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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

AI

Key Takeaways From The First-Ever Food AI Summit

Last week, we convened some of the leading voices in AI and food at the inaugural Food AI Summit in Alameda, California, to discuss how this technology is transforming the food industry.

The conversation spanned the entire food system, examining the impact of AI on farming, food development, restaurants, personal nutrition, and household use.

It’s All About The Data

Throughout the day, it became clear that one of the most significant drivers for achieving highly functional and powerful AI systems is building them around the right data. Once you’ve trained the AI on good data, the insights derived from these platforms will far surpass what was previously possible.

Erica Bliss, the Chief Operating Officer of Mineral, believes where AI will really excel is in aggregating ‘multimodal’ data into a unified, synthesized analysis.

“It’s about integrating satellite imagery, soil data, weather data, historical yield data, camera data, and scouting notes from someone walking the field. The real power is in aggregating diverse and complex data types,” she said.

The Biggest Advances Will Come From a Combination of Human Knowledge with AI

The question of whether AI can replace human knowledge and innovation was a recurrent theme throughout the day. Oliver Zahn, the CEO of Climax Foods, believes that AI will not replace human knowledge. Instead, he sees the combination of technology and humans as a game-changer.

“People have this romantic notion that we have an algorithm, and you just tell it to make whatever cheddar, egg scramble, and then it will just tell you exactly how to make it,” said Zahn. “It’s vastly more complicated than that. In many cases, the humans are actually much better than the algorithms. And in real life, I don’t think anybody will ever write an algorithm and create a data set that is rich enough to do that. The algorithms give us a little bit of an edge over traditional food science companies, and in some cases, they give us a bigger edge.”

Erica Bliss believes that while AI will increasingly help farmers at both a systemic and individual farm level, it will be the combination of AI and human knowledge that will form the “Iron Man suit” amalgamation of capabilities that will lead to transformational outcomes.

“There are things that humans are incredibly good at that AI is not good at,” said Bliss. “And so if you’re aiming to get the best yield forecast, it is really the human plus machine that’s driving a far better outcome.”

AI Will Power Much More Personalized and Accessible Health and Nutrition Advice

Noosheen Hashemi, CEO of January, which offers a personalized nutrition and glucose tracking platform, believes AI will empower individuals with chronic conditions like type 2 diabetes to better monitor and anticipate the effects of their diet.

“There are things we have done you simply cannot do without AI,” said Hashemi. “We can build a digital twin of a person using wearable data and user-reported data. We’re then able to predict their glycemic response to any of the foods in the 32 million food database. With AI, we can also give counterfactuals like ‘you ate this, but if you had eaten this, this would have been your response.'”

Looking forward, Ari Tulla of Elo Health thinks AI-powered coaches could make healthcare much more personalized and accessible.

“Today, we live in a world where a doctor has 10 minutes to half an hour a year for you,” said Tulla. “What if you could have a bot or somebody that can talk to you like your personal trainer at the tune of 30 to 50 hours a year? That could have a very big impact.”

AI Will Have An Impact at the Macro and Hyperlocal Levels

David Lee, the CEO of Inevitable Tech, believes that AI will not only address the challenges of increased production due to a rising global population and climate change but also aid in making individual farms more financially sustainable.

“Around forty percent of farms break even or do any kind of variable profit, which means most farms operate at a constant loss,” said Lee. “AI isn’t just about serving these big global problems like food security. I can also address the very individualistic, local problem, which is to create financial sustainability, local and specific, to the unit of a farm anywhere in the world.”

The First-Ever Food AI Summit Could Be The Start of Something Big

During his comments, Ari Tulla commented on the event itself, believing it could be the beginning of something big.

“I’ve been at those events where there are a hundred people in the room, and you know this is the beginning of something,” said Tulla. “Ten years from now, some of us will look back and say, ‘I was at the first Food AI Summit.'”

We sure hope so! Thanks again to our speakers, sponsors, and attendees for making the first Food AI Summit a huge success!

Want to Try AI-Powered Cheese & Sausage? Join Us on October 25th at the Food AI Summit

So, what does food designed by AI taste like?

Next week at the Food AI Summit, you’ll have a chance to find out! That’s because not only will we have sessions by founders, inventors, and executives exploring how to bring food to our plates using the latest in artificial intelligence, but we’ll also get a chance to taste it!

After a full day of sessions that includes leaders from Pepsi, Afresh, ReFED, Chefman, Innit, Mineral and more, we’ll network and sample food from Shiru and Climax Foods! The founders of both companies will be on hand to talk about the process behind developing AI-powered plant-based food, so you will definitely want to stick around and join us!

You can check out the full-day agenda and great list of speakers over at the Food AI Summit page. If you’d like to join us, use the coupon code SPOON at checkout for $100 off tickets.

We’ll see you next week!

A Conversation With BioCraft On Building an AI to Accelerate Cultured Meat Development

Over the past few years, companies in food tech product development have begun to utilize machine learning and other AI techniques to accelerate the development of their products. One of those companies is Biocraft, a company focused on developing pet food utilizing cultured meat as its primary protein input.

The company announced in May they would focus exclusively on B2B (they had previously been developing a consumer-facing product under the brand Because Animals), and this week started talking about how they are utilizing AI to assist in product development.

I sat down with Biocraft CEO Shannon Falconer and AI lead Chai Molina to learn more about the company’s AI and the future direction of the company.

Tell us why you decided to investigate how AI could help you develop cultivated meat.

Falconer: My background is my PhD is in biochemistry, and so mostly I was working on drug discovery and antibiotic research. And you know, when AI really hit the pharmaceutical industry in a meaningful way about a decade ago, it dropped the time and the cost of bringing a drug to market, so I’ve been very bullish on integrating this technology into what we’re doing for cultured meat.

