Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

AI

Food Tech News: Google AI Cake, Chipotle’s Bitcoin Giveaway and Robot Food Delivery

Welcome to the first Food Tech News round-up of April! This week we have news on a cake created by Google artificial intelligence, Kiwibot hitting the streets of Santa Monica, Ember’s new travel charger, and Chipotle’s bitcoin giveaway.

Google artificial intelligence created a cake recipe in partnership with Mars Wrigley

Google Cloud engineers created a machine learning model that uses hundreds of existing baked good recipes to develop a completely new recipe. The result was a “Cakie” (a cake and cookie hybrid) and the components of what makes a cake and cookie were generated with artificial intelligence. For the partnership with Mars Wrigley UK, Maltesers (chocolate-covered malt balls) were incorporated into the recipe to create the first-ever “Maltesers AI Cake.” Google trends revealed that “sweet and salty” was a top search trend, and the cake recipe used a buttercream frosting infused with Marmite. Earlier this year, the same machine learning model was used to create two totally new baked good recipes, the “Cakie” and “Breakie”.

Kiwibot and MealMe partner for food delivery in Santa Monica

MealMe, an app that compares prices and times of food delivery services, and Kiwibot, a teleoperated robot service that delivers food, have partnered to deliver food in Santa Monica. On April 1st, the companies began delivery for Blue Plate Taco and Red O Restaurant on Ocean Ave. Kiwibot’s robots provide contactless food delivery, and so far 100k deliveries have been completed in Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Jose, Denver, Taipei, and Medellin,

Ember launches car charger to keep beverages warm on the road

Ember, the creator of the self-heating coffee mug, has created a car charger to keep Ember Travel Mugs warm all day. The Ember Travel Mug is capable of keeping a beverage warm for three hours, but now it can be plugged directly into a car charger for an all-day charge. The car charger costs $49.95 on Ember’s website.

Photo from Chipotle

Chipotle hosted a giveaway of free burritos and bitcoin

For National Burrito Day, Chipotle partnered with the founder of Coil, Stefan Thomas, to giveaway $100,000 worth of Bitcoin and $100,000 in burritos. To win, contestants had 10 chances to guess a six-digit code. The giveaway only lasted for nine hours on April 1st on BurritosOrBitcoin.com. Update: I tried, and did not win.

Food Tech Show Live: Sony Invests in our Robot Chef Future

The Spoon team recently got together on Clubhouse to talk about some of the most interesting food tech and future food stories of the week. This time around, we were also joined by food tech investor Brian Frank.

If you’d like to join us for the live recording, make sure to follow The Spoon’s Food Tech Live club on Clubhouse, where you’ll find us recording our weekly news review every Friday.

The stories we talked about this week include:

As always, you can find the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also download direct or just click play below.

Sony Invests in Analytical Flavor Systems To Help Our Robot Chefs of the Future Better Predict What We Want to Eat

When Analytical Flavor Systems (AFS) CEO Jason Cohen talks about his company’s technology, it usually involves a story about helping a big food company. In particular, how AFS’s AI flavor platform, Gastrograph AI, can predict how a new product such as a bag of chips or energy drink might perform in a new country or with a new demographic group.

Ask him to tell you about his company’s flagship product in the future, though, and the conversation might well include discussing how it helped a robot chef decide what exactly to make us for dinner.

That’s because the New York-based startup has recently taken a corporate investment round from Sony, which late last year announced a dedicated project focused specifically on developing food focused AI and robotics technology.

According to Cohen, Sony’s investment team believes AFS’s technology could help them achieve their goal of creating robot chefs that know exactly what to cook.

“Once you get a food robot up and running, you don’t know what people are gonna want to eat, what they’re going to prefer, like and dislike,” said Cohen in a Zoom call.

But with a technology like Gastrograph, robots of the future might be able to more accurately predict flavor combinations consumers better than humans themselves.

“Consumers have no idea what they like and dislike,” said Cohen. “They’re actually really bad at determining whether, say, they want more vanilla in their vanilla cup. You ask them and they say ‘yes’, you put it down and they want less. Sony recognized that and that’s what part of this investment is for: future innovation and growth, to help them accomplish their goals of getting cooking robots into every home.”

