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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Video: Cafe X and Byte Technologies on Data Rabbit Holes and the One Thing Your Data Team Must Track

The beauty of running an automated or robot-powered business like the coffee-slinging Cafe X or Byte Technologies smart fridges, is that you generate a lot of data. What people are purchasing, when they purchase it, where, how often, etc. All this data powers demand algorithms that help companies like Cafe X and Byte be more efficient by accurately determining business critical decisions such as products to offer and how much inventory to carry.

The downside of running an automated or robot-powered business like Cafe X or Byte Technologies is that you generate a lot of data. Too much data, actually. You could easily spend most of your time diving down a data rabbit hole, trying to fine-tune demand algorithms and actually wind up making them less useful.

So how do you determine what data to capture and what data to pay attention to?

Glad you asked! Because the role of data was central to my discussion with Cafe X COO Cynthia Yeung and Byte Technologies Founder Lee Mokri during the Forecasting, Personalization & Customer Service Challenges for Robotic Retail panel at our ArticulATE food robotics conference last month.

It was fascinating to sit down and learn from Yeung and Mokri about how their respective companies tackle the data issue, and how they use that data to maximize product variety within the limited square footage of their automated storefronts.

Plus, for all you entrepreneurs out there, Yeung explains the one thing you absolutely need to do when building out your data team and plan.

Watch the full video below, and check back for more of our full sessions from ArticulATE 2019.

ArticulATE 2019: Forecasting, Personalization & Customer Service Challenges for Robotic Retail

Report: Food Robotics Market to Hit $3.1 Billion by 2025

One of the big reasons we put on our ArticulATE food robotics conference earlier this month, was that we could see the rise in automation throughout the food stack. Now Meticulous Research projects some numbers for that growth, with a report out today saying the size of the global food robotics market will hit $3.1 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 12.7 percent between 2019 and 2025.

According to the press announcement, there are a number of factor that will drive this growth, including: “increasing food safety regulations, rising demand for advanced food packaging, growing demand to improve productivity, increasing production of low-cost robots, increase in investments for automated solutions in food industry, and growing demand for reducing production cost and increasing food shelf-life leading to increased adoption of robotic systems.”

Meticulous Research predicts that articulating robots (think: Flippy) will be the most popular form of food robot because their speed and accuracy continues to improve while their price keeps dropping.

Europe is the biggest user of food robots, followed by North America and Asia-Pacific. However, Meticulous Research predicts “significant growth” in food robot use in the Asia-Pacific during the forecast period because of investment in automation as well as growing demand for food safety regulation and packaged goods.

If you follow The Spoon then this report shouldn’t be a huge surprise. For the second year in a row, there were a record number of robots shipped in North America, with the food industry among the top non-automotive sectors buying.

More anecdotally, during our ArticulATE conference, we heard from companies across the food world talking about how a growing global population and its desire to, you know, eat, combined with a labor shortage is generating increase interest automation. As this report notes, these food robots are getting better (Flippy is on its third generation), smaller and cheaper. And from my personal experience, robots are pretty great at making food as well.

Sifted Wants to Be the One-Stop Solution for the Catered Office Lunch

Say you’re a newish tech company looking to attract coveted young programmers to your startup. How do you entice them?

One trend more and more offices are looking to is catered lunches. But unless you’re a Google or a Facebook with a giant in-house team constantly making fresh food on site, you’ll have to choose a catering partner. And that’s where the options start to stack up: Do you want to order directly from local restaurants? Farm the selection and ordering process out to a middleman? Put a bunch of cold cuts and a salad bar out and call it a day?

Jess Legge and Kimberly Lexow co-founded Sifted four years ago to simplify the ways offices handle catered lunches. The Atlanta-based catering operation serves workplaces which invest heavily in lifestyle perks. But unlike most other services, Sifted handles the entire catering process in-house, from ingredient sourcing to menu planning to food prep and delivery.

Monday through Friday, the company offers two lunch options: one with meat, one vegetarian. All of Sifted’s food is served buffet-style. Pricing depends on the size of staff required and frequency of service. Sifted company currently has around 150 staff.

Throughout our conversation, Legge kept repeating one phrase: “We really want to become your single food vendor.” However, that definition seems chiefly narrowed on lunch. Legge told me that Sifted will also do Happy Hours and snack services, but their main focus is midday eating.

