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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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The EPIC-KITCHENS Project is Building a Foundation For Artificial Intelligence in the Kitchen

From the post in 2018:

The ultimate goal behind EPIC-KITCHENS is to create an open dataset about kitchen-centric objects, behavior, and interactions upon which researchers across the world can then focus their deep-learning algorithms on in the hope of advancing artificial intelligence in the kitchen.

Since those early days, the project has continued to progress, recently releasing a newly expanded dataset and publishing the results from the second annual challenge. The first research challenge, completed in 2019, was focused researchers building models that can recognize actions in the kitchen. The recently completed challenge focused on action anticipation, where they asked researchers to predict what action would take place after one second of video.

Researchers who competed in the most research challenge include teams from a variety of universities spanning the globe from Cambridge to Georgia to Singapore as well as some corporate research labs such as the AI team from Facebook.

I recently caught up with the resesarch lead for EPIC-KITCHENS, Dr. Dima Damen from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, who told me that the various research teams competing used a variety of approaches to help make their systems better at recognizing and predicting actions based on the information from the video.

“There are some people who’ve used audio,” said Damen. “So they’ve used the audio from the video to identify something like opening the tap versus closing the tap. Traditionally, computer vision has relied on just images without like videos without sound.”

“There are some people who looked on a very big set of things, at what happened the past minute, because that’s helping them. And there are people who said, ‘no, I’ll focus on the objects, like where the hand is, where the object is, that’s a better approach.'”

For the next set of challenges, the group is providing a newly expanded set of data and asking them to focus on things such as “test of time”, where they ask if models trained two years ago still perform well and “scalabilty,” where they will have researchers look at whether more data is better.

Part of the expanded data will be a newly broadened dataset called EPIC-KITCHEN-100, where new footage brings the total number of hours of video captured to 100. According to Damen, the new video is from a cohort that included participants from both the previous study (half of the original 32 participants agreed to participate again) and 8 new participants.

According to Damen, by bringing back past participants, it will allow the computer models to better understand kitchen behavior by factoring in what happens with the passage of time, like in real life, but also better understanding how small changes can impact the results.

“It’s the natural progression, like how life will be,” said Damen. “The question is what happens to computer vision in the meanwhile? So it’s tiny tiny changes, right? It’s a slightly new camera, people might have moved home, and then we’re asking more questions that we believe would be interest to the community.”

Damen said she hopes that her technology can help build better technology and systems that could be of help to humans who need assistance.

“So there are new questions that are being asked which, interestingly, even the assistive technology community is not talking about. As in, if you want to help someone, sometimes you can guess what they’re doing, but many times you can’t.”

Spoon Plus Subscribers can read the full transcript of our conversation and watch my video interview with Daman below.

Restaurant Robots Used to Be About Labor, Now They’re About Hygiene

This was one of the takeaways from our virtual fireside chat on The State of Restaurant Robotics yesterday. Linda Poulliot, CEO of Dischcraft Robotics, and Clatyon Wood, CEO of Picnic, were our guests, and they shared their insights about what their customers are looking for with automation right now.

At the moment, restaurants, cafeterias and other food service establishments are looking for safety and hygiene, something that robots can definitely help with in a few ways.

For example, Picnic’s pizza assembling robot can top 200 pizzas in an hour without human hands ever touching them. The stretched dough runs on a conveyor belt where robotic nodes dispense the proper amount of toppings consistently. Not only does this reduce the number of people touching food, it also helps in small kitchens where there isn’t enough room for workers to socially distance.

For its part, Dishcraft offers dishes as a service to cafeterias, restaurants and more. Dirty dishes are picked up from a restaurant and brought to a Discraft’s facility where the robot cleans and inspects them better and more environmentally friendly than a human can. The company recently branched out into offering reuseable containers so restaurants can cut down on all the packaging waste that comes with takeout and delivery.

These were just a couple of topics we touched on during our exclusive Spoon Plus event. Spoon Plus subscribers can check out the full video from the event below.

If you’d like to see the full event video, future events and premium reports, interviews and exclusive research, become a member today!

