Nextatlas for Barilla: ChefAtlas, AI-Powered Foodservice Industry Intelligence

Barilla Group is one of the world's leading food companies, with a strong presence in the global foodservice sector through its professional and out-of-home channels. To maintain its position as a strategic partner for chefs and foodservice operators, Barilla needed a faster and more specific understanding of where culinary professionals were directing their attention and creative energy.

Traditional research methods lacked the speed and granularity to capture the priorities of a global chef community. Surveys gave back answers shaped by the question itself, missing the organic, unfiltered intelligence that chefs express freely in their own creative spaces.

Nextatlas built ChefAtlas, a generative AI platform that monitors and interprets the digital conversations of over 45,000 verified chefs and culinary professionals worldwide. The audience is rigorously verified by profession, geography, and activity level, filtering out sponsored content and noise to focus exclusively on what real culinary professionals are genuinely discussing on social media and professional forums.

An AI-driven taxonomy of hundreds of culinary subcategories, from sustainable sourcing and fermentation techniques to texture preferences and preparation methods, continuously organises these signals. Machine learning and natural language processing then answer hyper-specific questions: which sustainable proteins are gaining traction among Latin American chefs; how cooking techniques are influencing product texture across markets; which plating and ingredient approaches are moving from fine dining into broader foodservice. A human-in-the-loop validation model ensures every insight remains contextually grounded, with Nextatlas expert researchers interpreting and refining what the AI surfaces.