Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Allen Weiner

Israel’s Tastewise Turns Diverse Data into Real-Time Insights Using AI

Those who rely on data to make an important business decision know the adage, “Garbage in, garbage out.” Data is plentiful for those in the food world, but it is a challenge to select the correct data, understand what the information means, and how it relates to your specific situation.

Enter Tastewise, an Israeli market intelligence platform that harvests a vast—and we mean vast–array of structured and unstructured data and turns it into meaningful insights. Working with Nestle, Mars, PepsiCo, and others, Tastewise recently upped its game by adding AI capability using ChatGPT to its functionality.

In a recent interview with The Spoon, Alon Chen, Tastewise Co-Founder, and CEO explained the company’s origins. After working for Google, Chen ran into Eyal Gaon, who became co-founder and CTO. The two men discussed the gap between bringing new products to market and eventual success.

“We found very early on that 90% of innovation–tens of thousands of new products that come out to the market every single year– fail, right? CPG companies and others win up; they innovate a lot less and focus on acquisitions because they can’t keep up. We took a deeper look at this and said, why is that? “

The answer became evident to the two men. Companies, especially in the food area, focused on retail data, which becomes stale quicker than a week-old banana. “Retail data is not good for the food industry because if something is successful and you see that on sales data, you are already 18 months too late,” commented Chen.

Which led to a two-part solution—the underpinnings of the Tastewise platform. Step one is harvesting data from myriad sources ranging from restaurant menus to recipe sites on the Web. The trick of turning raw information into actionable insights is to take structured (quantitative) and unstructured (qualitative) data and offer users easy-to-understand answers. For example, Tastewise can tell a CPG customer what customers are enjoying the latest food fad. The details of those results can go deep into the location and demographics of those trends and the foodies behind them.

“We call it the fast-moving consumer data,” Chen observed. “Fast moving consumer data, which is a whole new category that we think that is evolving today and is now being integrated into the different workflows and the tasks nig companies have in place. Tastewise is a layer of data that brings consumer preferences and needs into the food brand and the food manufacturing life cycle.”

Taking its SaaS data platform to a new level, Tastewise has added AI functionality to its product line. Called TasteGPT, users can ask such questions as:

  • What product ideas are the best fit for my Gen Z consumers?
  • What concepts should I invest my R&D budget in?
  • Where should I launch my new beverage product first?
  • Where is my competition under-represented, and what can I do about it?
  • What should the focus of my next marketing campaign be?

“AI influences how consumers choose what to eat and drink in countless ways. Consumers are also more informed than ever, and they expect us to meet their needs accurately, specifically, and on-demand,” Chen said at the March launch of the new AI capability. “TasteGPT can now help companies get closer to their consumers by capturing the pulse of culinary, nutritional, and dietary needs, and to stay competitive in a rapidly changing market.”

“Artificial intelligence is the only way to mitigate a lack of credible data by enabling organizations to make sense of vast amounts of data,” said Gaon. “With relevant AI tools, data turns into meaningful insights that drive better decision-making and innovation in real-time.”

Israel’s Wasteless Uses A.I. As A Solution for Food Waste

The aptly named Wasteless is a triple threat as it offers a solution that simultaneously benefits retailers, consumers, and the environment. The Israeli company provides an AI-driven solution to cut down on food waste in retail by allowing supermarkets to give consumers dynamic pricing based on the freshness of a given product.

Wasteless has reached a milestone in announcing a partnership with Hoogvliet, a leading European supermarket chain with over 70 stores across The Netherlands. Using Wasteless’ dynamic pricing technology, the retailer will reduce food waste by optimizing costly price markdowns. This partnership forms part of a wider store rollout to stop throwing viable perishable goods into the dumpster, increasing margins while benefiting shoppers and the planet.

“The E.U.’s supermarkets alone are responsible for nearly 7% of all food waste, leading to more than 15 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions,” Oded Omer, Co-Founder, and CEO of Wasteless, said in a company press release. “By the time this waste occurs, all the energy and resources have already gone into the food. It’s the costliest waste we’re creating – indeed, it costs each store up to 4% of its revenues. In addition, Wasteless will help customers make smarter grocery decisions. Our solution also helps retail managers by optimizing inventory control systems. Joining forces with leading innovative retailers like Hoogvliet means we’re another step closer to saving the environment and achieving our goal of reducing food waste in retail by 80% while increasing retailers’ profits. This is a concrete step toward the Food Waste Pledge we signed at the COP27 Climate Conference and other signatories, including the World Wildlife Fund.”

