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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

AI

KloveChef Opens Up Voice-Guided Cooking Platform to Publishers

KloveChef, the voice-guided cooking startup cofounded by one of India’s biggest celebrity chefs in Sanjeev Kapoor, is opening up its platform this month to publishers wanting to add voice-guided cooking functionality to their recipes.

The new tool will allow anyone who has recipe content — chefs, cookbook authors, bloggers or food retailers — to upload their recipes to KloveChef’s platform via a web interface and it will convert them into a voice-guided recipes.

“We will democratize the interactive recipe creation and distribution,” said Bahubali Shété, KloveChef cofounder and CEO, in an interview with The Spoon.

Shété told me that recipe publishers will be able to use KloveChef to publish their recipes across a variety of voice platforms such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Google Home and Amazon Fire TV. To do so, they just copy the recipe URL or paste the full recipe into the web interface and KloveChef will convert into a voice-guided recipe.

Shété also said that publishers will have the option of letting users send their recipes posted on other web channels such as YouTube or Pinterest to their voice assistants for guided cooking.

KloveChef is opening up their voice platform after finding some success with their Alexa voice skill targeted primarily at home cooks in India. According to Shété, the guided cooking assistant has a total of 465,000 users and 100,000 monthly active users.

Shété says publishers can make money through KloveChef if the recipe is converted into a shopping list. The recipe-to-shopping list feature, which KloveChef has been testing through its app in India, currently has over 1 million recipes converted into shopping lists via voice search.

I have to admit, I like the idea of self-publishing recipes to voice platforms. It reminds me of the early days of ebooks, when authors would use technology from early pioneers like Smashwords to put their books into the world and on other popular platforms. Perhaps not all that surprisingly, just as like those early days of ebooks, recipe self-publishers are relying on Amazon to reach the end consumer, only instead of Kindle this time it’s Alexa.

It’s too soon to see how successful KloveChef will be in attracting cooks for its voice guided recipe assistant outside of India. In its home market, they’ve been able to leverage the large reach of Kapoor, while here in the states, Alexa tends to favor its featured partners such as Food Network or Tasty. KloveChef will have to compete with the algorithm-favored partners through attracting recipe publishers such as popular food bloggers or food retailers with built-in audiences to accrue a sizeable user base.

Looking forward, the company hopes to also attract users by making the platform better over time. One of the early features will be adapting guided cooking where users can speed up a recipe or slow it down depending on their experience. The company plans to release the new capabilities by mid-August.

How Will the Black Swan of COVID-19 Impact Data Used in AI-Based Flavor Prediction?

In order to build an effective artificial intelligence (AI) platform, you need good data. Data feeds the algorithms that go into the AI; the better your data the better your AI system will function.

In the food tech world, there are a number of startups like Spoonshot, Analytical Flavor Systems and Tastewise have built intricate AI platforms that use tons of different data to help big CPG companies identify and predict culinary and flavor trends.

But what happens when a big catastrophic black swan event occurs like, oh, I don’t know, a global pandemic, which changes the eating and buying patterns of almost everyone on the planet all at once?

For instance. In February, it was easy to buy flour and yeast at your local grocery store. Fast forward to March and suddenly store shelves were empty and you had to resort to making your own yeast. Around that same time, instead of pictures of fancy restaurant meals, social media accounts were flooded with pictures of homemade bread.

Food predicting AI systems uses data points like restaurant menus, social media mentions and consumer purchasing patterns to determine future trends. But everyone didn’t start making sourdough bread at home because it was suddenly fashionable. It was because everyone was stuck inside.

How then, will AI systems handle this shock to the data system? Sheltering in place won’t last forever (knocks on wood), and who knows how long people will actually make their own bread. The popularity of it now is an aberration, does this mean that the data surrounding it is no good? Is bread making today indicative of anything other being bored or does it foretell a bigger trend?

To get a better sense I reached out to both SpoonShot and Analytical Flavor Systems to see how they are incorporating this massive disruption to our eating patterns into their own prediction process — and got two very different answers.

SpoonShot’s AI uses more than 3,000 sources across 22 data sets including menu, social and pattern data. Kishan Vasani, Co-Founder & CEO of SpoonShot, didn’t seem to think that COVID-19-induced eating changes would impact his company’s predictive capabilities at all. “Algorithms shouldn’t be overly sensitive to black swan data,” he said, “If you think about it, AI essentially means having enough relevant and appropriate data to process and predict.”

