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Food AI Bulletin: Google’s Robot Breakthrough & Wendy’s Spanish-Speaking AI Drive-Thru Bot

While it’s mid-summer, and while most of Europe (and a good chunk of the American workforce) is taking some well-deserved time off, the AI news hasn’t slowed down one bit.

This week’s Food AI bulletin has updates on a new Google breakthrough on enabling better contextual understanding of our homes (including our kitchens), how Gemini is powering new features in Google’s smart home products, Wendy’s release of a Spanish-language edition of its AI drive-thru assistant, Amazon’s AI refresh of Just Walk Out, a new AI-powered digital tool called the NOURISH to help those living in food deserts make better food choices, a Danone and Microsoft multiyear deal to upskill employees on AI tools, and a survey that shows South Korean students prefer AI-generated healthy food options over more conventionally developed products.

Here we go:

Google’s New Robot Breakthrough Could Make It Easier to Train Your Robot Butler to Cook or Grab You a Cola

In the past, robots were challenged in doing useful tasks with autonomy, in part because they didn’t generally understand what they were seeing and how it related to a person’s specific living situation, etc.

That’s begun to change in recent years, in part because we’ve seen significant advances in robot navigation as researchers using new tools such as Object Goal Navigation (ObjNav) and Vision Language Navigation (VLN) have allowed robots to understand open commands such as “go to the kitchen.”

More recently, researchers have created systems called Multimodal Instruction Navigation (MIN), which enable robots to understand both verbal and visual instructions simultaneously. For example, a person can show a robot something like a toothbrush and ask it where to return it using both the spoken request and the visual context.

Now, Google researchers have taken things a step further by creating what they call Mobility VLA, a hierarchical Vision-Language-Action (VLA). This is a “navigation policy that combines the environment understanding and common sense reasoning power of long-context VLMs and a robust low-level navigation policy based on topological graphs.”

In other words, showing a robot an exploration video of a given environment will allow it to understand how to navigate an area. According to the researchers, by using a walkthrough video and Mobility VLA, they were able to ask the robot and have it achieve previously infeasible tasks such as “I want to store something out of sight from the public eye. Where should I go?” They also write that they achieved significant advances in how easily users can interact with the robot, giving the example of a user recording a video walkthrough in a home environment with a smartphone and then ask, “Where did I leave my coaster?”

One of the biggest challenges around having robots be useful in a food context is that the act of cooking is complex and requires multiple steps and contextual understanding of a specific cooking space. One could imagine using this type of training framework to enable more complex and useful cooking robots or even personal butlers that will actually be able to do something like fetching you a cold beverage.

You can watch a robot using this new Gemini-enable navigation framework in the video below:

“You’re Food Delivery Is Here”: Google Bringing Gemini Intelligence to Google Home

Speaking of Google, this week, the company announced a new set of features coming to their suite of smart home products that their Gemini model will power. The new features were revealed as part of an announcement about a new version of the company’s smart thermostat and its TV streaming device. According to the company, they are adding Gemini-powered capabilities across a range of products, including their Nest security cameras and its smart voice assistant, Google Home.

By underpinning its Nest camera products with Gemini, the company says its Nest Cams will go from “understanding a narrow set of specific things (i.e., motion, people, packages, etc.) to being able to more broadly understand what it sees and hears, and then surface what’s most important.” Google says that this will mean that you can ask your Google Home app questions like “Did I leave my bikes in the driveway?” and “Is my food delivery at the front door?”

During a presentation to The Verge, Google Home head of product Anish Kattukaran showed an example of a video of a grocery delivery driver which was accompanied by an alert powered by Gemini:

“A young person in casual clothing, standing next to a parked black SUV. They are carrying grocery bags. The car is partially in the garage and the area appears peaceful.”

After what’s been a somewhat moribund period of feature-set innovation for smart homes over the past couple of years, both Google and Amazon are now tapping into generative AI to create new capabilities that I’m actually looking forward to. By empowering their existing smart home products like cameras and their smart home assistants with generative AI models, we are finally starting to seeing leaps in useful functionality that are bringing the smart home closer to the futuristic promise we’ve been imagining for the last decade.

Wendy’s Pilots Spanish-Language Drive-Thru AI Voice Assistant

This week, Wendy’s showed off its new Spanish-language capabilities for its Fresh AI drive-thru voice assistant according to announcement sent to The Spoon. The new assistant, which can be seen in the Wendy’ s-provided b-reel below, has a conversant AI bot that seamlessly switches to Spanish, clarifies the order, and upsells the meal.

