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Fresco Introduces Complete Refresh of KitchenOS Platform, With Aim of Delivering True Multi-Brand Device Contol

Next-Gen Cooking

Today, Fresco announced the launch of its KitchenOS platform, a ground-up refresh of its smart kitchen software suite. As part of the announcement, the company revealed that Instant Brands, the maker of the popular Instant Pot smart pressure cooker, would be the first brand to launch the new KitchenOS with the Instant Pot Pro Plus.

The new KitchenOS, which includes new firmware, apps, and smart recipes, is the result of a two-year effort by the Dublin-based company designed to enable multi-appliance control and a new personalized user experience.

In an interview with The Spoon, Fresco CEO Ben Harris said the company realized in 2021 that in order to achieve a scalable approach to the smart kitchen, they would need to rebuild the platform from the ground up. They began to work on the new platform, accelerating their pace last year after a $20 million Series B investment.

“When we launched the Drop scale nine years ago, we received a lot of inbound interest from appliance manufacturers who saw the need for a neutral platform for the kitchen and the inevitability of one interface for the entire kitchen and their expectation that there would be one screen for orchestration,” said Harris. “They all want the back-end infrastructure, they all want the apps, they want the IoT branded for themselves, but customized with similar components under the hood.”

This led to numerous partnerships and many custom-built apps for appliance brands, but the problem, according to Harris, was that as the inbound requests started to multiply for custom-built customer-facing apps, it really began to slow the company’s ability to build products.

“We would tweak something on the platform over here, and it would cause problems over there,” said Harris.

According to Harris, the company faced three major problems around this time. First, they had to build new firmware for every single appliance, which meant it took nine months to launch a new product. Second, the company had to build a new UI for every appliance. And finally, they had to create new recipes for an appliance to work with the appliance firmware and app.

Limited cross-brand connectivity was another issue. Because each brand had a custom app and entirely unique firmware, a brand’s appliances could only communicate with another brand’s appliances through the Fresco app. Harris and the Fresco team knew that to achieve the promise of the smart kitchen, this would need to change.

It was around the same time they realized this approach was not scalable that Harris and the rest of the team started discussing the evolution of the Fresco platform with one of the company’s advisors, Steve Horowitz. Horowitz, who was added to the board when his firm invested in Fresco (then Drop), was with Google during the early days of Android and helped lead the engineering team that developed what would become one of the world’s dominant mobile operating systems.

In 2021, the company went back to the drawing board and started to rethink how they could build a more scalable platform that didn’t require building entirely new custom apps and delivered on the promise of true appliance-to-appliance interconnectivity. To achieve this, the company began working on what Harris described as a universal firmware and universal appliance UI that would work with all appliances connected to the Fresco platform.

Shots from the new Fresco/Instant Brands App

According to Harris, getting there required a step back to examine the commonality across appliances and a reimagining by the company of how they view the universe of appliances in the kitchen.

“We used to build appliances by their category, like stand mixer, oven, blender,” said Harris. “But we actually realized that we needed a sort of universal communication layer between recipes and between appliances.”

Harris says this step-back enabled them to realize that there were 77 common cooking capabilities in the kitchen – such as bake, broil, steam, etc – and across these cooking capabilities, there were 8 ways to describe them such as time, temperature, and cooking speed.  

“Suddenly, we now had, architecturally, from a back end point of view and then from a customer UI point of view, this set of universal concepts that we can have to join recipes and appliances, and to have appliance control,” said Harris. “We rebuilt the consumer experience with this multi-brand appliance control that sits inside our appliance partner apps, to reflect this top-to-bottom experience that ultimately allows us to deliver on the vision of this universal appliance control that can orchestrate all of your appliances.”

This new approach would need buy-in from their partners. That’s because it would require each appliance to have a new firmware and a new app that included access to a common Fresco account alongside the appliance brand’s account. From a customer perspective, it’s this single Fresco account identification, that sits within the different brand apps, that would enable the cross-brand connectivity.

“When you set up an account and our partner apps, you agree to basically set up the dual account both with Instant Brands and Fresco at the same time,” said Harris. “And you agree to both the Instant Brands and the Fresco terms and conditions. And then that allows both the individual tenants for Instant Brands and each one of our partners, and then also the sort of interconnectedness that’s brought by Fresco.”