In other words, if your AI system is worth its salt, you should be able to weather big changes like this. “Everything goes back to the data and data sources,” Vasani said, “Menu data is significantly slowed down, but that’s compensated for with cooking platforms.”

On the other hand Jason Cohen, Founder and CEO of Analytical Flavor Systems, thinks the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns are a big deal. “Companies will say, ‘no no no, we can make predictions,'” Cohen said, “I do not believe that. This is the most rapid and intense change to consumer behavior since World War II.”

Cohen believes that with quarantines already in place for more than 60 days, new habits will definitely have formed. People will still be baking bread at home. What’s important is to meet this new data where it lives, literally.

Up until the pandemic, Analytical Flavor Systems used a 50 person panel of tasters as part of its data collection. This panel would come into the office to try various on-market foods. But since lockdown, the company has moved entirely to at-home testing. “In addition to CPG products, we are asking them to taste profile their homemade bread and soups,” Cohen said, “The point is we need to see those flavors, aromas and textures they are exposing themselves to.”

Cohen doesn’t think that past data is invalidated, but rather that data needs to be collected before during and after this crisis. Something which I think Vasani would agree with.

The thing about predictions now is that we won’t know if they were accurate for a long time. SpoonShot looks out 18 months and is even considering pushing that out to two years.

Hopefully we’ll be able to eat bread at a restaurant again by then.

Intello Labs Raises $5.9M for its AI-Based Food Grading

Intello Labs, which uses a combination of computer vision and artificial intelligence to grade food quality along the supply chain, announced today that it has raised a $5.9 million Series A. Saama Capital led the round with participation from global agritech funds GROW (Singapore) and SVG Ventures THRIVE (USA), and existing investors Omnivore and Nexus Venture Partners. This brings the total amount raised by Intello to $8.3 million.

Based in Gurgaon, India, Intello Labs offers a suite of computer vision products and cloud-based AI that can be used by farmers, food packers, exporters and retailers to assess the quality of fruits and vegetables. The goal is to bring transparency and objectivity to the food buying and selling business and establish fair prices throughout the supply chain. By having AI judge food grades, you eliminate haggling between biased people over what a particular bushel of apples is worth, for example.

When we first wrote about the company in 2018, it was focused on rural farmers and only used smartphone cameras to capture images of food. Finding that smaller farmers were more apprehensive about working with technology, Intello shifted to work with bigger, more corporate clients last year.

The company offers a number of different assessment tools:

  • Intello Track uses smartphone cameras to capture images of produce, which are analyzed by Intello’s cloud to assess size, color, and defects before returning a food grade.
  • Intello Sort is a machine that separates produce based on quality.
  • Intello Pack can be used to monitor produce as it is being packed for shipment
  • Intello Deep is a handheld scanner that detects Brix , pH , TSS, dry matter, moisture, pesticide residue

Intello isn’t the only company using AI and computer vision to assist with the assessment of fresh fruits and vegetables. AgShift offers similar services and launched its Hydra scanning system for bulk inspections last year.

Quickly and fairly assessing food quality has taken on greater importance during this time of global pandemic. Mass restaurant closings and general upheaval revealed the weaknesses and inequalities in our food supply chain with farmers throwing out tons of food. Tools like Intello Labs’ can bring efficiency to the food buying process and help keep the world fed.

Expect More Restaurants to Use AI Cameras Like DragonTail’s to Show a Kitchen’s Cleanliness

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, people mainly worried about where their food came from. Was it organic, locally raised, grain-fed, etc. (It was a simpler time.) But as the virus has spread, the bigger concern for consumers is who has touched their food, and were they wearing gloves and a face mask when they did so.

This is the socially distant, contactless delivery world that we now live in, which actually makes it the perfect time for Dragontail Systems to launch its new AI-powered camera that detects the sanitary conditions of food prep areas as the food is being packaged up for delivery.

You may remember Dragontail when its camera + computer vision system debuted at Domino’s in Australia last year. Dragontail’s camera is mounted above the workstation in Domino’s back of house where pizzas come out of the oven, are sliced up and boxed.

