Innovating nutrition: Roquette boosts consumer engagement with AI technology

AI is becoming a cornerstone in the nutrition industry and transforming how companies develop products and engage with consumers. By harnessing AI-driven persona technology, Roquette is crafting personalized food concepts that resonate with diverse consumer profiles.

According to the company, its latest platform enriches consumer interaction, feeding into its product innovation and ensuring market-relevant offerings.

Nutrition Insight explores the transformative impact of AI on the nutrition industry with Roquette’s head of customer marketing Europe at Roquette, Valérie Le Bihan, who discusses the company’s AI customer platform.

How does Roquette’s AI-driven persona technology enhance the consumer experience and influence product development?
Le Bihan: Roquette’s AI-driven persona technology creates highly personalized food concepts that align with the unique preferences and expectations of diverse consumer profiles. This tailored approach makes the consumer experience more engaging and relevant for our customers, helping them to better envision how our ingredients can meet the needs of the end consumer.

Ultimately, our focus on the industry’s needs and consumer insights ensures that our offering contributes to creating products that truly align with market demand and ensure consumer satisfaction.

What specific functionalities does the AI-driven video platform offer, and how does it tailor the experience to individual consumer profiles?
Le Bihan: Our AI-driven video platform is designed to highlight how our plant-based ingredients bring unique value to tailored end-product concepts for specific consumer profiles or personas. 

The platform immerses visitors in curated food experiences by showcasing evolving market trends and detailing ingredient panels and nutritional profiles of proposed formulations. It also brings these concepts to life through compelling consumer stories and realistic visualizations of how the product could appear on-shelf. 

This personalized, interactive approach ensures the content is highly relevant and engaging, so our customers and prospects feel inspired to deliver an enhanced and impactful food experience.Roquette’s AI platform on display at FiE 2024 in Frankfurt, Germany.

Can you explain how the AI integrated into the video platform processes consumer data to generate personalized food concepts?
Le Bihan: We leveraged AI to generate targeted consumer profiles and impactful concept mock-ups for the showcased end products. The key to harnessing AI effectively lies in providing a well-defined brief — clear guidance that ensures the output is meaningful and reliable. This is where human expertise played a pivotal role.

Our marketing and technical teams combined their deep market knowledge and experience to guide the AI through multiple iterations, ensuring the concepts were relevant, engaging and aligned with consumer needs. The result is a seamless blend of human insight and AI-driven creativity, of which we are incredibly proud. 

Could you provide examples of how the AI platform has directly influenced product innovation or improved the formulation process for Roquette’s offerings?
Le Bihan: AI technology acts as a powerful engine for enhancing innovation and streamlining the formulation process for Roquette’s offering. By accelerating brainstorming sessions and creative processes, our teams can explore new ideas, identify unique solutions and optimize product development much faster.

In what ways does Roquette plan to implement AI technologies in the future, and are there plans to further develop the personas platform?
Le Bihan: We recognize that AI is not just the future — it’s the present. We’re actively exploring AI technologies across several business areas to drive innovation and efficiency. This includes predictive maintenance for our biorefineries to enhance operational reliability, advanced supply chain optimization to streamline processes and improve resource efficiency, and enhanced food safety monitoring to uphold the highest quality standards. 

By leveraging AI, we aim to stay at the forefront of technological advancement, ensuring we meet the evolving needs of our consumers while continuously improving our operations and offering.