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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Internet of Food

Samsung Adds Food Image Recognition To Bixby Through Calorie Mama API

Search has come a long way since the earliest algorithms deployed by Google, Lycos, and Inktomi. After conquering basic and complex queries, search engines set their sites on images, video, and audio as frontiers that required new ways of looking at metadata to provide consumers with useful results.

Image recognition has been a focus of developers wanting to add value to the basic ability to capture and identify a picture of a peach or a fast food meal at Wendy’s. The key, as exemplified by companies such as Palo Alto-based Azumio, is to link image recognition to valuable datasets. For Azumio’s Calorie Mama AI-powered platform, the company offers an API available for third-party developers as well as a consumer download which allows users to track nutrition intake.

While Azumio faces competition from Google and Pinterest, a new partnership with Samsung may allow the folks behind Calorie Mama to separate itself from the pack. Samsung has announced a working relationship with Azumio to adds its Calorie Mama technology to Bixby, the South Korean giant’s AI personal assistant platform. Calorie Mama will be baked into the new Galaxy S9 and S9+ enabling users to obtain instant nutritional information about the food they eat.

“Our vision for the Calorie Mama API is to provide the best food image recognition technology to our partners,” Tom Xu, co-founder of Azumio said in a press release, “and to simplify nutrition tracking and food discovery for healthy living to their customers.”

While this announcement is a nice to have for Samsung smart device users, the true value goes far beyond the basic ability to count calories and set nutrition goals. Azumio’s work primarily is focused in areas related to health in such areas as diabetes and sleep disorders. The company’s Argus platform offers activity and diet tracking along with a social network focused on health and fitness. Argus powers its suite of applications such as Instant Heart Rate, Sleep Time, Fitness Buddy and Glucose Buddy.  The endgame of connecting food recognition with health-related applications, focusing on those in which diet management is essential, is where the real power lies.

Samsung and Azumio’s combined efforts began in 2013 when the Argus platform was offered in Samsung’s Gear line of devices. Samsung continues to work on its own proprietary health and fitness apps, but those have not been offered to consumers outside of Korea. The value of adding Calorie Mama to Bixby could show great promise. For example, a cook wanting to create a healthy meal could ask Bixby to recommend a substitute for a high-fat ingredient by tapping into its database of image data.

Pinterest—which is preparing for a possible IPO—will undoubtedly rise to the challenge to go beyond its image recognition work with Google (called Lens) which allows users to find recipe pins based on captured pictures. Pinterest recently has hired a new head of computer vision, Chuck Rosenberg, a 14-year Google veteran. Given the primary task of computer vision technology is to analyze images and tie those results to associated data, Pinterest is on an accelerated path in this space. Unlike Samsung, working in a somewhat closed ecosystem, Pinterest will make its application available to all takers.

Big Food Invests In The Future: A Talk With Tyson Ventures’ Tom Mastrobuoni

If you’ve listened to an investor conference call for a big food company lately, there’s a good chance you know the following:

  • Consumers are asking for healthier options and want to understand better where their food comes from.
  • The world’s population continues to grow in the face of an increasingly stressed food ecosystem.
  • Food brands are increasingly establishing direct relationships with consumers and exploring new business models that represent big departures from traditional food retail.

In short, big food is being forced to think about the future.

Some of the ways they are doing this are through partnerships, incubation and accelerator initiatives and establishing direct investment arms. Tyson Foods is doing all of the above, and one of the people at the heart of the company’s investment efforts is Tom Mastrobuoni, the CFO for Tyson Ventures, our guest for this week’s episode of the Smart Kitchen Show podcast.

One of the things I talk to Tom about Tyson’s recent investment in Tovala. The deal was interesting to me because it was Tyson’s first investment in a connected kitchen and food delivery startup, joining the group’s other investments in clean meat startups Beyond Meat and Memphis Meats.

Tom and I also talk about how Tyson and other companies are thinking about technologies such as AI, Blockchain and much more.

Have a listen below, download here or subscribe on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen).

