A Conversation with Tastewise Co-founder & CEO Alon Chen
Knowing how and when to pivot strategy has always been essential for companies to stay alive and stay in the lead. For startups it’s a core fact of life; for enterprises in the AI era, it’s increasingly becoming one too.
But what happens when an AI-native company – one that’s been ahead of the curve since 2017 – faces the very technology revolution it helped pioneer? When ChatGPT launched, Tastewise CEO Alon Chen made a decision that surprised even his board: discontinue the successful legacy product, rebuild from scratch, and risk losing customers in the process.
The bet paid off. Today, Tastewise releases new business solutions weekly and serves a market ten times bigger than before. Nurit Ben sat down with Alon on the art of the pivot, from learning to spot the shifts, to making the tough decisions and executing them right.
When AI exploded into the global conversation, you were already years deep into building with GenAI. Set the scene for us for those unfamiliar with what you do.
Back in late 2017 we realized the food industry is vastly disconnected from the consumer. No one had a direct understanding of what consumers eat and drink and why. They knew what they buy at the supermarket, but not what they order in restaurants. We saw that understanding consumers’ eating habits and behaviors in a streamlined way is one of the biggest hurdles in helping this huge food and beverage industry move from a very inefficient, disconnected space to a very optimized, and efficient one.
A lot of market education was involved. But the companies were able to understand why a 10 million consumer panel is better than a 200-person survey. Today we unite consumer panels, market trackers, and agents to expand distribution, accelerate innovation, and drive demand for leading food and beverage brands. We have data assets that can’t be reproduced with the most advanced LLMs. The big AI boom gave us a tailwind for others to better understand what this technology is really about.
So ChatGPT arrives. What made you realize this moment required a real pivot and not just a cosmetic change?
Beyond the market hype, what was apparent was the level of sophistication now possible; the outputs we were able to get in such a short turnaround were transformational. And we realized that if we don’t reorganize the company, if we don’t redo our product roadmap, we won’t continue to lead the market.
As a company that really first created AI for the food and beverage industry, we wanted to make sure we stay leaders. The tech stack was becoming a lot more sophisticated and robust, the market more educated, and we have a bigger industry and market to tap into if we figure this out.
It was the perfect storm, but it also required very brave decisions that we made together with the board to sit there and say, okay, our legacy solution is discontinued. It’s a great business. But we’re going to now voluntarily lose business, to be future ready. It required us to rethink everything, entirely.
Tell us about those early days. How did this all unfold inside Tastewise?
Days after ChatGPT’s launch, we had a company-wide hackathon. It wasn’t pre-planned. But it was clear that the change and the shift in the tech stack are so big and wide that we have to see what’s possible to do. The hackathon turned from 2 days into 2 weeks and 3 weeks, and then we said, okay, we need to rethink our roadmap altogether, because what this is allowing us to do is unbelievable. It’s not just another experiment. We started small, but we started with a business case. Can we deliver the same value to the business user, not to the analyst?
How did you make the tough decisions about what to keep and what to throw out?
It’s not that we changed everything overnight. We kept everything in place and then added new features. At first, we called it ‘a new set of business solutions,’ but very shortly after we realized it’s bigger than that. The new features were solving problems better and faster. So you need to be changing your messaging, changing the kind of people you’re serving, how you’re serving them. We asked, ‘am I helping you navigate through data, or am I helping you actually grow your business?’ Those are two different ways of dealing with the industry.
Then we made a shift. We were still serving customers that were using the old features until they were ready to make the move, but we stopped selling the old product to new customers.
Change management is notoriously difficult. How did you get your team on board?
I’ve led teams of thousands at a big corporation, and change management is always very hard. I thought that in a smaller company it would be easier. It’s easier, but it’s not easy. Every time you think something needs to change, there’s a very clear task force you need to set up as a leader and then have a daily and a weekly touchpoint with milestones to ensure the change was made.
What specific tactics helped make the transition successful?
In a corporate environment you can just change jobs, you move people around, and then they’re simply not working on what they’ve been working on before. In a startup, your leadership comes under real nitty-gritty evaluation by the people you hired and your management team. You have to show people the way every day, but you also need to enforce the checks and balances to see that the shift is made. You need to tell a new story, you need to change collateral. You put billboards in the office, you do daily training, a daily tip. There are so many things you need to be putting in place to push it.
Finding what you need to be doing is great, but executing it is more difficult. The most important thing, especially for smaller companies, is to make the tough decisions. I think that usually pays off. Not making a decision all the way through is potentially what’s going to cost you your future.
