Techniques to suggest alternative chemical compounds that can be used to recreate or mimic a target flavor using artificial intelligence are disclosed. A neural network based model is trained on source chemical compounds and their corresponding flavors and odors. The neural network-based model learns compound embeddings of the source chemical compounds and a target chemical compound of a food item. From the compound embeddings, one or more chemical compounds that are closest to the target chemical compound may be determined by a distance metric. Each suggested chemical compound is an alternative that can be used to recreate functional features of the target chemical compound.