Grace Ashiru
AKA Foods B.V. has revealed that Technology Driven Concepts (TDC), a leading African provider of advanced ingredient solutions and application development, has entered into a multi-year agreement to adopt AKA Foods’ cutting-edge AI-ready platform, AKA Studio, for food research and development (R&D) and knowledge consolidation. AKA Studio, an award-winning platform, helps food companies speed up the creation, optimization, and launch of products in a more efficient, intelligent, and cost-effective manner. TDC chose AKA Studio to enhance customer responsiveness, foster innovation across various categories, and improve decision-making processes.
This partnership, which benefits top consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, retailers, and a global fast food chain, places TDC among the first companies globally to establish a long-term strategy for AI-driven product development. The agreement follows a successful collaboration, where TDC served as an early design partner for AKA Studio. In this role, TDC contributed to demonstrating the platform’s ability to consolidate formulations, experiments, sensory insights, costing data, and tacit knowledge into a unified system that aligns with the workflow of food developers.
As Chris Botha, R&D Director at TDC, notes, adopting AKA Studio marks a transformative shift towards modern, data-driven product development:
“AKA Studio provides our developers with an invaluable resource: the ability to access and utilize all of our knowledge in one central location. It enhances our customer responsiveness, facilitates innovation across categories, and strengthens decision-making processes. By consolidating years of development knowledge into a structured system, AKA Studio positions TDC to leverage food-specific AI as it evolves. This platform future-proofs TDC for the next decade of product development,” says Botha.
“With AKA Studio, our teams will instantly access relevant past work, minimize duplication, and deliver more confident customer responses. It lays the groundwork for us to activate AI capabilities as they advance within the platform,” adds Botha.
Unlike generic tools, AKA Studio is tailored to the specific needs of food development. It organizes formulations, processes, sensory results, cost drivers, and historical project patterns within a unified system. This design enables developers to make faster, more informed decisions while maintaining confidentiality in a secure, siloed cloud environment.
“The pressure on food companies to innovate quickly, adapt to changing customer demands, and manage increasing input costs is mounting. Yet, many R&D teams still rely on disjointed spreadsheets, isolated formulation files, and unstructured project histories, which hinder decision-making and lead to redundant work,” explains Saul Abrahams, VP of Business Development at AKA Foods.
“TDC is a dynamic, multi-category innovator, and their commitment to AKA Studio is a strong endorsement of the platform’s potential. TDC helped shape and test the system against real-world R&D challenges, demonstrating its practical value. This partnership underscores the importance of building robust digital foundations to fully harness the power of emerging AI technologies. Moreover, it highlights South Africa’s leadership in food science and technology across Africa,” concludes Abrahams.