Back then, the Dragontail system was being used to assess quality control: that the pizza was the right shape with the right toppings, and that it was cooked properly. Dragontail’s camera took pictures of the pizza and Domino’s sent those pics to the customer as a way of showing hey, your pizza order was made properly and it’s heading out to you.

Now, in addition to the existing quality control features, Dragontail announced today that its camera system can check for sanitation conditions. The camera detects things like whether gloves and facemasks being worn, or how often a workspace is sanitized. The exact parameters of what to look for are up to the restaurant, as are how violations are communicated to the worker and/or manager.

So now, in addition to a picture of the food cooked properly, restaurants can provide a customer with a checklist of steps taken to show that the food was also handled properly. The end customer, then, can feel a little more comfortable knowing the restaurant followed proper cleanliness procedures.

We actually started seeing similar technology pop up last year in, of all places, China. As we wrote then, AI systems were installed in restaurants in the Shaoxing Province of China to monitor for unsanitary conditions like improper uniforms and mixed use of cutting boards. More recently in India, home cook marketplace FoodCloud launched a Kitchen Cam, which offers customers video footage of the kitchen and cooks as they make and package food.

Dragontail’s camera is currently being used in more than 2,500 stores across Australia, Canada, Singapore, the UK and Belgium. With today’s announcement, the company is ready to expand into the U.S. and work with restaurants of all sizes. The cameras cost between $500 and $1,000 and there is a $50 monthly fee for the computer vision systems.

As we’ve written before, the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating changes throughout the meal journey. With cameras like Dragontail’s likely becoming more commonplace, the meal journey will now include pictures.

Gousto Raises $41M for High-Tech Meal Kit Business

London, UK-based Gousto announced today it has raised another £33 million (~$41 million USD) for its meal kit subscription service, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. The round was led by Perwyn, with participation from BGF Ventures, MMC Ventures and online fitness guru Joe Wicks. It brings Gousto’s total funding to $179 million.

The new funds will go towards further developing Gousto’s technology, which is a huge component of both its customer interface and back-end logistics. On the consumer-facing side, Gousto uses an AI-powered personalization tool to recommend the most relevant meals to customers, who can select from over 50 recipes each week. Customers can choose a 2-person box or a family-size box, with recipes ranging from around $30 to $60, depending on the size of the box. According to the press release, Gousto currently delivers over 4 million meals to 380,000 U.K. households each month.

Behind the scenes, Gousto uses AI to automate parts of its supply chain and optimize overall logistics. The company also plans to launch a Next Day delivery service and build out its tech team over the coming months. 

If fundraising and headcount growth sounds a little out of place in today’s troubled economic times, remember that Gousto is a meal kit company whose primary goal is to serve people in their homes. The UK, where the service is available, is currently on lockdown in response to coronavirus that’s set to be extended until early May. That makes for a plenty of potential customers where a service like Gousto is concerned. The company told TechCrunch that demand for its business “has spiked upward” in recent weeks. In particular, Gousto has seen a 28 percent increase in family-style boxes. 

All that said, if you’re hoping to become a new Gousto customer, you’ll have to wait. A note on the Gousto website says the company is not accepting orders from new customers at this time, due to “extremely high demand.” There’s no word of how long that will last. Presumably, the new funding round and corresponding plans to increase headcount and tech development will help Gousto better reach the high demand for meal kits that will be around for some time.

CES 2020: Stratuscent’s Digital Nose Can “Smell” When Crops are Ripe or Food is Burning

Something good-smelling must be in the air at CES this week, because digital noses are becoming a bit of a thing at this year’s tech expo. Yesterday I dropped by the booth of Stratuscent, a Montreal, Quebec-based startup which is digitizing scents to detect freshness.

The company’s sensors, called eNoses, detect chemicals in the air to create a scent print — like a fingerprint for a smell. According to CEO David Wu, who gave me a tour, Stratuscent’s “secret sauce” is its superior AI and machine learning, which can quickly and accurately determine any number of complex scents, even ones too tricky for humans to smell. The company’s tech came from NASA, where it was originally used for leak detection.

