Tasting Tomorrow Today — Tastewise Co-Founder and CEO Alon Chen

Fred Schonenberg
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the VentureFuel Visionaries podcast. I'm your host, Fred Schonenberg, and I am thrilled today to have a conversation with one of the co-founders and the CEO of Tastewise, Alon Chen. Alon is a former Google CMO. He is using AI to decode what people crave before they know it, giving brands a real-time window into the future of food.

From building a category-defining company to riding the startup rollercoaster, Alon's going to share how data, culture, and taste are colliding and why the old way of tracking trends is already obsolete. So whether you're leading innovation on a global brand or just obsessed with food and tech, this conversation is packed with insights. I'm so excited to welcome Alon to the show. Alon, thank you for joining us.

Alon Chen
Fred, thank you so much for having me today.

Fred Schonenberg
So I want to start at the beginning. You were the CMO at Google in Israel and Greece, and went from that to founding this AI-powered food intelligence platform. What sparked that career shift? How did you come to this moment? 

Alon Chen
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, after a very long career at the corporate, since I was very young, I grew up at Google. I loved building a global business that turned into a multi-billion business. But I live in the startup nation, and it's always there. Everybody's building something. It's like Silicon Valley. And so I had this bug. I really wanted to create something on my own.

And then everything really started in my family's WhatsApp group, where my mom is making amazing Iraqi Jewish food every Shabbat dinner. And I found out that every Wednesday, she was writing to us on the WhatsApp group, the family WhatsApp group, what is your new shtick this week? Which diets are you on? We would come on a Friday, and we were on different diets, and she got very frustrated. 

Then very quickly, my business senses were working, and I was like, this is big. I mean, new diets, new trends, culinary preferences, restrictions. I mean, how is the industry coping with that? And then I found that it's a $10 trillion industry with very little understanding and connection to the most important part of this industry, the consumer. And this is where we started and turned from a great idea to a very successful business today.

Fred Schonenberg
So for those that don't know, can you tell them a little bit about what Tastewise is?

Alon Chen
Yes, absolutely. So we are a vertical SaaS solution for food and beverage. We're some sort of a marketing cloud, sales and marketing cloud that comes with the most important consumer intelligence and data set on food and beverage. So we'd connect to every single food delivery platform and read every menu and item. We know the bestsellers of every restaurant. We have the largest home cooking panel in the world with more than a trillion data points on how people cook at home and all the way to embedded social media.

We connect to your food brand assets and digital platforms, as well as the sales data and so on. And we basically help you digitize your entire go-to-market, connect to consumers, run the right marketing campaigns, come up with the new flavors for your new yogurt brand, and all the way to enabling your sales people to actually get yourself to the right distribution channel.

Fred Schonenberg
I love it. So you guys are analyzing billions of data points around food behavior. Could you maybe talk to some of the more surprising trends or things that you've uncovered recently just to ground people in how this is sort of at that cutting edge?

Alon Chen
Yeah, absolutely. The interesting thing is that trends, even if it seems like they're just popping up now, there is a foundation with human need or consumer behavior that's much longer. One of the trends we've been analyzing for a very long time now, the Dubai chocolate, right? It's just like a culinary trend. But actually, if you look at the underlying consumer behavior, pistachio has been such a prevalent ingredient in every dessert in the past three, four years, as well as Middle Eastern desserts. It's been rising all over, not just in the Middle East, not just in Dubai, but actually made it all the way to the US. So when the chef put together all of this, it was just the right time in the right place. So the Dubai chocolate is a great example. 

But if we're looking at what I think is the most exciting opportunity today is around hydration. And you would say, what's hydration? And I'd say in beverages, what consumers are understanding now and the business and the industry is also responding to that is that we understand that the water we're drinking does not include all the minerals that our body needs. So we would drink water and go run, rush to the toilets without actually observing all the liquid to our body. So people are adding Celtic salt, Baja salt, that are full, yeah, they have some sodium, but they're loaded with minerals as a way to actually observe water and hydrate their cells.

