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A new AI partnership is born.
Antwerp, Belgium - April 9th, 2026
deSter, a leading designer and manufacturer of sustainable food packaging and serviceware for the aviation, hospitality and foodservice industries, has chosen Made as its partner to bring agentic AI into an organisation built on five decades of direct human connection to markets worldwide.
The collaboration is positioned as a key experiment within deSter's AI & Digitization roadmap with a clear ambition: accelerate the journey from insight to finished product, without losing what makes deSter exceptional.
You can't replicate in months what deSter has built in decades.
A signature tableware collection co-created with Riyadh Air. The comfort items and service equipment behind Lufthansa's Allegris cabin overhaul. A long-standing sustainable serviceware partnership with Discover Airlines. deSter's name shows up in the most prestigious projects located on the intersection between aviation, hospitality and foodservice.
And there’s a good reason for it.
deSter wins these kinds of premium projects because they understand the markets better than anyone else. For over more than fifty years, the company has built something that no competitor can easily replicate: a living network of direct relationships with end users, chefs, airline operators, and foodservice professionals on every continent.
When deSter needs to know how a new tableware concept will land in Latin America, they pick up the phone and call a chef in Ecuador who will actually use it. When they need to understand what works in a Japanese premium cabin, they talk to the people who serve the meals.
This kind of first-hand, human connection to the market is rare, and it’s what sets deSter apart from the competition.
So when deSter signed off on their AI & Digitization roadmap and decided to bring AI into its operations, the intent was never to replace that human connection. The question was: can AI help our people to do even more with the extraordinary insight they already have?
"Traditional AI tools respond to a single prompt or command. Agentic AI workflows, however, reason independently through multi-step challenges, pull in information from different sources, and take action autonomously. It’s much like a very skilled and seasoned colleague who doesn't just answer questions but also acts on them to get work done", says Tanguy Ongena, Made's Business Lead for Manufacturing & Mobility. "That's exactly the kind of capability a company like deSter needs when operating at global scale."
Traditional AI tools respond to a single prompt or command. Agentic AI workflows, however, reason independently through multi-step challenges, pull in information from different sources, and take action autonomously. That's exactly the kind of capability a company like deSter needs when operating at global scale.
To deliver on that ambition, Made has partnered with Rollo, a specialist AI studio with deep experience in building and scaling AI applications. It is a deliberate combination.
Made brings the business design thinking, the industry knowledge, and the product and process expertise needed to ensure AI solves the right problems in the right way, drawing on its AI Growth Engine methodology to connect market intelligence with real business outcomes. Rollo brings the solution architecture and AI engineering muscle to make it work at scale.
Together, they form a team where business value and technical execution reinforce each other from day one.
Two years from insight to product. That's about to change.
deSter's people know what the market needs. That has never been the bottleneck. In a world where consumer expectations, sustainability requirements, and competitive dynamics shift faster than ever, time and process speed are often the constraints.
Today, the journey from a new insight or idea to a finished product in a customer's hands easily takes two years. This is where AI enters the picture. Not to replace the human judgment that makes deSter's work exceptional, but to facilitate and accelerate the process around it. To ensure that when deSter's teams uncover an opportunity - through a conversation with a client, a shift in consumer behaviour, a new material innovation - they can act on it faster, with precision, and with the confidence that comes from having the right intelligence at the right moment.
But the ambition goes further. Because the system is “always on”, it doesn't just wait for deSter's teams to feed it. An AI growth engine continuously connects dots across data sources, surfacing opportunities that might otherwise have stayed hidden.
It’s important to note that in no way AI will replace the human network that deSter has built over five decades. It will however supercharge it, by making the company's accumulated knowledge and creative intuition available at a speed and scale that was previously out of reach.
"It’s important to note that in no way AI will replace the human network that deSter has built over five decades. It will however supercharge it, by making the company's accumulated knowledge and creative intuition available at a speed and scale that was previously out of reach", says Filip Fransen, AI Director at deSter. "By creating agentic workflows that connect our expertise with AI, deSter will be able to serve customers in new and better ways, and do so faster than ever."
Both organisations see this collaboration as the start of something larger. Successful completion will validate a commercially viable, secure, and scalable solution that can grow with deSter's ambitions. The goal extends well beyond a single project: Made and deSter aim to build a long-term partnership focused on continuous innovation, where AI becomes an integral part of how deSter creates value for its customers worldwide.
