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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

AI

The Latest, But Not The First: Five Ways AI Altered The Food Industry Before ChatGPT

Generative AI has shaken the tech industry to its foundations. For the first time, Google’s search dominance looks vulnerable, while ChatGPT has elevated Microsoft’s Bing from second banana to sexy beta. Meanwhile, hundreds of new startups are creating vertically-focused SaaS offerings powered by OpenAI, and tech corporations, big and small, are evaluating how to jump on the generative AI bullet train.

In the food world, we have some early arrivers in spaces like restaurant tech software such as ClearCOGS and Lunchbox leveraging OpenAI to add additional functionality. On the content creator and influencer side, we’re already seeing recipe creators and culinary pros tap into the power of generative AI.

But if you think the arrival of ChatGPT is the first AI with the potential to have a big impact on the world of food, you’d be wrong. In fact, over the past decade, we’ve watched as artificial intelligence has started to transform significant portions of the food world. Here are five ways AI has changed food over the past decade:

AI-Generated Recipes

Over the past decade, one of the most significant milestones for artificial intelligence in the world of food is the application of IBM Watson’s general AI to recipe creation. About ten years ago, the Watson team figured it needed to do something besides beat human contestants on Jeopardy to demonstrate its AI’s powers. Before long, Watson had its own cookbook of what IBM called ‘cognitive recipes’. Eventually, CPG brands like McCormick partnered up with IBM to see how they could apply Big Blue’s AI to their business.

Novel Food Discovery and Creation

Over the past few years, a new cohort of startups using AI to accelerate the discovery of novel food ingredients or plant-based recipes have emerged, causing ripples through the consumer packaged food market as they present a direct challenge to the more conventional – and slow – way in which food companies traditionally discover new food products. Over five years ago, companies like Gastrograph started to use AI to create predictive modeling around how different consumer cohorts may react to new food products, and more recently, we’ve seen a new generation of food companies like NotCo base its entire roadmap around AI-generated recipes for its plant-forward product lineup. On the novel ingredient discovery side, companies like Shiru and Kingdom Supercultures are using machine learning to find new ingredients that can help replicate the functional and taste properties of more traditional animal-based inputs.

Alexa’s Personalized Meal Planning and Recipes

When Amazon showed off Alexa almost a decade ago, in late 2014, most thought it was a cool home-based voice interface for weather forecasts and kitchen timers. But Amazon’s AI-powered virtual assistant helped launch a new way for consumers to do everyday things, including buying food and checking on that roast in the oven. But it wasn’t long before Amazon started to help me automate and personalize our shopping lists, and eventually started to create personalized recipes based on our past behavior.

Computer Vision Is Everywhere

A little over two years after Amazon debuted Alexa, it opened its first Amazon Go store featuring its Just Walk Out technology. Powered by sensors and computer vision, the new storefront lets shoppers pick up things off the store shelves and walk out without going through checkout. Soon, a whole bevy of human-less retail startups emerged to offer grocery and convenience store operators platforms to create more friction-free shopping powered by computer vision. We also saw computer vision-powered home appliances enabling consumers to identify their food in the fridge or the oven. Computer vision has also taken off in the restaurant back-of-house for solutions that help reduce food waste and help optimize food inventory.

Food Robots

While robotics and AI are not always synonymous, many robots are deploying some form of AI to help feed us. Whether it’s Google Mineral’s farm robot modeling plant traits and phenotyping crop varieties or server robots dynamically mapping the layout of a restaurant dining room, we are seeing a proliferation of AI-assisted food robots up and down the food value chain.

As far as generative AI goes, we’ve only begun to see how it could change the food industry. Initial applications are more likely to be in restaurant marketing (like the image created for this post using DALL-E), operations, and customer service systems. But as the technology becomes more powerful and creative programmers figure out ways to integrate generative AI technology into their platforms, the impact of ChatGPT and similar AI systems holds massive transformative potential for the food industry.

If you’d like to learn more about how generative AI will change the food industry, you’ll want to attend The Spoon’s mini-summit, How ChatGPT & Generative AI Will Change the Food Biz, tomorrow. You can sign up here.

