Is the world of chocolate heading toward the same fate as the dodo bird?
It may be a surprise to some to consider that a centuries-old, worldwide favorite like chocolate is on its way out, but the reality is that most experts agree that climate change, ingredient shortages, rising prices, and other global pressures have put chocolate in jeopardy. Some even predict that it could one day become extinct.
The impending peril has meant that every global chocolate supplier has started looking for ways to adapt to the future, and increasingly, one of those ways is to do what many companies both in and outside of food are doing: look to AI to accelerate change. Some, like Hershey’s, have developed their own tools such as Atlas, while others are looking to companies with deep experience building AI models focused on food to help transform their business.
In that second category is a new partnership between Barry Callebaut, one of the world’s largest premium chocolate makers, and NotCo, the AI-powered food company that has made a name for itself in recent years with its Giuseppe food AI platform. The deal calls for NotCo AI to embed what it describes as its foundational AI platform directly into Barry Callebaut’s R&D pipeline. The announcement says the collaboration gives Barry Callebaut access to the same engine that has helped NotCo accelerate formulation cycles, solve complex ingredient challenges, and unlock unexpected flavor and functionality breakthroughs for global CPG brands.
For NotCo, the deal marks its most significant category-wide integration yet and reinforces what CEO Matias Muchnick said he and his cofounders believed from the very beginning. NotCo is not simply a maker of plant-based food. It is a next-generation R&D operating system for the food industry.
“This is exactly what we built NotCo for,” Muchnick said at SKS 2025 in July. “The value of our platform comes from a decade of high-fidelity data, from formulations and ingredient chemistry to sensory outputs and manufacturing parameters, all connected so we can solve multi-dimensional problems faster and with no human bias.”
The two companies plan to feed Barry Callebaut’s 100-year knowledge base and ingredient data into NotCo’s AI foundation model and build what they are calling the chocolate industry’s first end-to-end AI innovation hub. The goal is to iterate on new formulations, explore functional ingredients, and optimize for sustainability, cost, and Nutri-Score constraints.
At Future Food Tech in the spring, Muchnick gave a presentation that emphasized their push to become the go-to partner for AI transformation. The company’s Kraft Heinz partnership had already given them some street cred, so it is no surprise that they have seen strong interest from global food brands.
“Every big food company is having board-level conversations: do we have the technology to adapt to new consumers, shortages, and regulations? And consistently the answer is no,” Muchnick said at SKS in July. “That is why they’re coming to us. Everything changed in the last six months.”
In a sense, food AI specialists like NotCo are in a race against time as bigger general-purpose foundation models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and others become easier for different industries to customize with their proprietary data. Most CPGs do not yet have it in their DNA to build AI-forward development cycles, but that is likely to change in the next five years as boards demand transformation while they watch competitors accelerate product development and, in categories like chocolate, identify new alternatives in a market where environmental pressure, inflation, cost volatility, and other external factors force their hand.
“The companies that don’t adopt AI the right way will get the Blockbuster effect,” said Muchnick. “They’ll become obsolete. The future food companies will be AI companies.”
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