JapanFood and restaurants2024 – ongoingMorinaga Milk Industry
NEC AI for planning new ice confectionery products
Morinaga Milk's planners and NEC's AI picked the same benchmark product about 90% of the time in an ice cream trial
Problem
Planning a new ice confectionery product relies on choosing a similar past product as a benchmark and forecasting sales from it. The work depends on individual planners.
Approach
Morinaga Milk and NEC ran a trial of about three months from October to December 2024, using past ice cream launches. The AI weighed sales trends, seasonality, marketing spend and planner know-how to pick benchmarks for 10 new product candidates. It then linked the benchmark's results to a three-month plan, which was extended to a one-year forecast.
Results
Takeaway
The result is a match with human choices on past launches. It is a trial finding, and Morinaga Milk had not yet reported a result from live use.
Categories
- Industry
- Food and restaurants
- Business function
- Logistics and supply chainStrategy and organization
- Innovation type
- Process innovation
- AI technology
- Predictive analytics and ML
- Adoption
- Vendor solution
- Evidence
- Company's own claim
Sources
Source summaries
Covers NEC's April 2025 announcement of a three-month trial with Morinaga Milk on ice cream products. It reports that the AI matched planners' benchmark choices about 90% of the time and produced plans close to staff plans.
Full details are in the original sources.