From Formulation to Compliance—How Prodeen’s Agentic AI Automates the CPG Product Lifecycle

• Prodeen automates CPG product development using agentic AI for faster, smarter workflows
• Founders combine US and Czech expertise, targeting global clients with a flexible AI solution
• Early testing shows 80% time savings, aiming to transform both PLM and consulting sectors
• Plans include public beta launch, commercial rollout, and expansion into compliance-focused SaaS consulting

American Czech B2B SaaS foodtech startup Prodeen is quite fresh out of the oven. Founded in April this year by Tye Blazey (CEO, USA) and Jakub Janoštík (CTO, the Czech Republic), Prodeen develops a platform to create, launch, and scale CPG products without battling through spreadsheets, outdated tools, and silos.

A Fresh Take on CPG Innovation

The founding team is building a global company from day one and plans to structure it in a way to serve CPG clients best, regardless of where they may be based. It was decided to incorporate Prodeen in the US because of the strong investor community. With the CTO based in the Czech Republic and having a lot of experience building teams there, this CEE country shall be an important location with its impressive level of technical expertise coming from the university students to more senior developers, designers, and also CPG industry-focused individuals.

The two co-founders had previously worked together at a company, where they built software solutions for the CPG industry, specifically focused on product safety and compliance. Their clients included some of the largest food and beverage companies across Europe, North America, and Asia. Mr Blazey led the commercial side of the business while Mr Janoštík was the lead architect, overseeing machine learning teams and exploring the early use of GPT models.

Prodeen was inspired by two key triggers:

• The exponential improvements in foundational AI models made a new level of automation and system interoperability possible.
• Consistent feedback from users struggling with fragmented and outdated product development workflows in CPG companies.

The same pain points became recurrent—complex, siloed processes and tools that weren’t built for today’s fast-moving environment. The large PLM (product lifecycle management) systems and traditional CRUD-based SaaS platforms that people were used to could no longer support the kind of intelligent, adaptable workflows teams needed in reality.

‘The opportunity to start fresh—without legacy constraints—was too compelling to ignore,’ Mr Blazey points out.

Agentic AI to Fill the Gaps in the PLM Landscape

As it appears, the current PLM space tends to fall into two categories. Large, established companies are often locked into fixed and highly customized PLM systems. Smaller companies, on the other hand, typically don’t have any solution at all—they rely on documents or spreadsheets.

‘Prodeen provides intelligent workflows that help teams formulate products better, ensure regulatory compliance, and monitor for food safety incidents—all while working within their existing systems. You can choose from a buffet of tools that fit your process and start seeing benefits right away, without having to migrate to a new platform or retrain your team,’ Mr Janoštík explains.

‘There is a lot of ‘secret’ data around formulations which makes it difficult to create generic SaaS solutions. For larger companies, it’s impossible to move an entire organisation to a single way of working on one system. AI agents, with an appropriate set of tools, have the unique ability to be integrated into existing workflows without major disruption in the existing operations. This can happen now because of drastic improvements in tool call ability. For brainstorming, the new reasoning models can come up with creative solutions to new problems. These were just not possible even six months ago,’ the CTO continues.

Pre-existing approaches to PLM bring up a lot of issues to consider. Within compliance, the rule based systems fall short since their response is highly dependent on the context or interpretation of the expert. Generative AI systems can provide a new tool for experts to work highly efficiently. At that, the existing LLM solutions lack the access to the relevant sources and valid set of guidelines on which sources should be considered for certain markets. Various degrees of these problems span into non-compliance areas as well. Narrowing their scope to CPG allows Prodeen to contextualise existing models correctly or finetune new ones on highly specific tasks.

A Real-World Use Case and Measurable Impact

Prodeen walks us through a common scenario that someone in R&D might face when tasked with developing a new product for a specific market:

• It starts with research and concept development, where the user can work in natural language to define the product idea. This includes outlining key aspects like the target audience, flavor profiles, and market positioning.
• From there, the process flows into formulation, with the user generating a draft ingredient list.
• Once that’s in place, Prodeen can automatically perform a regulatory check to verify that each ingredient is approved for use in the target market.
• If an ingredient isn’t permitted, another agent can be triggered to search for compliant alternatives. This agent can even propose recipe adjustments based on the substitute ingredient to maintain the intended flavor or nutritional profile.
• Next comes label development, where Prodeen assists with allergen identification, the nutritional facts panel, and a claims evaluation process. The platform ensures that any health or marketing claims meet regulatory standards and are backed by credible evidence.
• In parallel, Prodeen supports food safety assessment, including the creation of a HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) plan.

