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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Sam Dean

As the Food Industry Wakes Up to Blockchain, Online Training Options are Now Available

It’s no secret that the food industry is rapidly awaking to the great promise of blockchain technology, and headlines abound about how it promises to make traditional paper ledger-based transactions obsolete, replaced by digital ledgers. That could revolutionize the food supply chain, which remains burdened by sketchy accountability. Part of the challenge in assuring that blockchain fulfills its promise is connecting the right people—everyone from farmers, to fishermen to warehouse managers to data scientists. Another part of the challenge, though, is educating people in the food industry so that they can implement blockchain-based food source tracing solutions, and more.

At major business schools ranging from Berkeley to Wharton, students are flocking to classes on blockchain and cryptocurrency. As CNBC recently reported: “According to a new survey of 675 U.S. undergraduate students by cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and Qriously, 9 percent of students have already taken a class related to blockchain or cryptocurrency and 26 percent want to take one.”

But you don’t have to be an MBA student to study blockchain basics. Recently, we’ve covered how blockchain could have mitigated the California Romaine lettuce crisis by providing more rigorous and easier-to-access sourcing information on where tainted lettuce as coming from. We’ve also covered blockchain’s growing role in tracing fishy seafood sourcing origins, which could give us confidence that the fish we think we are buying actually is what the label says it is.

That’s why it’s going to be essential for many people in the food industry to educate themselves on how blockchain works, how to implement a solution, who to partner with, and who is already running efficient blockchain deployments. The good news is that much of the underlying technology required is free and open source, with organizations such as hyperledger working hard to make sure they stay that way. Hyperledger is a multi-project open source collaborative effort hosted by The Linux Foundation, created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. Brian Behlendorf, the Executive Director of the project, has been named one of the top 10 influential voices in the blockchain world by the New York Times.

With open source solutions, food industry players can often pay nothing to implement a blockchain deployment. These players need education, though, so where can they turn?

There is more good news on this front, in that many of the best educational options for blockchain are either free or available at a nominal cost. In addition, there are a number of good online, self-paced educational options. Let’s consider some of the best courses.

Udemy offers many online blockchain courses priced at under $10, including The Basics of Blockchain, Learn How to Build Your First Blockchain, and Pass the Certified Blockchain Developer Exam. All these courses are self-paced online and available for $9.99. In the Basics of Blockchain course, TED speaker Bettina Warburg “connects the dots between the business, economics, and technology of Blockchain.”

The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project has steadily produced the key open technologies favored by blockchain developers, most notably Hyperledger Fabric–a foundation for developing blockchain applications or solutions with modular architectures.

These are a couple of the key courses offered by The Linux Foundation, with the first course priced at $299 while the second course is free:

Hyperledger Fabric Fundamentals (LFD271) Teaches the fundamental concepts of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.

Blockchain for Business – An Introduction to Hyperledger Technologies (LFS171)A primer to blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. Learn how to start building blockchain applications with Hyperledger frameworks.

These are self-paced online courses and the Fabric Fundamentals course is taught by the folks who created Hyperledger Fabric. You can find even more blockchain training options from The Linux Foundation here.

The Linux Foundation and hyperledger have done quite a bit of outreach to various industries to raise awareness of low-cost blockchain training options, and make clear that learning about blockchain does not require advanced technical skills. Still, there will be challenges in getting some non-technical participants in the food industry to take advantage of available blockchain training options. There are non-profit organizations tackling these challenges, and a good place to start is to join The Global Blockchain Business Council.

By joining The Global Blockchain Business Council, you can gain access to a lot of content about how blockchain works. You can also connect with other people and organizations who are actually deploying blockchain solutions.

In the food industry and across many other industries ranging from healthcare to finance, blockchain development and management skills are going to become ever more valuable.  Careers website Glassdoor lists thousands of job posts related to blockchain, and the numbers are growing.

Interested in more? At a 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit panel, executives from ripe.io and Walmart discussed the promise of blockchain in the food industry, food safety, and which groups of people need to get connected for blockchain solutions to work. Watch the video to hear the whole conversation.

 

Could Blockchain Solve the Fishy Problems Surrounding Seafood Accountability?

When you buy fish, do you have confidence that what you’ve purchased is as advertised at the point of purchase? According to the state attorney general’s office in New York, there is a good likelihood that what you’ve purchased is not even the same species as the one specified on the label. There could be a very promising solution to what the attorney general’s office calls “rampant” seafood mislabeling, though: blockchain technology.

