Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Kishan Vasani, Co-Founder & CEO at Spoonshot:
Q: How did the idea behind Spoonshot come about?
A: In the fact sheet, there’s a link to a blog post about why I started dishq, the original business. After more than 2 years working on that business, despite having happy customers, we decided to move onto another semi-related opportunity. We went from food personalization technology for digital food businesses, to food & beverage innovation intelligence. One of the main reasons for changing was because scaling an API business was tough. Also, the solution was more of a vitamin than a painkiller. With Spoonshot, we’re solving a huge pain point for CPG companies i.e. deeply understanding consumer needs, the emerging trends, and the consequent innovation opportunities. And we’re doing this in minutes, hours, not weeks or months.
Q: What is your core competence?
A: From a pure technology standpoint, our core capability is in acquiring unstructured data, processing and enriching it, and then connecting that disparate data using food science domain expertise, e.g. the chemical properties of ingredients, as a means to build insights. The resulting benefit for our customers is that they receive rich, relevant, and unintuitive intelligence related to their innovation goals.
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Q: In the food science market, what makes Spoonshot stand out?
A: We help R&D functions be consumer-centric. Traditionally, the R&D team takes its orders from Marketing about innovation strategy. They’ll receive a product brief, then they will research, ideate, and test a number of concepts that meet the brief. With Spoonshot, Food Scientists (Product Developers) can be more strategic and build a stronger partnership with their Marketing colleagues about the company’s innovation pipeline. Also, Product Developers are getting a front-end innovation research tool that was built specifically for them by using Spoonshot, instead of just using some general trends tools that is used for every sector. Underscoring this is the fact that we have a team of food scientists in-house who work with our data scientists to develop technology that deeply understands the domain and can uncover higher-order insights.
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Q: What is next on the roadmap for Spoonshot?
A: By the end of 2020, we’ll be launching our ‘Concept Generator’ feature. As the name implies, it will allow our customers to instantly create scientifically valid, on-trend product concepts, based upon a few simple inputs like product type. This technology will work both top-down and bottom-up, meaning that users can either get feedback on a product idea that they already have, or they ask our AI to generate a novel concept based upon its own understanding. The best part of this technology is that each concept will be explainable. Unlike most other AI solutions, we do not use blackbox algorithms/models to make recommendations to our customers.
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