What do you mean by ‘tough decisions?’
If you’re a company with 100, 200, 300 people, you were probably very good at doing one thing, and now you need to do something else. If you’re going try and keep doing two things at the same time, and not refocus, you’ll likely need a lot more people to do the same two things at the same level. And then you need think, is this worthy of my time, and my resources, and the risk?
So it’s making a tough decision about what you’re actually going to solve, in this case for these giant food and beverage companies. And especially when there’s an economic downturn and companies’ resources are scarcer, they go back to their core. They say, let’s put aside all the new ventures we’ve been working on, because if we only execute well at our core, we can grow market share and generate returns.
What are the early warning signs that a company needs to pivot versus just add a feature?
It really depends on your kind of business and leadership, but there are various telltale signs. If something big is happening, you need to be asking yourself, how am I adjusting? If your board is asking ‘why is this happening?’ and you don’t really have a good answer that’s structured and educated, then you may be at risk.
If you have a loyal customer that is now reducing budgets, or the departments they’re serving have less personnel, this is a big sign where you can smell risk or opportunity. I say it’s always an opportunity. I’m constantly on the road, meeting with the industry. If they’re telling you, ‘listen, this is not working,’ or they’re not meeting targets they were meeting before, something has changed. You should be looking at symptoms. Smell them. And talk to your employees – they’re out in the market.
Is that where a lot of companies go wrong?
A lot of startups get into a market, solve a problem, succeed, and then the market changes, and sometimes they lose the opportunity to adjust. They lose their core reason why startups exist, which is agility and reading the market. We’ve done a couple pivots by now, and I think we’re ready for the next one, because it’s just how you should be operating.
What’s interesting is it used to be only applicable for startups and smaller companies, but today it’s just as important for the big companies. If you’re not adjusting and changing and being future ready, you’re risking your business altogether, because the shifts are happening much faster than before.
But how do you maintain that agility as you scale?
It’s rooted in the same qualities I look for in my team and executives: to be out there in the market, in the world, have friction with users, with consumers. Back in my Google days, I was marketing Google Search and Google Chrome and Google AdWords for small and medium businesses, from the beautician to the electrician. You don’t learn anything if you’re in your comfy office. You need to be going down and talking to people to really get a feel for what’s happening.
Even when I go to see my nieces and nephews, I listen and hear how they’re living their lives. When my 15-year-old nephew is trading different gaming entities on Telegram and Discord, I’m like, okay, this is the new way. Be curious about the world. Spending time with people is how I get to learn and ultimately stay agile. The best ideas I ever got were always from meeting people.
It sounds like in many ways this is about a core mindset.
For sure, it’s a mindset that you need to be picking up on symptoms. When you see something, it’s a red flag, or it’s a flag to be curious about. Why am I getting this email? Why am I seeing this? Why has this deal not been performed? Why is this feature taking longer than expected? It’s an opportunity to go all in and see what’s working.
Your customers, the world’s food giants, don’t typically embrace rapid change. But as you mentioned, in this environment they don’t really have a choice. How is that going?
I think now it’s a race and they all understand they need to go there. Otherwise you’ll fall behind, and that’s now clear for everyone. The question is how.
The main interesting conversation I’m having with a lot of leaders is that they’re trying to build their tech stack in house, as an IP. I ask, wait – do you have a tech IP to date? Oftentimes, the answer is no. They have IP around their brand and formulation.
So my question is, why would you try to develop IP? Even if you do, after you invest a lot of money, maintaining it is expensive – and then everything changes all the time. Is this really a viable business opportunity? A lot of them have beautiful slides and the vision on GenAI and their IP and so on, but honestly, at Tastewise we’re changing our entire tech stack every two or three months. Can they do that? Of course not. It will take them 2 years to build.
So tech companies are there for a reason. It is becoming much easier to develop software, but then maintaining it, and quality assurance, and security – there’s so much complexity that you should be thinking about: even if I solve this now, is this really going to stick around for 5 years? The answer is no, and you will need to be putting in heavy Opex consistently.
On the flip side, there’s a risk of pivoting too often or chasing every new trend, especially right now. How do you avoid that trap?
If you have a big business, it’s irresponsible to pivot if you haven’t checked it out and tested the waters. Have a good plan. Pilot, start small, start manual. You need to have real clear evidence for yourself that you’re barking up the right tree. All this Kool-Aid is good, but it dissolves very quickly. You need to be solving real problems, real business needs. The fundamentals have not changed. You started a business because you had a good business case. The same needs to be true for the new business case.