The attorney general’s office purchased fish from 155 stores across 29 supermarket brands throughout the state, and then sent them to a lab for testing. A remarkable number of the specimens—more than one in every four, or 27%—were not what the supermarkets said they were. The complete results of the experiment are found here, with this conclusion:

“While mislabeling affected virtually every tested seafood category, there was rampant mislabeling of certain species. The results suggest that consumers who buy lemon sole, red snapper, and grouper are more likely to receive an entirely different fish. Similarly, consumers who bought what was advertised as ‘wild’ salmon often actually received farm-raised salmon instead. Such consumers had often paid more money—on average 34% more—to avoid farm raised fish.”

The report also notes that in many cases, consumers are getting fish that is less sustainably raised than claimed, and in some cases, they are unknowingly buying types of fish that can cause gastrointestinal problems. In addition, according to an article by Forbes, a report conducted between 2010 and 2012 by a marine surveying organization, Oceana, identified that as many as one in three seafood products in the United States were incorrectly labeled. Needless to say, a solution is needed, and pronto.

Enter blockchain. The disruptive new technology promises to make traditional paper ledger-based transactions obsolete, replaced by digital ledgers, and it also promises to guarantee more accountability and trust in the food supply chain. Headlines abound heralding how blockchain technology will revolutionize financial services markets, which remain burdened by unwieldy paper trails and costly proprietary software applications. Not everyone realizes, though, the move toward developing blockchain has direct roots in the erosion of trust that grew as the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 exploded around the globe.

Blockchain allows people to record transactions securely via a decentralized platform without a lot of intermediaries. Because of the advantages it can bring to the process of tracing food sources, it may also be a big part of the answer in fighting fish fraud.

According to Forbes: “Some companies are already using blockchain technology to track their supply chain – for example, an initiative called Tuna on the Blockchain provides a provenance system so that you will know where you tuna comes from. Back in late 2016 it was reported that a British-based start-up called Provenance went out to Indonesia and tested tracking tuna on the blockchain.”

There are a number of corporate and legislative proposals in motion, which could require detailed seafood product labeling. Legit Fish is a Boston-based company that is dedicated to improving the traceability and verification of seafood products. The company has developed a seafood traceability database that compares confidential data from supply chain participants to landings data collected by the government in order to provide seafood dealers, processors, retailers, and their customers a solid verification of each individual lot of product that has been transacted.  As this story notes, Legit Fish is working with companies such as BASE that are integrating seafood traceability solutions with blockchain.

At a meetup that The Spoon held in July, blockchain was very much on the minds of fishermen in attendance. They see blockchain as a way to not only prove provenance, but also to help them from getting unfair blame for fraudulent acts that take place down the fish delivery chain. Recently, we wrote about how blockchain technology could have helped quickly mitigate the crisis involving E.coli and Romaine lettuce in California. In a similar way, by providing better sourcing information and, importantly, more open food sourcing information, blockchain could make fish fraud much tougher to pull off than it is now.

At a 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit panel, executives from ripe.io and Walmart discussed the promise of blockchain in the food industry, food safety, and which groups of people need to get connected for blockchain solutions to work. Watch the video to hear the whole conversation.

Blockchain and Tracing Food Sources: Startups are Aiming to Solve the People Problem

Ask most people about blockchain, and they will likely have some familiarity with how the disruptive new technology promises to make traditional paper ledger-based transactions obsolete, replaced by digital ledgers. Headlines abound heralding how blockchain technology will revolutionize financial services markets, which remain burdened by unwieldy paper trails and costly proprietary software applications.

However, not everyone knows that the move toward developing blockchain has direct roots in the erosion of trust that grew as the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 exploded around the globe. Blockchain allows people to record transactions securely via a decentralized platform without a lot of intermediaries. Because of the advantages it can bring to the process of tracing food sources, it also promises to have a transformative impact on safety and accountability in the food industry.

The evolution of blockchain leads directly back to a crisis of trust, and numerous companies are working on blockchain solutions that will increase trust in the food industry and improve food safety. Katy Jones, CMO of food traceability company FoodLogiQ recently spoke with The Spoon on the topic of California’s tainted Romaine lettuce. “[Blockchain has] potential to be a transformative method to open up transparency in the food supply chain,” she said. However, she also noted that without data built on a common standard and supply chain partners committed to gathering and reporting on that data, blockchain alone will not solve all the issues.

In other words, just as security experts often stress that security is largely a people problem, blockchain’s promise will only be fulfilled if people come together. That’s precisely what some new companies are focusing on. For example, Ecogistix is launching blockchain solutions working directly with farmers to provide the kind of produce traceability that could have cut the California Romaine lettuce disaster at the quick. The solutions provide orderly tracking of inventory, order management and fulfillment.  With them, farmers can track and manage teams that are working in the field and in warehouses so Ecogistix can trace teams that actually packed specific cases. Ecogistix’s technology also meets the Produce Traceability Initiative’s requirements for case and pallet labels that integrate with blockchain.