According to Legge, Sifted’s main draw is that its entire operation is controlled in-house. The company has a chef team in each of their cities — Atlanta, Austin, Denver, Seattle, Nashville, and, next month, Phoenix — which work out of commercial kitchen spaces. Sifted also has a staff to set up and serve food. This level of control gives more transparency to Sifted’s office partners (they always know exactly where the food is coming from), and also gives the company the flexibility to pivot and adjust offerings based on diner feedback.

This is where Sifted can really differentiate itself. Every day, Sifted staff record metrics for production, worker lunch participation, etc. After service, all leftovers are weighed, to inform decisions about future food offerings. For example, based off of leftovers, Sifted could surmise that a particular office loved the Eggplant Parmesan but wasn’t a fan of the Chicken Parmesan, and update their menus accordingly. “Data drives us,” Legge emphasized.

Sifted has another value-add: its crusade against food waste. Legge told me Sifted tries to source the most sustainable ingredients possible, including over-supplied product and “ugly” produce that other food companies might pass over. The company also recently partnered with Copia, an excess-food donation platform, to give each day’s leftover food to those in need. It will be the first of Copia’s partners to donate 100 percent of its uneaten food to local nonprofits.

Reducing the amount of food you donate or throw away is just smart business. But it’s also a smart marketing move in a climate where people — especially millennials — are caring more and more about things like sustainability.

Sifted will need to use every card in its hands to distinguish itself in the crowded corporate catering space, especially since many of its competitors are expanding quickly and raising hefty funds along the way. Chewse raised $19 million for “family style” catering, Oh My Green raised $20 million, and ezCater raised an eye-popping $100 million. However, there’s also been lots of consolidation in the space: Peach laid off 33 percent of its staff, Square bought Zesty, and EAT Club acquired Farm Hill.

Legge is aware of the intense competition in the corporate catering space. But she’s adamant that Sifted’s end-to-end business model gives them a leg up, despite their lack of funding. “With Sifted, eaters know exactly what they’re eating and what to expect,” she said.

So far, Sifted has very intentionally avoided fundraising. Legge explained to me that they want to grow organically, without being beholden to investors’ “grow quickly” mentalities. This strategy is a double-edged sword. Without investor pressure the startup might be able to avoid the bust that has befallen other office catering companies in the past year. Then again, less money = less fuel for growth.

Sure, companies could work with small local caterers and get the same level of transparency and consistency in the food they order. But Sifted is taking that type of intimate partnership and applying it to each of their locations across the country, all while maintaining an ethos of sustainability. That might be an attractive enough option to entice more partnerships with offices across the country — and it’s certainly better than a sub-par platter of cold cuts.

Nielsen: Move Into Retail Making Moola for Meal Kits

The move into retail has been a smart one for the meal kit industry, as the new sales channel helped drive meal kit growth in 2018, according to a report out this week from Nielsen (h/t Grocery Dive).

Overall, Nielsen found that meal kit users (both online and offline) have increased 36 percent throughout 2018 and that 14.3 million households purchased meal kits in the last six months of 2018 (up from 3.8 million household from the end of 2017). And Nielsen says there’s more room to grow, with 23 percent of American households saying they would consider purchasing a meal kit within the next six months.

Nielsen points out that the majority of meal kit sales still happened online in 2018, but growth came from in-store sales, which makes sense as meal kits made their debut in grocery aisles last year: Kroger purchased Home Chef, Albertsons rolled out Plated meal kits, and HelloFresh made a deal with Giant and Stop & Shop. Nielsen says that 187 new meal kit items were introduced at retail outlets last year, and that in-store meal kit sales generated $93 million over the course of 2018 with the number of in-store meal kit purchasers increasing by 2.2 million households in less than a year. This jump accounted for a 60 percent growth in meal kit users.

So who’s buying meal kits? In a blog post, Nielsen writes:

Overall, affluent consumers earning an income of more than $100k drove meal kit growth across online and in-store in 2018. Compared to 2017, these consumers increased their online meal kit purchases by 6 points and their in-store purchases by 9 points. Across both outlets, growth is also being led by consumers between the ages of 35-44, who showed a 4.3 point increase in meal kit purchases online and a 9.2 point increase in those bought in-store. Meanwhile, meal kit purchases from older consumers aged 45-54 declined 2.8 points online and 7 points in-store over the past year.

