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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Personalized Food

Food Tech News: Nestlé’s Plant-based Partnerships and a Kroger Podcast

Happy winter weekend, all. Hopefully wherever you are has some fresh Snow, clear skies, or a fire in the fireplace. One thing it definitely has: some food tech news.

In this week’s roundup we have stories on Nestlé’s new plant-based partnerships, a fresh podcast from Kroger, and a personalized nutrition report. Enjoy!

Nestlé partners with Canadian plant-based ingredient makers
It looks like Nestlé has taken another step into the alternative protein space. This week the New York Times reported that the Swiss CPG company has teamed up with two Canadian plant-based ingredient manufacturers: Burcon and Merit Functional Foods. The deal will give Nestlé new resources to expand and improve its alternative protein products, such as the soy- and wheat-based Incredible burgers which are currently available in Europe.

Kroger unveils new podcast “Noshtalgia“
For those who love their podcasts with a side of groceries, there’s a new option to add to the listening queue. Kroger has launched a podcast called Noshtalgia which features stories of people sharing their food memories (h/t GroceryDive). Hosted by cookbook author and TV personality Danielle Kartes, the podcast is intended as a medium for people to share their favorite family recipes — and, ya know, promote a place to buy the ingredients for said recipes (cough, Kroger, cough). The first episode, “Poppy’s Waldorf Salad,” is already live wherever you get your podcasts.

Report indicates huge potential for personalized nutrition
This week USB released a report stating that personalized nutrition could generate annual revenues of $64 billion by 2040 (via CNBC). The report calls out big-name companies, like Uber and Amazon, who should be investing more in the space.

There’s a ton of buzz around this topic, which is why we’re organizing a food personalization summit in NYC next month! Called Customize, the event will feature speakers in CPG, grocery, restaurants, and more talking about how they’re harnessing personalization to create the future of food. If you’d like to join use code SPOON15 to get 15 percent off tickets!

The Complete CES 2020 Kitchen Tech Report

At this year’s big tech show in Vegas, there was no shortage of food tech. Everything from Impossible Pork to robot cooking assistants were on display, and so after spending five days in the desert checking out the latest and greatest, here’s my wrap-up of everything I saw in kitchen tech at the show:

Lots of Smart Fridges

It may be hard to believe in 2020, but Internet connected fridges have been showing up at CES for two decades. Of course, with powerful machine vision and food inventory tracking systems, today’s smart fridges are a lot more useful than these attempts from yesteryear even if they’ve yet to be widely adopted.

Some of the companies showing off smart fridge tech at this year’s CES included LG, Samsung, Bosch and GE. Bosch showed off a two-camera smart fridge powered by Chefling, a partnership that shouldn’t be all that surprising given BSH Appliances’ investment in the smart kitchen software startup.

LG’s latest smart fridge, which includes the popular Instaview transparent front door feature, now reorders food when inventory gets low. Samsung’s latest smart fridges use Whisk technology (a company they acquired last year) to suggest recipes based off of your in-fridge inventory. Smarter was also in Vegas at FoodTech Live showing off their retrofit fridge cam.

Home Grow Systems Get a Look

For the first time at CES, big appliance brands showed interest in allowing home grow systems to take root in the kitchen. Both Samsung’s BeSpoke grow system and the LG’s system were evolved proof of concepts that utilized sensors and allowed the home gardener to monitor the status of their plants within the form factor of a standup fridge.

GE’s Home Grown took the home farm out of the fridge and made the entire kitchen a multilayered food grow system. You can watch a video of a booth demo of the concept below:

CES 2020: A Tour of 'Home Grown', the GE Appliances Garden Kitchen Concept

All of the grow systems on display by big appliance brands were more proof of concepts than shipping products. I’ll be interested to see if any of them roll out these products in the next year. Of all the systems, the Samsung Bespoke home grow systems seemed to be the closest to a market-ready product.

Intelligent And Adaptive Surfaces

One of the big trends sweeping food tech is personalization, so why not apply the principle of personalization to our physical space as well? GE did just that with a concept called Shift, an adaptable kitchen that, well, shifts to adapt to each person’s specific requirements. The idea isn’t new. The first winner of the Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase, a German startup called Tielsa (now KimoCon), makes an app-controlled, adjustable kitchen platform that adjusts the height of the surface space to the specific user.

