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July 11, 2024

Food AI Weekly Bulletin: Is AI-Washing a Problem For Food Tech?

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Food AI Weekly Bulletin, our weekly wrapup that highlights important happenings at the intersection of AI and food. If you’d like to sign up to get this bulletin delivered to your inbox, you can do so here.

Is AI-Washing a Problem for Food Tech? Some predict one-third of startups will feature AI as part of their core product by the end of this year. Is stretching the truth about how truly AI-powered your product is a problem for food tech?

Gatorade’s AI Hydration Coach. Is Gatorade’s AI-powered hydration coach a marketing trick or another sign that wellness copilots are beginning to pop up everywhere?

Researchers Build RhizoNet, Which Uses Next-Gen Neural Network to Analyze Plant Roots. A new tool called RhizoNet could provide a big leap in understanding root growth.

Number of Retailers Using AI Doubles In The Past Year. AI adoption is skyrocketing, and retail looks to be one of the fastest growing sector.

CaperCart Continues Roll-Out of AI-Enabled Shopping Carts. Speaking of AI at retail, Instacart is hoping to do its part to spread the technology through its computer-vision enabled smart shopping carts.

Mineral AI Winds Down. Somewhat surprisingly, Mineral AI announced last week they would wind down and distribute their technology through license to partners such as Driscoll’s.

Mars Using AI to Develop 50 Product Concepts a Day. Big CPG is getting the hang of this generative AI thing.

eGrowcery Launches 70 Thousand AI-Generated Recipes. Are recipes set to become almost all AI-generated?

Is AI-Washing a Problem for Food Tech?

Anytime a new technology captures the public zeitgeist, brands invariably jump on the bandwagon. After all, that’s what brands do, and it’s incumbent on any good marketer to capitalize on any buzzy association possible.

Where it could be problematic is when a company claims to have a key competitive differentiator through a given technology and they’re stretching the truth. Being an early adopter of, say, cloud computing, Web3, or, yes, AI is worth mentioning or making the center of a marketing campaign (even if it can be eyeroll-inducing), but when it’s on your pitch deck and you are exaggerating just how core it is to your product, it can be potentially deceptive, at least according to the SEC.

And now the regulatory body has started to take a stand against what they’re calling ‘AI-washing’. While the focus of the SEC is on claims by investment firms claiming to deliver investor value through AI-powered decision-making, it’s clear they are policing the broader use of claims by companies looking to benefit by association.

According to European investment fund OpenOcean, by the end of the year, one-third of startups will feature AI in their pitch decks. My guess is many will have legitimate claims, but as we’ve seen over the past year in food tech, sometimes such claims seem a stretch. It’s a logical move as a founder, particularly in a market where raising capital has become exceedingly difficult. But as everyone jumps on the AI bandwagon, it’s worth it for startups to be cautious about their claims, and those looking to invest or partner with these companies should do their due diligence to see if there’s real substance behind the pitch deck.

Gatorade’s AI Hydration Coach

A couple of weeks ago, at Cannes Lions, the advertising industry’s biggest international confab and awards gala, Gatorade debuted its generative AI-powered app that acts as a hydration coach.

From Marketing Dive:

Gatorade’s AI Hydration coach app applied AI “to educate users about the best ways to stay hydrated through an assistant that draws on decades of historical data from the sport beverage brand’s research institute. The concept leans into the idea that AI has the power to democratize services that were once exclusive, giving everyday consumers the type of expert guidance usually reserved for elite athletes.”

It’s an interesting concept – after all, the future very well may be filled with AI-powered co-pilots, assistants will sit on our proverbial shoulders whispering in our ears to coach us through life – but I’m not sure how seriously consumers will take specific brand-activated assistants. Millennials and Gen-Z and are for tooling up when it comes to their health, but they all have great authenticity sniffing capabilities and brands aren’t always the most trusted advisors in part because it’s easy to question their motivation.

