Predicting food taste with bound-driven optimization

The prediction of sensory attributes from ingredient-level formulations is an emerging challenge at the intersection of food science and artificial intelligence. We address the fundamental question of whether the taste of a food can be predicted from its ingredients by treating recipes as composite materials. We apply Hashin-Shtrikman (HS) and Reuss-Voigt (RV) bounds, techniques originally developed for elastic moduli, as a null-hypothesis additive baseline for five taste dimensions (sweetness, sourness, bitterness, umami, saltiness) on a curated dataset of 70 recipes decomposed into 115 distinct ingredients scored against a library of 209 ingredient-level taste references with trained-panel ground truth. This baseline systematically under-predicts perceived taste: 77% of actual taste values exceeded the HS upper bound, with the exceedance rate ranging from 26% (bitterness) to 97% (saltiness). We traced this gap to specific processing chemistry (Maillard reactions, caramelization, evaporative concentration, protein hydrolysis, and nucleotide synergy) and introduced a hybrid model that augments the HS baseline with eight chemistry-proxy features encoding these mechanisms. Our results show that our interpretable hybrid model eliminates the systematic bias and reduces mean absolute error by 27%-62% for sweetness, sourness, umami, and saltiness while using only 10 interpretable features, achieving performance comparable to a black-box Lasso regression on 115 per-ingredient features. We further demonstrate constrained inverse design via Differential Evolution, recovering ingredient formulations that match target taste profiles subject to compositional bounds. Our work demonstrates how key chemical processes during food preparation can inform and augment physics-based and machine learning models, providing a quantitative fingerprint of processing chemistry's contribution to taste perception and paving the way for model-driven food formulation with targeted sensory characteristics.