Taste in the Age of AI - PlanetHAUS

The machine can cook anything now. It can generate ten thousand recipes before you finish reading this sentence. What it still can't do is tell you what's worth wanting.

That gap is the whole story.

The world's most valuable platforms figured out something we keep pretending is a mystery. They don't just sell you things. They learn your taste. Spotify learns what you want to hear next. TikTok learns what stops your scroll. Netflix learns how you want to live, temporarily. Sephora learns what you'll want on your skin. Taste, quietly, already runs the world.

Food is the exception, and it shouldn't be. Eating is the most frequent choice we make, and it still runs on fragmented signals, guesswork dressed up as data.

But before we talk about food, look around the room you're in. Taste didn't only go missing from the plate. It slipped out of the buildings first. We once raised courthouses and corner stores with cornices and shade and a human scale you could feel in your feet; now the same gray box lands in Lagos, in Atlanta, in Seoul, rendered by the same software, optimized for the same spreadsheet. Fashion went next. The seasons collapsed into a feed, the feed collapsed into an algorithm, and a trend now lives and dies in the time it takes to ship it, each of us dressed by a recommendation we mistook for a choice. Music is quantized to the grid, films are greenlit by the numbers, our neighborhoods are drawn by whoever bids highest on the block. Everywhere the pattern is the same: the thing we used to make with judgment, we now receive from a machine that optimizes for engagement and calls it preference.

Food is simply where it hurts most, because we do it three times a day.

Here's why food is harder than a click. Food taste doesn't live in a tap or a swipe. It lives in the body, the memory, and the world around us. It's sensory: flavor, aroma, texture, color. It's behavioral: what we buy, search, substitute, and reach for again. It's biological: nutrition, allergens, metabolism, the moment we feel full. It's cultural: heritage, geography, ritual, identity. And it's situational: price, availability, occasion, mood, the company at the table.

No recommendation engine holds all of that. Food doesn't need a better recommendation engine. It needs a taste-intelligence layer.

I see this differently because I've stood in each of the rooms where the answer usually gets lost. I've worked in kitchens, laboratories, supply chains, and algorithms. I built Journey Foods because the industry was drowning in product data and starving for any understanding of why a thing deserves to exist. The scientist asks what food actually is. The technologist asks what a machine can infer. The cultural observer asks what the data keeps missing. The founder builds the layer that closes the gap between them.

Because somewhere in the last hundred years, taste went missing.

The recipe used to be the scarce thing. Now recipes are free and infinite. We used to be the architects of our own neighborhoods. Now an algorithm draws the block. The imagery of food used to come out of our own kitchens. Now it's AI-dreamed, belonging to no one's kitchen at all. Balance used to be built into the plate. Now it's the first thing we lose.

And here is the part the industry would rather not say out loud: the taste that got optimized away was never everyone's taste to begin with. It was a narrow band of it. The training data of the modern palate was written by a handful of markets, and the rest of the world was asked to develop a taste for the leftovers. But the deepest wells of flavor on this planet were never in those markets. They're in the fermentation cultures of West Africa, the chili and cacao lineages of Mesoamerica, the spice logic of South Asia, the sour and smoke and bitter that the wellness aisle is only now "discovering" a century late. The Global South didn't lose its taste. It kept the recipes the algorithm never learned. A taste-intelligence layer that only speaks in the accent of a few zip codes isn't intelligent. It's just the old scarcity wearing a new interface.

So the work isn't only to bring taste back. It's to bring back all of it, and to build the machine so that the grandmother in Opelika and the fermenter in Accra and the market cook in Oaxaca are sources of intelligence, not afterthoughts of it. Every voice at the table, or it isn't really taste. It's just someone else's, scaled.

So let's go get it back.

Journey Foods connects what food is, what it could become, and who will actually want it. Procurement buys cost, shelf life, and volume. Nobody buys for taste, because until now nobody could measure it, which is exactly why novelty so rarely survives the trip down the supply chain. We built three layers to change that. A data layer of ingredients, products, suppliers, procurement, formulations, nutrition, and regulation. A taste-intelligence layer of sensory patterns, cultural context, behavioral signals, and human judgment. And an action layer that runs the loop: find, understand, formulate, source, launch, learn. More than 110 billion connected data points. Millions of ingredients, products, and suppliers. One layer where taste finally becomes usable.

We think about it as a pie. Predict, integrate, experience.

Predict and infer: what attribute actually drove the choice, what someone would accept instead, what profile fits a market. Integrate that intelligence into formulation, supplier selection, and procurement, the places where novelty is quietly bought or quietly killed. Then experience and evolve, out in products, retail, restaurants, events, and neighborhoods, where real response feeds back in. Taste stops being an opinion collected at the end. It becomes intelligence applied throughout.

A hundred years ago, Langston Hughes wrote, "I, too, am America. Tomorrow, I'll be at the table when company comes." Taste has always been a claim on a seat at that table, staked long before we rushed to sell everything on it. AI just raised the stakes. When the machines can make anything, the question of what deserves to be made, and who gets to decide, is the only one left that matters.

The future worth building tastes like something. It tastes like everywhere. Let the machines make the options infinite. Let taste, all of it, keep them worth wanting.

‍