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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

personalized

Introducing The Tomorrow Today Show With Mike Lee

Back in 2017, I wrote a story exploring the idea of personalized food profiles. The piece explored whether, someday, we might walk into restaurants, shop at the grocery store, or have dinner at a friend’s house and be able to communicate our food preferences and dietary restrictions in advance, shaping our entire meal journey accordingly.

The inspiration for that article came from Mike Lee, who had just spoken at our Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle that October. During his talk, he introduced the idea of a “food passport” that could someday help personalize food experiences wherever we go. I had gotten to know Mike through his work at The Future Market, where he developed a concept store of the future for the Fancy Food Show. It didn’t take long for me to realize that Mike has a rare ability to imagine the many possible futures of our food system and to understand how technology and social change might intersect to bring those futures to life.

However, it wasn’t until he published his book Mise: On the Future of Food that I fully appreciated the breadth of his thinking and the ways he can masterfully get his ideas across. In Mise, Mike not only describes big potential technologies and changes we will wrestle with in the future, but he gave us stories of how these changes might unfold in our lives.

In short, Mike is not only skilled at identifying early signals and trends, but he’s also a master of using storytelling to illustrate how these futures might unfold, which is why I’m super excited to welcome his new show to The Spoon Podcast Network: The Tomorrow Today Show.

In his new podcast, Mike takes listeners on a weekly deep dive into the future of food, whether it’s restaurants, farming, consumer products, nutrition, or even food hedonism. Each episode features long-form conversations that go beyond surface-level takes, offering nuanced insights from some of the most thoughtful voices in the industry.

In this first episode, The Future of Restaurants, Mike has a roundtable conversation with Kristen Hawley (Expedite), Elizabeth Tilton (Oyster Sunday), David Rodolitz (Flyfish Club), and yours truly. We explore everything from the role of empathy in hospitality to why chefs are trading molecular gastronomy for comfort food like pot pies.

Season one is launched, and you can watch the first episode below or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to subscribe, rate and review!

Mike is my guest on this week’s episode of The Spoon Podcast, so make sure to listen to that as well to hear a little more about Mike’s background.

The Future of Restaurants

This Japanese Snack Company is Selling Personalized Granola Based a Person’s Microbiome

Last month in Tokyo at the Smart Kitchen Summit Japan, we learned about a new personalized cereal offering from Japanese snack and breakfast food company Calbee. Called Body Granola, the product provides a personalized mix of prebiotics and cereal tailored to a customer’s microbiome, as determined by an at-home test.

Here’s how it works: Once customers sign up, they receive an internal flora (microbiome) stool sample test kit. They take the test and send it to Calbee’s testing partner, Metagin, for analysis. About six weeks later, customers can access their results via the Body Granola website. From there, they can order their personalized granola by selecting prebiotic ingredients that best align with the primary bacteria in their microbiome.

As shown in the video interview, these prebiotics come in the form of letter- and color-coded toppings that are mixed with Calbee’s base granola. While the granola itself isn’t mixed specifically for each customer, customers are guided to a limited number of options tailored to support certain types of microbiome microflora. They then mix the prescribed final cereal at home.

Several startups in the U.S. have rolled out personalized nutrition offerings based on microbiome DNA testing, resulting in customized meal plans or supplement subscriptions. However, none of the major CPG brands have ventured into microbiome testing or other personalized testing—let alone offered a subscription service for customized consumables like this.

Currently, the product is only available in Japan, but the company says it plans to expand to the U.S. and other locations in the future.

Calbee Body Granola - Personalized Granola

Tastermonial Lets You Scan Grocery Items to See Which are the Best Fit for Your Diet

Sticking to a diet — or avoiding an allergen — is hard enough without having to worry about potentially hidden ingredients in grocery products. Does that jerky have soy in it, or do those potato chips actually contain dairy?

One startup is trying to make grocery shopping more transparent and personalized. Tastermonial is a new startup based in the Bay Area which offers a link between personalized nutrition services and actual food brands. Users can download the Tastermonial app and use it to scan products on grocery shelves. The app then extracts nutritional data and gives viewers a readout of the item, noting whether or not it would be a good fit for them to eat, based off of their pre-saved dietary profile. If it’s not, Tastermonial will recommend other, better-suited grocery products available via delivery through one of their retail partners.

Founded in July 2019 by Bude Piccin, the startup launched a beta version of its app in January 2020 and currently has about 200 users. Thus far Tastermonial’s database includes over 400,000 SKUs, including everything from CPGs to frozen and refrigerated foods. Piccin said that they pull nutritional data from public databases.