Speaking to the origins of the company, Omer told The Spoon, “I stood in the supermarket, and I said to myself, well, it doesn’t make sense that I’m going to pay the same price for Chobani for that expires in two days and six days,” he recalled. “So, I started to contact some the academic professors and so on, and to understand the perspective of revenue management.”

That revelation in 2016 led to Wasteless, a machine-learning system embedded in a retailer’s data center. It can be applied using electronic shelf markers (which are more common in the E.U. than in the U.S.) or stickers applied to anything from meat and poultry to apples and salad greens. The pricing scheme is done in small increments using sell-by and consumer shopping data. Wasteless’ pricing can also be applied using a consumer-facing application.

To date, Wasteless is backed by $9.75M in funding, led by Slingshot Ventures (N.L.), Zora Ventures (U.S.), SOSV (U.S.) IT-Farm (Japan), Food Angels (Germany), strategic industry-related investors, and Israel Innovation Authority grants.

In 2021, Wasteless announced a collaboration with NX-Food, a German food tech hub, to bring its pricing systems into stores from METRO, one of the world’s leading wholesale specialists. Omer summed up the win-win bottom line for implementing dynamic pricing. “It’s a huge win for us as we grow and show the world what our technology is capable of. Most importantly, this is a huge win for the environment. There’s a lot of talk about sustainability in business, but it only really works if it’s also profitable.”

Finless Foods Dual-Pronged Strategy Targets the Plant-Based and Cell-Cultured Based Tuna Markets

Environmental concerns, shortages in the supply chain, and a global focus on health are fueling excitement at the prospect of a cell-cultured food industry featuring meat, poultry, and seafood produced without the slaughter of animals. At this point, however, it’s an industry with high hopes whose players are willing to gamble time and money as the USDA and FDA ponder the establishment of guidelines for product safety, labeling, and other consumer considerations.

Finless Foods, based in Emeryville, California, is bullish on the future of its lab-cultivated Bluefin tuna. Still, the company is mitigating its risk by releasing a plant-grown tuna in the coming months. Armed with some new Series B funding to the tune of $34 million, Finless is anticipating government approval by the end of the year and is building out an 11,000 square-foot pilot production plant in Emeryville to meet what it hopes is consumer acceptance and widespread distribution.

“The FDA has already rubberstamped the blueprints for our facility,” Finless CEO Michael Selden told The Spoon in a recent interview. “We should be finished with construction in about three months.”

The dual-pronged strategy of initially releasing a plant-based tuna, the main ingredient of which is winter melon) makes sense for a company with more than $48 million raised. It purports to have a pleasing taste and color and similar mouthfeel to “real” tuna. Focused on Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami, Selden said that it will help in brand building and drive revenue before its cell-cultivated tuna is ready for the market.”

Selden won’t give a specific date for Finless’ plant-based tuna release, but he claims it has received great reviews from its sampling at the South Beach Food and Wine Festival and New York Wine and Food Festival.

Once the joint efforts of the USDA and FDA establish guidelines for lab-grown meat, poultry, and seafood, Seldon said that the initial focus would be on foodservice firms for distribution. He does not rule out a direct-to-consumer play as the market matures.

“That’s something I’d like to do in the future,” Selden said of selling to consumers via a subscription service. “Americans, at least from the data I’ve seen, aren’t used to doing that for seafood.”

“Because it’s a new thing, we wanted people to get used to it in typical settings such as in restaurants,” the Finless CEO added. “From there, If we build a strong brand presence, we can expand and create a more omnichannel approach.”

The is a method to Finless’ madness in selecting Bluefin as its first foray into the cell-cultivate fish business. Seldon said that while other species, such as salmon, have prior established research on their structure, with Bluefin, there is no existing work, making the reward for the company’s efforts much more lucrative.

“We wanted to come out with something people perceive as very high quality,” Selden said. “On top of that, it’s not democratized, which makes it very expensive. Skipjack or Blue Eye (tuna) is 15 dollars a pound. Bluefin is closer to $40 a pound. It also has much higher levels of omegas.”

Japan’s Dainichi Corp is among Finless’ investors, which makes sense given Japan makes up 90% of the world’s consumer consumption of Bluefin tuna. Having a home-grown financial partner will allow Finless to make a quick splash when the Japanese market has its regulatory approval completed.

