How Ai Palette can solve the FMCG scene's multi-billion problem

Success rate of FMCG product launches is less than 10%, incurring a US$40b annual loss globally.

To bolster the success rate of new product launches in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry, Ai Palette launched a platform that provides the kind of data manufacturers need in order to better predict consumer preferences.

Ai Palette’s co-founder and CEO Somsubhra Choudhuri stated that the success rate of product launches is less than 10% and failures can incur an average loss of US$5m per product, amounting to a US$40b annual loss globally.

To help businesses solve this, it established a platform dubbed as Foresight Engine, a cloud-based AI platform that harnesses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and computer vision. This shows data on food trends in a particular food category for a country. For example, if a beverage brand in Indonesia wants to understand its market better, the platform can be configured for their specific needs with geography and food category as Indonesia and Beverage respectively.

Another solution of theirs is “Screen Winner”, which screens and validates new concepts based on consumer needs, identifying such needs, motivations and opportunity areas where the company should focus their innovation on.

“FMCG companies traditionally use conventional research methods like Category reports to understand the trends. These reports typically give a static view of category and become outdated very quickly as consumer preferences are now changing very fast; and more often than not the results are affected by biases such as response bias and group-think,” said Ai Palette’s co-founder and CEO Somsubhra Choudhuri.

Choudhuri also added that consumer preferences are now fast-changing due to the emergence of smaller boutique brands.

So far, they have contracts from several FMCG giants recognised amongst the Fortune 500 companies.

In August, Ai Palette raised $1.5m in a seed round led by cross-border VC fund Decacorn Capital. It was also attended by SGInnovate, Silicon Valley and foodtech-focused VC AgFunder.

“What made Ai Palette stand apart from the crowd was the speed with which they could build not just a powerful trend-spotting platform, but also layer it with a comprehensive prediction engine combining cognitive AI, data analytics and a proprietary natural language algorithm which overcomes language barriers in Asia’s diverse terrain, creating early traction with global food and beverage brands, and being in a position to transform the product development process,” commented Abhijit Banerjee, managing director at Decacorn Capital.