Cup Club

Cup Club Brews Up an IoT-Powered Solution to Coffee Cup Waste

One of the most famous songs from the old musical 70, Girls, 70 is a song called “Coffee in a Cardboard Cup,” where one character decries the use of to-go cups: “The trouble with the world today/It’s plain to see/Is coffee in a cardboard cup.” The musical was written in back the ’50s, long before Starbucks, but its creators were unknowingly on to something.

Fast-forward to 2018, we’re throwing out over 40 billion single-use cups across the U.S. and Europe each year. Many have tried to address the waste issue; no one’s succeeded on a large scale. Offering to knock 10 cents off the cost of my $5.00 coffee isn’t much of an incentive to lug a bulky, reusable cup around (if I haven’t already lost said cup in a taxi cab).

Safia Qureshi considered all this when she created Cup Club, a subscription service using the Internet of Things and RFID to reinvent the reusable cup.

It works like this: Participating coffee retailers stock the cups, made of plant-based plastic, and give them to a Cup Club member buying a coffee. The latter can then “return” the cup to any number of locations around the city. Once returned, the cups are collected, washed, and redistributed to the participating stores. And since each cup is RFID tagged and registered to a user’s account, Cup Club can charge a user for unreturned cups.

Cup Club will reportedly be available to the public this month in London, and will be followed by a worldwide rollout in the future.

Qureshi took inspiration for the company from the chai wallahs in India, who sell chai in glass cups that are returned, washed, and reused. “I’m very passionate about putting an end to products that are only used one time,” she recently said. “It’s a selfish and arrogant stance.”

For Cup Club to work on a large scale, Qureshi will need not just the support of the coffee shops who participate, but also a strong enough interest from the general population. I speculate here, but I could see Cup Club or its technology eventually getting acquired by a heavyweight coffeeshop chain, one with the kind of reach and brand power Cup Club needs to influence consumer behavior.

The fact that she’s not the only one to consider this type of approach is encouraging. In Germany, the city of Frieberg has introduced The Freiberg Cup: users put a 1 euro deposit down on a cup and can return it to one of the 100 participating businesses across the city. The system is reportedly cheaper for both consumers and businesses, and early results are “encouraging.” It’s not unfathomable for similar systems to start popping up all over the country as more people ditch the cardboard cup.

Because that’s what the success of the reusable cup really comes down to: changing our behavior. It’s automatic at this point to walk into a coffeeshop, order, and walk out clutching a paper cup. That companies like Cup Club offer an environmentally conscious option without the inconvenience of having to keep track of a reusable cup means the concept could have a real shot at success. If it doesn’t, “Coffee in a Cardboard Cup” is just going to get more and more relevant as time goes on.

Chefling Raises $1 Million for its Inventory and Recipe Assistant

Chefling, a kitchen app that connects what food you have with recipes and shopping lists, has raised $1 million in funding. According to a report in VentureBeat, the money will be used to for to hire marketing people, data scientists and a chef.

With the Chefling app, users can scan barcodes or take a picture of their receipt to monitor what foods they have in their fridge and pantry (an keep tabs on when that food will expire). Based on your food inventory, Chefling’s smart cookbook will then recommend recipes you can make. If you are missing any ingredients, Chefling automatically creates a shopping list for you and as you check these items off this list, the app keeps track of the new food available for newer recipe recommendations. Chefling works with Alexa and Google Home so users can ask for recipes or add grocery items to the list just by talking.

Chefling was created by a group of Northwestern grad students, and they were part of our Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase last October. You can see their demo pitch on how Chefling works in this video:

Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase Pitch: Chefling from The Spoon on Vimeo.

The nexus of food on hand, recipes and shopping is fast becoming a hot market with a number of entrants. LG and Samsung showed off smart refrigerators at this past CES that let you keep track of food and offer up recipes. Recipe app Innit lets you alter recipes based on different ingredients you already have. Smart tag Ovie keeps track of when your food will go bad and makes meal recommendations. Additionally, Flexy and AllRecipes are making shoppable recipes a reality by integrating with Amazon.

It’s also interesting that Chefling is hiring an actual Chef. In the VentureBeat report, the company says the chef “will be hired to curate and improve upon tens of thousands of recipes Chefling draws from food bloggers.” This perhaps points to the limitations of relying solely on algorithms and scraping websites for recipe recommendations. Or, just as Innit hired celebrity chef Tyler Florence, maybe Chefling will bring on their own celebrity chef to boost its visibility in a crowded space.