I asked Chai if there are any types of tools that are available or that could work for us to actually do what we want to help in dropping our costs, and getting the right ingredient and nutritional profile of our products. Chai looked around and said, “No, there is not.” And so it was then really that we decided if there’s nothing available that we can purchase and use, then we’ve just got to build this ourselves.

Molina: I come to this with a view that this is a mathematical problem, that we just have to find the connections between kind of modeling out how human reasoning sort of works and connecting the dots between pieces of machinery in the cell. To try to understand how we can tweak this Rube Goldberg machine. How we can push it into the direction that we want it to go.

How did you start building the AI model?

Molina: There’s a machine learning component that is along the lines of natural language processing, where we collect our data from lots of publicly available papers and databases. From there, we process the data and basically build out a picture of the machinery inside the cell.

What do you mean by that?

Molina: These databases and papers might show a tiny glimpse of one piece of that machinery inside a cell. In a way, we’re superimposing little pictures and little parts of that machinery to build out the bigger picture. From there, we try to understand if you pull this cable or take this step, what’s it gonna do? There are all these threads of biochemistry in the cell, I like to think of it like dominoes where you push one, and then you see downstream effects. And so that is more of a mathematical modeling approach, involving network theory.

You’re using the analogy of a machine to describe a cell and understand what the domino effects of a certain action or input within a given hypothesis about that cell.

Molina: Yes. Once we have a picture of the machinery in the cell, it’s like, okay, ‘what can we how can we tweak that to make it do what we want?’ Say we want to add a novel medium component for a growth serum for the cells that will hopefully push them in the direction that we want, such as cell proliferation. So, for example, we look at different substances that are safe for consumption and ask how would the addition of these things at least qualitatively impacts the machinery in the cell.

And you’re running these hypotheses in the AI and then testing out promising results in a wet lab?

Falconer: If you’re a wet lab scientist, and you generate a hypothesis, there are so many things to test. Especially when you’re working on something as complicated as media optimization in order to achieve the right cocktail that will elicit proliferation as well as the nutritional profile that you are that you want that you desire. And so the time that it would take to perform all these various experiments empirically, not only of course, is very lengthy and very expensive. And so what this tool does is it allows us to trim down that list of experiments. This tool is able to prioritize for us and give us sort of a ranking order as to which hypotheses are more likely to succeed or fail. And so this shortens the time and the number of experiments.

And then and then the other thing that it does for us is, it allows us to actually get better at identifying sort of the unknowns. What this tool can do is it can identify, say, anywhere between, say, A and Z -anywhere along this line where a human brain cannot read and put into place all of the different connections – what might ultimately elicit the end desired effect. We can then go back and say, Oh, but we now know that five nodes upstream in these completely disconnected papers, we see that this domino will hit this one, and then this one hits this one, etc. And then we can actually achieve this desired effect down the road.

You announced last May you were becoming a B2B company exclusively, and you were sunsetting your CPG products. How has this new focus, combined with the AI development tool, changed your product development speed?

Falconer: Yes, so now we’re exclusively a b2b company, focused on delivering volumes and working with existing pet food manufacturers who already have that massive consumer base and who can disseminate product quickly as soon as we have it available to sell it. And so that’s what we’re focused on right now. I’d say over the past 12 months, with just focusing on this product development. I think we’ve made probably more progress in 12 months than we did in five years. And a big part of that is the development of our AI platform.

If you’d like to learn more about how AI is accelerating next-generation food development, join us October 25th at the Food AI Summit.

Delivery Giants DoorDash and Uber Eats Join The Rush to Integrate AI Into Ordering Platforms

Over the last six months, we’ve watched as seemingly every quick-service restaurant chain jumped on the AI freight train, integrating new generative AI technology into apps, chatbots, and voice ordering tools to expedite the customer experience.

Now, it looks like food-ordering platforms DoorDash and Uber Eats are taking their turn to roll out AI tools.

This week we learned of DoorDash’s AI-powered voice ordering, which the company is rolling out as part of its merchant solutions portfolio. At first available in select markets, the new AI voice agents will be the first point of contact for restaurants leveraging DoorDash’s white-label voice-order platform. The company says AI voice ordering can take orders in different languages.

The AI will be trained on each operator’s menu and make personalized upsell recommendations. DoorDash makes clear that live human agents will be standing by to jump in if additional support is needed.

And, courtesy of Bloomberg, we also learned this week that Uber Eats is working on a new AI-powered chatbot for its food-ordering app. Techcrunch writes the new AI chatbot will ask users about food budgets and preferences and help them place an order. The Uber Eats AI chatbot news comes a month after DoorDash confirmed it is also working on an AI chatbot.

The news of AI-powered tools by the two delivery giants comes after a string of AI rollouts on the quick service front. This spring, Wendy’s announced it was working with Google to develop an AI for its drive-thru called FreshAI, and early this month, White Castle announced it was working with SoundHound to develop a drive-thru AI.

As I mentioned in my writeup of the food AI workshop ethics workshop, one of the first areas I expect to see AI and automation impact food is on the front lines of quick service. The historically low pay and high turnover for these jobs make them low-hanging fruit when it comes to AI tool integration, particularly for order taking, which is often the biggest bottleneck and the most easily automated part of the entire food purchase process.

We’ll be talking AI and how it will change the restaurant business at our Food AI Summit on Oct 25th in Alameda. Get your ticket today to join the conversation!

I Attended a Workshop on the Impact of AI on The Food World. Here’s What We Discussed

Last month, I headed down to San Luis Obispo to participate in a National Science Foundation-funded project analyzing the impact of automation and AI on the food system. I’d been invited to participate in a workshop headed up by Patrick Lin and Ryan Jenkins, professors at Cal Poly and the project leads.

