Welcome to this week’s edition of the Food AI Weekly Bulletin, our weekly wrapup that highlights important happenings at the intersection of AI and food. If you’d like to sign up to get this bulletin delivered to your inbox, you can do so here.
Is AI-Washing a Problem for Food Tech? Some predict one-third of startups will feature AI as part of their core product by the end of this year. Is stretching the truth about how truly AI-powered your product is a problem for food tech?
Gatorade’s AI Hydration Coach. Is Gatorade’s AI-powered hydration coach a marketing trick or another sign that wellness copilots are beginning to pop up everywhere?
Researchers Build RhizoNet, Which Uses Next-Gen Neural Network to Analyze Plant Roots. A new tool called RhizoNet could provide a big leap in understanding root growth.
Number of Retailers Using AI Doubles In The Past Year. AI adoption is skyrocketing, and retail looks to be one of the fastest growing sector.
CaperCart Continues Roll-Out of AI-Enabled Shopping Carts. Speaking of AI at retail, Instacart is hoping to do its part to spread the technology through its computer-vision enabled smart shopping carts.
Mineral AI Winds Down. Somewhat surprisingly, Mineral AI announced last week they would wind down and distribute their technology through license to partners such as Driscoll’s.
Mars Using AI to Develop 50 Product Concepts a Day. Big CPG is getting the hang of this generative AI thing.
eGrowcery Launches 70 Thousand AI-Generated Recipes. Are recipes set to become almost all AI-generated?
Is AI-Washing a Problem for Food Tech?
Anytime a new technology captures the public zeitgeist, brands invariably jump on the bandwagon. After all, that’s what brands do, and it’s incumbent on any good marketer to capitalize on any buzzy association possible.
Where it could be problematic is when a company claims to have a key competitive differentiator through a given technology and they’re stretching the truth. Being an early adopter of, say, cloud computing, Web3, or, yes, AI is worth mentioning or making the center of a marketing campaign (even if it can be eyeroll-inducing), but when it’s on your pitch deck and you are exaggerating just how core it is to your product, it can be potentially deceptive, at least according to the SEC.
And now the regulatory body has started to take a stand against what they’re calling ‘AI-washing’. While the focus of the SEC is on claims by investment firms claiming to deliver investor value through AI-powered decision-making, it’s clear they are policing the broader use of claims by companies looking to benefit by association.
According to European investment fund OpenOcean, by the end of the year, one-third of startups will feature AI in their pitch decks. My guess is many will have legitimate claims, but as we’ve seen over the past year in food tech, sometimes such claims seem a stretch. It’s a logical move as a founder, particularly in a market where raising capital has become exceedingly difficult. But as everyone jumps on the AI bandwagon, it’s worth it for startups to be cautious about their claims, and those looking to invest or partner with these companies should do their due diligence to see if there’s real substance behind the pitch deck.
Gatorade’s AI Hydration Coach
A couple of weeks ago, at Cannes Lions, the advertising industry’s biggest international confab and awards gala, Gatorade debuted its generative AI-powered app that acts as a hydration coach.
Gatorade’s AI Hydration coach app applied AI “to educate users about the best ways to stay hydrated through an assistant that draws on decades of historical data from the sport beverage brand’s research institute. The concept leans into the idea that AI has the power to democratize services that were once exclusive, giving everyday consumers the type of expert guidance usually reserved for elite athletes.”
It’s an interesting concept – after all, the future very well may be filled with AI-powered co-pilots, assistants will sit on our proverbial shoulders whispering in our ears to coach us through life – but I’m not sure how seriously consumers will take specific brand-activated assistants. Millennials and Gen-Z and are for tooling up when it comes to their health, but they all have great authenticity sniffing capabilities and brands aren’t always the most trusted advisors in part because it’s easy to question their motivation.
Researchers Build RhizoNet, Which Uses Next-Gen Neural Network to Analyze Plant Roots
According to a story in Interesting Engineering, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Applied Mathematics and Computational Research (AMCR) and Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) Divisions have developed a new neural network tool called RhizoNet to analyze plant roots.
From IE:
It paved the way for scientists to accurately measure root growth and biomass, making it much easier and faster to study plant roots in the lab.
In simple terms, RhizoNet automatically interprets images of plant roots which makes it more effortless and faster to comprehend the workings of root growth and how they respond to different conditions.
According to the report, the system will enable much faster and more accurate analysis of root biomass, especially compared to more manual (i.e. human-driven) analysis of plant roots.