One obvious concern appliance brands may have with having a single Fresco account embedded within different apps to connect across brands is that customer data privacy is protected both for the customer and the individual brands. According to Harris, that privacy was their top priority in architecting their new platform.

“That’s a real, clear, hard-line,” said Harris. Harris said each brand would get its own “data warehouse for lack of a better term”, and they ensured that each set of data would adhere to all data privacy rules. Harris said that if a customer opts in, their data would be part of aggregate, anonymous data around usage to help appliance brands build better products. But, in the end, “nobody sees anyone else’s user data, and they only have their own appliances and their own users that they are interacting with.”

Beyond the new architecture to enable cross-device interactivity, Fresco also focused on redesigning the customer experience, implementing design tenets from the likes of Apple Watch and other Apple Carplay to help guide users during the cook. Unlike early guided cooking platforms, however, Fresco focused on making sure the user would have as much or as little assistance as they needed and made sure to clearly communicate information to customers in a way that ensure they were informed and had control.

In rethinking the customer experience, Harris gave a shout-out to Wired writer Joe Ray, whose review of the Drop/Fresco platform gave them clarity on what they needed to focus on. 

“Joe Ray did an amazing job of calling out the issues with the experience we’ve built. And that was obviously a catalyst in the process, in really assessing the underlying data, and for to ask ourselves if we are delivering on our promises.”

According to Harris, the complete rebuild of the code base was a long and difficult process, but it was a necessary one given the direction of the smart home and smart kitchen. He pointed to Matter (he says Fresco will integrate as devices become Matter-compliant), and how all the big smart home brands were aligning around the standard. However, kitchen products, he pointed out, were fundamentally different and needed a platform like Fresco.

“This is where the future is, this is what Matter is building,” said Harris. “All of these appliances starting to be able to work together in any location. We’re just accelerating that we’re delivering it today, instead of waiting years before that Matter becomes a reality.”

GoodBytz Unveils Modular Robotic Kitchen That Can Make up to Three Thousand Meals Per Day

Robotics, AI & Data

GoodBytz, a robotic kitchen startup based in Germany, debuted its new kitchen robot last week in its hometown of Hamburg at the INTERNORGA 2023 trade fair.

The GoodBytz food robot is a modular system that can be tailored around different food types and menus:

  • The refrigerated storage module can hold up between 24 and 72 different ingredients and sauces and feeds into different food assembly robots.
  • The food assembly robot modules can measure ingredients, fill bowls, place toppings, and perform cleaning functions.
  • A separate topping module can plan up to 24 ingredients and sauces into the bowls. GoodBytz offers a ‘cooking zone’ module that can output up to 3,000 meals per day if an operator wants a system set up for hot food.
  • The serving module makes up to four different types of bowls available for serving, and the output module presents the finished food ready for delivery to the customer.
  • A dishwasher module

Below is a schematic that shows the standard GoodBytz system. At 12.75 square meters – a little less than 200 square feet – the system has quite a large footprint, but that’s not that surprising given it’s essentially a self-contained professional food service kitchen.

The robot is centered around an internal chamber in which a couple of robotic arms maneuver around to gather ingredients, cook and place them into bowls. Once an order is placed, a robotic arm positions a cooking pot under the ingredient dispensing station to gather ingredients, dispense sauces and then place the pots on a shelf where they are rotated and cooked. The cooking shelf is reminiscent of the Spyce cooking system, in which the pots are spun in place to ensure proper heat and ingredient distribution.

Once the food is finished, the robotic arm picks up the cooking pot and pours the finished food into the bowl. From there, a separate robotic arm maneuvers the bowl under a dispensing station that puts vegetables and other items to complete the bowl and then places the bowl onto a conveyor belt so it can be rolled out to be picked up for serving.

GoodBytz Robotic Kitchen

The cooking robot’s sensors measure ingredients and adjust cooking times based on the dish being prepared, and the system features a touchscreen control module that allows for recipe customization. GoodBytz claims that the system, which can integrate with different ERP systems, can monitor food ingredient inventories and track ingredient freshness.