SJW Robotics Raises $2M as It Eyes Launch of Autonomous Robotic Restaurants This Spring

SJW Robotics, a maker of autonomous robotic restaurants, has raised a $2 million seed funding round, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The Canadian startup’s newest round includes investments from Alley Robotic Ventures and celebrity chef Tom Colicchio.

Company CEO and cofounder Nipun Sharma told The Spoon the new investment would be used to fund the rollout of the company’s robotic kitchen system with partner Compass Canada. The two announced their partnership last summer, with Compass disclosing that they had plans to pilot three RJW robotic restaurant kitchens in select markets. According to Sharma, the first Compass autonomous kitchen pilot will launch at a hospital in the Toronto market under Compass’s Bok Choy brand this spring.

Sharma told The Spoon that the Compass deal is indicative of the company’s business model: SJW provides the robotics and AI technology via a robotics-as-a-service mode, and brand partners focus on culinary, menu development, and marketing.

During a walkthrough of the RoWok system last year, we watched as the system dropped pre-cut ingredients such as chicken cubes, green onions, and julienne carrots from segmented storage siloes in customized proportions onto a perforated steel tray. From there, the tray shuttled through a steam tunnel via a conveyor belt (“like a car in a carwash”), and the warmed food was dropped into an oiled wok for cooking. Finally, the cooked food was dropped into a bowl where sauces were added, and the meal was prepped for serving.

The new self-contained includes refrigerated storage for up to 350 meals, including all proteins, vegetables, sauces, and starches, and can make up to 60 meals per hour. According to Sharma, the units are ‘real estate agnostic’ and can be set up anywhere with proper space and utility connections.

You can watch Sharma give a tour of SJW’s RoWok system below.

A Look at the RoWok Robotic Restaurant From SJW Robotics

Israel’s Wasteless Uses A.I. As A Solution for Food Waste

The aptly named Wasteless is a triple threat as it offers a solution that simultaneously benefits retailers, consumers, and the environment. The Israeli company provides an AI-driven solution to cut down on food waste in retail by allowing supermarkets to give consumers dynamic pricing based on the freshness of a given product.

Wasteless has reached a milestone in announcing a partnership with Hoogvliet, a leading European supermarket chain with over 70 stores across The Netherlands. Using Wasteless’ dynamic pricing technology, the retailer will reduce food waste by optimizing costly price markdowns. This partnership forms part of a wider store rollout to stop throwing viable perishable goods into the dumpster, increasing margins while benefiting shoppers and the planet.

“The E.U.’s supermarkets alone are responsible for nearly 7% of all food waste, leading to more than 15 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions,” Oded Omer, Co-Founder, and CEO of Wasteless, said in a company press release. “By the time this waste occurs, all the energy and resources have already gone into the food. It’s the costliest waste we’re creating – indeed, it costs each store up to 4% of its revenues. In addition, Wasteless will help customers make smarter grocery decisions. Our solution also helps retail managers by optimizing inventory control systems. Joining forces with leading innovative retailers like Hoogvliet means we’re another step closer to saving the environment and achieving our goal of reducing food waste in retail by 80% while increasing retailers’ profits. This is a concrete step toward the Food Waste Pledge we signed at the COP27 Climate Conference and other signatories, including the World Wildlife Fund.”

Speaking to the origins of the company, Omer told The Spoon, “I stood in the supermarket, and I said to myself, well, it doesn’t make sense that I’m going to pay the same price for Chobani for that expires in two days and six days,” he recalled. “So, I started to contact some the academic professors and so on, and to understand the perspective of revenue management.”

That revelation in 2016 led to Wasteless, a machine-learning system embedded in a retailer’s data center. It can be applied using electronic shelf markers (which are more common in the E.U. than in the U.S.) or stickers applied to anything from meat and poultry to apples and salad greens. The pricing scheme is done in small increments using sell-by and consumer shopping data. Wasteless’ pricing can also be applied using a consumer-facing application.

To date, Wasteless is backed by $9.75M in funding, led by Slingshot Ventures (N.L.), Zora Ventures (U.S.), SOSV (U.S.) IT-Farm (Japan), Food Angels (Germany), strategic industry-related investors, and Israel Innovation Authority grants.

In 2021, Wasteless announced a collaboration with NX-Food, a German food tech hub, to bring its pricing systems into stores from METRO, one of the world’s leading wholesale specialists. Omer summed up the win-win bottom line for implementing dynamic pricing. “It’s a huge win for us as we grow and show the world what our technology is capable of. Most importantly, this is a huge win for the environment. There’s a lot of talk about sustainability in business, but it only really works if it’s also profitable.”

Will AI Make For Better CPG Products? These Startups Think So

While the overall food tech market has seen a contraction in funding in 2022 as venture investors become more cautious, one area of companies that seems to continue to raise interest is those that leverage ML and other forms of AI to power CPG decision-making, product development, and core ingredient development.

Over the past couple of months, we’ve seen a bevy of startups raise funding, announce new products and tout their platforms for AI-powered CPG. Here are just a few examples:

NotCo

This week, NotCo, a Jeff Bezos backed startup with roots in Chile, announced a $70M Series D on a $1.5 Billion valuation. The funding will be used to launch the startup’s B2B business where it will open access to its AI platform to other CPG brands to accelerate plant-based CPG product development. The B2B platform launch comes after the company announced a new joint venture with Kraft Heinz earlier this year under which they have already launched plant-based versions of Kraft’s cheese slices.

StarDay Foods

StarDay, a startup which bills itself as a ‘next-generation food conglomerate’, just launched its third CPG product, a gut-friendly seasoned rice product. The company’s ‘Starday Insights Machine’ uses  natural language processing, machine learning models, testing capabilities, and analytical insight tools to “identify and predict trends, derisk our investments, and speed up the product development process”. The company has raised $4 million in seed funding.

Verusen

Verusen’s approach to leveraging AI is to use it to help other CPGs create more resilient supply chains. The company claims it has created $30 million in “working capital optimization” for a global CPG brand (which it doesn’t name). Verusen says its platform “leverages artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, data harmonization, and decision support to help global brands control risk, attain supply chain resiliency, and improve economies for their operations.”

Fractal AI

Fractal has created a CPG and retail-focused AI platform called Asper AI, which the company claims “unifies demand planning, sales and distribution, inventory planning, and pricing and promotion.” Fractal says its ‘autonomous decisioning platform’ can help CPG and retail companies achieve “10%+ potential growth opportunities in financial performance and more than 50% in the automation of decision-making.”

SymphonyAI

SymphonyAI has what it calls a “end-to-end, integrated AI-powered merchandising, marketing, and supply chain solutions for retailers and CPG manufacturers” which it recently used to help German retail giant Metro GMBH to optimize its SKU mix and find retail shelf space efficiencies for its Romanian storefronts.

Shiru

Shiru is building a B2B business for CPG brands who want to create plant-based meat and dairy alternatives. The company’s Flourish platform utilizes machine learning to mine a proprietary database with the goal of developing plant-based functional ingredients.

The interest in utilizing new approaches for CPG product development, supply chain optimization and ingredient discovery comes at a time of upheaval for the broader industry. Supply chain worries, persistent inflation, global geopolitical instability, and rapidly changing consumer tastes have all made modeling the future a much more difficult task, adding pressure on CPG brands and their retailers to shorten product development and planning cycles.

While it’s worth asking how many of these startups are utilizing true “artificial intelligence” or simply capitalizing on the desire among brands to re-configure their development process, there’s no doubt that leveraging the rapidly maturing and powerful AI technology that has reached the commercialization stage will be a trend that only intensifies in 2023.

How ChatGPT Is Going to Make You a Better Cook

You’ve probably heard of ChatGPT by now, the AI-powered chatbot wowing technologists, journalists, and a whole bunch of Twitter users with its ability to understand human language and give realistic human-like responses.

The New York Times called ChatGPT the “best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public” while others have speculated how the technology could change industries ranging from banking to healthcare.

