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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Elo Health Partners With Nourished For Launch of 3D Printed Gummy Supplements

This week, Elo Health, a personalized nutrition startup, announced they have partnered with UK-based Nourished to offer Elo customers an option to take their personalized supplements in gummy form.

The new partnership, which will allow Elo customers to replace up to 7 pills with a single 3D-printed gummy as part of a daily supplement regimen, is the result of a year and a half of collaboration between the two companies, according to Elo Health CEO Ari Tulla.

“We’ve been trying to find and build a better product for delivering the nutrients to people,” Tulla said in an interview with The Spoon. “Nourished has developed this unbelievably good modality of 3D printed gummy vitamins, and we’ve been working with them to formulate the ideal formulation based on the Elo Health AI.”

According to Tulla, while some of Elo’s customers are perfectly okay with taking multiple pills with a daily regimen, some would prefer a different delivery method for their supplements.

“Now they can take the equivalent of seven pills in one gummy,” said Tulla. “Seven layers equals seven pills. And we’ve worked with Nourished to dose them appropriately, so they actually have the same outcomes as the pills.”

Another new option to the Elo Health platform is the company is now allowing its customers to build their initial personalized supplement profile with a questionnaire instead of a blood panel. Initially, Elo required a finger prick blood sample to get a panel determining cholesterol, lipid, vitamin D levels, and more than a dozen other biomarkers. Understandably, some customers didn’t like the expense (up to $150 per test) or the discomfort of a blood test.

Tulla says the company’s AI model has optimized its platform so customers get similar outcomes with personalized supplements without an initial or ongoing blood testing.

“We have taken the learning from the last two and a half years and thousands of people who went through the funnel. And we’ve been optimizing the questionnaire to get very close to the same way we can get with a panel.”

For those who want to continue to use blood testing for an initial panel and on an ongoing basis, Elo will continue to offer them.

For Nourished, the Elo partnership continues the company’s momentum over the past year. This summer, the company announced they were entering Japan at Smart Kitchen Summit Japan, and they are also in the market in the northeastern US, the UK, and Europe.

In the future, Tulla sees his company’s AI-powered personalized coaching and nutrition counseling.

“When you have a question about nutrition, you want to get the response right then and there. And that’s what the AI can provide. It can provide a dialogue that happens right then.”

You can listen to my full conversation with Ari in the latest episode of The Spoon Podcast. If you’d like to hear from Ari in person, join us next week at the Food AI Summit.

Three Years After CES Debut, ColdSnap Readies Launch of Countertop Ice Cream Making Appliance

Nearly three years after it stole the show at CES 2021 with its countertop ice cream machine, ColdSnap has readied itself for a commercial rollout of its system this fall.

In a recent blog post, the company shared a glimpse of the product’s development over the past few years, detailing its pod production capacity expansion, the development of its production partner ecosystem, and the continuing refinement of the ColdSnap machine itself.

According to the company, they’ve expanded their production facility in the Boston suburb of Billerica, adding 20,000 square feet with an additional 24,000 square feet of space leased across the street. After producing their initial batches of liquid in small batches in their test kitchen, the enlarged factory that is part of the company’s headquarters will support 300-gallon batches of their liquid mix that will fill the ColdSnap aluminum cans (think energy drink-size) on-site.

In addition to the company’s ice cream and frozen treat mix production within its own factory, they are working with co-manufacturers to ramp up production. According to ColdSnap, initial tests of its mix showed the product was too thick to flow through the pipes at third-party manufacturers because the liquid was different from commercial ice cream mixes commonly made at manufacturing facilities. The company’s food science team reformulated the mix for production in external factories and for large-scale production in-house.

Another big step towards its commercial launch was the addition of packaging automation. It’s hard to believe, but until now, the company has hand-packaged all of the pods to support the roughly one hundred trial machines in the field. Now, as they look to scale, they’ve added automation equipment and project they will be able to manufacture 30 million pods per year.

ColdSnap also detailed improvements to the countertop machine, including adding a QR code reader that will tell the machine which type of drink it is making and what the company describes as a ‘more powerful’ refrigeration machine.

Part of what makes ColdSnap intriguing is its ability to make instant ice cream from room temperature, shelf-stable liquid. As company CEO Matthew Fonte told me last year, a product like this could be potentially transformative for markets where cold chain storage is not widely available or cost-prohibitive.

“China’s ice cream market is as large as the United States, but they have 25% the amount of refrigeration per capita that we do here in the States,” Fonte said. “If you could circumvent the cold supply chain and give them shelf-stable pods, they can freeze their ice cream on demand, they can reach the masses there and grow that market four times.”

I agree that this type of machine could be really interesting in markets without substantial cold chain storage, my guess is clones would pop up pretty quickly in markets like China once the concept is proven out.

ColdSnap’s initial target is the office and business markets, but in the long term, Fonte says the company will enter the consumer kitchen. He said he’s open to partners for any expansion into the home market, and I’m sure he’ll be able to find him if he and ColdSnap can prove the technology works and there’s demand for it in the commercial space.

A Conversation With BioCraft On Building an AI to Accelerate Cultured Meat Development

Over the past few years, companies in food tech product development have begun to utilize machine learning and other AI techniques to accelerate the development of their products. One of those companies is Biocraft, a company focused on developing pet food utilizing cultured meat as its primary protein input.

The company announced in May they would focus exclusively on B2B (they had previously been developing a consumer-facing product under the brand Because Animals), and this week started talking about how they are utilizing AI to assist in product development.

I sat down with Biocraft CEO Shannon Falconer and AI lead Chai Molina to learn more about the company’s AI and the future direction of the company.

Tell us why you decided to investigate how AI could help you develop cultivated meat.

Falconer: My background is my PhD is in biochemistry, and so mostly I was working on drug discovery and antibiotic research. And you know, when AI really hit the pharmaceutical industry in a meaningful way about a decade ago, it dropped the time and the cost of bringing a drug to market, so I’ve been very bullish on integrating this technology into what we’re doing for cultured meat.

I asked Chai if there are any types of tools that are available or that could work for us to actually do what we want to help in dropping our costs, and getting the right ingredient and nutritional profile of our products. Chai looked around and said, “No, there is not.” And so it was then really that we decided if there’s nothing available that we can purchase and use, then we’ve just got to build this ourselves.

Molina: I come to this with a view that this is a mathematical problem, that we just have to find the connections between kind of modeling out how human reasoning sort of works and connecting the dots between pieces of machinery in the cell. To try to understand how we can tweak this Rube Goldberg machine. How we can push it into the direction that we want it to go.

How did you start building the AI model?

Molina: There’s a machine learning component that is along the lines of natural language processing, where we collect our data from lots of publicly available papers and databases. From there, we process the data and basically build out a picture of the machinery inside the cell.

What do you mean by that?

Molina: These databases and papers might show a tiny glimpse of one piece of that machinery inside a cell. In a way, we’re superimposing little pictures and little parts of that machinery to build out the bigger picture. From there, we try to understand if you pull this cable or take this step, what’s it gonna do? There are all these threads of biochemistry in the cell, I like to think of it like dominoes where you push one, and then you see downstream effects. And so that is more of a mathematical modeling approach, involving network theory.

You’re using the analogy of a machine to describe a cell and understand what the domino effects of a certain action or input within a given hypothesis about that cell.

Molina: Yes. Once we have a picture of the machinery in the cell, it’s like, okay, ‘what can we how can we tweak that to make it do what we want?’ Say we want to add a novel medium component for a growth serum for the cells that will hopefully push them in the direction that we want, such as cell proliferation. So, for example, we look at different substances that are safe for consumption and ask how would the addition of these things at least qualitatively impacts the machinery in the cell.

And you’re running these hypotheses in the AI and then testing out promising results in a wet lab?

Falconer: If you’re a wet lab scientist, and you generate a hypothesis, there are so many things to test. Especially when you’re working on something as complicated as media optimization in order to achieve the right cocktail that will elicit proliferation as well as the nutritional profile that you are that you want that you desire. And so the time that it would take to perform all these various experiments empirically, not only of course, is very lengthy and very expensive. And so what this tool does is it allows us to trim down that list of experiments. This tool is able to prioritize for us and give us sort of a ranking order as to which hypotheses are more likely to succeed or fail. And so this shortens the time and the number of experiments.

And then and then the other thing that it does for us is, it allows us to actually get better at identifying sort of the unknowns. What this tool can do is it can identify, say, anywhere between, say, A and Z -anywhere along this line where a human brain cannot read and put into place all of the different connections – what might ultimately elicit the end desired effect. We can then go back and say, Oh, but we now know that five nodes upstream in these completely disconnected papers, we see that this domino will hit this one, and then this one hits this one, etc. And then we can actually achieve this desired effect down the road.

You announced last May you were becoming a B2B company exclusively, and you were sunsetting your CPG products. How has this new focus, combined with the AI development tool, changed your product development speed?

Falconer: Yes, so now we’re exclusively a b2b company, focused on delivering volumes and working with existing pet food manufacturers who already have that massive consumer base and who can disseminate product quickly as soon as we have it available to sell it. And so that’s what we’re focused on right now. I’d say over the past 12 months, with just focusing on this product development. I think we’ve made probably more progress in 12 months than we did in five years. And a big part of that is the development of our AI platform.

If you’d like to learn more about how AI is accelerating next-generation food development, join us October 25th at the Food AI Summit.

Survey: Parasite & Mercury-Free Fish Are Key Attributes of Cell-Cultured Seafood According to Sushi Eaters

According to a report published by cell-cultured seafood startup BluNalu, consumers value the absence of parasites and mercury in cell-cultured seafood, especially among those who frequently eat sushi. The data, sourced from a survey conducted by a market research specialist in 2022 and featured in a comprehensive report by BluNalu this week, displays how consumers prioritize specific qualities of cell-cultured seafood, like BluNalu’s toro tuna.

The survey chart below reveals the answer to the question: “How significant are the following benefits of cell-cultured seafood when deciding whether to order it in a restaurant?” The top four attributes, as ranked by sushi enthusiasts, all pertained to the “clean” attributes of food cultivated beyond our increasingly polluted and climate-affected oceans. The importance placed on seafood being free from parasites, pesticides, mercury, and microplastics suggests the kind of narratives companies like BluNalu should adopt when introducing their products to the market.

Other interesting insights from the BluNalu research compilation include a preference among chefs and food industry experts for the toro portion of the tuna – the fatty belly portion of the fish – when asked which type of fish and part of a fish that the company should emphasize when created a cell-cultured alternative to wild-caught fish. This desire for toro, according to BluNalu, is because chefs see an opportunity to present this premium cut to a wider audience. From the report:

Another intriguing insight from the BluNalu research is the preference among chefs and food industry experts for toro, the fatty belly region of tune. When inquired about which fish type and section the company should highlight when producing a cell-cultured alternative to wild-caught fish, most leaned towards the toro. BluNalu believes this is because chefs see an opportunity to offer this high-priced cut to a wider audience. From the report:

Discussions with chefs illuminated the opportunity presented by cell-cultured bluefin tuna toro to extend menu utilization in non-Japanese fine-dining restaurants for the first time at scale, given that 80% of the world’s supply of this fish has historically been consumed in Japan.

While it’s worth noting the while research in the report is obviously self-serving, the insights and data seem to ring true. Like many, I’ve become increasingly worried about the potential for toxins when eating seafood over the past few years, and I’d be interested in eating seafood that doesn’t have exposure to chemicals, parasites, and other contaminants of seafood pulled from the sea. And like many in the food tech world, I’m also interested in eating less seafood due to the threat to the seafood population from overfishing.

If you’d like to take a look at the full report, you can find it here on BluNalu’s website.

As Online Grocery Sales Flatten Post-Pandemic, Shoppers Lock In on Pick-Up as Preferred Method

As the world continues to normalize and behaviors regress to the mean post-pandemic, online grocery shopping is no different. According to a new report from online grocery research firm Bricks Meets Click, online grocery shopping in the U.S. dropped 3.1% in September vs last year, going from $7.8 billion in September 2022 to $7.5 billion this year.

According to the firm, a decline in order frequency and total dollars spent per order were the main culprits for the drop in online grocery revenue. The average number of orders per monthly active user (MAU) fell 8% year-over-year, finishing at 2.31 this year compared to 2.52 for September 2022. For recurring online grocery customers (shoppers who have used e-grocery four or more times), the average order value dropped from $104.39 in September 2022 to $100.49 this September.

This suggests that as most folks are comfortable returning to the world again, there is likely a natural adoption ceiling for online grocery shopping even as more grocers offer the service. Those who are either too busy with their lives to grocery shop or who can’t or don’t want to shop in the physical world likely will continue to be the most devoted users of online grocery shopping, while others will likely continue to mix in-person shopping with the occasional use of online grocery shopping.

One bright spot for online grocery is pickup. This shopping format, where shoppers order online and have their bags run out to them at a designated parking lot area, continues to eat into home delivery. According to Brick Meets Click, pickup was used by 58.7% of monthly active online grocery shoppers, compared to 53% of orders in September of 2022. First-party delivery (delivery by grocer or third-party service like DoorDash) dropped from 40.4% to 38.8%, and ship-to-home (delivery by common/contract carriers like FedEx) fell from 42.4% last year to 39.9% this September.

Ben Leventhal Discusses Raising $24M for Web3 Restaurant Loyalty Platform, Blackbird

This week, Blackbird, a startup building a Web3-powered restaurant loyalty platform, announced it had raised a $24 million Series A funding round led by a16z’s crypto team with participation from Amex Ventures and Bolt by QED, among others.

With the news, the company lifted the curtain around its platform and how it works. When customers arrive at a restaurant, they initiate membership by tapping their smartphone on Blackbird’s NFC reader. From there, Blackbird issues an NFT, which acts as an identity card that keeps track of the customer’s relationship with the restaurant. When a customer returns and taps with the NFC reader, it acts as a digital handshake that sends info associated with a customer’s membership to the restaurant, such as first and last name, address, and dining history.

In short, the platform is designed to work without burdening the customer or the restaurant with technical know-how. The Web3 technology works in the background, creating a wallet for customers to hold their NFTs and the $FLY tokens earned over time.

It’s clear from the announcement that the company is not leaning too heavily in branding itself as a Web3 company but instead emphasizing what founder Ben Leventhal sees as a friction-free, next-generation loyalty platform that helps smaller operators who may not have a significant technical staff or internal resources.

“Blackbird works very well if you couldn’t possibly care less about the blockchain,” Leventhal told The Spoon. “That’s crucial because the adoption of blockchain and the passion around the blockchain is rather specific and limited right now. And we need to create magic for all guests, regardless of how they think about tech, or if they think about tech at all.”

Still, while Leventhal and Blackbird aren’t emphasizing the platform’s Web3 underpinnings, there’s no doubt that much of the buzz around the company and the reason it was able to raise money from blue chips like Andreessen Horowitz in a challenging environment is precisely because it’s a web3 company; there’s a sense among investors and early partners that the company’s technology could, in some way, upend the traditional restaurant loyalty technology market.

I asked Leventhal how he thinks his company’s Web3 tech differentiates itself from what’s out there today. He pointed to a campaign his early trial partners ran this summer in partnership with Coinbase called the Summer Sweet Pass as part of Coinbase’s OnChain Summer.

“If you’re somebody who likes dessert, you have a sweet tooth, and you’re in New York in August, we curated eight restaurant desserts for you that you could, by virtue of having this pass in your Blackbird wallet, enjoy. I think that there are potentially several layers of community and connectivity that we can power for restaurants.”

It became clear during our conversation that Leventhal thinks his company can appeal to the passionate – but relatively small – community that wants to leverage blockchain and Web3 today to tap into experiences in the physical world while also helping restaurants build loyalty platforms that have more headroom to grow in the future while not putting any significant technical burden on their small staffs or the customer.

According to Leventhal, a low technical burden is especially crucial for smaller independent operators, the type of customer that Blackbird is targeting.

“We’re trying to focus on independent restaurants to help them level the playing field against some of these, you know, very, very serious competitors,” said Leventhal. “The average independent coffee shop is competing with Starbucks for their customers. The average independent restaurant competes with Sweetgreen and PF Chang’s for their customers. So they’re going to need some tools to do that effectively.”

This is Leventhal’s third restaurant industry startup. He founded the food media company Eater nearly two decades ago before selling it to Vox and started reservation tech company Resy in 2013 before selling it to American Express in 2019.

I asked Leventhal how things compare today to those previous eras.

“Twenty years ago, and the average restaurant is making ten to twelve percent margin,” said Leventhal. “Today, it’s three to four. So, we need to continue to think about what the future for restaurants looks like. And to me, a big part of the problem is not around the kind of reservations technology – that is now a pretty mature and robust area of technology – I think it’s about core connectivity to restaurants and guests and giving restaurants to make the most of their most loyal customers.”

We Must Still Define Regenerative Agriculture

This guest post was written by Nate Crosser, J.D., is a food and agriculture technology investor.

Imagine a sandwich that actually made you – and the world – healthier by virtue of making it. This dream is held by hard-nosed ranchers, coastal vegans, corporate types, and hippy homesteaders alike. The term they often use to describe the dream is “regenerative agriculture.” Leo DiCaprio even has a venture capital fund that evokes the term. Surely we can’t all want the same thing for once, right?

Nobody knows because there isn’t a clear or agreed definition of what regenerative agriculture means, putting it at risk of being yet another term greenwashed into meaninglessness, like “humane” or “free-range”, 1984-style. Regenerative agriculture has been used to describe a plethora of agriculture practices: Cover-cropping, no-till biodynamic farming, organic permaculture, sustainable agroforestry, the three sisters, but, most frequently, livestock grazing. These forms of farming aim to restore the terribly depleted soil, which harbors microorganisms and fungi that naturally sequester carbon and nitrogen, fight pests, and reduce erosion and pollution. 

However, the term is capriciously and liberally used by marketers, and is mostly used as a synonym for traditional ranching. Though “conservation” or rotational grazing is surely better than modern conventional factory farming, is that really where the bar should be set?

Some forms of ranching can improve soil health compared to certain baselines; animal dung has undeniable fertilizing qualities (and isn’t made of fossil fuels like most fertilizers). But, regenerative farming should do more than heal the soil, it should heal both human and non-human communities (i.e., societies and habitats, respectively). Our conception of re-generativity should take a systems-level view, rather than focusing on a single measure, like soil carbon, which can be deceiving and incomplete measures. 

There are a few early efforts to create meaningful standards for regenerative practices, most notably the Regenerative Organic Certified® (ROC) certification for textiles, food, and personal care products that is backed by Patagonia. ROC goes a step further than most frameworks, with a focus not just on soil health but also the welfare of farmers, ranchers, workers, and animals. ROC is an important certification program, but is more of an “extra organic” stamp that doesn’t fully capture the possibility of regenerative agriculture; to heal the world through agriculture.

Regenerative agriculture should not just be an appeal to a pastoral food system, but instead should ask what agricultural practices help us move towards better systems, holistically? Can organic rotational ranching actually help us stop climate change and fertilizer runoff, boost soil biodiversity, reverse industry consolidation, reduce rising obesity rates, address environmental justice or land grabbing, and improve animal welfare? Can it do so better than processing feed crops directly into plant-based meat alternatives and re-wilding the excess cropland? Should regenerative even inherently mean organic and non-GMO? These are empirical questions that can be studied, but only if we engage in the requisite research and debate as an industry. 

What about novel practices that are not even tied to the land itself, such as urban indoor vertical farming, precision fermentation, or meat cell cultivation (which has recently been cleared for sale for the first time in the US by the FDA and USDA)? These sound highly technological but might actually serve the goals of regeneration, so let’s not immediately give into the naturalistic fallacy and instead look at the data – regenerative means restorative, not rustic. Just because wild grass-eating cows existed does not mean that grass-fed beef is categorically good. Neither does it mean that non-GMO crops are inherently good. Both grass-fed beef and white rice can be huge methane emitters linked to human health conditions. One peer-reviewed study found that cell-cultivated beef could have almost 90% lower GhG emissions than conventional. Whereas grass-fed beef may actually be the single worst food you could eat, from a climate change perspective, and yet many conflate it to regenerative agriculture, but not so with cell-cultivated meat. 

To create a meaningful “regenerative agriculture”, we need consensus, and regulations, not just one-off certifications from private companies. Luckily, the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) has recently kicked off the first state-led attempt to do so, which could have repercussions not only for the state’s $50 billion agriculture industry but also for the entire nation. As the country’s largest state, both in terms of agricultural production and population, California often bends the nation to its will. Take Prop 12, the California referendum that imposed very basic animal welfare improvements for poultry and pork within the state. The meat industry went all the way to the Supreme Court to overturn the law, claiming Prop 12 would send ripple effects through the national market. The law was ultimately upheld in a decision penned by Justice Gorsuch in May as a clear case of voter-consumer sovereignty. Maybe California will lead the way again here, as it is in the field of cellular agriculture. 

As we weather another bad wildfire and hurricane season, we are reminded of the urgency of tackling the numerous global ecological crises. We must urgently change agricultural practices, which currently use half of the world’s land, emit over a quarter of humanity’s greenhouse gasses, and account for 70% of global freshwater withdrawals. We cannot afford to lose this chance to transform the food system, to give into greenwashing or Luddite tendencies. Let’s join together as producers and consumers around a bold, progressive vision for regenerative agriculture.

As More Tech Comes to the Drive-Thru, Will Consumers Agree to T&Cs Regarding Their Privacy?

Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a flood of new technology making its way into the restaurant customer experience in everything ranging from mobile ordering apps to digital touch screens. And now, with perhaps the biggest wave of new technology yet, we’re seeing new ways in which restaurants will use tech to reinvent the customer drive-thru experience.