We are typically pretty bearish on the future of mail-order meal kits here at The Spoon. A lot of that sourness is driven by our own experiences with the product. Mail-order meal kits are expensive, they generate a lot of packaging waste, they are a lot of work to make, and because the ingredients are fresh, you pretty much have to make them as soon as they arrive (whether you still want that recipe or not) or else they spoil.

Meal kits in grocery stores, however, can still offer the same benefits of meal kits — pre-portioned fresh ingredients, introduction to new types of cuisine — but do it in a way that is more convenient and fits into a consumer’s existing daily flow.

And we’re really just at the beginning of what is possible for meal kits at retail as they only started rolling out last year. There is tons of head room for experimentation and innovation, whether that comes in the form of frozen foods, meal kits sold in new retail outlets like drug stores, offices, or even customized meal kits created in stores and brought out to you curbside so they can be made that night.

Hi Fidelity Genetics Raises $8.5M for AI-Driven Plant Breeding

Hi Fidelity Genetics (HFG), which combines sensors, data and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve plant breeding, today announced that it has raised an $8.5 million Series A led by Fall Line Capital and Finistere Ventures. This brings the total amount raised by HFG to $11.5 million.

There are two parts to the HFG system. First, the company inserts proprietary capacitance sensors into the ground that are used to make a 3D statistical model of the roots of individual plants throughout their entire growth cycle. (A heartier, deeper root structure means a healthier plant.) HFG then combines that underground data with other, above ground data such as crop lineage weather, pests, etc. HFG runs all this information through its AI platform, and is able to predict which plants should be cross-bred to create new hybrids that will be more robust and have greater yields in that farm’s particular setting.

Traditionally, finding the right plants to cross-breed is a manual process that is reactionary, happening after plants have survived drought conditions or some form of pest. Additionally, most breeding processes rely on trial and error. Spencer Maughan, Co-Founder Hi-Fidelity Genetics and Partner at Finestere Ventures, told me by phone that Hi Fidelity’s massive data-intensive approach allows for a new type of automated, predictive, cross-breeding selection process. “We can predict hybrid outcomes,” he said. HFG doesn’t do the actual cross-breeding of plants, rather it just indicates which plants should be cross-bred. The actual hybridization is farmed out, as it were.

Right now, HFG’s technology works with corn. The company has been conducting tests for the past three years and will go into its first trial in North America in 2019. Its primary business will be selling hybrid corn seed bred for particular situations such as specific region’s soil makeup or drought conditions. HFG currently offers four varietals of organic and non-organic seeds but will eventually get its catalog up to around 40 hybrid seeds. Maughan also said that the company will explore monetizing its AI platform as some kind of SaaS offering for other breeding organizations.

Data is playing an increasingly important role across agriculture as sensor companies like Arable and Teralytic provide new insights into the soil conditions for farmers so they can improve how they grow crops. Hi Fidelity is now looking to use data to change the what type of crop is grown.

From Pop Rocks To Spicy Snickers: Why Data Science Is The Future of Food Creation

When I think of interesting food products, I often think of Bill Mitchell, a legendary food scientist who stumbled upon what would eventually become Pop Rocks.

Hunkered inside a General Foods research lab in the 1950s, Mitchell discovered that mixing sugar with carbon dioxide in his mouth caused them to fizz and pop. The prolific food researcher — who would go on to invent a number of other innovative products like Tang and Cool Whip — filed for a patent on his idea in 1959. It took a couple decades for Pop Rocks to become a part of the 1970s cultural zeitgeist, but the fizzing candy is still sold to kids around the world today.

That’s the thing with food: so much of what has makes it to store shelves, whether Pop Rocks or the popsicle, is the result of magical mistakes. But in the era of smart phones, connected appliances and Amazon Alexa, this may soon change. Increasingly, new products will be less likely to come from happy accidents like that of Dr. Mitchell’s and instead will grow out of insights gleaned from consumer data made available through connected platforms.

Take the recent story about Mars using Alibaba data to create a spicy Snickers bar. According to Bloomberg, Mars used data gathered through the Chinese Internet giant’s various online platforms that showed customers who like chocolate also buy spicy food.

From the story:

That prompted the creation of the Spicy Snickers candy bar, which incorporates the Sichuan peppercorn, the source of China’s famous “mala” (numb and spicy) taste. Typically Mars spends two to three years developing a new product; the Spicy Snickers came together in less than one.

