Puratos teams up with the longest established AI research group of Europe

Nurturing consumers’ health & well-being has been part of Puratos’ DNA since its founding 100 years ago.

This engagement remains intact and as relevant as ever as the company remains committed to providing products and solutions with the best possible nutritional value without compromising on taste, texture or quality.

Puratos is working tirelessly to increase the availability of ingredients recognized for their positive impact on health (such as fruits, fibres and wholegrains) and decrease the presence of ingredients such as salt, certain fats and sugars. They also focus on launching more transparent, ‘cleaner labels’, gut health promoting compounds as well as organic, gluten free and plant-based alternatives.

Puratos further demonstrates its commitment to Health & Well-Being through the AI Healthy Food Project, which recently secured a VLAIO funding.

Over the years, Puratos has developed its knowledge and understanding of ingredient interaction and created a considerable number of recipes, generating a large amount of data, big data.

With this AI Healthy Food project, the company aims to implement data science and machine learning as a measure to translate the Health & Well-Being strategy in the design of nutritionally optimized recipes by identifying healthier ingredients and understanding their behaviour during and after backing processes.

Predictive modelling will then serve to translate these insights into automatic recommendations for development of recipes with healthy characteristics and a more balanced nutritional profile while maintaining the end characteristics of the finished good such as its taste, texture, or freshness.

We will leverage these results to train an AI model that will help Puratos continuously improve new recipes towards more healthy alternatives.

"The  Artificial Intelligence Lab (aka “AI Lab”) of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel is the first-established research lab for A.I. in Continental Europe, and will act as a key partner in the AI Healthy Food Project.
Founded in 1983 by Prof. Dr. Luc Steels, it is internationally recognized for its research expertise in Reinforcement Learning, Natural Language Processing and Computational Creativity. Its active research team has made major contributions to business throughout the years, combining fundamental and applied research to enterprise. It is included in Reuters “Top 100: Europe’s Most Innovative Universities 2019″ ranking and has alumni reaching as far as MIT, Sony, Prowler and DeepMind.

The Lifelong Learning Program is an outward-facing educational initiative created by the AI Lab. It aims to empower professionals of today with in-depth knowledge on AI. The knowledge we share is accumulated through decades of academic scientific research."