And, as just as we’ve seen in other areas in which new technology enters our lives, this means a growing presence of something else we’ve become all too familiar with – a screen with lots of small print asking for permission to use (i.e. monetize) information about us.

The terms and conditions (T&C) agreement has become a regular feature of modern life, something we see whenever we sign up for a new app or connected gadget. I’d even seen them in restaurants, where I’d agreed to T&Cs for a mobile ordering app or a bio-authentication payment system. But, I must admit I was surprised to see a T&C show up in a place I’d never seen one before: the drive-thru.

I didn’t see this new T&C screen in person, but in a video showcasing technology from voice tech specialist Soundhound. The video shows the Soundhound AI-powered voice assistant being used at White Castle, which is partnering with Soundhound and Samsung, the provider of the digital display screen used at the restaurant’s drive-thru.

The video, which you can see below, is impressive, but I was struck by the fact the customer in this video is asked to verbally approve the T&Cs that ask to record the customer’s voice. The request, which you can see in the video, states, “White Castle and its contractors, including without limitation Mastercard and Soundhound, will capture, collect, store, share and use an audio recording of your voice. The specific processing purposes and the length of the voice audio recording is being collected, stored, and shared is available at the below link, along with the retention schedule and guidelines for permanently destroying the audio recording.”

Below the small print is a call to action that says, “To agree and proceed, say ‘ok, I’m ready.'”

It really shouldn’t be surprising that White Castle and others decided to ask for permission from the consumer, particularly given the bad press and legal problems companies like Samsung have come under fire for with products like smart TVs. If they didn’t, there’s no doubt at some point, some organization would out them and probably file a class action lawsuit. It’s also somewhat refreshing for a company to ask for permission from the get-go, especially as more and more technology like cameras and sensors are coming into retail and food service as a way for operators to monitor, market, and enable commerce with their consumers.

All that said, however, I must admit it’s a bit of a jolt for anyone who’s used to going through a drive-thru their whole lives to be asked to agree to share their personal data, including the sound of their voice, when ordering a burger and fries. And if someone like me, someone who’s been following the evolution of the drive-thru voice ordering technology, finds it a bit weird to be presented with a T&C screen at the drive-thru, I have to wonder what everyday drive-thru customers think of being asked to record their voice and use it in some mysterious way?

There’s a good chance many will be ok with it. After all, many of us – maybe the majority -quickly scroll down to the bottom of the T&Cs when signing up for a new product to get to the experience of using it. And most of us, even if we wanted to read through all the legalese, probably can’t quite precisely decipher the terms of what we’re agreeing to. But I think some will find this new request to use our personal info disturbing and say “No way” instead of “It’s ok.”

For those types, my guess is White Castle and others in this space will have an order tree path that enables users to connect with a live person to take their order.

It’s hard to say how exactly new technology will change restaurants in the future. Still, one thing we can probably be sure of is that we’re going to have to get used to that mainstay of modern digital life, the T&C screen, becoming a fixture at the drive-thru of the future.

Yummly App Adds New Features, Reminding Us It’s Still Around Six Years After Whirlpool Deal

Today, recipe and guided cooking app Yummly announced a refreshed set of features, including what it describes as AI-powered recipe recommendations, an improved meal planner feature, and integration with an upgraded Yummly thermometer.

Since Whirlpool acquired Yummly, the recipe recommendation and cooking guidance app has largely flown below the radar while adding periodic incremental improvements over the years. And as far as I can tell, the announced improvements are par for the course.

This includes the new and improved “AI-powered recipe recommendations,” which sounds a lot like the things the company was promoting almost five years ago when they were touting “AI-powered personalization.” It’s not immediately clear how these AI-powered recommendations differ from previous AI-enabled recommendations, but we’ll have to take the company’s word for it.

The app’s improved meal planner function looks like it’s primarily focused on further building out a shoppable recipe function, something that has become relatively common in recent years for many recipe apps as a way to monetize through affiliate marketing commerce. The Yummly meal-planning shoppable recipe meal planning capability is a premium feature for users through a monthly subscription.

Whirlpool is hardly mentioned in the release (outside of the About Yummly boilerplate at the bottom), and the only real evidence of the company’s influence is the integration with an improved Yummly Thermometer, which is a product that Whirlpool has gone through pains to integrate with a number of their appliances. According to the announcement, the new Yummly thermometer now has three sensors, up from the two sensors in the previous generation.