Researchers Build RhizoNet, Which Uses Next-Gen Neural Network to Analyze Plant Roots

According to a story in Interesting Engineering, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Applied Mathematics and Computational Research (AMCR) and Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) Divisions have developed a new neural network tool called RhizoNet to analyze plant roots.

From IE:

It paved the way for scientists to accurately measure root growth and biomass, making it much easier and faster to study plant roots in the lab. 

In simple terms, RhizoNet automatically interprets images of plant roots which makes it more effortless and faster to comprehend the workings of root growth and how they respond to different conditions.

According to the report, the system will enable much faster and more accurate analysis of root biomass, especially compared to more manual (i.e. human-driven) analysis of plant roots.

The researchers noted they tested the system’s effectiveness through analysis of Brachypodium distachyon, a grass species of plants, as they subjected it to deprived nutrients over five weeks. 

“We’ve made a lot of progress in reducing the manual work involved in plant cultivation experiments with the EcoBOT, and now RhizoNet is reducing the manual work involved in analyzing the data generated,” stated Peter Andeer, a research scientist in EGSB and a lead developer of EcoBOT.

“This increases our throughput and moves us toward the goal of self-driving labs,” he added.

Number of Retailers Using AI Doubles In The Past Year

According to the Food Industry Association’s just-published annual study on the state of food retail, The Food Retailing Industry Speaks 2024, retailers are increasingly turning to AI to optimize parts of their business. The report, which surveyed large and small retail chains, said that 41% of those surveyed say they are using AI for parts of their business. This is double the number of retailers using AI over just a year ago.

A doubling of AI usage at retail is not surprising given the proliferation of various tools, from supply-chain optimization to in-store computer vision systems for real-time inventory and theft reduction analysis. My guess is that by next year, most retailers will be deploying AI in some parts of their operations.

CaperCart Continues Roll-Out of AI-Enabled Shopping Carts

Instacart has added another round of stores to the list of those its CaperCart smart shopping carts. The company announced that Price Chopper and  McKeever’s Market & Eatery have each added the “AI-powered grocery carts” to a store locations in Missouri. This comes a week after the company announced Wakefern announced they were increasing the number of storefronts using the Capercart.

As we’ve noted for the past couple years, the company is increasingly looking to diversify from its personal shopper business. It has been focused on creating technology platforms for the non-Amazon grocery retailers of the world to transform themselves in an increasingly digitized grocery shopping industry.

Mineral AI Winds Down

Whenever a company graduates from Google’s moonshot factory X to become an operating company under parent company Alphabet, most assume said company will be a success. But the reality is these graduates, for whatever reason, sometimes just don’t get the traction required as an independent company and eventually wind down.

The latest example of this is Mineral AI. Mineral, a ‘computational agriculture’ company that graduated from X with significant fanfare last year, announced last week it was winding down. In a post by Mineral CEO, Elliott Grant, he says the company’s technology will live on through a license to Driscoll’s and other “leading agribusinesses where they can have maximum impact.”

It’s hard to decipher variables around decision-making at a giant like Alphabet, but it’s been clear since the beginning of the year that the company has been paring back its moonshot initiatives, both through layoffs and in how much capital they expand to fund the initiatives. A decade ago, X was home to a bunch of out-there concepts, such as balloon-powered broadband, but as cheap capital has dried up past and the company is funneling resources towards keeping up in LLM space race, those days look to be coming to a close.

Mars Using AI to Develop 50 Product Concepts a Day

While it’s easy to caricature big food brands as giant behemoths slow to adapt to new innovation and technology, it’s becoming increasingly clear that many are quickly building internal capabilities leveraging AI to accelerate core product development processes.

The latest indication is the news that Mars has developed its own generative AI-powered tool called Brahma to develop up to fifty product concepts a day. According to a report in Consumer Goods Technology, Brahma “uses data from consumer insights studies the CPG conducted last year involving 80,000 consumers and 800,000 consumption moments across 11 countries.” 

eGrowcery Launches 70 Thousand AI-Generated Recipes

eGrowcery, a white-label grocery e-commerce platform company, announced today they have launched an AI-powered personalized recipe offering to their SaaS customers.. The company said their new AI recipe feature uses AI to tailor recipe suggestions based on regional preferences and store inventory. The company hopes to boost shopper satisfaction, sales, and market share for retailers with a suite of over 70 thousand personalized recipes.

