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Artificial intelligence for food innovation
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AI
DOI：10.1038/s43016-026-01380-7.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Global food systems must deliver nutritious, sustainable foods while sharply reducing environmental impact. Yet, food innovation remains slow, empirical and fragmented. Artificial intelligence (AI) offers a transformative path to link molecular composition to functional performance, connect chemical structure to sensory outcomes and accelerate cross-disciplinary innovation across the production pipeline. While it is broadly applicable to food systems, we focus on sustainable proteins—plant-based, fermentation-derived and cultivated—as a high-impact test bed for AI-driven closed-loop design. We review the applications, opportunities and challenges of AI for food as an emerging discipline that integrates ingredient design, formulation development, fermentation and production, texture analysis, sensory science, manufacturing and recipe generation. We identify four priorities: advancing scientific machine learning with embedded domain priors, treating food as a programmable biomaterial, building self-driving laboratories for automated discovery and developing deep reasoning models that integrate nutrition and sustainability. Integrating AI responsibly into the food innovation cycle can accelerate the transition to sustainable food systems and establish a predictive, design-driven science of food for human and planetary health. Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming how new foods are designed, produced and experienced. While AI has the potential to link molecular composition to functional and sensory performance and accelerate food innovation, challenges related to data quality, transparency and governance remain. Addressing these challenges requires interdisciplinary collaboration, open and inclusive data ecosystems and AI systems that augment, rather than replace, human expertise.
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