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Dispatches from Israel Food Tech Ecosystem: Daphna Heffetz, CEO of Wanda Fish

Daphna Heffetz is the CEO and Co-Founder of Wanda Fish, a cellular agriculture company aimed at producing cell-based fish meat, starting with bluefin tuna. We talked about making cell-based fish entirely out of plant materials, the problems our oceans face today, and why Wanda Fish will only sell to high end restaurants to start. 

J: Tell me about your background and how you came to be the CEO and co-founder of Wandafish. 

D: I have been around for a long time in the biotechnology industry but focusing on life sciences. Almost two years ago, the Kitchen Hub approached me and tried to interest me in establishing Wanda Fish. I didn’t know enough about the issues of the ocean at that time, so I started to read and speak to several people. 

J: Can you tell me more about what Wanda Fish does and what makes it unique from other cell-based fish products? 

D: What we are doing is a variety of cultivated fish filets. Our strategy is to have a premium product that originates from the top fish species like bluefin tuna and yellowtail. We produce a whole-cut fish filet consisting of muscle and fat cells and make it similar to the fish itself by taking all the elements from the fish itself. We first take a one-time single sample of the fish tissue and never go back to the fish. We separate required cells, mainly muscle, and fat, which compose the fish filet and grow them in the same manner they would grow in the fish body. We are doing it in the lab initially and later on in a hygienic manufacturing facility in a bioreactor. All the elements are plant-based, no animal is used as the animal components are replaced with plant-based ones. We don’t add any supplements or additives because all the cells are taken from the fish and have the elements from the fish itself. 

J: What is the significance of the problem that Wanda Fish solves? 

D: The reason it’s so needed is because the population of the world is growing so rapidly. Also, the ocean is becoming very much polluted and 80% of its pollution is manmade. Also, there is unregulated fishing which is causing many types of fish to be endangered. More than 70% of the oxygen we all breathe is from the ocean. 

J: What stage is Wanda Fish currently at? 

D: It is already in the lab stage but in process development and gradual scaling. We are working with tabletop bioreactors that have all the elements of big bioreactors. 

J: Who are the ultimate customers? 

D: The product at the beginning will be served to restaurants. However, at the next stage, it will be sold in retail and you can get it in the supermarket. 

J: What is the reason for this strategy? 

D: More companies that are more advanced in us that started in 2017 or 2018 are also looking to sell to restaurants. One of the reasons for that is that it’s like a clinical study, you are selling to people, and you get feedback. Also, this helps spread branding. And most of all, in restaurants, the selling price is higher. Even before having price parity, you can sell to restaurants without losing money because the price point is much higher. 

J: Is there a specific type of restaurant that you are selling to? 

D: Because we are focusing on the top fish species, we are looking to start in high-end restaurants. This will be everywhere, hopefully in Asia and Japan and in the U.S. and Israel. We are going to do sales in countries based on the economic and regulatory situation. 

J: What are the challenges of adapting to sell in different markets? 

D: Unique market education. Because we won’t be the first in the market since there are a couple of companies ahead of us, still in production, market education will be minimal when we enter the market. In principle, there are some voluntary organizations, like GFI, that have done market and consumer research on the consumer world already. Through them, we have ideas of market acceptance. 

J: What do the next few years look like for you, and what are the goals that you are trying to hit? 

D: We are progressing with bluefin tuna as our first product and gradually scaling up with cost reduction and price parity. This can be done by increasing the density of cells in the bioreactors, lower-cost ingredients, and recycling of the medium. We are starting the regulatory process in several territories and hoping to collaborate with big international food suppliers. 

J: When do you think you’ll be ready for market? 

D: This will take a couple of years, but the goal is to be in the market in 2026.

Cultivated Meat is On Sale, But It’s Pricey. A New Study Shows How to Bring the Cost Down

Now that the cultivated meat industry has achieved the long-awaited milestone of going on sale to consumers in the US, the focus will increasingly turn to whether it’s possible to make meat outside the animal more affordably. After all, it’s cool to make meat using a process that sounds straight out of pages of a science fiction novel, but most of us can’t afford to dine in restaurants run by some of the world’s most famous chefs.

So how do we go from prices that rival the world’s most expensive cuts of meat to a more approachable price per pound? According to a new techno-economic analysis (TEA) from bioreactor startup Ark Biotech, using current methods – in other words, with technology and processes primarily developed by a pharmaceutical industry where drugs can cost thousands of dollars per ounce – we can get to about $29.5 per pound for cultivated meat. That’s (kind of) progress, but when you consider that’s what you’d pay for a pound of filet mignon at a butcher, it’s clear that that price per cut will not cut it.

To navigate from filet mignon prices to something closer to that of ground chuck, Ark outlines four ways to do that in the analysis:

  1. Reduce the cost of media
  2. Improve biomass yields
  3. Optimize the bioprocess
  4. Reduce capital spend (depreciation), primarily through larger bioreactors

The TEA breaks down how much each lever currently contributes via the legacy production process:

From there, they analyze how to cost-optimize the price along all four cost levers:

Reduce the Cost of Media

Media is the most significant cost driver today. Ark believes that the price can be reduced by “decreasing media production costs (e.g., procurement, recipe), and (2) increasing the cell mass per unit of media (growing more meat with the same amount of media).” They also explore further cost reductions through other methods, including recycling media and developing ‘fit for purpose recipes’.

Improving Cell Mass

Increasing the cell density and growing more mass per liter of input is another way to decrease the overall cost per pound or, in other words, improve the overall production yield. Ark’s analysis goes into significant technical detail on how to do so, including by optimizing cell lines naturally or through genetic modification.

Optimizing the bioprocess

Another significant lever to reduce the overall cost of cultivated meat is to optimize the bio-production process, which means selecting the optimal mode in which nutrients are supplied to the cells in the bioreactor. According to Ark, there are four primary methods for providing nutrients to cells in the bioreactor (batch, fed-batch, perfusion, and continuous), and the choice of the technique involves tradeoffs in capital expense vs. ongoing cost of goods sold.

Bigger Bioreactors

The most significant capital expense in cultivated meat production is the bioreactor, those giant metal vats which grow cultivated meat. While larger bioreactors have larger price tags, the capital cost per unit of cultivated meat decreases as production volume increases. Factoring in that the costs of running a bioreactor are largely fixed, the short-short is that bigger bioreactors mean lower prices per pound of meat produced.

The analysis concludes that to get to pricing that approaches the commodified price of traditional ground beef, a combination of improvements (i.e., lever adjustments) is needed. Exhibit 1 shows how much progress each lever will contribute to reducing the cost per pound of cultivated meat.

It goes without saying that Ark has a significant amount of self-interest in arriving at these conclusions. Still, from what I can see, the analysis is a reasonably thoughtful assessment of what drives the costs of cultivated meat and where the industry needs to go to lower the price per pound.

Of course, they go into much greater detail in the full report, so I’d suggest those interested check it out.

MIT & NVIDIA Researchers Are Building Tech That Could Enable Better Kitchen-Robot Precision

This week, a group of researchers from MIT and NVIDIA are showing off a system that one day may be pivotal in helping our robot chef make dinner without making a mistake.

While robotic planning systems are good at developing high-level plans, they often fail when confronted with highly-complex environments. Because of this, the group wanted to create a task-planning system that performed well in complicated scenarios with many obstacles.

The project focused on developing a task and motion planning (TAMP) algorithm to help robotic systems solve mobile manipulation problems in difficult environments. The core of the algorithm is PIGINet, which the group describes as a transformer-based learning system that, for each proposed task plan, helps the system more quickly understand the success probability of a given motion trajectory.

Today’s robotic system task planners often fail when faced with the reality of highly complex and infinitely variable real-world scenarios, getting bogged down in processing how to navigate through the unique physical geometries of their environments. The seemingly infinite variety of small things in a kitchen – random items on a counter, the different locations of a pot on a cooktop, open doors and drawers – may be easy for a human to handle but can give a robot fits. With the PIGINet transformer, the system will be able to more quickly process through and understand the success probabilities of each course of action due to the specific start state and the given obstacles within.

According to the group, the PIGINet transformer-enabled task planner gives the robot a better chance of success by better understanding the various scenarios and each’s feasibility before they are executed. Their initial experiments showed that using PIGINet substantially improves planning efficiency, cutting down runtime by 80% on problems in relatively simple scenarios and up to 50% in more complex ones.

While the group’s initial effort focused on kitchen and food-planning tasks, it believes its system can be applied to other tasks within and outside the home.

While there have been a lot of venture capital dollars and product development hours spent on developing kitchen robotics, you can see by this project and those similar to it just how early we are in developing truly advanced kitchen automation. The kitchen is one of the most complex and variable work environments, and creating a robot that doesn’t simply automate a single repeatable process is extremely difficult. With projects like this one and EPIC Kitchens, we are laying the foundation for our robot chef future.

You can watch a video on their project and how it works below:

PIGINet: Sequence-Based Plan Feasibility Prediction for Efficient Task and Motion Planning

The Spoon Weekly: The Edible Barcode

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For the last few years, there’s been lots of excitement about blockchain’s potential to finally bring end-to-end transparency to the food system. After all, once we have an incorruptible record of where food comes from, we’ll be able to track it from the time it leaves the farm until it arrives on our plate, right?

As it turns out, realizing the dream of registering our food on a decentralized ledger and getting everyone across the food system to use it is a lot harder than it sounds. Add to that the doubts that have surfaced over the past year-plus about blockchain and the broader crypto world, and web3 hasn’t really delivered on becoming the food transparency magic bullet.

But even before web3 stumbled, did it ever really have a chance to truly track our food throughout the food system? Except for maybe a cow here and there with a driver’s license, food commodities don’t usually come with digital ID cards that allow you to automatically identify its point of origin. In fact, over its lifetime, a grain of wheat may travel thousands of miles across a number of factories and kitchens until it lands on your plate. 

But what if you could insert the identification into the food itself, where the food has a unique identifier baked (or sprayed, or mixed) inside or onto that can be identified no matter where it goes along the food value chain? That’s the idea behind a form of digital tag from a company called Index Biosystems, which has developed what they call a form of invisible barcode in the form of baker’s yeast. 

The way it works is the company creates what they call a BioTag by mixing baker’s yeast in extremely trace with water, then spraying or misting it onto a product such as wheat. BioTags are incredibly sticky once applied and remain attached to the surface of the grains, withstanding the milling process while remaining detectable in flour. From here, the BioTab becomes, in a sense, an invisible bar code that the company or one of its customers can read using molecular detection techniques such as PCR and DNA sequencing.

Index Biosystems isn’t the only company working on the idea of the invisible, integrated, and edible bar code. In 2020, a group of Harvard researchers wrote about their idea for an edible “bar code,” which they described as a scalable microbial spore system that identifies object provenance in under 1 hour at meter-scale resolution. According to the researchers, the spores would be identifiable for up to three months and multiple stops down the supply chain. The year before, SafeTraces announced they’d patented a system that took DNA strands drawn from seaweed that would turn into DNA bar codes readable throughout the food supply chain. 

DNA-powered identification systems are a compelling idea for a food world in which pathogens and food-borne illnesses have become a big problem. Companies early to this space (like SafeTraces) may have been a bit early, but now, as DNA identification systems have become commonplace and tools have become accessible by almost everyone, I have to wonder if the day has arrived for the embedded edible bar code. 

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 Andy 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.”

Check out the news (and how your’s truly is involved) over on The Spoon.

We’ve Added New Speakers for our Food AI Summit!