The workshop was the first for the four-year project exploring the social and ethical impacts of automation and artificial intelligence in kitchens. The project endeavors to draw out the wide-ranging implications of this technology, exploring both the impact on commercial environments like restaurants and how automation could impact the longstanding tradition of home cooking and family meals.

“This project will help to draw out the hidden and very broad impacts of technology,” said Lin at the time of the project’s announcement. “By focusing on the trend of robot kitchens that’s just emerging from under the radar, there is still time for technical and policy interventions in order to maximize benefits and minimize harms and disruptions.” 

The two-day workshop included a cross-section of academic types, chefs and food service professionals, journalists, and technology experts. It was the first of three workshops across continents to gather insights and work towards producing a report and academic curriculum centered around the intersection of food and automation and AI.

The workshop, structured as a giant whiteboard session, included expert presentations and facilitated conversations. During and after each presentation, the participants shared their thoughts on potential impacts – both direct and cascading effects – that could result from the introduction of AI in its various forms over time. While much of the conversation focused more heavily on AI in the form of automation – i.e., cooking robots – AI in other forms, such as generative AI, was also discussed.

Below are some of the key themes discussed during the two days, as well as a few of my thoughts now that I’ve had time to think through the issues since the workshop.

I’d also love to hear your thoughts on this critical topic, so please send them along!

Finally, we’ll be discussing many of these same issues at the Food AI Summit on October 25th. If this is an issue critical to you and your company, make sure to join us!

Atrophying Cooking Skills

One of the concerns raised during the workshop was the potential loss of cooking skills and culinary knowledge as we rely increasingly on automation and AI to make our meals. While it was generally recognized that robotics could take over repetitive and tedious cooking tasks, some wondered if handing over the cooking process to machines could lead to a general loss of competency in culinary arts and a homogenization of meals produced by highly automated cooking.

It’s easy to see how highly automated food prep would be extremely popular; some would hand the entire process over to the machine. However, there’s a good chance that handing off the mundane parts of cooking would give home cooks, chefs, or food workers more time to focus on creating the special touches that often make a meal great. As we have seen with the advent of digital design and art tools, there’s a possibility that those who love making food could use technology to take their work to the next level.

The Loss of Together Time

Another concern raised across the two days was the impact on shared family time by handing over meal prep and cooking to robots. Parents and other caregivers often use time in the kitchen to share lessons to help children develop motor skills, understand their heritage and develop self-confidence. Over-automation of cooking could disrupt this transfer of knowledge. Cooking has also shown many positive mental health benefits for those involved.

I think these are valid concerns, as there is a real risk of losing some of the benefits of the shared cooking process due to automation. After all, there’s no replacement for a grandchild spending time with their grandma learning how to make her special cookies and the sharing of family history that comes along with such an activity.

However, a few counterpoints. First, no one says the act of hand-making that special recipe has to be a victim of technology, and, in some ways, I think the kitchen will prove to be one of the areas where some families will insist on preserving the art and act of doing the actual cooking themselves.

And as the world becomes more digital and automated, kitchens may be a refuge for many who find the hands-on nature of making food therapeutic and fulfilling. In other words, the kitchen may be the last true ‘maker space’ left in our homes, and many will look to protect and preserve that.

Finally, average meal times shrank 5% between 2006 and 2014, a much smaller decline than we’ve seen in meal prep times as the advent of ready-to-eat meals has become more popular over the past few decades. While automation may result in faster meals, people could spend nearly as much time – or maybe more – sitting around the dinner table.

A Loss of Authenticity, Creativity, and Happy Accidents

With AI, there’s a chance recipe creation algorithms may rely too heavily on existing data patterns and therefore lack originality. There was also the concern that AI systems may limit opportunities for spontaneous creativity and the type of “happy accidents” that often lead to new recipes. One workshop participant gave an example of mistakes leading to important new dishes, like the croissant.

There was also concern that using AI to generate meal plans or recipes could result in over-standardization and homogenization, particularly if the AI systems rely too narrowly on popular recipes, which could also reduce culinary diversity.

It’s a valid concern that AI systems will generalize based on limited data sets, often creating recipes or meal plans based on popular or trending food concepts. Anyone who listens to algorithm-generated playlists by Spotify or Pandora can attest to some off-note song recommendations, and I can see how that could easily be the case with food and recipe generation. However, good technology products allow humans to reject recommendations and fine-tune algorithms, which may allow for more personalized recommendations based on a particular user’s preferences.

There’s also a real possibility that AI could lead to new and intriguing food combinations. Chef Watson and other AIs have been able to create unexpected but interesting recipes based on intelligence built into the algorithms around flavor compounds. If a restaurant or home chef can leverage heretofore inaccessible deep insights based on science and flavor research built into AI systems to create their next masterpiece, the results could be exciting.

As for the impact on cultural diversity, I think it’s important to recognize that AI systems are known to have bias problems, often hewing more closely to the worldviews of their creators and their preferred datasets. Because the world of food is one of the most important pathways for under-represented voices to connect with broader audiences, it will be critical for us to guard against the loss of accessibility and equality in the culinary world as AI and automation tools become more commonplace.

However, food AIs could be built to emphasize unique and emerging food cultures, which could be a savvy move since millennials and younger generations celebrate new food discoveries, often from cultures outside their home markets. Also, many of the creators of new food automation technology are often from markets outside our own, emphasizing food types different from our traditional fare.

This is just a few of the themes discussed during the workshop. Other themes, such as job loss and the economic impacts of automation, were also explored in detail, and I’ll have more thoughts on that later this week.