The Wireless Power Consortium had a full kitchen built out at CES 2020, showing off how their Ki kitchen standard using induction heating and wireless charging worked. Speaking of induction, one of the most innovative entries in intelligent surfaces at CES 2020 was from design firm GHSP, who showed off technology for a video-enabled induction cooktop. I know Americans are in love with their fire cooking, but hopefully new ideas like this will generate interest in what is clearly a superior (and flexible) technology in induction. You can check out a quick video of GHSP’s concept below:

Drink Tech Was EVERYWHERE

Drinks have always been a little easier to serve up in the future kitchen than cooking technology, and this year was no different as we saw well over a dozen next-gen beer, booze, coffee and tea machines sprinkled around the show floor.

On the booze front, CES 2020 had offerings from Drinkworks and Bartesian, while on the beerbot side, we saw offerings from PicoBrew, BEERMKR, MiniBrew and INTHEKEG to name a few. Noticeably absent was LG’s HomeBrew, the automated beer making appliance concept they debuted a year ago at CES 2019.

When it comes to coffee tech, longtime Spoon readers shouldn’t be surprised at my excitement over seeing a working production model of the Spinn coffee maker, a product I’ve been covering since I pre-ordered one way back in 2016 (we’ll have a video of the Spinn later this week). Terra Kaffe had a TK-01 on hand at FoodTech Live to demo the machine’s grind and brew (and milk frothing) capabilities, while MoJoe Brewing was showing off its portable coffee making system.

You can watch Chris’s interview with Spinn CEO Roderick de Rode and take a look inside the Spinn in the video below:

CES 2020: A Look at the Spinn Grind and Brew Coffee Maker

DNA & Microbiome Driven Diets

With DNA testing now fast and affordable, it’s not all that surprising to see offshoot concepts that capitalize on the information provided by a person’s profile. One of CES’s most buzzy startups in this space was DNANudge, a French company that is offering a wearable that tells a person whether that CPG product they picked up in the grocery store is a good fit for them. On the microbiome front, Sun Genomics was at FoodTech Live to show off its personalized microbiome kit.

Food Waste Reduction & Sustainability

One area that has traditionally lacked innovation is in the management of food waste in the home. While we still didn’t see a whole lot around food waste prevention tech outside of ever-more-advanced machine vision making its way into our fridges, there was a scrappy Canadian startup was showing off a cool new concept for home composting. The Sepura, made by British Columbia based Anvytech, automatically routes your solids into a food compost bin and disposes of your liquids.

You can see CNET’s video tour of the Sepura composter below:

Food Inventory Management

In addition to a number of food recognizing fridges, there are also a few other products on display showcasing how we could better manage our food. The Ovie smart food tracking system was on display at FoodTech Live, while a new entrant into the smart food tracking space, PantryOn, showed off a new dry pantry tracking system that will notify you and reorder an item when the product is low. While the PantryOn is a bit pricey with a retail price of $900, I am glad to see some companies think about innovating in the pantry.

Smart Schnozzes

Long-term, more intelligent sensors – and the software and AI that stitches together all the information gathered from these technologies – are going to make the kitchen truly sentient, which is why I always make sure to check out the new digital nose technologies every year while at CES.

While there was no shortage of electronic noses at CES this year, one digital schnoz that stuck out Cyrano de Bergerac-style was that from Stratuscent. The company’s technology, originally developed by NASA, can be used in a variety of verticals, but the company’s initial focus is food applications. Company CEO David Wu told me they are currently talking to appliance manufacturers about the possibility of including Stratuscent tech in their products.

Countertop Cooking

On the counterop cooking front, Anova was at CES showing off its Precision Oven, which is slated to appear sometime this year. The company was demoing the benefits of steam throughout the show, including showing off how steam can help make much better bread. You can watch a walkthrough of the Anova oven from food tech innovator Scott Heimendinger below, who has been helping Anova with the oven.

