Tastewise raises $50M to power the AI brain behind Kraft, Mars, and Campbell’s
The Israeli startup's GenAI platform monitors recipes, eating habits, and social trends to create real-time product pitches.
Tastewise, which has developed a generative AI (GenAI) platform for the food and beverage industry, has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round. The platform converts consumption data and trends into actionable marketing and commercial strategies. The round was led by TELUS Global Ventures, with participation from Disruptive AI, Peakbridge Capital, Duo Partners, and PICO Venture Partners. The new funding brings the company’s total capital raised to $72 million and will support its expansion of AI-powered marketing and sales solutions for global food and beverage brands.
At the core of Tastewise’s offering is a generative AI platform that claims to ingest trillions of real-time food signals - from recipes to restaurant menus to social media content - and combine them with proprietary brand data. The result, it says, is not just insight into consumer behavior, but real-time generation of sales decks, marketing campaigns, and product positioning.
The promise: weeks or months of cross-functional work compressed into minutes.
Food giants are under pressure from all sides. Ingredient inflation, shrinking shelf space, and a rapidly evolving consumer base have made traditional product cycles too slow. In the U.S. foodservice sector alone, 91% of menu changes last quarter were price hikes, and private-label products are reportedly growing four times faster than national brands. Tastewise aims to offer incumbents a way to keep up by accelerating decision-making and execution.
Its tools are already in use at 80% of the top global food and beverage companies, including Mars, Kraft Heinz, and Campbell’s. At Kroger, one product line reportedly moved from testing to national rollout within months, supported by Tastewise-generated marketing collateral and positioning.
In a conversation with Calcalist, Alon Chen, CEO and co-founder of Tastewise, explained: “Back in 2018, we realized that the food industry, one that directly impacts people's health, was disconnected from the end consumer. Major food manufacturers were making decisions without truly understanding consumer behavior. So we created a system that monitors real-time eating and drinking habits. Today, we work with 80% of the largest food and beverage companies in the world. Our AI agents embed directly into their product development and marketing teams, tracking consumption trends and accelerating internal processes.
“Previously, companies would outsource product ideas for validation, a process that took months. That delay was often responsible for innovation failure. Now, with GenAI, we’ve evolved from being a data provider to a full-stack solution, generating not just insights, but product concepts and marketing materials in real time. For instance, we helped a U.S. frozen food brand identify demand for 'Ninja'-style frozen vegetable preparation, opening a whole new product category.”
The capital from the latest round will help expand Tastewise’s presence in North America and Europe, and enhance its AI-driven tools through deeper integration with marketing and sales platforms. The company also plans to recruit dozens of new employees in Israel, primarily in artificial intelligence, data science, and prompt engineering.
Founded in 2018 by Alon Chen and Eyal Gaon, Tastewise currently employs 100 people, with more than 60 based in Israel and the rest in New York, Spain, and remote locations.