Chefling’s investment was from Chicago-based XVVC LLC, and brings the total amount raised by the company to $1.2 million.

Worried Those Leftovers will Make You Sick? Ovie’s Tags Will Help

If your fridge is anything like mine, it holds stacks of Tupperware containers filled with various leftovers from meals past. And if your brain is anything like mine, it gets nervous about eating two-day-old salmon, so you leave the fish in the fridge in the hopes that your spouse is either brave enough to chow down — or will just throw it out.

I’m ashamed to admit that these leftover minefields in my fridge lead to way too much food waste on my part. Which is why I’m intrigued by the Ovie food tags. Mike Wolf describes Ovie’s tech pretty accurately as “Tile for food.”

Basically, Ovie makes LED-lit tags that you can affix to food through either a special Ovie container or clip or strap. These tags work with Amazon’s Alexa and when you press the button you tell Alexa “This is lasagna.” From there, Ovie’s LED tags will keep track of how long it’s been in the fridge and alert you when something is about to or has already gone bad. Green light is good, yellow light means it’s nearing the end and a red light means its bad. The company pulls its spoilage information from USDA guidelines.

With the accompanying Ovie app, you can see what foods you have stored and what state they’re in. The app will even make rudimentary pairing suggestions based on other food you have stored with Ovie. So you can enjoy some lasagna, and Ovie might also suggest some green beans that should be eaten soon.

According to Ovie Co-Founder and CEO Ty Thompson, the company is exploring partnerships with recipe apps and delivery services to expand its capabilities. By working with Ovie, a recipe app could see what foods you already have, suggest a recipe and forward a list of any additional ingredients to Instacart for delivery that day.

The Ovie system is not available yet. The Chicago-based company is funded through friends and family at this point and aims to do a crowdfunding campaign at the end of February. When Ovie does hit stores, Thompson says the price points will be roughly $59 for three tags (complete with straps), “a little bit more” for three of the clip version, and close to $89 for three containers.

The big concern for a company like Ovie is when this type of technology gets embedded directly into fridges. LG’s forthcoming ThinQ fridge lets you put virtual stickers on items to let you know when they are about to go bad. And Amazon is researching using scent sensors in the fridge to do the same thing.

That will happen, but over the course of the next five years, there is still a sizable market of people who would rather spend $89 to keep track of food in their existing fridge rather than thousands of dollars on a new one.

One thing that won’t change is how nervous I get about eating leftovers (or even opening the container to see what they are). Hopefully, a system like Ovie’s can help me reduce the amount of food I embarrassingly waste.

Nima Unveils Portable Peanut Sensor to Make Meals Safer

The startup behind the world’s first portable gluten sensing device is launching a peanut sensing version at CES this week. The new Nima Peanut Sensor is a handheld device designed to detect peanut particles in food by testing small samples in an insertable cartridge.

According to the Food Allergy Research & Education organization, around 15 million Americans suffer from food allergies and around 1/5 of those have some type of peanut allergy, ranging from mild to severe. The Nima Peanut Sensor aims to give people with peanut sensitivities or parents of children with peanut allergies a portable tool to test liquid or solid foods before they take a bite.

The sensor shares the same form factor as the gluten version – a compact black triangular device with room for a testing cartridge and a readable diagnostic screen. But, instead of coming with capsules that create a reaction when interacting with gluten particles, the peanut sensor ships with cartridges designed to detect 20 parts per million (ppm) of peanut protein or more in foods or drinks. Users take a portion of the item they want to test and insert a small sample into the cartridge and place both inside the sensor. After three minutes, the test gives a simple reading; if the peanut sensor detects peanut protein, the portable device will display a peanut icon. If no protein is found, a smiley face pops up letting the user know the food is safe to eat.

When Nima first launched its gluten sensor, the real excitement around the company’s innovation was around the technology – and science – inside each cartridge. What Nima’s founders have done is essentially developed a mini-laboratory in every device and a capsule with the right test materials to detect the unique proteins found in gluten. But as many pointed out, the setup Nima created could be used to detect other allergens and even beyond.