Wrap It Up: Innovation in Edible Solutions to Extend Food Lifespans (a Spoon Plus Report)

Suppliers, especially large warehouse distributors, have several strategies they currently use to extend the lifespan of produce. One is refrigeration. Produce can be stored in cold warehouses to slow down the ripening process and make it last longer. Another is to install vents in the warehouses to remove ethylene, the gas that causes fruit to ripen, from storage. Some warehouses even use gases like nitrogen and sulphur to counteract the effects of ethylene, thus keeping fruit preserved in an unripe state until they’re ready to ship to retailers. Some fruits, like lemons and apples, are also coated in an artificial wax to keep them from rotting.

All of these solutions have their drawbacks. Vents are expensive to install, using gases to regulate ethylene is not proven to be effective, and artificial wax is unappetizing. Regulating produce freshness at warehouses also does not help once that fruit or vegetable has left the supplier and is sitting on a retail shelf or in a consumer kitchen.

However, over the past several years, innovators have begun experimenting with new ways to extend the lifespan of fresh produce. These solutions are meant to be a more sustainable, healthy, and versatile alternative to current practices used in warehouses.

This report is available to subscribers of Spoon Plus, includes analysis of key players Apeel, Sufresca, Stixfresh, and Hazel Technologies, a look at opportunities in this fast-changing space, the impact of COVID and a look forward at what’s next.

New subscribers to Spoon Plus can use discount code NEWMEMBER to get 15% off an annual plan today. Go here to learn more. 

SavorEat Plans to Build an Appliance For The Home That Prints & Cooks Meat

“That’s our goal,” said Vizman when I caught up with her via a zoom call. “Where we can also have, next to a microwave, we can have machines that you know can create variety of products.”

But to get there, first her company is working on building a product that can print and cook food instantly for a large quick service food chains, starting with one of the biggest in Israel, BBB (Burgus Burger Bar).

“We are about to start this testing it in their facility within a year, while we believe that we will be commercialize it in a larger scale two years from closing the financial round that we are now running.”

That financial round Vizman is looking to close is a $3.5 million seed round led by a company called Next Food, an Israel based food tech investment fund. Next Food led SavorEat’s pre-seed round of $1.75 million.

3D printed meat has gained momentum over the past couple years, especially, it seems, in Israel. SavorEat joins two other venture funded Israel based 3D meat printing startups in Redefine Meat (formerly Jet Eat) and Meatech, a company which prints cultured meat cells into steak.

Two things set SavorEat’s technology apart from those and other 3D meat printing startups. The first is the company’s binder, which is a proprietary plant-based cellulose. The cellulose is combined with other ingredients such as plant-based fats and protein to make the final product.

“We’re using the cellulose to bind a variety of fats and proteins and other tastes and flavors and combine a very stable emulsion,” said Vizman.

The other big differentiator for SavorEat’s technology is that it prints and cooks simultaneously, which allows the company’s printers to make a fully cooked piece of 3D printed meat like you might see produced by a futuristic appliance like that in the TV show Upload.

The food comes out “ready to be eaten,” said Vizman. “We’re printing one layer, then we cook one layer, print one layer, cook one layer. So at the end, you get something that’s ready to be consumed.”

This print and cook technology, according to Vizman, will give the cook a high degree of precision of over the final print.

“The nice thing about that is that you can also control the way you cook it. You can decide whether you want it medium, you want in rare, well done. How you want to cook it in the you want to grill it from the inside and rare from the outside.”

The company’s technology was invented by Oded Shoseyov, a serial inventor and entrepreneur who spends much of his time spinning out new ideas from his research lab at Hebrew University. Shoseyov is SavorEat’s chief science officer. Shoseyov and Vizman are joined by other executives from companies like Stratasys (3D printing) and IFF/Frutarom (flavors).

The full interview with Vizman, where we go in depth on the company and its technology, can be read below if you are a Spoon Plus subscriber. Find more information here about subscribing to Spoon Plus. 

Food Tech Intelligence Briefing: What Do App Clips Mean for the Food Industry?

This market power is derived from the strength of the iPhone. The device’s widespread adoption makes Apple and its associated app ecosystem a necessary consideration for any new consumer-facing technology (or technology adjacent) product launch. 

But as Techcrunch wrote last week, the world of apps that Apple ushered in a dozen or so years ago (yes, it’s been that long) has become long in the tooth. Not only are grid-based apps becoming less relevant in an age of voice assistants, AI, and chatbots, but most of us have become fatigued with app downloads and are reluctant to cede space on that ever-important first screen. 