The researchers noted they tested the system’s effectiveness through analysis of Brachypodium distachyon, a grass species of plants, as they subjected it to deprived nutrients over five weeks.
“We’ve made a lot of progress in reducing the manual work involved in plant cultivation experiments with the EcoBOT, and now RhizoNet is reducing the manual work involved in analyzing the data generated,” stated Peter Andeer, a research scientist in EGSB and a lead developer of EcoBOT.
“This increases our throughput and moves us toward the goal of self-driving labs,” he added.
Number of Retailers Using AI Doubles In The Past Year
According to the Food Industry Association’s just-published annual study on the state of food retail, The Food Retailing Industry Speaks 2024, retailers are increasingly turning to AI to optimize parts of their business. The report, which surveyed large and small retail chains, said that 41% of those surveyed say they are using AI for parts of their business. This is double the number of retailers using AI over just a year ago.
A doubling of AI usage at retail is not surprising given the proliferation of various tools, from supply-chain optimization to in-store computer vision systems for real-time inventory and theft reduction analysis. My guess is that by next year, most retailers will be deploying AI in some parts of their operations.
CaperCart Continues Roll-Out of AI-Enabled Shopping Carts
Instacart has added another round of stores to the list of those its CaperCart smart shopping carts. The company announced that Price Chopper and McKeever’s Market & Eatery have each added the “AI-powered grocery carts” to a store locations in Missouri. This comes a week after the company announced Wakefern announced they were increasing the number of storefronts using the Capercart.
As we’ve noted for the past couple years, the company is increasingly looking to diversify from its personal shopper business. It has been focused on creating technology platforms for the non-Amazon grocery retailers of the world to transform themselves in an increasingly digitized grocery shopping industry.
Mineral AI Winds Down
Whenever a company graduates from Google’s moonshot factory X to become an operating company under parent company Alphabet, most assume said company will be a success. But the reality is these graduates, for whatever reason, sometimes just don’t get the traction required as an independent company and eventually wind down.
The latest example of this is Mineral AI. Mineral, a ‘computational agriculture’ company that graduated from X with significant fanfare last year, announced last week it was winding down. In a post by Mineral CEO, Elliott Grant, he says the company’s technology will live on through a license to Driscoll’s and other “leading agribusinesses where they can have maximum impact.”
It’s hard to decipher variables around decision-making at a giant like Alphabet, but it’s been clear since the beginning of the year that the company has been paring back its moonshot initiatives, both through layoffs and in how much capital they expand to fund the initiatives. A decade ago, X was home to a bunch of out-there concepts, such as balloon-powered broadband, but as cheap capital has dried up past and the company is funneling resources towards keeping up in LLM space race, those days look to be coming to a close.
Mars Using AI to Develop 50 Product Concepts a Day
While it’s easy to caricature big food brands as giant behemoths slow to adapt to new innovation and technology, it’s becoming increasingly clear that many are quickly building internal capabilities leveraging AI to accelerate core product development processes.
The latest indication is the news that Mars has developed its own generative AI-powered tool called Brahma to develop up to fifty product concepts a day. According to a report in Consumer Goods Technology, Brahma “uses data from consumer insights studies the CPG conducted last year involving 80,000 consumers and 800,000 consumption moments across 11 countries.”
eGrowcery Launches 70 Thousand AI-Generated Recipes
eGrowcery, a white-label grocery e-commerce platform company, announced today they have launched an AI-powered personalized recipe offering to their SaaS customers.. The company said their new AI recipe feature uses AI to tailor recipe suggestions based on regional preferences and store inventory. The company hopes to boost shopper satisfaction, sales, and market share for retailers with a suite of over 70 thousand personalized recipes.
The move by eGrowcery is an indication that shoppable recipes are an obvious early candidate of a category that will be consumed by generative AI. It will be interesting to watch how much consumers take to these offerings, given that so many home cooks take inspiration nowadays from other sources (such as social media) to get recipe and meal ideas. However, we’ve begun to hear that the influencer-recipe space is struggling to keep up with the rapidly changing landscape resulting from Google’s push towards using AI-powered summaries rather than link-outs to other sites.
In other words, AI is beginning to sink its hooks ever deeper into the food planning and inspiration space from seemingly every angle.
Our Favorite AI-Generated Food Images of The Week
Over on our Spoon community Slack, we had some of our Spoon community drop some AI-generated artwork
First this tasty looking food from Min Fan. You can see all the images from Min on our Slack.
And we also liked this futuristic food creation facility from Emma Forman:
If you would like your AI-art work featured on The Spoon, drop them into our Spoon Slack.
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