GoodBytz CEO Hendrik Susemihl told The Spoon the company uses a robotics-as-a-service business model, where the customer pays a fixed monthly service fee for the robots and an additional price-per-produced dish. The pricing varies depending on the configuration, with a cold bowl configuration differing from a configuration where meals are cooked in a convection oven.

The company’s prototype robotic kitchen was operational just three months after the company was founded in August 2021 and opened up a ghost kitchen in June 2022 to test the robot under natural conditions. GoodBytz plans to start cooking meals for its first big customer, Sodexo, in Q3 of this year. At INTERNORGA 2023, GoodBytz announced partnerships with system suppliers Palux and Winterhalter.

GoodBytz is first targeting the European market, but Susemihl said the company is eyeing expansion into the Asia and North American markets next year. The company has raised a €4 million seed round and is starting to raise its series A.

Kroger to Use Gatik Robotic Trucks for Middle-Mile Delivery of Fresh Products

Delivery & Commerce, Robotics, AI & Data

This week Kroger announced a collaboration with Gatik, a company specializing in autonomous middle-mile logistics, to utilize autonomous box trucks in Dallas, Texas. According to the announcement, the partnership aims to enhance delivery frequency, reliability, and responsiveness for customers while streamlining costs and increasing efficiency throughout the supply chain.

Starting in the second quarter of 2023, Gatik’s medium-duty autonomous box trucks will be responsible for transporting fresh products from Kroger’s Customer Fulfillment Center (CFC) in Dallas to several retail locations. These trucks are fitted with a 20-foot cold chain-capable box, designed for the safe and efficient transportation of ambient, refrigerated, and frozen goods.

The two companies believe the collaboration will provide Kroger customers with an expanded range of same-day pick-up times and more flexible order cut-off times. Gatik will handle the transportation of groceries, foodstuffs, and general merchandise for 12 hours daily, seven days a week.

Gatik’s autonomous middle mile solution will assist Kroger in addressing the needs of customers who shop online and in-store, offering quicker and more dependable access to products. Since commencing commercial operations in 2019, Gatik says it has successfully delivered half a million customer orders using its robo-trucks.

The deal is another win for Gatik, which has previously secured middle-mile delivery contracts for Walmart in Louisiana and Arkansas and for Loblaws in Canada. The company, which raised over $121 million in funding, was recently rumored to be in talks with Microsoft to raise more funding at a $700 million valuation. The Microsoft deal would be a strategic investment that would result in the autonomous truck company using Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform to develop technology for autonomous delivery vehicles.

Video Sessions: Food Robotics Outlook 2023

Robotics, AI & Data

We also heard from entrepreneur and restaurant operator Andrew Simmons, who is reinventing his neighborhood restaurant with digital technology and robotics.

Atish Aloor told us how his company CloudChef is creating a way to digitize the chef and building an operating system for repeatable, high-quality cooking.

Mark Oleynik of Moley and Khalid Aboujassoum of Else Labs discussed the opportunity and challenges of building cooking robots for the home kitchen.

Arthur Chow of S2G Ventures and Buck Jordan of Vebu Labs discussed the funding environment for food robotics startups and how the market’s unique characteristics make it different from other food tech verticals.

This content is for Spoon Plus subscribers. However, if you are interested, you can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

‘It’s Tough for Robotic Companies’: VCs Talk About the Funding Landscape for Food Automation

Robotics, AI & Data

It’s not a secret that the tech industry is going through a challenging time when it comes to venture capital. The food tech sector is no exception, and, according to Vebu Labs managing partner Buck Jordan, food robotics has been hit especially hard.

“It’s tough for robotic companies,” said Jordan during the venture capital landscape session at this week’s Food Robotics Outlook 2023 event from The Spoon. According to Jordan, the overarching reason is that food robotics startups have an especially long journey to get to that first dollar of revenue.

“The challenge is that robotics is a really expensive sport. It takes two or three years to get to a commercializable major product.”

Arthur Chow, an investor at S2G Ventures, agrees.

“With valuations, the hammer has come down hard on the anvil there in the last couple of months,” said Chow. “These are really capital-intensive businesses. So you’re just looking at a math equation around valuation; how many rounds you have to raise in the future and how much you will get diluted. And then ultimately, an exit value, which there haven’t been a lot of exits.”

The reason for these long journeys to revenue is that, often, the founders of these companies have such big visions for their robotic systems.

