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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Algae Cooking Club Debuts High-Smoke Point Cooking Oil Made from Fermented Microalgae


Today, a startup called the Algae Cooking Club introduced its first product, a chef-grade algae-based cooking oil. According to the company, the new oil has a smoke point of 535 °F, much higher than olive or corn oil, with a high density of Omega-9 fats (93%).

The high Omega-9 concentration is due to the utilization of microalgae, known for its efficiency in producing heart-healthy fats. Unlike macroalgae, those multi-cellular and visible-to-the-eye organisms like seaweed, microalgae are single-cell organisms usually found in lakes, streams, and oceans. However, the Cooking Club doesn’t spend its time or resources trying to scoop up enough of these little guys to churn out its oil; instead, it uses (what else?) giant metal vats to create them via fermentation.

The company feeds the microalgae sugar in bioreactors, where the organisms convert into oil, a process that allows them to bypass the need to harvest algae from natural habitats. Within just a few days, the algae achieves an oil content of approximately 80% by weight. From there, the algae undergoes an ‘expeller pressing’ technique, which the company compares to the process used in the olive oil industry. This means applying pressure to the algae to separate the oil from the biomass. Afterwards, they bottle up the resulting cooking oil.

The unveiling of Algae Cooking Club’s cooking oil comes at a time when the broader food industry recognizes the need to find ways to produce food more sustainably and without as much CO2 impact. Findings from researchers at The University of California, San Diego, reveal that algae, through rapid photosynthetic growth, can produce significantly more biomass than traditional crops like corn using the same amount of land. This efficiency, coupled with algae’s minimal impact on biodiversity and its ability to grow in conditions that would otherwise be unsuitable for agriculture, continue to thrust algae – and increasingly solutions based on microalgae – into the conversation about the future of more sustainable food production.

The Algae Cooking Club’s product isn’t the first algae-based cooking oil. In 2015, TerraVia (then known as Solazyme) launched an algae-based product line under the Thrive brand, and the Thrive algae-based cooking oil gained some dedicated customers due to its high smoke point. Unfortunately, that product was discontinued, so now Algae Cooking Club hopes to tap into those customers left behind by Thrive and, I imagine, grow the market significantly for the category.

The oil can be purchased at the company’s website for $25 per bottle (less if you subscribe).

Food as Medicine Platform Foodsmart Expands Reach to 7.4 Million Patients as it Reels in $10M in Fresh Funding

Today, food as medicine and telehealth startup Foodsmart announced an expansion of its “Foodscripts” program and a new round of funding. The company says it will reach up to 7.4 million patients across three major healthcare systems: Advocate Health, Memorial Hermann Health System, Intermountain Health. These healthcare systems, alongside the American College of Cardiology and Glen Tullman’s 62 Ventures, have invested $10 million as part of an expanded Series C investment (now up to $40M) as part of the expansion.

The company is part of the food-as-medicine movement, which encourages healthier eating to create a healthier life overall.  As chronic diseases continue to be a predominant health issue in the United States, there have been calls for our health system to provide better nutritional guidance to patients. The growth in food-as-medicine has come alongside growing usage by at-risk patients of GLP-1 drugs as a reasonably fast way to manage their weight. However, GLP-1 drugs are expensive and often require daily self-administered injections. Foodsmart and other food-as-medicine proponents see “food care” as a better, longer-term, and less costly solution, as well as one that can be paired with initial “jump starter” usage of GLP-1 drugs to get quicker and sustained outcomes.

In an email to The Spoon, Foodsmart outlined the different components of the program expansion:

  1. Extended Reach: The program will be extended to 7.4 million patients across the funding healthcare systems, which the company says represents a substantial increase in its impact and potential to improve health outcomes.
  2. Enhanced Funding: The additional $10 million funding brings the total Series C investment to $40 million.
  3. Strategic Partnerships: Collaborations with healthcare systems and organizations, which Foodsmart says emphasize the importance of integrating nutrition into healthcare and highlight Foodscripts’ potential to transform patient care.
  4. EHR Integration: Foodsmart has developed an Electronic Health Record (EHR) integration, which they say will enable providers to enter and track Foodscripts more easily for insurance purposes.
  5. Upskilling Providers: Foodsmart will start emphasizing upskilling healthcare providers. This involves educating them on the latest scientific data and best practices for addressing the nutritional needs of patients with various chronic diseases.