Strella Believes Its Machine Learning Tech Will Help Deliver The Perfectly Ripened Banana

Did you know that there’s a job in the banana industry called a ripener?

It makes sense, right? After all, anyone who eats bananas knows the time it takes to go from rock-hard green banana to brown mushy mess can be as short as a week. This means the banana industry has to work hard to ensure bananas ripen at the right time so they are peaking in bright, beautiful yellow by the time they show up on grocery store shelves.

Like many jobs, the ripener role relies heavily on judgment. Not that they don’t use some modern tools when monitoring and managing the ripening cycle of the banana, but from the looks of it, the ripener job seems ripe (sorry) for a Moneyball-style analytics and technology revolution.

Enter Strella. The company, which has gained traction in the apple industry for its IoT monitoring technology over the past few years, has gone bananas. According to company CEO Katherine Sizov, the company’s new AI-powered model helps them (and those working as ripeners) better decipher the signals the bananas send.

“We’ve built a machine learning model that helps us get bananas from that green to that perfectly yellow color every single time,” Sizov told The Spoon. “And the way that we do that is we measure what the bananas are telling us.”

According to Sizov, the hardware they use for banana monitoring is the same as for apples. The difference is software.

“The hardware is the same, but the algorithms are different,” Sizov said.

Sizov says that whether it’s apples or pears (fruit with longer ripening cycles) or avocadoes or bananas (fruit with shorter ripening cycles), the key indicators sending signals around the ripening stage are ethylene and CO2 emitted from the produce. The Strella hardware module has eight different sensors, sensing ethylene, CO2, and other environmental factors such as heat and moisture.

And just as with apples, the Strella technology can help determine what exactly is needed to slow down or accelerate the ripening cycle of a banana. The only difference is that things move much more quickly with bananas or avocados, which is why a job explicitly focuses on managing the process of ripening the produce.

“Unlike bananas, apples are picked perfect off the tree,” Sizov said. “And they can last a whole year in gigantic storage rooms.”

With bananas or avocadoes, the ripening process is much more closely managed. They are picked before they are ripe and then stored cold to slow the ripening until they get near the point of consumption. From there, they go into ripening rooms, and the ripener introduces ethylene gas and CO2 and adjusts the temperature to kick the ripening process into gear. And now, according to Strizov, Strella’s new banana and avocado machine-learning algorithms can help determine precisely how much of each is needed to adjust the ripening cycle to get the desired output.

Should ripeners be worried about technology taking their jobs away? Sizov doesn’t think so.

“When people are very good at their jobs, they’re always looking for tools to do better,” Sizov said. “Ripeners have a ton on their plate, they’re working 12 to 14-hour shifts, so I think they’re always looking for ways to get a little more sleep. Our tool is one way to do that.”

According to Sizov, Strella has worked with 85% of the US market for apple and pears suppliers and estimates the company has saved 20 million pounds of apples and pears from going to waste. Now, she hopes they can replicate that success in bananas and avocados.

“We’re growing pretty quickly, and we’re excited to get into bananas and avocados after having had our foray into apples for five years now.”

If you’d like to hear Katherine discuss how AI can perfect the ripening of bananas, she will be speaking at the Spoon’s Food AI Summit on October 25th in Alameda, CA! Get your early bird tickets today!

As Jobs Disappear, Could Restaurants Become a Battleground For Pushback Against AI & Automation?

Last month, after 29 months straight of job gains, the number of total available restaurant jobs dropped. It wasn’t a huge dip – 800 jobs – but compared to the previous month’s gain of 24 thousand and monthly gains as high as 81 thousand at the beginning of the year, the dip was somewhat surprising, especially as restaurant sales have slowly but surely inched upwards throughout the year.

Could this be a temporary setback? Perhaps, but there’s also a possibility that it’s an early indicator of a long-term, potentially irreversible decline in the restaurant industry’s job market as emerging technologies come into play.

And by new technologies, I primarily mean automation and artificial intelligence. All one has to do is scan the headlines for the past 12 months to find that the restaurant industry has caught automation fever. Big chains ranging from Chipotle to Sweetgreen to McDonald’s are experimenting with ways to automate their restaurants.

And then there’s AI. Last month Wendy’s announced a new partnership with Google in which they are piloting a new generative AI solution called Wendy’s Fresh AI in a drive-thru in Columbus, Ohio. The company said this is the first of what could potentially be many locations that use the technology. Mcdonald’s has also been trialing AI technology, which its execs believe, in some ways, is better at handling customer interactions than humans.

“Humans sometimes forget to greet people, they forget, they make mistakes, they don’t hear as well,” Lucy Brady, McDonald’s chief digital customer engagement officer, told CNN. “A machine can actually have a consistent greeting and remain calm under pressure.”

This wave of new tech goes beyond robotic arms and simulated voices taking orders at the drive-thru. There’s been a recent surge – accelerated during the pandemic – in digital kiosks, mobile ordering apps, and QR code ordering at tables. These have resulted in an increased number of digital touchpoints designed to speed up the process and, to some extent, reduce reliance on human intervention.

It’s hard to fault the operators. A significant number of restaurant employees permanently exited the industry during the pandemic, and since then, operators have struggled to fill vacant positions. Despite offering higher wages and improved benefits, many open positions remain unfilled due to a lack of interest. If employees are hard to find, why not let technology take over?

Which brings us back to how we humans will be impacted by all this new technology. Workers are increasingly tasked with working alongside all this new tech, transforming job descriptions into something that can sound like working an IT help desk. Others find that technology is increasingly eating away at opportunities at the human connection aspect of the job they enjoy.

“Those points of connection get lost in mobile ordering,” said one former Starbucks barista. “So, it’s just like, ‘Here’s your order, bye.”