“We all start these food robotics companies with like, ‘let’s automate everything, the biggest thing,'” said Jordan, previously a founder of Miso Robotics, the company behind the Flippy restaurant robot. “We devise these like huge, aggressive, big projects, and they’re incredibly valuable, but the capital curve to get there is so steep.”

One potential remedy to these long gestation times is taking a portion of that bigger idea and offering something useful – and quicker to market – than a hugely complicated system that takes years to perfect.

“I suspect that some robotics companies who are a little more responsible, or a little more revenue-oriented, are going to start paring down their objectives,” said Jordan.

Jordan pointed to Creator, a maker of fully roboticized restaurants, as an example of a company he believes has valuable technology that could be ‘parted out’ to the market and be successful.

Both Jordan and Chow believe that there will be a number of food robotic startups that could get acquired over the next year as well-funded companies look to roll up interesting IP. But beware, says Jordan.

“There’s an opportunity because you can buy this IP for pretty affordable prices, but you need to have a team and expertise in house to do that. And so, woe be to the pure financial investor who starts rolling these things up without having a team on board to do that.”

In the end, both investors still see an opportunity for food robotics, but believe the key will for startups to not only show a path to revenue, but clearly illustrate how they can enable new lines of revenue over time.

“It’s sort of that gradual build we’re talking about,” said Chow. “We start with one use case in revenue and it makes money there, but then you do need to, over time, build and continue to think about the utilization of the robot and an ROI.”

You can watch the full session below.

Venture Capital Food Robotics Outlook 2023

After Years of Building His Robot, Stellar Pizza Founder is Having Fun Dishing Pies to USC Students

Robotics, AI & Data

Back in 2019, Benson Tsai decided to attend a food robotics conference. The engineer had spent the last five years working for Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, applying what he had learned about battery technology as a member of the technical staff for electric vehicle startup Lucid Motors to space travel, but now he had a vague idea of launching a new startup that builds food robots.

At the conference, he watched a panel on investing in robotics that featured venture investor Avidan Ross, the founding partner at Root Ventures. The two struck up a conversation and hit it off, and those early conversations led to Ross becoming Tsai’s first investor.

In those early days, Tsai thought maybe he’d build an Asian food robot, mostly because he loved Asian food. Eventually, though, he’d settle on another type of food: Pizza.

“I ended up looking at what made sense to automate,” Tsai told The Spoon in an interview this week.

Benson Tsai

Tsai got to work on his robot, hiring about 30 or so SpaceX engineers in the process. He’d also raise lots more money beyond the initial $9 million investment led by Ross’s Root Ventures, the most recent being a $16.5 million funding round led by Jay-Z’s Marcy Ventures.

Four years and over $25 million in investment later, Stellar Pizza‘s food robot is ready for action and, over the past few weeks, has been serving pizza on the campus of USC. The robot heads to campus in a sprinter van, where students order pizza using the Stellar Pizza app.

I asked Tsai if he’s serving food from his robotic mobile food truck, and he answered yes, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I really enjoy going out in the field,” said Tsai. “I spent a lot of time working on the crazy robots, and now I get to see people bite into the pizza, and it’s really fulfilling.”

Tsai says so far, things are going pretty well. The Stellar Pizza van rolls onto campus five days a week, and already he’s seeing lots of return customers.

“We’re at 45-50% return customers,” said Tsai.

I asked him what the long-term vision is for the company and if he plans to license the technology to some of the bigger pizza chains. He told me that may be in the cards in the future, but for now, he’s happy building an end-to-end robotic pizza company.

“Nothing is off the table, but right now, we’re chasing the vision of Stellar Pizza, specifically just selling pizzas because, for one thing, building hardware that can make 100 different pizza recipes is actually quite hard. So we’re dogfooding and building our own brand, and if that’s successful, maybe we’ll chase that.”

Tsai and his company have come a long way from those early days when he first attended that conference back in 2019; Stellar’s first product is in the field and happy customers coming back for more.

Oh, and that first conference? It was The Spoon’s Articulate, the first-ever food robotics conference.

If you’d like to hear Tsai tell the story of building his pizza robot, sign up for The Spoon’s next food robotics event, the Food Robotics 2023 Outlook, a virtual conference taking place next Wednesday.