While Whirlpool seems content to let Yummly operate mainly as a standalone app with its own brand, it seems a far cry from when the company acquired the app and saw it as driving the digital transformation of the appliance giant’s product lineup. Outside of a big splash at CES 2019, which the company described as a “roll-out across multiple Whirlpool brands,” the app hasn’t added all that much in terms of feature sets beyond what it had five years ago, and there’s been scant evidence of any further integration – thermometer notwithstanding – with the broader Whirlpool family.

One reason the app has become something of an afterthought in Whirlpool might be that many of the original stakeholders have moved on. Yummly founder Dave Feller left soon after the deal was done, and Brian Whitlin, who drove much of the product innovation, left in 2021. Add in the fact that the acquisition’s primary champion within Whirlpool, Brett Dibkey – who drove much of Whirlpool’s digital transformation – left in 2020, and the company’s current caretaker mode makes sense.

Pizza Hut Sees Huge Runway for Growth in China, Plans to Add up to 1,500 Net New Stores by 2026 (Sponsored Post)

Pizza Hut is planning to rapidly expand its footprint across China in the coming three years as part of an ambitious growth strategy announced by Yum China Holdings Inc. (NYSE: YUMC; HKEX: 9987), at the company’s recent 2023 Investor Day in Xi’an, China.

Following its successful revitalization program, which strengthened the brand’s fundamentals and improved the payback period for new stores, Pizza Hut is poised for rapid growth. The brand is aiming to open 400-500 net new stores per year from 2024-2026, more than double its pace of the past three years, while continuing to maintain a healthy store payback of approximately 3 years.

Pizza Hut’s plans are part of the refreshed “RGM 2.0” strategy launched by Yum China, which also operates KFC, Taco Bell and other restaurant brands in the country. At its Investor Day, Yum China set an overall target to reach 20,000 total stores by 2026 and deliver double-digit CAGR for EPS in 2024-2026 while returning $3 billion to investors during the same period through quarterly dividends and share repurchases.

With a presence in China since 1990, Pizza Hut is a top player in China’s casual dining sector, operating 3,072 stores in over 650 cities. The brand dominates in all of its core categories: pizza, steak and pasta, with over 100 million pizzas and 20 million steaks sold over the last 12 months.

Pizza Hut General Manager Jeff Kuai commented, “As an absolute leader in the sector, our slice of the market is bigger than the next nine brands combined. Despite our leading position, there is still tremendous opportunity for us to gain an even larger share of the market.”

The brand’s strategy for footprint growth includes adding store density in existing cities while continuing to expand into new cities. China has vast untapped markets for Pizza Hut. There are more than 1,200 cities in China that have a KFC but do not yet have Pizza Hut, highlighting the opportunity to leverage Yum China’s infrastructure and resources to expand in many of those locations. Pizza Hut increases its penetration with flexible store models. Its satellite store model, which has a smaller dining area, focuses on off-premise occasions and requires lower capex. The store model has a 2-year payback, which is better than its traditional stores. The brand is also testing a fast-casual store model that aims to provide faster and lighter service while improving labor efficiency.

In addition to expanding its footprint, Pizza Hut has focused on improving its core menu offerings. In particular, the brand has been reinforcing its reputation as a “pizza expert” through product upgrades and new flavors. Its Super Supreme Pizzas and Durian Pizzas have been big hits with consumers. In the first half of 2023, pizza sales rose 56% compared to the same period in 2019.

As Pizza Hut continues to expand, it is aiming to capture more consumer segments through a wider range of food and beverage choices and providing more occasions to visit. The brand is preparing to launch a new line of made-to-order burgers. From September 2023, it also introduced premium Lavazza coffee at its restaurants. Pizza Hut has expanded individual meals, including its personal-size pizza, to cater to solo diners and office workers; as well as breakfast offerings to better serve customers while maximizing store utilization. In addition, the brand is broadening its previous focus on families to better cater to younger generations. Its partnership with Genshin Impact, for example, has attracted many young people and gamers.

Meanwhile, Pizza Hut remains focused on providing excellent value for money. Its popular “Scream Wednesdays”, “All You Can Eat”, and “Buy One Get One Free” value campaigns are huge draws for dine-in and delivery traffic. It is also broadening its price ranges to serve a wider range of customers on everyday needs.