“It helps with understanding the market,” Selden said of the Japanese opportunity. “For example, Japanese customers like a different cut of tuna. Americans like otoro, the fattiest cut of tuna while in Japan, they prefer chutoro, the second fattiest cut.”

Finless is not alone in the cell-cultivate fish business. Wildtype, a company that recently raised $100 million, is a healthy competitor, although Selden said its focus is more on Amberjack than the more costly Bluefin. San Diego-based BlueNalu is also in the space, but Selden believes the company has yet to develop a working prototype.

Regulation of the cell-based meat, poultry, and seafood world is being mapped out by a joint effort of the USDA and FDA. Although, once rules are finalized, the FDA will have jurisdiction over the seafood space. Singapore and Qatar are the only two countries with regulations for the cell-cultivated food industry. As reported in The Spoon, the Netherlands’ House of Representatives passed a motion to make the sampling of cell-cultured meat legal.

With New Funding Mustard Adds More Relish to the Food Ordering Experience

For hungry L.A. diners unable to decide between the Caliente Burger from Tommy’s in Van Nuys and Yukdaehang from a Korean restaurant in Los Angeles, Mustard may be the perfect video condiment. The Mustard app allows users to browse, compare, select, order, and have their food delivered from a vast cornucopia of eat-it-now options. And one cannot deny the mukbang element of watching others salivate over their spicy ramen bowls.

“People are discouraged by the food ordering process,” Mustard CEO Diana Might said in an interview with The Spoon. “The format of menu ordering is outdated.”

Inspired by an uptick in food delivery during the pandemic, Might and her co-founder Chief Product Officer David Currant recognized an opportunity to give social media users an easy soup-to-nuts process to order food. It starts with a video showcasing a given menu item and ends with the ability to select a delivery service to bring it to their home in short order. The videos are uploaded by what Might call “influencers” to the Mustard platform where the content is “Mustardized” and then, for now, returned to the author for uploading to social media. The result is a clip that allows the customer to see the duck meat, Wagyu beef, or bagel up close and personal with a narration from the video creator. An icon allows the viewer to click and order what they see on the screen.

Currant explains that Mustard’s technology uses several distinct data feeds that show the restaurant’s location, menu item, price, and delivery providers. Not willing to divulge the company’s secret sauce, which combines these varied data points, Currant acknowledges the use of computer vision and that the company’s platform is extensible to other areas such as travel.

Mustard is off to a good start, recently securing a $1 million investment from Operate Studio, Newfund, Great North Ventures, and Fund LA. “Mustard is disrupting the food industry by connecting food content consumption and IRL experiences together,” says Newfund’s Christy Wang, who believes Mustard has the potential to dominate the food vertical in the social video app space. “Food videos are mostly viewed and loved on social media, yet they are not actional and informative. Mustard closes the loop by integrating the ordering and booking process right at the moment of food content consumption, providing actionable menus and interactive food experiences within one video.”

Currently, the revenue model rewards content creators with a small affiliate fee, with Mustard getting paid based on the delivery service and their special promotions and offers. At this point, Might explains, the restaurants become the beneficiaries of the app but do not pay anything for the customer acquisition. Soon, the CEO says, that could change.

The company hopes to make its service even more user-friendly by eliminating the friction in the delivery process. Now, an influencer uploads its video to Mustard to be mustardized (tagged with price, restaurant location, delivery service, etc..). The same influencer uploads it to social media—most often Tik-Tok or Instagram. Might says it won’t be long before videos can be sent directly to Tik-Tok from the Mustard platform.

In theory, Mustard is available worldwide but is focused on the 8,000 restaurants in the Los Angeles area with more than 1,000 active users. The initial goal is to expand into other parts of southern California and grow organically throughout the United States.

Dallas Chef Offers A Fearless Approach to Her Vegan Ghost Kitchen

For Dallas chef Lori Moore, operating her new business, Vspot, out of what is commonly called a “ghost kitchen” is no figment of anyone’s imagination. Her vegan-inspired menu evolved from her fanciful passion for food, but Lori’s lunch and dinner spot is the result of years of training, hard work, and planning. In her case, the “ghost” part of the equation is more of a conscious choice than a need to follow a growing trend.

