Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Education & Discovery

UK Researchers Kickstart a New Project to Study and Fight At-Home Food Waste Behaviors

The United Kingdom has set up a national research project to study the impact of Covid-19 lockdowns on food waste and develop methods for helping consumers better manage that food waste. Researchers from the University of Leeds have teamed up with two environmental organizations — Zero Waste Scotland and the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) — for the 18-month-long research project.

According to a press release, researchers will examine consumer behavior around food waste both during and after lockdown periods in the UK, and use those findings to develop new ways to help consumers fight food waste and change their behaviors in the home. The project has received £328,000 (~$448,000 USD) in funding, a sum that includes a £268,000 (~$366,000 USD) from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The project is “part of the UK Research and Innovation’s rapid response to Covid-19.”

Part of the project’s inspiration comes from earlier research by WRAP showing that self-reported levels of food waste in the UK fell by 34 percent during the country’s first Covid-19 lockdown. “While we understand some of this behaviour, we want to broaden our knowledge of why the changes came about, and how we can build on this to help people prevent more food going to waste in future,” Dr Gulbanu Kaptan, one of the individuals leading the new research project, said in a statement.

As is the case in the U.S., the bulk of food waste in Britain happens inside consumers’ own homes. Curbing it will come from a range of different approaches and solutions. Right now, some approaches include smarter storage systems a la Mimica, meal-planning tools like Kitche and Meal Hero, and fridge appliances that can track food inventory more precisely.

All of these methods have varying success rates. University of Leeds’ new project appears to be focused more on the consumer behavior aspect of food waste than on individual tech tools, however. 

For the new project, around 1,500 people across the UK will take part in a survey by relating details of how they choose, store, manage, and cook food. Roughly 30 people will take part in more detailed interviews and will also keep “diaries” of their household food waste.

Impact Investor Norrsken Is Taking Applications for Its Food-Tech-Focused Accelerator Program

Stockholm, Sweden-based Norrsken Foundation announced this week it will launch an eight-week accelerator program this summer for startups, including those working in the food tech realm. 

The Norrsken Impact Accelerator will, as its name suggests, look for companies enacting positive change across all areas of sustainability that encompass the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. While Norskken says on the program’s website that it supports startups “across all verticals,” food tech is a particular focus this year. Norskken did not name exact areas of food tech, but given its alignment with the UN SDGs, it’s safe to assume the program is looking for companies that work in areas like health and wellness, food waste, food insecurity, alternative protein sources, and other areas with a sustainability angle. 

Companies should ideally be at early (pre-seed) stage. While geographically they can be based anywhere in the world, applicants should plan to relocate to Stockholm for the duration of the program if accepted. Norrsken will choose 20 companies from the pool of applicants to participate in the eight-week program, which begins on July 5, 2021. 

Chosen companies won’t follow a set curriculum. Rather, they will focus on the issues most pressing to their specific company’s journey, whether that’s product development, regulatory issues, marketing, or strategy. Mentorship is also a big part of Norrsken’s program. Companies participating will get access to a range of executive mentors from Oatly, Voi, Klarna, Wild Earth, and many others.

Participants will also receive a $100,0000 investment (with 5 percent equity) at the start of the program and a chance to pitch to potential investors via a demo day near the program’s end. 

Applications are open until February 28.

Spoonshot Launches Free Version of its AI-Based Flavor Pairing Tool

Spoonshot, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to uncover novel flavor combinations, has launched a free version of its tool that is accessible to anyone. Spoonshot CEO and Co-Founder, Kishan Vasani spoke about the new level of service at The Spoon’s Food Tech Live event earlier this week.

Up to this point, Spoonshot’s platform has been a B2B play, meant for CPG companies and foodservice operators looking ahead to see what the next food and flavor trends might be. As we wrote last year when Spoonshot raised $11 million:

To get ahead of the curve, Spoonshot’s platform examines data from across a vast number of food-related sources including online menus, food science, CPG ingredients and online food communities. Spoonshot runs this data through its proprietary machine learning and AI algorithms to help companies identify existing and novel flavor combinations.

The key word here is “novel.” When you enter a flavor like “banana” into Spoonshot’s Ingredient Network tool, the service brings back a number of potential flavor combinations and scores them based on novelty. Combining banana + chocolate is common, but combining banana + aloveera juice is something that probably hasn’t occurred to most people and a combo that Spoonshot says will be tasty.