Since ChatGPT has been used for everything from sending clients emails to writing poetry, I figured I’d play around with it to see how it could help me make a better cook.

The first thing I thought I’d do is see if the chatbot could help create a recipe with some interesting flavors. I asked it to make a bread recipe “using beer, chocolate and Rice Krispies” and, after a few seconds, a recipe complete with cooking instructions appeared on my screen:

Sounds good to me. I mean, who wouldn’t want a beer and chocolate bread recipe featuring Rice Krispies?

When I asked Google the same question, no recipes that featured beer, chocolate, and Rice Krispies in the ingredient list showed up. In fact, every time I asked ChatGPT for a recipe suggestion, the results were as good or better than the results from Google.

But where ChatGPT really shined is its ability to remember my previous questions and build upon those for very context-specific responses. Take, for instance, my query for a pasta recipe that featured red sauce and garlic. ChatGPT’s initial response was a recipe that looked good, but it was a recipe that could have easily been found with a Google search.

When I asked for a Keto-friendly version of the pasta recipe, ChatGPT considered the specific recipe and gave a pretty good answer about how to fit the specific dietary profile I wanted:

As you can see, ChatGPT makes the process of figuring out a meal something closer to a conversation with a chef or a culinary planner rather than the traditional process of piecing together search engine queries. In fact, I found I could build an entire meal plan using the chatbot, including things like wine pairings…

To side dishes…

And it’s not just flavor pairing and meal planning where ChatGPT shines. Because the chatbot has a wide breadth of understanding of pretty much everything, you can ask it for advice about how to use food in a variety of different situations, such as life events:

Or when someone you know may need a little pick-me-up:

Not every response is perfect, and some have noted (including ChatGPT’s creators) how the chatbot often gives answers that make no sense or appear wrong. But the hits seem much more frequent than the misses, and overall the technology looks like it can already give better responses than the traditional tools we use when looking for our next meal.

I’ll have more to say on this later, but my initial test has convinced me that an AI like ChatGPT could significantly change the way home cooks and the food companies that serve us approach meal-making. While ChatGPT doesn’t have an official API yet, it probably won’t be long before it does. Imagine a world where a foodie-focused chatbot incorporates meal planning with a shopping engine and delivery to help you instantly build a meal plan and have it deliver everything you need to your door. I’m sure Google and Amazon are thinking about it, as are creators of dedicated recipe or meal-planning apps.

So will ChatGPT replace humans or other experts who help us make great food? Probably not, at least right away.

As for what ChatGPT thinks about that question, I’ll let you read its answer:

With Connected Stores, Instacart Continues Push to Become Technology Platform Partner for Grocers

Today Instacart announced a new bundle of technologies aimed at helping retailers digitally power their storefronts. A mix of existing and new products, the new suite is a sign of Instacart’s continued effort to transform itself from an in-store shopper and delivery services company to an omnichannel grocery technology arms dealer.

The Connected Store suite of technologies includes the following:

A new and improved Caper cart: The new suite includes a third generation Caper cart. Like the second generation Caper, the new cart allows customers to drop their items in the cart and the Caper adds it to the list without a barcode scan, but is 65% larger, has a longer-life battery, and is designed to work well in inclement weather.

Scan & Pay: For retailers who choose not to deploy Caper carts, Instacart is introducing a new service called Scan & Pay. Scan & Pay allows shoppers to scan and pay for products with their phone. The service looks especially helpful for EBT Snap users, who can scan items to identify whether they are EBT SNAP-eligible.

Lists: Lists syncs up a shopper’s personal shopping list with the the Caper cart app or a grocer Instacart-powered app. Items are imported into the Caper list and checked off when you drop them in your cart.

Department Orders: The Department Orders feature enables coordination between grocery store prepared food departments by enabling them to sync orders. For example, the bakery can coordinate with the deli to enable orders to be ready simultaneously. The new feature is powered by Foodstorm, a food service order management platform the company acquired last year.

Carrot Tags: Maybe the most innovative new feature of the new Connected Stores bundle is Carrot Tags. A customer can find items in-store by clicking them on their phone, which lights up a corresponding electronic shelf label. As someone who often has trouble finding items on his shopping list, I can see Carrot Tags coming in pretty handy.

Instacart Introduces Connected Stores

As I wrote last year, Instacart’s acquisition of Caper and continued development of digital transformation technologies is a sign the company is trying to transition to become an enabling platform player for grocers.

As Instacart grows its enterprise technology solutions, I expect we’ll increasingly see its flagship shopper service decoupled from its technology as it looks to serve larger retailers who want greater control over the customer relationship. Since the start of the pandemic, many grocery retailers have started to roll out and standardize around their delivery services, which means a fast-growing market for technology solutions. My guess is that Instacart is anticipating this as it rolls up some of the best-in-class independent solution providers as it prepares for an IPO soon.

With Connected Stores, Instacart is attempting to integrate what has seemed to this point a loose grab-bag of technologies assembled mostly by acquisition into a cohesive suite of technologies. It’s an evolution that makes sense for the company strategically and for its collection of platform products, even if it does still feel the suite is much a re-naming and branding exercise as it is an actual integration across products. As part of the effort, the company is trying to showcase the full vision with its first partner store in Good Food Holdings’ Bristol Farms store in Irvine, California. According to the announcement, Good Food Holdings will also use Instacart’s Storefront Pro software to power its online store.

The news of the Connected Store platform comes as the company readies for its IPO, which it filed for in May.

NotCo Built a Unicorn Using AI To Accelerate Food Innovation. CEO Matias Muchnick Tells The Spoon How They Did It

When Matias Muchnick started NotCo in 2015, food innovation was a slow-moving process.

“Food R&D was three guys in lab coats, doing trial and error in a developmental kitchen,” said Muchnick in a recent interview with The Spoon. “Reading research papers from 1980 about using soy to replace animal-based ingredients. That was it. So whenever you have an industry that has a very obsolete technology, then a lot of bad things happen.”

He and his co-founders wanted to create new plant-based food products, but they wanted to do it in a new way that didn’t rely on antiquated methodologies. Eventually, they started wondering if using technology like artificial intelligence could help them make better decisions and help create new types of food faster.

They decided yes and started building an extensive database of information about all the components that create the taste and experience of food.

“Your machine learning will always be directly proportionate to the amount of data and the dimensions of data that you collect,” said Muchnick. “So from the very beginning, understanding what data was relevant for the objective that we were trying to do, which was replacing animals with plants, was important to us.”

Their database was comprised of chemical and biological attributes that made food what it is and the attributes that impacted the human perception of taste, texture, smell, and color. The goal, said Muchnick, was to create a large enough database of information to use their AI (which would eventually be called Guiseppe) to create a whole line of new plant-based food products.

“We wanted to build a general-purpose artificial intelligence,” he said. “Not an algorithm that is only great at doing mayo, or a burger, or yogurt. The things you’d like from a burger are very different from what you’d like from yogurt, so (we wanted to know) how we could get a real understanding of the human brain to create an algorithm that would attack all of the categories of products. That was super important from the get-go.”

Seven years later, his company is an alt-protein unicorn: the company is growing very fast in the North American alt milk category, just started a joint venture with a food giant, and this week debuted a new alt-meat product at the natural foods show in Los Angeles.

So how does the platform that made all that possible work?

Muchnick gives an example of how the process would work if Giuseppe were used to, say, make a new kind of cheese.

“The algorithm comes up with this crazy amount of recipes and processes attached to each ingredient that we put into it,” said Muchnick. From there, they would take recipes and take them to the “AI test kitchen,” where a group of fifteen chefs try the product out, make the recipe, and then have it evaluated by a trained panel.

“The trained panel gives feedback to the algorithm. Maybe the formulation was good or bad, we feedback the algorithm with the good things and the bad things. So we feedback the algorithm with the many dimensions of the sensory aspects.”

Muchnick says its this continous loop where AI-generated concepts, recipes, and processes are tested in a kitchen, critiqued with feedback, which is then fed back into Guiseppe, which helps NotCo’s AI get better and better.