“I was always that weird kid that loved veggies,” Moore said in a recent interview with The Spoon. After graduating from Dallas’ Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in 2011, Lori toyed with the idea of opening a vegan food truck. Still, the cloud kitchen concept allowed her to focus more on cooking and less on infrastructure.

In order to avoid tackling complex technology on her own, Moore took advantage of a platform offered by Los Angeles-based CloudKitchens, a company founded by Diego Berdakin in 2016. Key features of CloudKitchehn are tools that allow Moore to track orders and work with suppliers. The consumer-facing process starts with Flipdish, a seperate technology, that takes customer orders, which are sent to the kitchen owner for fulfillment. Next in line is Otter, an AI-based technology, which seamlessly connects to various delivery options, including Uber Eats, Door Dash, Caviar, and Grubhub.

“Using the technology of a cloud kitchen, it takes care of the technology that is out of my range,” Moore said. “It lets me do what I do best—cook.

Before starting Vspot, Moore offered meal prep, which gave customers menu options in advance that the Dallas chef would prepare for her clients to pick up. Her weekly menu would include five different choices for lunch and five for dinner.

Moore’s decision to focus on vegan food was partially based on her food preferences and appealing to the North Texas’ growing interest in plant-based foods, which was aligned to her community becoming more health-conscious during the COVID-19 pandemic. The commissary where she does all her cooking is in Trinity Grove, near the downtown area, where many of her regulars live.

“Many people are intimidated by the idea of being vegan,” she said, commenting that many are shocked when they order and enjoy a vegan burger. “They can’t believe it’s vegan and can’t wrap their head around it.”

Between 75% and 80% of her food is made from scratch, with such items and burgers, cheese, chicken, and buns provided by a local purveyor. Listening to what she jokingly calls “voices in her head,” Moore hopes to add soups and other staples to her roster of vegan offerings.

As with most successful upstart food companies, Moore is a heavy user of social media leaning on Instagram to whet people’s appetite with pictures and videos of her burgers (Impossible Burger), vegan chicken sandwiches, sides, and desserts.

The cloud/ghost kitchen concept fits Moore’s vision to a T. She refuses to be satisfied with her single location in Dallas, hoping to expand her idea across the country. She would find a place for the cloud kitchen and train people to handle the food prep in order to carry out that vision. Of course, leaning heavily on her model of using Flipdish and CloudKitchens for the required tech muscle would be a significant key towards achieving her long-term goal.

Lori Moore is not alone in seeing the power and profit of vegan-themed cloud kitchens. Aside from startups in China and India, there are Souley Vegan, based in Oakland; Good Vibes in Sacramento; Qusqo Bistro in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles-based Plant Nation.

With New Funding in Hand, TrusTrace Looks To Make Supply Chains More Sustainable

Supply chain is the buzz phrase filling daily news headlines related to empty supermarket shelves and this year’s hottest toys being in short supply. Specifically, one longer-term issue is the traceability of products—especially food and other perishables—as consumers become increasingly conscious of their health and the environment.

Companies such as Stockholm-based TrusTrace are among those who are applying a combination of technologies to empower suppliers and consumers in the flow of information from field or processing plant to table. To further its growth in this space, the company recently received a $6 million investment from Industrifonden and Fairpoint Capital. The funds will be used for product development, global expansion, and building out the company’s management team.


“TrusTrace enables product-level traceability and supply chain transparency to drive better, more sustainably-conscious and socially responsible sourcing decisions,” said Shameek Ghosh, CEO, and Co-Founder of TrusTrace said in an interview with The Spoon. “With this latest funding round, we will continue leveraging cutting-edge technology and the best minds in the industry to achieve positive, restorative change for people and the planet.”

Consumer interest in the details about the origins of their various foods is becoming more than just a nice-to-have. According to research by ADM, the trend had been growing for several years with the pandemic, and it’s the associated concerns about health and safety, acting as a catalyst for a greater understanding of what is in everything from farm-fresh tomatoes to canned string beans. Global supplier ADM discovered 58% of global consumers would be more concerned with locality claims because of COVID-19. In addition, ADM reports that 38% of global consumers will back their interest in sustainability with their wallets and pay more for verified products.

Among the details of sustainability, tracing include place of origin, ingredients, the use of chemicals, processing stops along the route, and other factors related to the environment.