As you may have heard, this October we’re hosting the Food AI Summit, a new event focused on how AI will transform our food system. 

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. 

We’re continuing to build a great list of speakers, and this week we’ve added longtime food AI innovator Riana Lynn of Journey Foods. Lynn joins others like Jasmin Hume of Shiru, David Lee of Inevitable Tech, and Kevin Yu of SideChef. We’ve got more great speakers on the way, including maybe you! If you think you have an interesting insight or are building something that will change the world, feel free to fill out the speaker inquiry form and let us know!

Also, if you’d like to sponsor the event, we’d also like to hear from you as well! Just fill out this form, and we’ll be in touch.

And, of course, we’d love to see you in Alameda in October! Our Spoon community is the engine that makes our events and website go, and we are excited to connect with you IRL and talk about this exciting space! If you’d like to attend, we have a special discount just for newsletter subscribers. Just enter NEWSLETTER in the coupon code when buying a ticket for $100 off an early bird ticket. 

Check out The Food AI Summit Website. You can read the full announcement on The Spoon. 

The Consumer Kitchen

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.

Read the full story on The Spoon. 

ARE YOU A SALES PRO WHO LOVES FOOD TECHNOLOGY?

If you have experience selling sponsorships for events and building multifaceted ad and brand campaigns for some of the world’s biggest food companies, we’d love to hear from you! A great opportunity to be involved in the world of food tech! Just drop us a line with a resume or link to your Linkedin, and we’ll be in touch!

Cultivated Meat

José Andrés Serves Up Cultivated Chicken in Honor of Willem van Eelen, The ‘Godfather of Cultivated Meat’
 

A couple of days after the first sale of cultivated meat this weekend in San Francisco, news of José Andrés serving up GOOD Meat on the opposite coast landed in my inbox.

According to the release, Andrés served charcoal-grilled cultivated chicken last night to a hand-picked group of diners. The dinner included cultivated chicken marinated with anticucho sauce, native potatoes, and ají Amarillo chimichurri, and precedes China Chilcano’s menu debut of the dish, which will be served weekly in limited quantities and by reservation only later this summer.

The meal was served in honor of the late Willem van Eelen, known as the “godfather of cultivated meat,” on what would have been his 100th birthday yesterday, July 4, 2023. After hearing a lecture on preserving meat, van Eelen, a WW2 prisoner of war, came up with the idea of creating meat outside of the body of an animal. Over the following decades, van Eelen would start businesses to save money to pursue this idea while working on it and filing for patents. He would pass away in 2015 at the age of 91, just two years after Dutch startup Mosa Meat would be the first to realize his idea with their cultured meat hamburger.

Read the full story on The Spoon. 

Big Week For Cultivated Meat: Dutch Government Approves Tastings, UPSIDE’s Chicken Debuts at Crenn

It’s been an eventful few days for cultivated meat.

After getting the final regulatory green light from the USDA to serve cultivated meat to U.S. consumers, UPSIDE Food’s cultivated chicken showed up on menus for the first time this weekend at Bar Crenn. The event, hosted on Saturday, July 1st, marked the first time cultivated meat has gone on sale in the U.S.

Here’s how the special menu, prepared by famed French chef Dominique Crenn, was described by the press release sent to The Spoon: Diners at this historic meal were served UPSIDE Foods’ cultivated chicken, fried in a Recado Negro-infused tempura batter and accompanied by a burnt chili aioli. Served in a handmade black ceramic vessel adorned with Mexican motifs and Crenn’s logo, the dish was beautifully garnished with edible flowers and greens sourced from Bleu Belle Farm. It reflects the global benefit that Chef Crenn sees in cultivated meat – with UPSIDE Chicken from the Bay Area in California, tempura from Japanese traditions, and an infusion of Recado Negro from Mexico’s Yucatan.

Read the full story on The Spoon.

Coffee Tech

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.

Read about Ansā’s tech on The Spoon.

The Meataverse

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.