Is Kiwibot’s Sale & Leaseback Deal a Way For Food Tech Startups to Traverse the Venture Capital Winter?

Robotics, AI & Data

Interesting bit of news today from sidewalk delivery robot startup Kiwibot: The company announced it has signed a $10 million financing deal in the form of a sale and leaseback arrangement with Kineo Finance, an asset financing company based in Switzerland.

According to company founder Felipe Chavez, the deal is structured such that Kineo will make up to $10 million available in financing to Kiwibot, and in return, Fineo will buy the robots built by Kiwi at cost and lease them back to the company. This arrangement enables Kiwi to have ready access to growth capital to build its robots and also limits the equity dilution of a typical growth-round investment.

 “It is a straightforward sale and leaseback,” Chavez told Tech Funding News. “Once we manufacture them and ship the robots to their final destination, we sell them to Kineo at cost.”

While this is the first time that I’ve seen this type of capital agreement in the food robotics space, it could be a sign of things to come. As we’ve seen from this month’s news from Picnic, the food tech hardware market is having challenges as more traditional venture investor appetites for large growth rounds have shrunk in the current uncertain economic environment. By using a sales and leaseback deal, startups can get access to a whole new type of financing and also limit how much of their company they need to give up in the process.

Of course, there are also downsides to these types of arrangements. Kiwi has to make sure they can find customers for their leased robots, as they’ll now have a monthly payment to service for the robots in the field. Kineo owns the robots and if Kiwibot can’t make the payments, the financing company can do whatever they want with them. Add in other complicating factors like the loss of tax benefits such as asset depreciation, and the conversation about whether to adopt this new model becomes somewhat nuanced.

That said, I applaud Kiwi for finding a new and creative way to fund their expansion, and I have to think other food robotics vendors might be taking a look at this type of financing arrangement.

This Finnish Company Uses Radio Waves to Monitor and Reduce Dairy Waste

Foodtech, Robotics, AI & Data

Dairy plants around the world are facing a new set of challenges as they grapple with rising raw milk costs and increasing pressure to reduce their carbon footprints as plant-based competitors try to draw a contrast with animal milk. A Finnish startup named Collo wants to help on both fronts using what it describes as liquid fingerprint technology.

According to the company, its technology can detect any type of liquid in pipes in real-time, giving companies a way to optimize production and cut product losses. Collo says its technology can keep track of the liquids in the pipes, showing exactly where the leakage is occurring. This enables dairy plants, breweries, and other liquid processors to address the problem at the point of origin.

Collo’s technology is based on an electromagnetic resonator that emits a continuous radio frequency field into the liquid. The signal reacts to interferences caused by different components, chemicals, and phases in the liquid, and the Collo analyzer immediately warns of any disturbances so that the process can be adjusted.

Collo says its analyzer simultaneously measures eight proprietary parameters from a liquid, which collectively creates the liquid’s fingerprint. If one or more of these characteristics change during processing, the analyzer shows the changes so that corrective measures can be made.

While leakage may not seem like a problem, it can be costly to dairy processors. Sometimes it’s just a small leak that can lead to lost revenue over time, while other times bigger leaks can lead to harmful environmental incidents that can draw the scrutiny of citizens and local governments. Collo says its technology can help avoid both profit-wasting slow leakage and high-profile spillage incidents by alerting processors instantaneously.

“As our technology can supervise all the draining points in real-time, it can keep track of the liquids in the pipes and show exactly where the leakage is,” company spokesperson Mikko Tielinen says. “This makes it possible to address the problem at the point of origin, saving huge amounts of milk and money.”

Do You Have Thoughts on the Impact of Robotics & AI on The Food Biz? Fill Out Our Survey!

Robotics, AI & Data

Last week, The Spoon hosted an insight-filled day talking with founders and operators about how new technology like generative AI will change the food business.

And next week, we’ll bring together investors, restaurant operators, and technology builders to get a pulse on the state of the food robotics market.

One thing we know from running these events is our community is one of the sharpest around when it comes to predicting how these technologies will impact the food business, so we figured why not ask them their thoughts in a Food Robotics and AI industry survey?