So a lot of brands are actually coming up. And if you're looking online today, you can't find the main brands for this salt anywhere. And it also taps into the rise of liquid IV liquid, where actually the industry has already responded to what we've been saying, three, four years ago, but now it's, it's everywhere.

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah, it's very cool. I remember my mom, I just saw her and she was like, what is that? What is that little packet you have? And I was like, oh, it's basically salt to put in my water. She was like, why would you do that? And I'm like, don't worry, you'll read about it soon enough.

Alon Chen
There you go. So hydration is big. Another trend we've been following very carefully for a long time is actually fermentation. Do you remember the rise of kombucha? People understood that fermenting on fermented mushrooms in this case is highly nutrient for your gut. Your gut health is your brain health. And so there is an involvement moving to the comeback of kimchi fermenting pickles at home and all the way to the crazy trend around cottage cheese that is mostly fermented in product that you can add to some flour and create the baked good or add to your eggs and whisk it and create a great high protein omelet.

It's also more nutritious and good for your gut. So that is another trend that's evolving and actually becoming bigger and bigger. So cottage cheese is already there. Kombucha is already there. What's next? Another fermented good that is easy to put together in your kitchen into a new dish. And so watch this as well.

Fred Schonenberg
Very interesting. How is AI changing the way food and beverage brands are making decisions about innovation? I mean, I've certainly seen it from years ago, how innovation was ideated upon. And I'm curious how obviously Tastewise would be at the center of this answer, but how is AI changing how innovation is happening at large companies?

Alon Chen
First, we have to remember that consumer trends and shifts are happening much faster than ever before because of AI, because of all the algorithms that actually are serving you new content on your TikTok, Instagram, or even when you're searching for a recipe online, right? So there's a lot more content, a lot more options, and a lot more information consumers are exposed to. And so the consumers are creating big shifts. And so the market and the industry really needs to respond to that. So brands, unlike when we started the business back in 2018, we had to explain to them why the shifts are happening so fast and why AI is important for them and what's computer vision and what's MLP. 

And today it's clear and apparent to every single healthy business that they need to catch up. And so AI is not just the disruptor, it's also the solution for them, right? So many of the brands started where we started, which is like, let's understand consumers. We can now process a trillion data points every single month that shows us how people cook at home or billions of social convos to understand why people are choosing to buy chocolate or cottage cheese for their bagged goods. And this was not possible before, but that's not enough, right? 

It's also important to understand that once you understand what the trend, what the consumer needs are, you can actually get to the market much, much faster. So I can now, with a click of a button, give you like 10 different ideas for your new flavor for your, let's say, your word brand. And you don't even need to go and execute on it. You just put it on an online testing platform, you put it out in front of consumers, you see what they're responding to best, and then you narrow down your options. And so your loop of innovation can turn from six months, nine months research and so on. You don't need that anymore.

Let the consumers choose for themselves. And this can be done with AI that can create your product in 2000 different variations and put it in front of consumers and then go and execute and build a product that is tasty and put all the right food science behind it. 

Fred Schonenberg
I think it's super exciting. Do you, I mean, you guys work with Pepsi, Nestle, Campbell's, all sorts of industry leaders helping them find white space. Is there an example of maybe a case, right? Or something that you could share a little bit where a client of yours saw an insight and then acted on that to drive some sort of new opportunity.

Alon Chen
Yeah, absolutely. So I will not name the brand, but basically we've worked with one of the largest fruit and vegetables brands in the US. And five years ago, we helped them see that Gen Z is using frozen vegetables with their kitchen appliance, air fryer, Ninja, that was not as it was just getting into the markets back then. And we helped them repackage their product and put an air fried version of their frozen line and triple their profit.

And this is just an example where you take a consumer need and you just bring the right product in front of them and you help them solve dinner and a side dish for your dinner, or actually instead of ordering maybe your unhealthy option to actually get something so easy because they are looking for convenient and at a great value. 

Fred Schonenberg
Very cool. I love that. I also love having the vegetables from the air fryer. So it's good to know you guys, you guys spotted that early. One of the things we're talking a little bit offline ahead of time is first congratulations on the $50 million Series B. Having gone through that experience, I was mentioning to you that like, I remember seeing you guys, it might have been 2018. It was really, really early. And now you've worked with over half of the Fortune 100 food and bev companies. 

