NEW YORK, June 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — WISEcode, the first Foodtech AI company, today brought its FoodTruth™ platform to the 2026 Summer Fancy Food Show, June 28–30 at the Javits Center in New York City, with a message for the specialty-food industry: the rules of the business are about to be rewritten.
WISEcode’s thesis is that the food industry stands at a generational inflection point. For decades brands competed on perception, marketing, packaging and shelf placement, because consumers could not see what was actually in their food. Artificial Intelligence, paired with food data, deeply removes that barrier. When every shopper can know what is in a product and what it does to their body, competition shifts from perception to performance, and the advantage moves to the companies with the best products rather than the biggest budgets.
“AI is one of those rare technologies that doesn’t just improve an industry, it rewrites the rules,” said Founder and CEO Peter Castleman in the company’s main-stage keynote. “The automobile, the microprocessor, the smartphone, they all arrived quietly, the establishment dismissed them, and then one morning the ground had already moved. That’s where the food industry is today. For decades the industry competed on perception. The next generation will compete on performance. That creates something we have never truly had before: a race to the top.”
For consumers, WISEcode is starting with the question shoppers ask most and no one has answered: is my food ultra-processed? Its free UPF Detector™ lets anyone scan a barcode for a simple yes-or-no in seconds, then go as deep as the science allows. It’s a free ingredient-based app, covering more than a million foods, and runs on iPhone and Android. Coming next is WISEcoach™, a personalized nutrition coach that evaluates every food against an individual’s own goals rather than a one-size-fits-all standard, a shift the company describes as food finally adapting to the consumer instead of the other way around. At the WISEcode Fancy Bodega at the show’s main entrance, attendees can test the platform and take home the WISEcode stuffed owl and hats.
For brands, WISEcode’s tools are designed to turn food transparency into competitive assets. WISEcode’s Non-UPF Shield™ is a verification program available to brands through the company’s verification portal. Non-UPF Verified™ program gives food brands a science-backed certification that proves their products meet the standard for non-ultra-processed food, helping verified brands get discovered by shoppers and retailers actively searching for cleaner food.
“The food industry feeds this country and the world, and the products on this show floor are spectacular,” Castleman said. “The problem isn’t the food. It’s that we know more about our Uber driver than about what we feed our children. Today we know less than one percent of what we could know about the food we eat, not because people don’t care, but because the information simply didn’t exist.”
That gap, WISEcode argues, has left consumers and the companies serving them inside a broken system. The company frames the consumer as already past the tipping point, actively asking two questions the old label could never answer: What is in my food? And what does it do to me? WISEcode’s wager is that the brands and retailers who can answer those questions credibly will define the next era of the category.
WISEcode’s central claim is that this transformation is only possible on top of food data that did not previously exist, and that building it, not building another app, is what sets the company apart. AI, the company stresses, is only as good as the data beneath it: bad data yields bad advice and bad outcomes.
A Mission and an Invitation
WISEcode frames its work less as a business than as a public good. “WISEcode was never built to be another software company or a hot AI company,” Castleman said. “It was founded to help create a better food system. If, five years from now, people simply expect FoodTruth before they buy food without even remembering WISEcode, we’ll know we succeeded.”
“If you believe great products should win because they’re better, not because they have the biggest marketing budget, then join us. This isn’t a race to sell more food. It’s a race to build better food, and to leave the next generation with a healthier food system than the one we inherited.”
About WISEcode:
WISEcode is a company offering FoodTechAI™ on a mission to give everyone the truth about what is in their food and what it does to their body. Built on The Food Genome Project™ and grounded in scientific research, WISEcode turns complex food data into clear, accessible insight into ingredients, nutritional quality, and ultra-processed food (UPF) levels for consumers, brands, retailers, and policymakers, all through one platform. As demand for food transparency grows, WISEcode is driving the national conversation around nutrition and food education. WISEcode calls it FoodTruth™, and for the first time, the world has it. Find Your Food Truth™.
Download the free UPF Detector™ from the App Store or Google Play, or learn more at WISEcode.ai.
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SOURCE WISEcode