“There’s no reason it can’t be used for dairy or peanuts and there’s nothing stopping them from going to pathogens either,” food tech VC Brian Frank told the Spoon at the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit.

While the gluten sensor goes after a growing segment of awareness of gluten intolerance in the U.S., the peanut sensor hits an even bigger market and one that’s close to the heart of many parents. Peanut allergies tend to appear in childhood and can produce a life-threatening reaction. Parents and caregivers will be able to use the Nima Peanut Sensor to test foods on the go, at birthday parties and restaurants to avoid a reaction.

Just like the gluten sensor, the peanut sensing device will connect to the Nima mobile app to share test results and build a user database of peanut-free friendly restaurants and packaged foods.

Nima’s peanut sensor is only available for pre-order right now in the U.S. and Canada through March 8 and starter kits are $229 during this promotional period. A starter kit will come with the sensor, a twelve pack of test capsules along with the charger and a carrying case. The sensor will ship at retail later in 2018 and regular price for the peanut sensor starter kit is $289 and additional cartridges will be $6 each and sold in twelve packs. Nima also offers an auto-delivery or membership option which lowers the price of capsules to just under $5 a piece (sold in packs of twelve.)

Interestingly, Nima also has waitlist signs up available for soy, tree nuts, dairy, shellfish and eggs. The company clearly has plans to be the go-to for the millions who suffer from all kinds of food allergies in the future.

“WeWork” for Food Entrepreneurs Gets Financial Shot in the Arm

Budding butchers, bakers, and (edible) candlestick makers have another innovative option to provide the vital tools, training, and resources to facilitate movement from startup home food entrepreneurs to the realization of their goals of commercial success.

New York-based Pilotworks (formerly FoodWorks), billed as a “WeWork for food startups,” has received $13 million in expansion capital from Acre Venture Partners, a fund backed by Campbell’s Soup, along with TechStars, a funding and mentoring program. The money will be used for expansion to markets, such as Chicago and Dallas, along with the development of the necessary properties, culinary infrastructure, and staffing.

A company press release reveals the company was founded in 2016 and has since helped more than 250 food and beverage startups get off the ground. Pilotworks says that more than 70% of the businesses it has worked with are women or minority-owned.

“We’re very excited to add so many great strategic partners and continue our work of empowering anyone to start a food business successfully. We will be adding new units: Newark just opened, and Chicago and Dallas are slated to open in December alongside our existing kitchens in Brooklyn, Portland, and Providence, as well as furthering our presence in New York City. We are also excited to continue expanding our services and offerings across the entire food stack,” said Pilotworks CEO and co-founder Nick Devane.

The company’s website says it offers a full range of services that go beyond a mere stove and fridge. Everything from garbage and linen service, to assistance with branding and web design, is available to its members. Companies such as Aida Eats, Mac & Son, BOONBOX, Dank, and Crown Jewel Beverages are veterans of Pilotworks programs.

While the association with WeWork is fine for general identification purposes, it fails to capture the essence of what makes the boom in community commercial kitchens a hot commodity. Pilotworks enters a crowded space that spans options from highly regarded Food Corridor—a community and network of commercial kitchens that offers similar services to Pilotworks in a more federated manner—to individual shared-use kitchen incubators such as Capital Kitchens in Austin. The website Culinary Incubator offers a database and list of 725 shared-use kitchens in the United States.

What looms as a difference-maker for Pilotworks is its association with Campbell’s Soup. The New Jersey-based food and beverage giant could use this network of startup kitchens to find the next great idea to bring in house and take to the global market. That said, Tyson Foods, General Foods, and others also are operating accelerators with the same endgame in mind.

Worth noting is the startup goldrush led by Pilotworks and other similar endeavors focused on major markets that are either population centers (New York, Dallas, Chicago) or food meccas (Portland, Providence). A tour of any farmers market in smaller cities would prove there are some great food-next ideas worth nurturing outside marquee locations.