Armed with this novel combination, a restaurant or CPG company could go about building a new product that will appeal to consumers.

Launched at the start of the new year, Spoonshot’s new free tier of service now allows anyone to try its AI platform out (pricing starts at $99/month). Chances are good that most of us in our everyday lives don’t need enterprise-grade artificial intelligence to uncover novel flavor combinations. But aside from being a fun (and free) little distraction for everyday chefs, it could also be useful for small CPG or restaurant owners that don’t have R&D budgets to expand their offerings.

Brightseed’s First Major Phytonutrient Discovery Finds Black Pepper May Help with Fatty Liver

Brightseed, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to uncover previously hidden phytonutrients in plants, today announced preclinical data from its first major discovery targeting liver and metabolic health.

The discovery was made with Forager, Brightseed’s AI platform that looks at plants on a molecular level to identify novel phytonutrient compounds (for example, antioxidants in blueberries). Once found, Forager then catalogs these compounds and uses that information to predict the health benefits of those compounds.

With today’s announcement, Brightseed’s Forager has identified phytonutrients that can help with fat accumulation in the pancreas and liver, a condition linked to obesity. Brightseed explained its findings in a press release, writing:

Using a computational approach with data from Brightseed’s plant compound library, Forager identified two natural compounds with promising bioactive function, N-trans caffeoyltyramine (NTC) and N-trans-feruloyltyramine (NTF). Researchers determined that these compounds acted through a novel biological mechanism governing the accumulation and clearance of liver fat. The preclinical data was presented in the fall of 2020 as a poster session at The Liver Meeting® Digital Experience hosted by American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, and published as abstract #1679 in Hepatology: Vol 72, No S1. 

The release continued:

IIn preclinical studies, NTC and NTF acted as potent HNF4a activators, promoting fat clearance from the steatotic livers of mice fed a high fat diet, by inducing lipophagy.  HNF4a is a central metabolic regulator that is impaired by elevated levels of fat in the bloodstream resulting from chronic overeating. Administered in proper doses, NTC and NTF restored proper function of this central metabolic regulator, including maintaining healthy lipid and sugar levels in the bloodstream to normalize organ function. Their activities were confirmed using a cell-based human insulin promoter activation assay. Forager found NTC and NTF in over 80 common edible plant sources. 

One of those plant sources, Brightseed Co-Founder and CEO, Jim Flatt told me by phone this week, is black pepper. Now, before you run out and grab your pepper grinder, there is still a lot of work that remains before the results of this discovery bear out.

First, the compounds still need to go through clinical trials to validate Brightseed’s initial findings. This includes not only confirming any health benefits, but also determining the doses and best methods for administering the compounds. Then the best plant source for those compounds needs to be determined as well as the best method for compound extraction. Flatt told me that if all goes well, you can expect to see some form of supplement on the market by the end of 2022.

Even though that is a ways off, part of the reason to be excited by today’s announcement is because of how little time it took Brightseed to make this particular discovery. Through its computational processes, Flatt told me his company was able to shrink what used to take years down to months. “Fifteen to 20 percent of time that is computational saves us 80 percent of the time in the lab,” Flatt said.

Brightseed has already analyzed roughly 700,000 compounds in the plant world for health properties and says it’s on track to surpass 10 million by 2025. Doing so could help unlock a number of previously unknown treatments for a number of ailments and conditions as well as general improvement to our metabolic and immuno health.

In addition to independent research such as today’s findings, Brightseed also partners with major CPG brands to help them identify new applications for their products. For instance, Danone is using Brightseed’s technology to help find new health benefits of soy.

Brightseed’s announcement today also reinforces the bigger role AI will play in our food system. AI and machine learning is being used to do everything from turning data into cheese, to solving complex issues around protein folding.

As more discoveries using AI are made, more investment will be poured into the space, which will accelerate even more discoveries.

Report: Foot Traffic to Major QSRs Down by 50 Percent from Start of Year

It’s probably not much of a shocker to learn that far fewer people are venturing inside quick service restaurants (QSRs) these days. There is, after all, a global pandemic that continues to rage across the U.S. But Yahoo Finance posted a story over the weekend with actual data showing just how precipitous the drop in foot traffic has been for a number of major QSR brands.