In addition to Sony, AFS also took on corporate investment from BASF. According to Cohen, the German conglomerate’s plant breeding and genomics program is interested in using Gastrograph AI to help them in seed development so they can ultimately predict with a higher success rate with the crops they are breeding.

“It takes a really long time, anywhere from a year to a couple of years, even decades, on some crops, in order to breed in specific traits,” said Cohen. “And so they work with us to rapidly screen and profile the fruits that they are market leaders in, or the fruits that they want to become market leaders in, and to breed better seed stock that they can then sell to farmers in different countries around the world.”

While Cohen wouldn’t disclose the amount of investment from Sony and BASF, he did say that this was an in-between “corporate”round that they had been discussing with the two strategic investors before COVID hit, so when everything shut down in March of last year things were “already in place.” Next year, said Cohen, he expects the company will raise a Series A round of funding.

Speaking of COVID, I asked Cohen how his company did this past year, and he said their core business of working with CPG innovation teams actually benefitted because as companies wanted to keep the innovation pipelines moving during a time of severe travel restrictions and AFS’s technology allowed them to do that. Since the normal big food practice of testing products in-market with focus groups curtailed during lockdowns, some companies relied on Gastrograph AI’s technology to predict how a new product might do.

This recent investment follows a 2018 seed round investment of $4 million.

HungerRush Launches Its AI-based Text-to-Order Tech for Restaurant Chains

Restaurant management software company HungerRush announced today that it launched its artificial intelligence-driven text-to-order product.

Dubbed HungerRush TextAI, the new feature uses natural language processing to interpret and place orders that come in via SMS. The new product is the result of HungerRush’s acquisition of OrdrAI last December. In its press announcement today, HungerRush said that TextAI works better than traditional phone or other employee-assisted formats by virtually eliminating order errors.

Text AI also integrates with HungerRush’s overall suite of products that include POS, delivery management, online ordering, mobile app, reporting and management, payment processing, and loyalty program.

HungerRush’s TextAI product launch comes at an interesting moment for AI integration for restaurants. Artificial Intelligence-driven software grabbed headlines last year as Kea, Clinc and even Google all had products that used natural language processing to hold “conversations” with restaurant customers. The promise, of course is that AI can take over incoming customer orders, allowing humans to perform more food creation and order expediting.

But in a signal that AI might not work as well as had been predicted, news broke this week that McDonald’s may sell Dynamic Yield, the AI startup it acquired in 2019. Granted, Dynamic Yield’s implementation of AI is more about creating dynamic menus that improved upselling (e.g., it’s cold outside, the menu highlighted warm beverages), so it’s a bit apples to oranges when compared with text-to-order. But if McDonald’s reportedly couldn’t even get a 1 percent bump from its implementation of AI, that could impact how other restaurant chains perceive the overall value of AI.

That’s not to say restaurants will abandon AI altogether. All of these technologies are new, and, not for nothing, are being tested under the unusual conditions of a pandemic, which has us ordering more takeout and delivery. Restaurants, which are seeing diminished value in third-party delivery services, need to save money where they can. If AI-driven text-to-order can drive sales and help restaurants get more value out of their labor, then that will go a long way towards adoption.

Demetria Raises $3M to Automate Coffee Bean Analysis

Demetria, a startup that promises to automate the analysis and grading of coffee beans, came out of stealth yesterday and announced that it has raised $3 million in seed funding. The round was led by Celeritas and a group of private investors including Mercantil Colpatria, the investment arm of Grupo Colpatria.

As coffee beans move through the supply chain, their quality has traditionally been judged by “cupping.” In this process, a human with proper certifications selects samples of beans and judges them based on factors like aroma, acidity and flavor. As you can imagine, this process is slow, wasteful, and because it’s done by experts, not globally available.

It also means that coffee bean quality and pricing is a subjective process, which can incorporate any number of human biases that can affect the prices paid to farmers and across the supply chain.