“You get an algorithm that is working on improving every single day with 1000 recipes.”

But it’s not just recipes getting better, but the optimization of processes around which they run experiments. Muchnick gives the example of a project on frothing plant-based milk. Instead of spending months experimenting with different ways to achieve it, Muchnick says it will help show faster routes to success to help deliver results in a week.

“Instead of starting from scratch with every food formulation you want to create, or any expression you want to create, the AI is telling the food scientist to go through different routes. The algorithm is optimizing every single set of experiments.”

And its this process and the success ultimately drew in Kraft Heinz to consider working with NotCo.

“Kraft Heinz said, guys, you do food products in a quality we’ve never seen before, at a pace we’ve never seen before, and with an agility and an execution that we haven’t seen before,'” said Muchnick. “‘How do you guys do it, and how can we partner up?'”

The answer to that question would eventually be a joint venture.

“They were like, ‘Why don’t we bring superior plant-based products with the familiarity of our brands and with your know-how of executing amazing R&D based products?'”

“And,” said Muchnick, “we’re like, ‘Yeah, I mean, that makes a ton of sense.'”

If you’d like to hear my full conversation with Muchnick about how they are using AI to accelerate food development, just click play below.

Kraft-Heinz and NotCo Form Joint Venture for AI-Powered Food Products

Today Kraft-Heinz and NotCo, the food tech company behind the NotCo brand of plant-based foods, announced they are forming a joint venture to develop a lineup of plant-based food products.

According to the announcement, the new company will leverage the strengths of both companies to develop and bring to market a new line of plant-based products. Called The Kraft Heinz Not Company, it will leverage NotCo’s patented AI platform to develop the food products, while Kraft-Heinz will offer up its production capabilities and formidable sales channels to help bring the products to market.

In joining forces with NotCo, Kraft-Heinz is partnering up with one of the hottest new brands in the fast-growing alt-milk category. The Chilean-based startup has secured distribution deals with a number of premium natural and organic food retailers such as Whole Foods, Sprouts and others since entering the US market in late 2020. The deal also gives the CPG stalwart access to the startup’s patented AI product development platform.

And its this AI platform, which goes by the name Guiseppe, which NotCo cites for its fast success in the US market. Guiseppe works by sifting through huge datasets from the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Agricultural Library and other sources to find ingredient and processing combinations that would best mimic the elements (flavor, texture, etc.) of real meat or dairy in plant-based analogues. The goal is to find the types of combinations that can create a product that completely mimics traditional meat and dairy — a feat few if any plant-based protein-makers have yet to achieve.

For NotCo, which has seen bigger CPG brands like Danone attempt to mimic its playful and somewhat irreverent product branding, the JV marks a potentially powerful new way to reach a broader swath of consumers in an increasingly crowded alt-protein market. However, by launching an entirely new set of products into the market with Kraft-Heinz, NotCo also runs the risk of potential cannibalization of its existing product lines. The deal announcement doesn’t specify how the new JV will sort out how the two will divvy up retailers, something that could come into play since some retailers will not have shelf space for similar alt-milks from the two brands. It could be that the Kraft Heinz Not Company will focus on new products such as plant-based cream cheese or other categories that play to Kraft’s strengths.

Finally, one wonders if this new JV will set a template for other large CPG brands looking to rejuvenate their product lines as more consumers turn to plant-based diets. Many of the old-school brands are ill-equipped to utilize newer product development tools like AI to create new products, so it makes lots of sense to partner up with ascendant brands well-versed in faster digital-cenric product development methodologies.

Checkers To Roll Out AI-Powered Voice Tech to 267 Restaurant Drive-Thrus By End of 2022

This week restaurant chain Checkers & Rally’s announced a deal with Presto, a maker of restaurant technology, in which the drive-thru focused chain will roll out Presto’s AI-powered voice assistant technology chain-wide by the end of the year.

