At Foodpairing, we’re passionate about flavor. In the past few months, I’ve been working on a revamped version of our cocktail generator. At its core, this cocktail generator has an optimization algorithm that knows which mixers it has at his disposal, as well as which kind of drink a user would like, and then produces a highly personal and super flavorsome mocktail or cocktail as output.

Of couse – we can’t just take the algorithm’s word for it, so today we organized a tasting/testing session of our algorithm together with Peter Coucquyt (co-founder and chef) and Elisa Gragnani (our resident Flavor Insights Strategist). We recreated in real life the cocktails that our algorithm produced on paper, and critically evaluated whether the levels of bitterness, sweetness, floral-ness etc, were all according to the user’s expectation. Needless to say it’s been a pretty fun and delicious afternoon at work! If only all algorithm development & testing were this enjoyable!