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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Food AI Summit

From Data-Scraping to Discernment Layer: How NotCo’s Giuseppe AI Has Evolved Over the Past Decade

Almost a decade ago, while others experimenting with AI focused on algorithms for trading, diagnostics, or digital advertising, a company called NotCo was experimenting with AI by the name of Giuseppe to create plant-based foods that could match the taste and texture of their animal-based counterparts.

According to Aadit Patel, SVP of AI Product and Engineering at NotCo, the company’s founders (Patel would join a couple of years after the company was founded in 2015) realized early on that, in order to build an AI model that could help create plant-based products mimicking the taste, texture, and functionality of their animal-based counterparts, they would need a whole lot of data.

The problem was, as a startup, they didn’t have any.

When I asked Patel in a recent interview how the company overcame the infamous “cold start” problem—the challenge many embryonic AI models face before they have built large datasets on which to train—he told me they found the solution in a very public place: the U.S. government’s website.

“In the early days, when we had no money, we literally scraped the USDA website,” said Patel. “If you go to the USDA website, there’s a bunch of free data materials for you to use. And I guess no one had actually joined it together to create a comprehensive dataset… So the first versions of Giuseppe were built on that.”

This cobbled-together dataset formed the foundation for Giuseppe’s recommendations, leading to the creation of products like NotMilk, which uses unexpected combinations like pineapple and cabbage to replicate the taste of dairy milk.

As NotCo grew, so did Giuseppe’s capabilities. New analytical labs in San Francisco and Santiago, Chile, gave the company a wealth of new data on which to train its AI. Over time, the model’s ability to create innovative food products also improved.

One of the biggest hurdles in food development is the fragmented nature of the supply chain. Data is scattered across various entities—ingredient suppliers, flavor houses, manufacturers, and research institutions—each holding critical information that contributes to the success of a product. Over time, the company realized that to create an AI capable of building innovative products, it couldn’t rely solely on NotCo’s datasets. Instead, Giuseppe would need to integrate and analyze data from across this complex web of partners.

“What we’ve done with Giuseppe is figure out a way to incentivize this very fragmented ecosystem,” Patel said.

According to Patel, pulling together these disparate datasets from across the product development and supply chain would result in a more holistic understanding of what is needed for a successful product that is better aligned with market realities.

“We realized that if we just made an AI system that’s specific to CPG, we’d be losing out,” said Patel.

Generative AI and Flavor and Fragrance Development

One recent expansion of Giuseppe’s capabilities has been the exploration of new flavors and fragrances using generative AI. While GenAI models like ChatGPT have become infamous for creating sometimes strange and off-putting combinations when designing recipes and new food product formulations, Patel explained that the company has been able to overcome issues with general LLMs by creating what he calls a discernment layer. This layer filters and evaluates the multitude of generated possibilities, narrowing them down to the most promising candidates.

“Discernment is key because it’s not just about generating ideas; it’s about identifying the ones that are likely to succeed in the real world,” Patel said. “With generative AI, you can prompt it however you want and get an infinite amount of answers. The question is, how do we discern which of these 10,000 ideas are the ones most likely to work in a lab setting, a pilot setting, or beyond?”

The discernment layer works by incorporating additional data points and contextual knowledge into the model. For instance, it might consider a formulation’s scalability, cost-effectiveness, or alignment with consumer preferences. This layer also allows human experts to provide feedback and fine-tune the AI’s outputs, creating a process that combines AI’s creativity with the expertise of flavor and fragrance professionals.

Early tests have shown positive results. When tasked with creating a new flavor, both the AI and the human perfumers receive the same brief. When the results are compared in A/B tests, Patel says the outputs of Giuseppe’s generative AI were indistinguishable from those created by human experts.

“What we’ve built is a system where AI and human expertise complement each other,” said Patel. “This gives us the flexibility to create products that are not just theoretically possible but also market-ready.”

CPG Brands Still Have a Long Way to Go With AI-Enhanced Food Creation

Nearly a decade after building an AI model with scraped data from the USDA website, NotCo has evolved its AI to create new products through a collaborative approach that results in a modern generative AI model incorporating inputs from its partners up and down the food value chain. This collaborative approach is being used for internal product development and third-party CPG partners, many of whom Patel said approached the company after they announced their joint venture with Kraft Heinz.

