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March 29, 2021
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March 30, 2021
Google Cloud AI is baked into our work with customers all over the world. We’ve partnered with organizations to use AI to make new predictions, automate business processes, forecast flooding and even combat climate change and chronic diseases. And sometimes, we even get to help our customers use AI to invent new things–tasty new things.
When legendary confectionery manufacturer Mars, Inc. approached us for a Maltesers + AI kitchen collaboration, we couldn’t resist. Maltesers are a popular British candy made by Mars. They have an airy malted milk center with a delicious chocolate coating. We saw this opportunity as a way to partner with a storied and innovative company like Mars and also a chance to showcase the magic that can happen when AI and humans work together.
Good AI, or good design for that matter, happens when human designers consider the capabilities of humans and technology, and strike the delicate balance between the two. In our case, our AI pastry chef offered a helpful assist to its creator–our very own amateur baker and ML engineer extraordinaire, Sara Robinson!
Hunkered down in 2020, Sara and millions of others started baking. And, like a good dough, that trend continues to rise. According to Google Search Trends, in 2021 baking was searched 44% more compared to the same time last year. Sara hopped on the home baking trend to investigate the relationship between AI and baking.
AI + Google Search trends create a quirky dessert
This time around, Sara trained a new ML model to generate recipes for cookies, cakes, scones, traybakes, and any hy-bread of these. Armed with a dataset of tried-and-true recipes, Sara set out to the kitchen to find ways to infuse her own creativity and Mars’ Maltesers into the model’s creation.
After hours of model training and baking experiments, Sara cleverly combined chopped and whole Maltesers with her model’s AI-optimized cake and cookie recipes to create a brand new dessert.
But the team didn’t want to stop there. Our recipe needed a creative twist to top it off. We searched for something savory, creamy, and UK-inspired that we could use to balance the sweet, crunchy Maltesers. Enter, Marmite-infused buttercream!
With some help from Google Search Trends, we discovered that one of the top searched questions recently regarding “sweet and salty” was “Is Marmite sweet or savory?” A popular savory spread in the UK, we decided to incorporate Marmite into our recipe. Sara headed back into the kitchen and whipped up a Marmite-infused buttercream topping. Yum!
So, how exactly did Sara build the model? She started by thinking more deeply about baking as an exact science.
Building a sweet model with TensorFlow and Cloud AI
Our goal for the project was to build a model that could provide the foundation for us to create a new recipe featuring Maltesers and Marmite. To develop a model that could produce a recipe, Sara wondered: what if the model took a type of baked good as input, and produced the amounts of the different ingredients needed to bake it?
Since Maltesers are primarily sold in the UK, we wanted the recipe to use ingredients common to British baking, like self-raising flour, caster sugar, and golden syrup. To account for this, Sara used a dataset of British recipes to create the model. The dataset consisted of four categories of popular British baked goods: biscuits (that’s cookies if you’re reading this in the US), cakes, scones, and traybakes. To create a cake recipe, for example, the model inputs and outputs would look like the following:
