Over the past decade, there’s been no shortage of attempts to better understand, map, and recreate food and its properties with the click of a mouse.
From new data ontologies to a proliferation of digital noses, we’ve seen incremental steps toward an envisioned world where the fundamental building blocks of food can be better understood. However, in the past year, there has been a rapid acceleration in our collective ability to digitize various properties of food, largely driven by advances in AI.
The latest example of this comes from Osmo, which recently announced its development of the ability to digitally “teleport” a scent by using AI to digitize and re-materialize it.
As the company’s CEO, Alex Wiltschko, explained:
“We select a scent to teleport and introduce it to a machine called the GCMS (Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry). If it’s a liquid, we inject it directly; if it’s a physical sample, like a plum, we use headspace analysis, trapping the scent in the air around the object and absorbing it through a tube. The GCMS identifies the raw data, which can be interpreted as molecules, and uploads it to a cloud. There, it becomes a coordinate on our Principal Odor Map — a novel, advanced AI-driven tool that can predict what a particular combination of molecules smells like. This formula is sent to one of our Formulation Robots, which treats it as a recipe and mixes different scents to replicate our sample.”
In other words, Osmo breaks down the building blocks (molecules), creates a map, and then sends this digital map to an essence “printer” that re-creates it.
This announcement comes just weeks after leaders of NotCo’s scent and flavor AI team shared research on their new generative AI that creates scent and flavor formulations. Here’s how Aadit Patel, NotCo’s head of product, described the model:
“The system takes your prompt—such as ‘an ocean scent on a breezy summer day on a tropical island’—and creates a novel chemical formulation of that scent in one shot.” The model then 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.
With years of work focused on digitally understanding, quantifying, mapping, and reproducing scents, flavors, and food building blocks, what is allowing these latest efforts to make such significant leaps?
In a word (or two): AI. In the past, creating a facsimile of a flavor or scent took thousands of hours, relying on trained experts to work in a lab or kitchen, drawing on years of expertise. Now, AI is expediting that process with orders of magnitude more efficiency, often leaving the expert to provide a final sign-off to ensure the AI-created formula meets standards for proximity to the desired result, as well as checks for safety, cost feasibility, and more.
For the record, Osmo isn’t the first company to discuss “teleporting” a formula for digital recreation. In 2018, Japanese startup Open Meals made headlines with its “sushi teleportation” demo, essentially sending 3D printing instructions to create a sushi-like meal. We also saw Cana’s ambitious attempt to make a Star Trek replicator (though, as it turns out, investors weren’t quite ready to enter the food teleportation age).
All of this follows years of efforts to quantify and understand food digitally, including the creation of ontologies for the Internet of Food and early attempts to use AI to analyze food. But over the past couple of years, there’s no doubt that parallel advances in AI (especially in large language models) and breakthroughs in food, olfactory, and chemical science are ushering in a world where true food “teleportation”—or, more accurately, the ability to understand and synthetically recreate food, flavors, and scents—has arrived.
I’m excited to see where this all goes. To manifest the vision laid out in science fiction over the years and imaginative product concepts like that of Open Meal required a true digital understanding of the molecular building blocks of food. With AI, we are closer than ever to that understanding, and the products we’ll see built in the coming decade will not only create some mind-blowing consumer experiences but also possibly fundamentally change how food and beverage products are made and distributed.