What advice do you have for any founders that are listening on navigating that, that early stage when AI wasn't on the tip of everyone's tongue. So you were doing a lot of educating, probably getting a lot of nos. Curious if you have any advice for founders out there that are maybe a little earlier in their journey.

Alon Chen
Yeah. It's interesting. You mentioned AI back in 2018. It was, it was a little bit too early to the markets. Okay. So also you need to understand sometimes when, when are you too early? Right. And we were too early in either of the curve in different, in other ways to say that, because AI for, was actually a strange word and concept for food and beverage for the industry we were selling into. So we were only targeting early adopters. 

And at the same time, investors didn't really understand why we needed to focus on a vertical, even though it's a big domain of food and beverage. And so you have to listen very carefully. And we went through, because we developed really cutting edge technology. We were able to get through the phase of educating the market, right? Because this is what we had to do. 

So my first, my first recommendation is really trying to see, are you way, way, way too early? And can you actually structure a solution where you do not need to do market education, both for your investors and for you need to be a little bit more, a little bit ahead of the zeitgeist and the trend, but you cannot be way too early.

Luckily for us, we worked really hard and we were able to wait and anticipate until ChatGPT launched in 2022. We restructured our entire product and offering, and we had a gen AI to every single part of their process. And we moved from it being a data platform and a trend prediction platform to a marketing cloud, right? Because we were able to take this unique asset and mode and actually act upon it. So this is really important. 

The second thing, and you mentioned fortune 100, and we are working with the biggest brands in the world, and we're adding a couple of dozen more of them every single quarter. The most important thing I came from the corporate side. You really have to under promise and over deliver. There's no other option. I mean, with the big brands, just walk in and tell them, what is it that you know how to do and you can do really well and really truly deliver on that. We did it from the first day with great partnership. For instance, with PepsiCo, and we're very grateful for their partnership. But we always deliver. We always make sure that we know how to over deliver and provide them even more than what they've been promised. 

Fred Schonenberg
So I want to kind of go to the other end of that question, which is now, I don't know if I have a conversation where AI isn't said. Obviously, we're talking to very large companies. We're talking about innovation. So it makes sense. But a lot of these large companies don't really know what to do with AI. They know they need to do something, but they're nervous, right? For a number of very valid reasons. It's new technology, what will it do? 

Then you get into IT and cybersecurity and all the legal procurement sides. We don't have to go into that. I'm curious for R&D innovation leaders and large CPGs that are listening to this, how do they best start to experiment with AI? And can it actually accelerate their timelines? What advice would you have for those that are maybe just getting into this game?

Alon Chen
Yeah, I think the most important thing is to first choose a business challenge that is really worthy of your time and resources, right? So everyone wants to adopt and so on, and it's a cool project. And then you move on to the next thing. Really, if there's something so important for you, then you will invest the right time and you'll get your legal and procurement teams behind you because they understand the upside of solving this with cutting edge technology. So this is really, it's important not to become just a nice site project, but actually to see how you can be helping your core business and challenges. This is the first thing. 

The second thing, and this is something Gen AI and a lot of startups out there have a lot of money for sales and marketing. So they come in and they sell you everything. And then you really need to think about your edge, your footprint. Is your edge really to develop IP around Gen AI? Is it really worthy of your time, not just to develop and implement, but also to maintain? Maintaining software at an enterprise grade takes a lot of resources and effort. And these are the preliminary questions that come to my mind that I'm having these conversations constantly with leaders. 

And I think you really have to be suspicious of when you're being pitched. And really the most important thing is to actually find references to successful comparables. Because again, as I mentioned, the generic Gen AI solution, they raise a lot of money, they have a lot of sales and marketing, and they come to you and they put together great presentations, but show me the real productivity and the real outputs of similar and comparable. Otherwise you're getting into a high risk experiment and thinking about your Gen AI IP, where does it sit? Is that really what you're gonna be making your valuation or business on? I doubt it. 