If you run a food company or provide technology that uses robotics or AI, or just have a good perspective on where you think these technologies are going, we want to hear from you! If you take a few minutes to fill out our survey and we’ll send you a summary of the results and enter you in a giveaway for a $100 Amazon gift card!

And oh yeah – make sure to sign up for next week’s event to get an early glimpse at the results and hear from some food robotic builders and investors.

Picnic CEO Departs Just Weeks After Pizza Robot Startup Has Significant Layoffs

Business of Food

Clayton Wood, the CEO of pizza robot maker Picnic, is departing the company, according to a post made by Wood on Linkedin.

Wood joined the company – originally named Otto Robotics and Vivid Robotics before it eventually settled on Picnic – in 2019 after it parted ways with its founding CEO, Garett Ochs. Since then, Wood has led Picnic through significant growth and a couple of funding rounds.

The Picnic CEO’s departure comes just weeks after Wood announced on Linkedin that the company was having its first layoffs. At the time, Wood said the company “had to make the difficult decision to reduce our company size and say goodbye to some colleagues” due to the “current economic environment.” Now Wood is saying goodbye to the company he led for over four years.

“After an amazing 4+ year ride, I’m stepping down as CEO at Picnic,” Wood wrote. “It’s been an exhilarating adventure, helping to build a new industry of restaurant automation, and I’m very proud of the work I was able to accomplish with the invaluable assistance of an amazing team of leaders and contributors.”

Wood said he does not know where he will end up next but plans to start looking for his next role after some time off. After laying off a big chunk of his team and facing the prospect of trying to raise more capital in the current VC winter, I can’t blame him for wanting to take a break.

So what does the future look like for Picnic and the broader food robotics space?

The near-term prospects for the company are tough, having to look for a new CEO and raise additional money. The company raised a $16.3 million Series A in 2021 and, according to a filing last year, was looking to raise an additional $7.75 million. Despite Wood’s success raising money previously, the company was undoubtedly having difficulty raising a significant Series B in the current funding climate. The company could now be a target for acquisition by a larger company such as Middleby, a food equipment conglomerate that has fueled much of its growth via acquisition. Middleby showed off its own pizza robot in 2020 but hasn’t talked much about it since.

As for the broader market implications, my guess is, unfortunately, we will continue to see some food robotics startups struggle over the next couple of years, given the slowdown in venture capital, particularly those looking to raise larger rounds for scaling. The pizza space is particularly competitive, and we’ve already seen some startups in the space go out of business.

We wish Clayton – who has been generous with his time for Spoon events and podcasts – good luck on his next adventure!

Tovala Debuts 5-in-1 Air Fryer, Its First Non-Steam Countertop Appliance

Next-Gen Cooking

This week Tovala debuted a new countertop cooking appliance, the multifunction Tovala Smart Oven Air Fryer. The new appliance is the first new hardware from the company since it unveiled the second-generation smart steam oven in 2018.

Some readers may be thinking, ‘wait, didn’t Tovala release an air fryer last fall?’ Well, they did introduce air frying, but it was as a retrofit upgrade to the gen 2. Because the gen 2 Tovala had convection (a built-in fan for air circulation), they could add air frying through a software upgrade and an air fry basket.

With the new Smart Oven Air Fryer, they’ve built an entirely new appliance designed around its air fry capability.

“Our engineering team redesigned the oven’s airflow system by introducing a 2-speed motor, and a larger fan blade and vent in order to accomplish max air frying power in this oven,” said Maggie Condon, Tovala head of communications, in an email with The Spoon. “These adjustments allow for more air to circulate throughout the oven and around your food faster, creating a stronger, crispier air fry experience. With these changes, we introduced a designated Air Fry setting on the oven and in the Tovala App.”

With the release of the new air fryer, the Tovala gen 2 appliance – with its steam capability and retrofitted air fry function – has been renamed the Tovala Pro.

Interestingly, the new Tovala appliance is the first without steam capability, which has long been one of the most popular features of Tovala ovens. Judging by a recent conversation on a Tovala user group page on Facebook, some are confused about whether the just-announced Tovala has steam built in and how it compares to the now-renamed Pro version.

So why release a new appliance without steam? My guess is the company did it due to the popularity of air frying; even with the upgrade to the second-generation appliance, many customers still probably didn’t realize it had its new function since air frying was not on the function dial. With the new Tovala Smart Oven Air Fryer, the steam option goes away, and air fry has been added.