CES 2020: A Look at the Anova Precision Steam Oven

One product that seemed to get lots of buzz at CES was a multicooker called Julia from CookingPal. The device looks and acts in large part like a Thermomix, with the main difference being a separate touch screen interface in the form of a 8.9″ display. The touch screen has a camera on it that, according CookingPal, will recognize food and suggest recipes. From there, the Julia offers video-powered guided cooking, and afterwards has a self-clean mode.

Cooking Robots

Much like big appliance brands caught home garden fever, many also seemed bitten by the food robotics bug. Chris covered much of what was on display, most of which struck me as futuristic visions of how robotics could be implemented in a consumer or professional kitchen to make our lives easier. Not that futuristic or far off is a bad thing – what seemed crazy ten years ago often seems pedestrian in the present, and I expect at some point some of these products will be commercialized.

One that’s worth a look is the Samsung Bot Chef. While a bit reminiscent of the Moley robot arm kitchen robot, the Samsung bot’s fine motor movements and handling of kitchen utensils was impressive, suggesting that maybe a home robot chef isn’t as far off as I might think.

Samsung Bot Chef first look at CES 2020

Key Takeaways

When I was doing my research on what to expect at this year’s CES for foodtech, I was surprised at some of the big ideas that were debuting at the show.

While CES normally is where gee-whiz technology debuts, this year appliance and home brands seemed to thinking bigger with concepts that could potentially solve real-world problems like reduce food waste or help those with special needs.

There also seemed to be a big focus, generally, on the kitchen as a place to employ cutting edge technologies ranging from AI, robotics, virtual reality and more. Big appliance, it seems, has realized what we’ve long believed: the kitchen is the heart of the home.

Finally, it seems personalization is grabbing hold in a big way. Everything from personalized nutrition to physical cooking spaces to meal plans is on the menu, something that I think aligns well with the broader push towards more personalized worlds in this era of data abundance.

We’ll be continuing the conversation about personalization at Customize, our Food Personalization Summit, in NYC on Feb 27th. Join us!

Taco Bell Promotes More Menu Personalization With Certona Partnership

Taco Bell announced a partnership today with tech company Certona to use the latter’s platform to improve personalization for Taco Bell customers. Registered users of Taco Bell’s mobile app will be able to access more personalized recommendations and offers when ordering, according to the press announcement. 

Using Certona’s AI-powered “personalization suite,” Taco Bell will be able to pull data on things like a customer’s past orders, dietary preferences and favorite items as well as outside factors like weather and a user’s location. It can then use that information to make more relevant menu recommendations and upsell suggestions. 

The idea is to make it easier for customers to re-order favorites and also find new items that match their dietary preferences and restrictions. 

It’s also a way for Taco Bell to drive more orders through its mobile app and increase its overall digital business — a must for QSR chains in today’s increasingly tech-forward industry. For Taco Bell, the Certona partnership will likely improve the overall user experience for pick-up orders, where a customer orders via the app then collects the food themselves. 

Delivery is another story. Right now, Taco Bell customers can only order food for delivery via Grubhub, which means going into the third-party delivery service’s app and using their technology — not Taco Bell’s or Certona’s. That would seemingly limit the number of digital users Taco Bell can reach with the Certona integration. Though for all we know, the chain may have plans up its sleeve to eventually roll out a hybrid delivery strategy, as other fast food chains have done recently.

Taco Bell said nil about its delivery strategy in today’s press release. However, a hybrid strategy that makes it easier for registered Taco Bell users to access delivery — and therefore better personalization through Certona’s technology — from within Taco Bell’s own digital properties.

Regardless of whether Taco Bell pursues that strategy, today’s news certainly underscores the increasingly important role personalization plays when it comes to restaurant menus both off-premises and in the dining room. McDonald’s sent that trend mainstream last year when it acquired AI tech company Dynamic Yield to make its drive-thru menus more “Netflix-y.” Others have followed, from Starbucks to Chili’s, which announced earlier today a partnership with Presto to bring personalization right to customers’ tables.

Want more info on food personalization? Join us in NYC for The Spoon’s first-ever Customize event, taking place on February 27, 2020.

CES 2020: DNANudge Guides Your Grocery Shopping Based Off of Your DNA

Unless you’re a nutritionist or really adept at reading nutrition labels, it can be tricky to tell which brands of peanuts/chocolate/crackers are healthiest for you. Especially when grocery stores offer dozens and dozens of SKUs for every possible food item.