The growth in offerings within the formalized healthcare community around nutrition guidance comes at a time of increased attention among technology platform providers around personalized nutrition and metabolic health management. Startups like January.AI are providing AI-powered solutions that help those at risk of metabolic disease ways to manage their caloric intake and the impact on their blood glucose levels without having to use a continuous glucose monitor. Other startups like Supergut are tapping into the growing awareness of metabolic health – largely driven by rising awareness of the impact of GLP-1 drugs – by providing over-the-counter supplement approaches that claim to have some of the same benefits as these medications.

Investment in this space has been a countervailing trend to slowing interest among venture investors in plant-based food and other better-for-you offerings, which has been victimized in part by a broader venture slowdown as well as slower-than-expected growth of some of the high-profile, high-fliers in the space, such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods.

Big Idea Ventures’ GFRP Fund Acquires Edible Packaging Startup DisSolves

Today, Generation Food Rural Partners I, LP (GFRP), a member fund that is part of the food tech investor Big Idea Ventures (BIV) family, has announced its acquisition of DisSolves, Inc., a Pittsburgh-based maker of biodegradable and edible packaging solutions.

With this deal, GFRP gets a patented technology that utilizes GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) biodegradable and edible components to create films and packaging materials. That technology is what’s behind Dissolves’ first product, a polysaccharide-based film that can be used to package up individual servings of powders, baby formula, and instant coffee, which can then be dropped into liquids (like water, milk, or coffee) where it will dissolve and not alter the taste.

“Our partnership with GFRP will accelerate our efforts, allowing us to implement pilot programs with leading food producers and move towards scaled manufacturing of all-natural dissolvable food packaging,” said DisSolves founder Jared Raszewski. You can see Raszewski explain how the product works in the video below.

DisSolves Duquesne New Venture Challenge - Round 2

If a fund acquiring a startup to commercialize and scale sounds a little different than the typical way a venture deal works, you’re right. However, according to BIV Chief Investment Officer Tom Mastrobuoni, GFRP was created to build companies from scratch and commercialize them. The only difference with DisSolves, said Mastrobuoni, is that they didn’t need to start from zero, validate the technology, or find a founder. DisSolves provided all that off the shelf.

The typical BIV model “is we are starting a company from the ground up,” said Mastrobuoni. “The Investment Committee usually approves the first million dollars to be deployed into that company, and that’s done because we’re bringing on a new CEO, we’re doing techno-economic analysis of IP. We want to make sure what we’re actually building is what we thought we were going to be building during the IC (investment committee) process.”

Mastrobuoni says from there, the GFRP IC has a second phase where it will approve a $3-$5 million capital investment that enables it to take that initial company and product foundation and get it from sort of prototype to minimally marketable products, all the while utilizing shared resources across the BIV family such as fractional CFOs and manufacturing expertise. Since DisSolves already accomplished what is usually done with the first round of capital, GFRP and DisSolves will be able to move right away to this second phase of capital deployment to enable commercialization scale-up.

DisSolves appealed to GFRP and BIV because the fund saw an opportunity within a growing space of more sustainable packaging where there haven’t been any established winners, particularly in the single-serve segment. Mastrobuoni says that as bigger food brands begin to realize the difficulty of reaching their corporate sustainability pledges over the next 5 to 10 years, they’ll begin to embrace technologies like those from DisSolves, which can solve a lot of the single-use serving packaging that ends up in the waste stream.

“A lot of these corporates have made 30 by 30, 25 by 25 promises,” said Mastrobuoni. “And it’s going to be interesting when those years hit to see how many of them have actually hit those numbers, not by buying carbon offsets but actually achieving reductions in their footprint.”

While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, Mastrobuoni’s guidance suggests the company was probably valued at around $1 million or so. Raszewski will continue with the company as Founder & Chief Product Officer, and GFRP will install Scott Bolin, the founding CEO of another BIV portfolio company in Terrasafe (which also makes sustainable packaging), as president of DisSolves. Bolin will also continue in his role with Terrasafe.

Chris Young: Generative AI Will Provide Big Payoffs in Helping Us Cook Better, But Overhyping It Will Burn Some Folks

Chris Young has never been shy about providing his thoughts about the future of cooking.