On a recent phone call, Piccin told me that the app can only scan items and give both a general evaluation (good choice for many diets) and a personal evaluation (not suitable for you based on your profile). They plan to roll out the ability to purchase through retail partners later this year, starting with Piccin’s former employer, Amazon.

Thus far, users have to input their own dietary preferences and any food allergens, however, Tastermonial plans to let users link its app to microbiome- or DNA-driven food personalization services to automatically upload their nutrition profile. The company is already in talks with DAYTWO, a personalized nutrition company which recommends recipes to individuals based on their microbiome.

Tastermonial’s app is free to use. The company plans to make money by adding a small fee (5 to 10 percent) onto each sale through their retail partners. There’s also a SaaS play. Piccin said that Tastermonial will partner with personalized nutrition services, like DAYTWO, to provide the ingredient layer to those recipe recommendations. She explained that Tastermonial’s database could help users select the most health-appropriate foods for their suggested meals — all of which could be delivered to their door.

Since the company is so early-stage, it’s hard to predict if it’ll be able to follow through on its plans to become the go-to interface for grocery shopping based on your nutrition. But Tastermonial is tapping into a trend that, like Hansel, is so hot right now: personalization. (So hot, in fact, that we had a whole conference dedicated to personalization a few weeks ago in NYC.)

In addition to Tastermonial, there are several other companies racing to bring personalization to the grocery store. Pinto (formerly Sage Project) and DNA Nudge are two startups that pull from individuals’ nutrition profiles to help them decide which retail products are best suited to their needs. According to Piccin, Tastermonial’s differentiator is its ability to connect users with alternative products that are better for them, if the grocery options don’t cut it. “We’re connecting to that practical side,” she told me.

My question is whether or not consumers will actually take that extra step. Will people really create an entire online grocery order for one or two items, pay a premium for delivery, and wait for it to show up at their door?

Tastermonial is betting on it. Considering that 81 percent of consumers never order groceries online, that’s a risky bet, which is why I think that Tastermonial’s SaaS play has more potential than the app itself. As personalized nutrition services become more popular, more and more people will be looking for ways to easily shop for the best ingredients for their individual needs. If it becomes part of the personalized nutrition services themselves, Tastermonial could help make the process just a little bit easier.

Not Sure What to Eat? Just Breathe (Literally)

When deciding which diet to follow, most of us rely on friends’ recommendations, online questionnaires, or internet wisdom. Then again, why not shape your food choices off of your actual breath.

Israel-based startup Lumen gives dining recommendations based off of the amount of CO2 which you exhale into their proprietary device (which reveals whether you’re burning carbs or body fat).

We think that breath-based dietary guidance is pretty cool, so we invited Dana Varrone, Lumen’s VP of Strategic Partnerships, to speak at Customize, our food personalization summit, in NYC later this month. Join us there to hear her talk about how personalization can unlock the power of food as medicine (use code SPOON15 to get 15 percent off those tickets).

But first — if you want to learn more about how your breath can indicate what you should be eating, check out our Q&A with Varrone below.

Tell us a little bit about what Lumen does.
Lumen is a device and app that helps you take control of your metabolism. Through your breath, the Lumen technology measures your fuel source in real time, telling you if you’re using fats or carbs for energy, and provides you with a personalized nutrition plan to help you reach your health and fitness goals.

A metabolic measurement (RQ) that was once costly and time-consuming in a clinical setting is now available through a single breath with Lumen.

Why do you think that there has been a rise in interest around personalized nutrition over the past few years?
I think there are three main reasons for the rise. Firstly, people are fed up with going on diets and not getting the results they want, and are starting to recognize that what may work for one person may not work for them. “Go Keto as carbs are the devil” is on the one extreme and “follow the myplate and eat a balanced plate of grains, protein, fruit, veggie and dairy” is on the other extreme of the advice spectrum. Couple this with advanced research being published on how various foods may impact your gut and the increase in allergies nationwide, and question marks start going off in people’s minds of perhaps one size does not fit all.

Secondly, with the rise in technologies such as the AppleWatch, fitbit and the like, consumers are seeing the value in getting personalized feedback. Consumers can now see how many steps they’ve walked, calories they’ve burned and can even get feedback on their heart rate. This immediate feedback empowers consumers to feel like they can now be in control of their own lives, whereas before it was left to your doctor and your yearly physical visits.

Lastly, with the rise in social media and newsfeeds being curated for you, people are demanding speed and instant gratification. This is specifically the case with the millennial generation that have grown up with this being their norm. This results in people wanting answers fast, based on them and their needs, now.