The eNose is pretty simple to use. Just wave the product in question under the eNose and it will determine what it is — as well as its percentage of accuracy — in under thirty seconds. You can Wu demonstrating the technology below:

CES 2020: Stratuscent's eNose is a Digital Smelling Machine

Wu told me that Stratuscent’s noses have a variety of applications, including sniffing ethylene, a chemical that indicates spoilage, in crop shipments. They’re also working with a dairy company to detect milk freshness. In the home, Wu told me that the eNose could also be integrated into smart kitchen appliances to identify cooking stages (your sauce is about to burn!) and alert users to food spoilage.

Startuscent was founded in 2017 and has raised $4.3 million thus far. Wu said that in addition to its partnership with a dairy company, Stratuscent is pushing further into the food and agriculture space, and is also in conversations to work with indoor agriculture farmers.

Stratuscent isn’t the only player digitizing smell technology (what a world). Yesterday Chris wrote about Aryballe’s new Digital Nose 2.0, which also debuted at CES this week and also digitizes scent to detect freshness, cooking smells, etc.

Regardless, the digital scent landscape is just beginning to emerge. As food safety outbreaks grow — and consumers become more conscious about reducing home food waste — I think there will be a growing market for this sort of technology. Which means there’s ample opportunity for more than one player to nose its way into the digital smelling space.

Sony Sets up AI Unit to Work on Food

Sony announced this week that is has launched Sony AI, a new organization that will research and develop artificial intelligence specifically for games, imaging and sensors, and “gastronomy.” The new initiative will have offices in Japan, Europe and the U.S.

There aren’t many details around what exactly Sony will be working on, but Sony spokesman Shinichi Tobe told AlJazeera yesterday that “AI and robotics will not replace chefs. We are aiming to offer new tools to expand their creativity with AI and robotics.”

This isn’t Sony’s first foray into food. In April of last year, Sony teamed up with Carnegie-Mellon University to work on food robots. As we reported at the time:

Sony said they were starting off with food-related robots because the complexities involved with food could later be applied to a wider range of industries. Specifically, it cited the ability to work with fragile and odd-shaped materials, as well as the ability to operate a robot in small spaces.

AI and robots are like peanut butter and chocolate with AI being the “brain” for the robot “hands.” Things like computer vision, deep learning and synthetic data help form the AI so the robot can determine objects to grab and manipulate, etc..

Sony’s motivations may also be more societal in nature as the company’s home country of Japan is facing an aging population. Robots and other forms of automation could help with a potentially diminished labor force.

Food is a popular subject for robotics and AI researchers. Nvidia’s Lab in Seattle built a kitchen to train its robots to do everyday tasks. IBM partnered with spice company McCormick to use AI to develop new food products. And Korea’s Woowa Bros. hooked up with UCLA to work on food robots as well.

Something tells me we’ll be seeing more of these types of deal throughout next year.

French Nutritional Coaching App Foodvisor Raises $4.5M

Foodvisor, a nutrition assistant app that aims to help people eat better, announced today that it has raised $4.5 million from the VC fund Agrinnovation (operated by Demeter) along with other angel investors. With this round, Foodvisor has raised $5.3 million to date.

Foodvisor creates an AI-powered food diary that allows users to keep track of what they eat. The app uses a combination of computer vision and deep learning so that all a user need do is snap a picture of the food they are eating. Foodvisor can then identify the food on the plate, serving size and create a detailed nutritional report. Foodvisor says its app can identify 1,200 different food items and is constantly learning new ones.

The company says it will use the new money to accelerate growth in the United States where, the Foodvisor CEO makes a point to say in the press announcement emailed to The Spoon, that “70% of the Americans are overweight or obese.” Foodvisor says that currently 20 percent of its user base comes from the U.S.

They say that you lose weight in the kitchen and get fit at the gym. Keeping track of what you eat is a good first step for anyone looking to shed a few pounds and get healthier. Foodvisor isn’t the only app that uses your smartphone camera to help make food journaling easier. Bite.ai offers a free consumer app as well as an API that other business can tap into to for similar food recognition services.

Foodvisor offers a free app for iOS and Android as well as premium version that offers more personalized advice and recommendations for a monthly subscription that costs from $4.99 to $6.99.

Will Steve Easterbrook’s Departure Slow Down McDonald’s Tech Initiatives?

McDonald’s has fired CEO Steve Easterbrook after he engaged in a consensual relationship with an unnamed employee. The board voted on Friday to remove him, according to the Wall Street Journal. McDonald’s USA President Chris Kempczinksi was named the new CEO, effective immediately.