The move by eGrowcery is an indication that shoppable recipes are an obvious early candidate of a category that will be consumed by generative AI. It will be interesting to watch how much consumers take to these offerings, given that so many home cooks take inspiration nowadays from other sources (such as social media) to get recipe and meal ideas. However, we’ve begun to hear that the influencer-recipe space is struggling to keep up with the rapidly changing landscape resulting from Google’s push towards using AI-powered summaries rather than link-outs to other sites.

In other words, AI is beginning to sink its hooks ever deeper into the food planning and inspiration space from seemingly every angle.

Our Favorite AI-Generated Food Images of The Week

Over on our Spoon community Slack, we had some of our Spoon community drop some AI-generated artwork

First this tasty looking food from Min Fan. You can see all the images from Min on our Slack.

And we also liked this futuristic food creation facility from Emma Forman:

If you would like your AI-art work featured on The Spoon, drop them into our Spoon Slack.

June 16, 2022

Mars Teams Up With Perfect Day to Launch Animal-Free Chocolate Bar

Today Mars announced the launch of a new animal-free chocolate under the brand CO2COA. Developed in partnership with precision fermentation specialist Perfect Day, the chocolate is available today via the product’s new website.

While Mars already offers a range of vegan chocolate bars, this is the first bar from a major candy brand that replaces animal dairy with identical proteins produced through precision fermentation. A German startup by the name of QOA announced last year they are using precision fermentation to develop new chocolate, but their focus is on replacing cocoa rather than animal inputs. The Mars deal follows an announcement made by Perfect Day and Betterland Foods in March of an animal-free chocolate bar.

The new candy is available only via a new website and “while supplies last,” which tells me Mars is trialing the concept before committing to a longer-term product launch (and rollout at retail). It’s reminiscent of the toe-in-the-water that Starbucks took with its testing of Perfect Day’s animal-free dairy. My guess is the company will keep a close on customer response and, possibly, eye a wider rollout in time if the response is positive.

For Perfect Day, the Mars deal is yet another in a growing list of partnerships the company has inked with consumer-facing brands to utilize their animal-free dairy in products such as gelato, chocolate milk, and protein powders. The company also continues to periodically add new products under their own consumer brand subsidiary, Urgent Company, adding protein powders late last year and acquiring another ice cream brand, Coolhaus, to add to their ice cream lineup alongside Brave Robot.

January 25, 2021

The Mars Farm: a Not-Too-Distant Reality?

The following is a guest post written by Jonathan Hua of Scrum Ventures.

The disruptive impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the world’s agricultural systems have been broad and varied. And they follow several years of challenging production and market conditions such as disruptive weather events and poor planting conditions. Although the pandemic exposed weaknesses in current food production processes, the food industry had a banner year in 2020. 

In the first few weeks of 2021, we’ve also seen several major VCs, entrepreneurs, philanthropists and even major corporations take an interest in new ways to produce food. They’ve been launching climate and sustainability funds focused on areas such as regenerative agriculture, sustainable food, renewable energy, healthcare and innovations in new materials, infrastructure, and water. At the same time, the past few years have brought significant progress in space travel, space tourism and exploration missions to the moon and Mars. 

These advancements and focus areas have many putting two and two together and asking: is it possible to produce food in space? If, as expected, one day humanity exhausts its natural resources on Earth and has to consider surviving elsewhere, we’ll have to answer many questions including how to grow food on space stations, in spaceships, and even on a completely different planet. 

Six-figure salads?

It isn’t too far-fetched to imagine space as the final farming frontier. There’s already a space garden, the Vegetable Production System, Veggie, on the International Space Station (ISS). Although Veggie is only about the size of a carry-on bag, it helps NASA study plant growth in microgravity and provides astronauts with nutrients. The problem? At roughly 16 pounds, Business Insider estimates Veggie costs $145,600 to $690,900 to transport onto the ISS—that’s an expensive salad. 

