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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Researchers at Cal Poly Are Studying The Social Impact of AI & Robotics on the World of Food

Last fall, a group of researchers at Cal Poly was awarded a $700 thousand grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the social and ethical impacts of AI and cooking automation.

The study will last four years and explore the benefits and risks to individuals and the impact on family and communal relationships, creativity and culture, economics and society, health and well-being, and environment and safety.

The study is led by Patrick Lin, a philosophy professor and director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at Cal Poly.

“Robot or AI kitchens would automate a special place and communal activity in the home, so that immediately warrants critical attention,” Lin said in the announcement. “Outside of the home, restaurants are one of the most essential and oldest businesses, given the primacy of food. They are the bedrock for an economy, the soul of a community, and the ambassador for a culture. But the pandemic is causing a seismic shift in the restaurant industry, and robot kitchens could be a tipping point that forces many restaurants to evolve or die in the coming years.”

According to Lin, the primary work output will be a public “ethics impact report” that evaluates the societal impacts of robots and AI on this “last mile” of food automation. This will include examining everything from robots flipping burgers or making restaurant pizzas to using AI and robotics in the home to produce and create complete meals.

It’s an interesting project that came onto my radar because Lin personally invited me to participate in a workshop hosted at Cal Poly to discuss the impact of robotics and AI on the last mile. While I usually don’t participate in these types of research projects, I decided to take him up on it since this is an area that I’m pretty fixated on of late.

One potential area I am particularly interested in is how human workers will react to the addition of automation to their workplace. While I expect some workers will embrace the opportunity to use technology to make their work-life easier, others will bristle or outright resent some of their previous tasks being taken over by automation.

One operator who experienced this firsthand is Andrew Simmons. He recently saw former employees undertake a social media campaign to disparage his restaurant for using robotics in the kitchen, including reporting the restaurant to the local health department. What’s interesting about Simmons is, unlike many of the headline-grabbing robot installations at national chains like Sweetgreen, he’s a small one-restaurant operator who is reinventing his entire restaurant workflow through an automation-heavy tech stack. I imagine other smaller operators will attempt to follow the template he’s created (he says he could automate future restaurants for $70k), particularly if he shows he can be successful.

As restaurant robots become lower-cost and more accessible, there’s no doubt society at large will need to think through what the impact will be. I’m excited to participate in Lin’s workshop to help think some of these through, and I hope to share some of the insights from the workshop. I will be limited in what I can share – Lin explained that the workshop would follow the Chatham House Rule, which forbids the identification of other participants without their expressed consent – but I do plan to write about some of the key insights discussed at the workshop in the future, so stay tuned.

For those who didn’t get an invite to this workshop and want to discuss this exciting topic, I suggest coming to The Spoon’s Food AI Summit, which is taking place in the Bay area this October!

Ansā’s New Roaster Uses Radio Waves To Roast Coffee on The Countertop

While we know fresh-roasted coffee tastes better, by the time store-bought beans make it into our coffee machines, chances are they were roasted months ago. But what if we could roast the beans right before they enter the brewer?

If a new company called Ansā has its way, coffee roasting will come to our office breakroom with its new e23 microroaster. The e23 takes green beans sent from the company and roasts them on the countertop without any smoke or ambient heat associated with traditional gas-fired roasting systems.

So how does the company’s roaster work? According to Ansā, the company uses dielectric heating, which usually refers to microwave heating-based systems. According to the company, the system’s computer vision (provided via a built-in camera) coordinates roasting with precision application of the radio waves to transmit the energy to individual beans, creating a highly precise and homogeneously applied roast.

When asked if the system uses an older magnetron-based heating (the heating system for the traditional microwave oven) or newer solid-state heating systems, Ansā wouldn’t specify, instead telling The Spoon, “We’ve designed a purpose-built EM system that allows us to digitally control the intensity and location of the energy concentration within the roasting chamber, in real-time.” My guess is since the system can direct energy with high precision, the system uses a solid-state amplifier to transmit the energy via radio waves.

The company also wouldn’t disclose pricing, saying, “Price is set by the distributors, and at their discretion.” I would estimate the machine would cost anywhere from $5 to $10 thousand, but will be offered at a much lower initial price, subsidized via a built-in coffee supply contract in which Ansā supplies the unroasted green beans for a fixed term.

