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Two companies set out to do the same audacious thing: let a machine design food.
One produced a blue cheese that blind-tasting judges named a winner. The other built an AI that invents and formulates new products, and patented it. Neither of them is trying to sell you food anymore.
The cheese that cleared a blind tasting
Climax Foods, founded in Berkeley by an astrophysicist who had been a data scientist at Google, treated cheese as a solvable data problem. In 2024 that pitch got tested by someone other than the company: Climax Blue was named a winner at the Good Food Awards, a competition decided by blind tasting, with a panel the foundation describes as nearly 300 industry leaders, technical experts, grocers, chefs and food writers.
Then on 22 April 2024, a week before the ceremony, it was disqualified. Two reasons: the cheese contained kokum butter, which the foundation said may not be FDA GRAS-approved, and the product was not “retail ready.” Neither reason is about taste.
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What happened next
Production of Climax Blue paused during 2025. On 6 October 2025 the company rebranded as Bettani Farms, closed an initial $6.5 million Series A led by S2G Investments, and hired a new chief executive, Sandeep Patel. Founder Oliver Zahn is, in Patel’s words, “no longer a part of the team.” The new focus is a plant protein sold to other manufacturers — not award-winning blue cheese.
NotCo made the same move. Its Giuseppe AI, which formulated NotMilk and the Kraft Heinz Not Cheese slices, is now sold as business software promising to “reduce your trial and error by up to 10x.” We could find no independent evaluation of that figure. NotCo handed its North American consumer operations to Kraft Heinz in 2024.
The pattern is not sinister, but it is consistent: the AI is real, and it is being sold to food manufacturers, not to you.
The appliance version is smaller than it sounds
Samsung’s AI Vision, the camera system in its Bespoke AI refrigerators, recognized 37 food items as of April 2025 — fresh fruits and vegetables. Packaged foods have to be registered by hand, up to 50 of them. Thirty-seven is a real number, and it is small, which tells you far more than the phrase “AI-powered kitchen” ever will.
The part you can actually check, for free
In 2011 four network scientists published Flavor network and the principles of food pairing in Scientific Reports. It is open access. They took 56,498 recipes, linked 381 ingredients to the 1,021 flavor compounds known to be in them, and asked whether cooks pair ingredients that share chemistry.
The answer split the world in two. North American and Western European recipes use compound-sharing pairs significantly more than chance predicts. East Asian and Southern European recipes use them significantly less.
Their own examples:
Coffee and beef share 102 flavor compounds.
Shrimp and lemon share 9.
Chocolate and blue cheese share at least 73.
And the caveat that never survives the retelling: the effect is carried by a handful of ingredients. Remove 13 from the North American data — milk, butter, cocoa, vanilla, cream, cream cheese, egg, peanut butter, strawberry, cheddar cheese, orange, lemon and coffee — and the signal collapses. Those 13 appear in 74.4% of all recipes. It is less a hidden rule of taste than an accurate description of Western baking.
What to do this week
Cook one deliberate high-overlap pairing — a spoonful of finely ground coffee in a beef rub is the cheapest version of the experiment — and then one deliberate low-overlap pairing, like shrimp and lemon. Notice that both are good. That is the honest lesson: compound sharing is a real, measurable pattern in Western recipes, and it is not a rule for what tastes good.
And when you meet an AI food claim, ask the two-part question: who is making it, and where can it be checked? “Blind-tasting judges named it a winner” is a fundamentally different kind of statement from “up to 10x,” even when both appear in the same article in the same confident tone.
The machines really are getting good at this. But right now the AI most likely to change what ends up on your plate is not in your kitchen — it is in a food manufacturer’s R&D department, and you will never see its name on the box.
The site version has the full breakdown, a proof table showing exactly how far each claim can be traced, an interactive flavor-pairing test, and the copy-paste prompt that plans the experiment around what is actually in your kitchen.