Wendy's Demos Fresh AI Drive-Thru in Espanol

According to Wendy’s, the company launched its Fresh AI in December of last year and has expanded it to 28 locations across two states.

This news comes just a week after Yum! Brands announced plans to expand Voice AI technology to hundreds of Taco Bell drive-thrus in the U.S. by the end of 2024, with future global implementation across KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. Currently, in over 100 Taco Bell locations, the company believes the technology will enhance operations, improve order accuracy, and reduce wait times.

Amazon Previews New Generative AI-Powered Just Walk Out

Last week, Amazon gave a sneak peek at the new AI model that powers its Just Walk Out platform.

In a post written by Jon Jenkins, the VP of Just Walk Out (and, as Spoon readers may remember, the former founder of Meld and head of engineering for the Hestan Cue), we get a peek at the new AI model from Amazon. Jenkins writes the new technology is a “multi-modal foundation model for physical stores is a significant advancement in the evolution of checkout-free shopping.” He says the new model will increase the accuracy of Just Walk Out technology “even in complex shopping scenarios with variables such as camera obstructions, lighting conditions, and the behavior of other shoppers while allowing us to simplify the system.”

The new system differs from the previous system in that it analyzes data from multiple sources—cameras, weight sensors, and other data—simultaneously rather than sequentially. It also uses “continuous self-learning and transformer technology, a type of neural network architecture that transforms inputs (sensor data, in the case of Just Walk Out) into outputs (receipts for checkout-free shopping).”

Academic Researchers Creating AI Tool to Help Americans Living in Food Deserts Access Better Food Options

A team of researchers led by the University of Kansas and the University of California-San Francisco is tackling the issue of food deserts in the U.S. with an AI-powered digital tool called the NOURISH platform. According to an announcement released this week about the initiative, the group is supported by a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator program and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The project aims to provide fresh and nutritious food options to the estimated 24 million Americans living in areas with limited access to healthy food. The platform will utilize geospatial analyses and AI to identify optimal locations for new fresh food businesses, linking entrepreneurs with local providers and creating dynamic, interactive maps accessible via mobile devices in multiple languages.

Danone Announces Multiyear Partnership with Microsoft for AI

An interesting deal focused on bringing AI training to a large CPG brand’s workforce:

Danone has announced a multi-year collaboration with Microsoft to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) across its operations, including creating a ‘Danone Microsoft AI Academy.’ This initiative aims to upskill and reskill around 100,000 Danone employees, building on Danone’s existing ‘DanSkills’ program. Through the AI Academy, Danone plans to enhance AI literacy and expertise throughout the organization, offering tailored learning opportunities to ensure comprehensive training coverage. The partnership will initially focus on developing an AI-enabled supply chain to improve operational efficiency through predictive forecasting and real-time adjustments. Juergen Esser, Danone’s Deputy CEO, emphasized that collaboration is not just about technology but also about fostering a culture of continuous learning and innovation. Microsoft’s Hayete Gallot highlighted the significance of AI in transforming Danone’s operations and the broader industry, aiming to empower Danone’s workforce to thrive in an AI-driven economy.

My main critique of a deal like this is that it essentially brings training and curriculum to train employees from an AI platform provider with skin in the game in Microsoft. As someone who’s long weaned myself off of most of Microsoft’s software products, I’d hate to go into a curriculum that will mostly be largely Microsoft AI tools training, not really broader AI training.

It is a good deal for Microsoft, with a smart focus on upskilling by Danone. Let’s hope Microsoft’s training brings a broad-based AI tool belt to the Danone workforce that is not entirely walled-gardened within Microsoft’s products.

Survey: Korean Students Prefer AI-Driven Health Foods

While some Americans are becoming more concerned about AI’s impact on our lives, it appears that at least some South Korean students are embracing AI in the development of healthier food options.

According to a recent survey conducted by Korea University Business School, young South Koreans are more likely to trust and purchase healthy functional foods (HFF) developed using artificial intelligence (AI) than those created through traditional methods. The study involved 300 participants and revealed that AI-developed HFFs scored higher in trustworthiness, perceived expertise, positive attitude, and purchase intention. The AI model, NaturaPredicta™, uses natural language processing to analyze botanical ingredients, significantly reducing the time and cost required for new product development. However, researchers noted the potential bias due to the relatively young demographic of the participants and suggested broader studies for more representative results.