The e23 is the first we’ve seen using RF radiation to roast the beans on the market. Coffee is traditionally roasted in big drums over gas-powered flames, an energy-intensive roasting process that produces lots of CO2, while newer electric small-footprint roasters like the Bellwether uses convection and conduction heating. According to sources I spoke to this week at the International Microwave Power Institute’s annual conference, microwave-powered coffee roasting is a topic the coffee industry is intrigued by, but it has yet to be commercialized (at least until this week).

According to Ansā, the company is working with a network of distributors across the US focused on the office/workplace segment. These Office Coffee Service (OCS) companies will sell the solution as a bundled service of ansā’s specialty green coffee beans and the e23 micro roaster.

This Company is Using Baker’s Yeast to Create Invisible Barcodes That Track Food Through the Supply Chain

In a world where food-borne illnesses and food fraud are happening at ever-greater frequencies, tracking food provenance through the supply chain is becoming increasingly critical. The challenge, however, is that the further an ingredient travels from the farm to our plate, the harder it becomes to determine where it came from.

Enter the barcode made from baker’s yeast. A company out of Canada named Index Biosystems has developed a way to use nothing more than the single-cell microorganism and water – combined with its proprietary tracking software – to trace the point of origin for pretty much any type of food product.

According to Index, the company can create a BioTag – the company’s name for its baker’s yeast barcode – by mixing baker’s yeast in extremely trace with water, then spraying or misting it onto a product such as wheat. The spray equipment that applies the water/BioTag mixture varies, but Index says it’s usually just a simple nozzle. The company says that BioTags are incredibly sticky once applied and remain attached to the surface of the grains, withstanding the milling process while remaining detectable in flour. To detect the BioTag, the company or one of its customers uses molecular detection techniques such as PCR and DNA sequencing (because the “bar code” is essentially the unique DNA sequence of the baker’s yeast).

According to Index’s CEO Mike Borg, the company’s technology only needs a small sample of flour – a metric gram – to determine every farm involved in producing the wheat that made that flour. He says that with the company’s BioTags and GS1 standards, they can verify the carbon footprint of a slice of bread.

Borg says that because the BioTag does not involve any genetic modification, the company has already received approval for using the tags in food products from the U.S. FDA and Health Canada. He also says the platform has been proven across various products ranging from commodities to pharmaceuticals.

The challenge of food traceability has been one of the biggest focuses in the food industry in recent years, leading to various approaches, such as NFTs for cattle to digestible food sensors. But by using a DNA-based tracking approach using something as simple as baker’s yeast, Index has essentially taken the bar code concept and integrated it into the food itself.

SEERGRILLS Unveils the Perfecta, an ‘AI-Powered’ Grill That Cooks the ‘Perfect Steak’ in Two Minutes

AI is seemingly everywhere nowadays, so it was only a matter of time before it would show up at the backyard BBQ to help us cook the perfect steak.

That’s the vision of a UK startup named SEERGRILLS, which debuted the Perfecta this week, which the company describes as the world’s first AI-powered grill. The grill combines high-temperature infrared cooking with its AI system called NeuralFire, which automates the cooking process.

According to SEERGRILLS CEO Suraj Sudera, the AI works through a combination of sensor data, cook preferences inputted by the user, and intelligence built into the software around different food types.

“The device will capture the starting temperature of, say, chicken breast and adjust the cooking in line with the preferences you’ve inputted in the device,” said Sudera. “Whether it’s a three-inch or five-inch chicken breast, it doesn’t matter. It will be whatever adjustments it needs, just like your cruise control on your car will adjust to keep you at the preferred speed.”

When a cook is done, users can rate the quality of the cook, which informs and optimizes the NeuralFire algorithm for the next cook. Suraj says that SEERGRILLS is also constantly updating its food database, so if, say, a new type of steak from Japan becomes popular, the AI engine will be updated to optimize the cook for that meat type. The company says its AI will also optimize to reach each type of meat’s sear and doneness, as well as help to perfect the Maillard reaction.