With DNANudge, a London-based personalized nutrition startup, the key to optimizing your grocery shopping is on your wrist. The company’s app links up with wearable bands which scan CPG products and give you real-time feedback on whether they’re a good fit for you to eat — or not.

We stopped by DNANudge’s booth at CES 2020 to get a tour of how it works. First you send off a saliva sample to the company’s HQ in Covent Garden, London. DNANudge analyzes your DNA to give you a breakdown of your nutritional profile — sensitive to salt, low risk of diabetes, etc. — which is available via the company’s app. (Your sample is then destroyed.) The app also connects to DNANudge’s wearable armbands, available online or in its London retail store. 

Then the fun begins. You can scan the barcodes of edible CPG products with the armband, which will either flash green (a good match for your biology) or red (not so much). After the band flashes, you can check on the app to get a more detailed breakdown of why the food is/isn’t a fit for you, and also get recommendations for products that might be a better match. Which kind of makes me wonder why the armband is even necessary — couldn’t you just scan all the products with your phone? Though I guess it looks #fashion and saves you the step of pulling out your phone, if you just want a quick yes/no in the grocery aisle.

Speaking on the CES show floor, DNANudge’s co-founder and CEO Chris Toumazou told me that he started the company in 2015 to empower people to eat healthier. “If you want to eat a biscuit, you’re going to eat a biscuit,” he explained to me. “But you can eat the best biscuit for your biology.”

DNANudge’s scanning currently works with all CPG SKU’s in major U.K. supermarkets, except for Marks & Spencer. The entire system — DNA test, wearable, and app — is currently available in the U.K. for 120 pounds ($158). Toumazou told me that they were planning to launch in the U.S. soon, possibly in L.A. He estimates that the system will retail for $120 stateside.

Personalized nutrition — either based off of DNA or gut microbiomes — has become quite a trend lately. Viome and Sun Genomics make dietary and supplement recommendations based off of your microbiome. The most similar offering to DNANudge is GenoPalate, which also uses a saliva swab to map DNA and make suggestions about which foods people should eat. However, GenoPalate doesn’t have the wearable aspect, so it can’t make recommendations on a case-by-case basis like DNANudge does.

There’s no doubt that more people want more personalized dietary guides, but how exactly to do that — and protect consumer data — is still unclear. If you’re curious this emerging space you should come to Customize, our food personalization summit on February 27th in New York City. See you there!

Will 2020 Be the Year Truly Personalized Food Becomes a Reality? (Sort of.)

You’re almost certainly already used to customizing your food to some degree. Maybe you get extra guac at Chipotle, or leave off the mayo on your drive-thru burgers. You might even use platforms like Innit to easily substitute ingredients when cooking at home.

But the era of truly personalized food — exactly what you want (or need), and nothing you don’t — has yet to come. And advancements in AI, data, and food science are helping us get there.

2020 is the time for personalization to mature and become more than just a gimmick. I see a few high-potential spaces in which personalization has the opportunity to really grow over the next year (or two): drive-thrus, sit-down restaurants, and dietary guidance.

When it comes to personalization in fast-food, McDonald’s is the clear leader. Earlier this year the QSR giant acquired Dynamic Yield, a personalization platform which it’s using to tailor menu recommendations based off of things like weather, time of day, etc.

But what Dynamic Yield brings to Mickey D’s isn’t real personalization, per se. The software can customize menus based on external factors— if it’s cold out, maybe you’d like a piping hot cup of coffee? — but it doesn’t pull from customer data to create menus actually drawn from individual preferences, dietary restraints, or allergies. And as the Spoon founder Mike Wolf pointed out earlier this year, true menu personalization is the holy grail for dining establishments.

That holy grail might be closer than we think, however. Startup 5Thru‘s tech will scan people’s license plates to access their past orders, which it uses to suggest your favorite foods. KFC is testing out similar tech. The fast-food space in general is investing heavily in personalization, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we see lots of individual players accelerating their efforts in 2020 to try and smoke the competition.

Non-fast-food restaurants are also trying to leverage personalization to improve the consumer dining experience (and, you know, sell you more stuff). Suggestic and THE.FIT are developing tools to generate personalized versions of restaurant menus based on consumers’ dietary goals and restrictions. That sort of customization also extends to in-restaurant experiences; this year OpenTable and Upserve partnered to share guest data so restaurant employees can have pre-warning about their preferences, allergies, etc.

As these sorts of tech become more commonplace and affordable, restaurants will only get more personalized in 2020. I’m betting over the next twelve months that in-restaurant menu customization apps like Suggestic and THE.FIT will become, while not commonplace, at least more widely available. On the digital search side I could also envision Google Maps, which already surfaces restaurants’ most popular dishes during searches, displaying customized sample menus based off of your customized dietary profile.

2020 could also be the year that personalized nutrition becomes more mainstream. Viome and GenoPalate already create customized food and recipe recommendations based on your microbiome and DNA, respectively, to help fight preventable diseases. As these technologies become more widespread and affordable, we might even see these services integrating with restaurants to help you see which menu items best suit your diet and/or avoid triggering foods.

True, that might not happen in the next twelve months. But we will no doubt see more vaguely customized products like Nourished, which creates individualized 3D printed vitamins. That sort of generalized personalization also extends to things like baby food and wine delivery. While these offerings are based off of broader markets like age and preferences, not data as granular as your microbiome makeup, they indicate a real effort by companies to take a step in that direction and offer customized CPG products, typically delivered right to your doorstep.

It’s also worth acknowledging the potential pushback against personalization. Creating things like highly customized menus and restaurant recommendations necessitates massive amounts of personal data, which could have frightening consequences if that data gets hacked. Despite those risks, I have no doubt that companies will keep pursuing the personalization trend into 2020 and beyond.

That said, we’ve got a ways to go until we reach a truly personalized dining future. I don’t think that by December 31st, 2020 we’ll be able to go to a drive-thru and see menus sporting all of our favorite dishes thanks to info it gleaned from your dietary profile. But it might remember you love the Buffalo sauce with your chicken nuggets — and that’s a start.

We’re so interested in the potential (and challenges) of food personalization that we created a whole summit around it! Join us at Customize in NYC on February 27th — Early Bird tickets are on sale for a few more days.

Yumi Raises $8M for Weekly Baby Food Delivery Service

Today Yumi, the organic food delivery service for babies and kids, announced it has raised an $8 million strategic round from the founders and CEOs of Warby Parker, Sweetgreen, Uber, and more. This brings the L.A.-based startup’s total funding to $12.1 million.

Founded in 2017, Yumi delivers weekly subscription-based shipments of baby food tailored to meet each child’s specific growth stage and any special dietary needs. The company works with doctors, nutritionists and chefs to develop each of their 70 blended and solid baby foods. Additionally, Yumi sends parents educational info and tips tailored to each kid’s age and developmental stage, as well as previous food orders via the service. Customers can choose subscription plans for one, two or three meals a day, which shakes out to around $5 per meal. Meals are shipped nationwide every week and shipping is free.

Yumi will use its new capital to expand nationally and further develop its proprietary personalized meal planning software.

The average baby food found on supermarket shelves is unappetizing, shelf-stable mush, so it’s no surprise that Yumi is trying to shake up the space with fresh ingredients and D2C delivery. But they’re not alone. Little Spoon and Nurture Life also deliver personalized pre-made baby food. On the more DIY side, Raised Real and Thistle Baby deliver pre-prepped ingredients meant to be steamed and blended at home (though the latter is not currently accepting new customers).

I’m guessing that Yumi is hoping that its data-driven meal customization, as well as its supplementary educational content, is enough to help it stand (er, crawl) out from the crowd. Perhaps its new $8 million in funding will help them do so.

It’s Personal: Nourished 3D Prints Vitamins Tailored Exactly to Your Needs

If you’re like me, when shopping for vitamins you might pick up whatever’s on sale. After all, vitamins are mostly one-size-fits-all, right?

British startup Nourished would very much disagree. The Birmingham, U.K.-based company is trying to shake up the supplement space by using 3D printing technology to create personalized vitamins made specifically for you.

