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4/9/2025

Puratos elevates customer engagement with Azure OpenAI Service chatbot

Baker holding a baked good in a room with customers

Puratos offers innovative products and ingredients for the bakery, patisserie, and chocolate sectors in 100 countries. With a complex catalog of thousands of products, and varying needs for each customer, Puratos wanted to advance its customer service and engagement capabilities.

Puratos turned to its long-standing partnership with Microsoft and utilized Azure Open AI Service to develop the Purabot to assist its customers with questions and provide on-demand help.

The Purabot had a two-fold advantage in improving customer service engagement and product content on the website. 42% of customers use Purabot to source product information, 21% to find recipes, and 14% want to reach out to a sales rep.

Puratos

“We’re a 1,000-ideas-a-day company. The challenge is deciding which idea we focus on today.”

Philippe Arnauts, Communications Director at Puratos, is describing the culture of innovation that the company embraces—and the game changing idea that it recently led to: the Purabot.

An innovative Belgian company that offers products and ingredients for the bakery, patisserie, and chocolate sectors in 100 countries, Puratos needed to maximize its complex catalog of thousands of products and wanted a way to make the information more accessible to its customers. That’s when the Purabot came in. Powered by Azure OpenAI Service, the Purabot is an AI-powered chatbot that makes it quicker and easier for customers to identify products to meet their needs.

“When it comes to innovation, we are always curious to explore it, try it, and see the value of it,” says Benjamin Bado, Data and Digital Manager of Puratos who has led the implementation of Purabot.

Puratos has historically leveraged technology to enhance its products and services. AI has played a crucial role in its research and development processes, helping the company analyze trends, optimize formulations, make internal processes more efficient, and accelerate product development. 

For example, its Taste Tomorrow initiative, powered by the latest semantic AI techniques, provides customers with always-on insights into consumer needs, their expectations, and future trends.

It’s that same innovative spirit that led Puratos to use Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service to deliver a better buying experience for their customers.

“We’re a 1,000-ideas-a-day company. The challenge is deciding which idea we focus on today.”

Philippe Arnauts, Communications Director, Puratos

An idea that ignites an innovative solution 

The Purabot was no exception.

“We were in conversation with Microsoft since the beginning of creating our data science team,” says Bado. “When we started with GenAI, we looked at multiple use cases and we tried to think, what would really help our customers?”

The Puratos product catalog is complex and hosts thousands of items from a variety of margarines, mixes, and whole grains for bakeries to glazes, ganaches, and fillings for patisserie chefs. Any ingredient you can think of that a bakery or patisserie might need is housed here. So, the team wanted to help customers more easily navigate it for their specific needs.

A solution that simplifies the buying process for customers

But what does that mean in the Puratos realm?

Say a baker in France wants to purchase one of Puratos’ products to make a sourdough bread, but there are 20 different types of sourdough. And there are variations of each ingredient you can use. Where to begin?

Without a dedicated team member available on demand to address customers’ questions, that posed a challenge for Puratos.

Enter Purabot, Puratos’ Generative AI chatbot.

“Instead of looking for a specific product, the customer explains what they are looking for and Purabot provides them with concrete and understandable solutions or recipes,” says Bado.

One of the initial challenges of building the Purabot was that the company had accumulated a lot of data but didn’t know how or where to access it. The first step was working with Microsoft Azure to build what’s called a data lake, a centralized repository that ingests, stores, and allows for processing of large volumes of data in its original form. 

Since the Puratos team had Microsoft GenAI specialists on hand to launch the project, it allowed for a smooth transition and effectively saved them months in development time.

The Purabot helps customers understand which Puratos products are right for them, based on which delicious delicacies they plan to produce, saving them time and streamlining the process. 

Now, 42% of Puratos customers consult the Purabot for products, and 21% search for recipes. Of those users, 14% wanted to reach out to a sales rep.

Technology with two-fold benefits

The Purabot made its debut on the Puratos website in France last year, peaking in customer usage at its third month and remaining at that level. It has already launched in the United States and Belgium and will be introduced to seven other countries this summer. A third phase expanding into more countries will roll out by the end of 2025.

Not only has it helped customers better understand their product needs, but it has also allowed the Puratos team to gain a broader knowledge of their offerings and descriptions.

That was a result of a challenge the Puratos team faced after initially launching the Purabot. When customers queried the bot, they discovered discrepancies in the product descriptions and the team learned it needed to adapt and improve the content.

“Because Purabot is focusing on the recipes and product information for customers, it also has the added benefit of improving the quality of digital product descriptions on the website,” says Bado.

What began as a challenge for the Puratos team ultimately led to a triumph.

Benjamin Bado, Data and Digital Manager, Puratos

“Because Purabot is focusing on the recipes and product information for customers, it also has the added benefit of improving the quality of digital product descriptions on the website.”

Benjamin Bado, Data and Digital Manager, Puratos

Deepening the relationship with GenAI to build the future 

The introduction of the Purabot is the product of a long-standing relationship with Microsoft and speaks to the inherently innovative spirit of the company that has been a part of its identity since its founding.

The Purabot is also just one of the first pillars of Puratos’ GenAI roadmap.

“Microsoft has been our partner since the beginning of this journey. Today it’s Generative AI bots. In 2025, I think it will be the year of AI agents,” says Bado.

It is a partnership that will help propel Puratos into the next phase of experimentation where the possibilities are boundless. 

“We are always happy to stay ahead because we really want to be the first, the most innovative in the area of bakery, pastry, and chocolate both in the product area and in the digital world,” says Bado.

Benjamin Bado, Data and Digital Manager, Puratos

“Microsoft has been our partner since the beginning of this journey. Today it’s Generative AI bots. In 2025, I think it will be the year of AI agents.”

Benjamin Bado, Data and Digital Manager, Puratos

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