Bringing Bean to Bar to the Home Food Factory

“Bean to bar” is among the lesser-known, but still popular, phrases in the foodie lexicon. For most, it’s the equivalent of an exquisite, controlled farm-to-table production process in the chocolate world. In that specific application of the term, it follows the cocoa bean from the farm. The bean starts with drying. After it is shelled, the inside nib is taken to a lab-like kitchen where those inner goodies are mixed with raw cocoa butter and sugar to make sumptuous craft chocolates.

For others, “bean to bar” is a come-hither headline that leads the inquisitive culinary explorer to a class where the hands-on experience of making (and later eating) chocolate is a multi-hour learning session. In such workshops from New York to the southern regions of Peru, the do’s and don’ts of chocolate making are explored, including how to carefully remove the outer part of the cocoa bean and devise the formula/ratio of bean to sugar and cocoa butter to suit individual tastes. Hence, when you see a chocolate bar in your local gourmet shop that says 70%, it means it’s 70% cocoa bean with the remaining 30% made up of sugar and cocoa butter.

In the bean to bar workshop, the class hits the pause button before actual production. The process of making artisan chocolate—be it a small batch for a class of 20 students, or for a large order—is a lengthy one that tempers the ingredients in a melangeur or similar commercial machine. Those in the workshop are given silicone molds, perfectly melted chocolate, and mix-ins to allow each student to create his or her final artistry.

With an emphasis on growing veggies at indoors, brewing your own beer, distilling booze and other home food factories, making your own chocolates appears to be lagging. With shrinking global supply chains, there certainly is a wide range of choices when it comes to cocoa beans, cocoa butter and sugars of every vintage (raw, refined, organic, etc.…) The issue is the lack of popularly-priced home chocolate tempering appliances. Smaller versions of a traditional melangeur run more than $350 with industrial-sized models running well over $1,000.

Following the model of such entrepreneurs as PicoBrew make sense for the home craft chocolate market. Any easy-to-use machine where the ingredients come in “kits” would be an idea for the novice chocolatier. Brands such as Nestle, Hershey, Ghirardelli and others could create kits (bean, cocoa butter, sugar) that carry their signature flavor and communities of chocoholics could share their magic recipes.

The global chocolate market is work more than $98 billion, so there’ s little fear the home market will cause the Belgian economy to suffer. As a foodtech trend, the home chocolate market appears to be a large, untapped opportunity.

Building A Common Language For Food

Perhaps the most overused buzzword in the past several years is IoT – Internet of Things. We’ve even seen IoE (Internet of Everything) and IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) emerge – but this year at SKS 2017, we were introduced to another Internet of phrases – one that has a chance to completely transform how we interact with food in our lives.

IoF stands for the Internet of Food, an effort to create a digital language and infrastructure for food. At the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit, Dr. Matthew Lange of UC Berkeley and IC-Foods presented on the beginnings of IoF, describing it as “bring[ing] a common data language and ontology to the world of food and the impact on activities, such as food shopping and cooking.”

Despite its name, the Internet of Food is not just about food; it’s about every process and industry related to food, such as the environment, agriculture and health. The idea is to create a language to operationalize all food-related data pertaining to these subjects and impact every industry that may touch the food chain.

This means thinking about food outside of the kitchen—before it gets into the kitchen, and after it leaves the kitchen before we eat it. Lange explains that IoF is about annotating these processes and building a vocabulary that can explain the likes of flavor components, nutrient components, energy usage, etc. By developing an ontology about how food moves through the supply chain, farmers, for example, can be given more appropriate advice about how to best grow, store, and deliver food.

When it comes to smart things in the kitchen, most people immediately jump to thinking about appliances. But Lange insists we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Suppose, for instance, you have a sensor that measures the precise humidity and temperature of a drawer in your refrigerator. Seems handy, right? “But this doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know at what humidity and temperature that spinach should be stored,” notes Dr. Lange.

This is where the Internet of Food comes in. When we bring smart into the kitchen, we have to think one step before appliances and gadgets and get smart about food itself first—and we have the data to do it.

There is already a plethora of food data available: there are traditional data sets harvested from governmental and private researchers, and there is data about food sourced from the Internet of Things. The vision for the Internet of Food is to combine all these data sets and develop an ontology to tag the data, making it interoperable between scientific disciplines and different people on the supply chain.

