Proxy Foods AI partners with Aperio Global to secure AI food product development

Proxy Foods AI has partnered with Aperio Global to launch a secure AI-driven intelligence platform designed to help food and beverage companies accelerate product development while protecting sensitive data.

• Proxy Foods AI and Aperio Global have announced a strategic partnership focused on secure AI-powered food product development.
• The platform has been designed for enterprise R&D, formulation, manufacturing, sourcing and regulatory workflows.
• Aperio Global has contributed Zero Trust architecture, post-quantum cryptography and privacy-preserving computation capabilities.

The Washington, DC-based AI food formulation company announced the partnership on 12 May, describing the combined platform as a next-generation system for product formulation, ingredient optimization and performance prediction. The companies reported that the system was being engineered for the speed, scale and compliance needs of global food manufacturers, consumer packaged goods companies, foodservice operators and ingredient suppliers.

Proxy Foods AI has presented the partnership as a response to mounting pressure on food companies, including supply chain instability, clean-label expectations, regulatory shifts, cost volatility and the need for faster innovation cycles. The company reported that its platform was now being strengthened with Aperio Global’s enterprise security architecture, built for regulated and critical infrastructure environments.

“Enterprise R&D and manufacturing teams must be both fast and secure; speed without control is no longer viable,” said Panos Kostopoulos, CEO of Proxy Foods AI. “Our partnership with Aperio Global allows innovation teams to accelerate safely, with world-class data protection and governance.”

The companies confirmed that the joint platform was being designed with strict tenant isolation to protect brand-to-brand confidentiality, encrypted analytical workloads powered by homomorphic encryption, private RAG and LLM deployments within Azure Confidential Computing, and continuous compliance monitoring using Microsoft Purview and Defender for Cloud.

According to Proxy Foods AI, the architecture was intended for organizations that require trust, traceability and transparency across R&D, sourcing, manufacturing and regulatory workflows in North America, Europe, Asia and emerging markets.

Proxy Foods AI reported that its platform helps R&D, formulation and manufacturing teams move from concept to commercialization more quickly by predicting sensory, processing and performance outcomes. The company noted that recent projects had achieved up to 80% fewer iterations in new product development.

The platform also consolidated ingredient, regulatory, processing and sensory data, with the aim of helping developers use existing company knowledge more effectively. Proxy Foods AI reported that its system could also support cost, labeling, supply and compliance adjustments while preserving product quality.

The company cited recent project results including a 20% reduction in formulation costs and improved consumer acceptance benchmarks in new food prototypes.

Aperio Global, headquartered in Chantilly, Virginia, has joined the platform effort to implement enterprise security architecture for organizations handling sensitive, IP-rich and compliance-critical data. Its contribution included Zero Trust security using Microsoft Azure-native controls, conditional access, managed identities and private networking.

The company also brought CipherIQ’s post-quantum cryptography capability, designed to protect data against future quantum threats, and homomorphic encryption, which enables computation on encrypted data without exposing proprietary formulations or regulatory-sensitive information.

Aperio’s role focused on privacy-preserving computation, data isolation and quantum-resilient encryption. The companies reported that this would allow food companies to analyze sensitive information through Proxy Foods AI while keeping access tightly controlled.

“Proxy Foods AI is setting a new standard for intelligence in food innovation,” said Earl Stafford Jr, CEO of Aperio Global. “We’re proud to support that mission with a Zero-Trust, quantum-resilient security layer engineered for regulated global supply chains and critical food infrastructure.”

The companies confirmed that the partnership was designed to support enterprise and government stakeholders, including agencies such as HHS, FDA and USDA, that are seeking secure and scalable food infrastructure systems.