This app fatigue is a problem for any products that rely on the aging app ecosystem Apple has built. If customers don’t use apps, brands can’t monetize through them.

Some products have tried to move almost entirely to voice, but it’s almost impossible to make a voice skill the primary interface for a device because they are so ephemeral. If we can’t see them, we aren’t going to use them. There is no first-screen for voice apps. 

Say Hello to App Clips

Which brings us back to Apple. At WWDC in late June, Apple introduced the App Clips, which are slimmed-down versions of an app or, more specifically, the portion of an app that is necessary in a given moment. 

The rest of this report is available only for Spoon Plus subscribers. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. If you already have a Spoon Plus account, you can log in here.

Talking 23andMe For Farms, Bioreactors-as-a-Service & Other Crazy FoodTech Ideas With Dave Friedberg

But here’s the thing: most ideas about the future sound a little crazy the first time you hear them.

I had known about Friedberg for some time, in part because was the founder and CEO of agtech’s first unicorn in the Climate Corporation, a company that sold to Monsanto in 2013 for over $1 billion.

More recently I’d been tracking his progress at the Production Board, a company that is essentially an idea incubation factory for food, bio and ag tech concepts. The group is run by what Friedberg describes as “operators more than investors”.

The Production Board company portfolio is strung together by something closer to a grand unified theory about how the world should work rather than any sort of single investment theme. This theory, which Friedberg articulates in a manifesto on the Production Board website, reads as much like a science fiction short story as it does an investment guide and is centered around how the world’s existing food and agricultural production systems are antiquated relics of an inefficient industrial production processes that have taken root over the past couple centuries.

I sat down for a (virtual) meeting with Friedberg recently to talk about how the Production Board works and the progress he is making for upending some of the antiquated food and ag systems. We also talk about Friedberg thinks the future of food could look like ten years or more in the future.

You can see some excerpts from our interview below. In order to see the full interview and read a transcript of our conversation, you’ll want to subscribe to Spoon Plus.

Friedberg on how crazy it is we aren’t harnessing the full technology development to address our problems around food and agriculture:

If a Martian came down to planet Earth and they look at the way we’re doing things they would say, “that’s a little bit crazy. Not only that, but it’s crazy that you guys do things the way you do them given all the technology you have. You can do crazy shit as humans. You can like write DNA and you can like ferment things in these tanks and make whatever molecule you want. And you can pretty much print anything anywhere using different chemistry.” It’s ridiculous that the systems of production operate the way that they do.

Friedberg on the idea behind Culture Biosciences, a company he describes as an AWS for Bioreactors:

If you fast forward 50 years, Tyson Foods and these feedlots and cattle grazing, I mean, it’s so fu**ing inefficient it’s just unreal. It’s mind blowing how much energy and money and CO2 is part of the system of producing meat and animal protein. And we have the tools to make animal proteins and fermenters, so if you could have a fermenter in your home, and it just prints meat when you want it, I think that would be pretty cool. Technically the science is there, the engineering isn’t. And that’s the thing: with a lot of these things, the science is proven, but a lot engineering work still to do. But it’s, it’s feasible. All these things are feasible.

Friedberg on how the Production Board germinates ideas that ultimately become one of their portfolio businesses:

We do primary research, we spend a lot of time with scientists and researchers and identify new and emerging breakthroughs in science and technology. We also spend time in the markets we operate in: food, agriculture, human health, increasingly looking at things like energy materials. And then we try and identify what’s a better way of doing this thing in this market?

So using all these new breakthroughs using all this new science, using all this technology that might be emerging, how can we do something that can transform one of these markets and really do a 10x on it? If it’s not a 10x, if it’s just a 5% better model or a 10% better model, it’s not worth doing. If we can 10x the market – reduce cost or energy by 10 times – then it becomes kind of exciting. And so that’s how we kind of think about operating business opportunities.

The full interview and transcript are available for Spoon Plus customers. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

The Premium-ization of Coffee and Taking Roasting to the Edge

Bellwether Coffee makes ventless, electric coffee roasters the size of a fridge that automate the roasting process. It’s an interesting play to take coffee roasting away from centralized producers and bring it closer to the edge. At least in theory, that means fresher java for consumers, and bigger savings for Bellwether customers (which range from cafés to grocery stores).

