This from an article in this week’s New Yorker, Snacks for a Fat Planet, in which writer John Seabrook looks at where PepsiCo is headed, with some great interviews. (Behind the subscriber wall, otherwise I’d link and clip a fascinating paragraph.) However, the abstract at the website does have this intriguing sentence that says quite a lot all by itself:
Describes a robot at the facility that has been fitted with human taste buds.
The robot in question has an arm with which it tastes each day tens of thousands of “assays” – samples of food or flavors gathered from around the world. It has cultured human taste buds, which are hard wired up to a computer to see what stimulates what.