NotCo’s founder and CEO, Matías Muchnick, was prominently featured in the March 22, 2026, edition of Forbes as the leading figure in AI-driven formulation for the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. The company boasts an elite client roster that includes industry giants such as Ferrero, Kraft-Heinz, Unilever, Mondelēz, and Grupo Bimbo.
“We’ve become the ‘Better Call Saul’ for the most complex problems facing major food brands,” Muchnick told Forbes, highlighting the company’s reputation as a high-stakes problem solver for the global market.
Muchnick (37), a 2007 Business Engineering graduate from FEN and a member of its Circle of Honor since 2019, splits his time between San Francisco and Santiago. He co-founded NotCo in 2015 alongside Karim Pichara and Pablo Zamora. The company’s core innovation is Giuseppe, an AI platform that analyzes the molecular structure of ingredients to propos
new formulations that mimic traditional products without altering their flavor, texture, or sensory profile.
The Forbes report provides an in-depth look at NotCo’s collaboration with Ferrero (the maker of Nutella and Kinder). Following the 2024 cocoa price surge, Ferrero turned to NotCo to identify substitute ingredients across its more than 30,000 annual recipes. “If you change one thing, you change everything else,” Muchnick explained regarding the complexity of food science. “A computational problem is not a linear problem.”
Building on this success, NotCo launched Concept Quant in 2025, a B2B portal that allows brands to access Giuseppe directly to accelerate research and development. According to the report, seven of the world’s top 20 CPG companies are already working with the firm. Muchnick described their current evolution as an enterprise-level AI provider: companies now deploy a version of Giuseppe within their own cloud environments, integrating their proprietary data to create a fully customized formulation platform.