Then there’s the threat of job extinction as automation and AI take hold. While no big chains have deployed robotics or AI so widely that they’ve eliminated key positions in the front or back of house, it’s only a matter of time before early pilots become the primary engine of production. Sweetgreen has essentially proclaimed its new bowl-making robot is the future, and both Wendy’s and McDonald’s have hinted at broader applications of automation and AI.

As we teeter on the precipice of an automated and AI-powered restaurant industry, are we beginning to see signals of pushback stemming from job loss fears? There are subtle signs. When Chili’s showed off their trial of the Bear Robotics server in a video on Facebook last year, some commentators pushed back. “Quit trying to erase people!” wrote one. Another commented, “Another reason why I will never set foot inside of a Chili’s. You cannot replace a human in the hospitality industry.” Others are penning editorials saying that while operators may benefit from automation, workers and customers lose.

In certain instances, workers displaced by new technology have begun to retaliate. As detailed in our interview with restaurant operator Andrew Simmons, he struggled when a former employee who resisted the deployment of automation at his San Diego area pizza restaurant started making negative comments on social media and called in complaints to the local health department.

Are these initial pushbacks a sign of a larger anti-technology movement? That remains to be seen, but ignoring these early indications of a neo-luddite movement would be ill-advised, according to one professor.

“The various signals currently circulating in public discourse are not immediately obvious, nor are they specifically anti-technology or anti-progress,” wrote Sunil Manghani, a Professor of Theory, Practice & Critique at the University of Southampton and Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute for AI. “Yet, arguably, the signals are of a nascent sense of ‘protest’. Just as Hobsbawm reminds us, the Luddites were not opposed to machines in principle, but rather to those machines that were threatening their livelihoods and communities, we will likely start to see opposition not to software in principle, but various instances of software; opposition, then, to how and who deploy new technologies in the particular.”

Today resistance may manifest in an employee fighting back here or there or the occasional social media pushback against new automation. However, these intermittent signals could become the norm, especially if job numbers continue to decrease while more restaurants deploy robots and AI. Some studies say that over 80% of restaurant jobs could be handled by robotics, and some experts see millions of jobs being replaced through AI or automation within a decade.

And, of course, it’s not just restaurant jobs. Other lines of work, from creative to industrial, are threatened by new technology. And as more and more workers see unionization as the front line to a fight for more equitable pay, it’s also apparent – as evidenced by the Writers and Actors guild strike – the biggest fear about making a living in the future is whether or not employees will be replaced by technology.

Still, the restaurant industry, perhaps more than any other, is ripe for an automation and AI takeover, which is why I think that it could become the central battleground for the pushback in the form of an automation neo-luddite movement. Restaurant chains are the second biggest employer in the US, and two – Mcdonald’s and Yum Brands – are two of the top three employers in the country. Although Andrew Yang’s campaign warning of societal destabilization due to robotics and AI didn’t gain much traction in 2020, there’s a good chance he was ahead of his time, and we may see future politicians campaigning on an anti-automation platform with restaurants as one of the primary areas of focus.

Readers of The Spoon know we’re not anti-technology around here. In fact, we’ve covered just about every food robot out there and will continue to do so. But as we see more signals about potential pushback against the rise of automation and AI, I think it would be wise for the restaurant industry to begin to get ahead of this growing issue and think about how to balance new (and often necessary) technology with taking care of their employees.

Otherwise, they risk losing control of the narrative as more people organize to resist the impending AI and robot invasion.

Come hear experts talk about the impact of automation and AI on food jobs at The Food AI Summit on October 25th.

The Spoon Weekly: The Edible Barcode

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For the last few years, there’s been lots of excitement about blockchain’s potential to finally bring end-to-end transparency to the food system. After all, once we have an incorruptible record of where food comes from, we’ll be able to track it from the time it leaves the farm until it arrives on our plate, right?

As it turns out, realizing the dream of registering our food on a decentralized ledger and getting everyone across the food system to use it is a lot harder than it sounds. Add to that the doubts that have surfaced over the past year-plus about blockchain and the broader crypto world, and web3 hasn’t really delivered on becoming the food transparency magic bullet.

But even before web3 stumbled, did it ever really have a chance to truly track our food throughout the food system? Except for maybe a cow here and there with a driver’s license, food commodities don’t usually come with digital ID cards that allow you to automatically identify its point of origin. In fact, over its lifetime, a grain of wheat may travel thousands of miles across a number of factories and kitchens until it lands on your plate. 

But what if you could insert the identification into the food itself, where the food has a unique identifier baked (or sprayed, or mixed) inside or onto that can be identified no matter where it goes along the food value chain? That’s the idea behind a form of digital tag from a company called Index Biosystems, which has developed what they call a form of invisible barcode in the form of baker’s yeast. 

The way it works is the company creates what they call a BioTag by mixing baker’s yeast in extremely trace with water, then spraying or misting it onto a product such as wheat. BioTags are incredibly sticky once applied and remain attached to the surface of the grains, withstanding the milling process while remaining detectable in flour. From here, the BioTab becomes, in a sense, an invisible bar code that the company or one of its customers can read using molecular detection techniques such as PCR and DNA sequencing.

Index Biosystems isn’t the only company working on the idea of the invisible, integrated, and edible bar code. In 2020, a group of Harvard researchers wrote about their idea for an edible “bar code,” which they described as a scalable microbial spore system that identifies object provenance in under 1 hour at meter-scale resolution. According to the researchers, the spores would be identifiable for up to three months and multiple stops down the supply chain. The year before, SafeTraces announced they’d patented a system that took DNA strands drawn from seaweed that would turn into DNA bar codes readable throughout the food supply chain. 