The hardware itself is somewhat unique compared to other infrared grills on the market in that it cooks meat vertically. The user puts the meat in a holder, which will sense the temperature and thickness of the meat. Once inserted, both sides are cooked simultaneously using infrared heat, powered by propane, which SEERGRILLS says can reach 1652ºF. According to the company, the grill can cook three ribeyes in one minute and fifty seconds, six burgers in a minute and thirty seconds, and four chicken breasts in two minutes and thirty seconds.

In addition to the grill itself, the company is also building accessories such as a rotisserie module, a pizza module, and a grill station. The company will start taking preorders in July and plans to begin shipping the Perfecta by the end of this year. Pricing for the grill and its accessories has not yet been disclosed.

🚀 Introducing Perfecta™ - The World’s First AI Powered Grill. 🚀

EU Moves Towards Relaxing Rules Over Gene-Edited Food

According to a new document leaked by the Genetic Literacy Project, the European Union is moving towards relaxing its current regulations overseeing gene-edited food.

The draft regulation of the European Commission, the body responsible for drafting new regulations for the EU, recommends that food developed using tools such as CRISPR be approved as conventional rather than adhere to the laborious approval process dictated by the EU’s GMO regulations. According to the proposal, the EU would create a new category for plants developed using gene-editing techniques that could side-step the GMO categorization, provided that the new varieties could have been achieved using traditional breeding techniques.

Unlike genetic modification, which introduces genetic material from foreign species, gene-edited food introduces changes native to the species. According to the proposal, gene editing that introduces changes to the plant that goes beyond what would be possible through natural breeding techniques would require full GMO authorization.

The reasoning behind the shift is a growing recognition among European regulators of the need to embrace new science-forward techniques to deal with the increasing threat of climate change.

“The science and the evidence show that these can be achieved also through conventional breeding of crops,” an EU official told the Financial Times. “The economic rationale is very strong. If we want to cope with climate change and support food security we need these techniques.”

The new proposed legislation from the European Commission signifies an evolution of perspective around gene-edited food. In the past, the EU has viewed food developed using CRISPR and similar gene-editing technologies as essentially the same as genetically modified food (GMO), which meant they were subject to the same blanket moratorium from 2003 over any new approvals of GMO products.

While the move could potentially push the EU’s stance closer to United States’ more permissive regulatory environment for gene-edited food, the same forces which support GMO regulation and the initial ban on gene-editing – such as Greenpeace and some groups within the European parliament – plan to fight the proposal.

“The EU’s top court was clear that GMOs by another name are still GMOs,” Eve Corral of Greenpeace told the FT. “The EU must keep new GMOs regulated to make sure they pose no danger for nature, pollinators or human health.”

Molecular Farming Startup Moolec Shows Off ‘Piggy Sooy,’ Its Animal Protein Producing Soybean

Today molecular farming startup Moolec showed off its new soybean platform for producing animal proteins, the “Piggy Sooy.”

According to the company, the new soybean reached an expression level of up to 26.6% of total soluble protein in soy seeds, which they say is four times higher than initially projected. Moolec says that the results can be observed visually in the pink color of the bean, which is essentially the same color as a pig. The company says the success of its soybean platform has led them to “file a new patent utilizing a novel approach aiming to provide the company with a frictionless regulatory pathway going forward.”

Moolec, a spinout of Bioceres Crop Solutions, is one of the first companies to utilize molecular farming to create alternative proteins. Molecular farming is that it uses crops as a protein factory, compared to traditional microbial fermentation techniques that utilize more capital-intensive fermentation infrastructure. Genetic engineers introduce animal DNA directly into the seeds, and once the genetically engineered seeds are planted, traditional farming management techniques can be employed to grow the crops until they are ready for harvest.

The efficiency of the technique recently led to the Good Food Institute declaring that molecular farming as the ‘fourth pillar’ of alternative protein. According to GFI, there are currently 12 companies worldwide using this technology to grow various products, including casein and lactoferrin (Forte Protein and Greenovation Protein), animal-free dairy proteins for cheese, ice cream, and yogurt (Miruku, Mozza, and Nobell Foods), growth factors for cultivated meat (Tiamet Sciences and Bright Biotech), and more.