According to location intelligence service Gravy Analytics, as of December 8, foot traffic to Burger King, Popeyes, KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Domino’s, Papa Johns and Starbucks fell 50 percent compared to February 2020. Furthermore, Gravy Analytics reports that foot traffic to Chick-Fil-A, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Dunkin and Chipotle dropped more than 40 percent compared with pre-pandemic levels.

Obviously the key word here is “pandemic,” which forced big changes to restaurants of all sizes here in the U.S. Early on in the pandemic, restaurants in various parts of the country were forced to close dine-in operations entirely. Though many have reopened, most dining rooms still operate under reduced seating capacity and other restrictions as states continue fighting the virus. [I REWROTE THIS GRAF FOR CLARITY]

Given that fewer people could physically stand and sit inside a restaurant, it makes sense to see the kind of drop in foot traffic that Gravy Analytics reported. And as we learn more about COVID, especially how it travels farther and faster inside restaurants than previously thought, these types of limitations are likely to stay in place until the vaccines are widely available. The question now is, even when the vaccine arrives, will people still want to dine in, or equally as important, will QSRs want them to?

In response to the pandemic, QSRs have been aggressively pivoting away from dine in and more towards drive-thrus and delivery. In the back half of this year, McDonald’s, KFC and Burger King have all announced various plans for future store designs to emphasize pickup and drive-thru operations rather than dine in options. At the same time, the rise of delivery services like DoorDash and Uber Eats means that hungry consumers don’t even need to leave their couch if they want a Big Mac or a Whopper.

With 2020 almost in the rearview mirror (thankfully), and the aforementioned vaccine on its way, hopefully the numbers we see from QSRs and all restaurants will be a lot better.

Michelin Star Japanese Chef Launches Startup to Create Cultured Meat

While high-end cuisine is a logical launch point for cultured meat, few expect chefs themselves to start companies that create this form of alternative protein.

But if you’re Chef Shimamura Masaharu of Japan, someone who writes that in high school he wondered whether to “to wear a cook’s lab coat or a scientist’s lab coat,” straddling the two worlds makes perfect sense.

Which is why the chef/owner of Michelin-starred restaurant Unkaku has launched DiverseFarm, a joint venture with cell-ag technology company TissueByNet.

TissueByNet has developed a proprietary technology to make cultured cellular tissue to create lab-grown organs in hospitals, which DiverseFarm hopes to now use to make cultured meat.

TissueByNet’s technology uses what is called spheroids, which are three dimensional spherical globs of cells that get fed into what the company calls Net Molds. Net Molds are containers that allow the tissue to grow without a more traditional scaffolding structure based on biomaterials. The cell culture is placed into the Net Mold with the spheroids culture, where they fuse together and are ready to “harvest” in one to three weeks.

On its website, DiverseFarm shows some examples of what the cell-cultured meat menu selections might look like, listing a variety of mainly cultured duck meat including “Deep-fried Domyoji of cultured duck meat, seasonal bean paste” and “Dashi chazuke of cultured duck meat.”

The news is another illustration of the growing interest in cultured meat in Japan. While Singapore’s been getting lots of attention due to the government’s active catalyzation efforts and milestones like Eat Just’s, startups like Integriculture and Shojinmeat (the news of DiverseFarm was first highlighted via a tweet from Shojinmeat) have captured the imagination of those in this island nation who are interested in increasing food sovereignty.

Exclusive: Tastemade Acquiring Dining and Drinking Guides Platform ChefsFeed

Food media company Tastemade announced today that it is acquiring dining and drinking guide platform ChefsFeed. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Tastemade is the company behind a number of food, travel and home design-related video shows including Broken Bread with Roy Choi, Make This Tonight and Thirsty For.

ChefsFeed uses culinary experts to create a variety of different types of food- and drink-related content, including restaurant and bar guides for cities around the world, video recipes, mini-documentaries and live-streamed cooking classes.

In a press statement emailed to The Spoon, Tastemade said this acquisition will give the 6,000-plus culinary experts (chefs, mixologists, sommeliers, etc.) a larger platform on which to share their work.

Food-related video content took on a new purpose this past year as the pandemic limited travel abroad and shut down much of the restaurant industry. Rather than being just aspirational (Maybe I’ll try to make a soufflé some day), food and cooking content became something more necessary. Cooped up in our houses, video was our only way to experience far off places or learn how to cook new types of food.

Online video was also one of ways restaurants themselves tried to pivot. With dining rooms shut down, some restaurants turned to live online cooking classes to generate revenue.