It’s not just Internet giants getting in on the action. Because every Joule sous vide appliance from ChefSteps is connected, the kitchen startup knows what customers are cooking at any given time. The company is able to analyze this data to unearth potential opportunities for new products.

For example, Joule usage data showed one of the biggest challenges time-starved consumers face when creating a sous vide meal is creating multi-ingredient sauces to go with a protein. This catalyzed the company to create a new product called Joule Ready sauces that solves for this exact problem. The Seattle startup has also built an agile production process that allows them to scale up new sauces based on consumer usage data and double down on popular ones.

While data-driven product development has been on the rise for some time, products like the spicy Snickers are a sign food companies are embracing data insights to take new risks and speed time to market.  And this embrace of data is only the beginning. A whole host of new startups are building upon the foundation of better food and consumer data to build AI platforms that not only will discover new products faster, but ensure a much higher likelihood of success.

Just as we saw with baseball, there might be some old-schoolers that decry the world of food undergoing its own Moneyball revolution. As for the inventor of Pop Rocks, I suspect Bill Mitchell would have been ok with it.

The reason? His grandson — also named Bill Mitchell — runs a little connected beer brewing appliance by the name of PicoBrew.

AgTech IoT Startup TeleSense Raises $6.5M to Help Prevent Food Spoilage

TeleSense, an agtech startup that provides wireless monitoring for grain and food production, today announced it has raised a $6.5 million Series A round of funding led by Finistere Ventures. Congruent Ventures, Maersk Growth, Rabobank’s Food & Agri Innovation Fund, Radicle Growth and Trailhead Capital, as well as previous investor Plug and Play Ventures also joined the round.

TeleSense is basically an industrial internet of things (IoT) company that uses a combination of wireless sensors and data tracking to help improve the food supply chain. TeleSense is initially focusing on grain storage and food transport, with its sensors continuously monitoring elements such as temperature and humidity. Using TeleSense’s cloud-based analytics platform, food producers can detect and be notified of anomalies or other problems early, and take action to prevent food spoilage. The company says that it has already helped its customers save $3 million dollars worth of grains.

According to the press announcement, TeleSense will use its new funding to invest in research and development of its GrainSafe artificial intelligence platform and build out channels for international expansion.

We’ve covered a lot of farm IoT startups over the past year as there is a huge rush towards giving farmers and other food producers data-driven insights into their operations. Companies like Teralytic and Arable analyze soil and crop conditions, while Connecterra keeps track of cows. The danger with all these data platforms and a potential challenge for TeleSense is vendor fatigue. Farmers want to farm, not implement multiple platforms and analyze millions of data points.

But TeleSense’s transport monitoring technology is also working to help improve the supply chain, an area which is also seeing a lot of action. Companies like AgShift, Zest Labs, and Apeel are all bringing new technologies to market to help reduce food waste.

Toast and BevSpot Want to Improve the Way Restaurants Use Back-of-House Data

Yesterday, restaurant-management software maker Toast announced a partnership with BevSpot, whose own software simplifies the order tracking and inventory process for restaurants. The new solution claims to save businesses time and energy collecting and making sense of data from sales, ordering, and inventory.

Toast’s Android-powered platform already combines a POS system, front- and back-of-house operations, and customer-facing technology (e.g., tabletop order kiosks) into a single cloud-based platform. The BevSpot partnership is a boost because it addresses the often arduous process of gathering and analyzing data from activities that happen behind the scenes: taking accurate inventory, checking the status of an order, and calculating things like pour costs. For a restaurant — particularly a large operation — a combined service like the Toast-BevSpot one could speed up and/or automate a lot of these tasks, not to mention make the numbers more accurate.

Inventory tracking alone is tough; screwing it up, even with a tiny miscalculation, can drastically change the sales numbers. With the Toast-BevSpot integration, businesses will be able to see exact numbers on what goes into the kitchen, what goes out, spillage, customer complaints, theft, and a whole bunch of other factors that affect inventory.

And by harmonizing the POS data with inventory and order data (which is all digitized, thanks to BevSpot), businesses will in all likelihood have an easier time spotting trends, whether it’s about which time of day sells the most fries to what days of the week the kitchen goes through more eggs.

