Arla Foods uses Azure OpenAI Service to help its staff create recipe collections

“It’s all about providing high-quality recipes that meet the ever-increasing demand from home chefs, and we’ve been doing that for many years.”

Andreas Westling, Owned Digital Lead at Arla Sweden is explaining the importance of maximizing the use of the company’s huge database of recipes.

“Mealtimes are a very important part of the day whether we are with family or friends and eating together—it is a time when we share precious moments. Arla has a great history of helping our consumers make their meals better,” Andreas continues. “Arla is proud to have offered people in Sweden their first recipe website in 1997, and the first iOS app in 2008.”

“Now in 2024 it’s time for the company to continue to offer innovative ways to enjoy food that is in line with the latest tastes and trends in cuisine. Effectively, generative AI (GenAI) came along at a very good time and has become a true assistant for its editors. As their trusted partner, we were very happy to be on hand to make that happen—together with Microsoft,” comments Martin Brogaard, CEO at Knowit Experience.

Keeping a valuable resource relevant

A cooperative owned by farmers in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, United Kingdom, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, Arla Foods produces a number of well-known consumer food brands. Since 1997 a key marketing tool the company has used to engage both current and potential consumers is a free database of recipes from Arla Sweden, that has been continually added to, and now features instructions to nearly 6,500 dishes.

Arla Sweden was looking for a way to ensure that its pioneering approach, now very much mainstream in the market, continued to be relevant to the tastes of its current target audience. The ultimate aim was to attract more traffic and deliver relevant content.

“To stay aligned with consumer food preferences, Arla continuously needs to optimize how they utilize data. Alongside numerous insights and other technologies, OpenAI serves as an excellent tool to remain relevant,” says Brogaard.

“We were very early in adapting to the Internet and digitizing recipes, and the company grew its database organically. In Sweden and Denmark, ours is one of the leading recipe collections, and we’re big on basically every digital touch point, from direct traffic via Google to indirect traffic from Instagram and other social media and apps,” explains Westling. “People often search specifically. So, it’s essential to our brands that our content adapts swiftly to the dynamic food trends and user search behaviors.”

The importance of recipe collections

“We wondered if we could use GenAI to align Arla’s content strategy with these ever-changing food trends, without compromising content quality and recipe originality,” explains Andreas Westling. 

“The team also wanted to make the process of gathering information faster and more effective when developing content, and to use our resources more effectively. We try to create the perfect match between human expertise and generative AI. With the help of Azure OpenAI, we can effectively distribute our chef-made recipes that we're so proud of, so that more people can cook delicious meals with them,” he concludes.

The right AI tool for scaling

Explaining his team’s selection of technology, Westling remarks: “There are so many tools we could have chosen, but we wanted something that would fit easily into our existing digital ecosystem and become a core component. It would also need to expand in one or maybe several markets within Arla. So, it needs to have the potential for scalability as well. Azure OpenAI fulfilled both those criteria." 

“We have a very proactive relationship with both Microsoft and Knowit Experience, our digital solution partner. So, both were vital to driving this project forward,” comments Westling. “The custom solution and interface were built by Knowit Experience and integrated into our content management workflow. They provided a comprehensive tool which includes advanced prompt engineering." 

He says they’ve also helped to ensure that the assistant's tone of voice is aligned with Arla's brand guidelines. “Additionally, the solution ensures secure handling of new recipes within Azure and employs machine learning to suggest the most relevant recipes based on seasonality and current trends." 

“The intuitive interface streamlines the differentiation between editor inputs and GenAI outputs, significantly enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of Arla's content strategy,” he adds.

Making recipes relevant and quicker to produce

The overall result of the deployment includes a significant effect on Arla Food’s ways of working, as Westling makes clear: “By integrating Azure OpenAI into Arla’s digital ecosystem, editors are provided with a fast and innovative approach to content management using GPT. This technology allows us to cluster our collection of over 6,000 recipes into themed articles that align with popular search trends.” 

The new solution has also turbocharged productivity of creating new content to continue expanding the content database. “We would never let a computer create our recipes since we have a lot of pride in creating original recipes done by experts, but OpenAI let us do research and structure our content in a great way. A lot of formatting is simply automatic now. Thanks to the integration of GenAI, we can now build pages a lot faster, with far less effort, enabling greater productivity. It also means we have much more time to concentrate on more creative tasks than publishing,” explains Westling.

Adding metadata, and much more

Now that Arla Sweden has embraced a GenAI solution that is making a significant and positive impact on the company, Westling and his colleagues are highly committed to spreading knowledge, expertise, and enthusiasm for the technology. “With OpenAI now fully incorporated into our digital ecosystem, we can continue to develop, learn and move much faster than everyone else,” says Westling. "That, in turn, means we can provide our editors with a rapid and innovative method for content management—all using GPT.”

The company also wants to build on the success of the deployment as he explains: “Enhancing the metadata for our content with GenAI is something the team will do in the future. Because having the right metadata around the content is crucial for us to understand that content, and how best to use it."

“We're also considering ways to answer the questions people have around products a lot quicker. Utilizing the kind of tools Microsoft has provided us with to crunch our own information and make it available to our customers more efficiently is definitely one of our goals too,” he concludes.