Demetria aims to automate this process by using near-infrared scanning and cloud-based artificial intelligence analysis to develop “digital fingerprints” of coffee beans. As green coffee beans move through the supply chain, they are analyzed with a near-infrared scanner to look for biochemical markers to match a bean’s profile with an industry standard set of quality metrics.

This means that bean quality can be quickly assessed with a handheld scanner and mobile phone. What’s more, beans do not have to be taken out of the supply chain to tested via cupping. Instead, they stay, reducing waste.

We’ve seen this type of AI-based scanning in the food supply chain elsewhere. Most recently, Driscoll’s announced that it was using Consumer Physics’ SCiO technology to scan berries for sweetness. Consumer Physics’ handheld scanner is one of the tools being used by Demetria.

Other companies in the space include AgShift and Intello Labs, both of which use computer vision and AI to assess food quality and bring objective grading to buyers and sellers.

In its press announcement yesterday, Demetria said it has successfully completed a pilot with Carcafe, the Colombian coffee division of agricultural commodity traders Volcafe/ED&F Man. Demetria said it is also working with Federación Nacional de Cafeteros (FNC), the Colombian National Federation for Coffee Growers, to develop apps that help farmers and their transaction points in the supply chain control and track bean quality, and price.

Technologies like Demetria’s can hopefully bring more fairness to the food supply chain by speeding up the process and standardizing the analysis so everyone gets paid a fair price.

Vivino Raises $155M Series D for its Wine App and Online Marketplace

Mobile wine app and online marketplace, Vivino announced today that it has raised a $155 million Series D round of funding. This round was led by investment firm Kinnevik and Sprints Capital, with participation from GP BullHound and Creandum. This brings the company’s total funding to $221 million USD.

This most recent round of funding will be used for Vivino’s continued geographical expansion and to incorporate more personalized AI (artificial intelligence) into its platform. The company will focus its expansion efforts in markets in the US, UK, Germany, Portugal, and Japan. Its AI will be improved to create better wine recommendations for its customers.

Vivino’s community can use the mobile app or online marketplace to see reviews and ratings of different wines, and view personal recommendations based on their preferences. Customers shop for wine online through the website marketplace or app, and have wine shipped directly to their homes. Vivino allows the customer to shop for wine based on grape or region, and offers wine pairing recommendations for a variety of foods. Once the wine delivery arrives, customers can use the accompanying app to scan each bottle and receive additional information about the wine. For those unsure which bottle of wine to pick out, Vivino uses its AI-based recommendation platform to make suggestions.

E-commerce alcohol sales have significantly increased since the start of the pandemic, and this sector seems to be having its moment. Vivino’s fundraise comes just one day after alcohol delivery service and online marketplace Drizly was purchased by Uber for $1.1 billion.

Currently, 50 million people worldwide are part of the Vivino community of wine drinkers. The Vivino app is free, and available for both Apple and Android phones.

Foodspace is Using AI to Create Better CPG Data So You Find That Spicy Cheese Faster

You ever search for a food product online or at the grocery store but can’t find that exact something that perfectly matches your taste, dietary or nutritional preferences? You’re not alone. One of the big reasons searching for food products can be so frustrating is they are often bucketed under data categories that are holdovers from existing category management systems built fifteen or twenty years ago.

A new startup called Foodspace wants to eliminate this annoying experience by helping the CPG and food retail industry update their old-school category management systems with technology that makes sure that every conceivable product attribute a consumer may be searching for is documented and assigned to products headed to a physical or digital shelf.

The Boston-based startup plans on doing that by using machine vision technology that analyzes scanned images of new product packaging introduced by CPG manufacturers and uses AI to synthesize and assign attributes based on its understanding of the product packaging and label data. The attributes go beyond the typical high-level product categories such as organic or gluten free, and factors in things such as sensory preferences (creamy, grainy, etc) and consumer taste and lifestyle archetypes. All told, Foodspace’s system can assign nearly three thousand different attributes to a product.

The end result should be faster, more personalized searches for consumers. If, for example, a person who likes cheese, loves spicy food, and has a gluten allergy heads to the deli section of an online grocery store, they shouldn’t have to drill down five categories deep within the deli category to find that gluten-free habanero cheddar. With Foodspace’s AI-powered synthesis and matching of different attributes, a consumer finds a product match much faster, perhaps almost immediately, depending on the understanding the online grocer has about the shopper.

