AI‑powered Ooby™: a creative ally in food and beverage innovation
Mastering digital transformation is key to unlocking the opportunities technology offers.
We explore how artificial intelligence and big data can revolutionise our flavour and fragrance creations, what new value-added services digital platforms can deliver to our customers, and how we can push the boundaries of our industry by developing innovative, digitally-enabled business models.
One key example is Ooby™, an AI‑powered creative platform that helps marketing and product development teams accelerate their creative process, remove bottlenecks, and generate inspiring concepts for categories such as beverages, snacks, confectionery, and dairy. Short for ‘Out of the Box’ and pronounced as U-be, Ooby™ generates category‑specific, on‑trend concepts in seconds, saving time and stimulating creativity.
Rapid, widespread uptake
Ooby™ emerged from Givaudan’s Digital Factory team in Paris, who worked closely with marketing and commercial colleagues to ensure that the tool was not just technically innovative, but also relevant to customer needs. Their success is evident. Since its launch, Ooby™ has evolved from an innovative prototype into a go‑to creative ally used across the globe. More than 300 projects across beverages, snacks, confectionery, and dairy portfolios have already been created with Ooby™ worldwide, and more than 70% of our marketers now use the platform daily.
Success stems from the fact that the platform addresses familiar bottlenecks in the fast‑moving world of food and beverage innovation. Whether in terms of visual communication and the endless hours searching for suitable images, the inspiration for finding ‘the good idea’, or time‑consuming copywriting to find fitting words to describe every element from scratch, opportunities could be missed because the process was too slow or fragmented. Before Ooby™, even the most talented teams were slowed down by these familiar constraints.
Productivity booster and creative partner
Combining creative assets, sensory cues, consumer insights, and an intuitive visual experience, Ooby™ speeds up steps that used to take days or weeks. A marketer can, for instance, start with a single keyword, persona, or mood, and Ooby™ will propose dozens of concept directions in minutes. Complete with imagery, naming inspiration, descriptors, and flavour territories, the platform guides users through every item in the marketing mix of the product concept smoothly. Trained with a mix of external and proprietary Givaudan data, Ooby™ integrates a unique source of knowledge, producing outstanding concepts differentiated from what other tools on the market may offer. Going beyond internal application, the tool is also used with customers in co-creation workshops, allowing us to be more proactive, be present earlier in the customer's value chain, and secure more exclusive briefs.
Every project brings new insights, creative patterns, and assets, making Ooby’s scalable and future-focused inspiration engine increasingly relevant over time and turning the platform into both a productivity booster and a creative partner for daily work, enabling faster time‑to‑market.
Sacha, a Beverages Marketing Manager in Europe, used Ooby™ with her team to explore personas, emotion territories, and flavour worlds to address an ambitious brief for a fast‑moving beverage innovation. Within hours, the platform delivered ready‑to‑share moodboards, flavour notes, and copy that enabled seamless collaboration with technical and added‑value service teams, moving from idea to compelling creative direction in record time.
Differentiating, scalable and future-focused
Looking ahead, this unique, scalable and future-focused platform will integrate broader market data, deeper connection to Givaudan’s ingredient portfolio, packaging brand alignment tools, and enhanced collaboration features such as real‑time co‑creation, sharing, and feedback within the platform.
By piloting emerging technologies, we are shaping the next era of customer experience, redefining how we create, develop, and deliver flavours and fragrances that delight consumers while driving greater value for our customers.