NotCo: How AI can help companies align innovation with new US dietary guidelines

The 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans are prompting food and nutrition companies to rethink their innovation strategies, focusing on reduced sugar, sodium, and saturated fats and increased high-quality protein and fiber.

Nutrition Insight speaks with NotCo’s VP of R&D, Alisia Heath, about how businesses may implement these changes. She warns that companies may face challenges with R&D timelines to make swift changes. However, she points to AI solutions to accelerate product development. 

She highlights Giuseppe, a proprietary platform that enables data synthesis to optimize ingredient choices and significantly reduce trial-and-error. This is especially relevant since companies must decipher unclear terms like “highly processed foods” and “real food” from the dietary guidelines.

What does the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines update signal for companies’ current innovation pipelines?
Heath: Food companies will need to carefully review their innovation and renovation plans to ensure they are complying with potential future regulations. While the report references reducing sugar, sodium, and saturated fats and increasing high-quality protein and dietary fiber, many of the themes that have been referenced recently, such as seed oils, are missing.

Additionally, while the guidelines recommend avoiding highly processed foods, a clear definition of “highly processed” is not provided. To future-proof their product development pipelines, food companies are going to need to make some assumptions or accept the risks associated with reformulation now to stay ahead of the curve.

Why are traditional R&D timelines not suited to sudden shifts in nutrition policy?
Heath: Traditional R&D timelines vary widely — for legacy R&D teams, adapting portfolios to meet new expectations around ingredients, processing, and nutrition typically takes 18–24 months. Given how quickly regulatory guidance and consumer preferences are changing, accelerating any part of the development process is critical to staying relevant. 

NotCo’s VP of R&D, Alisia Heath.NotCo AI is designed specifically for addressing pain points within food product development. By leveraging Giuseppe, we are able to identify white spaces in the market and collapse this traditional time-to-market paradigm from years into a matter of weeks. Whether it is defining a product concept, discovering ingredients and a starting formulation, or getting to the final prototype, NotCo AI can accelerate product development timelines.

Giuseppe treats food innovation as a data problem. It synthesizes ingredient chemistry, formulations, sensory readouts, manufacturing parameters, and consumer data into a single decision-making engine. This allows us to:

• Reduce trial and error: Giuseppe reduces trial and error by up to 10 times, transforming bold ideas into market-ready products with unprecedented speed and accuracy.
• Solve multidimensional challenges: The platform processes thousands of variables, such as cost, flavor, availability, sustainability, and regulatory limits, simultaneously. For example, in a recent project to reduce sugar for a popular beverage, Giuseppe was able to 100% match the quantitative sensory experience of the full-sugar product in the first batch, reducing sugar content from 13 g to 2 g in just five weeks.
• Bridge the policy-to-shelf gap: As policy conversations move toward implementation, AI is becoming the missing layer between nutrition guidance and what actually makes it to the shelf, helping brands pressure-test and adapt products to evolving nutrition frameworks faster than ever before.

How are brands interpreting “real food” and reduced processing?
Heath: Given that a definition of “highly processed foods” is not yet available, companies are having to create their own definitions. For “real food,” this often means avoiding artificial ingredients or ones that consumers perceive as unnatural. 

Regarding processing, companies are determining what falls in and out of scope for them. One approach we are seeing is a shift toward using more transparent or familiar processes instead of multi-step or chemically intensive methods. The goal is to make the ingredient deck “explainable” to the average consumer. 

How can AI help shorten the gap between new nutrition guidance and products reaching shelves?
Heath: With so many changes, AI is essential to balance all the requirements that food companies face. Each product is a complex equation: taste, cost, accessibility, regulation, shelf life, sustainability, metabolic impact, and microbiome interaction. Changing one variable can affect the entire solution. This challenge cannot be solved through ideology, nor through slow, linear trial-and-error in the lab.

AI is increasingly shaping how food companies adapt products to meet the upcoming 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines.NotCo AI is able to rapidly identify ingredients that support reformulation requirements. By accounting for regulatory standards and nutrition guidelines while maintaining the same sensory experience, NotCo AI integrates all of these factors to arrive at solutions faster than traditional product development.

What are the biggest barriers to reformulating products under tighter expectations around ingredients and processing?
Heath: Legacy products have been developed over the years using the tools provided by the industry. Functional ingredients, like preservatives, were originally created in order to extend shelf life and stability. Reformulating to remove these ingredients or to reduce processing will have an impact not only on the flavor of the product but also on shelf life and cost. 

Consumers are very familiar with these legacy products and continue to prioritize value, so getting the reformulation right without breaking the price model or altering the taste they love is critical for maintaining market share.

Nutrition Insight recently explored the science, policy, and ideology behind the 2025–2030 US dietary guidelines with dsm-firmenich, the American Society for Nutrition, and a nutrition expert. Critics have argued the final guidelines diverge sharply from the 2025 advisory committee’s recommendations, raising concerns about industry influence and transparency.