Of course, this move towards more granular, highly-consumer centric data is something that CPG and retail industries recognize is important, but have been slow to evolve away from because of the huge magnitude of switching towards systems that have thousands of product attributes. The Food Industry Association (which goes under the acronym FMI), has been working on a new framework called Shopper Centric Retailing that would update product information in the more detailed way, and this week at FMI’s annual midwinter meeting, the industry consultant who developed Shopper Centric Retailing framework, Winston Weber, announced Foodspace as a “premier” strategic solution partner to help food product companies transition their products to the new format.

In short, Weber sees Foodspace’s technology as an enabling platform to help food brands migrate to the future.

Foodspace’s technology is “helping translate products in the online space, to the benefit of brands, retailers and the end consumers,” said Weber CEO and namesake Win Weber in the press release. “Their technology is the conduit for which the Shopper-Centric Retailing business model can optimize consumer satisfaction.”

As I thought about better product data that could personalize my food product searches, I started to wonder if this could help usher in the personalized food profile concept that I’ve been thinking about ever since I heard Mike Lee talk about the idea at Smart Kitchen Summit in 2017.

Foodspace CEO Ayo Oshinaike thinks so. “The universal data set that enables that is not there,” Oshinaike told me via Zoom. “That’s the piece that’s in the middle that Foodspace is trying to solve with the breaking down of the information accuracy and how we’re able to relate products to consumers.”

Ukko Raises $40M to Fight Food Allergies and Develop its Good Gluten

Ukko, a biotech company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to develop food and therapeutics that fight food allergies, announced today that it has raised a $40 million Series B round of funding. The round was led by Leaps by Bayer (the impact investment arm of Bayer), with participation from Continental Grain Company, PeakBridge Ventures, Skyviews Life Science and Fall Line Capital. Existing investors including Khosla Ventures and TIME Ventures, the investment fund of Marc Benioff, participated as well.

This brings the total amount of funding raised by Ukko to $47.7 million dollars. According to the press announcement, the new funding will allow Tel Aviv, Israel-based Ukko to enter into clinical trials for its investigational therapeutic for peanut allergies and, more relevant for our purposes, accelerate development of the company’s proprietary gluten.

Simply speaking, Ukko uses its AI platform to analyze patient data to map how an allergen triggers a reaction in the body. With that information, Ukko breaks down the gluten protein to its component level and gets rids of the bad parts that cause allergic reactions. It keeps the good parts. Ukko then creates this new good gluten either by genetically modifying wheat plants or fermenting yeast (or some other applicable base cell) to grow it in a bioreactor.

The result, Ukko Co-Founder and CEO Anat Binur told me by phone this week, is a gluten that stretches and bakes and has all the biophysical aspects of gluten, and can be eaten by people with gluten sensitivities and celiac disease. This, in turn, means that gluten-sensitive people don’t need to sacrifice quality when enjoying different types of baked goods.

At least, that’s the plan. Binur said that some of the company’s new funds will go towards clinical trials of its gluten and getting the product through all the safety protocols and to the point of commercialization.

Once Ukko’s gluten reaches the commercialization stage, Binur said that there are a number of options for how it comes to market. Ukko could sell its own gluten, which could be added to gluten-free starches (like almonds or rice). Alternatively, the company could sell its own gluten flour as an ingredient to food companies and restaurants/bakeries, or create its own line of branded gluten-free flour to be sold on store shelves. Or Ukko could pursue some combination of all three.

By one estimate from Grand View Research, the gluten-free products market was valued at $21.61 billion in 2019, and projected to grow at a CAGR of 9.2 percent through 2027. So there is plenty of market opportunity just in gluten for Ukko.

But Ukko’s platform can be applied to any food allergy. As noted, the company is developing therapuetics for peanut allergies, but Ukko’s tech could be used for dairy allergies, soy allergies, egg allergies, etc. Creating replacement foods from the ground up that have the same nutrition and behave like the original could help alleviate a lot of sickness and save lives.