TrusTrace hopes to expand beyond its current client base, including Coop, a Swedish retail chain. As Ghosh explains, one of TrusTrace’s signature advantages is that it fully integrates with a client’s ERP system using blockchain and its own proprietary technology. Being connected to Coop’s inventory management system allows TrusTrace to collect accurate information to document sustainability, which measures ten different parameters across 10,000 food products. In simple terms, TrusTrace creates a mapping of a product’s supply chain, which allows a customer to know essential details about a given product.


In the case of Coop, consumers can use an application that deploys a scanner to investigate the sustainability of a product and manifest that information in an easy-to-read diagram. The parameters used by Coop via its TrusTace implementation are based on an agreement by the county’s leading companies in conjunction with The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).


Ghosh hopes to bring TrusTrace to major retailers across Europe in the coming months and is even eyeing the United States as a potential target. At issue, he explains, is the need for national consensus on specific areas to measure to create a helpful mapping. The lack of a universal agreement in sustainability will be a hindrance to educating consumers worldwide.


TrusTrace is not alone in looking to cash in on this trend. Other companies in this space include Alpharetta, GA-based Aptean, IBM with its Food Trust product, and New York-based ripe.io

Perdue Is Putting Birds Out to Pasture With Solar-Powered Mobile Chicken Coops

With more than $7 billion in annual sales, it would be easy for Salisbury, MD-based Perdue Farms, a top 10 domestic poultry producer, to focus on business as usual. Instead, the company looks to the future and understands its vision must go beyond simply putting broilers, wings, and chicken breasts in supermarkets and then on consumers’ dinner plates.

In launching its expanded pasture-raised program, Perdue is putting into play a clever piece of technology that benefits consumers, the environment, and, of course, its birds. At its 6th Annual Perdue Farms Animal Care Summit, the company unveiled its solar-powered mobile chicken coops, which it believes will play a key role in its future.

Ryan Perdue, VP, and GM of Perdue’s pasture business explained how the solar-powered mobile chicken coops operate and how they will lead to more sustainable farmland and a healthier product for consumers. Perdue’s commitment to the pasture-raised part of the business was further fueled by its December 2019 purchase of California-based Pasturebird, a firm whose mobile chicken coop took the pasture-raised process to a new level. The acquisition made Perdue the largest producer of pasture-raised chickens in the United States.

While a seemingly subtle distinction, the change in location yields significant benefits. As Perdue explained in an interview with The Spoon in advance of the announcement, a mobile, solar-powered chicken coop houses 6,000 birds which is 75% less than a typical bird house. It is a floorless building, 150 feet by 50 feet in size, and via a solar-powered engine, it moves 50 feet per day.

Perdue says the chickens are offered a new, fresh bounty of grass, insects, flowers, and grains at each new pasture location. While the chickens are not labeled organic, there is a significant increase in the organic matter they eat when presented in a new feeding area each day.

Perdue says that rotating the pasture areas creates a “virtuous cycle” where there is less erosion from rain, and by having the land rest, grass and flowers grow back even more bountiful than before.

While much of the process is automated, farmers will be hands-on overseeing the movement of the mobile coops.

“There are major benefits to the consumer,” Perdue adds. “A pasture-raised bird has less saturated fat, is more nutrient-dense, and higher in Omega-3.”

Perdue Farms is not disclosing how many solar-powered mobile coops it currently deploys or a schedule as to when its poultry-raised product will be widely available on supermarket shelves. Because it is a premium product, pasture-raised chicken commands a higher price; however, Perdue reports, “as the company finalizes price points, Perdue will not sell its pasture-raised chicken at a profit.”

At the time of Perdue’s purchase of Pasturebird, several smaller producers of pasture-raised poultry, primarily sold at farmers’ markets and specialty grocery stores, feared that the deal would put pasture-raised poultry out of the hands of independent farms. Based on Perdue’s acquisition of Coleman Natural Meats in 2011 and Niman Ranch in 2015, the company has grown more than in revenue and product lines.

In an interview with The Counter.org, Lauri Torgerson-White, senior animal welfare specialist with Mercy for Animals, suggests Perdue has learned a lot from companies like Niman Ranch, a pioneer in progressive farming. “Most companies, like Tyson, blow us off. We’ve done multiple investigations of their farms, and they refuse to talk to us,” she says. “But when Perdue learned what was going on, they reached out to talk to us, and since then, we’ve had a really positive relationship with them. Every year they’re doing more to improve the welfare standards on their farms. It’s been a very, very good, cooperative, productive relationship.