April 27-29, 2026

All Speakers

Dog and cat food research experts who will present at Petfood Forum & Petfood Essentials

Carmen Sook
Director of Customer Solutions
Bestmix Software
Carmen Sook works with pet food manufacturers to translate production data into decisions operators can act on. Her focus is extrusion AI, helping operations and quality teams move from reacting to moisture problems to predicting and preventing them. For Sook, animal nutrition was part of everyday life growing up; her father spent years as a dairy nutritionist, and agriculture was simply the world she came from. Currently, she is also building university partnerships across the U.S., focused on training the next generation of formulators and operators.
Date/TimeTitle
Mon Apr 27
8:45 AM - 10:00 AM
Petfood Essentials: From nutritionist to operator: AI as your trusted copilot
KCCC Room 2215

Carmen Sook, director of customer solutions, Bestmix Software, explores how AI can be a copilot that helps formulators and operators work together through shared, transparent insights. Despite advanced automation and formulation software, quality and efficiency often still depend on who happens to be on shift. This human factor, while valuable, introduces bias and variability that modern technology should help us overcome. Sook explains how AI can turn a company’s own production data, a true goldmine of untapped knowledge, into actionable insights that reduce dependency on individuals and stabilize quality across shifts and recipes. She shares learnings from early implementations showing how AI-driven analytics detect and predict process deviations before they affect product quality, provide operators with real-time recommendations to optimize performance, feed production intelligence back into formulation to continuously improve recipes and build trust in data-driven decision-making while reducing “formulator bias.” The future of pet food manufacturing doesn’t replace expertise but enhances it.