Consumers are not the only people who stand to benefit. Many blockchain experts agree that farmers have everything to gain by opting in for blockchain solutions. In a recent interview, Sandra Ro, CEO of the Global Blockchain Business Council, said that blockchain technology could put more money in the pockets of farmers while improving the quality of food.

Additionally, standards are emerging for blockchain and food traceability initiatives. The Produce Traceability Initiative (PTI) outlines 7 milestones to implementing case-level electronic traceability in the produce industry. On its website companies can find the tools and resources needed to implement PTI requirements and work successfully with blockchain technology. PTI reports that blockchain traceability and transparency pilots are now underway with Walmart, Kroger, Wegmans, Dole, Driscoll’s and IBM, and “demonstrate the value of whole chain traceability.”

Ripe.io is another company altering the trajectory of the food system through blockchain technology and the Internet of Things. The company’s mission is to “[design] a radically transparent digital food supply chain, [harnessing] quality food data to create the Blockchain of Food – an unprecedented food quality network that maps the food journey to answer what’s in our food, where it comes from, and what has happened to it.” The company is focused on the people problems that need to be solved, and its technology connects food producers, distributors and consumers. With it, farmers can leverage IoT and sensors to automate processes and provide full sourcing accountability.

Just as blockchain itself rose from the ashes of an inflammatory crisis of trust surrounding a global financial crisis, its promise for the food industry is directly tied to getting farmers, retailers, consumers and more groups aligned together. At a 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit panel, executives from ripe.io and Walmart discussed the promise of blockchain in the food industry, food safety, and which groups of people need to get connected for blockchain solutions to work. Watch the video to hear the whole conversation.

Visualize it: Augmented Reality and the Future of Food

All around us, augmented reality technology is beginning to give us more information about our immediate environment than can be seen with the naked eye. There are (AR) apps for overlaying where nearby WiFi signals are centered, and apps that help surface unseen nearby locations and attractions to visit. Now, food production is set for transformative developments thanks to AR.

On this front, Huxley has developed what it bills as the world’s first “augmented operating system,” which mashes up augmented reality with artificial intelligence. “ By combining vision, environment, and plant data, we can now grow more with less using AI,” Huxley reports.

Imagine a smart greenhouse of the future, where farmers with augmented reality glasses can surface information about what kinds of plants at various stages of growth surround them. The same greenhouse might have smart cameras that keep track of everything from watering status, to activity from pests and threats.

Huxley is being leveraged for these kinds of food production scenarios, and is even being leveraged to optimize marijuana production. It is a hands-free system that combines AR, AI, and machine learning to optimize “plant vision,” as seen in the screenshot here.

“Intelligent Automation for Controlled Environments is the future,” the Huxley team reports. “By collaborating with the most innovative companies and organizations we can provide anyone in any language the power of a master grower. Data just got dimensional.”

According to a recent Wall Street Journal story, augmented reality can also help optimize harvesting plants: “New cameras, sensors and smartphone apps help monitor plant growth. One company is even developing augmented-reality glasses that can show workers which plants to pick.”

The same story notes that companies are also developing new ways to grow vegetables in tiny spaces and often urban spaces, including rooftops, balconies, and abandoned lots. From controlled lighting to augmented reality solutions for discerning when to harvest plants, these solutions were not found on grandpa’s old farm.

Meanwhile, Danish researchers are investigating ways to use augmented reality to optimize the trimming and boning process for pork bellies. “The AR technology has demonstrated lucrative applications in industrial QA procedures and even farm management applications appear to benefit from applying the technology,” the researchers note.

So how might augmented reality boost your food frontiers when you are at the table in a restaurant? A company called Kabaq is on top of that concept. It is developing 3D and augmented reality menu and visualization technologies so that you can see exactly what your order will look like in front of you, from every angle. Check out the technology in action in this video:

Watch how you can use Apple ARKit in Food ordering

The technology driving augmented reality devices and applications is rapidly advancing as well. Apple is one of many tech giants driving the technology forward, and the result is likely to be ever smarter AR-driven food applications. Stay tuned to this space.

Wondering What to Make for Dinner? Why Not Turn to AI?

Artificial intelligence (AI) and the future of food have been on convergent paths for some time now, and AI-driven technologies with recipes at the core are proliferating. As noted here, Microsoft is just one of many companies increasing its investments in AI, and is betting on a bot with probably the world’s most famous chef.

Smaller companies are eyeing the intersection of AI and recipes as well. Chicory, a New York-based food technology company paving the way for grocery ecommerce, has announced the release of its artificial intelligence engine, “Dolores.” Dolores intelligently matches digital recipe ingredients to purchasable products that consumers are or will be looking for. Consumers can then buy the shopping list with just the click of a mouse via one of Chicory’s grocery integrations.

