Photo - Barun Ghosh/Unsplash
Food System Innovations (FSI) has announced the launch of its new Food Intelligence Lab to develop the open-source infrastructure needed to accelerate AI-driven sustainable protein development. The Food Intelligence Lab’s goal is to shorten commercialisation timelines for better-tasting, more sustainable products.
Sustainable proteins are essential to decarbonising food systems, which generate about 26% of global greenhouse gas emissions and livestock supply chains make up more than half of that, contributing 14.5% of all global anthropogenic emissions. Livestock are also responsible for 44% of global methane emissions and 53% of nitrous oxide emissions, two especially potent warming gases.
Reducing animal protein consumption is critical to decarbonising food systems, but US consumers have been slow to adopt sustainable alternatives into their daily diets. Taste remains one of the sector’s biggest barriers. In NECTAR’s Taste of the Industry 2026 report, just 33% of participants rated dairy-free products as foods they “like” or “like very much,” roughly half the rate of the animal benchmarks, with similarly low overall liking rates for meat alternatives.
More R&D is needed to improve the sensory performance of these products, but many companies face limited budgets, fragmented datasets, and long development cycles that constrain meaningful progress. AI has the potential to dramatically accelerate product development, but the sector has lacked the integrated data infrastructure needed to reliably predict key consumer outcomes like taste and texture. Until now.
“AI is already transforming fields like drug and materials discovery, but food still lacks the shared infrastructure needed to fully unlock the potential of AI in this space,” said Anna Thomas, Director of Machine Learning at the Food Intelligence Lab and a computer scientist at Stanford University. “We’re building tools to help food scientists iterate faster and create truly exceptional sustainable protein products.”
“Food scientists shouldn’t have to spend months on trial-and-error to get texture, mouthfeel, flavor, and aftertaste right. At Proxy Foods AI, we’re building the technologies and operating infrastructure that help companies hit their R&D and sustainability targets faster, with the goal of eventually reaching 90% in silico and reserving the wet lab for the final 10% of validation and optimization,” expressed Panos Kostopoulos, Founder and CEO of Proxy Foods AI. “Every iteration, successful or not, adds value and compounds. Partnering with FSI’s Food Intelligence Lab to open-source these tools is how we accelerate those breakthroughs and ultimately change how we feed the planet for the better.”