DNA-powered identification systems are a compelling idea for a food world in which pathogens and food-borne illnesses have become a big problem. Companies early to this space (like SafeTraces) may have been a bit early, but now, as DNA identification systems have become commonplace and tools have become accessible by almost everyone, I have to wonder if the day has arrived for the embedded edible bar code. 

Researchers at Cal Poly Are Studying The Social Impact of AI & Robotics on the World of Food

Last fall, a group of researchers at Cal Poly was awarded a $700 thousand grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the social and ethical impacts of AI and cooking automation.

The study will last four years and explore the benefits and risks to individuals and the impact on family and communal relationships, creativity and culture, economics and society, health and well-being, and environment and safety.

The study is led by Andy Lin, a philosophy professor and director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at Cal Poly.

“Robot or AI kitchens would automate a special place and communal activity in the home, so that immediately warrants critical attention,” Lin said in the announcement. “Outside of the home, restaurants are one of the most essential and oldest businesses, given the primacy of food. They are the bedrock for an economy, the soul of a community, and the ambassador for a culture. But the pandemic is causing a seismic shift in the restaurant industry, and robot kitchens could be a tipping point that forces many restaurants to evolve or die in the coming years.”

Check out the news (and how your’s truly is involved) over on The Spoon.

We’ve Added New Speakers for our Food AI Summit!

As you may have heard, this October we’re hosting the Food AI Summit, a new event focused on how AI will transform our food system. 

The conference, which will take place on October 25th in Alameda, California, will convene scientists, investors, entrepreneurs, and others who are building the future of food using AI together for a day of keynote talks, interactive sessions, product demonstrations, and networking. 

We’re continuing to build a great list of speakers, and this week we’ve added longtime food AI innovator Riana Lynn of Journey Foods. Lynn joins others like Jasmin Hume of Shiru, David Lee of Inevitable Tech, and Kevin Yu of SideChef. We’ve got more great speakers on the way, including maybe you! If you think you have an interesting insight or are building something that will change the world, feel free to fill out the speaker inquiry form and let us know!

Also, if you’d like to sponsor the event, we’d also like to hear from you as well! Just fill out this form, and we’ll be in touch.

And, of course, we’d love to see you in Alameda in October! Our Spoon community is the engine that makes our events and website go, and we are excited to connect with you IRL and talk about this exciting space! If you’d like to attend, we have a special discount just for newsletter subscribers. Just enter NEWSLETTER in the coupon code when buying a ticket for $100 off an early bird ticket. 

Check out The Food AI Summit Website. You can read the full announcement on The Spoon. 

The Consumer Kitchen

SEERGRILLS Unveils the Perfecta, an ‘AI-Powered’ Grill That Cooks the ‘Perfect Steak’ in Two Minutes

AI is seemingly everywhere nowadays, so it was only a matter of time before it would show up at the backyard BBQ to help us cook the perfect steak.

That’s the vision of a UK startup named SEERGRILLS, which debuted the Perfecta this week, which the company describes as the world’s first AI-powered grill. The grill combines high-temperature infrared cooking with its AI system called NeuralFire, which automates the cooking process.

According to SEERGRILLS CEO Suraj Sudera, the AI works through a combination of sensor data, cook preferences inputted by the user, and intelligence built into the software around different food types.

“The device will capture the starting temperature of, say, chicken breast and adjust the cooking in line with the preferences you’ve inputted in the device,” said Sudera. “Whether it’s a three-inch or five-inch chicken breast, it doesn’t matter. It will be whatever adjustments it needs, just like your cruise control on your car will adjust to keep you at the preferred speed.”

When a cook is done, users can rate the quality of the cook, which informs and optimizes the NeuralFire algorithm for the next cook. Suraj says that SEERGRILLS is also constantly updating its food database, so if, say, a new type of steak from Japan becomes popular, the AI engine will be updated to optimize the cook for that meat type. The company says its AI will also optimize to reach each type of meat’s sear and doneness, as well as help to perfect the Maillard reaction.

Read the full story on The Spoon. 

ARE YOU A SALES PRO WHO LOVES FOOD TECHNOLOGY?

If you have experience selling sponsorships for events and building multifaceted ad and brand campaigns for some of the world’s biggest food companies, we’d love to hear from you! A great opportunity to be involved in the world of food tech! Just drop us a line with a resume or link to your Linkedin, and we’ll be in touch!

Cultivated Meat

José Andrés Serves Up Cultivated Chicken in Honor of Willem van Eelen, The ‘Godfather of Cultivated Meat’
 

A couple of days after the first sale of cultivated meat this weekend in San Francisco, news of José Andrés serving up GOOD Meat on the opposite coast landed in my inbox.

According to the release, Andrés served charcoal-grilled cultivated chicken last night to a hand-picked group of diners. The dinner included cultivated chicken marinated with anticucho sauce, native potatoes, and ají Amarillo chimichurri, and precedes China Chilcano’s menu debut of the dish, which will be served weekly in limited quantities and by reservation only later this summer.

The meal was served in honor of the late Willem van Eelen, known as the “godfather of cultivated meat,” on what would have been his 100th birthday yesterday, July 4, 2023. After hearing a lecture on preserving meat, van Eelen, a WW2 prisoner of war, came up with the idea of creating meat outside of the body of an animal. Over the following decades, van Eelen would start businesses to save money to pursue this idea while working on it and filing for patents. He would pass away in 2015 at the age of 91, just two years after Dutch startup Mosa Meat would be the first to realize his idea with their cultured meat hamburger.

Read the full story on The Spoon. 

Big Week For Cultivated Meat: Dutch Government Approves Tastings, UPSIDE’s Chicken Debuts at Crenn

It’s been an eventful few days for cultivated meat.