“Ever since our announcement with Kraft Heinz and signing a joint venture, there’s been a lot of inbound interest from a lot of other large CPGs asking ‘What can you do for us?’ and ‘What is Giuseppe?’ They want to see it.”

When I told Patel I thought that big CPG brands have come a long way over the past twelve months in their embrace and planning for using AI, he slightly disagreed. He said that while there’s a lot of interest, most big brands haven’t actually transformed their business to fully create products with the help of AI.

“I would say there’s strong intent to adopt it, but I think there hasn’t been put forth like a concrete action plan to actually develop the first AI-enabled R&D workforce,” said Patel. “There is room, I think, for new AI tech for formulators, and room for best practices and lessons learned of adopting AI.”

You can watch my full interview with Aadit below.

The NotCo team will be at the Food AI Summit talking about their new efforts using generative AI to develop flavor and fragrance, so make sure to get your tickets here.

NotCo's Aadit Patel Talks About the Evolution The Company's Food AI Giuseppe

Jason Cohen Believes Generative AI-Powered Synthetic Data Will Transform CPG Development

Back in 2007, Jason Cohen was an aspiring political scientist studying in China. As it turned out, locals—and the Chinese government—weren’t too enthusiastic about political science students from America asking lots of questions.

Luckily for Cohen, that initial pushback from Chinese officials was the beginning of a circuitous path that would eventually lead him to tea and, surprisingly, to developing AI tools that help food brands accelerate their path to market. The Spoon recently caught up with Cohen to hear about his journey from the tea markets of Yunnan province to his current role at Simulacra Data.

A Serendipitous Start in the Tea Markets

Shortly after Cohen arrived in China as a young prodigy who had graduated high school early and was sent to study politics, things quickly unraveled.

“Turns out, blonde hair, blue eyes, and bad Chinese don’t really endear you to asking about the government in rural southwestern China,” Cohen said. With his political studies cut short, Cohen was drawn to the local tea markets, where he encountered Ji Hai, a fermentation master at the Communist-era tea conglomerate CNNP. It was here that Cohen’s fascination with tea took root.

“I started hanging out in the tea market, originally out of a mix of interest in practicing Chinese,” he said. “But pretty quickly, I realized there was something more going on here.” This unexpected immersion in tea tasting honed Cohen’s palate and laid the foundation for his future endeavors in understanding consumer preferences.

From there, Cohen went to live at the Makaibari Tea Plantation in India, where he continued to study tea. He then embarked on a long journey from Guangzhou, China, through Tibet and Nepal into India, visiting tea places and picking up odd jobs along the way.

Eventually, Cohen returned to the United States, where he attended Penn State on a political science fellowship. However, as in China, his interest in politics was pushed aside by his passion for tea. “Like everything I touch, it kind of spiraled out of control,” Cohen says, describing how a small research group he started evolved into a full-fledged tea research institute, where he did his studies in sensory science and artificial intelligence. Cohen’s research at the Tea Institute eventually became the basis for his first company, Gastrograph AI.

Gastrograph AI: A Pioneering Venture in Flavor Prediction

In 2011, Cohen took the learnings from the tea institute and used them to found Gastrograph AI. At the time, he thought he could build an AI model to predict consumer preferences based on flavor. Over time, Gastrograph built a proprietary dataset of over 100,000 product evaluations from 35 countries, which Cohen claims allowed the company to accurately forecast which flavors would appeal to specific consumer segments.

“We were building a foundation model for flavor,” Cohen explained.

As CEO, Cohen helped Gastrograph AI secure large CPG brands as customers, where the company’s model helped fine-tune their products to meet the tastes of different demographics. Around this time, Cohen observed that AI researchers began to build large language models using neural networks and deep learning, but he wasn’t yet convinced of the power of generative AI for CPG research.

“I had always been a skeptic of the use of traditional neural networks and deep learning models,” he said. “In consumer research, you deal with small, expensive, and difficult-to-collect data sets. You can’t just throw a deep learning model at it and expect good results.”

The Turning Point

Cohen’s skepticism about generative AI shifted as he observed the rapid advancements in new tools based on LLMs over the past couple of years. One particular tool that caught his eye was Midjourney, the generative AI tool that creates lifelike images with simple prompts.