It also reminds me, Fred, back in 2018, when I've been out in the market and built my food trends platform, I really, I got a lot of commentary from investors telling me, oh, we just spoke to this and that CPG and food brand, they're working on their own trend prediction platform and so on. Today it's 2025, none of them have anything of that sort. They all get great partners and vendors like Tastewise that help them do that, because this is not a core business. The core business is to produce great products, bring them to consumers, and work with the distribution. And this is my two cents.

Fred Schonenberg
Alon, I think you just touched on something that I love, and I'm very curious to dig slightly deeper on. And the way I would frame it is this idea of buy, build, or partner, right? If you're a big company, you have the ability to go in any of those three lanes, and you became a big company because you're great at building, right? To your point of what's your edge, if you're in the food and beverage space, you became great and big because you built a brand, you built a better chocolate bar, whatever that might be.

And so there's this moment with Gen AI, big companies tend to have this bias toward building, I've noticed, right? Because that's how they got big, they want to protect their IP. And so I'm sure most of the big companies have either thought of or are exploring, how do we create our own trend predictions? How do we do our own Gen AI version of iterations? And the tools are making it pretty easy to spin up some version of that. What advice do you have for them on why it makes sense? And I think you just answered it, but I'd love a little bit more depth on it, which is like, is this your edge? How do you maintain it? Like, can you go a little deeper into that? Because that's something a lot of big companies are wrestling with right now, should they do it themselves?

Alon Chen
Yeah. Here's the thing. I mean, big brands were built because they have the essentials, right? Understand the consumer in order to bring products to market. But sometimes they have an edge with the supply chain, with a unique portfolio, with unique access to distribution, with unique brands that they're capitalizing on and cross selling and so on.

If you know what's your core differentiator, you can build some IP around that and technology and Gen AI can be part of it, but it cannot be across your basic basic business execution needs like your supply chain and your consumer trend analysis and your sales enablement and your marketing dimension. It's just not a possibility because then you'll turn yourself into a tech company and you don't have the margins nor the resources internally to become one. And so you have to be modest and humble and think about where my edge is and what I am, how I am differentiating myself with Gen AI? It is a difficult process because there's a lot of top down desire to build IP around that.

But here's my indicator. If you haven't built any unique tech and digital capabilities that's really made a difference for your product to date, I'm not sure it's going to be possible in the future, even though it may feel like Gen AI is easy to execute. There are so many challenges building a reliable enterprise grade solution with IP, with legal, with unique data and precision accuracy calibration. 

And you just have to be thinking about your limitations. We do have some cases where we have our out of the box solution. We give you your marketing solution, your innovation solution, your sales solution, and sometimes you need something unique. We'll help you come up with that. And if you need to go to another vendor, we'll show you what's the right one. But you have to be genuine to your core values and not just spread yourself too thin.

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah, I think it's awesome advice. All right. So we're going to do something fun here at the end. Just a quick fire closing round. I'm going to hit you with a couple of fast questions, whatever comes to mind. We'll kind of go fast here at the end. So what's one food trend you think is overhyped?

Alon Chen
Dubai chocolate.

Fred Schonenberg
What's your go-to snack when you need to focus? 

Alon Chen
I love cottage cheese with some honey. 

Fred Schonenberg
Nice. All right. What is one book or idea that shaped your thinking as a founder?

Alon Chen
The Tipping Point by Gladwell really made a difference in how I think about analyzing trends and making new trends and getting your brand out there.

Fred Schonenberg
I love it. All right. So help me finish this sentence. The future of food is blank.

Alon Chen
Indulging, healthy, and sustainable.

Fred Schonenberg
Indulging, healthy, and sustainable. I love it. Alon, I want to thank you for taking the time to join us today and everything you're doing to spark change in the industry and what you're building. It's been a joy to watch you all grow and I can't wait to see what's next for you. Where should people go that are interested in learning more about what Tastewise does? Is there a good place you'd like to guide everyone?

Alon Chen
Yeah. Tastewise.io or our LinkedIn. We have so much content. There's a lot to learn about different food trends and how to build a great food brand and marketing operation.

Fred Schonenberg
Awesome. Well, thank you again. It's been great catching up.

Alon Chen
Thanks for having me, Fred.