Whether it was on stage at the Smart Kitchen Summit, on his YouTube channel, or a podcast, he’s got lots of thoughts about how technology should and eventually will help us all cook better.

So when I caught up with him last week for the Spoon Podcast, I asked him how he saw things like generative AI impacting the kitchen and whether it was necessary for big appliance brands to invest in building out their internal AI competencies as part of their product roadmaps for the next decade. You can listen to the entire conversation on The Spoon podcast.

I’ve excerpted some of his responses below (edited slightly for clarity and brevity). If you’d like to listen to the full conversation, you can click play below or find it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

On the resistance by some to using advanced technology to help us cook better:

Young: “A lot of people are focused on going backward in the kitchen. They want to go back to cooking over charcoal and cooking over fire. That can be fun, but if you look back at what it was really like in the 19th century, the kitchen was not a fun place to be.”

“The modern kitchen is much healthier and much safer. And it does a better job of cooking our food. But we’ve kind of stalled, in my opinion, for the last couple of decades of really innovating and creating a compelling vision of what the future of the kitchen can be. I think the idea that our appliances are too stupid to know when to turn the temperature up or down to cook my food correctly is bizarre in the modern world where sensitive, high-quality sensors are cheap. And we have unlimited compute and AI now to answer a lot of these questions that humans struggle with, but I don’t see the big appliance companies or the incumbents doing this on their own. So, my small contribution was to create a tool that measures temperature and makes it very easy for people to do things with those measurements.”

On why it’s important to create a vision for the future of a technology-powered kitchen:

Young: “My criticism with a lot of people in this space is they haven’t sold a vision of what the future of that your kitchen could be like that resonates with people, that feels human, that makes it a place I want to go that is forward-looking rather than backward-looking. The kitchen of the 1950s, the kitchen of the 1920s, feels more human, feels more relatable, and I think people want that. It’s not to say you can’t create a forward-looking vision of a kitchen where it’s easier to cook food, it’s easier to bring people together and have everything work out right, but nobody’s really creating that vision.”

Combustion’s thermometer runs its machine-learning calculations on the chip within the thermometer rather than in the cloud where many AI compute happens. Young explains how – and why – they made that possible:

Young: “One of the crazy challenges was this is some pretty hardcore math. I think even we initially thought, ‘Oh, we’re gonna have to run this on the cloud, where we essentially have unlimited compute to run these fairly sophisticated algorithms.’ But we have some very clever software and firmware people on our team who have a lot of experience doing these kinds of hardcore machine-learning algorithms. And we were able to basically figure out some clever trick techniques to get the stuff running on the thermometer. The benefit is that it means the thermometer is always the ground truth; if you lose a connection, if you walk too far away, or if Bluetooth gets interrupted, or if any of that happens, the thermometer doesn’t miss a beat. It’s still measuring temperatures, it’s still running its physics model. So as soon as you reconnect, the results are there, and nothing has been lost.”

Young on the benefit of generative AI:

Young: “In the short term, AI as it’s being marketed is going to be disappointing to a lot of people. It’s going to burn some people in the way that IoT burned some people. But there’s going to be meaningful things that come out of it.”

“…When I was playing with ChatGPT 3.5 and I would ask it cooking questions, the answers were mostly garbage, as judged from my chef perspective. When GPT 4 came out, and I started asking some of the same questions, the answers were actually pretty good. I might quibble with them, but they wouldn’t completely fail you and they weren’t garbage. And if you modified the prompt to rely on information from Serious Eats, ChefSteps, or other reputable sources, all of a sudden, I might have given you a different answer, but it’s not necessarily better. And in many cases, what people want is a good enough answer. Building those kinds of things into the cooking experience where, when you run into a problem, or you’re confused about what this means, something like the Crouton app, or the Combustion app, or a website can quickly give you a real-time good enough answer, that actually solves your problem and keeps you moving forward and getting dinner done. Those I think will be really, really big payoffs, and that stuff’s coming.”

Young on whether big food and appliance brands should invest on building their own AI internal competency:

Young: “It’s hard to give advice when that’s not my business. But I have a few observations from having worked with these companies. It’s very hard to sustain a multi-year effort on something like an AI software feature. For these companies, that culture doesn’t exist, the way of thinking about the long term payoff of software tends to not be a strength of these companies. And so while they have the resources to go do this, the willingness to make those investments and sustain them, for years and years and years, and learn and iterate, that hasn’t proven to be their greatest strength.”