After getting the final regulatory green light from the USDA to serve cultivated meat to U.S. consumers, UPSIDE Food’s cultivated chicken showed up on menus for the first time this weekend at Bar Crenn. The event, hosted on Saturday, July 1st, marked the first time cultivated meat has gone on sale in the U.S.

Here’s how the special menu, prepared by famed French chef Dominique Crenn, was described by the press release sent to The Spoon: Diners at this historic meal were served UPSIDE Foods’ cultivated chicken, fried in a Recado Negro-infused tempura batter and accompanied by a burnt chili aioli. Served in a handmade black ceramic vessel adorned with Mexican motifs and Crenn’s logo, the dish was beautifully garnished with edible flowers and greens sourced from Bleu Belle Farm. It reflects the global benefit that Chef Crenn sees in cultivated meat – with UPSIDE Chicken from the Bay Area in California, tempura from Japanese traditions, and an infusion of Recado Negro from Mexico’s Yucatan.

Read the full story on The Spoon.

Coffee Tech

Ansā’s New Roaster Uses Radio Waves To Roast Coffee on The Countertop

While we know fresh-roasted coffee tastes better, by the time store-bought beans make it into our coffee machines, chances are they were roasted months ago. But what if we could roast the beans right before they enter the brewer?

If a new company called Ansā has its way, coffee roasting will come to our office breakroom with its new e23 microroaster. The e23 takes green beans sent from the company and roasts them on the countertop without any smoke or ambient heat associated with traditional gas-fired roasting systems.

So how does the company’s roaster work? According to Ansā, the company uses dielectric heating, which usually refers to microwave heating-based systems. According to the company, the system’s computer vision (provided via a built-in camera) coordinates roasting with precision application of the radio waves to transmit the energy to individual beans, creating a highly precise and homogeneously applied roast.

Read about Ansā’s tech on The Spoon.

The Meataverse

Yes, I’ve Entered the Meataverse

Last year, when news got out that Slim Jim had gone and registered the term meataverse, we all had a good laugh.

Over a year later and a few notches down the Gartner Hype Cycle, the salty meat stick company has finally launched its web3 world effort to get people to go online and collect digital art of cartoon meat sticks. The company, which, in a sarcastic nod to Facebook’s new corporate name, has periodically rebranded itself as MEATA on Twitter and described the effort in its trademark finding as something providing “services featuring virtual goods, virtual food products, and non-fungible tokens,” along with “providing a metaverse for people to browse, accumulate, buy, sell and trade virtual food products.”

But now, they’ve gone and done it by Jim, and I’m going along for the ride. Sure, it sounds ridiculous and something an adult who doesn’t eat Slim Jims would probably avoid wasting his time on, but here I am, the proud owner of GigaJim #1070.

Read about Mike’s adventure in the Meataverse over at The Spoon. 

Researchers at Cal Poly Are Studying The Social Impact of AI & Robotics on the World of Food

Last fall, a group of researchers at Cal Poly was awarded a $700 thousand grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the social and ethical impacts of AI and cooking automation.

The study will last four years and explore the benefits and risks to individuals and the impact on family and communal relationships, creativity and culture, economics and society, health and well-being, and environment and safety.

The study is led by Patrick Lin, a philosophy professor and director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at Cal Poly.

“Robot or AI kitchens would automate a special place and communal activity in the home, so that immediately warrants critical attention,” Lin said in the announcement. “Outside of the home, restaurants are one of the most essential and oldest businesses, given the primacy of food. They are the bedrock for an economy, the soul of a community, and the ambassador for a culture. But the pandemic is causing a seismic shift in the restaurant industry, and robot kitchens could be a tipping point that forces many restaurants to evolve or die in the coming years.”

According to Lin, the primary work output will be a public “ethics impact report” that evaluates the societal impacts of robots and AI on this “last mile” of food automation. This will include examining everything from robots flipping burgers or making restaurant pizzas to using AI and robotics in the home to produce and create complete meals.

It’s an interesting project that came onto my radar because Lin personally invited me to participate in a workshop hosted at Cal Poly to discuss the impact of robotics and AI on the last mile. While I usually don’t participate in these types of research projects, I decided to take him up on it since this is an area that I’m pretty fixated on of late.

One potential area I am particularly interested in is how human workers will react to the addition of automation to their workplace. While I expect some workers will embrace the opportunity to use technology to make their work-life easier, others will bristle or outright resent some of their previous tasks being taken over by automation.

One operator who experienced this firsthand is Andrew Simmons. He recently saw former employees undertake a social media campaign to disparage his restaurant for using robotics in the kitchen, including reporting the restaurant to the local health department. What’s interesting about Simmons is, unlike many of the headline-grabbing robot installations at national chains like Sweetgreen, he’s a small one-restaurant operator who is reinventing his entire restaurant workflow through an automation-heavy tech stack. I imagine other smaller operators will attempt to follow the template he’s created (he says he could automate future restaurants for $70k), particularly if he shows he can be successful.

As restaurant robots become lower-cost and more accessible, there’s no doubt society at large will need to think through what the impact will be. I’m excited to participate in Lin’s workshop to help think some of these through, and I hope to share some of the insights from the workshop. I will be limited in what I can share – Lin explained that the workshop would follow the Chatham House Rule, which forbids the identification of other participants without their expressed consent – but I do plan to write about some of the key insights discussed at the workshop in the future, so stay tuned.

For those who didn’t get an invite to this workshop and want to discuss this exciting topic, I suggest coming to The Spoon’s Food AI Summit, which is taking place in the Bay area this October!

SEERGRILLS Unveils the Perfecta, an ‘AI-Powered’ Grill That Cooks the ‘Perfect Steak’ in Two Minutes

AI is seemingly everywhere nowadays, so it was only a matter of time before it would show up at the backyard BBQ to help us cook the perfect steak.

