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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Food AI Co-Lab

Can You Use AI to Create a Wi-Fi Powered Rolling Pin? Join Today’s Interactive Workshop to Find Out!

Last June at the Smart Kitchen Summit, Scott Heimendinger talked about today’s temptation among product builders to follow a similar path with AI as consumer product builders forged a decade ago when they added Wi-Fi connectivity to almost everything.

“There’s a temptation that’s especially prevalent in our industry, but in others as well, that when new technologies become available to the world, we want to kind of slap those on what we’re doing,” he said. “We slapped WiFi on a bunch of things, but the world does not need a WiFi-enabled rolling pin.”

This doesn’t mean Scott doesn’t embrace AI as an inventor and product builder to help make him more productive in doing his job. It’s the opposite, and the one-time technical lead for Modernist Cuisine and founder of one of the earliest consumer sous vide hardware startups in Sansaire leverages AI tools to assist across the product development process. From ideation to market research to writing code, Heimendinger tells me that AI is a crucial tool to help him do his job faster and more efficiently.

If you’re looking for ways to figure out how to use AI in your job, join us this morning for this month’s Food AI Co-Lab as Scott shows us how to leverage these tools as we, yes, build an imaginary new product in a Wi-Fi rolling pin and look to bring it to market.

Join us for today’s interactive workshop at 8:30 Pacific Time to learn how a successful product developer and inventor like Scott leverages AI to up his game as he shares practical tips for you to do the same. Scott will work through his process and show ways he leverages a variety of tools and offer tips for you to do just the same. And who knows, maybe you’ll come away with an idea for the next big product (just not an AI-rolling pin, ok?). Register now!

Live Event: Using Generative AI to Build Next-Generation Flavors & Fragrances

Join us today for a live event at 8:30 AM PT, featuring the project leads for NotCo’s new AI to develop flavors and fragrances. Register and watch below or head to Streamyard.

Can AI be used to create new flavors and fragrances?

As I wrote last week, food-tech company NotCo has been asking itself this question for the past couple of years. Their answer is a newly unveiled generative AI model, the Generative Aroma Transformer (GAT), that they say is capable of creating new flavor and fragrance formulations.

The company’s Senior vice president of Product, Aadit Patel, described how it works this way: “The system intakes your prompt, such as ‘an ocean scent on a breezy summer day on a tropical island’, to create a novel chemical formulation of that scent in one shot.” From there, the model generates a corresponding fragrance formula. According to Patel, the model is built on a “natural language to chemical composition” framework, tokenizing molecules to create a system capable of understanding and generating novel combinations.

NotCo says early tests have been extremely positive, and the company says their research indicates that GAT’s abilities rival those of human perfumers. At the Food AI Summit last month, the two product leads, Francisco Francisco Clavero and Cindy Sigler, gave an in-depth presentation on the science behind their new model and talked about early results.

Their presentation was fascinating, so I asked them to present to our Food AI Co-Lab community.

Watch the recorded session below:

Using Generative AI to Build Next-Generation Flavors & Fragances

Announcing The Food AI Co-Lab, a New Collaboration Between The Spoon & Future Food Institute

If there was one thing we learned when we held the first-ever Food AI Summit last October, it is that pretty much every food company believes their business will fundamentally change due to artificial intelligence.

Whether it’s companies building farm equipment, managing food supply chains, launching new grocery shopping formats, or creating new quick-service restaurant chains, no one along the food value chain will remain untouched by the rapid pace of change brought on by AI. In other words, we are in a once-in-a-generational rethink of business as usual, a tectonic shift that demands company leaders continuously learn, strategize, and collaborate to make sure their companies survive and even thrive into the future.

Because of this, we realized that we wanted to find a way to bring together our community and others within the food system to talk about the different impacts AI is having across various parts of the food system more than once a year. While we loved the fact that the big ideas that were shared at the Food AI Summit have already resulted in new partnerships and collaborations, we wondered if we brought together folks more regularly – on a monthly basis or even more frequently – might have an even bigger impact.

Luckily for us, one of my favorite organizations – the Future Food Institute, led by one of the most consequential leaders in the future food space in Sara Roversi – had a similar idea. So when Sara approached me about joining forces for a collaborative new organization to do just that – I jumped at the chance.

So, alongside the FFI, I am super excited to announce today the launch of the Food AI Co-Lab!

What is the Food AI Co-Lab? It’s a collaboration that aims to be a meeting space and learning center for leaders who are building the future of food through artificial intelligence. We will explore different topics, engage with our community, and provide information such as industry surveys about what people are doing at the intersection of food and AI.

To kick things off, we will host monthly industry-focused meetings with thought leaders creating using AI across various parts of the food system. Soon, we will also announce in-person events in the US and Italy where the community can get together, network, learn together, and build their own collaborations.

If you’d like to join us on this journey, we encourage you to join our LinkedIn group and also register for our first virtual event, AI & The Future of Food, which will take place next Tuesday, March 19th. At that event, we’ll interview two thought leaders: Dr. Patrick Story, a professor of Philosophy at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, participating in a National Science Foundation-funded project analyzing the impact of automation and AI on the food system, and Kevin Brown, the CEO of Innit, a company building a platform that plugs into generative AI large language models to make them more food “fluent” and power AI-assisted food knowledge systems and services.

I hope to see you there, and I am excited to work with you to learn, collaborate, and build the future with the Food AI Co-Lab!