LOVE BREAD + BOTS

Peter Thomas
Apr 20
3 min read

How AI Helped Create the “恋AIパン” (Love AI Bread)

When Netflix launched its animated series Love, Death & Robots, it opened a window into strange, powerful futures:

stories where love, technology, and humanity collided in ways both beautiful and unsettling.

Each episode dared to ask:

What happens when emotions meet machines?

That same spirit — the blending of feeling and technology — is no longer just fiction.

In Japan, it’s already happening.

And instead of killer robots or dystopian cities, the result is something much sweeter: bread designed by love.

Welcome to the story of 恋AIパン (Love AI Bread) — a groundbreaking collaboration between NEC, Kimuraya Sohonten, and ABEMA.

A project where cutting-edge AI, traditional craftsmanship, and youth culture combined to create something entirely new:

An edible experience built from human emotions

A Quick Note on the Name: 恋愛 → 恋AI

In Japanese, the word for romantic love is 恋愛 (ren’ai).

The creators of 恋AIパン cleverly replaced the “愛” (love) with “AI” — keeping the pronunciation almost the same while giving it a new meaning:

Love powered by Artificial Intelligence.

It’s a small detail — but it perfectly captures the spirit of the project:

Blending human emotion and advanced technology to create something entirely new.

The Vision: Emotion as the Starting Point

Rather than asking, “What flavors are trending?”

the team asked a much deeper question:

“What does love taste like?”

Their mission was to capture the raw emotional energy of teenage romance — the excitement, the nervousness, the joy — and transform it into actual flavors that people could experience.

It wasn’t about following market trends.

It was about creating something that felt real.

The Process: How AI Mapped Human Emotion to Food

The team used NEC’s advanced AI platform, NEC the WISE, in two groundbreaking ways:

Conversation Analysis
- Real conversations between high school students were recorded.
- AI transcribed the conversations and analyzed the emotional content — scoring factors like admiration, excitement, affection, and fear.
- Different romantic “scenes” (such as a confession of love) were mapped according to their dominant emotional fingerprints.
Lyric Analysis
- AI also scanned and analyzed lyrics from popular songs, focusing on references to food.
- Foods like peach, dragonfruit, and honey were emotionally tagged based on how they were portrayed in music.

Then came the match-making.

The AI cross-referenced foods and emotional scenes, pairing them based on emotional resonance —

a confession scene filled with nervous admiration might connect with the gentle sweetness of peach, for example.

This process created entirely new concepts for flavor experiences — ones designed from feelings first.

The Creation: Love in the Form of Steamed Buns

Using the emotional maps generated by AI, Kimuraya, the legendary Japanese bakery famous for inventing anpan (sweet red bean buns), developed five types of special steamed breads (蒸しパン).

Each one represented a different emotional moment from the journey of young love:

The thrill of confessing your feelings.
The sweetness of a new relationship.
The bittersweet excitement of a first crush.

And each flavor was crafted using foods emotionally linked to those specific feelings —

transforming a conversation, a lyric, an emotion into something you could actually taste.

The Launch: Turning Emotion into Experience

To bring the experience to life, ABEMA, Japan’s major internet TV and entertainment platform, played a critical role.

They wove the Love AI Bread into youth programs, online content, and cultural promotions —

turning the product launch into something bigger than food:

a shared emotional event for Gen Z consumers.

It wasn’t just about selling steamed buns.

It was about letting people taste a feeling — and then share that experience through stories, media, and culture.

The Future: Emotion, Innovation, and Haruna Co-Create

恋AIパン shows what’s possible when technology doesn’t replace human emotion —

but amplifies it.

At Haruna Co-Create, we believe in that same future.

We are using AI not just to optimize processes, but to enhance the speed, precision, and emotional richness of how we co-create new products.

Our goal is simple, but bold:

To build products that don’t just satisfy — but inspire.

By blending human creativity with the capabilities of AI, we’re unlocking new ways to turn ideas into experiences — faster, smarter, and with more emotional resonance than ever before.

Because the future isn’t about choosing between technology and humanity.

It’s about bringing them together to create something unforgettable.

And at Haruna Co-Create, we’re just getting started. Peter Thomas Chief Innovation Officer Haruna Group

Haruna Co-Create