Google Announces Winners of the Single-Use Plastics Challenge

This week, Google announced the winners of the Single-Use Plastics Challenge, an open-invitation challenge where the company invited startups to present solutions that help reduce plastic waste. The challenge, which launched this past spring, had Google testing out those products that met state and federal requirements and Google’s Food program standards in the company’s U.S.-based cafes and MicroKitchens.

The twelve winners featured several different approaches to the massive problem of plastic waste, from edible cutlery to candy made of upcycled ingredients to biodegradable cups made out of clay. Below is a list of each winner and their product:

Climate Candy: Climate Candy a company that makes candy out of imperfect, unharvested produce. The company reduces plastic by using plant fibers in its packaging.

Eco Refill Systems: The company provides cooking oils in refillable stainless steel containers. The company’s containers can “be refilled and never thrown away.”

GaeaStar: GaeaStar, which The Spoon first wrote about in April of this year, makes clay cups that disintegrate into dust. The company’s founder got the idea while visiting India, where dissolvable, biodegradable clay cups have a long history. The company has developed a proprietary 3D printer that makes each cup in less than 30 seconds.

Homefree: Homefree makes baked goods for food service that use reusable, recyclable packaging. The company’s founder was inspired to create its packaging approach to help reduce plastic waste in the form of the standard large plastic tray and delivers both large and small cookies in formats that reduce plastic waste for food service.

Incredible Eats: Incredible Eats, a Smart Kitchen Summit finalist in 2019 (then known as Planeteer), makes edible cutlery. The company’s founder, Dinesh Tadepalli first came up with the idea for edible cutlery when he was getting his children an ice cream treat. Nowadays, the company is working with large national brands like Dippin Dots, offers both savory and sweet options, and has expanded its options into straws and sporks.

Loliware: Loliware makes biodegradable, compostable cutlery and straws out of seaweed. According to the company, its seaweed-derived resins can be made using standard plastic processing production equipment.

Pulp Pantry: Pulp Pantry makes upcycled snack chips provided in bulk packaging targeted towards food service.

Sun & Swell: Sun & Swell provides healthy snacks such as fruit and nut mixes in various compostable and reusable packaging. The company transitioned to compostable packaging in 2019 for its single-serve SKUs and recently launched a pilot program to offer bulk offerings in reusable packaging.

The Aggressive Good (TAG): TAG makes a bulk-food management system. The system includes a smart bulk dispenser that communicates inventory status and consumption trends, and the company’s reusable cartridge system enables direct shipments of bulk goods from manufacturer to retail.

PlasticFri: PlasticFri provides film-based and fiber-based packaging products using agricultural waste, wild plants, non-edible plants, and wood fibers. Their packaging formats include straws, cups, food mailers, and fruit bags.

Asarasi: Asarasi aims to make a dent in the plastic bottled water market by selling maple water (water derived from maple trees while extracting syrup) served in recyclable aluminum cans.

SOFi: SOFi creates what they describe as “plastic straws that don’t suck.” The company says its straws and cups are made with 100% paper materials, without the plastic or PFA chemicals that make straws and cups unrecyclable.

According to Google, the winners can pitch their products to large food service brands and test their products out in Google’s cafeterias and kitchens. Many of them are already being used to various degrees in various Google locations, and I had a chance to try many of these products earlier this month when I visited Google for its Food Lab.

You can watch a YouTube shorts pitch reel below that includes a description of the challenge and a company pitch from each winner.

Podcast: Talking AI & Food With Evan Rapoport

In this week’s podcast, we talk food and AI with Evan Rapoport.

Over the past decade, Evan has led teams in Google Research and other organizations, looking at how AI could impact biodiversity and change. During our conversation, we talked about a project called Tidal, in which he and Google used AI technology like computer vision and applied it to aquaculture, and discussed the impact of AI more broadly on the food system and how Evan thinks newer technology, like generative AI, might have an impact sooner than we think on the world of food.

You can find the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or just click play below!

Google Wants to Put an End to Single-Use Plastic, So It Put Out a Call For New Ideas

We all know plastic is bad for the environment, but despite all the videos of plastic bottles and wrappers floating in oceans and piling up in landfills, billions of single-use containers are used and tossed every year.

