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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Internet of Food

This Finnish Company Uses Radio Waves to Monitor and Reduce Dairy Waste

Dairy plants around the world are facing a new set of challenges as they grapple with rising raw milk costs and increasing pressure to reduce their carbon footprints as plant-based competitors try to draw a contrast with animal milk. A Finnish startup named Collo wants to help on both fronts using what it describes as liquid fingerprint technology.

According to the company, its technology can detect any type of liquid in pipes in real-time, giving companies a way to optimize production and cut product losses. Collo says its technology can keep track of the liquids in the pipes, showing exactly where the leakage is occurring. This enables dairy plants, breweries, and other liquid processors to address the problem at the point of origin.

Collo’s technology is based on an electromagnetic resonator that emits a continuous radio frequency field into the liquid. The signal reacts to interferences caused by different components, chemicals, and phases in the liquid, and the Collo analyzer immediately warns of any disturbances so that the process can be adjusted.

Collo says its analyzer simultaneously measures eight proprietary parameters from a liquid, which collectively creates the liquid’s fingerprint. If one or more of these characteristics change during processing, the analyzer shows the changes so that corrective measures can be made.

While leakage may not seem like a problem, it can be costly to dairy processors. Sometimes it’s just a small leak that can lead to lost revenue over time, while other times bigger leaks can lead to harmful environmental incidents that can draw the scrutiny of citizens and local governments. Collo says its technology can help avoid both profit-wasting slow leakage and high-profile spillage incidents by alerting processors instantaneously.

“As our technology can supervise all the draining points in real-time, it can keep track of the liquids in the pipes and show exactly where the leakage is,” company spokesperson Mikko Tielinen says. “This makes it possible to address the problem at the point of origin, saving huge amounts of milk and money.”

Front Of House Takes an NFT Program to Smaller Restaurants

If you’ve ever taken home a souvenir menu or ashtray from your favorite restaurant, you will understand the role NFTs play in the hospitality industry. The same goes for attending a restaurant theme night or local pop-up of a new dining establishment. As Front of House (FOH) co-founder Phil Toronto eloquently puts it, a restaurant establishing a successful NFT strategy is “a beautiful merging of the digital and physical experience.”

Launching on May 18, Front of House (FOH) is a marketplace for NFTs of digital collectibles and experiences for independent restaurants. Co-founders Phil Toronto (VaynerFund), Colin Camac (former restaurateur), and Alex Ostroff (Saint Urbain) represent a mix of people with backgrounds in digital technology, advertising, and the hospitality industries. Initial clients include Wildair and Dame, with upcoming partners such as Rosella, Niche Niche, and Tokyo Record Bar.

The company’s business model is for the restaurant to keep 80% of the sale of digital collectibles. If an establishment uses a collectible as an invite to a unique dining experience, the restaurant will keep all the money from the food event.

Toronto stresses that FOH’s digital collectibles will be the digital analog to buying swag (such as a sweatshirt or tote bag) from your go-to dining establishment. Over time, he adds, the digital representations can grow to become interactive experiences that can be shared and/or enjoyed as a personal keepsake. “It’s a passport of sorts from your favorite restaurant,” the FOH co-founder told The Spoon in a recent interview.

The early adopters of using NFT as a marketing and sales tool are “scrappy entrepreneurs,” Toronto added, who had to get creative to stay afloat during the pandemic. “The commonality is that every restaurant owner interested in our program is entrepreneurial and looking to go outside the box,” he said.

Marketing and being on the cutting edge are only part of it. The impetus for jumping on board the growing NFT trend is about money. In addition to their regular dining business, an owner can collect revenue from digital collectibles, but the aspect with the most upside is creating memorable dining experiences. A key to all the possibilities is to make it simple for the customer to engage. A key to FOH’s success will be what the co-founder calls creating a frictionless experience, making it a little more than a typical eCommerce check-out experience.

“One of the avenues we’d like to explore is ticketed experiences where Front of House will work with a restaurant to buy it out for the night and have a special ticketed experience,” Toronto said. “That experience is sold through a digital collectible that lives on as a memory and a digital ticket stub you can take.”