“We were able to teach Dolores to implement the same subjective reasoning about food that humans make,” said Yuni Sameshima, Chicory CEO and Co-Founder. “For example, Dolores sees that the recipe requires pepper and can deduce whether that is black pepper or a bell pepper based on the context, which allows us to better provide users with their desired ingredients.”

A startup out of Sweden has a roughly similar AI-driven concept that begins with personalized recipe recommendations, then transforms the information pertaining to the recipes into a shopping list.

AI researchers are joining in, too. A team from MIT has trained an artificial intelligence system called Pic2Recipe to scrutinize a photo of food and then predict the ingredients and suggest similar recipes.  You can watch a video of how it works here:

Pic2Recipe: Predicting recipes from photos

The same team at MIT has created Recipe1M, a large-scale, structured “corpus” of over one million  recipes and 800,000 food images. According to the team: “As the largest publicly available collection of recipe data, Recipe1M affords the ability to train high-capacity models on aligned, multi-modal data. Using these data, we train a neural network to find a joint embedding of recipes and images that yields impressive results on an image-recipe retrieval task. Additionally, we demonstrate that regularization via the addition of a high-level classification objective both improves retrieval performance to rival that of humans and enables semantic vector arithmetic.”

In addition to winning Jeopardy!, IBM’s famed Watson supercomputer-driven AI engine is also getting smart about recipes and food pairings. According to a Quartz post: “Watson scanned publicly available data sources to build up a vast library of information on recipes, the chemical compounds in food, and common pairings. Knowledge that might’ve taken a lifetime for a Michelin-starred chef to attain can now be accessed instantly from your tablet.”

Yale University researchers have recently conducted a series of experiments showing that enhancing personal skillsets with AI is much more promising than entirely substituting human skillsets with AI. That concept is giving rise to many AI-driven chatbots that can suggest recipes intelligently.

For example, Microsoft has launched “Heston Bot,” its first ever food-inspired bot, exclusively for the Skype platform. It lets you get up close and personal with superstar chef Heston Blumenthal, and provides several ways for you to benefit from his fluency with food.

Heston Bot appears to have very strong natural language and AI smarts. I asked it about cooking techniques and more, and it understood me and also directed me to where I can find all of Heston’s recipes. It’s definitely smarter than your average bot.

For more on AI and cooking, see our recent stories on the Forksy conversational foodbot, a chatbot-powered sommelier, and our interview with Michael Gyarmathy, the creator of an Alexa Skill called Cooking Competition.

From Safety to Savings, Blockchain Technology Will Disrupt the Food Scene

Behold the blockchain. The disruptive new technology promises to make traditional paper ledger-based transactions obsolete, replaced by digital ledgers. Headlines appear every day heralding how blockchain technology will revolutionize financial services markets, which remain burdened by unwieldy paper trails and costly proprietary software applications. But blockchain technology will also have a transformative impact on the food industry and many other industries. From cost savings to removal of intermediaries to more efficient and precise tracking of contamination, the food business will derive many benefits from blockchain.

None of this is lost on titans in the food industry and technology giants are focused on blockchain, too. IBM has announced a blockchain collaboration with food giants including Walmart, Unilever and Nestle. Big Blue has announced that it will help global food businesses use its blockchain network to trace the source of contaminated food instantly.  Because blockchain uses digital means to track transactions and trace the flow of food, contamination trails can be solved by data-centric means rather than paper-based ones. Officials from Walmart have demonstrated how this kind of contamination tracking can take place in under three seconds.

According to the World Health Organization, one in ten people will fall ill every year due to contaminated food. Children under 5 years of age are at particularly high risk, with 125,000 children dying from foodborne diseases every year. Blockchain technology will have a giant impact on these problems. The full list of food companies signed on to work with IBM’s blockchain network is as follows: Dole, Driscoll’s, Golden State Foods, Kroger, McCormick and Company, McLane Company, Nestlé, Tyson Foods, Unilever and Walmart.

In this video, Walmart’s VP of Food Safety discussed the huge impact that blockchain will have:

According to Forbes: “By using blockchain, when a problem arises, the potential is to quickly identify what the source of contamination is since one can see across the whole ecosystem and where all the potential points of contamination could be using the data to pinpoint the source. As such it is ‘ideally suited’ according to IBM to address these challenges because it establishes a trusted environment for all transactions.”

IBM has already conducted several pilots focused on food safety in order to demonstrate the ways in which blockchain can benefit global food traceability.