How our relationship with food video content will change as the pandemic recedes remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure: there is a lot pent up desire to travel in people right now. When they’re able to do so more freely again, having expert bar and restaurant guides like those from ChefsFeed for destination cities could prove to be a savvy play by Tastemade.

XPRIZE Launches a Four-Year-Long Competition to Improve Alt-Meat

Non-profit XPRIZE today launched a four-year-long competition to transform the global meat industry. Done in partnership with ASPIRE, the project management pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), the XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion competition will foster technological breakthroughs for a more secure food system as we inch towards 2050 and a larger population. Registration is open now, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The competition was developed in response to XPRIZE’s recently released Future of Food Impact Roadmap, where the organization pinpointed 12 “breakthrough opportunities” that could help build a better food system. Alt-protein is one of those areas. XPRIZE noted today that “the need for alternative proteins at-scale was identified as a critical impact area that requires significant technological advances, decreased price points, and notable shifts in consumers’ preferences – all while maintaining positive health and environmental benefits as compared to animal-based proteins.”

In keeping with that, the Feed the Next Billion Competition will incentivize teams to produce chicken breast and fish fillet alternatives that “replicate or outperform” the real thing in terms of nutrition, environmental sustainability, animal welfare, and taste and texture, according to the competition’s site.

Participants will need to develop multiple consistent cuts of meat alternatives that look, taste, and feel like traditional animal-based meat. All teams will also need to demonstrate the ability to scale production for global distribution. 

The competition comes at a time when the meat and dairy industry account for about 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases and concerns about how to feed a growing world population abound. Alternative proteins, whether plant-based or cultured, have emerged in recent years as a key tool in fighting off the environmental and humanitarian consequences of traditional meat production. There are many routes to alt-protein out there, from Meat-Tech’s 3D-printed cultured beef to the growing list of companies in the $10 million plant-based egg industry. Especially noteworthy recent developments include Eat Just getting the world’s first regulatory approval for cultured meat and Israel’s newly stated goal to develop a national plan for alternative proteins. 

Companies from around the world are invited to register for XPRIZE’s four-year-long competition. Registration will run through April 28, 2021. A total of $15 million will be given to multiple grand prize winners (a specific number of winners was not named) in the first quarter of 2024.

Babylon Microfarms Bets on Automation for the Future of Vertical Farming

What started as a humble tabletop farm at the University of Virginia has since evolved into a major company to watch in the vertical farming space, particularly when it comes to the software piece of the process. Babylon Microfarms has over the last few years garnered quite a bit of attention for its controlled-environment farms the company now licenses to hospitals, cafeterias, and other other foodservice operations.

Based in Charlottesville, Virginia (though soon moving HQ to Richmond, VA) Babylon makes a “plug-and-play” system for hydroponic farming that automates much of the grow process and makes controlled-environment farming more accessible. The company raised a $2.3 million seed round in January of this year and, its current product is a standalone farming unit that grows leafy greens.

Of late, however, the bulk of founders Alexander Olesen and Graham Smith’s focus is on software: namely, using it to automate the growing process, which removes the more complicated aspects of vertical farming that would be off-putting to the average user. 

“Growing is a cumbersome experience for many,” Olesen explained to me over the phone this week. “Removing the friction of the user experience and combining that will some of the remote management [will make] smaller forms of vertical farming possible.”

Were the average person to try and build their own high-tech grow system, it would require significant expertise in horticulture, hardware infrastructure, and software development. To name just a few examples, that would include calculating one’s one LED light recipe (which takes the place of sunlight in controlled-environment ag), controlling the temperature of the farm, and understanding how much nutrient to feed each crop and when to do that. Everyday would require a certain amount of trial and error for every plant variety.

All of this makes for prohibitively high costs when it comes to commercial greenhouse production. Olesen noted that for controlled-environment farming to go mainstream, it has to be less technically complicated for the user.    

Babylon’s software is one solution addressing those complications. The company’s “seed-to-sale” system automatically dispenses the right amount of nutrients, light, and water for each crop, simultaneously collecting data on the plants so that the system can make adjustments as needed. The entire system can be controlled remotely via a mobile app.

Up to now, the company has drawn comparisons to the likes of Farmshelf, Farm.One, and InFarm, all companies that license a hardware-software farming combination out to foodservice and hospitality operations.