Toronto said he is surprised that 65% of the customers he approaches get the idea and understand its value but might have a wait-and-see attitude. Once the pioneers prove NFTs successful and more than a “get rich quick” concept, he believes any reluctance will disappear. Also, Toronto commented that the NFT opportunity for restaurants isn’t limited to New York, Los Angeles, and other coastal towns. Given the hospitality business’s everyday issues, the concept will work just as well for Des Moines or any eatery wanting to explore a new business opportunity.

FoodLogiQ, IBM Food Trust, ripe.io and SAP Demonstrate Successful Interoperability in Food Traceability

Information standards company GS1 US announced today the completion of a proof-of-concept in which multiple traceability systems successfully interoperated when following a product through a supply chain. This first part of a multi-phase trial included blockchain, cloud and other technologies from FoodLogiQ, IBM Food Trust, ripe.io and SAP.

GS1 is a non-profit that creates global unique numbering and identification systems, barcodes, Electronic Product Code-based RFID and more for supply chains. Using the GS1 standard, FoodLogiQ, IBM Food Trust, ripe.io and SAP simulated a seafood supply chain and shared data with one another. According to the press announcement, the group was able to communicate with one another about critical events in the supply chain such as when a product was shipped, received, packed or transformed.

In a FoodLogiQ blog post, FoodLogiQ CEO, Sean O’Leary said, “The adoption of traceability in the food industry is reaching a tipping point. With the successful completion of this proof-of-concept, we have demonstrated that regardless of the underlying technology being used to house the data, whether blockchain or other enterprise database technologies, food companies will be able to connect their systems to achieve the holy grail of whole chain traceability.”

In a nutshell, food traceability won’t be locked into or reliant on one particular technology. Different systems in the supply chain will be able to talk with one another to provide insights and verification as a product moves throughout the supply chain.

Now the coalition of companies is moving on the next proof-of-concept phase, which is adding suppliers, distributors, retailers and foodservice operators to see how it will work in a real-world setting. After the proof-of-concept phase is complete, the next step will be to understand data requirements and see if any new protocols are required for interoperability.

The global COVID-19 pandemic highlighted shortcomings and faults in our existing food supply chain. Successful demonstrations of technology interoperability like the one announced today can help create a more robust, transparent and hopefully resilient supply chain going forward.

When it Comes to Identifying the Source of Foodborne Illness, The Future is Now

Foodborne illnesses are not only an unpleasant personal experience for millions of Americans each year, they’re a logistical concern for businesses, with the potential to drive and keep people (and their dollars) away for good. As our food supply becomes increasingly global, the ability to accurately and quickly identify the source of any pathogen causing a foodborne illness has become exponentially more difficult. To ensure the safety of what we eat, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) plans to build upon its early success with digital technology and whole-genome sequencing for its New Era of Smarter Food Safety.

Whole-genome sequencing

At its simplest, a genome is the information a cell needs to create an organism. Since an organism’s genome is as unique as a fingerprint, sequencing that genome is the first step in being able to quickly identify just what is making a person sick. Scientists generate the sequence by gathering samples of a particular food in a sterile environment, mashing it up, and conducting the genome analysis. The result is the fingerprint for that specific entity.

The problem is, having this information on hand at the local level is useful only under very limited circumstances. For instance, it would be enough if a group of people became ill after eating a single meal with food sourced locally, in a single sitting at a single event. With a few calls, it might be possible to identify the food causing the illness and take steps to keep it from being shipped to new locations.

More common is the case in which a number of people with nothing in common at first become ill within days of one another. Making a match between the pathogen causing the illness and the pathogen in each food involved is still fairly straightforward – if everything is sourced locally. But what if some of the food comes from sources across the globe? How are the fingerprints for those foods going to be of use in stopping the spread of the illness to additional locations when there is no way to readily communicate with other localities?

GenomeTrakr

So, to bring whole-genome information into play on a global scale, the FDA created a United States-based open-source distributed network of labs in 2013. The result is GenomeTrakr – the stuff of foodie-sci-fi. It makes whole-genome sequences from foods around the world available globally. Any health agency, anywhere on the network, can upload data from a pathogen causing illness in their locality and receive information about entities that match or closely approximate that sequence. In effect, the power of the digital fingerprinting and related DNA sampling now in use in law enforcement  can be put to work for foodborne illness outbreaks by either making a match or reporting that the match is likely to be found within a certain cluster of “related” genome sequences. This game-changing use of whole-genome sequencing has already helped to halt the spread of global foodborne pathogens several times.

