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DSM-Firmenich is partnering with AI company Boltz PBC to accelerate the discovery and development of new flavour and fragrance molecules, using artificial intelligence to model how molecules interact with taste and odour receptors.

The partnership will see Boltz’s biomolecular foundation models integrated into DSM-Firmenich’s ingredient discovery processes. The companies aim to combine AI-driven molecular modelling with DSM-Firmenich’s extensive library of taste and odour receptor data to identify new opportunities for sensory innovation.

The collaboration will result in a set of exclusive models designed around DSM-Firmenich’s expertise in sensory science. These will be used to predict and design molecular structures and assess how they interact with specialised proteins that act as receptors for taste and smell.

DSM-Firmenich said its teams will have access to the full Boltz platform, including its Boltz Lab interface, API and integration with large language model agents. The latter will allow scientists to use natural-language instructions to orchestrate complex molecular design and prediction workflows.

Researchers from Boltz will also work alongside DSM-Firmenich scientists as part of the collaboration.

Sarah Reisinger, chief science & research officer at DSM-Firmenich, said: “Being at the very forefront of this technology brings significant value to our businesses. That’s why we’ve chosen to partner with Boltz, a pioneering company with unrivalled AI models, built on scientific expertise from MIT.”

The partnership comes as AI is increasingly being applied across the food industry to improve areas including ingredient discovery, formulation, product development and sensory analysis. In flavour development, molecular modelling offers the potential to reduce the time spent identifying viable compounds and help researchers explore combinations that may otherwise be difficult to uncover through conventional experimentation.

Gabriele Corso, co-founder and CEO of Boltz, said: “We are excited to work with DSM-Firmenich to tackle odour and taste receptors, some of the most interesting and understudied proteins in the human body, by combining our best-in-class models with their unmatched expertise in this field."

The company operates across nutrition, health, beauty, flavours and fragrances, with operations in almost 60 countries and more than 20,000 employees.