This ensures the product meets the highest food safety standards by identifying and mitigating potential risks throughout the production process.

While testing and benchmarking Prodeen’s solution against current ways of working, the team focuses on key metrics, including:

• time savings in new product development, helping teams accelerate from concept to launch;
• reduction in the percentage of products that don’t reach the market, by identifying risks earlier and streamlining approvals;
• reduction in team hours required, leading to more efficient use of cross-functional resources and freeing up capacity for higher-value work;
• increased number of markets teams that can enter, thanks to lower market entry costs enabled by automated compliance checks and localization support;
• reduction in regulatory violations through proactive identification of non-compliant elements before products are launched.

By these metrics, Prodeen can boast about its initial user testing that revealed reductions in the time requirements to perform this work of over 80%.

Balancing Automation and Human Expertise

Mr Blazey tells ITKeyMedia that ensuring compliance, traceability, and auditability across markets is one of the most highly discussed considerations when deploying agentic AI into the enterprise. What is the balance between automation and human involvement when making critical decisions that impact the ingredients people consume or apply to themselves?

‘Prodeen’s focus, first and foremost, is to support the actual experts involved in food science, regulatory or quality. Just as you rely on other colleagues, you can turn to Prodeen to help with specific tasks. If you take the area of compliance, for example, what we are doing is building our own ‘data bank’ composed of the official government sources responsible for governing food or personal care products. Our domain expertise means that Prodeen knows to consult and always reference the actual sources. It then feeds that relevant context to the LLMs based on both general knowledge and specific data. Our agents are trained to guide users to the information sources instead of simply declaring the answer outright. From the traceability and auditability standpoint, all of the agent interactions and outputs can be organized by specific projects making it easy to track developments and retrieve past information,’ the CEO answers expansively.

Strategic Focus, Roadmap, and Funding

Prodeen’s addressable market within CPG is food & beverage, dietary supplements, cosmetics and personal care. The team calculated the market size for Product Lifecycle Management software at USD 3B, leaving the startup  plenty to go after as per its business plan for 36 months. Beyond that, the solution can certainly be considered for other consumer products such as toys, clothing or other consumables, but for now the co-founders underline their strong intention to to stay as focused as possible.

In terms of timeline, Prodeen was formed this April and the team has been validating the concept with industry partners and users. Over the course of June and July, the system is opening up in a private beta with these same users. Public beta for a broader audience is scheduled in August, and September is when Prodeen launches its first commercial playbooks and agents for commercial use officially.

‘We are currently closing on pre-seed funding with an external investor which is an exciting development. Our ambition is to secure more substantial investments later in the year once we can demonstrate strong traction with our design partners and first commercial users,’ Mr Blazey adds.

‘Service-as-a-Software’—the kind of solution that Prodeen suggests—sounds like a natural evolution of what has been growing inside the consulting space for years. This is no longer futuristic, but rather the demand of our times. It is true that big consulting firms still work by the model that relies on human resource, manual labor, and individual projects too much. However, for small and medium businesses that have neither the budget for Big 4’s services, nor the time to wait for others to understand their niche, such scalable digital solutions become a life saver,’ Movadex’ co-founder and Knight-Hennessy scholar at Stanford Salome Mikadze comments.

More Ambition: Rethinking Consulting with AI

According to Mr Janoštík, in addition to Prodeen’s core business, the two entrepreneurs strongly believe in a significant opportunity to revolutionize traditional consulting, especially for SMEs that often face challenges due to limited in-house compliance and R&D expertise. Typically, these companies rely heavily on external consultants to innovate products and navigate complex regulatory frameworks, which can be costly and slow.

‘Our vision is to reshape this approach by partnering with established consulting firms globally, transitioning their traditional service models into more innovative SaaS platforms. Thus, we aim to enable consultants to offer their expertise to their clients more efficiently, promptly, and at a lower cost. Such transformation will allow SMEs to seamlessly integrate cutting-edge compliance and product development capabilities directly into their workflows, significantly reducing barriers to innovation and growth. Ultimately, we envision creating a scalable and accessible ecosystem where expertise meets technology, fostering continuous advancement and competitive advantage for businesses of all sizes,’ Mr Janoštík shares.

Automating CPG product development processes is becoming essential as companies face increasing pressure to launch faster, stay compliant across global markets, and manage complex formulations with fewer resources. Traditional systems—often fragmented and manual—struggle to keep pace with this demand, leading to inefficiencies, regulatory risk, and missed opportunities. Platforms like Prodeen, which leverage agentic AI to streamline and contextualize these workflows, are crucial in enabling smarter, faster, and more scalable product innovation across the industry.