DAVIS, CALIF. — PIPA LLC, an artificial intelligence (AI) company providing enterprise intelligence services to support the food industry, introduced its new Digital Extruder platform, a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering to help those in the consumer packaged goods industry, including pet food companies. The platform can help companies accelerate product innovation, enhance production efficiency, and keep pace with consumer demand for various food products.

The Digital Extruder platform works by creating connections between food formulation, manufacturing operations, and sensory and nutritional product characteristics, uniting these processes that have been traditional siloed, according to PIPA. The platform is part of the PIPA Operating System (OS) and uses AI, food science and fluid dynamic models to develop digital simulations of food processing techniques including extrusion, baking and fermentation.

“PIPA OS is a step towards a paradigm shift in food product development,” said Chris Stamelos, chief technology officer of PIPA. “By testing thousands of scenarios in seconds, we enable our partners to rapidly innovate and co-create products that drive consumer liking, focused on affordability, palatability and health. In today’s volatile market, agility is key, and the PIPA OS provides the tools to achieve that.”

The company used computational fluid dynamics, heat transfer, food chemistry, modeling and machine learning to develop a platform that connects ingredients and processing methods. 

“Applied cutting-edge AI is not sufficient when it comes to a complex system such as food manufacturing,” said Dimitris Sfondilis, technical lead of the project at PIPA. “By embedding core food science knowledge into agentic AI, we have created a platform that helps product development in a way that is faster, better and cheaper than before.”

PIPA is currently partnering with various companies to pilot PIPA OS, specifically focusing on those that use extrusion processes like snacks, confectionary and pet food. According to the company, adopters of the platform have witnessed a significant time reduction in R&D, increased sustainability and less variability due.

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