Where Cuisine and Culture Connect with AI!

What Is Pepo?

Pepo is a fun mobile application that can discover, share, and preserve traditional recipes and sustainable food knowledge.
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Throughout the millennia, family and cultural traditions have been passed down verbally through storytelling. With Pepo, this traditional knowledge is being transformed into AI-suitable datasets.

​Consumers and enterprises alike can now promote healthy eating habits and ensure that family and cultural values are not lost in our collective transition to a more digital and automated world.

Why Now?

Pepo fills a niche for home cooks who desire more culturally diverse food experiences by providing engaging storytelling features alongside recipes. 

• 2020 ushered in massive interest in home cooking and according to the National Restaurant Association, AI will be a major disrupter of the food industry in the next decade. 
  
• A 2020 Nestle report shows consumers want to engage in stories about their food and furthermore that interest in ethnic cuisine and cross-cultural mashups is one of the top food trends.
  

This cultural food data will also appeal to food marketers seeking to better understand the historical legacy of ingredients and recipes from different cultural traditions. The current demo version includes recipes and stories selected from ten worldwide cultures.

Why Pepo?

Increasingly, home cooks are using technology to discover new recipes through the use of mobile cooking applications. Apps like New York Times Cooking and Kitchen Stories are some of the top products in the market. 
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NYT Cooking is renowned for its high-quality expert recipes, advanced search functions, and user comments and ratings. Kitchen Stories provides videos, articles, step-by-step photos, and the ability to share your own recipes and photos via its app. 

​Yet neither of these applications has taken the next step to integrate AI storytelling and traditional knowledge into its platform. This is an area ripe for innovation, given the increasing interest in AI technology and diverse representation throughout the food industry.

A World of Food

As a precursor to integrating Pepo with AI technology, we will gather a large quantity of reliable and unique food data from food experts and application users. The current demo version includes recipes and stories representing ten worldwide cultures. As new users from around the globe join the Pepo community, they will become active contributors to our database of cultural recipes and stories.

We will focus on collecting data representing a broad set of cultures, identities, languages, and pronunciations in order to build unbiased, intelligent, and reliable algorithms for the AI platform. Pepo will demonstrate how creating structure around food stories and recipes can foster reasoning and cultural intelligence in conversational AIs, building demand for this data and technology. Near-future plans for Pepo include utilizing AI techniques to recreate lost dishes and forgotten food traditions as well as offering new and modified cooking options according to cultural preferences.

The Social Impact of Pepo

By discovering, sharing, and preserving a world of food, Pepo users, businesses and investors can help create a positive real-world impact. The 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda lists 17 development goals and calls for an end to hunger and prevention of all forms of malnutrition by 2030. Pepo helps reduce data inequality and promotes multicultural diversity, gender diversity, family traditions, and community development.