Pizza Hut is also investing in building a best-in-class digital customer experience, an area that is critical to its future success, with approximately 92% of orders placed on digital channels. A key priority is improving its user interface and providing real-time order tracking for customers on its app. The brand is also boosting its member visit frequency through privilege programs and targeted offers based on members’ preferences.

Kuai says: “With continuing efforts to build on our core strengths and expand into new categories, improve value for money, drive delivery growth, and enhance our digital capabilities, we are confident that Pizza Hut will generate even stronger sales momentum and enhance our leading position in the market.”

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Scentian Bio Raises $2.1M for Tech is Says Can Replicate Insect Smell Receptors

Scentian Bio, a biosensor startup that claims to have blended nature and technology by leveraging the olfactory capabilities of insects to develop a powerful new sensory tool, announced a $2.1 million seed funding today according to a release sent to The Spoon. The company’s new investors, which include Finistere Ventures and Toyota Ventures, will join the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, bringing their total backing up to $4.4 million.

Scentian says their technology relies on virtualizing insect olfactory receptors (iOR), using AI to process and interpret signals from its biosensors to replicate an insect’s neuronal network to interpret smells. According to Scentian, their sensors are a thousand times more sensitive than a dog’s nose and have dozens of unique receptors that effectively recognize millions of virtual organic compounds or VOCs.

The company says they’ve been running a trial with a large unnamed food brand, and based on its early success in this trial, the company plans to focus on quality control for the food industry initially. This company’s first digital biosensor, which is expected to launch commercially at the end of 2024, will provide quality control of key food ingredients’ smell and taste attributes. The company will focus on essential oils and expand later to other ingredients.

The pitch is compelling, but the company doesn’t explain precisely how their technology replicates insect smell detection. It says they combine “insect smell receptors” with sensing surfaces that create “the most sensitive digital fingerprint for smell.” It sounds good, but I have to wonder if it’s just a colorful way to describe a really powerful electronic nose.

ScentianBio - Unlocking the Language of Life

Amazon Details Usage of Generative AI-Created Synthetic Data to Train Just Walk Out Technology

For a while now, we’ve known the basic gist of how Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology works: A combination of computer vision, machine learning, and other sensor data helps enable a friction-free shopping experience in which customers pick items off the shelf and walk out the door without ever having to stop at a cash register.

But in a recent blog post by Amazon’s retail technology team, the company explained how it all worked in greater detail than we’ve seen in the past, including how the company has been using generative AI to train its Just Walk Out platform for long-tail cases that are rare but entirely possible in the unpredictable environment of retail.

According to Gérard Medioni, vice president and distinguished scientist at Amazon, the company uses a generative AI called a generative adversarial network (GAN) to create synthetic data for training Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology. The Just Walk Out team used datasets from millions of AI-generated synthetic images and video clips mimicking realistic, and sometimes rare, shopping scenarios, including variations in lighting, store layouts, and crowd sizes. According to Amazon, this training using generative AI-created synthetic visual data enables Just Walk Out to recognize and properly interpret millions of customer actions.

“When the customer exits, having an accurate account of their purchases is critical,” Medioni said.

The company also went into detail about how Just Walk Out and its Amazon One palm-based bioauthentication technology does – and don’t – work together. According to Amazon, the two systems operate independently of each other, keeping a person’s biometric information associated with their payment separate from Just Walk Out. When a shopper enters the store, the Just Walk Out system assigns the shopper a temporary numeric code, which serves as their unique digital signature for that shopping trip. When a shopper exits, the code disappears. When they come back, they get a new code.

Medioni says that Just Walk Out associates a person’s “pixels” to the one-time payment code assigned for that trip and the products they pick up off the shelf.

“Just Walk Out tech doesn’t collect any biometrics. All we need to know is where that person is on the floor, and where their hands are in relation to the store’s merchandise.”

According to Medioni, the system is sophisticated enough to track groups of shoppers assigned to a single payment instrument, and the system can create a single receipt for a group shopping trip.

“We had a tour bus that came in one day, and they had 90 people all paying with a single credit card,” Medioni adds. “Even if people leave the store separately and we can still keep track of the group’s purchases.”

While Amazon has shown mixed signals regarding its retail footprint, the company appears to remain interested in developing its technology platform for usage by other retailers. My guess is they’ll likely see some smaller retailers and non-grocers (like stadiums/sports venues) adopt the technology, but larger grocers will remain reticent to jump on board with technology developed by a competitor.

If you’re interested in how generative AI will change food retail, join us at the Spoon’s Food AI Summit on October 25th in Alameda!