First you answer a short questionnaire on the Nourished website describing your lifestyle, health issues and nutrition goals. Nourished’s algorithm then builds you a unique “stack” out of their 28 “nourishments.” (You can also build your own stack if you already know what ingredients you want.) The company then 3D prints bespoke, layered vitamins just for you out of vegan gel — which end up looking like rainbow gummy candy — and deliver to your door every month.

Why 3D print the vitamins? According to Nourished’s Head of Brand, Caitlin Stanley, manufacturing supplements via 3D printing opens up a whole new world of personalization possibilities. Typically, active ingredients that show up in vitamins — like ashwagandha and Vitamin A — interfere with each other when combined into the same capsule. However, by printing these ingredients on top of each other, Nourished can fuse them into the same bite-sized supplement.

Each Nourished box comes with 28 stacks meant to be taken once a day. The vitamins are individually packaged “to maintain efficacy,” according to Stanley, who added that the packaging is compostable.

Photo: Nourished

If there’s one thing that might put people off of Nourished, it’s the price. The service costs £39.99 (~ $51.00) a month, which is significantly more than your average vitamin bottle off the pharmacy shelf. However, the cost is on par with other personalized D2C vitamin services, like Care/Of.

When I asked about competitors, Stanley was adamant that Nourished is the only company out there right now creating a truly personalized supplement. Care/Of basically just aggregates a variety of pills into a single pouch, while Nourished actually combines all of the ingredients into a bespoke bite-size supplement made specifically for the individual.

Nourished just launched a little over six weeks ago, so it’s in the very early stages. Right now it’s only shipping in the U.K. However, Stanley told me that the company plans to head to the U.S. in 2020. The company has raised a seed round for an undisclosed amount and currently has a team of twenty-five.

Personalization is a hot trend in the food space right now. Consumers want all aspects of their diet tailored to their exact preferences, from recipes to drive-thru orders to the foam topping your craft cocktail. But when it comes to health and nutrition, customization should be “first and foremost,” said Stanley. We’ll see if Nourished’s 3D printing strategy can help them be first and foremost in the personalized vitamin space, too.

If you’re interested in what’s coming next in personalized nutrition, you’ve got to be at Customize. The one-day event in New York City will explore the world of food personalization throughout the meal journey. Grab your Early Bird ticket before they’re all sold out!

Newsletter: Personalization in a Tech-centric Food Era, Plus Food Tech Hacks for Your Thanksgiving Prep

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Customizing our food is a decades-old practice we’ve come to expect if not outright demand when it comes to the way we eat. Fast-casual chains like Chipotle and Sweetgreen are built on the idea of each person customizing a meal to their specific eating needs. Most of us will to some degree customize the traditional Thanksgiving spread tomorrow, using plant-based ingredients in place of meat or maybe even turning the whole meal into a bowl of ramen. Meanwhile, there are reportedly 87,000 ways to order a drink at Starbucks. Can our food and beverage consumption get any more customizable. 

Yes, actually, and largely thanks to tech. As we discuss often at The Spoon, apps and other tools powered by AI and machine learning, big data and analytics, as well as food science and research are making it possible to customize our food  right down to our DNA. That includes food not only at restaurants or holiday feasts, but also with our daily meals and snacks, our dietary needs and restrictions, and even our grocery shopping lists. 

Customizing and personalizing our food through tech, however, is a relatively new practice. While some standardization is beginning to occur — notably in the QSR drive-thru lane — this space is right now a pretty fragmented one, with many ideas and solutions but no clear idea yet as to how they come together to help us eat smarter and enjoy our food at the same time.

That’s why we created Customize, a one-day executive summit slated to take place on February 27 in NYC. During the one-day event, which will be held at WeWork’s 85 Broad St. space, The Spoon will examine topics from the world of food personalization, including microbiome-based nutrition, AI-powered grocery recommendations, new developments in CPG products, and much more.

We’re already got a great lineup of speakers to talk about the impact of personalization in the grocery store, at the restaurant table and in our own kitchens, and we’re adding more every week so make sure to check them out!

Want to learn more? Head over to The Spoon Publisher Mike Wolf’s post introducing the event, then grab tickets before they sell out (which they will).