A digital framework

But global genome sequencing is still not all that is needed to safeguard the food supply – and your health. Being able to readily access a whole-genome sequence  can tell you which food is the culprit, but how do you know where the food originated, what path it took from field to plate, and where any additional product is currently located on its journey from field to plate?

The FDA’s remedy to this part of the challenge is to digitize the records kept at each step of a food’s journey through the global system. Rather than filling out a paper form that remains local or creating a paper-based dossier that travels with a food shipment, each step along the way will be documented in a globally accessible, digital format. The result will be a system that complements the GenomeTrakr by making it possible to trace the source of a foodborne pathogen to its point of origin in minutes rather than weeks or months.

Why does it matter? It matters because ready access to the genome, the origin, and the trail it traveled will make it possible to stop the flow of this food through the system: It will keep additional people from becoming ill.

A blueprint

As the first step in the FDA’s Strategic Blueprint for this New Era of Smarter Food Safety, agencies and companies from all parts of the food sector met in October to discuss the logistics of the new approach and offer input.  Considerations ranging from ownership of the data to concerns about data transfer were among the many raised. These issues are not not only vital to the integrity of the data in the system, but will also result in a system we can count on when we sit down to eat.

 

Nectar Raises $1.1M CAD Seed Round for its IoT Beehive Monitoring Tech

Nectar, the startup that creates IoT sensors and software for more precise commercial beehive management, has raised a $1.1 million CAD (~$824,000) seed round of funding. According to Betakit, which first reported the story, “The round was led by Interdomus Capital, and saw participation from Real Ventures, Upper Canada Equity Fund, First Stone Venture Partners, Third Estate Investments, and other angel impact investors sourced through MaRS’s impact investing platform, SVX.”

Bees are vital to our food supply. As we wrote last year when we first covered Nectar:

According to the USDA, “One out of every three bites of food in the United States depends on honey bees and other pollinators. Honey bees pollinate $15 billion worth of crops each year, including more than 130 fruits and vegetables.” But since 2006, roughly 30 percent of beehives have collapsed due to disease, pesticides and loss of habitat.

Nectar works by inserting a “Beecon” sensor into a hive, which monitors temperature, humidity, audio and movement activity. That data is beamed from the Beecon to the BeeHub station, which transmits the data to the cloud where it is analyzed by Nectar’s software. Beekeepers can then better monitor their hives to see if a new queen is hatching, if the temperature is correct, hive mortality rates and more.

Nectar isn’t the only startup catching the buzz on bee management. ApisProtect in Ireland uses IoT sensors for commercial hives as well, and BroodMinder is an open source solution for bee hobbyists.

Prior to this seed round, Nectar was a part of the Founder Fuel accelerator in Canada, which provided $100,000 (CAD). Nectar told Betakit it will use the new funding to grow its presence in North America and work with more commercial beekeepers and farmers.

The Week In Restaurant Tech: More Innovation From Domino’s, Back-of-House Fridges That Fight Food Waste

Historically speaking, August is a slow month for new tech developments, but clearly not everyone in the industry has hightailed it to the beach. The past week held a few notable announcements from the restaurant tech world, including developments from Domino’s and new takes on existing tech in both the front and back of house. Here’s a quick look:

Domino’s Launches Innovation Garage
It seems Domino’s is in the news every other week for tech developments to make its delivery process as fast and friction-free as possible. That won’t change any time soon: the company announced this week the opening of its Innovation Garage, a 33,000-square-foot space in Domino’s hometown of Ann Arbor, MI that will be ground zero for testing all manner of tech-related initiatives. Self-service kiosks, autonomous vehicles, GPS delivery tracking, and Domino’s AnyWare ordering technology were a few items mentioned in the press release.

Image via Unsplash.

TripAdvisor Adds Wi-Fi Offering for Restaurants
TripAdvisor this week launched a service called Wi-Fi Plus, which will allow restaurants to offer customers free wi-fi in exchange for their contact information. Customers who opt in will receive the inevitable automated marketing messages that usually follow the handing over of one’s email addy, and will be encouraged to leave more TripAdvisor reviews about their restaurant experience. The restaurants, meanwhile, will get more access to potentially valuable customer data, and hopefully a business boost in the process. When reporting the news, RestaurantDive cited a recent study that claims 65 percent of restaurant guests say wi-fi is a must for quick-service restaurants.

