What does love taste like?
What does love taste like? The answer may depend on who you ask. Some people would say love tastes bitter, like dark chocolate. Others might describe it as delicious, like a sweet cupcake.
A Japanese bakery chain is using technology to answer that question. The country’s oldest bakery, Kimuraya, has teamed up with Japanese electronics company NEC Corp to produce what they call the “Ren AI Pan” — which translates to “AI Romantic Bread.”
Full set of 5 types of "love bread" - Photo: CNN
NEC and Kimuraya claim the new product, which comes in five flavors, captures the essence of the emotion many of us associate with love. NEC used its AI technology to analyze conversations from a reality TV dating show as well as songs that mention fruits and sweets in their lyrics.
Through this analysis, they identified five main romantic emotions: first meeting, first date, jealousy, heartbreak, and love. It is then assumed that the bakery used its own secret recipe to translate these emotions into different flavors of bread.
How to find the taste of love?
As for what led to this combination, it seems that both brands faced a similar challenge: how to increase their appeal to the younger generation of Japanese people.
Through market research, Kimuraya discovered that although more and more young Japanese people say they are not interested in pursuing romantic relationships, in fact, the desire among young people to date, fall in love, and end up with a partner is still very strong.
Recognizing this gap, the company decided to create AI Love Bread, a product that recreates romantic flavors to evoke feelings of love when they eat it — in fact, inspiring them to bring some of those feelings into their personal lives.
"Tears of Heartbreak" bread has cider and grape flavors - Photo CNN
NEC said it used two AI technologies for the project: “NEC Enhanced Speech” to convert speech to text and “NEC Data Enrichment” to generate emotion scores from text data.
Using this information, the AI selected components that represent emotions associated with love.
For working material, the experts conducted a “conversation analysis” using 15 hours of excerpts from a Japanese reality dating show called “I Fell in Love Today.”
From there, the AI converts the conversations into text, placing each conversation into one of five categories: fateful encounter, date, jealousy, heartbreak, or love.
Next, the AI extracted the lyrics of about 35,000 songs related to love and food from a Japanese database. The AI was then used to assign “emotion scores” to the conversations and lyrics to create a visual map that matched different stages of love with specific foods and flavors.
The “Fateful Encounter” bread has a cotton candy flavor that symbolizes the sweet, airy feelings of the first vibrations of love. The “Jealousy” bread tastes like purple sweet potatoes, truffle oil and raisins.
As for the other breads, “First Date” has citrus flavors, specifically lemon and orange peel, while “Mutual Love” is a sweet blend of honey, peach, and dragon fruit.
Even though these bread concepts are created by technology, human involvement is still required.
“The selection of ingredients is done by AI, but our role is to turn them into bread. We paid attention to the colors used to visually express romantic feelings and aimed for a bright and striking look for Love Bread,” said Yuki Kitazawa, a developer at Kimuraya bakery.
Currently, these “love breads” are sold at supermarkets in Japan's Kanto region and on Kimuraya Bakery's online store.
Nguyen Khanh (according to CNN Travel)
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