The Latest, But Not The First: Five Ways AI Altered The Food Industry Before ChatGPT

Robotics, AI & Data

Generative AI has shaken the tech industry to its foundations. For the first time, Google’s search dominance looks vulnerable, while ChatGPT has elevated Microsoft’s Bing from second banana to sexy beta. Meanwhile, hundreds of new startups are creating vertically-focused SaaS offerings powered by OpenAI, and tech corporations, big and small, are evaluating how to jump on the generative AI bullet train.

In the food world, we have some early arrivers in spaces like restaurant tech software such as ClearCOGS and Lunchbox leveraging OpenAI to add additional functionality. On the content creator and influencer side, we’re already seeing recipe creators and culinary pros tap into the power of generative AI.

But if you think the arrival of ChatGPT is the first AI with the potential to have a big impact on the world of food, you’d be wrong. In fact, over the past decade, we’ve watched as artificial intelligence has started to transform significant portions of the food world. Here are five ways AI has changed food over the past decade:

AI-Generated Recipes

Over the past decade, one of the most significant milestones for artificial intelligence in the world of food is the application of IBM Watson’s general AI to recipe creation. About ten years ago, the Watson team figured it needed to do something besides beat human contestants on Jeopardy to demonstrate its AI’s powers. Before long, Watson had its own cookbook of what IBM called ‘cognitive recipes’. Eventually, CPG brands like McCormick partnered up with IBM to see how they could apply Big Blue’s AI to their business.

Novel Food Discovery and Creation

Over the past few years, a new cohort of startups using AI to accelerate the discovery of novel food ingredients or plant-based recipes have emerged, causing ripples through the consumer packaged food market as they present a direct challenge to the more conventional – and slow – way in which food companies traditionally discover new food products. Over five years ago, companies like Gastrograph started to use AI to create predictive modeling around how different consumer cohorts may react to new food products, and more recently, we’ve seen a new generation of food companies like NotCo base its entire roadmap around AI-generated recipes for its plant-forward product lineup. On the novel ingredient discovery side, companies like Shiru and Kingdom Supercultures are using machine learning to find new ingredients that can help replicate the functional and taste properties of more traditional animal-based inputs.

Alexa’s Personalized Meal Planning and Recipes

When Amazon showed off Alexa almost a decade ago, in late 2014, most thought it was a cool home-based voice interface for weather forecasts and kitchen timers. But Amazon’s AI-powered virtual assistant helped launch a new way for consumers to do everyday things, including buying food and checking on that roast in the oven. But it wasn’t long before Amazon started to help me automate and personalize our shopping lists, and eventually started to create personalized recipes based on our past behavior.

Computer Vision Is Everywhere

A little over two years after Amazon debuted Alexa, it opened its first Amazon Go store featuring its Just Walk Out technology. Powered by sensors and computer vision, the new storefront lets shoppers pick up things off the store shelves and walk out without going through checkout. Soon, a whole bevy of human-less retail startups emerged to offer grocery and convenience store operators platforms to create more friction-free shopping powered by computer vision. We also saw computer vision-powered home appliances enabling consumers to identify their food in the fridge or the oven. Computer vision has also taken off in the restaurant back-of-house for solutions that help reduce food waste and help optimize food inventory.

Food Robots

While robotics and AI are not always synonymous, many robots are deploying some form of AI to help feed us. Whether it’s Google Mineral’s farm robot modeling plant traits and phenotyping crop varieties or server robots dynamically mapping the layout of a restaurant dining room, we are seeing a proliferation of AI-assisted food robots up and down the food value chain.

As far as generative AI goes, we’ve only begun to see how it could change the food industry. Initial applications are more likely to be in restaurant marketing (like the image created for this post using DALL-E), operations, and customer service systems. But as the technology becomes more powerful and creative programmers figure out ways to integrate generative AI technology into their platforms, the impact of ChatGPT and similar AI systems holds massive transformative potential for the food industry.

If you’d like to learn more about how generative AI will change the food industry, you’ll want to attend The Spoon’s mini-summit, How ChatGPT & Generative AI Will Change the Food Biz, tomorrow. You can sign up here.