GND Solutions Fights Restaurant Food Waste With Semtech Integration
This week IoT provider GND Solutions announced it is integrating Semtech Corp’s LoRa devices and the open LoRaWAN protocol into its new smart refrigeration solutions for restaurants. The GLoSe-916T device from GND is a wireless IoT door alert sensor that will immediately notify the restaurant when a fridge door opens or closes, and will also monitor humidity and temperature. The hope is that more real-time data on these factors can help restaurant managers eliminate food waste by cutting down on human error (e.g., accidentally leaving the fridge door open). The sensors integrate with the fridge without the need for additional wiring, and can accurately report temperatures between -40°C and 100°C.

Want more restaurant tech? We’ll be covering plenty of it at the Smart Kitchen Summit this October in Seattle. Grab your tickets here.

No More Lukewarm Beer! The Chilled Drink Calculator Helps You Cool Drinks Faster

Summer may be waning, but there are still a few hot days left before we put away our white pants and break out the sweaters. And while the sun is still out, you’ll want to down a frosty beverage, not some tepid libation. To help make sure your drinks are at their optimal cold temperature for EXTREME thirst quenching, look no further than the free, online Chilled Drink Calculator.

Just enter the type of beverage you are about enjoy (beer, soda, juice, etc.), the size and type of container it comes in (glass, plastic), what your starting point is (room temperature, outside), where you are putting it (fridge, freezer, ice bath) and how cold you want it. That sounds like a lot when spelled out, but trust us, it’s zippy to fill out.

Once you enter all those parameters, the Chilled Drink Calculator spits out how long it will take you to properly chill your beverage. This is especially helpful for those throwing any Labor Day parties and wanting to make sure all the drinks are at the right temperature.

If you aren’t so good at planning ahead and you find yourself with a bunch of room temperature drinks, the calculator also provides some chilling hacks like wrapping a wet paper towel around your drink container, using a salt ice water bath, and, if you are Bill Nye or some other scientist, dry ice.

How does the Chilled Drink Calculator work? From the description:

Despite appearances, this calculator doesn’t run on magic. Instead, it makes use of a much more powerful resource: physics! This calculator is an easy-to-use version of our own Newton’s law of cooling calculator that has been modified to include technical values for the most common combinations of containers and beverages.

Newton’s law of cooling:

T = T_ambient + (T_initial – T_ambient) * exp(- k * t),

which, solving for time (t), we transform into:

t = -log[(T – T_ambient)/(T_initial-T_ambient)]/k,

where

T [K]: temperature of the object at time t,
T_ambient [K]: ambient temperature,
T_initial [K]: initial temperature of the object,
t [s]: time spent cooling,
k [1/s]: cooling coefficient,

The cooling coefficient is equal to:

k = h * A / C,

where

k [1/s]: cooling coefficient,
h [W/(m² * K)]: heat transfer coefficient,
A [m²]: area of the heat exchange,
C [J/K]: heat capacity.

Duh.

The Chilled Drink Calculator was developed by University of Warsaw physics student Álvaro Diéz and his foodie pal Tibor Pal. It lives on the Omni Calculator site and is part of a collection of 843 free online calculators. The site even has other food-related calculators, like the “Do or Donut,” which tells you how much exercise you need to burn off after eating one of those delicious confections, the “Coffee Kick Calculator,” which helps you gauge your caffeine intake, and the “Perfect Pancake Calculator.”

Here’s The Spoon’s 2019 Food Robotics Market Map

Today we head to San Francisco for The Spoon’s first-ever food-robotics event. ArticulAte kicks off at 9:05 a.m. sharp at the General Assembly venue in SF, and throughout the daylong event talk will be about all things robots, from the technology itself to business and regulatory issues surrounding it.

When you stop and look around the food industry, whether it’s new restaurants embracing automation or companies changing the way we get our groceries, it’s easy to see why the food robotics market is projected to be a $3.1 billion market by 2025.

But there’s no one way to make a robot, and so to give you a sense of who’s who in this space, and to celebrate the start of ArticulAte, The Spoon’s editors put together this market map of the food robotics landscape.

This is the first edition of this map, which we’ll improve and build upon as the market changes and grows. If you have any suggestions for other companies or see ones we missed you think should be in there, let us know by leaving a comment below or emailing us at tips@thespoon.tech.

Click on the map below to enlarge it.

