Client
Technology Driven Concepts (TDC)
A leading innovation business supplying customized innovation solutions, application support and specialty tailored ingredients company supporting global food manufacturers, retailers, and foodservice brands across multiple categories.
The Challenge
TDC’s R&D team was already highly disciplined.
They relied on one very well-structured, carefully maintained master spreadsheet that captured formulations, experiments, and project learnings. It worked — until scale and complexity increased.
Over time, the spreadsheet became increasingly difficult to manage:
- Manual maintenance burden as projects and data volume grew
- Limited search and reuse of past work without deep familiarity with the file
- Knowledge dependency on individuals who knew how to navigate and interpret it
- No clear path to AI enablement or advanced data reasoning.
- Managing teams on various location throughout South Africa.
What had once been a strength was becoming a constraint.
TDC needed a way to keep their structure and rigor, while moving to a system that could scale with the business and support future innovation.
The Solution
AKA Studio — a scalable evolution of structured R&D
TDC adopted AKA Studio, AKA Foods’ secure, food-specific R&D platform, under a multi-year agreement.
Rather than replacing their approach, AKA Studio built on it — transforming a single, fragile spreadsheet into a robust, scalable system designed for real food development workflows.
AKA Studio enabled TDC to:
- Preserve the logic and discipline of their existing data
- Eliminate manual spreadsheet maintenance
- Make formulations, experiments, and learnings searchable and reusable
- Support collaboration across teams without relying on individual memory
- Establish an AI-ready foundation for future data-driven development
TDC also acted as an early design partner, helping validate the platform in real-world R&D conditions and shaping its evolution.
The Impact
Structured Knowledge, Without the Fragility
With AKA Studio, TDC moved from a single point of failure to a shared, structured R&D system.
- Faster access to past formulations and experiments [100% ]
- Reduced duplication of work [75%]
- More confident, evidence-based decisions [100%]
- Improved responsiveness to customer requests [75%]
“AKA Studio gives our developers something we never had before — the ability to see and use all of our knowledge in one place.”
— Chris Botha, R&D Director, TDC
Why It Matters
TDC’s story shows that digital transformation isn’t about fixing chaos. It’s about what happens after you outgrow even the best spreadsheet.