Read about Mike’s adventure in the Meataverse over at The Spoon. 

José Andrés Serves Up Cultivated Chicken in Honor of Willem van Eelen, The ‘Godfather of Cultivated Meat’

A couple of days after the first sale of cultivated meat this weekend in San Francisco, news of José Andrés serving up GOOD Meat on the opposite coast landed in my inbox.

According to the release, Andrés served charcoal-grilled cultivated chicken last night to a hand-picked group of diners. The dinner included cultivated chicken marinated with anticucho sauce, native potatoes, and ají Amarillo chimichurri, and precedes China Chilcano’s menu debut of the dish, which will be served weekly in limited quantities and by reservation only later this summer.

The meal was served in honor of the late Willem van Eelen, known as the “godfather of cultivated meat,” on what would have been his 100th birthday yesterday, July 4, 2023. After hearing a lecture on preserving meat, van Eelen, a WW2 prisoner of war, came up with the idea of creating meat outside of the body of an animal. Over the following decades, van Eelen would start businesses to save money to pursue this idea while working on it and filing for patents. He would pass away in 2015 at the age of 91, just two years after Dutch startup Mosa Meat would be the first to realize his idea with their cultured meat hamburger.

GOOD Meat invited van Eelen’s daughter Ira and his grandson Kick (both pictured above) to the tasting.

“I am grateful that a promise my father made decades ago has come true. I’m so happy we can stop talking about it and go eat it, because tasting is believing,” said Ira van Eelen. “This is the meat we love and trust, just made in a better way.”

The sale of GOOD Meat’s cultivated chicken a day after his birthday was not the only synchronous event for the van Eelen family this week. On the same day, the government of his home country approved a ‘code of practice’ to allow tastings of cultivated meat to occur within tightly regulated environments.

Big Week For Cultivated Meat: Dutch Government Approves Tastings, UPSIDE’s Chicken Debuts at Crenn

It’s been an eventful few days for cultivated meat.

After getting the final regulatory green light from the USDA to serve cultivated meat to U.S. consumers, UPSIDE Food’s cultivated chicken showed up on menus for the first time this weekend at Bar Crenn. The event, hosted on Saturday, July 1st, marked the first time cultivated meat has gone on sale in the U.S.

Here’s how the special menu, prepared by famed French chef Dominique Crenn, was described by the press release sent to The Spoon: Diners at this historic meal were served UPSIDE Foods’ cultivated chicken, fried in a Recado Negro-infused tempura batter and accompanied by a burnt chili aioli. Served in a handmade black ceramic vessel adorned with Mexican motifs and Crenn’s logo, the dish was beautifully garnished with edible flowers and greens sourced from Bleu Belle Farm. It reflects the global benefit that Chef Crenn sees in cultivated meat – with UPSIDE Chicken from the Bay Area in California, tempura from Japanese traditions, and an infusion of Recado Negro from Mexico’s Yucatan.

Just a few days later, on July 5th, the Dutch government approved a ‘code of practice’ to allow tastings of cultivated meat to occur within tightly regulated environments, an agreement that precedes the E.U. novel food approval. The code of practice was done in consultation with Dutch cultivated meat companies Mosa Meat and Meatable, along with HollandBIO.

This agreement makes the Netherlands the first country in the European Union to make pre-approval tastings of food grown directly from animal cells possible before a broader E.U. novel food approval. Cellulaire Agricultuur Nederland, a group created to implement a €60M award from the Dutch National Growth Fund, will be responsible for implementing the code of practice, which will include the hiring of an expert panel to evaluate requests by companies to conduct tastings of cultivated meat and seafood.

In many ways, 2023 is shaping up to be a critical year for cultivated meat, as governments seem to finally be comfortable with producing meat in giant metal vats. With approval in hand, companies like UPSIDE and Mosa Meat will continue to work on scaling up to larger production plants and creating lower-cost and ever-more climate-friendly techniques for producing meat in bioreactors.

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.