But Babylon’s founders told me they aren’t necessarily interested in the hardware aspect going forward. Smith says they would prefer something like teaming up with a hardware manufacturer that wants to make vertical farms but perhaps needs more expertise in software to complement their hardware capabilities. 

Such a scenario is actually on its way to becoming a reality. At CES this past year, hardware giant LG announced plans for a smart-farming appliance for the consumer kitchen. At the same time, GE Appliances showcased its Home Grown concept, which featured grow systems using hydroponics and soil-based methods. Prior to CES, Miele acquired Agrilution in another play for smart farms in the appliance space.

All of these hardware developments suggest great opportunity for the accompanying software. While many companies in the vertical farming space try to do both right now, Babylon’s future focus on being “an enabling company” that offers software and services may prove a wiser bid for the long term. Besides building out distribution of its own farms, Babylon is currently interested in working with other businesses, particularly those making hardware, that want to enter the vertical farming space.

There will be no one product that wins, Olesen said, adding that instead, it will be a combination of tools working together to make vertical farming more accessible to everyone.

Heali Launches its AI-Based Nutrition and Meal Planning App

Heali, a Los Angeles-based startup that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create more personalized nutrition advice and meal planning for people, announced today the beta release of its mobile app.

The Heali app helps people adhere to their choice of 30 different diets (Vegan, Low FODMAP, Paleo, etc.) through recipes as well as grocery shopping and restaurant meal selection guidance.

Heali uses a number of features to help people with their nutritional choices. It has optical character recognition (OCR) so a user can take a photo of a menu description or a product’s nutritional label and the app will understand what ingredients are in that item. There’s a barcode scanner for use on products at the grocery store. Heali also has a meal planner, which analyzes the nutritional makeup of hundreds of thousands of recipes, products and meals to provide its nutritional guidance.

But the Heali app isn’t just for people wanting to eat fewer carbs. I spoke with Heali Founder and CEO Kyle Dardashti last month, who explained that his app can also provide guidance for people with certain medical conditions. For example, if a user has Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), they can use the app when grocery shopping to see if products contain certain emulsifiers that exacerbate their condition.

Heali is part of the personalized nutrition/food-as-medicine movement, and there is certainly no shortage of players in that space. There are other mobile apps like Yes Health and Foodvisor, hardware devices like the Mixfit, and meal delivery services like Kaigo. All of these are looking to help you eat healthier.

When asked what separates Heali from all the other competitors in the space, Dardashti told me, “Others have taken 10 diets or so, they have their subset of recipes in their app. They’ve tagged those few hundred recipes for how it adheres to those 10 diets.” He added that Heali has “built the engine that can do it all programmatically. Now it’s not just one of 10 tags. It has been done programmatically with AI.”

This, according to Dardashti, makes Heali, the most personalized dietary engine on the market.

The proof, as always, will be in the (diet-approved) pudding. The Heali app is free on both iOS and Android, and those interested can join the waitlist. Beta users will be admitted in cohorts.

Human Steak: the Next Lab-Grown Meat?

The range of alternative meats grown in a lab widens every month, and now we have companies attempting lab-grown beef, chicken, seafood, brisket, and even kangaroo. Could human meat be next?

I doubt it, but a group of designers recently highlighted how possible that concept would be should someone attempt to try it. Andrew Pelling, Orkan Telhan and Grace Knight made a DIY meal kit for lab-grown human meat that was recently nominated for Design of the Year by The Design Museum in London.

Called the Ouroboros Steak (named after the ancient symbol of the snake eating its own tail), the design is for a meal kit that would come with everything a person needs to culture cells from their own body and turn them into mini steaks. The design was commissioned for the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Designs for Different Futures exhibition, which ended in March of this year. 

To be clear: no one is growing human meat to sell in the grocery stores. The design is purely conceptual. According to Design Museum, it is “a critical commentary on the lab-grown meat industry and critiques the industry’s claims to sustainability.”

That critique is right on the mark, since lab-grown meat producers generally rely on the controversial Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS) to produce their alt-meat wares. FBS is a byproduct that comes from the blood of cow fetuses. As this article from Slate from a few years back highlights, it’s a gruesome practice that involves killing a pregnant cow, removing the live fetus, then draining the latter of blood that eventually gets refined and turned into FBS. 

The website for the Ouroboros Steak concept doesn’t specifically mention FBS, but notes, almost wryly, that, “Growing yourself ensures that you and your loved ones always know the origin of your food, how it has been raised and that its cells were acquired ethically and consensually.”

