Interesting news out of IFT First this week, the food scientist expo in Chicago, where the longtime trade association announced its own AI tool called CoDeveloper. According to the announcement, CoDeveloper is a platform built for food scientists by food scientists, offering a suite of AI-powered tools to help them formulate new products, reverse-engineer existing…
In the early 90s, Amy Taylor had dreams of Olympic gold as an elite track and field athlete. Back then, she never could have predicted she’d spend the bulk of her career in the beverage business. But after moving to Atlanta (where the Olympics were to take place in 1996) and working for a short…
Early stress detection via precision agriculture just got a serious upgrade, according to new research out of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Led by Dr. Ittai Herrmann, the team developed a drone-based platform that blends hyperspectral, thermal, and RGB imaging with powerful deep learning technology to precisely identify nitrogen and water deficiencies in sesame crops.…
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Imagine scanning a tuna steak in your fridge and suddenly a tiny laser pulse beams an expiration date or, surprise, tells you it’s not really wild-caught. That’s no longer a sci‑fi: new research from a group of academic researchers from the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece published…
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At this year’s ReFED Summit in Seattle, Andrew Shakman was in a reflective mood. When asked about the state of the food waste reduction movement, the Leanpath CEO, who has spent more than two decades fighting food waste, compared the moment we’re in to the second act of a three-act play. “If we go back…
For most of us, the food system isn’t a distant farm or a produce distribution center. It’s the grocery store. We push carts through brightly lit aisles where abstract forces—supply chains, agricultural policy, consumer trends—become tangible reality. The supermarket is where the nation’s entire food apparatus converges in a single, accessible arena. The grocery store…
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In 2018, when I saw a company called Silo launch a crowdfunding campaign for a modern food storage system – essentially Tupperware for the digital age – I couldn’t resist. I pulled out my credit card and backed it. Little did I know it would take nearly a decade for the product to show up…
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Sustainable, healthy foods won’t win through guilt trips alone—they need to be irresistible. Flavor is the most powerful force in our food system. Not nutrition labels, not health claims, not environmental impact. It’s flavor. It’s the gravitational force that decides what we eat, what gets produced, and what companies make billions from. You know how…
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While most companies across the food value chain are embracing AI in some form, one major player that’s been notably quiet is Starbucks. From mobile ordering to Web3 experiments, and computer vision-powered bioauthentication to automated drink-making, the Seattle-based coffee giant has never shied away from tooting its own hard about tech-forward initiatives. But when it…
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While we’ve all become accustomed to battery-powered vehicles transporting us around town, the idea of battery-powered appliances is still a relatively new concept to most consumers. But slowly but surely, startups making appliances with batteries built-in are jumping through the necessary hoops to bring these products to market in mainstream channels that will expose them…
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Mesh Gelman didn’t set out to build a cold coffee company. In fact, when he left his role leading innovation at Starbucks, he didn’t want anything to do with coffee. “I was interested in the left side of my email address and not the right side, the Gellman part, not the Starbucks part,” he told…