Beyond technical efficiency, the IoF also aims to improve perhaps the best part about food: its flavor. The question is: How can we know which flavors go well together? Lange makes an analogy to musical notes; if you dissect a musical scale, you’ll see that C plays in harmony with E, but no so much with F#. What if we can apply this systematic principle to food and food flavors? According to Lange, with a developed ontology for food, we can find an algorithm to make sense of why certain flavors are in harmony with one another.

The Internet of Food expands “smart” out of the kitchen into every process related to food harvesting, shopping, and cooking. Watch Dr. Matthew Lange’s full talk from the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit:

IKEA’s Startup Bootcamp Gives Us a Glimpse Into Some Hot Future-of-Food Trends

Swedish furniture-maker IKEA is right in the middle of its very first “IKEA bootcamp” startup accelerator, a three-month program the company is running with global cooperative Rainmaking. The three-month program, announced back in May, has been underway since September.

Ten startups were picked from a pool of several hundred applicants. The chosen few arrived in Älmhult, Sweden in September to work closely with IKEA and Rainmaking within the accelerator codeveloped by the two companies. The program runs until December, when the startups will show off their progress with a demo day.

It’s significant that two of the 10 companies chosen are specifically about food tech, and that a third product touches the food sector. IKEA has always been about improving the everyday, whether that’s affordable routes to smarter lighting, energy efficient home appliances, or a range of smart-kitchen devices.

IKEA’s food business is almost as famous as the brand itself. The infamous horsemeat scare in 2013 led the company to change parts of its food business. It axed Pepsi and Coca-Cola products, replacing them with Swedish fruit waters, and, in 2015, introduced a veggie version of its much-loved meatball dish.

And thanks to these startups currently hard at work, new food developments are probably not far away—starting with bugs.

One of the startups, Israel’s Flying SpArk, produces protein ingredients from fruit flies. The ingredient, which comes in powder and oil form, is rich in minerals and proteins, and fruit flies require minimal water and almost no land to farm.

“I don’t know if the future is a crispy bug ball, but I know we are going to work with lots of different partners to bring changes to our food business,” Food Services Managing Director Michael la Cour said at the recent Sustainability Summit.

Insects, of course, are getting a lot of attention of late. Michelin Star restaurant Saison now offers crickets on the menu. Meanwhile, Tesco’s outgoing executive chairman, John Chambers, got a lot of attention after his talk at last week’s Techonomy conference. He believes consumers around the globe will transition to a more orthopteran diet “definitely within 20 years and maybe within 15.”

But it’s not all creepy crawlies over at the IKEA bootcamp. Another startup is Niwa, who makes a connected hydroponic system that completely automates gardening. The technology is compact enough to fit inside a small apartment and can be controlled with a smartphone. The company is currently accepting pre-orders for the product.

Niwa, however, isn’t just another smart-home gadget for consumers. Ambitious growers can opt to build their own system. And Niwa Pro, which is considerably more complex, is aimed at those growing on a larger scale.

The other Bootcamp company deserving a mention is Germany-based Goodbag, whose product aims to eliminate plastic shopping bags. Buy a cute, tote-like bag from the company’s online store, and scan it at the checkout. For every scan you make, a new tree is planted. Bag owners also get access to discounts at participating stores. The bags work in any shopping scenario of course, but grocery stores tend to be monstrous consumers of plastic shopping bags, especially in the U.S.

Getting backing from a mega-company like IKEA shows that these concepts are, if nothing else, growing increasingly important to the conversation around food and technology. If we’re all soon bringing bug powder home in our connected totes and cooking it up with smart veggies, we’ll know IKEA chose its startups well for this inaugural event.

ImpactVision Raises $1.3M to Combat Food Waste with Hyperspectral Imaging

ImpactVision, which uses hyperspectral imaging to determine food quality, raised $1.3 million to further develop its technology. Agfunder News reports that the seed round was led by Acre Venture Partners (which is backed by Campbell’s Soup).

