows us to accelerate our ways of working to deliver the best possible customer experience.”

The project aims to explore the development of the next generation of chocolate, potentially setting a new standard for how food companies innovate. By testing AI-driven formulation processes, the collaboration seeks to shorten development cycles, improve hit rates, and digitally empower every scientist and chef to create with unprecedented speed and precision, delivering exceptional taste while advancing sustainability goals, the companies note.

"Our high-fidelity data corpus collected for the past 10 years has become the most fundamental value proposition for the next generation of CPG and ingredient companies of the future," says Matias Muchnick, co-founder and CEO of NotCo AI. "By integrating Barry Callebaut's unparalleled chocolate knowledge with our general-purpose approach platform, we're creating a personalized and unique innovation engine that will set a new standard for the entire industry." 

The initiative forms part of Barry Callebaut’s multi-year digitalization agenda, where Barry Callebaut is aiming to pioneer the chocolate industry by entering into the AI era and reinforcing the company's commitment to deliver breakthrough innovation.

Climate pressure, ingredient shortages, and rising cocoa costs have forced the chocolate industry to reformulate products and deploy substantial R&D budgets to address supply chain disruptions. By combining Barry Callebaut's category expertise with NotCo AI’s technology, both companies are aiming to proactively building a resilient future for chocolate innovation that maintains taste and quality regardless of volatile agricultural conditions.

NotCo AI’s platform has already powered hundreds of successful product launches for some of the world's largest food and beverage companies, the company says. Its AI’s technology is trained on a unique proprietary dataset of food and consumable properties accumulated over 10 years.

Related: Barry Callebaut debuts $104M chocolate plant in Canada