Veggie is just one example. The price of eating in space is prohibitively costly. This Columbia Tribune article estimates that it could cost as much as $18,000 just to send one 16-oz bottle of water weighing about one pound into space. Assuming some economies of scale and the unit economics of sending many months’ worth of food in a single trip, it’s probably safe to assume that it would cost anywhere between $5,000 to $10,000 per astronaut per meal.

Costs aren’t the only issue. There are also space-related constraints such as microgravity and lack of refrigeration and water. Food choices are limited as well. Most items have to be calorie-dense and have extraordinary shelf lives. 

The potential of vertical farming

Despite the challenges, finding a more sustainable food production system locally in space would be an endeavor with both immediate and long-term benefits. Vertical farming offers a viable solution to this food production problem. Controlled-environment agriculture promotes growth of veggies, herbs, and some fruits in limited spaces. In addition, vertical farms are optimized for year-round production and are less susceptible to extreme environmental conditions. 

Next, because vertical farms are closed systems, water supplies can be filtered and recycled to maximize efficiency. Sensors and software within the vertical farms can also regulate water usage. And, AI can optimize water usage to prevent over or underwatering. Finally, because vertical farms are highly automated, there is the potential for high productivity. 

This all sounds too good to be true, so what’s the catch? As with many things space-related, vertical farms are cost-intensive and limited in scope. Unless progress is made on both fronts, it will be challenging to even start to consider building them at any kind of scale in space. The long-term decline in cost of technology, as well as improved yields, will drive the success of a vertical farming operation in any location. If we can successfully pull this off, vertical farms will provide additional benefits that are unrelated to food consumption. For instance, plants produce oxygen that we will need to breathe in extraterrestrial climates. 

Drilling down: vertical farming by the numbers

If we’re going to start farming in space, we’ll need to understand the numbers in depth. Here’s what we’re seeing from some of our latest research. 

  • Facility costs: Building a vertical farm could cost upwards of $40M for each facility. According to this AgFunder article, AeroFarms’ facilities cover 70,000 square feet of space and will be able to grow 2 million pounds of greens annually. Vertical farms built in shipping containers cost quite a bit less. Usually, containers cost somewhere in the ballpark of $75,000 to $100,000, but are much smaller and will produce less food, so multiple containers would be required to scale up this kind of vertical farming system that could quickly increase costs. Location of real estate will also affect these costs.
  • Labor costs: Larger-scale vertical farms employ anywhere between 25-50 employees for each facility. Assuming most of these employees are being paid somewhere between $40,000 to $50,000 per year, that’s $1M to $1.25M in additional costs for labor to maintain these farms. The number of employees would need to be scaled down quite a bit in space, but the salaries would probably be higher as well.
  • Resource costs: The cost of water can be justified by recycling the water that isn’t used for the crops or lost via evaporation, but energy costs are currently one of the highest expenditures for vertical farms. Lots of LED lights are required to grow food in a vertical farm. Some estimates put it at around 3,500 kWh of energy a year to produce just 1 square meter of lettuce. 
  • Last-mile costs: Depending on size of loads, locations, and other factors, transportation and delivery costs can be quite significant. In space, vehicles would be in limited supply, and would need to be modified to handle different gravity effects and refrigeration, not to mention likely very high electricity or fuel costs to run. This cost could be quite difficult to justify.
  • Limited variety: Vertical farms are optimized for growing microgreens, herbs and a few types of fruits.

How to Make Vertical Farming More Feasible and Cost-Effective

Here are some of the strategies we need to consider to make vertical farming in space feasible.

