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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

eating

When It Comes to Cooking Videos, Gen Zers Love TikTok, Millennials Embrace YouTube

As a former industry analyst, I’m a sucker for survey research exploring how we cook, eat, and shop for food. Luckily for me, word of a new research study landed in my inbox this morning from (of all places) Home Run Inn Pizza. Okay, so not exactly Nielsen, but the study used a good sample size (2,000 US respondents) and had a mix of gender and regional representation. In other words, it seemed to be designed well enough to elicit decent results.

The survey focused on food behavior by Gen Z and Millennials. I’d seen studies like this before – heck, we’ve even conducted them here at The Spoon – but what stood out to me about this one was just how vital the dominant video platforms are nowadays when it comes to gaining cooking inspiration. According to the survey, 71% of Gen Z (between ages 9 and 24) and 67% of Millennials watch cooking videos but differ substantially in what platforms they watch the videos on.

Source: Home Run Inn

According to the study, Gen Zers are more than twice as likely (38% compared to 16% of Millennials) to watch cooking videos on TikTok. A more significant percentage of both groups said they watch cooking videos on YouTube, but Millennials usage far outpaced Gen Z respondents (66% of Millennials compared to 47% for Gen Z). Instagram usage was surprisingly low, with only 7% of Millennials and 4% of Gen Z saying they watch cooking videos on the platform. Neither Millennials (9%) nor Gen Z (3%) watched much traditional TV when watching cooking videos. According to the survey, both generations – 56% of Gen Z and 29% of Millennials – use TikTok for recipe discovery and learning cooking techniques.

Source: Home Run Inn

Another surprising data set was the kitchen gear each used to cook food. According to the survey, both generations rely most heavily on the stovetop, with two-thirds of Gen Z and Millennials saying that was their primary appliance. Interestingly, only 10% of Gen Z and 8% of Millennials said air fryers were their go-to, and an even smaller percentage – 6% for Gen Z and 4% for Millennials – said the microwave oven was their primary cooking appliance. For some reason, the survey didn’t ask about pressure cookers, an oversight, in my opinion, despite the struggles of the pioneering Instant Pot.

Finally, a significant percentage of both generations can be scolded for being poor company when using technology while breaking bread with others. According to the survey, 81% of Gen Z admit they have stared at their phone while dining with others, compared to 60% of Millennials.

If you’d like to see the study’s full results, you can find it here.

Startup Says its Spoons and Forks Compost in as Little as 10 Days

No offense to the humble spoon (after all, this site is named after it), but it’s not as necessary for modern American diets than its pointier sibling, the fork.

And although there’s been some innovation in terms of environmentally friendly disposable spoons in the form of Planeteers’ edible spoon, there are few options for plastic fork replacements that don’t destroy the Earth. Startup TwentyFifty aims to change that with its fork, which founder Zack Kong, a bioengineering graduate from the University of California San Diego, said is “the first compostable fork in the world that’s similar in function to plastic and wooden forks.”

The difference between TwentyFifty’s technically edible products — which currently include forks and spoons but will eventually encompass chopsticks, stirrers and straws — is its patent-pending manufacturing process that compresses wheat flour, soy flour, corn flour and water into strong utensils that can withstand higher temperatures. Essentially, TwentyFifty’s spoons won’t melt soaking in a bowl of hot soup for 30 minutes. Due to the nature of the ingredients of the utensils, the company says they will break down in a backyard compost pile in as little as 10 to 30 days, while competing compostable products need to be broken down in industrial plants.

“The other benefit of this product is not just the compostability, but it’s also an organic fertilizer,” said Albert Liu, a TwentyFifty board member and business advisor. “When these utensils compost, they add 2.7 cents worth of fertilizer to the soil. We use grains to make the utensils, then they go back into the earth to help grow more grains.”

The big hurdle for the company now is cost, with retail price per utensil around 50 cents each, wholesale at 25 cents and bulk at 15 cents. That’s hugely expensive compared to plastic, which could be as cheap as pennies per utensil. TwentyFifty anticipates prices to drop to 5 to 10 cents as it scales up and automates its production line, which will allow it to produce 10,000 to 20,000 units a day. 

TwentyFifty’s target market isn’t individual consumers, however, who could just use silverware. Rather, it’s aiming to partner with universities and municipalities. Liu said the company has a vendor agreement with UC San Diego, and has partnerships in place with Malibu, Santa Monica and San Francisco, which have all placed bans on single-use plastics. The utensils can also be found at a number of California cafes and yogurt shops.

Earlier this year, the New Food Economy found that so-called compostable bowls frequently used by Chipotle and Sweetgreen actually contained “forever chemical” PFAs, which as their name suggests, don’t break down. Meanwhile, plastic pollution continues to be a global threat. So if TwentyFifty’s utensils break down like the company claims, and more environmentally friendly alternatives become available, progress can be made toward preventing future waste.

