On April 15, Travis Mavrich, PhD, PIPA’s Bioinformatics Technical Lead, gave a guest lecture to undergraduate food science students at UC Davis. The class hosts a speaker series featuring researchers and innovators. 

Travis’s talk, “Connecting the dots in food product development“, covered where product development stalls in practice: bench formulations that don’t translate to plant trials, weeks lost reconciling data across ingredients, processes, and cost. Then he showed how PIPA’s platforms and technology address those gaps directly.

First was FIOS™, the Food Innovation Operating System. FIOS™ brings formulation, processing, and regulatory data into one environment so teams can evaluate trade-offs before scheduling a pilot. Travis walked students through a live workflow — adjusting formulation inputs, showing how AI can speed up finding solutions to common reformulation challenges all within a single system instead of across separate tools and handoffs.

Next was the Digital Extruder, one of PIPA’s digital twins. Built from first-principles physics and calibrated against real production runs, it models screw and barrel configuration, thermal zones, operational steps, and the quality of the final extruded products. Travis changed process parameters live and showed students how the simulation responded — a concrete look at finding scale-up problems in software rather than on the production line. You can learn more about Digital Extruder and the rest of our Digital Twins here.

The presentation was rich with discussion and the students brought plenty of questions, diving deep into how the models are built, where simulations diverge from real production data, the many ways AI can be directly integrated, and the future of food science.

Several students followed up afterward, asking about testing FIOS™ and the Digital Extruder themselves. Travis’s closing point landed: AI is already changing how food products move from concept to production, and the scientists who will lead that shift are the ones building fluency in both food science and code now.