“I think that is kind of why there was an opportunity for Combustion, and for a company like Fisher Paykel (ed note: Fisher Paykel has integrated the Combustion thermometer to work with some of their appliances) to recoup the millions and millions of dollars, we’ve invested in the AI in our algorithms team. (Fisher Paykel) could maybe build the hardware, but doing the software, investing in the hardcore machine learning research, I think it would be very hard for them to sustain that effort for three or four years when they’re only going to maybe sell 12-25,000 units a year. We’re in a much better position because we can spread it across the entire consumer base.”

“And so I think you’re going to see more partnerships emerging between the big appliance companies that can provide the infrastructure, the appliance that’s got ventilation over it, that’s plugged into a 240 volt, 40 amp or 50 amp circuit. They’re going to be very good at that. If they basically open up those appliances as a platform that third-party accessories like the predictive thermometer can take advantage of, I think over the long term, they actually take less risk, but they actually get a market benefit.”

“Because as more small companies like Combustion can get wins by integrating with these appliances inexpensively and easily, making our products more useful, I think you’ll start to get a lot of things like the rice cooker no longer has to be a dedicated appliance that you put in a cabinet. Instead, it can be a special pot that goes on the stove. But now it can communicate with the stove to do what a rice cooker does, which is turn the power on and off at the right time. And now a lot of these small appliances can migrate back to the cooktop, they can migrate back into the oven.”

If you want to hear the full conversation with Chris Young, you can click play below or find the episode on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Chef Robotics Raises $14.75M To Automate Food Assembly in Commercial Kitchens

We’ve been tracking Chef Robotics before it was even called that when the company’s CEO and founder, Rajat Bhageria, spoke at The Spoon’s food robotics conference ArticulATE in 2019.

At the time, Bhageria was still in stealth on what would become his restaurant robot company, but he had hinted that he was up to something when we talked to him and convinced him to come and speak at the conference as an investor for his investment shingle, Prototype Capital. Since that time, Chef Robotics has exited stealth and the company is actually selling its robot (Bhageria says that company revenue has doubled between 2022 and 2023) and, as first reported by Techcrunch, the company has raised a new $14.75 million combo debt/equity round of funding.

From Techcrunch: Rajat Bhageria tells TechCrunch that Chef distinguishes itself from the likes of Miso by focusing on food assembly, rather than cooking specifically. The company is also touting ChefOS, the underlying software driving its robot arm’s decisions. “[F]ood is very highly dimensional: depending on how you prep the ingredients (e.g., julienned onions vs chopped), cook the ingredients (e.g., sauteed, baked, broiled), store the ingredients (e.g., cooked, room temp, frozen), the material properties radically differ,” the company notes. “And these properties change daily based on who is prepping and cooking. To deal with this, Chef uses various sensors – like cameras – to collect training data and then trains models that help Chef learn how to manipulate a large corpus of ingredients.”

When he spoke at ArticulATE in 2019, Bhageria discussed the importance of better and cheaper computer vision and the growing power of AI to help power useful robots in food service and beyond.

“In my head, computer vision is absurdly important here,” said Bhageria. Now you have better sensors with cameras, better computation with GPUs, cloud computing, and deep neural networks, and better actuation.”

You can watch the food robotics panel with Bhageria and other food tech investors below.

Articulate 2019: Investment Opportunities in Food Robotics

Robomart Partners With PIX Moving to Build Mobile Retail Stores On Top of PIX’s Skateboard Chassis Platform

Robomart, a company that helped pioneer the concept of “store hailing” when it first brought its concept of mobile convenience stores to CES five years ago, announced it had signed a deal with autonomous mobile vehicle platform company PIX Moving to utilize PIX Moving’s expertise in autonomous vehicle production to enhance its fleet of mobile retail stores.

PIX is a logical partner for Robomart on which to build its mobile storefronts because the PIX chassis has always been designed to enable functional and end-use design flexibility from the get-go. PIX’s platform allows for custom-designed compartments, which can be optimized for specific needs like size and temperature control. When we first covered PIX here at the Spoon, one of the concepts the company envisioned was a mobile grocery or convenience store on wheels.