To learn more about how coffee roasting is evolving — and where the coffee market is headed in general post-COVID — I spoke with Bellwether’s CEO Nathan Gilliland. 

This long-form interview is exclusive to Spoon Plus subscribers. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

The Great Vending Reinvention: The Spoon’s Smart Vending Machine Market Report

Thanks to advances in hardware, the internet of things, and food preparation, vending machines today are basically restaurants in a box. They offer high-end cuisine in minutes, require minimal setup time, and have the on-board computing smarts to manage inventory and communicate any issues that arise.

With these capabilities, it’s no wonder the vending machine category was valued at more than $30 billion in 2018, according to Grandview Research, and was anticipated to have a CAGR of 9.4 percent from 2019 through 2025.

Had this report been written even just a few months ago, the main takeaway would have been that vending machines are perfect for high-traffic areas that operate around the clock: airports, corporate offices, college dorms, and hospitals.

But we’re living in a world continuously being shaped and reshaped by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Right now, some form of shelter-in-place orders blanket most of the U.S. Global air travel volume has plummeted, so airports are not busy. Non-essential businesses are closed and people are working from home, not office buildings. And colleges may not hold in-person classes until 2021.

While on the surface, those factors suggest vending machine companies will be yet-another sector wiped out by coronavirus, there has actually never been a better time for the automated vending machine industry. The small footprint and high-end food these devices offer are perhaps more important than ever at a time when minimizing human-to-human contact in foodservice is paramount to doing business. That makes the vending machine market uniquely positioned to capitalize on a post-pandemic world.

This report will define what the automated vending machine space is, list the major players, and present the challenges and opportunities for the market going forward.

Companies profiled in this report include Alberts, API Tech/Smart Pizza, Basil Street, Blendid, Briggo, Byte Technology, Cafe X, Chowbotics, Crown Coffee, Farmer’s Fridge, Fresh Bowl, Le Bread Xpress, Macco Robotics, TrueBird, and Yo-Kai Express.

This research report is exclusive for Spoon Plus members. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here.

S2G Ventures’ Managing Director on the 4 FoodTech Trends That Will Rise Post-COVID (Spoon Plus)

I wanted to (virtually) sit down with Krishnan to discuss S2G’s recent white paper entitled “The Future of Food in the Age of COVID-19.” It outlines four foodtech trends that S2G expects will grow in the coming months and years: digitalization, decentralized food systems, de-commoditization, and food as as medicine. Krishnan and I unpacked these four trends — and speculated about how investors will change their focus post-COVID — in our call.

The Deep Dive interview is available for subscribers to Spoon Plus. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

FoodTech Intelligence Brief: Evaluating Permanency of COVID Related Behavior Change

And now, with most countries trying to reboot their economies, food-related companies have the challenge of determining which behavioral changes were temporary and permanent. 

Many of the temporary surge behaviors were related to the worries among the population around shortages, causing many people to go out and buy things.

A good example is rice. Rice is shelf-stable, cheap food, something people might horde during uncertain times. 

Here’s a Google Trends graph for the search term “Buy Rice”: 

It’s probably safe to say that rice buying was driven by consumers who wanted cheap, easy to make, shelf-stable food during an uncertain time. Chances are, many consumers will not buy as much rice in the future.

This Food Tech Intelligence Brief is available to Spoon Plus members. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

From Crowdfunding Cows to Selling Meat Subscriptions: A Conversation With Crowd Cow’s Joe Heitzberg

Half a decade later, the company is still selling to the same eco-conscious consumers and hardcore foodies, but nowadays the fast-growing online meat seller also finds what cofounder Joe Heitzberg calls ‘backyard grilling dads’ and ‘head of household females’ among its key customer groups.

This expansion into more mainstream buyers has come as the company moved away from its original crowdfund-the-cow concept to a fast-growing online business that sells small-farm beef, pork, poultry and even fish to consumers in a variety of formats, including subscriptions. Just as in the early days, Crowd Cow continues to source form small farmers and local co-ops who are sidestepping the massive industrial meat-processing complex.

I caught up with Joe last month to discuss how the company’s business has evolved over the past half-decade, the launch of their fast-growing subscription business and to see how the pandemic has changed their business.

The interview is an exclusive offering for Spoon Plus members. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here.