Excerpted from the National Geographic article “Software Creates New Flavors, Some Not for the Squeamish” by Rachel A. Becker
Jonathan Brill, founder of Special Projects Agency, an innovation and design consulting firm based in Sausalito, California, is trying to shake up culinary traditions by creating a program that combines unexpected flavors based on their chemical makeups.
Brill’s passion project—he calls it his “5 to 9 job”—uses data science to create a global cuisine. “Not a 1980s fusion cuisine,” he says, “but something that’s truly a mature exploration of global flavors.” He teamed up with former Special Projects Agency data scientist Jonathan Pelsis and Executive Chef Jamie Simpson of the Culinary Vegetable Institute and Chef’s Garden in Ohio to bring it to fruition.
While IBM’s Chef Watson learns from a magazine’s recipes, Brill says Why Flavors Work uses a novel algorithm that considers both human physiology and food chemistry.
“‘As with most complex machine learning that’s effective, there needs to be a human feedback loop,” Brill says, to help decide which ingredients actually taste good together in the real world, and in what proportion.