To be fair, a number of lab-grown meat companies acknowledge the ethics around FBS, and some are taking steps to find a different media for their products. When I spoke with BioBQ last month, CEO Katie Kam emphasized that her company does not use FBS and is instead looking for an alternative media for its lab-grown brisket. In Canada, a company called Future Fields is in the midst of developing what it calls “animal-free media,” which is just as it sounds.

Still, the FBS is the go-to media when it comes to cell-based meat, and calling out the ethics of it was a major goal of the Ouroboros Steak design: “As the lab-grown meat industry is developing rapidly, it is important to develop designs that expose some of its underlying constraints in order to see beyond the hype,” Pelling told Dezeen magazine.

He added that, “We are not promoting ‘eating ourselves’ as a realistic solution that will fix humans’ protein needs. We rather ask a question: what would be the sacrifices we need to make to be able to keep consuming meat at the pace that we are?”

Lab-grown meat is in the midst of an investment frenzy, not to mention the subject of much hype and news coverage. But it won’t be landing on grocery store shelves any time soon, in part because, in addition to being controversial, FBS is extremely expensive. A number of regulatory issues and questions around scalability also need to be resolved before we’re eating a cell-based Big Mac or nabbing a couple fillets for the backyard BBQ. Opinions differ around lab-grown meat’s timeline to the mainstream, with some claiming it will take just a couple years and others putting that mark “somewhere north of 15.” Some say it will never happen.

Wherever the reality falls, lab-grown meat producers will have to address the controversies surrounding their process process. That could mean explaining to consumers the gory details of FBS or, better yet, finding an alternative. Human meat won’t ever be that alternative, but the Ouroboros Steak project rightly reminds us we need to think twice about the ethics of innovation before barelling headlong into the hype.

Choco Is Challenging L.A. Chefs to Curb Food Waste With Food Creativity

As the world’s food waste problem gets literally bigger each year, so too does the amount of creative effort tech companies are putting into fighting it. The latest of these comes in the form of the Waste is Gold campaign, a pop-up event in Los Angeles in which three restaurants will serve dishes created from the food byproduct in their own kitchens. Powering the event is restaurant tech company Choco, which has big ambitions for fighting food waste both now and in the future.

The pop-up event will take place from Nov. 19–21 at Counterpart Vegan in Echo Park, Strings of Life in West Hollywood, and Beelman’s in Downtown L.A. These restaurants’ chefs will create dishes made from food byproduct (e.g., tomato soup from leftover vegetables) that will be available for takeout or outdoor dining. Customers can order online via the Waste is Gold website.

Choco is best known for its mobile platform that connects restaurant kitchens directly with suppliers to more easily order and manage their inventory. The company raised $30.2 million back in April, around the time it also launched a direct-to-consumer channel in response to the pandemic and ensuing restaurant industry meltdown. 

But speaking to me on a call this week, Chelsea van Hooven, the Global Industry Advisor at Choco, said that the company’s overarching goal was to fight food waste, and that Choco is working on a number of different projects to raise awareness about the problem, including the Waste Is Gold campaign.

She noted that the inspiration for this campaign came after working with Matt Orlando, owner and chef at Amass, a zero-waste restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark. In keeping with Orlando’s idea of building creative menus from food byproduct, Choco has given chefs participating in the Waste is Gold campaign a similar challenge.

For example, Mimi Williams, the executive chef for Counterpart Vegan, has created a ratatouille with spaghetti made from various parts of squash — parts that might normally be thrown out. Using more of the entire food, whether a squash, a pumpkin, or whatever else happens to be in the fridge, is lesson more chefs could take advantage of, and one that doesn’t necessarily require a lot of tech to execute on.

Tech, however, definitely has a role to play in the fight against food waste. For her part, van Hooven said that Choco is exploring the role of data in this area and how her company can provide a layer of it that will bring awareness and understanding of food waste to more restaurants. Tracking inventory data, and therefore food waste data, needs to become a part of daily business for restaurants. “We’re analyzing data in every field of our life, we should definitely use it for the better and optimize our food system,” she said. It’s a sentiment the food industry is voicing more these days as data’s critical role in fighting waste becomes more and more apparent.

While it’s still early days for Choco’s ambitions around creating that data layer, the pop-up restaurant events will definitely be making their way to more cities in the future.