The Food Robotics Market 2019:

You’ll Soon Be Able to Order Domino’s Pizza From Your Car

Domino’s announced this morning it will launch its Anyware digital-ordering platform in cars in 2019. To do so, the pizza chain-turned-tech trailblazer has teamed up with Xevo, whose in-vehicle commerce technology is currently in about 25 million cars.

This is actually not the first time the Anyware platform has made its way into a car. In 2014, Domino’s worked with Ford Motors to bring voice order to the Ford Sync vehicle. That initiative was slurped up into Anyware when the latter launched in 2015 and is still available today.

With the new in-car app, customers use the car’s touchscreen to find their local store, order, and track the pizza. Voice-ordering will also be available. According to a press release, the feature will be automatically loaded onto cars with Xevo platform starting “in late 2019.” While the release didn’t state which car brands this includes, Xevo already works with Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC, so I’d expect models from those companies to be on the list. Xevo also partnered with Hyundai in 2018 to allow customers to order and pay for meals from Applebee’s, so this isn’t its first go at a QSR partnership.

For Domino’s, the Xevo partnership seems like another stop on Domino’s quest to seemingly try out every new technology it possibly can for delivering pizzas. The list of channels from which Domino’s customer can use the Anyware platform keeps growing: phones, smart watches, TVs, Alexa and Google Home devices, Slack, Facebook Messenger, and Domino’s own Zero Click app. The chain also delivers to HotSpots, which are “non-traditional” locations like beaches, parks, and probably even the zoo. And Domino’s launched a separate partnership with global addressing platform what3words earlier this year, to use the latter’s technology in countries and regions that lack a more straightforward address system.

At one point, Domino’s was the only pizza chain around trying out new technologies left and right, but times have changed. Pizza Hut recently partnered with FedEx to use its autonomous bot to deliver pizzas, and even has some weirder projects in the works, like the autonomous pizza factory on wheels the company unveiled in 2018. (It’s still a prototype.) Papa John’s, who has weathered a good deal of trouble in the last year, got a $200 million investment in February. The company hasn’t said yet what the money will go towards, but if it wants to keep up, a little tech innovation will probably be part of its plans.

The only bummer about the Domino’s-Xevo deal is that you still have to either pick the pizza up at a store or get home by the time the pie arrives. My guess is that will change quickly, and Domino’s will either integrate its HotSpots into car ordering or even use the what3words’ tech. You have to figure that, with its many tech initiatives and a platform called Anyware, Domino’s is aiming to eventually deliver everywhere.

MealMe’s Instagram-Meets-Yelp-Style App Helps You Decide What’s for Dinner

The average consumer nowadays will probably use multiple different apps to figure out where to eat on any given night: discovery, recommendations, booking a reservation or ordering food for delivery. As the folks at Hypepotamus recently noted, a new company, MealMe, wants to simplify the food lover’s food journey by bringing its many pieces into one single app.

Matthew Bouchner and Will Said, both students at Emory University, created the MealMe app as a kind of Instagram-like social network for food that also integrates table booking and ordering capabilities. The idea is to offer a one-stop-shop for all your food needs by aggregating the many disparate parts of the food journey into a single interface.

When a user opens the MealMe app, they see an AI-powered feed that combines Yelp’s data (location, cost, etc.) with user-generated data such as comments and likes, and pulls the most relevant results to that user. So if you live in Indianapolis and tend to order a lot of Thai food, the app will pull up restaurant results relevant to that criteria. The app also pulls in Yelp’s mapping feature, so you can see where your restaurant of choice is and your distance from it.

Image via MealMe.

Users can also snap photos of their meals and share them, much like they do on Instagram, and restaurants can do the same to promote specific items. When a user clicks on a photo, they are given the option to access services like Opentable or Postmates, to book a reservation or order delivery.

The visual aspect of this food journey is especially important to the MealMe folks. Research has shown that the visual cortex of the brain plays a much more significant role in decision making than was previously thought, and can impact whether or not we choose an item from a menu. So in addition to making the logistical side of “what’s for dinner” easier, MealMe also bills itself as a place for people who also just “love looking at food porn,” an activity that’s so popular it’s a bonafide industry.