Five Startups that Fight Off Unhealthy Eating at the Office

Time for some bad news/good news.

The bad news? A recent CDC report says eating at the office is about as healthy as eating at Wendy’s, which makes sense if you think about typical office cafeteria food (for those not working at some Silicon Valley startup with a private chef), vending machines, and office cakes for co-workers’ birthdays.

New Food Economy first reported on the CDC’s study yesterday, writing:

According to the Healthy Eating Index, a metric created by USDA to measure nutritional quality on a scale of one to 100, workplace fare scored an average of 48. That’s the same score as a Wendy’s menu. Food consumed at work added extra calories to their diets—about 1,292 calories a week—with more than two-thirds of that coming from food given away for free.

The good news? There are a number of startups looking to make eating at work a whole lot more healthy. Here are a few we’ve been following.

Byte Foods provides offices with smart fridges full of fresh, healthy foods like salads and falafel snack packs. Employees just swipe their credit card, take what they want, and are charged automatically.

SnackNation offers companies healthy snacks as a service to “inspire more conscious food decisions.” The company heavily curates its catalog, reviewing and taste-testing each product.

Farmer’s Fridge is a vending machine filled with individual kitchen-made meals such as Smoked Cheddar Cobb Salad, Tarragon Chicken Salad Wrap, and Almond Butter Oats Bowl.

Chowbotics is a more high-tech robot vending machine that whips up salads on the spot. The company raised $11 million last year to expand from salads into food bowls.

KitchenMate has perhaps the most comprehensive solution on this list. It provides offices with a fridge filled with ready-to-cook meals (kale and brown rice bowls, salmon and rice, etc.) and a smart cooker that uses a barcode scanner to automatically cook those meals properly.

It’s tough to fight off snacking and grazing while at the office. After all, you need something to get you through all those meetings and conference calls. Hopefully, though, these startups will take hold, so more workers can have healthier options at the workplace.

The Future Of How (And What) We Eat

As connectivity is transforming the way we live, work and shop, there is a heavy focus on technology’s role in our everyday lives. The internet pushed us into a global economy and the internet of things will connect us to our stuff and to the people who make our stuff. What about food? We’ve explored the way kitchen appliances are evolving and the way grocers and retailers are shifting the way our food gets to our plates. Could the revolution change the way we eat?

VR Comes To Dinner

Picture this: you’re sitting at a dinner table, but instead of a fork and a knife in front of you, it’s a bunch of electrodes connected to your tongue and jaw. With the right amount of electrical and thermal stimulation on your taste buds and muscles, those electrodes can actually trick your brain into thinking your tasting – and chewing – something sweet. Sounds like something from a sci-fi movie, but it’s real work being done by food scientists.

But this is all stuff in a lab – could it ever be commercialized? One group calling themselves Project Nourished thinks so and have developed a type of virtual reality tourism around it.  The experience involves a VR headset but also a diffuser to mimic food aromas and even a “bone conduction transducer” which creates the sound of chewing. The future of VR eating might mean some day you could sit at a table in Cleveland and experience the sites, sounds and tastes of a restaurant in southern Italy. In addition to tourism, the diet and nutrition industry could also capitalize, developing programs where people would think they were snacking on their favorite treat – without the calories and guilt that come with it.

Looking Inside Your Food

We’ve become hyper aware of the food we eat – where it comes from, if it’s healthy, organic, or non-GMO. But usually , we have to rely on labels to tell us if something is good – or safe – for us to eat. Seeing an opportunity, startups are addressing this problem with different types of scanning technology.

One of the more well-known and embattled companies in this space is Consumer Physics, makers of the SCiO,  an infrared spectrometer. The device was designed to read the molecular makeup – including calories and nutrients – of food. The company struggled to bring a solid product to market and faced legal challenges and since then has moved to putting its software inside mobile phones. Others like French kitchen device company Terraillon are developing kitchen scale with an embedded SCiO that scan food and read the nutritional info – less revolutionary, but still attempting to provide visibility into what we eat.

Perhaps the most promising in the sensor-powered food monitoring category is Silicon Valley startup Nima. Nima’s flagship product is a portable gluten sensor, able to detect small amounts of gluten – a largely hidden ingredient – inside of food. The science behind the product involves a chemical reaction that takes place using elements inside a disposable pod. Food placed inside the pod is then tested for antibodies and a simple happy or sad face reading is given based on the result. Nima’s advisors claim the same technology could be used to detect other allergens like peanut butter or dairy.

So – could technology make you think you’re eating chocolate when you’re actually consuming just air? Could a portable device tell you exactly what’s in the food you’re about to enjoy or even better – warn you of a potential allergic reaction?

It looks as though the future of eating might include more technology than we think.

This post was originally by The Spoon as part of a Smart Home magazine distributed at the Home and Housewares Show.