Google has decided to do something about it, so it’s launched a call to food companies with sustainable packaging to submit their products to the Google Single-Use Plastics Challenge. According to the company, Google will test out those products that meet state and federal requirements and pass muster with Google’s Food program standards in the company’s U.S.-based cafes and MicroKitchens. Finalists will have the opportunity to pitch their products to Google and “leading global food operators” to scale them across Google’s U.S. offices.

Reading the fine print, Google is prioritizing reusable serviceware and packaging but will also accept packaging concepts that are edible, fiber-based, or unlined serviceware/packaging. The company will accept some post-consumer recycled packaging for certain categories, and while it will accept glass and aluminum, it makes clear these are “not preferred.” Those with plastic, bio-based, compostable, multi-layer, or PFAS-lined products need not apply.

While big corporates have made progress in recent years in eliminating plastic in the form of straws and drink containers, a whole bunch of plastic is still being used in food service and cafeterias every day. Google’s effort goes further by emphasizing food service plastic in all forms, including plastic containers and wrappers, a huge problem that has gotten less attention than plastic bottles, straws, and cutlery.

For those interested in applying to the Google Single-Use Plastic Challenge, you’ll need to hurry since the deadline is May 30th.

Food company challenge | Single-Use Plastic

Wendy’s Announces FreshAI, a Generative AI for Drive-Thrus Powered by Google Cloud

Today Wendy’s announced it is working with Google Cloud to develop a generative AI solution for drive-thrus called Wendy’s Fresh AI.

The new solution, which is powered by Google Cloud’s generative AI and large language model technology, will go into a pilot test next month at a Wendy’s company-operated store in Columbus, Ohio. According to the announcement, the new tool will be able to have conversations with customers, the ability to understand made-to-order requests, and generate responses to frequently asked questions. 

In contrast to general-purpose consumer interfaces for LLMs such as ChatGPT and Google Bard, Wendy’s Fresh AI will be walled off and tailored around interacting with customers ordering food at a Wendy’s drive-thru. According to the company, Wendy’s Fresh AI will have access to data from Wendy’s menu and will be programmed with rules and logic conversation guardrails, ensuring that the conversation bot doesn’t spout off about politics or culture when prompted, but focuses solely on helping customers get their burger order right.

The deal is a nice pick-up for Google, which has been on its heels to a degree since last fall when the OpenAI released ChatGPT. Google’s strength in enterprise platforms through its Google Cloud infrastructure services could possibly give it a leg up on other generative AI platforms, even though OpenAI beat the company to the fast food drive-thru lane through its partnership with Presto.

Wendy’s says that it will use the learnings from the pilot to inform future expansion of the platform to other Wendy’s drive-thrus.

Where Is This All Going?

The restaurant quick-service industry has been embracing digital transformation in a big way over the past few years as a way to remedy the industry’s continued struggle with finding qualified workers, and the fast food drive-thru is probably one of the roles could be largely automated with a well-tuned generative AI model. I can envision a hybrid model that utilizes a gen-AI as the first point-of-contact customer interaction layer, but has it backstopped by a remote carbon-based life form (i.e. human) that can step in when there is the first hint of something out of the ordinary. Think of it as a Gen-AI/Bite Ninja hybrid model (while Bite Ninja hasn’t announced any AI solution partnerships for its cloud labor platform, I would be surprised if those conversations aren’t already underway).

Google’s Farm Tech Moonshot Mineral Becomes Alphabet Company

Google parent company Alphabet has added a new company to its portfolio this week in Mineral, a farm tech startup that spent the last five years incubating within Google’s X.

The news of Mineral’s graduation to full-fledged Alphabet company came in the form a blog post by Mineral CEO Elliott Grant (previously of Shopwell, a shopping startup sold to Innit). According to Grant, the mission behind Mineral is to “help scale sustainable agriculture”, which they are doing by “developing a platform and tools that help gather, organize, and understand never-before known or understood information about the plant world – and make it useful and actionable.”

According to Mineral, they have analyzed over 10% of the total farmland on Earth, modeled more than 200 plant traits, phenotyped 17 crop varieties, and developed more than 80 high-performance ML models. Mineral’s ag-optimized analysis tools will be used to process large unstructured sets of the world’s agricultural data, sourced from satellite images, farm equipment, public databases, and Mineral’s own proprietary data streams. The company will make this data available to partners to combine this data with their private data to derive insights into yield, genomic understanding, and agronomic discovery.