Nutrition is one area where customization is going to be huge, and indeed is already showing up via apps and websites that help users determine the kinds of foods they should be eating and plan out meals and diets.

Trouble is, it’s one thing to download an app that promises to help you eat healthier. It’s another to actually take the time to track the food you’re eating and determine whether it has any actual nutritional value in your life (hey, iceberg lettuce).

That’s where companies like Foodvisor come in. As my colleague Chris Albrecht noted recently, the French nutritional coaching app startup lets users simply snap a picture of their food then, using computer vision and deep learning, the app analyzes it and auto-creates a nutritional report of the food. The company just raised $4.5 million in fresh funds, and it’s one of a growing number of food-tracking apps out there. Another notable example is Bite.ai’s app, which also offers consumers visual food tracking through their smartphones.

Getting consumers to actually change out unhealthy eating habits for smarter ones is, of course, a whole other mountain to tackle, and one we’ll be discussing more of at Customize. 

Last-Minute Food Tech Hacks for Thanksgiving

Of course you may have more immediate concerns around customization, like how in the heck you’re going to get dinner on the table on time and with every dish at the right temperatures.

Fear not. Chris put together this handy guide that highlights a few pieces of connected-kitchen gear that could make your cooking easier, some of which you can still grab before your Thanksgiving cooking commences.

Finally, if you are planning on going to CES and are looking to explore some food tech in Vegas, make sure to check our Food Tech Live event. If you want to showcase your product at FTL drop us a line, and if you want to attend you can request a ticket here.

Feast responsibly,

Jenn

Introducing Customize, the Food Personalization Summit

If you live in the U.S., odds are you have Thanksgiving on the mind this week. Though many T-Day menus feature the same classic rolodex of dishes — turkey, cranberries, stuffing, etc. — each spread is slightly personalized to reflect the preferences of the chef and guests.

But personalization goes well beyond what’s on the holiday dinner table. In fact, we here at The Spoon believe breakthrough discoveries in food science, artificial intelligence, micro-manufacturing and other critical areas will lay the foundation for a food system that will be radically reshaped by personalization over the next decade.

However, even as the era of one-sized-fits-all food comes to an end, the conversation in the space is pretty fragmented. While everyone knows that personalization is the goal, they’re not exactly sure how to make it happen.

Which is why we created Customize, a one-day executive summit that will explore the impact of personalization across the food system. Customize will take place in New York City on February 27th at WeWork’s awesome 85 Broad St. space in NYC’s Financial District. (WeWork Food Labs is our awesome event partner for Customize.) 

Throughout the day we will examine topics from the food personalization space, including microbiome-based nutrition, AI-powered grocery recommendations, CPG development and more. 

To help create an amazing day of conversation, we’ve already recruited a star-studded lineup of speakers, including:

And that’s just the beginning. We’re adding more speakers every week, so be sure to check back regularly for updates. If you are building something world-changing in the area of food personalization, drop us a line or fill out our information form on the Customize website and let us know!

Tickets absolutely will sell out — get your Early Bird pass now before prices go up on December 31.

Finally, if your company has something interesting cooking in the world of personalization and you would like to be a sponsor for Customize, let us know!

We’re super excited to bring you this new event and look forward to exploring the world of food personalization with you in February.

See you in New York!

French Nutritional Coaching App Foodvisor Raises $4.5M

Foodvisor, a nutrition assistant app that aims to help people eat better, announced today that it has raised $4.5 million from the VC fund Agrinnovation (operated by Demeter) along with other angel investors. With this round, Foodvisor has raised $5.3 million to date.

Foodvisor creates an AI-powered food diary that allows users to keep track of what they eat. The app uses a combination of computer vision and deep learning so that all a user need do is snap a picture of the food they are eating. Foodvisor can then identify the food on the plate, serving size and create a detailed nutritional report. Foodvisor says its app can identify 1,200 different food items and is constantly learning new ones.

The company says it will use the new money to accelerate growth in the United States where, the Foodvisor CEO makes a point to say in the press announcement emailed to The Spoon, that “70% of the Americans are overweight or obese.” Foodvisor says that currently 20 percent of its user base comes from the U.S.