In fact, multiple companies are now zeroing in on the visual aspect of the food industry and trying to turn it into a business. Wine n Dine, which like MealMe lets users order from within the app, is a food-porn-lover’s dream that shows a feed of pictures a la Instagram and even breaks pictures down into cuisine. And Pinon is another group of students, this time from the University of Massachusetts, who have created “smart” menus that show videos and interactive pictures of food items, and also lets users order from within the app.

Bouchner and Said have been at work on the MealMe app since 2018; it’s currently in beta, with a launch planned for later this year and is currently free to use. The company has said it makes money by taking commissions from delivery orders, offering targeted ad space, and selling premium data packages to restaurants and CPGs. Right now the company is currently bootstrapped and seeking a $120,000 seed round.

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.

Bevi Fights Plastic Bottle Waste With Its Smart Beverage Machine

What’s twice the size of Texas, floats on water, and weighs as much as 500 jumbo jets?

That would be the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

By recent numbers, there are roughly 1.8 trillion plastic pieces floating in the patch, which sits in the North Pacific ocean between Hawaii and California. Much of that debris comes from plastic drink bottles, which can take hundreds of years to disintegrate. The U.S. alone buys about 29 billion water bottles per year, and only one in six of those are recycled. The rest wind up in landfills or, more often, the ocean.

Finding an alternative to those plastic bottles is the core mission behind Bevi, the smart beverage dispenser currently making its way into offices, gyms, schools, and hotels. In the words of cofounder and Head of Marketing Frank Lee, the company is “building a future without plastic bottles and cans.”

The Bevi machine dispenses both still and sparkling water, which can also be flavored, and comes in two sizes: a five-foot-tall dispenser and a countertop model. It’s hooked up to a tap water source, and that water runs through the machine’s custom filtration system. Users, meanwhile, can select flavors (the machine can hold up to four at one time) and adjust their drink’s sweetness with a sliding scale that appears on the touchscreen. All flavors are vegan, kosher, and sweetened naturally, according to the company.

But back to the floating garbage patch: Bevi Cofounder and Head of Product Eliza Becton started reading about it when she was studying industrial design at Rhode Island School of Design. “[Bevi] was essentially a way for her to figure out how to clean up the ocean,” says Lee. Becton, Lee, and CEO and cofounder Sean Grundy joined forces in 2013 and started making smart beverage prototypes, from which Bevi was eventually born.

Besides being an eco-friendly alternative to bottled drinks, Bevi is also trying to offer more consistency and precision when it comes to flavor. A traditional soda gun (which the trio reverse engineered at one point in the name of research) has no consistent flavor level or carbonation settings. So instead, Bevi used some of the same technology found in medical devices, where dispensing the correct dosages is life or death. In other words: precision is paramount.

Water flavors may not fall in the lifesaving department, but digitizing the way people get them still delivers a much more consistent product.

Lee points out a couple other advantages to being digital:

For one, Bevi is an internet-connected machine, which means the company can monitor flavor data in real time. That makes it much easier to know when a machine’s flavor supply needs to be refilled. Office managers, Lee points out, typically have to restock beverages by going to a place like Costco and buying cases that have to be lugged back to the office or facility. By proactively monitoring levels and dispatching someone to refill them before they run out, Bevi eliminates this particular task, along with the wasted time and back pain that goes along with it.

The other advantage to being digital is that it allows Bevi to analyze which flavors are working, which are less popular, and any other noteworthy trends. At the start of the year, for example, cucumber-flavored water spiked as people were making their new year resolutions. That’s great information for Bevi, who can plan ahead to next January and push “cleansing” flavors accordingly.

Right now Bevi is focused on putting their devices in public places, where they see the most opportunity. While many, including myself, have asked about a home version of the machine, Lee didn’t have any specifics as to if or when that might materialize. Currently, both models of the machine are only available for business use. Pricing varies by company, but the Bevi website notes that “Bevi can cost as low as 26 cents per drink.”

Bevi is all about changing consumer behavior, which is a cornerstone of any true innovation. It’s also not easy to accomplish, and when it comes to plastic water bottles, there are decades of conditioning to undo in consumers before the majority of them opt for a more eco-friendly alternative. That’s really true for any kind of beverage receptacle, plastic or otherwise. I’d love to see a future where everything from fast food joints to Starbucks to the gas station has a Bevi or Bevi-like machine that’s not only digital but also offers a a real alternative to those fridges full of plastic.

No telling if that’ll actually happen, but in terms of changing the way we think about what we drink, the folks at Bevi seems up to the challenge.