Yes, I’ve Entered the Meataverse

Last year, when news got out that Slim Jim had gone and registered the term meataverse, we all had a good laugh.

Over a year later and a few notches down the Gartner Hype Cycle, the salty meat stick company has finally launched its web3 world effort to get people to go online and collect digital art of cartoon meat sticks. The company, which, in a sarcastic nod to Facebook’s new corporate name, has periodically rebranded itself as MEATA on Twitter and described the effort in its trademark finding as something providing “services featuring virtual goods, virtual food products, and non-fungible tokens,” along with “providing a metaverse for people to browse, accumulate, buy, sell and trade virtual food products.”

But now, they’ve gone and done it by Jim, and I’m going along for the ride. Sure, it sounds ridiculous and something an adult who doesn’t eat Slim Jims would probably avoid wasting his time on, but here I am, the proud owner of GigaJim #1070.

The site, which allows you to join for free and to mint one of ten thousand NFTs free of charge (they even pick up the gas fees), is user-friendly and targeted at the average meathead who doesn’t own a crypto wallet. I have a Metamask wallet lying around somewhere, but I just let Slim Jim’s Meataverse create a wallet for me, and within 5 minutes, I had minted my GigaJim.

The site comes complete with an origin story for the Meataverse world, detailing how how a brilliant young scientist named “Slender” Jim (what else?) is recruited by Slim Jim Industries to head up its secretive M.E.A.T. (mechanics engineering and technology) lab and, within a few years, Dr. Jim has proposed a theory of alternate meat dimensions (aka the ‘meataverse’), virtual worlds that are “meatier, spicier and home to powerful energies.”

When I started looking for ways to increase my GigaJim’s value, it (surprise, surprise) required buying Slim Jims and scanning the bar code. Once you show you’re consuming meat sticks in the physical meat world, you’re given more base sauce to add to the sauce extractor, and once you have three base sauces, you can create a super sauce and level up your Jim.

As I said, it’s all ridiculous, but I have to say, as corporate brand web3 metaverse efforts go, it has me (somewhat ashamedly) thinking about running to the local store and picking up some Slim Jims (which is, of course, the point).

See you in the Meataverse!

Announcing the Food AI Summit: A Global Conference on AI’s Role in the Food System

Today the Spoon is thrilled to announce the Food AI Summit, the world’s first event focused exclusively on AI’s impact across the food ecosystem.

The conference, which will take place on October 25th in Alameda, California, will convene scientists, investors, entrepreneurs, and others who are building the future of food using AI together for a day of keynote talks, interactive sessions, product demonstrations, and networking. The event will feature experts from the worlds of agriculture, food science, retail, synthetic biology, restaurants, and consumer products discussing the implications of AI. Sessions will cover the entire spectrum of AI technologies, from machine learning and computer vision to the quickly evolving world of generative AI.

“Over the past decade, AI has had a significant impact on every aspect of the food system,” said Michael Wolf, publisher of The Spoon and the Food AI Summit’s conference chair. “But we’re only at the beginning, as AI becomes an increasingly critical accelerator to transforming a global food system under stress from unprecedented challenges.”

At the Food AI Summit, attendees will hear from some of the most visionary leaders at the intersection of food and AI, including NotCo’s Matias Muchnick, Shiru’s Jasmin Hume, and Inevitable Tech’s David Lee. More speakers will be announced in the coming weeks.

The Food AI Summit is produced by The Spoon, a leading news and events company focused on food technology. The Spoon’s first event, the Smart Kitchen Summit, launched in 2015 and helped catalyze the conversation about the digital transformation of the consumer meal journey and today The Spoon has events in Europe, Asia, and North America.

Early bird tickets for the Food AI Summit can be purchased at www.foodsummit.ai. Those interested in sponsoring the Food AI Summit can find out more information here.

Instacart’s AI-Powered Shopping Cart Arrives at ShopRite and Fairway Market

Today Instacart announced that ShopRite in Spotswood, New Jersey, and Fairway Market in Kips Bay, Manhattan are the first two locations to deploy the company’s latest generation smart shopping cart.

The new Caper Cart, which the company announced last September, is the third generation of the AI-powered smart shopping cart platform and the first version of the cart built entirely on the watch of Instacart, which acquired Caper AI (the startup behind the Caper Cart) in October of 2021.