Using a combination of digital imaging, spectroscopy and machine learning, Impact Vision’s technology allows food companies to take a picture of food, analyze the unique spectral reflections of the light, and determine nutritional content, fat and protein content and freshness level.

With this automated and non-invasive technique, ImpactVision hopes to help make the food chain more transparent, improve the quality and freshness of food available, and reduce food waste.

According to its site, ImpactVision currently offers software packages that can work with beef, white fish, bananas and avocados. These packages include a camera for acquiring the hyperspectral data, and the software platform to provide analysis and results.

Digital imaging and AI analysis is getting its moment in the sun when it comes to food production. At our recent Smart Kitchen Summit, Consumer Physics showed off its handheld SCiO spectrometer food sensor, which, in conjunction with machine learning in the cloud, identifies various components of food like salmon. The SCiO has been used up the food chain to better identify the quality of feed given to milk cows.

ImpactVision is currently in paid pilot programs with a handful of food companies. It says the money raised will go towards developing its technology, and expand its platform to work with a range of hyperspectral sensors.

Thanks to This Brooklyn Startup, Farm-to-Table Is Now Kitchen-to-Table

There’s a new way to do the whole the “farm-to-table” concept in restaurants: put the farm in the kitchen.

That’s what Brooklyn-based startup Smallhold, a “distributed farming” company, is helping restaurants to do. The business supplies various New York City locations with 100 percent climate-controlled mini-farms, which are quite compact in size will certainly give any kitchen a futuristic vibe. With the farm onsite, restaurants can “harvest” things like mushroom and basil, giving customers the freshest ingredients they’re likely to get in a public restaurant.

The company was started by Andrew Carter, a longtime expert in controlled-environment farm systems, and Adam DeMartino, who specializes in product strategies for startups. The two operate out of Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, where they keep a warehouse full of reclaimed shipping containers that hold the mini-farms. Smallhold grows the crops three-quarters of the way in the warehouse, delivering them to restaurants during the final growth stage.

All farms are wi-fi enabled, so that the growers at Smallhold can monitor and control climate remotely. The restaurant only has to worry about picking the goods once they’re ready for eating.

Bun-Ker Vietnamese was the first restaurant to use Smallhold. Mission Chinese had a custom installation of the mini-farm created to match the design of the restaurant. And Smallhold is working with Meyers USA/Great Northern to reclaim coffee grounds and turn them into King Oyster mushrooms.

Urban farming is on the rise across the country, with 40 percent of USDA-backed programs now in cities. NYC, in particular, holds a high concentration of urban farms. That’s not to say urban farming isn’t thriving elsewhere, but the Big Apple’s an interesting location because it’s pretty much the most farm-unfriendly mass of land in the country.

These urban farms run the gamut in terms of how much technology is used, but it’s typically a combination of hydroponics, aquaponics, aeroponics, and traditional growing methods.

Some notables include:

Verdical, who can supply restaurants and homes alike, makes a “living food appliance” in the form of a tower equipped with sensors and horticulture LEDs. Users insert a seed pod, push a button, and then simply monitor this mini-farm throughout the grow process.

Oko Farms, in Brooklyn, raises both fish and produce. Wastewater from the fish tanks is pumped into the plant beds, providing fertilizer for the produce. They also offer a crash course in aquaponics.

Elsewhere in Brooklyn, the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm is a 6,000-foot garden offering fruits, vegetables, and flowers. The building is owned by Broadway Stages, home of shows like The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. They offer apprentiships for the especially eager.

Bell Book and Candle, in the West Village, is the first restaurant to use a rooftop garden for its produce supply. It uses a hydroponic technique that reportedly helps plants grow at a faster rate than would be on a traditional farm.

Even famed jail complex Riker’s Island has an urban farm, run by the Horticultural Society of New York since 1996, where inmates receive vocational training and horticulture therapy.

A program like Riker’s may not be as technologically in-depth as someone like Smallhold, but it still serves the same mission: finding sustainable ways to grow and deliver food in a world where traditional agriculture techniques grow increasingly worse for the planet. I’d love to see a company like Smallhold make its way into a place like Riker’s or other state-run institutions, like public school projects. That could make for some truly innovative new farming methods.

Image credit: Brooklyn Magazine