Google Cloud Team Uses AI to Develop Hybrid “Cakie” and “Breakie” Recipes

I remember at some point last year after the pandemic had started, I called three different grocery stores to check if they had yeast in stock. Of course, I had no luck at any location because our country had entered a baking extravaganza; ovens were fired up non-stop across the country to bake sourdough, banana bread, and chocolate chip cookies. Due to this baking frenzy that overtook our country in 2020, the Google Cloud team analyzed the ingredients and specific ratios used in favorite baked goods like cookies, bread, and cakes through the use of a machine learning program. The goal was to essentially determine what defined something as a cookie, cake, bread, and how each of these categories differ from each other. As a result, the team also used its AI to produced two new hybrid baked goods called a “Cakie” and a “Breakie”.

The team collected hundreds of different recipes for bread, cookies, and cakes to create a dataset and then used Google Cloud’s AutoML Tables tool to build a machine learning model. The model analyzed the amounts of key ingredients such as yeast, butter, eggs, and sugar, in the different recipes and was able to determine if the recipe was for bread, cake, or cookies. Bread recipes were accurately labeled about 90 percent of the time, but sometimes the model mislabeled cookie recipes for cake recipes.

Using this model, the team used ingredients and measurements that the algorithm determined were key for cookie, bread, and cake recipes to create two new hybrid recipes. The “Breakie” is half cookie and half bread, which turned out to be a fluffy, airy cookie with a texture similar to that of a muffin. The “Cakie” maintained a cake shape and sponginess but has a buttery flavor and crispy outside like a cookie.

Google Cloud’s project is just one neat example of how machine learning and AI (artificial intelligence) can be applied in food technology. Spoonshot recently launched a free version of its AI flavor-pairing tool that offers the user both novel and unique pairings for different ingredients. Brightseed created an AI platform called Forager, which detects hidden phytonutrients in different plants. Even companies like Starbucks, Sweetgreen, KFC, and McDonald’s use AI to some degree in order to streamline day to day operations.

As we still find ourselves in the pandemic early 2021, you may be looking for some new recipes to bake. You’re in luck; the Google Cloud team provided the two recipes created through the use of AI, the “Cakie” and the “Breakie”.

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.

Sony AI Unveils Trio of Food Projects Including AI-Powered Recipes and Robots

Sony AI, an artificial intelligence and robotics research and development company spun out from Sony, today announced its “Gastronomy Flagship Project.” The new food-related endeavors include an AI-powered recipe creation app, a robot chef’s assistant and a community co-creation initiative.

Sony launched Sony AI last November and the unit became its own company in April of this year. Sony AI’s mission is to develop AI-related products for videogames, imaging and sensing, and gastronomy “with the aim of enhancing the creativity and techniques of chefs around the world,” according to today’s press announcement.

To that end, the three projects Sony AI announced today are:

  • AI-Powered Recipe Creation App – Gathering up data such as aroma, flavor, molecular structure, nutrients and more, this app will use AI algorithms to help chefs create novel food pairing, recipes and menus.
  • Chef Assisting Cooking Robot – This is pretty self-explanatory. Sony AI will develop a robot that can mimic the physical actions of a human chef to do everything from preparing to plating dishes.
  • Community Co-creation Initiative – This project is a little more vague, with Sony AI only saying it will “aim to contribute to the long-term sustainability of the community” through relationships with universities, research institutes, companies and more. The first step in this process is a “Chef Interview” video series on the Sony AI website.

Sony AI’s press release didn’t provide specific details around when or where these projects would launch (other than the video series).

But today’s announcement continues a trend we’ve been seeing with large electronics corporations doing advanced work on food robotics and AI. LG is working on robot waiters with Woowa Brothers in South Korea. And Panasonic is working with with the Haidilao chain of hot pot restaurants in China to develop a robotic kitchen.

Sony itself is no slouch when it comes to food-related robots. The company collaborated on cooking robot research with Carnegie-Mellon University a couple years back. And it has a pretty grand vision for advanced AI-powered cooking robots and assistants that could make Michelin star meals in your home.