The announcement comes after early trials showed a 98% order accuracy for the voice assistant technology. And now, according to Checkers President and CEO Frances Allen, the chain plans to roll out Presto’s voice technology to all 267 store-owned and operated locations by the end of 2022. She also indicated that many franchise locations are expressing interest in the technology.

“We had a vision two years ago that we wanted what I would call ‘Alexa at the drive-thru,'” said Allen.

And now, with Presto, they have it. According to Allen, about 80% of the chain’s total business comes through a drive-thru, so the company’s management felt transitioning to a high-accuracy automated drive-thru could significantly impact the business.

“Anything we can do to improve operations, streamline for our guests and our employees, we wanted to do.”

You can hear the Presto voice assistant taking an order at a Checkers drive-thru in the video above. The Presto bot sounds, well, bot-like as it says “Welcome to Checkers, this drive-thru microphone is monitored and recorded for quality assurance.” In fact, the entire exchange sounds like something you might hear on an automated customer service line.

Expedite’s Kristen Hawley thought so too and asked during the press briefing if customers could access live humans at any point during the interaction.

“There are 2% of orders where the system says ‘you know, I don’t quite understand that,'” said Presto founder and CEO Rajat Suri. “If the person is insistent on talking to a staff member or operator, the system will escalate to the human in the restaurant.”

When asked if the broader rollout of Presto’s technology will result in a permanent reduction of headcount, Allen said no. Instead, she said, Presto’s technology helps fill roles left empty by the persistent shortage of workers the entire restaurant industry has been experiencing since the pandemic began.

“Our motivation is to fill the gap between the people that are available to us working in restaurants and where we need to focus that human labor,” said Allen. “In an ideal world, maybe we have five people at any shift right now. We probably have three or four available. And so this (Presto’s voice assistant) is like a fifth person that is coming in to help.”

“Our motivation here is not to replace people with robots.”

How Do You Train AI-Powered Checkout To Recognize A Product? In Vegas (& Elsewhere), You Throw It Like Dice

When it comes to training machine vision and AI-powered retail checkout systems, packaged goods and locally created food items are treated very differently.

That’s at least according to Mashgin, a maker of touchless checkout systems. Company spokesperson Toby Awalt said that’s because another store on the network has likely already added that bag of chips or candy bar to their 10 thousand plus item database.

Not so when it comes to locally made food items.

“CPG items, we have to do less and less because there’s enough overlap,” said Awalt, who gave us a walkthrough of the system at CES 2022. “But for dishes, we’ll do every time.”

According to Awalt, adding a new food menu item for a restaurant doesn’t take that since most cafeterias or restaurants only serve between 15 and 50 items.

“You can do that relatively quickly,” he said.

Still, a new packaged good has to be entered into the system now and then. Whenever that happens, the operator has to position the package in several different positions to give the system enough info to recognize the product whenever it shows up under the camera.

Mashgin’s Toby Awalt Rolls the Häagen-Dazs

“I actually do dice rolls with the product,” said Awalt, throwing a Häagen-Dazs ice cream bar onto the tray.

According to Mashgin, the company recommends the system capture 20 to 50 total positions of a product so it can recognize the product from various angles and also distinguish between different variations within the same product line (such as two different flavors of ice cream or potato chips).

You can watch a walkthrough of the Mashgin system below.

The Spoon checks out Mashgin's AI-Powered Checkout at CES 2022

How California’s New Food Waste Law Could Catalyze Interest & Investment in Tech-Powered Food Recovery Platforms

Starting next year, California’s Senate Bill 1383 will begin to require businesses and consumers to separate food waste from their garbage and put them into “green” bins for proper composting.

The legislation, passed in 2016 by then-governor Jerry Brown and the California state legislature, also will begin requiring tier 1 food businesses (grocery retailers, food distributors, food service providers) to divert 20% of food destined to be thrown away to food recovery organizations by the year 2025.

While I think it’s a good thing that everyone in California – both consumers and businesses – will eventually be required to start composting, I’m more interested in how SB 1383 could catalyze interest in platforms that help put food destined for the waste bin on someone’s plate instead. After all, while composting is a net positive from a climate impact reduction perspective, it’s also the last stop on the food waste recovery and mitigation express. In other words, when food feeds someone instead of ending up as fertilizer, everyone wins.