They say that you lose weight in the kitchen and get fit at the gym. Keeping track of what you eat is a good first step for anyone looking to shed a few pounds and get healthier. Foodvisor isn’t the only app that uses your smartphone camera to help make food journaling easier. Bite.ai offers a free consumer app as well as an API that other business can tap into to for similar food recognition services.

Foodvisor offers a free app for iOS and Android as well as premium version that offers more personalized advice and recommendations for a monthly subscription that costs from $4.99 to $6.99.

SideChef Launches Guided Cooking Integration With Bixby, Samsung’s AI Assistant

This week, SideChef announced an integration with Samsung’s intelligent voice assistant Bixby. The partnership centers around the launch of a voice-activated guided cooking capsule (capsules are Samsung’s equivalent to Amazon Alexa skills) which will give users of Bixby-powered mobile phones access to approximately 15 thousand recipes, most with step-by-step video-powered cooking instructions.

From the news release:

“Users can hone in on the exact recipe they would like by adding natural language constraints, such as dietary restriction, cuisine type, and even specific ingredients. Once a recipe is selected, SideChef provides video instruction through Bixby to guide home cooks through the entire recipe preparation process, from start to finish.”

While Samsung’s voice assistant doesn’t quite have the same degree of loyal usership as, say, Google Assistant on mobile phones or Amazon Alexa in the home, it is installed on a whole lot of Samsung products. Last year Samsung CEO D.J. Koh declared that the company’s AI assistant could reach a total of 500 million devices if it were to be installed on every Samsung device.

Of course, to reach that massive audience, SideChef’s new capsule would then have to be installed by the consumer, who will be able to find it on the Bixby Marketplace (Samsung’s “app store” for Bixby Capsules). Samsung launched the marketplace in mid-2019, and the newness of the store may actually play to SideChef’s advantage as theirs is probably one of the few recipe-centric voice apps and most likely the only guided cooking capsule on the still relatively bare shelves of the Bixby marketplace.

This move comes a year after SideChef launched on Amazon’s video-enabled Alexa devices, the Alexa Echo Show and Echo Spot, and just a couple months after the smart kitchen software startup announced an integration with Haier’s smart fridges at IFA 2019. While it isn’t immediately clear if the Bixby integration will put SideChef on Samsung Family Hub refrigerators, I would expect that will happen sooner rather than later.

Finally, while SideChef continues to rack up appliance partnerships, the company is also beginning to explore partnerships with big CPG brands. Last month the startup partnered with Bacardi through its Alexa integration to enable step-by-step drink mixing.  This trend of food brands integrating with smart kitchen software platforms isn’t limited to SideChef, as SideChef competitor Innit announced a partnership in September with Mars through a Google Lens integration that will enable both guided cooking and personalized meal and nutrition recommendations.

SKS 2019: How Data Can Help You Live Longer — and Drink Better Cocktails

You might think that in order to make a perfect cocktail or figure out your healthiest foods, you need to channel the mind of a mixologist or nutritionist. But what if it’s more useful to get into the head of a data scientist, instead?

That’s what Marc Drucker and Jacques Moore of Drinkworks, which makes an automated countertop cocktail and beer making machine, and Victor Penev of Edamam, the company putting a data layer on the Internet of Food, spoke about on the SKS 2019 stage earlier this month.

Penev argued that dietary behavior change is difficult; people don’t like working hard to figure out how to eat better. At Edamam, he and his team are figuring out ways to leverage data to help you figure out what to eat, and then get that food to your kitchen without any added work for the consumer. “It’s a no-brainer solution,” Penev told the SKS audience.

The Drinkworks team is taking that level of personalized convenience and applying it to one of our favorite things: cocktails. The company wanted to create a countertop drinks machine that would be different than anything else on the market. To figure out what that would look like, they turned to data — what people want to drink, what times of day they’re drink it, and how exactly they want those beverages to taste. “Data really is the key to our product development,” said Drucker. “Probably much more so than the traditional ethnographic interview systems we used the first time around.”

Check out the video below to learn how companies are harnessing Big Data to make kitchen products that can do everything from improve your Happy Hour to figure out how to make you eat healthy enough to live to 120 years old. It’s an awesome, nerdy conversation that will make you appreciate just how many numbers go into kitchen product development.