Artificial intelligence in gastronomy: transforming culinary innovation, food design, and consumer experience

Artificial intelligence (AI) has expanded its application in gastronomy across six main areas: computational culinary knowledge, assisted creativity, food design and personalization, intelligent execution, enhanced experience, and cultural and consumer sustainability. Evidence indicates that AI enables the analysis of relationships among ingredients, the generation and reformulation of recipes, the optimization of products according to nutritional, sensory, and environmental criteria, the personalization of recommendations, and the support of culinary processes through robotics and computer vision. It also contributes to predicting preferences, reducing food waste, and promoting more sustainable consumer decisions. However, important limitations remain regarding data quality, sensory validation, privacy, user acceptance, authorship, algorithmic bias, and the representation of cultural diversity. In this context, the most promising approach is augmented gastronomy based on human–AI collaboration, in which technology complements, rather than replaces, human creativity, cultural knowledge, and sensory judgment.