Image Source: CalRecycle SB 1383 Overview

The timing is good for the law, partly because the pandemic has driven home the realization among businesses that it’s their responsibility to try and divert food to local food banks or other food recovery organizations as good corporate citizens. And of course, it also makes good business sense, since by redirecting food to food recovery organizations, these businesses can also claim these donations on their taxes.

As grocery retailers and other tier 1 food businesses ramp up their food diversion efforts, there are some organizations that could help them along the way. One of these companies is Goodr, which offers grocery retailers and other food-related organizations a tech platform and associated service to help them get excess food in the hands of food charities. Goodr sprang into action in its home market of Atlanta during the early days of the pandemic and showed it could really make an impact. Other organizations such as Quest also provide food diversion services and food waste audits.

One of the challenges of a food recovery program is just having the ability to track and manage potential food waste. There are a number of technology platform providers such as Afresh and Crisp that give grocery providers tools powered by machine vision, AI, and other cutting-edge technologies to better predict and manage fresh food inventories. There are even food robot companies like Simbe developing technologies to help assist in food waste reduction management.

Finally, there are marketplaces like Olio and Too Good to Go that enable grocery retailers, restaurants, and other organizations to list excess edible food for sale on a highly-discounted basis to local consumers. While food sold on these platforms will not count towards the company’s 20% food diversion requirement, using them will help a company reduce the overall amount of food wasted and help provide low-cost food to consumers.

But what I am most excited about is how SB 1383 could give rise to new solutions to help food retailers and foodservice providers waste less food. New regulations often serve as catalysts for innovation, giving large businesses a new reason to invest in core technology infrastructure. As SB 1383’s regulations begin to go into effect, innovators with good ideas for new technology to help companies reduce food waste and redirect excess food towards food insecure citizens will have a growing market opportunity for their solutions. This growing opportunity will likely attract more venture investment for a category that has, at least in the past, had a hard time convincing investors there was enough of a market to garner them a return on their investment.

Watch Nala Robotics’ Robot Chef in Action

A restaurant that can serve millions of different dishes, is open 24/7, and doesn’t close on holidays sounds like a dream, right? After three years in the making, Nala Robotics has made this dream a reality with its fully automated robot kitchen that opened on November 11th in Naperville, Illinois.

The first automated restaurant/kitchen by Nala Robotics is called One Mean Chicken, and it serves wings and fried chicken. It is manned by multiple robots powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, which do not need human intervention to function. Without the need for humans, Nala’s restaurant can operate throughout the day and night, on holidays, and without social distancing considerations.

Watch this video to see the robots preparing food:

Recipes can be uploaded by the user to the recipes catalog, and the robots can learn to make any dish within just a few minutes. This easily gives restaurant concepts the opportunity to offer multiple cuisines under one roof.

Nala’s use of articulating robotic arms to do everything from prep, cook, and more while handling a variety of cookware and utensils is reminiscent of Moley’s chef robot, which the UK-based company announced general availability for last year. Unlike Moley, Nala is exclusively targeted for commercial foodservice applications, whereas Moley is targeted both towards high-end residential installations in addition to commercial applications.

According to Ajay Sunkara, the founder and CEO of Nala Robotics, “Being AI-powered, the robotic chef gets better and better every single day. The more it cooks, the more it’s going to learn and master these recipes.”

Restaurants around the country have been facing major labor shortages in 2021 due to the aftermath of the pandemic, and over 25 percent have reported that they are struggling to hire line cooks. Automated kitchens like Nala, and others such as Mezli, Spyce, and Cala may prove to be a viable solution to these ongoing shortages.

Nala Robotics will soon open two more restaurant concepts in the same location as One Mean Chicken (in Naperville’s Mall of India). The next to be launched will be Nala’s Thai 76 (Thai food) and then Surya Tiffins (South Indian food). In 2022, Nala plans to open 10 restaurant locations, and then 100 locations by 2024.