The updated Caper Cart has scales, sensors, touchscreens, and computer vision to enable self-checkout by the customer. Despite the added features, it is slimmer and lighter than the previous version and has 65% more capacity. Perhaps most important for grocers, the new cart system comes with stacked charging, allowing them to charge batches of carts at once and eliminating the need to charge carts individually or swap out batteries.

From the release:

To get started, customers at the ShopRite of Spotswood and the Fairway Market in New York City can grab a Caper Cart at the front end of the store. Powered by AI and computer vision technology, the Caper Cart recognizes and scans items as they are placed in the Cart, allowing customers to easily stay on budget with a running total shown on the screen. To checkout, customers simply scan the barcode displayed on the Cart’s screen at the store’s self-checkout area.

Instacart’s win with Wakefern Food Corp (a retailer-owned cooperative that includes ShopRite and Fairway Market) comes as its competitors in the smart shopping cart space continue to move forward. In January, smart cart startup Flow announced they’d inked a thousand shopping cart commitment from German retailer Expresso. A month later, Shopic announced they’d locked down a deal for two thousand smart carts with Israel-based grocery chain Shufersal. Stateside, Amazon has deployed its Dash cart to numerous locations.

Not all startups in the space have found the road easy, however. Seattle-based Veeve recently announced it was pivoting towards becoming an extension of grocery retailer media networks, using its in-store shopping cart add-ons as yet another digital screen to offer up promotions and ads to in-store shoppers.

According to Instacart, the carts are available at the ShopRite of Spotswood and will soon be introduced at the Fairway Market in Manhattan.

The Instacart Caper Cart Shopping Cart

Alt Protein Enters New Era as USDA Approves Sale of Cultivated Chicken By UPSIDE & GOOD Meat

Today marks a big day for cultivated meat as two companies, UPSIDE Foods and Good Meat, announced today that they had received approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to sell their cultivated meat products to consumers.

According to UPSIDE, the news came in the form of notification from the USDA that they have received a “grant of inspection” (GOI) from USDA, which means the company has met the applicable federal requirements and standards to operate as a meat establishment and is allowed to process, package, and sell our cultivated chicken in the United States under the inspection of USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.

UPSIDE says that with this news, they have passed all three of the requisite milestones necessary to sell its meat – 1) “No Questions” Letter from FDA — November 2022, 2) USDA Label Approval — June 2023, and 3) today’s GOI notification.

With the latest news, the company says they are starting manufacturing of meat and scaling up production at their EPIC facility. They plan to start selling the meat soon at San Francisco’s Bar Crenn through their partnership with 3-Michelin Star chef Dominique Crenn.

Not to be outdone, GOOD Meat – the cultivated meat division of Eat Just – plans to sell its first cultivated meat in the U.S. through a partnership with Chef José Andrés. According to the company, the sale of their cultivated meat product was greenlighted with the news that the USDA has given the company approval for its first poultry product to enter interstate commerce in the U.S. According to GOOD Meat, the sale of its product will take place at a yet-to-be-disclosed restaurant in Washington, D.C.

For GOOD Meat, the news marks the second country approval for the company will begin selling its cultivated meat product. The company achieved a global first in late 2020 by selling its cultivated chicken in Singapore.

Today’s news is truly a watershed event for the alt protein space. After billions of dollars spent across the industry for research and development, commercialization, and production, we will finally see the first cultivated products sold to U.S. consumers.

However, despite today’s news, everyday consumers may still have a bit of a wait. Cultivated meat products are still being made in small quantities and will first be sold in the most exclusive of restaurants, and it might be a while before we see it at the corner grocery store.

Karakuri Joins The Growing List of Food Robot Startups That Have Shut Down

More bad news on the food robot front.

Karakuri, a startup that made a robotic food kiosk that assembles various cold and hot ingredients into prepared meals, is shutting down, according to founder Barney Wragg.

In a post on Linkedin, Wragg cited the pandemic and the challenging fundraising environment as the reason for the news and included a link to a Google Sheet with Karakuri employees who Wragg said it was “incumbent” on him to assist in finding new roles.