All participants in the global food supply chain stand to benefit from blockchain technology, ranging from growers to suppliers and distributors. Beyond tracking contamination, blockchain promises to usher in much more efficient, trusted financial transactions that can remove many types of intermediaries. According to a new market intelligence report by BIS Research, titled ‘Blockchain Technology in Financial Services Market – Analysis and Forecast: 2017 to 2026′, cost savings of $30 to $40 billion per year will be achieved in trade finance.

The move to blockchain does not necessarily mean buying into expensive proprietary platforms, either. While IBM’s blockchain network resides on the IBM Cloud platform, The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project is squarely focused on keeping blockchain open source and blockchain solutions free. Many powerful companies are partners on the project, and are committed to keeping patent wars and proprietary shenanigans out of the blockchain ecosystem.

“Blockchain technology enables a new era of end-to-end transparency in the global food system – equivalent to shining a light on food ecosystem participants that will further promote responsible actions and behaviors,” notes Walmart VP Frank Yiannas. “It also allows all participants to share information rapidly and with confidence across a strong trusted network.”

Location, Location, Location: Food Tech and the Science of Knowing Where You Are

Let’s face it, we aren’t getting any less busy. As we all juggle jam-packed schedules, the convenience of services and apps that can efficiently bring food to us is squarely in the spotlight. In all likelihood, you have already tried or you rely on food apps and services that make getting good food hassle-free. Even the names of some of the emerging apps in this arena reflect ease and efficiency. Just consider Seamless, which lets you browse menus from local restaurants, order within the mobile app, and have the food delivered to you quickly.

Meanwhile, the market for food delivery service for daily meals is exploding. Here, you may think of providers such as Blue Apron, Fresh Direct, and Hello Fresh, but titans including Walmart and Amazon are muscling into the market. We recently tested a Wagyu burger meal kit delivered by Amazon and the experience was as easy as it was tasty. The purchase experience, delivery time, packaging and presentation, cooking experience and quality of meal were all high-caliber. Here is a shot of the plated Wagyu burger kit meal from Amazon:

The finished meal

Should the Blue Aprons of the world be concerned as titans encroach on their businesses? The answer is yes, and the reason is that the titans are in command of powerful location intelligence driven by big data. Not only do goliaths like Amazon and Walmart oversee gargantuan data stores that include information on consumer preferences, but they have ever more powerful tools to yield insights from that data. They know where you are, what you like, what your delivery preferences are, and much more.

Over the years, a player like Amazon has learned powerful lessons about customer loyalty, leveraging delivery infrastructure, and more. These players can harness sophisticated location intelligence.

As this blog post notes, Instacart, a same day grocery delivery service, has published a series of choropleth data visualizations showing the deliveries that it fulfills over seven days, by analyzing GPS generated location data for orders across many locations, as seen here:

These visualizations help Instacart optimize its location intelligence. According to the company: “The application that decides what orders each shopper should fulfill is called our ‘fulfillment engine,’ and it is just one component of our overall logistics system, which also forecasts demand and shopper behavior, manages capacity and busy pricing and plans and adapts our staffing.”

Take a look at some of the visualizations here, and the discussion of machine learning algorithms, to see how sophisticated location intelligence can truly be.

According to a recent Forbes Insights report, “The Power of Place: How Location Intelligence Reveals Opportunity in Big Data,” location intelligence is becoming a very competitive arena. “Organizations today are using location-based data and analytics to do just that in a number of ways, from reducing costs through augmenting address verification to improving customer experiences with in-store location technology.”

On the food tech front, where delivery windows and personal preferences really matter, location intelligence is a rapidly growing business differentiator.

Is Instant Aging the New Frontier for Wine?

When it comes to wine, most of us know that time for aging is essential. The last thing we want is what Steve Martin refers to in The Jerk as “fresh wine,” and many fine wines go through extensive filtration processes and years of barrel aging. At Cavitation Technologies Inc. (CVAT), though, researchers have come up with a patented process that can purportedly duplicate and even improve upon the wine aging process — all in a matter of seconds.

Specifically, Cavitation Technologies has a patent on:

“A method and device for manipulating alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages to obtain desirable changes in the beverages, comprising subjecting said beverages to a flow-through hydrodynamic cavitation process and continuing the application of such process for a period of time sufficient to produce a consumable product. In the case of wine, the method includes altering the composition and accelerating the conversion of ingredients to obtain wine with a superior homogeny, an extended shelf life and a mouth feel, flavor, bouquet, color and body resembling those of wine that was subjected to a traditional oak barrel maturation.”

In the following video from MoneyTV, CVAT’s Global Technology Manager and founder, Roman Gordon, demonstrates that it only takes about two minutes for the process to execute, when applied to making cognac:

As noted in the video, the cavitation reactor changes the composition of the beverage at the molecular level, encapsulating the water clusters around alcohol clusters, and simultaneously removing the unhealthy impurities that are in alcoholic drinks, including methanol and butanol.

