The internet can be a useful, if not vital, research in helping food companies find such information. However with so many websites, blogs and forums focused on food it is often difficult to narrow down the wide range available.
Jens Tellefsen, Accelovation's vice president of products, told ConfectioneryNews that the new market-discovery software can be used by businesses in all areas to look for market solutions or technologies.
The company charges a fee for the service.
"General search engines, such as Google or Yahoo, are great for finding single, popular documents, as long as these documents have specific keywords," he said. "However, each search will provide millions of results."
Accelovation's software, on the other hand, uses a semantic search to sift through three billion web pages, to produce a smaller, but more relevant group of results.
"Our system processes four billion pages and more than 50 billion sentences in less than a minute," Tellefsen claimed.
And while many search engines only look for specific keywords, the Accelovation model provides businesses with pages that apply to several specifications.
"This search engine would allow a company to search for wrapping that looks old-fashioned and classically designed, aesthetically pleasing for consumers, as well as being hermetically sealed and therefore hygienic," he said.
The database is also useful for clients who are not sure what exactly they areas looking for, he added, especially if the topic is vague, or if the client is not exactly sure what he or she is hoping to find.
According to Tellefsen, the software has already been taken up by two dozen businesses in the Fortune 500 list, the top 500 US public corporations in terms of gross revenue, as well as five of the top eight US food companies and several chemical and packaging firms.
The company is currently working on a new easier-to-use version of the software, rather than the more complicated version currently on the market, and hopes to start looking for clients outside the US very soon, he added.
