Kimuraya, Japan’s oldest bakery, has embarked on an innovative venture by teaming up with NEC Corp, a prominent Japanese electronics company, to introduce a line of cakes and breads infused with AI-created flavors.
Dubbed Ren AI Pan, or “AI romance bread,” the new products feature flavors conceptualized by artificial intelligence, drawing inspiration from 15 hours of footage from a Japanese reality dating show and over 35,000 songs containing references to fruit and sweets in their lyrics. NEC’s advanced artificial intelligence technology meticulously analyzed this vast dataset to discern the five fundamental emotions of love: fateful encounter, first date, jealousy, heartbreak, and mutual love, as reported by CNN.
Utilizing two key AI technologies – “NEC Enhanced Speech” for speech-to-text conversion and “NEC Data Enrichment” for emotion score generation from text – NEC’s AI algorithm identified ingredients symbolizing these love emotions. Collaborating closely with Kimuraya, the AI system curated a diverse range of flavored breads to encapsulate these emotions.
According to details from NextShark, the resulting flavors include cotton candy to evoke the sentiment of “fateful encounter,” citrus for the essence of the “first date,” a unique blend of purple sweet potatoes, truffle oil, and raisins representing “jealousy,” apple cider and grapes for the feeling of “heartbreak,” and a delightful combination of honey, peach, and dragon fruit to capture the essence of “mutual love.”
While AI played a crucial role in ingredient selection, human expertise remains indispensable in the final product’s creation, particularly in ensuring its visual appeal.
Yuki Kitazawa, a developer at Kimuraya bakery, explained to CNN: “The selection of ingredients was done by AI, but our role was to make them into bread. We paid attention to the colors used to express romantic emotions visually and aimed for a vibrant and pop appearance for Love Bread.”
Since early February, these AI-inspired breads have been made available for purchase in Japan’s Kanto area and through Kimuraya Bakery’s online store.
A manager from Kimuraya expressed to the Japan News: “We really made this bread to encourage romance among young people. We believe it will be an effective way of tying you to someone you love.”