Elle & Vire is best known for its butters and creams, often nicknamed ‘the Eiffel Tower brand’ due to its incorporation of the structure on its logo.
The brand recently unveiled its first AI-designed cake to underscore the role of this technology in the food and beverage industry, and highlighted its belief that AI will play a pivotal role in the sector – but not to the point of replacing humans just yet.
“AI is pretty much a open topic within the industry these days, and we know that it has an important role to play to improve efficiencies in areas such as data management, marketing and so on,” Elle & Vire parent company Savencia Fromage & Dairy Southern Asia MD Joris Bernard told FoodNavigator-Asia at the launch event.
“It makes things easier, it makes things faster, and for us in this industry it also plays an added role of being able to accelerate the ideation process and provide inspiration when it comes to designs and so on.
“However, the caveat here is that this in no way means that AI is set to replace humans – It can be creative and help with tedious tasks, but at the end of the day it still cannot be used as-is yet.
“For instance, with regard to our AI-designed cake, we input keywords and it generated many different designs - but it still came down to our chefs’ innovation and creativity to put these into recipes based on their own experience.
“So we see that we can leverage AI to improve the creation process, but definitely not rely on it to replace the human element entirely at all.”
Challenges in dairy
Bernard also stated that as a premium dairy brand, the firm has the added task of not only maintaining but improving dairy product quality and efficiency in the current times of economic turbulence, in order to justify its product prices in this price-sensitive region.
“There can be no denying that prices of not only dairy but various commodities have surged over the past two years, and this comes down to not just the products but also items like electricity and transport costs, particularly in Europe,” he said.
“The demand for butter and cream post-pandemic has somehow seen a major surge, meaning that supply is now less than demand, and this issue has been made worse by a number of dairy farmers giving up the business as many of the younger generation don’t want to be farmers.
“This saw the butter prices in Europe for example surge up and more or less double since 2023, from around EUR400/ton to over EUR600/ton and this has been a challenge for basically everyone in the dairy sector from distributors to manufacturers.
“All this has meant some price increases, and as a premium dairy brand we also have the added responsibility of increasing the quality of our products to justify any price increases we implement, and we are also working to improve efficiencies and productivity.”
That said, he expressed optimism for the sector in the near future given the brand’s premium status.
“In times of inflation such as this, we are seeing that consumers are even more on the lookout for value for their purchases, which means that quality has become even more important for them,” he said.
“This plays in our favour as a premium brand, as consumers will still come to us for good value – they may use a little bit less in order to save, but they will still choose us.
“This has been quite apparent as despite the inflation and economic situation, our volumes have still been on the up and up, so we are optimistic.”