According to the WSJ, Kempczinksi noted he would maintain Easterbrook’s focus on tech, saying, “There isn’t going to be some radical strategic shift. The plan is working.”

Clearly, no sane executive in 2019 would reverse course on technology initiatives that could speed up and simplify restaurant operations while also meeting demand for delivery, convenience, etc. For McDonald’s, however, this executive shakeup could certainly slow the pace of change.

Under Easterbrook’s tenure, McDonald’s pursued an aggressive strategy around technology. In the last year alone, that included the acquisition of Dynamic Yield and subsequent rollout of the latter’s AI technology at McDonald’s drive-thru, buying up voice-tech startup Apprente and building a new tech innovation lab, expanding delivery with more third-party partners, and a heap of other developments that seem to land in the inboxes of us reporters every other day.

All this and more is part of McDonald’s Experience of the Future mandate for stores, an initiative that requires franchisees to update their store designs, invest in tools like self-order kiosks and new menu items (e.g., fresh beef), and curbside pickup.

Not surprisingly, McDonald’s franchisees have pushed back at these costly but not necessarily profitable changes. A recent Bloomberg article noted that “[Franchisees] object to the enormous costs of the project, which, for owners of several locations, can run into tens of millions of dollars, even with McDonald’s offering to subsidize 55 percent of the capital for the remodels.”

About a year ago, a group of U.S.-based McDonald’s franchisees formed the National Owners Association advocacy group to address some of these challenges. For example, franchisees were originally required to have their locations remodeled by 2020, a date that, after enough outcry, was pushed back to 2022 (albeit with caveats).

Easterbrook’s departure won’t stop tech innovation at McDonald’s. Nor should it. And to be clear, no one has officially yet stated any specific changes to the strategy. But the conversation around franchisee tensions has only grown louder in recent months, and under Kempczinksi’s leadership it’s possible McDonald’s could slow its pace on some of these developments or give franchisees more say in how to implement some of these initiatives without incurring some of their heavy costs. Meanwhile, McDonald’s has to somehow address its sluggish sales while still maintaining its edge over other QSRs, who are rapidly deploying self-order kiosks, AI in the drive-thru, and other high-tech solutions. Whether the chain can do that more effectively under Kempczinksi looks to be yet-another unanswered question in this ongoing McSaga.

KFC Hints at AI, License Plate Recognition for Drive-thrus

KFC is exploring technology that would automate the process of ordering and upselling items in the drive-thru, according to an interview the chain’s U.S. Chief Technology Officer Christopher Caldwell did with Nation’s Restaurant News this week. KFC’s strategy looks to be focused on AI technology similar to that of McDonald’s, whose digital menu boards speed up ordering and automatically recommend items to customers.

The news comes on the heels of KFC’s little-publicized launch of an in-house online ordering platform, which happened earlier in October and is clearly part of a larger push from the Louisville, KY chain to increase efforts around the digital restaurant experience.

While Caldwell said the new native online ordering platform is “exceeding expectations” in terms of customer response, improving and innovating on the drive-thru is crucial for KFC.

That’s hardly surprising. Speed of service at the drive-thru in general has steadily gone down over the last decade, with the average time in 2019 a good 20 seconds longer than the previous year. But drive-thrus still account for a huge percentage of sales at QSR chains. For KFC, they account for about 65 percent of sales, according to Caldwell. Using automation in the drive through could potentially minimize both mistakes that happen during the order-taking process in the drive-thru as well as the length of time a customer spends waiting.

Caldwell also said drive-thru technology could bump up check averages thanks to better personalization and suggestive selling — one of the key benefits McDonald’s has been touting with the Dynamic Yield AI technology it’s rolled out to thousands of drive-thrus of late. He also hinted at license-plate recognition in the future, where the system can scan a customer’s plate and immediately suggest that person’s favorite meal.

A number of other QSRs are now testing new technologies and methods to speed up service in the drive-thru. Chains like Dunkin’, Krispy Kreme, and Chipotle are adding lanes for mobile-only orders. Sonic piloted AI-powered menu boards earlier this year. Meanwhile, companies like 5thru and Valyant AI are partnering with QSRs to automate more of the process through AI.