The folks at CVAT originally developed their patented technology for use in edible oil refining, algal oil extraction, and renewable fuel production. They are now looking into how to bring their technology to market for consumers, and, as the patent notes, it can be applied to much more than just replicating the effects of aging on wine.  As reported by Equities.com, CVAT’s leaders also claim that their process can eliminate the hangover effect following drinking. Imagine the market for that.

Beyond the wine and beverage industries, there is also active research underway on techniques for instantly fabricating food customized for your DNA and health needs. And, 3D printing is also giving rise to many new culinary approaches. Take a look at the colorful, geometrically complex sugar-based shapes and concepts seen here, which make your local diner’s sugar cubes look downright unimaginative. Many such concepts have been shown at the 3D Food Printing Conference in Venlo, the Netherlands.  Chefs have also created five-course 3D-printed meals, and scientists have created 3D-printed beef.

New On Tap: Coasters That Interact With You

With thousands of craft beers inundating the market, how does a brewer go about getting noticed? At Coronado Brewing Co., which is one of San Diego County’s oldest craft beer makers, the answer lies in sensor-based coasters that engage the brewer’s consumers with the simple tap of a smartphone.

Coronado Brewing’s smart coasters are based on Thinfilm’s technology, which embeds NFC sensing in packaging, labels and many other kinds of items. Consumers tap NFC-based products with their smartphones and then see a customized landing page, video or other digital asset provided by the brand. The brand can, in turn, see a customer’s data inputs in real-time.

“Any physical product can be turned into a channel at any point in time,” said Davor Sutija, Thinfilm CEO. “Thinfilm’s integrated mobile marketing solution empowers brands to own and manage the communication no matter where the consumer is, whether in the store, at the bar, or in the home.” Thinfilm also has a downloadable case study on its work with Coronado Brewing and the coasters’ impact on online conversions:  “Innovative Coasters Help Brewery Boost Website Conversions”

By deploying the coasters, Coronado Brewing Co. reportedly saw a significant increase in consumer engagement, particularly compared to click-through rates of 0.2% for its existing advertising. In fact, the coasters produced a 13 – 17.5X increase in website conversions, as measured by visits to the website resulting from consumer-initiated taps. Overall, Thinfilm has driven an estimated 92% lift in mobile traffic to the CoastWise landing page.

The smart coasters have been tested with CoastWise Session IPA, a new craft beer introduced by Coronado, brewed in collaboration with Surfrider Foundation, an environmental group. Coronado donates part of its revenues to Surfrider.

“Competing for the attention of craft beer drinkers is intense,” said Brandon Richards, COO, Coronado Brewing Co. “Getting people to hear your brand story without interference is even harder. The Thinfilm team made everything a snap. And our customers really enjoyed the interactive experience.”

Coronado Brewing Co. plans to have its remaining coasters direct consumers to its ecommerce page. The company is also considering using Thinfilm technology for additional point-of-sale opportunities.

Sensor and infrared technologies are also having an impact on managing bars. For example, we’ve covered Nectar Labs’ Getnectar, an IoT-based inventory management system. It uses sensor and infrared technology baked into bottle stoppers to track volumes left in each bottle at a bar. The system produces a dashboard of data that shows amount poured versus estimates and connects to an app to alert the manager when a given bottle is finished. The technology connects to ordering system to keep inventory topped up.

Meanwhile, Thinfilm is expanding its use of NFC sensing and tags within the beer industry. You can find a related set of case studies here.

Image credit: Flickr user John Kannenberg under creative commons license. 

Want to learn about the use of connected commerce in restaurants? Come to the Smart Kitchen Summit. Use discount code SPOON for 25% off of tickets.

Designer Biohacking: At the Intersection of Building Food and Optimizing Health

What happens when a highly skilled designer focuses on food? In the case of Chloé Rutzerveld, who is based in the Netherlands, she set up a food concept and design business that focuses on everything from designer biohacking of food to 3D-printed food concepts. Her Edible Growth project focuses on combining aspects of design, science and technology to make our food more efficient, healthy and sustainable.

According to Munchies: “Using layers of edible plants, seeds, spores, and other microorganisms, Edible Growth creates intricate small meals that combine living mushrooms and greens with the mechanization of the most industrialized foods. In a nutshell, the Edible Growth products are composed of a nutritious base, or ‘edible matrix,’ of nuts, fruits, agar, and protein (which can even come from insects) that are extruded by a 3D printer. That matrix becomes the soil, more or less, for sprouting seeds, yeasts, beneficial bacteria, and mushroom spores to grow in over the course of five days. Finally, there’s a crust layer composed of carbohydrates and more protein, to hold everything else like a little superfood pastry.”