  • Make real estate space available: We’ll need to make real estate space more readily available or subsidize prices for larger-scale vertical farm development.
  • Develop more tax incentives for vertical farming companies: Tax incentives will encourage companies to build, and decrease risks for investors who want to support the space. Right now, it’s primarily huge funds like SoftBank’s Vision Fund that have the capital and risk appetite to support the vertical farming space. Much more investment is required to bring vertical farming to a more commercial scale and to encourage other entrepreneurs to develop the complementary technologies needed to make it more cost-effective long-term.
  • Innovate LED technologies: Lighting accounts for the most significant energy use in a vertical farming system. It also has significant impacts on crop yield and time to maturity. Like the computer chip industry, innovations in LED technology will need to focus on stronger outputs in smaller and more energy-efficient form factors. Lights that can customize intensity for each plant and improvements in energy efficiency will be necessary.
  • Adopt renewable energy sources: Vertical farms should use more renewable energy sources like wind to help decrease energy unit cost, if the option is available on another planet. If there’s a way to harvest the sun’s energy more effectively on Mars, that would help as well. If sun exposure is weak on Mars, figuring out how to concentrate the sun’s rays and transmit them to use as energy on a vertical farm could be a worthy undertaking. 
  • Decrease the cost of hydroponics or aeroponics: There is no soil on the moon or on Mars, meaning that vertical farms in space will require the use of hydroponics or aeroponics, both of which can grow crops without soil by substituting soil with a mineral nutrient solution. Decreasing the cost of this growth medium, enhancing it to optimize yields and nutrition, or otherwise making it easier to produce at scale will help make vertical farming more feasible. Relying more on an aeroponic strategy that focuses on using nutrient-saturated water and mists rather than a more concentrated solution is likely the best strategy. 
  • Improve AI/IoT for greenhouses and vertical farms: Continuous monitoring and control of both environmental variables and crop growth are essential to the success of vertical farms. There are already many technologies for this, but more data and better algorithms will lead to better sensors and devices and more efficiencies that can cut down costs. Improvements in automation due to better AI/IoT can also decrease labor costs.
  • Choose crops wisely to begin with: At least initially, we’ll need to focus on crops with shorter production cycles and higher yields to cut down on resource requirements and use. Crops with year-round consumer demand should also be prioritized over more seasonal items to improve cost efficiencies.
  • Locate smartly: Make sure the vertical farms in space are built as close as possible to the densest population colonies to minimize transportation and logistics costs.
  • Build to withstand harsh environments: In space, there are other considerations that could make or break any attempts to implement vertical farms. For one, the facilities have to be able to withstand the harsh environmental conditions of the local terrain and climate. Next, it is unclear how differences in gravity, adverse environment and radiation exposure will affect crop yields, nutrition or even taste. Also, there’s the issue of food safety. New environments bring new microbes, bacteria and other organisms that could make food unsafe or toxic for human consumption. These are just a few of the many additional variables that will need to be considered. 

As we move toward developing vertical farms in space, the opportunities for budding founders and entrepreneurs to build successful space-focused food businesses are galactic. My hope is that we proceed with care and make sure our presence there does not defile the most pristine areas of the universe. We’ve already polluted it with space debris that we need to clean up. When it comes to space farming, humanity will need to work together to protect the environment that we will likely one day travel to and inhabit.

About Jonathan Hua

Jonathan is an investor with Scrum Ventures where he also helps run Scrum’s Food Tech Studio – Bites! a global program for startups of all stages who share a common vision of solving key challenges plaguing our food supply chain today, such as safety, waste reduction, and health.

July 22, 2019

Mars Announces Startups for Inaugural Seeds of Change Food Accelerator

This morning, CPG giant Mars unveiled the six startups participating in the company’s first-ever cohort for its Seeds of Change accelerator program, which helps early-stage companies with health- and sustainability-focused offerings hit their next phase of growth.

As a consumer-focused brand, Seeds of Change has been in operation since 1989, initially selling organic seeds to farmers and gardeners before launching a food line in the late 1990s.

The new accelerator program, which was announced in March of this year, is an extension of the brand’s focus on health and sustainability.

Participants were selected this past weekend, when 10 finalists from the application pool headed to Chicago and presented their companies and ideas to a panel of judges. Each will receive a grant of $50,000 and participate in a four-month-long program that includes curriculum and mentorship sessions designed to help startups scale up their operations.