KFC hasn’t actually deployed any of this technology to actual stores yet, though Caldwell told NRN that “there’s going to be no shortage of [KFC] franchisees that want to adopt and be a test partner” when that finally happens.

SKS 2019: Think of AI as Augmented Intelligence, and is the Future Just-in-Time Farming?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a vague, slightly tech-y term that is overused by marketing departments trying to show some bona fides. But if you want some real insights on what artificial intelligence is and what it can do, then you should check out these talks that Chris Satchell of Zume and Erik Andrejko of Evolv (the venture arm of Kraft-Heinz) each did onstage at our recent Smart Kitchen Summit.

But before you can begin talking about AI you must understand the importance of data. Not just plenty of it or the right kind, as Satchell points out in his presentation. Before you can get into algorithms you need clean, tagged data that is centralized. He recommends that you don’t spread out your data teams across the company, and instead cluster them together to get the best results.

With your data organized and your models in place, then you can start to analyze and gain insights. For Zume, that means making the food supply chain more efficient. When we talk about last mile delivery, we’re actually talking about the last five or seven mile delivery. Zume is using predictive analytics to know ahead of time what food will be ordered, when and where. From that information they can place mobile kitchens directly in those neighborhoods to make the delivery process more efficient for the cooks, the couriers and the consumer.

Satchell wants to take this type of AI-based prediction up the food stack to improve supply chains and even create predictive farming. This type of just-in-time farming would help farmers understand what types of crops to grow and when in order to help reduce food waste.

As Andrejko pointed out in his talk, agriculture is already changing thanks to analytics and AI. Though Andrejko would like people to think of AI as “Augmented Intelligence,” not “Artificial Intelligence.” On the farm, this means that data and algorithms can be used to optimize how fertilizer is applied, using more on acres that need it and less where it doesn’t. Or with emerging fruit-picking robots that can use computer vision to automatically harvest at peak times for ripeness.

Andrejko also sees augmented intelligence at our kitchen tables, giving us more human connection at dinner time. Say you want to cook a butternut squash chili for dinner. Eventually you’ll be able to say that request to a voice assistant, which will break down the list of ingredients and place the order, which will be brought to your house via a self-driving delivery vehicle, which also uses AI to travel to your door.

These talks, along with the panel discussion with Satchell and Andrejko afterwards, are great deep dives into AI for anyone curious about the trendy term or for any company looking to add that arrow to their quiver. At least have the marketing department in your life check it out.

SKS 2019: How AI Will Reshape Food Markets

Domino’s Innovation Garage Doubles Down on GPS Tracking, Driverless Cars

Domino’s has wasted no time in ramping up its innovations since opening the doors on its Innovation Garage in August. And at an event held at the facility this week, the pizza chain-turned-tech company highlighted a couple of the top innovations it is currently working on.

Nation’s Restaurant News, who was at the event, reported on these developments, which are geared towards getting pizzas to customers’ doorsteps as fast and as seamlessly as possible.

GPS tracking technology topped the list of developments the company is working on. Earlier this year, Domino’s started testing its system that lets customers and stores track drivers in 27 company-owned locations around Phoenix, Arizona. The system allows customers to see their driver’s progress on a map and receive a notification when their pizza is just a couple minutes away. Store managers can also track drivers via a screen inside the store. Domino’s has said it will roll out this tracking technology to all U.S. stores by the end of 2019.

At the Innovation Garage this week, the company wouldn’t give data on how much GPS tracking improves the pizza delivery experience, but said Domino’s locations are seeing improvements and that more of them are adopting the technology.

Speaking of cars, the company also said at the event that it has finished its testing of autonomous delivery in Houston, TX, and is ready to officially roll the program out in that city. Domino’s piloted driverless delivery this past summer, teaming up with a company called Nuro, who makes a fully automated, low-speed vehicle about half the size of a regular car.

With Nuro, customers who select the “autonomous” option when ordering a pizza use a PIN to unlock the car when it arrives and retrieve their pizza.

For now, autonomous delivery via Nuro will be concentrated on the downtown Houston area. Domino’s didn’t say whether a larger rollout is planned for other parts of the city or the U.S. However, highlighting the struggles around rising labor costs and the struggle to find enough drivers, Domino’s Chief Digital Officer Dennis Maloney said at the event, “This is the future of our company.”