“The moment that the switch flipped was with the release of MidJourney,” Cohen said. “If you can generate images based on a text prompt, you should be able to do that with tabular business data.”

Once Midjourney led Cohen to reconsider the potential of AI in consumer research, he began to think about how generative AI could enable companies to generate synthetic data for scenarios that would otherwise be too costly or time-consuming to study. “It became very, very clear to me in 2022 that generative AI was going to change what’s possible to achieve in consumer research,” Cohen said.

It wasn’t long after this realization that Cohen stepped back from his role at Gastrograph and founded Simulacra Synthetic Data Studio.

Simulacra: Redefining Consumer Research with Generative AI

According to Cohen, Simulacra uses AI in a significantly different way than what he and his team pioneered at Gastrograph; instead of relying on proprietary data, Simulacra uses a “bring your own data” model. This allows companies to input their existing consumer data into the company’s model, which then uses generative AI to create synthetic data for a wide range of scenarios.

“We built an AI that learns to build a synthetic data generation model on whatever data is uploaded,” Cohen said. He explained that this allows companies to simulate outcomes—from market reactions to new products to optimizing pricing strategies—without extensive market research. “It’s much more mathematically accurate. It’s much more correct for drawing direct statistical inference,” he said.

At the core of Simulacra’s technology is diffusion modeling, which Cohen describes as challenging conventional thinking about AI models. “Synthetic data generation turns a lot of what we think about models on its head,” he said. By treating all variables as both dependent and independent, Simulacra’s AI can create a more holistic and accurate model of consumer behavior.

The Impact of Generative AI on the Food Industry

Cohen believes that generative AI will have a profound impact on the food and consumer goods industries.

“We’ve seen the market fracture, and we’ve seen a greater number of consumer cohorts than there had previously been.”

Cohen believes that in a fast-changing market, traditional market research is often too slow and expensive to keep up with changing consumer preferences. Because of the rising cost of traditional research, companies are forced to rely on smaller studies with less statistical power, making decisions based on incomplete data or gut instinct. Simulacra, Cohen explains, offers companies a way to make data-driven decisions that are both accurate and affordable.

“That’s where Simulacra is really going to make an impact.”

Beyond Digital Twins

According to Cohen, there is a big difference between Simulacra’s approach and traditional digital twin technology. While digital twin technology typically involves creating exact virtual replicas of specific entities or datasets to model and predict behaviors, Simulacra uses survey data—ranging from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of observations—to synthetically generate new data or incorporate new knowledge. He believes this approach allows Simulacra to adjust and predict outcomes with more mathematical accuracy and statistical relevance. Rather than producing textual outputs like those from large language models (LLMs), Simulacra returns quantitative and categorical data that companies can use for rigorous statistical analysis.

Looking Ahead: The Future of AI in Consumer Research

As AI technology evolves, Cohen envisions a future where AI-driven consumer research—including synthetic data—is the norm rather than the exception. He predicts that tools like Simulacra will help companies reduce the high failure rates associated with new product launches by providing more reliable data and insights earlier in the development process.

Despite the transformative potential of this technology, Cohen is quick to dismiss concerns that using AI model and synthetic data will lead to consumer product homogenization.

“The idea that this technology is going to be a convergent force across different product development cycles, I don’t think that’s the case,” he said. Companies will still have different goals, constraints, and consumer segments, leading to diverse outcomes even when using similar technologies.

You can watch Cohen’s full interview below. If you’d like to hear him talk about Simulacra and meet him in person, he will be at the Food AI Summit on September 25th!

The Spoon Talks with Analytical Flavor Systems

Key Takeaways From The First-Ever Food AI Summit

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

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

It’s All About The Data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI Will Have An Impact at the Macro and Hyperlocal Levels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Spoon Weekly: The Edible Barcode

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Consumer Kitchen

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full story on The Spoon. 

ARE YOU A SALES PRO WHO LOVES FOOD TECHNOLOGY?

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

Cultivated Meat

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

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

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

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

Read the full story on The Spoon. 

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

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

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

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

Read the full story on The Spoon.

Coffee Tech

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

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

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

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

Read about Ansā’s tech on The Spoon.

The Meataverse

Yes, I’ve Entered the Meataverse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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