For this first cohort, the program looks to be focused mainly on ingredient innovation:

Fora produces non-dairy butter and is on track to release other yet-to-be-named plant-based dairy alternatives.
Prommus makes a protein-enhanced hummus, and also runs a program that provides meals to school children in food-insecure parts of the world
Brooklyn Delhi makes India-inspired condiments and sauces.
Tru Made Foods turns condiments like BBQ sauce and Sriracha into superfoods by replacing sugar with vegetables
NoBull Burger makes plant-based burgers.
Oxtale sells starter packs that let consumers cook traditional Asian meals in under 30 minutes.

The six companies chosen over the weekend were selected for Seeds of Change’s U.S.-based program. The company also runs an Australia-based version of the accelerator, for which applications just closed.

Mars, at this point, is better known for candy and pet foods than it is for sustainable eating. But like a growing number of major CPGs out there, the company is looking to double-down on food innovation by partnering with younger, leaner companies, and also align more with the growing consumer demand for things like health, transparency, and sustainability. Dairy Farmers of America, who works with some of the world’s largest food producers, has a new(ish) accelerator program that’s been getting attention as of late, and numerous other CPGs, from Kraft-Heinz to Nestle to BSH run programs.

April 9, 2018

Scientists in Antarctica Grow Food Without Soil or Sunlight — Get Ready, Mars

Astronauts, you had better like salad.

AP News reported last week that a team of scientists at Germany’s Neumayer Station III in Antarctica had successfully grown their first crop of produce without any soil, sunlight, or pesticides. The goal of the project was to explore food growing methods for use on outer space missions.

In total the researchers harvested eight pounds of salad greens, including swiss chard, 18 cucumbers, and 70 radishes — enough for quite the veg-heavy feast. And this crop just the beginning. The German Aerospace Center said last Thursday that its scientists hope to harvest up to 11 pounds of produce per week by May.

The vegetables were grown inside a shipping container, which arrived in the Antarctic in January of 2018. The plants are grown through aeroponics, a method of cultivation that doesn’t require soil or sunlight. Instead, plants receive nutrients via a liquid (made of nutrient solution and filtered water piped into the greenhouse) sprayed onto their roots, and bask in LED lights in air that’s enriched with CO2. The growing system and greenhouse are part of the “Eden ISS” project, in association with the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

Aeroponic farming is beginning to enter the home and specialty food markets, thanks to startups like Grove and AeroFarms. Since they rely on aeroponic mists and LED lights instead of sunlight and soil, these growing systems can support produce throughout the entire year, and in variable weather conditions. Including, apparently, the -20 °C (-4 °F) chill of Antarctica.

The Eden greenhouse. Photo: DLR via Flickr

This successful first harvest is a boost for scientists researching ways to grow produce on interplanetary missions where astronauts would be confined to tight quarters for several years. NASA already grew lettuce on the International Space Station earlier this year, but there are only so many salads you can eat before monotony sets in. This update from Antarctica shows that astronauts could replicate this growing system in space and cultivate a wide variety of fruits and vegetables in their ships  — and possibly, someday, even on Mars or the Moon.

NASA estimates that four crew members would need 24,000 pounds of food to sustain themselves on a three-year journey to Mars. Which can get very heavy and take up a lot of space. NASA is already working on light, durable packaging for interplanetary missions, but with a viable aeroponic system, they might not have to pack quite so much. Astronauts could grow at least a portion of their food on their ship, which would lighten the load (since there’s no soil required) and also give them access to fresh produce. Because freeze-dried ice cream must get old after a while.

This isn’t the only technology that might give astronauts more culinary options in space. The Japanese company Open Meals is working towards teleporting food through digitization and connected 3D bioprinters. If they reach their goal, astronauts could theoretically be snacking on tuna nigiri (or whatever else tickled their fancy) while orbiting the red planet. At least for now, though, they’ll have to settle for salad. Lots and lots of salad.

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