That’s the vision of a UK startup named SEERGRILLS, which debuted the Perfecta this week, which the company describes as the world’s first AI-powered grill. The grill combines high-temperature infrared cooking with its AI system called NeuralFire, which automates the cooking process.

According to SEERGRILLS CEO Suraj Sudera, the AI works through a combination of sensor data, cook preferences inputted by the user, and intelligence built into the software around different food types.

“The device will capture the starting temperature of, say, chicken breast and adjust the cooking in line with the preferences you’ve inputted in the device,” said Sudera. “Whether it’s a three-inch or five-inch chicken breast, it doesn’t matter. It will be whatever adjustments it needs, just like your cruise control on your car will adjust to keep you at the preferred speed.”

When a cook is done, users can rate the quality of the cook, which informs and optimizes the NeuralFire algorithm for the next cook. Suraj says that SEERGRILLS is also constantly updating its food database, so if, say, a new type of steak from Japan becomes popular, the AI engine will be updated to optimize the cook for that meat type. The company says its AI will also optimize to reach each type of meat’s sear and doneness, as well as help to perfect the Maillard reaction.

The hardware itself is somewhat unique compared to other infrared grills on the market in that it cooks meat vertically. The user puts the meat in a holder, which will sense the temperature and thickness of the meat. Once inserted, both sides are cooked simultaneously using infrared heat, powered by propane, which SEERGRILLS says can reach 1652ºF. According to the company, the grill can cook three ribeyes in one minute and fifty seconds, six burgers in a minute and thirty seconds, and four chicken breasts in two minutes and thirty seconds.

In addition to the grill itself, the company is also building accessories such as a rotisserie module, a pizza module, and a grill station. The company will start taking preorders in July and plans to begin shipping the Perfecta by the end of this year. Pricing for the grill and its accessories has not yet been disclosed.

🚀 Introducing Perfecta™ - The World’s First AI Powered Grill. 🚀

Announcing the Food AI Summit: A Global Conference on AI’s Role in the Food System

Today the Spoon is thrilled to announce the Food AI Summit, the world’s first event focused exclusively on AI’s impact across the food ecosystem.

The conference, which will take place on October 25th in Alameda, California, will convene scientists, investors, entrepreneurs, and others who are building the future of food using AI together for a day of keynote talks, interactive sessions, product demonstrations, and networking. The event will feature experts from the worlds of agriculture, food science, retail, synthetic biology, restaurants, and consumer products discussing the implications of AI. Sessions will cover the entire spectrum of AI technologies, from machine learning and computer vision to the quickly evolving world of generative AI.

“Over the past decade, AI has had a significant impact on every aspect of the food system,” said Michael Wolf, publisher of The Spoon and the Food AI Summit’s conference chair. “But we’re only at the beginning, as AI becomes an increasingly critical accelerator to transforming a global food system under stress from unprecedented challenges.”

At the Food AI Summit, attendees will hear from some of the most visionary leaders at the intersection of food and AI, including NotCo’s Matias Muchnick, Shiru’s Jasmin Hume, and Inevitable Tech’s David Lee. More speakers will be announced in the coming weeks.

The Food AI Summit is produced by The Spoon, a leading news and events company focused on food technology. The Spoon’s first event, the Smart Kitchen Summit, launched in 2015 and helped catalyze the conversation about the digital transformation of the consumer meal journey and today The Spoon has events in Europe, Asia, and North America.

Early bird tickets for the Food AI Summit can be purchased at www.foodsummit.ai. Those interested in sponsoring the Food AI Summit can find out more information here.

Shiru Used AI To Discover Its First Novel Ingredient in 3 Months. The Next One Will Go Even Faster

This week, novel ingredient discovery startup Shiru announced they have commercially launched their first ingredient, OleoPro, a plant-based fat ingredient the company says doesn’t have the environmental costs or health consequences of animal fat. As part of the announcement, the company disclosed that the company’s first commercial partner is Griffith Foods, a commercial food ingredient manufacturer.

As readers of The Spoon know, Shiru is part of a cohort of startups using AI to discover new ingredients more quickly than traditional methods. Unlike many first-generation synthetic bio products, OleoPro was developed using machine learning, enabling a multifold acceleration of the discovery and testing phase according to the company.

The company’s discovery timeframe for OleoPro took less than three months. According to the announcement, “Shiru’s biochemists and computational biologists used AI to scan and select nearly 10,000 formulations” in that time frame, and “then they determined the precise molecules that would combine to form an ingredient with the unique oil-holding protein scaffold of animal fat.” The entire discovery and commercialization process took 18 months from the project’s start, much shorter than the multi-year process typical of classical synthetic biology workflows.

And now, according to Shiru CEO Jasmin Hume, that time frame for discovery will compress even more now that the company has built out its machine learning model. Finding a new novel protein or functional ingredient will take “eight to 10 weeks is like what we’re comfortable with,” Hume told me in a recent interview. “And what that means is, it’s not just digital, but at eight weeks, we have up to half a dozen proteins that we’re making at a couple of grams. And so we go from totally digital to pilot-produced ingredients, not one but a couple that can work, in about eight weeks.”

“Instead of a half decade and more than a quarter billion dollars in R&D to ship a viable product, Shiru used AI to dramatically reduce the cost and time to market of an essential ingredient of plant-based meat to a matter of months and a few hundred thousand dollars – and the cost of protein discovery at Shiru continues to decline,” said Dr. Ranjani Varadan, Shiru Chief Scientific Officer, in the announcement. Varadan, who sat down with The Spoon last summer, was previously VP of R&D at Impossible Foods.