One such partner is Driscoll’s. The large berry company has been working with Mineral to explore ways to improve data collection in its breeding operations and work on better yield forecasting. The two also worked together to enhance berry inspection using Mineral’s perception tools and, according to Driscoll’s, was able to build a system that many believe performed similarly to human experts.

Another Mineral project Mineral was the creation of a special crop-roving robot named Don Roverto. Don Roverto was used by Mineral to assist the Alliance for Biodiversity and CIAT to accelerate their work to understand and uncover hidden crop traits within the world’s largest bean collection. Using Don Roverto, the Alliance, after thirty years of searching, found a “magic” bean with intrinsic drought-resistant characteristics.

Google has often used X to incubate mission-based startups, and Mineral is no different. According to Grant, they chose ag as a vertical because it is “increasingly believed to be a major contributor to the climate crisis — but it is also a victim of a changing climate. There is no time to waste to find more climate-resilient crop varieties, to transition to less chemical- and fossil fuel-intensive practices, to improve soil health, and to restore biodiversity.”

Innit & Google Cloud Offer Personalized Nutrition Recommendations For Those With Diabetes and Other Health Conditions

Innit, a startup that makes software to digitize the consumer meal journey, announced today it has teamed up with Google Cloud to offer a new software module to food retailers to enable personalized healthy eating recommendations to their online grocer customers.

The new offering, which will be available to customers of Google Cloud via the Google Cloud Marketplace, enables grocers and other companies to create personalized nutrition recommendations for customers with health conditions such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and heart disease.

According to the announcement, the module utilizes an algorithm that scores various meal plans based on the shopper’s needs and then offers recommendations for personalized nutrition to consumers looking to optimize for a variety of health concerns. The module also provides assistance with cooking and meal planning.

According to Innit CEO Kevin Brown, the company increased its focus on health and wellness over the past year. They developed an app for Roche, one of Europe’s largest pharmaceutical companies, to help those with type 2 diabetes better manage their eating and meal planning.

“The Roche project allowed us to sharpen up a lot of the diet and health and science focus,” Brown said in a phone interview with The Spoon. “We worked with our science committee, worked with the doctors of the customer to put together a really good program that provides daily guidance to people that are struggling.”

After the Roche project, Innit saw it could take much of what it built and offer it to a variety of customers through its partnership with Google Cloud.

“We saw that there was kind of a big unsolved problem for actionable healthy eating,” Brown said. “So now we’re packaging that up together with Google and bringing that to all of the grocery retailers, as well as healthcare companies.”

The new offering expands on Innit’s relationship with Google, which got its start in 2018 with the addition of Innit functionality to their Google Home product. Google Cloud first offered Innit’s technology for personalized food recommendations through the Cloud Marketplace last year, and this latest offering gives food retailers and others the ability to add focused personalized nutrition plans for specific health conditions.

Innit has come a long way since the company’s early focus on developing guided cooking and smart appliance software for kitchen appliance manufacturers. The company’s acquisition of Shopwell in early 2017 kickstarted Innit’s move into shoppable recipes and personalized food data, and today the company describes itself as a personalized nutrition platform company. In many ways, this move by Innit is indicative of the broader move by smart kitchen software players to beef up their food commerce and personalized health offerings over the past few years.

When I asked Brown if Innit is still talking to appliance manufacturers about building solutions for their products, he told me that while these companies did slow down their digitization initiatives over the past few years as a result of supply chain and manufacturing difficulties related to COVID, conversations have begun to heat up again.

“There definitely was some industry slowdown, but we’re seeing it wake up again,” Brown said. “I’ve had multiple calls and new customer discussions with appliance manufacturers and so things are starting to wake back up.”

Google Doubles Down on Food Waste Reduction, Gives $1 Million to ReFED’s Catalytic Grant Fund 

While Google has long focused on making sure they run their kitchens efficiently and minimize food waste, the pause on food service brought on by the pandemic gave the tech giant a chance to step back and evaluate how they could do an even better job.

Now, with workers heading back to the office, Google plans to double down on food waste reduction. In a new initiative announced yesterday in a blog post by Google’s VP of Workplace Programs, Michiel Bakker, Google will aim to cut food waste in half for each employee and send zero food waste to the landfill. The effort will achieve its aims through an increased focus on food sourcing and procurement, improved monitoring in the company’s kitchens and cafes, and ensuring food is repurposed or disposed of properly.