Here, you can see some of these concepts. The emerging field of food-focused “designer biohacking” also runs down to more basic, structural engineering of food and beverages, though. For example, The Odin is a company focused on “consumer genetic design” that sells kits for making green, fluorescent beer. The beer is based on a protein found in jellyfish that can be engineered into yeast. Customers execute this conversion themselves and the yeast can also be used to hack and morph champagne.

According to The Odin:

“Our goal with this kit is to begin to integrate synthetic biology and genetic design into people’s everyday life. We see a future in which people are genetically designing the plants they use in their garden, eating yogurt that contains a custom bacterial strain they modified or even someday brewing using an engineered yeast strain. Yeast is an integral part of our lives. It can used be used for brewing, baking, fermentation or as a research tool. Genetically Engineering yeast in your home seems like Science Fiction but is actually now reality. Using our kit you can make your yeast fluoresce and glow by inserting a gene from a jellyfish, the Green Flourescent Protein(GFP). This kit comes with everything you need to engineer a Mead Yeast we provide or your own favorite yeast that you provide.”

At the intersection of design and fanciful food concepts, 3D printing is also giving rise to many new culinary approaches. Take a look at the colorful, geometrically complex sugar-based shapes and concepts seen here, which make your local diner’s sugar cubes look downright unimaginative. Many such concepts have been shown at the 3D Food Printing Conference in Venlo, the Netherlands.  Chefs have created five-course 3D-printed meals, and scientists have created 3D-printed beef.

Meanwhile, home food reactors that make food using only electricity, carbon dioxide and organisms from the air we breathe are headed our way. Researchers from Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland have successfully produced single cell protein in the lab using only water, electricity, carbon dioxide and small organisms obtained from the environment. The end result is a breakthrough that, if commercialized, could result in solar powered home food reactors that produce protein and carb-packed food. The process could also be leveraged to produce food for livestock, from, essentially, nothing.

The industrial design and 3D printing communities may also want to pay attention to personalized food fabrication. It is an emerging field that has great promise. Dr. Amy Logan, a team leader for dairy science at The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), has just launched a three-year study into the personalized fabrication of smart food systems. Logan’s research team will focus on instantly available diagnostics and how 3D printing or similar technologies can fabricate genetically targeted food to correct deficiencies. The diagnostics may leverage, of all things, human sweat.

Hacking the basic building blocks of food is inevitably going to intersect with hacking our bodies for more optimal health outcomes. “I think the future of food will go in multiple directions,” Chloe Rutzerveld has said. “It’ll all be very high tech and monitor the body.”

Personalizing Food, Directed by Your DNA

What if, at the press of a button, you could have food generated for you that is customized for your genetic code and up-to-the-minute nutritional needs? With that in mind, Dr. Amy Logan, a team leader for dairy science at The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), has just launched a three-year study into the personalized fabrication of smart food systems.

As News.com.au reports, Dr. Logan has delivered a presentation on how personalized nutrition will converge with 3D printing so that custom food will be generated based on measurements of physiological markers through biosensors. Think of how sensors on a car warn us when, say, tire pressure is low. In Dr. Logan’s eyes, biosensor-based measurements can then trigger the automatic generation of nutritionally optimized food.

According to a mission statement for Dr. Logan’s study:

“Our scientists and engineers at CSIRO are working towards this future where food, nutraceuticals and other products will be personalized based on an individual’s genetic makeup, and a reality where optimum well-being for each person is a reality. We are building the underpinning science required to: Develop a personalized and instant food processor, providing the smart, structured soft materials (food and cosmetics) on demand and personalized for you on the day, incorporating sensor technologies that measure food – body and cosmetic – body interactions coupled with personalized genomics and phenotype (lifestyle) data.”

Dr. Logan’s study has participation from CSIRO’s Agriculture and Food and Manufacturing divisions, and it will go beyond focusing solely on conceptual advancements. The idea is to move toward instant ways to precisely detect what an individual’s body needs and instant ways to fabricate customized food to meet those needs.

Logan’s research team will focus on instantly available diagnostics and how 3D printing or similar technologies can fabricate genetically targeted food to correct deficiencies. The diagnostics may leverage, of all things, human sweat. At the Inside 3D Printing Conference, Logan said: “The vision we have is that in 20 years time, someone would wake up in the morning [and] their physiological markers will have already been measured in a really unintrusive way, potentially through their sweat while they’ve been sleeping using biosensor technology.”

