Spoonshot, a company that uses AI to predict new and different flavor combinations, announced today that it has raised $1 million in Seed funding. The round was led by SRI Capital and brings the total amount of funding for the company to $1.8 million.
The thesis behind Spoonshot is that companies looking to develop the next big thing in food need to look ahead. If your company only watches what is trending now, by the time it gets a product into market, that trend will already be over or commonplace.
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 company launched its Ingredient Network product last October. At the time, we wrote:
Ingredient Networks lets you search ingredients for recommended flavor combinations and pairings. For example, when you search “banana,” it brings up what might be considered unusual recommendations like coffee concentrate and sunflower seed butter. But remember, what Spoonshot wants to do is surface flavors you probably haven’t considered. So bringing up something like chocolate or strawberries would be useless because you already know about them.
I spoke by phone this week with Kishan Vasani, Co-Founder and CEO of Spoonshot, and he said that the company has taken its Ingredient Network to the next level with its new Concept Generator.
Whereas Ingredient Network was more about exploring different flavor combinations and possibilities, the Concept Generator is more concrete. CPG companies can come to the service with a set idea in mind, like say, a cookie with blueberry as the main flavor. The Concept Generator then takes that information and returns with a blueprints of different blueberry cookies with different flavor combinations as well as all the ingredients that would go into making it.
Spoonshot’s tools are available at a unique time, given the pandemic. The lockdowns have people eating at home more and doing quite a bit of snacking. Giving CPG companies tools to quickly create new types of comfort foods could be quite appealing.
Vasani said that Spoonshot will be using the new money for marketing, something the company hasn’t really done up to this point, as well as hiring out its team.
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