The BevSpot integration is part of Toast’s API Partner Program, where companies can partner with Toast to integrate its system into their own software. Among many others, Grubhub, LevelUp, and Hot Schedules all participate.

Toast raised a $115 million in Series D funding in July and is currently valued at $1.4 billion. But’s a crowded market out there. TouchBistro is a popular competitor and raised a $70 million Series D in June, and Square launched its own POS system in May. This partnership with BevSpot is no doubt a way for Toast to further differentiate itself by dabbling in the data issue — a topic that’s only going to get more important as high tech becomes commonplace in restaurants.

Gallup Poll: Grocery Shoppers Prefer In-Store to Online, Shun Meal Kits

A recent poll by Gallup shows that the 84 percent of U.S. adults say they “never” buy groceries online, and 89 percent never order meal kits. By contrast, 81 percent say that they shop for groceries in person at a store at least once a week. (Hat tip: Food Dive)

The Gallup poll reinforces other studies which found that people like to shop for groceries in-store so that they can see and touch them. But it also highlights two trends to watch: meal kits’ continued shift away from mail order, and the transformation of grocery stores into curbside fulfillment centers.

We’ve been skeptics of mail order meal kits for some time, so seeing Gallup’s statistic that 89 percent of respondents never ordering a meal kit isn’t that surprising. Look at the current meal kit landscape: Home Chef is owned by Kroger, Plated is owned by Albertsons, Chef’d abruptly shut down last month, and its assets were purchased to focus on retail. Even stalwarts like Blue Apron and HelloFresh are both rolling out retail strategies.

Part of this is because mail order meal kits deny people the convenience that they want. According to research by Acosta and Technomic, 85 percent of U.S. diners decide what to eat for dinner the day of, which is why placing meal kits in grocery store aisles makes more sense than requiring people to pre-order meals days (or weeks) in advance. People in the grocery store can grab what they want to eat that night — no pre-planning required.

For meal kit companies looking to make the move to retail, however, it might already be too late. As mentioned, Krogers and Albertsons own their own meal kit companies, but they’re far from the only ones: Amazon makes its their own meal kits, Walmart has started to. On a smaller scale, regional grocery stores like New Seasons are getting in on the action, too. There’s only so much grocery shelf space, and a retailer is probably going to promote its own branded kit over a third party’s.

Meanwhile, the in-store shopping experience is going through its own transition. Large grocery stores are starting to be outfitted with robotic micro-fulfillment centers and expanded drive-through pick up options. Alert Innovation is building out such a center for Walmart and Takeoff will announce its first in-store robot operation later this year. These fast, automated centers inside local grocery stores will allow for online grocery order pickup within a half hour to better fit in with people’s busy schedules of errand running or grabbing something on the way home from work.

Additionally, the ability to pick up items in person allows people to inspect their purchases on the spot for quality and freshness — and return something if necessary — while still at the store. They get the convenience of ordering online, the ability to pick up while already out (without having to wait at home for a delivery window), and the power to make adjustments before heading home.

But wait, Gallup said people aren’t buying groceries online. That’s correct… for now! If you look at the demographic break down, 14 percent of adults with children under 18 and 12 percent of adults aged 35 – 54 order groceries online. Compare that to the 8 percent of people 55 and older who buy groceries on the web. And sure, only 9 percent of adults aged 18 – 34 purchase groceries online (they are mostly ordering takeout), but this is a generation being raised on digital convenience.

If these demographic trends hold true, it seems like as though as younger generations age up and start families, the number of people comfortable with ordering groceries online will grow.

With all these changes, I’m looking forward to seeing the same Gallup poll five years from now.

Survey: Older Consumers Not Buying Groceries Online

Not many Americans over the age of 50 are shopping for groceries online, according to a recent study conducted by the International Food Information Council (IFIC) Foundation and the AARP (hat tip to Supermarket News).

The IFIC and AARP surveyed 1,004 Americans ages 50 years and older last month and found only:

  • 17 percent had ever ordered groceries to be picked up from a store
  • 17 percent ordered from a prepared meal delivery service
  • 16 percent ordered groceries to be delivered
  • 10 percent ordered from a meal kit delivery service

Older consumers, it seems, prefer going to the store; 90 percent of respondents shopped at the supermarket at least once a month, 71 percent at a super-store and 46 percent at a warehouse/discount club.

The survey shows that older consumers can see the value in ordering online: not having to travel to the store, a wide variety of products and eliminating the “physical burden of getting around the story or carrying groceries.” But, there are barriers that prevent them from fully adopting the technology.

The top barrier was high delivery fees for 89 percent of respondents. Coming right under that, 88 percent said that they still want to see and touch any item purchase to ensure its quality. These people had concerns about purchasing bad or bruised produce, as well as potential difficulty in returning a product if they ordered it online.

This desire to personally inspect food before purchasing is actually cross-generational. An eMarketer study earlier this year found that 96.1 percent of respondents shopped for food and beverages in-store, and an Adeptmind study this month found that the biggest perk of shopping in-store was to evaluate the product in person.

From the data, older consumers who do shop online are more attentive to food labels — but, they overwhelmingly say that label information is harder to get online. This makes sense for an aging population, which probably has to be more careful about what it eats. Displaying nutritional information more clearly could be an opportunity for retailers to open up more of this market.

It seems like these numbers will change as different generations who are more used to technology and the act of ordering groceries online ages up. But it’s still good to examine these numbers and look at implementing changes today to adapt to the older consumer market of tomorrow.

Zume to Open it’s Mobile Cooking Platform to any Restaurant

When Zume first came on the scene, a lot of people got hooked on its pizza-making robot. But what was always more intriguing to us here at The Spoon was Zume as a data and logistics platform.

Zume takes into consideration hundreds of data points, such as day of the week, weather, school calendars and more to develop predictions around how much pizza and what types of pizza will be ordered in a given location. From there a food delivery vehicle cooks up the pizza on the move and delivers it with precise timing.

Now Zume wants to license out that know-how, as today it announced a plan to open up its platform to any restaurant that wants to replicate Zume’s logistical and technical expertise. To help facilitate the cooking needs of these third-party implementations, Zume also announced that it has partnered with commercial foodservice equipment maker, Welbilt, to incorporate custom built, hyper-efficient appliances into the next generation of Zume’s customizeable food delivery vehicles.

“It’s all well and good to do pizza,” said Alex Garden, Co-Founder and CEO of Zume in a phone interview. “The truth is that we’ve developed a tech stack that will allow any restaurant to power the next generation of their business.”

The company was light on details, saying that today’s announcement is meant to spark discussions with potential customers. At first, Zume will be more like a consultancy, which works with clients individually to establish their goals and plan out an appropriate technical and vehicular solution. From there it will determine the next best steps and and offer a catalog of Welbilt appliances (steamers, griddles, broilers, etc.) that will work best in any food delivery vehicle.

Garden wouldn’t say exactly what kinds of customers Zume was targeting, but indicated that restaurants that are already at scale and feeling pressures from high wage costs, rent costs, or delivery systems digging too deeply into its margins would be a good fit.

It sounds like Zume is doing what Eatsa did towards the end of last year when it decided to pull back from running its own establishments in favor of helping other restaurants automate their businesses. Unlike Eatsa, however, Zume, which has raised $96 million in funding, is expanding its footprint instead of shrinking. As part of today’s announcement, Zume said it’s adding 26 new delivery locations around the Bay Area by the end of this year, and will completely cover the Bay Area by the end of 2019.

Given the methodical rate at which it’s expanding, powering other restaurants is a less capital-intensive way to reach a national scale. In addition to another line of revenue for the company, partnering with other restaurants would also give Zume access to lots of new geographic, customer and cuisine data sets. These new data sets could expand and improve Zume’s predictive algorithms which should, in turn, boost sales for partner restaurants and help Zume should it decide to broaden the types of food it serves.

Depending on what Zume ends up charging (and the data they demand), it’s easy to see why this could be a welcome partnership for restaurants. As delivery services like Uber Eats and DoorDash take off, more people are choosing to eat from home rather than sit in a restaurant. That’s a lot of square footage that can go unused at a restaurant, and a lot of commissions paid out to those delivery services, which eats into margins.

Additionally, hooking up with Zume would allow a restaurant to better control its own delivery destiny and better protect their brand. Instead of some indifferent third party bringing soggy fries to your door, a restaurant could take advantage of Zume’s cook on the way tech to ensure that the food arrives hot and fresh.