CSIRO’s “The DNA Diet” site explores these ideas further. The goal is not just to optimize nutrition for performance-oriented reasons, but to essentially hack the body to defy disease. “DNA damage is the most fundamental cause of developmental and degenerative disease and accelerated aging,” The DNA Diet report notes. “Pioneering CSIRO research has demonstrated that damage to the bodies DNA is a fundamental disease that can be diagnosed and partially reversed. A team of CSIRO scientists identified nine micronutrients that are significantly associated with DNA damage. The group also showed that supplementation with certain micronutrients can reduce DNA damage.”

Through work headed up by Dr. Michael Fenech, CSIRO has already developed a technique for measuring DNA damage that can serve as a model for Dr. Logan’s team to take further. According to The DNA Diet: “Reach 100 [is] a medical clinic offering diagnostic blood tests that measure DNA damage and information relating to the nutritional, life-style and environmental factors that influence it. The team at Reach100 checks the levels of important micronutrients in the patient’s blood, including red cell folate, serum folate and Vitamin B12, which are all essential for the body’s ability to replicate healthy DNA. Reach100 doctors then make recommendations about the health of the patient’s DNA, based on the results of these tests.”

Is it wildly exotic to think that in the future 3D printers might fabricate our food? Actually, many such concepts have been shown at the 3D Food Printing Conference in Venlo, the Netherlands.  Chefs have created five-course 3D-printed meals, and scientists have created 3D-printed beef. The object of Dr. Logan’s research, though, is to improve health outcomes through the instant fabrication of genetically targeted food.

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Building Wine and Meat Molecule by Molecule

“Engineering wines to perfection molecule by molecule.” That’s the tagline of Ava Winery, which is creating synthetic wines without grapes, yeast, or even fermentation.

Mardonn Chua and Alec Lee are the entrepreneurs behind Ava Winery. They create compounds with ethanol that mimic the chemical composition of wines, but that will sell for much less money. The full process involves experimenting with mixes of amino acids, sugars, and ethanol, and they have also tried mimicking the taste of 1992 Dom Perignon.

If you’re interested in the detail-by-detail mechanics involved in mimicking wines, read Mardonn Chua’s Medium post here, where he lays out recipes tried during experiments.

Ava Winery has shown tenacity in the face of critics, too. The editors at New Scientist grabbed headlines when they compared Ava Winery’s Moscato to a plastic “pool shark,” with “essence of plastic bag,” which prompted the winery to respond: “Nothing resembling plastic is an ingredient in the wine, taste is deeply subjective.”

Ava Winery sees the promise of its form of “hacking” extending beyond just wine, and its founders note: “This is what the future of foods looks like: food will be scanned and printed as easily as photographs today. These digital recreations will be identical chemical copies of the originals, capturing the same nutritional values, flavors, and textures of their ‘natural’ counterparts. Part scientists and part artists, our canvas will be macronutrients like starches and proteins; our pixels will be flavor molecules.”

Indeed, Ava Winery’s vision of creating synthetic wine is hardly the only game in town on the synthetic food and wine scene. Memphis Meats, impossible Foods and other companies are focused on synthetic meat and food, and Beyond Meat has gotten rave reviews for its synthetic burgers and also gained interest from both Bill Gates and his former Microsoft buddy Nathan Myhrvold.

In fact, Gates has penned a very interesting post titled “Future of Food,” where he notes the following: “The chicken taco I ate was made using Beyond Meat’s chicken alternative. I wasn’t the only one fooled by how real it tasted. New York Times food writer Mark Bittman couldn’t tell the difference between Beyond Meat and real chicken either. You can read his review here.” Gates has put his money where his mouth is and invested in Beyond Meat, as have others.

A video on Beyond Meat’s vision of taking animal protein out of the food chain is available here:

And then there’s the Impossible Burger. While Beyond Meat is working with other burger joints like Burgerfi to put their meat-alternative in the hands of consumers, Impossible Foods – the brain child of DNA microarray inventor Patrick O. Brown – decided to not only create a plant based burger that bleeds, but to create a national chain of restaurants – to sell the Impossible Burger.

While Ava Winery is focused on triggering the same pleasure receptors that are triggered when we consume a traditionally fermented fine wine, companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have the potential to create inexpensive alternatives to meat that could make a profound nutritional difference for people all around the world.

According to Ava Winery’s Alec Lee: “Today we’re on the cusp of significant technological breakthroughs in food production the likes of which have never been seen before. It took humanity nearly 10,000 years of agriculture to develop many of the crops and animal herds we consume today. It took only a few centuries to develop the farming tools that have culminated in large-scale, efficient mechanized farming. And it only took decades to marry science with food allowing us to directly manipulate the genetic constructs of our food.”

It’s worth watching Lee’s video, where he expands on these concepts and explores Ava Winery’s strategy:

Image credit: Flickr user Star5112