Japanese bakery Kimuraya, reportedly the nation’s oldest bakery, has used artificial intelligence to create romance bread.

According to yahoo news, the bread captures the essence of romantic feelings.

Made in collaboration with NEC Corp, Kimuraya created Ren AI Pan – or “Romance AI Bread” using AI technology that analysed conversations from Japanese dating show Today I Fell In Love as well as lyrics from approximately 35,000 love-related song in order to identify key romantic emotions. Those were: first encounter, first date, jealousy, heartbreak, and mutual love.

NEC Corp then used two AI technologies, NEC Enhanced Speech – which transformed spoken words into text – and NEC Data Enrichment, which produced emotion scores based on the textual data.

From there, Kimuraya translated those five emotions into five flavours of fluffy, steamed bread with the aim of inspiring romantic feelings in their consumers.

These flavours included cotton candy (fateful encounter); citrus (first date); purple sweet potatoes, truffle oil and raisins (jealousy); and honey, peach and dragon fruit (mutual love).

However, despite the use of AI human input was still required to craft the final product, with a special attention paid to visual appeal.

Kimuraya bread developer Yuki Kitazawa said the selection of ingredients was done by AI, but it was the team’s role to make them into bread.

“We paid attention to the colours used to express romantic emotions visually and aimed for a vibrant and pop appearance for Love Bread,” Yuki told yahoo news.

A Kimuraya official said, “We really made this bread to encourage romance among young people. We believe it will be an effective way of tying you to someone you love.”

The unusual pairing came about as both NEC Corp and Kimuraya sought to increase their brand appeal among the younger generations of Japanese people.

According to CNN Kimuraya discovered through  market research that a growing number of youths weren’t interested in pursuing romantic relationships. There was, however, still the desire to go on a date, fall in love, and end up with a partner.

The bread was released for sale on February 1 in Japan’s Kanto area and on Kimuraya’s website.

Image: NEC Corp