The new initiative builds up efforts by Google to fine-tune their kitchens using cutting-edge technology. At the end of 2020, the company took an initiative that had been in development in its moonshot factory called Project Delta, which had helped grocers like Kroger reduce food waste and started rolling it out to its kitchens across Alphabet. The company also uses machine vision technology from Leanpath to help their chefs monitor where food is going and how much is going to waste.

While it’s easy to think a company like Google relies solely on high-tech approaches to reduce food waste, efforts over the past two years have relied on a variety of creative approaches ranging from engineering employee behavior changes to rethinking the company’s food systems.

In an interview with Fast Company, the head of Google’s Food for Good program, Emily Ma, describes one example of how the company looked at ways to prompt behavior changes in Google employees through simple nudges.

“Even the size of the scoop you get makes a difference,” Ma says. In a few cafes, the company serves plated meals, so cafe staff can control portions, but that isn’t a viable option everywhere, she says. At a buffet, shrinking the size of plates or bowls helps since people otherwise often end up taking more than they actually want to eat. Simple signs reminding people to just take what they need—and that they can always come back for more—can also help.

The company is also working to change its meal recipes to use more upcycled food and is working to create more circular food systems within Google. In one program, the company has been testing feeding food scraps to black soldier flies, which are then fed to chickens which lay eggs that Google buys back.

Finally, Google is working with other organizations to help push the industry towards more data-driven solutions to end food waste. As part of the new effort, Google has donated $1 million to ReFED as an anchor funder for the food waste reduction organization’s new Catalytic Grant Fund, a five-year initiative to distribute $10 million in recoverable and non-recoverable grants to organizations working on initiatives across the food waste prevention.

“We aim to drive technology, process, policy and infrastructure innovation where it is most needed, because we know the biggest impact will come when the entire industry is empowered to keep food from going to waste,” said Ma in the announcement made with ReFED.

Podcast: A Conversation With Kevin Brown About Innit’s Google Cloud Partnership

This week I caught up with Innit CEO Kevin Brown to talk about his deal with Google Cloud.

Like a lot of Innit’s deals as of late, the partnership is focused on the grocery space. Late last year, Innit inked a deal with Carrefour to power a personalized nutritional score for 40 thousand products sold online by the European grocery giant. Before that, they’d announced a deal with SPINS to add personalized data to grocery retailer’s websites.

And after this week’s news, Innit is likely to be plugged into more grocery retail partnerships as the food and cooking digitization platform partner for Google Cloud’s retail team.

You can listen to my conversation with Kevin below or any of the usual podcast places.

Innit Teams Up With Google Cloud To Power Personalized Shopping

Smart kitchen and personalized shopping software startup Innit announced today they have partnered with Google Cloud. The new strategic partnership will help “grocery retailers to deliver personalized services across the entire meal journey, spanning online, in-store, and at home.”

This isn’t the first time the two companies have worked together. Innit was part of Google’s CES Demo in 2018, complete with a Tyler Florence cooking demo , and in 2019 the two announced a partnership with contract manufacturer Flex. Today’s news is an expansion of their collaboration into digitizing the grocery shopping experience.

Google “has been working with us to put together a solution targeting grocery retail,” said Innit CEO Kevin Brown via a Zoom interview this week. “Innit is a vertical market expert in food and recipes and nutrition and how it all comes together. AWe essentially combined the Innit capabilities with the Google capabilities to power grocery stores to have a much better digital experience with our consumers.”

At an execution level, Google Cloud will leverage Innit’s food and shopper data to help grocery stores to deliver more personalized experiences such as custom shopping lists built around recipes or dietary preferences. This could mean personalized recommendations for a shopper or building a custom meal kit around a recipe.

The partnership is part of a multiyear move by Innit into grocery shopping digitization which began with the company’s acquisition of Shopwell. Shopwell helped to round out Innit’s platform, which was initially focused on guided cooking and the in-kitchen consumer experience, and put them into conversation with grocers. The move paid off for Innit and help them snag a deal with Carrefour last year to power the large European grocery retailer’s personalized nutrition score initiative.

It also was one of the first moves by a smart kitchen software player to create digital grocery platforms.

I asked Brown why many of the smart kitchen players have focused on grocery in recent years.

“We’re excited about the future of that (connected kitchen), but it happens that sort of hardware speed,” said Brown.

“We see that as one of the anchor pieces over time, but right now, there’s a huge focus on the front end of that. Of how do I deal with all the wellness and health issues? How do I find the right products? How do I shop? And so that’s where we basically put all of the building blocks together of the past several years to finally be able to embed that into the shopping experience itself and carry people all the way through.”