From the post:

It’s with a very heavy heart that I have to report that our journey at Karakuri is coming to an end.

For the past five years, we’ve developed and deployed robotics for the QSR industry. We’ve survived many challenges, including the pandemic and our bank going bust us, but sadly we’ve been unable to find the funding we need to move to the next level.

Most of all I’d like to thank the incredible team we’ve built. They’ve stayed dedicated to the challenge and built incredible technologies in the face of abject uncertainty.

It’s incumbent on me to help these great people find new roles, spread their wings, and share their talents with others.

Attached is a list of the folks who are available and their preferred contact details.

Please feel free to reach out to anybody you think you need or could help find new roles.

I’m also on hand to help in any way I can.

Thanks, Barney

While it’s a bummer Karakuri couldn’t survive, it’s not surprising. Food robotic startups suffer from several disadvantages, including incredibly long development cycles and being capital-intensive.

Ex-Picnic CEO Clayton Wood summed it up well in a Linkedin post where he explained that a food automation startup’s “existential risk is being successful enough at the seed stage and building momentum (and costs) toward your scaling stage, only to find no Series A/B/C investors. Without planning and execution, you will be unable to survive. Progress means spending–and cutting spending to stay alive eliminates progress.”

Clayton says he believes newer startups will benefit from an earlier recognition that they need be frugal from the outset, unlike many of the first-generation food robot startups who launched in what was a more friendly fundraising era.

I also expect more food robot startups will start to look to commercialize a product or a subsystem more quickly in order to get to positive revenue faster. As I wrote a few months ago after our food robotics mini-summit, investors like Buck Jordan see a path to revenue through offering a portion of a founder’s big idea to the market instead of waiting years until the full vision is realized.

“I suspect that some robotics companies who are a little more responsible, or a little more revenue-oriented, are going to start paring down their objectives,” said Jordan.

Jordan pointed to Creator, a maker of fully roboticized restaurants, as an example of a company he believes has valuable technology that could be ‘parted out’ to the market and be successful.

Make that had valuable technology. Creator didn’t ever sell a portion of its systems and instead tried to make a full robotic restaurant. The company shut down in March.

Shiru Used AI To Discover Its First Novel Ingredient in 3 Months. The Next One Will Go Even Faster

This week, novel ingredient discovery startup Shiru announced they have commercially launched their first ingredient, OleoPro, a plant-based fat ingredient the company says doesn’t have the environmental costs or health consequences of animal fat. As part of the announcement, the company disclosed that the company’s first commercial partner is Griffith Foods, a commercial food ingredient manufacturer.

As readers of The Spoon know, Shiru is part of a cohort of startups using AI to discover new ingredients more quickly than traditional methods. Unlike many first-generation synthetic bio products, OleoPro was developed using machine learning, enabling a multifold acceleration of the discovery and testing phase according to the company.

The company’s discovery timeframe for OleoPro took less than three months. According to the announcement, “Shiru’s biochemists and computational biologists used AI to scan and select nearly 10,000 formulations” in that time frame, and “then they determined the precise molecules that would combine to form an ingredient with the unique oil-holding protein scaffold of animal fat.” The entire discovery and commercialization process took 18 months from the project’s start, much shorter than the multi-year process typical of classical synthetic biology workflows.

And now, according to Shiru CEO Jasmin Hume, that time frame for discovery will compress even more now that the company has built out its machine learning model. Finding a new novel protein or functional ingredient will take “eight to 10 weeks is like what we’re comfortable with,” Hume told me in a recent interview. “And what that means is, it’s not just digital, but at eight weeks, we have up to half a dozen proteins that we’re making at a couple of grams. And so we go from totally digital to pilot-produced ingredients, not one but a couple that can work, in about eight weeks.”

“Instead of a half decade and more than a quarter billion dollars in R&D to ship a viable product, Shiru used AI to dramatically reduce the cost and time to market of an essential ingredient of plant-based meat to a matter of months and a few hundred thousand dollars – and the cost of protein discovery at Shiru continues to decline,” said Dr. Ranjani Varadan, Shiru Chief Scientific Officer, in the announcement. Varadan, who sat down with The Spoon last summer, was previously VP of R&D at Impossible Foods.