Client
Technology Driven Concepts (TDC)
A leading innovation business supplying customized innovation solutions, application support and tailored specialty ingredients to 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
- Teams spread across multiple sites in 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
- Reduce reliance on 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
Faster development, more reusable knowledge
AKA Studio is now used by 17 people across TDC’s Johannesburg and Cape Town sites, connecting NPD developers and team leaders with directors, marketing, sales and quality teams around a shared R&D knowledge base.
10–15 hours saved per developer, per week
Developers estimate saving 2–3 hours each day by retrieving historical formulations, project history and development information in Studio instead of searching across spreadsheets and files, rebuilding formulations, or recreating reports.
2× faster project creation
TDC now creates new projects at about double the pace it managed with its previous Excel-based systems.
~50% faster onboarding
Because formulations and project history are already structured and searchable, new developers can get up to speed around twice as quickly as under the previous spreadsheet-based process.
“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.
User count and project pace are from TDC’s AKA Studio workspace, 2026 year-to-date. Time savings and onboarding figures are estimates reported by TDC’s development team.