But it’s not all just about third parties and platforms for Zume. There’s still cool stuff like robots, and those next-gen food delivery vehicles, which come with six high-efficiency ovens that can make 120 pizzas in an hour. Now we’ll just have to see how many restaurants climb aboard.

Teleported Sushi Has Big Implications for Digital Food

When I first heard internet murmurings that a company had figured out a way to teleport sushi, I immediately thought of one of my favorite childhood films: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. (The old version, not the new one with creepy Johnny Depp.)

Near the end of the movie, Wonka gives his diminishing troupe of children a tour of the factory’s teleporting technology, which has the power to “beam” you a chocolate bar through your T.V. As a chocolate lover and a T.V. lover, I was smitten. But I assumed that this technology would probably never become a reality, at least outside of Wonka.

How happy I am to be wrong!

A Japanese company called Open Meals premiered their “sushi teleportation” technology at SXSW2018, conducting what they call “the world’s first food data transmission.” In the demonstration, sushi that was designed in Tokyo was printed, via Open Meals’ Pixel Food Printer, in Austin, TX.

Their sushi currently prints in 5-millimeter blocks, giving the results a pixellated look straight out of an 80’s video game. However, they hope to reduce the size to 1-millimeter blocks, which would give the food a more organic, realistic appearance.

This demonstration was just the beginning of Open Meals’ plan to transform the way that food is created and transported. Eventually, Open Meals hopes to be able to transmit ingredients and whole dishes, using data and something that their website calls “Social Food Network Services.” They want to usher in what they dub the “fifth food revolution,” whose hallmarks are the “digitalization, transmission, and re-generation of food.”

Open Meals’ Pixel Food Printer isn’t the only 3D food printer out there; there’s also the Foodini and Dovetailed, and scientists at Carnegie Mellon recently came up with a way to DIY a 3D bioprinter. But its approach is unique. Instead of using food paste in a canister, sugar, or liquid as its medium, their machine (patent pending) uses data to set exact specifications to mimic the nutrients, color, texture, and flavor of a specific food, which it then adds to a gel pixel. The robotic arm “prints” this customized gel into a miniature 3D cube, which it stacks to reproduce the appearance of the food its replicating.

Open Meals’ Pixel Food Printer

The sushi demonstration was certainly flashy, but in my opinion the real potential for Open Meals’ vision lies in its Food Base project.

Their digital food platform allows users to search, upload, download, and share data, such as taste, texture, nutrient composition, and color/shape, for specific ingredients or dishes. They can then send that specific food’s data profile up to their connected Pixel Food Printer, which will recreate it.

Open Meals hopes to source data from Michelin-star restaurants, home cooks, television shows, and even food-themed art to populate its database.

Obviously we have a long way to go before we reach a time when digitized, teleported food is feasible on a large scale. You would never mistake Open Meals’ “transported” sushi for the real thing, and apparently the taste was nowhere near bluefin tuna or prawn.

But the implications of what they’re doing is huge, way beyond just a cool-looking trick for SXSW. OpenMeals wants to digitize food like Apple and others digitized music, democratizing it — at least for those who can afford its Pixel Food Printer. (The machine is currently a prototype, but if mass marketed will no doubt fetch a pretty penny.)

Open Meals’ digital food database.

Extrapolating from the claims on Open Meals’ website, a future with digitized, printable food could:

  • Allow for carefully calibrated meals for people with illnesses like diabetes, or athletes with restrictive diets. This could become especially popular as demand for personalized diets is on the rise.
  • Provide on-demand, nutritious food to disaster areas or combat zones where farming infrastructure is weak. That is, assuming the printed food and its corresponding 3D bioprinters would ever be affordable enough for disaster relief organizations to purchase in bulk.
  • Preserve traditional dishes, from cultural hallmarks to mom’s beef stroganoff recipe. Because we all know how hard it is to make food exactly like mom does.
  • Replicate elaborate dishes from cooking shows, so you can eat along with the T.V. (Way better than Smell-O-Vision.)
  • Help lab-grown meat mimic the texture of bluefin tuna or ribeye steak.
  • Be beamed into space so that astronauts can enjoy a wide variety of meals without having to pack a lot of heavy food. This is especially intriguing as NASA gears up for the 2030 mission to Mars. 

Open Meals hasn’t given a timeline for their goals to digitize the future of food. Until they do, I’ll just have to keep dreaming of the taste of a teleported chocolate bar.