Chinese company Pix Moving is taking a bit of a different approach to autonomous vehicles by removing most of the vehicle. The company is building a self-driving chassis platform on top of which its customers can build whatever they like.

So a big restaurant chain could create a mobile pod of lockers for meal delivery, or a grocery store could create a temperature-controlled store on wheels. A large warehouse-type store could just attach a flat base for moving inventory around.

Since then, PIX has expanded its vision towards building its own branded vehicles and has started calling its chassis a “skateboard chassis platform. ” The Robobus model PIX unveiled a couple of years ago looks pretty similar to the original Robomart concept, so building the next-generation autonomous Robomart models on top of the PIX platform looks like a fairly smooth transition.

I asked Robomart CEO Ali Ahmed how he sees the PIX-powered vehicles being rolled out and integrated with the current Robomart fleets, and he says that the PIX chassis-based Robomarts will start to be phased into the fleet starting near the end of 2025. Spoon readers will know that the current-gen Robomarts – which are called the Oasis model – are retrofitted sprinter vans manned by a driver and that Robomart introduced its autonomous version concept (called the Haven) last summer when it announced a funding round of $2M. Now, we know the PIX platform will power the Robomarts of the future, and, according to Ahmed, it will sit underneath both future smaller stores (like the future autonomous versions of the Oasis) and bigger stores in the Haven.

While it may not be a mobile store, you can see a PIX vehicle in action in the video below.

Meet PIX Moving Space at the park

Jersey Mike’s Jumps on the AI-Voice Order Bandwagon as it Deploys Soundhound to 50 Locations

The AI-voice bot customer service wave is coming at us fast, and the latest chain to roll out the technology is the sub-sandwich chain Jersey Mike’s.

Soundhound announced this week that Jersey Mike’s will deploy its voice AI ordering system to allow customers to place orders by phone. According to Soundhound, the AI has been trained on the entire Jersey Mike’s menu and can handle order placement and answer queries about menu items, specials, store information, and more, all while ensuring orders are taken accurately and efficiently.

The video below shows Soundhound’s Jersey Mike integration in action.

DEMO: Jersey Mike's Automated Phone Ordering System - Powered by SoundHound AI

Like many voice AIs, it sounds about 90% natural in action, but there’s still something of an Uncanny Valley stiltedness to it. Listening to the order, it seems to handle the natural conversation flow deftly, but I have to wonder just how nimble it is with various dialects and slang, which can be a natural part of incoming phone orders.

Soundhound, a company that’s been around since the mid-aughts and had focused on auto installations and music until its move into customer service interaction layers for restaurants and retail over the past couple of years, announced the acquisition of SYNQ3 Restaurant Solutions last month. At the time of the deal, Soundhound said the merger extended “its market reach by an order of magnitude to over 10,000 signed locations and accelerating the deployment of leading-edge generative AI capabilities to the industry.”

Soundhound isn’t alone in chasing fast food chains to provide voice AI customer service platforms. Par Technologies, ConverseNow, and OpenCity also offer third-party solutions, while some players, like McDonald’s, have brought voice AI in-house through acquisition.

After a decade of pushing towards digital ordering kiosks and new ways to serve customers in-store and through apps, AI-powered customer service layers have moved to the top of the list for many big chains, including Jersey Mike’s.

Half a Million Deliveries & Counting: A Five-Year Snapshot of Sidewalk Robot Deliveries at George Mason

This week, sidewalk robot delivery startup Starship Technologies celebrated the fifth anniversary of its first campus deployment in the US and, as part of its announcement, gave us a peek into how its fleet has grown over the past half-decade at George Mason University (Mason).

According to Starship, their robots started rolling around Mason on January 22, 2019. Since then, they’ve grown their fleet from its initial 25 robots to 60 and the number of merchants around campus from 4 to 18. According to Starship, the Mason fleet is the world’s largest sidewalk robot delivery fleet.

Here are some of the stats about the Mason deployment sent to The Spoon:

  • Nearly 500,000 deliveries have been made.
  • The robot fleet has covered over 474,225 miles.
  • A single student has made a record 880 orders.
  • The most popular menu item has been The Original Double ‘N Fries from Steak’ n Shake, ordered 15,779 times.