It’s the second move by the Google Cloud team into the consumer cooking and meal journey experience over the past couple of weeks. On August 19th, the company had announced a partnership with GE Appliances to build next-gen smart home appliances. One has to wonder if the flurry of digital food and kitchen deals is part of a broader effort by the cloud giant to grow its market share in the consumer food and lifestyle vertical in the coming years by focusing on next-gen digital and AI powered solutions.

Google Launches a Tool to Help Americans Struggling With Food Security

Google launched its new Find Food Support website today, which aims to connect people struggling with food insecurity to resources like food banks, school lunch programs, and food pantries. Google said in a blog post that it worked with No Kid Hungry, FoodFinder, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to capture data on food assistance programs around the country.

Google pointed out in its post today that the COVID-19 pandemic made the problems of hunger and food insecurity worse for many Americans. The number of people without access to “a sufficient quantity of affordable food” rose to 45 million in 2020, a nearly 30 percent increase from 2019.

The company also said that over the last year, Google searches for “food bank near me,” “food stamps application,” “school lunch pick up,” and other similar phrases reached “record highs.” And while anyone could type these terms into a search bar on their own, the Find Food Support tool centralizes all this information and can offer more precise results.

The tool includes a Google Map locator with which a user can find their nearest food bank, school lunch program, or other assistance program. There are currently 90,000 locations across all 50 U.S. states included, with more locations on the way. To find a nearby location, users simply type their address into the search bar and pull up relevant results. 

In addition to the locator, users can also view SNAP benefits in their area, find support for seniors, see state benefit sites, and access assistance hotlines and text lines, among other things. Those that want to donate food, time, and money can also find relevant information via the tool.

The Find Food Support tool follows other efforts in the food industry to connect food insecure individuals with resources. In April of this year, Instacart expanded its EBT SNAP payment integration to three new grocery retailers (though the SNAP payments can only be used for food, not Instacart’s delivery fees). Also in April, the USDA said it is expanding its P-EBT program to cover kids meals for summer months. 

Food Tech News: Google AI Cake, Chipotle’s Bitcoin Giveaway and Robot Food Delivery

Welcome to the first Food Tech News round-up of April! This week we have news on a cake created by Google artificial intelligence, Kiwibot hitting the streets of Santa Monica, Ember’s new travel charger, and Chipotle’s bitcoin giveaway.

Google artificial intelligence created a cake recipe in partnership with Mars Wrigley

Google Cloud engineers created a machine learning model that uses hundreds of existing baked good recipes to develop a completely new recipe. The result was a “Cakie” (a cake and cookie hybrid) and the components of what makes a cake and cookie were generated with artificial intelligence. For the partnership with Mars Wrigley UK, Maltesers (chocolate-covered malt balls) were incorporated into the recipe to create the first-ever “Maltesers AI Cake.” Google trends revealed that “sweet and salty” was a top search trend, and the cake recipe used a buttercream frosting infused with Marmite. Earlier this year, the same machine learning model was used to create two totally new baked good recipes, the “Cakie” and “Breakie”.

Kiwibot and MealMe partner for food delivery in Santa Monica

MealMe, an app that compares prices and times of food delivery services, and Kiwibot, a teleoperated robot service that delivers food, have partnered to deliver food in Santa Monica. On April 1st, the companies began delivery for Blue Plate Taco and Red O Restaurant on Ocean Ave. Kiwibot’s robots provide contactless food delivery, and so far 100k deliveries have been completed in Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Jose, Denver, Taipei, and Medellin,

Ember launches car charger to keep beverages warm on the road

Ember, the creator of the self-heating coffee mug, has created a car charger to keep Ember Travel Mugs warm all day. The Ember Travel Mug is capable of keeping a beverage warm for three hours, but now it can be plugged directly into a car charger for an all-day charge. The car charger costs $49.95 on Ember’s website.

Photo from Chipotle

Chipotle hosted a giveaway of free burritos and bitcoin

For National Burrito Day, Chipotle partnered with the founder of Coil, Stefan Thomas, to giveaway $100,000 worth of Bitcoin and $100,000 in burritos. To win, contestants had 10 chances to guess a six-digit code. The giveaway only lasted for nine hours on April 1st on BurritosOrBitcoin.com. Update: I tried, and did not win.