Japanese bakery chain employs AI to decode flavor of love
Japan's oldest bakery, Kimuraya, has teamed up with electronics giant NEC Corp to create "Ren AI Pan" or "AI Romance Bread." This unique product comes in five flavors, each symbolizing a key romantic emotion: first encounter, first date, jealousy, heartbreak, and mutual love. NEC's AI technology analyzed conversations from a TV reality dating show and songs with fruit and sweet references to identify these feelings.
How AI technology identified emotions for love bread
To accomplish this, NEC used two AI technologies: "NEC Enhanced Speech" for converting speech to text and "NEC Data Enrichment" for generating emotion scores from text data. They conducted a "conversation analysis" using 15 hours of footage from a Japanese reality dating show called Today I Fell In Love. The AI converted the conversations into text and sorted them into one of the five romantic feeling categories.
Matching emotions to ingredients and flavors
The AI also analyzed lyrics from about 35,000 love and food-related songs from a Japanese database. It assigned "emotional scores" to the conversations and lyrics, creating a visual map that connected different stages of love to specific foods and flavors. For instance, "Fateful Encounter" bread is flavored with cotton candy, symbolizing the sweet, airy emotion of initial attraction, while "Jealousy" tastes like purple sweet potatoes, truffle oil, and raisins.
The human touch in creating the AI love bread
Yuki Kitazawa, a developer at Kimuraya bakery, said, "The selection of ingredients was done by AI, but our role was to make them into bread." The bakery focused on colors that visually express romantic emotions and aimed for a vibrant and pop appearance for Love Bread. Kimuraya's artisans considered flavor affinities while combining the ingredients chosen by AI.
Encouraging romance among young people
AI Love Bread went on sale from February 1 at supermarkets in Japan's Kanto area and on Kimuraya Bakery's online store. A Kimuraya official stated, "We really made this bread to encourage romance among young people. We believe it will be an effective way of tying you to someone you love." The bread will be available at supermarkets and other retailers from February to April.