It’s all interesting and impressive in some respects, but I have to admit the stat I am most curious about is the student who’s ordered using the company’s sidewalk robot 880(!) times. I’m unsure if Starship has a loyalty program, but that’s essentially the sidewalk robot equivalent of the airline million-mile club.

According to the company, since it was first deployed at Mason, the Starship fleet saw its service grow from 25,000 deliveries and 150,000 miles traveled in 2019 to over 2,000 robots, 5 million deliveries completed, and over 7 million fleet delivery miles traveled.

That it’s a university setting where Starship has racked up the most miles and has grown its fleet to its largest single deployment makes lots of sense; not only are university campuses optimized for foot traffic and have relatively predictable delivery destinations (dorms, and student halls), but they also have built-in and receptive customer populations who frequent the same locations.

After Over Half a Decade in Development, Ovie Ships Food Freshness Trackers

Since I first saw the Ovie team standing in a small booth in the bottom floor of the Sands Convention Center during CES 2018, I’ve been following them to see if this group of founders could bring their vision for a smart food tracker to life. The team, which at that time consisted of Ty Thompson, Dave Joseph, and Stacie Thompson, had scratched together a prototype to showcase their idea at the big show: a low-cost visual tracking system to help people waste less food.

I liked the idea, so I was happy – and a bit surprised – to see that after over half a decade, the company’s founders had persevered and finally shipped product. Sure, the original idea – a “smart storage system” that not only included tags but some Tupperware-like containers as well as an app that allowed you to track your food inventory in one place – was a little bigger than what they ultimately brought to market (more on that in a minute), but the reality is it’s hard to ship hardware. Most project teams make compromises by the time the final product ends up in the consumer’s hands.

When I first wrote about them, I called the Ovie Smarterware trackers a ‘Tile for food’; in reality, the idea is a bit closer to an intelligent sticky note system to help you track your food’s freshness. The way the final, shippable product works is you stick Ovie smart trackers (called LightTags) on the food items you want to track, and you tell them how long you want to monitor a food item by clicking the light on the LightTag once for each day. So, for example, I would click a LightTag seven times for a pound of ground beef with an expiration date of a week from now.

As you can see above, if the light is teal, you have more than 24 hours left on your timer. Yellow warns that you have 24 hours or less on that food. The red light means time has run out. According to Ovie, each color has a blink pattern for the color-challenged. The blinks are slowest in the Teal stage and speed up as the expiration date inches near.

The company persevered through a series of challenges to finally reach this point. They launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2018, looked for investors and manufacturing partners, and fought through a pandemic and a significant hardware winter. While the Ovie tag system isn’t exactly as proposed in the company’s Kickstarter, the fact that founders saw it through and shipped it is a pretty impressive feat.

If interested, you can buy an Ovie system on the company’s website.

Forsea Foods Develops First Cell-Cultivated Eel Prototype

Today, Forsea Foods announced they have successfully created what they claim is the world’s first prototype of cell-cultivated freshwater eel. Working with Katsumi Kusumoto, executive chef of Tokyo’s vegan restaurant SAIDO, the Israel-based startup crafted two traditional Japanese dishes using the cultivated eel: unagi kabayaki and unagi nigiri.

The company chose cell-cultivated eel as its initial focus for a couple of reasons: First, the eel remains one of the most popular seafoods in Japan and sushi restaurants worldwide, which has put the population of this seafood under significant stress due to overfishing. Second, it’s a premium fish, which means initial pricing for the product will be much higher than commodified categories of fish or meat.

“Unagi is an enduring favorite in Japan,” said Kusumoto. “Its timeless appeal, however, is impacted by a growing awareness among the Japanese population of the need to take a more sustainable approach. It’s been a thrilling journey to join forces with emerging innovators, and working together to deliver the traditional unagi indulgence with a clear eco-conscience.”

Forsea’s novel approach uses organoid technology to create 3D microtissues of fat and muscle, which differentiate into edible cells without scaffold support. This simplifies production and enhances scalability, addressing major industry challenges.

“Forsea is at the forefront of addressing critical environmental issues,” says Roee Nir, CEO and co-founder. “Our cultured unagi aims to offer a genuine seafood experience without the ecological footprint.”

The company is eyeing commercial launch in 2025, targeting Japan, Asia, the EU, and the US.

Dodo Pizza Trials ChatGPT-Powered Flavor Generator in App

Dodo Pizza, a thousand-store pizza chain that’s built a name for itself by experimenting with different types of technology, announced last week that it was trialing a new “In-App Flavor Generator” powered by ChatGPT. The new generator, which is only available for now in the Dubai market, allows customers to create personalized pizza flavors from 35 different ingredients.

Here’s how it works: The app’s flavor generator, which uses generative AI technology, presents users with a choice of ingredients, all of which can be combined in different ways, which Dodo says can result in up to 30 million potential flavor combinations. This feature is designed to cater to individual preferences and moods, enabling customers to experiment with unique pizza creations.

For the launch, Dodo Pizza expanded its ingredient list with 17 new items, including some pretty weird flavors like popcorn, duck, guacamole, melon, fruit loops, falafel, and pumpkin seeds. The app’s interface queries the user’s mood and preferences, with options like “movie night,” and from there, users can customize their pizzas by specifying dietary restrictions or ingredient exclusions, such as vegetarian-only options or the omission of onions, pineapple, or spices.

The company, which was founded in Russia and originally grew to become Russia’s biggest pizza chain (but now is headquartered in Dubai), recently brought on a new CEO in Alena Tikhova, while company founder Fyodor Ovchinnikov has moved into the executive chairman role. Under Ovchinnikov, the company gained a reputation for embracing technology early on (Dodo was the first pizza chain to experiment with drone delivery), and this latest move continues that trend.

According to Dodo, early trials have piqued customer curiosity. The company says the AI “pizza card” generates about three times the clicks of other menu positions. Dodo says they plan to roll out the AI pizza generator in other regions this year, including Southeast Asia and Africa.

January AI’s New App Uses Generative AI to Predict How Food Will Impact Your Blood Sugar

If you’ve been diagnosed with a metabolic health issue, you might have used a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) at some point to track the impact of your food intake on your blood sugar. However, as of March 2023, only 2.4 million people used a CGM in the U.S., and because of the relatively small adoption rate of this technology, the vast majority of folks with diabetes or who are in danger of metabolic health issues may not have access to real-time insights into what the impact different foods may have on their glucose levels.

January AI aims to change this with its latest innovation: a free app that performs predictive analysis on the impact of various foods on blood sugar. The company, which unveiled its newest tool at CES last week, has developed an AI-powered app that analyzes meal photos and offers users immediate feedback on glucose impacts, macros, and healthier meal alternatives.

January says its app uses generative AI to automatically generate accurate food titles and estimates of ingredients and ingredient quantities within complex meals.

“It uses three kinds of generative AI to tell you your blood sugar response,” said Noosheen Hashemi, CEO of January, speaking at The Spoon’s CES Food Tech Conference last week. “It uses our own generative AI for glucose, and then it uses a vision generative AI to pick what’s in the food, and then it uses that language model to give it a title.”

According to the company, its AI-driven predictions are based on millions of data points, including wearable data, demographic information, and user reports. The company says this approach enables the app to provide personalized glucose level estimates and insights, making metabolic health management more accessible and actionable.

“It’s as simple as scanning a food,” said Hashemi. “You can also scan a barcode. You can also do a search. And we can tell you all the macro, its total calories, how much fiber, protein, fat, and carbs it has. And we can also show your blood sugar.”

According to Hashemi, the company’s platform can be customized and trained for specific users by taking data from a wearable such as a smartwatch, a person’s glucose monitor, or even food logs. With that data, the app can create highly customized predictions around a person’s biomarkers and dietary preferences.

“One out of three people in America has pre-diabetes, and 90% of them don’t know it,” said Hashemi. “And one out of nine people has diabetes, and 20% of those people don’t know it. So blood sugar is something we should all be managing, but we just don’t know that we should.”

Given the increasing popularity of GLP-1 medications, my guess is that more Americans will start to consider how their diet affects their blood sugar in the coming years. And, even if they don’t use a glucose monitor or get a prescription for a medication like Ozempic, increased awareness will push many to use apps like this one to help them better understand how a given food will impact their blood sugar and overall health.

You can hear Hashemi discussing the app and showing a demo in the video below.

January AI CEO Talks About New Generative AI App at CES