What are the biggest hurdles towards creating personalized dietary guidance towards consumers?
I think the biggest hurdles are in asking the right questions to the consumer at the onset and being able to adjust the personalization over time based on both qualitative and quantitative data that takes into account lifestyle changes, life events, food tolerances, goals, and physiology.

What do you think personalized food or drink will look like 5 years down the road?
I think data from a variety of touch points will be the primary driver in personalizing a consumer’s nutrition and will be housed with an engagement app that makes sense of all the data, with Lumen being at the helm of this.

If you want to see Dana speak about how personalization can unlock the power of food as medicine, join us at Customize this month in NYC! Use code SPOON15 to get 15 percent off tix.

CES 2020: DNANudge Guides Your Grocery Shopping Based Off of Your DNA

Unless you’re a nutritionist or really adept at reading nutrition labels, it can be tricky to tell which brands of peanuts/chocolate/crackers are healthiest for you. Especially when grocery stores offer dozens and dozens of SKUs for every possible food item.

With DNANudge, a London-based personalized nutrition startup, the key to optimizing your grocery shopping is on your wrist. The company’s app links up with wearable bands which scan CPG products and give you real-time feedback on whether they’re a good fit for you to eat — or not.

We stopped by DNANudge’s booth at CES 2020 to get a tour of how it works. First you send off a saliva sample to the company’s HQ in Covent Garden, London. DNANudge analyzes your DNA to give you a breakdown of your nutritional profile — sensitive to salt, low risk of diabetes, etc. — which is available via the company’s app. (Your sample is then destroyed.) The app also connects to DNANudge’s wearable armbands, available online or in its London retail store. 

Then the fun begins. You can scan the barcodes of edible CPG products with the armband, which will either flash green (a good match for your biology) or red (not so much). After the band flashes, you can check on the app to get a more detailed breakdown of why the food is/isn’t a fit for you, and also get recommendations for products that might be a better match. Which kind of makes me wonder why the armband is even necessary — couldn’t you just scan all the products with your phone? Though I guess it looks #fashion and saves you the step of pulling out your phone, if you just want a quick yes/no in the grocery aisle.

Speaking on the CES show floor, DNANudge’s co-founder and CEO Chris Toumazou told me that he started the company in 2015 to empower people to eat healthier. “If you want to eat a biscuit, you’re going to eat a biscuit,” he explained to me. “But you can eat the best biscuit for your biology.”

DNANudge’s scanning currently works with all CPG SKU’s in major U.K. supermarkets, except for Marks & Spencer. The entire system — DNA test, wearable, and app — is currently available in the U.K. for 120 pounds ($158). Toumazou told me that they were planning to launch in the U.S. soon, possibly in L.A. He estimates that the system will retail for $120 stateside.

Personalized nutrition — either based off of DNA or gut microbiomes — has become quite a trend lately. Viome and Sun Genomics make dietary and supplement recommendations based off of your microbiome. The most similar offering to DNANudge is GenoPalate, which also uses a saliva swab to map DNA and make suggestions about which foods people should eat. However, GenoPalate doesn’t have the wearable aspect, so it can’t make recommendations on a case-by-case basis like DNANudge does.

There’s no doubt that more people want more personalized dietary guides, but how exactly to do that — and protect consumer data — is still unclear. If you’re curious this emerging space you should come to Customize, our food personalization summit on February 27th in New York City. See you there!

SKS 2019: Naveen Jain Thinks We’re 5 Years Away from Making Sickness Optional

Back in 2010, entrepreneur Naveen Jain co-founded Moon Express, a privately held company gunning for the Moon. “When you have literally taken the moon shot, what do you do for an encore?” he asked the audience at the Smart Kitchen Summit 2019.

For Jain, the answer was, tackle healthcare. (No big, right?) To do so, he started personalized nutrition company Viome in 2016. Last week Jain told SKS attendees that he believes we’re just five years away from making sickness “optional.”

If you want to hear Jain’s vision for curing some of society’s most persistent diseases, you can watch the video of his conversation with moderator Brian Frank at SKS 2019 below. But for you impatient folks out there, the (very) short solution to curing chronic disease is to eat better.

Easier said than done, of course. You may think you know what “eating healthy” means — greens, lean proteins, etc. — but as Jain says, “What is healthy for one person is actually maybe toxic for someone else.”

Jain gives an inspiring argument for why we should all take a much closer look at what’s going on in our gut, and why personalized nutrition could help make disease a thing of the past. Check out the video below to hear why and keep an eye out for more content from SKS 2019 coming your way!

SKS 2019: The Power of Personalized Nutrition

The Food Tech Show: Personalized Menus

Over the past decade, we’ve seen how big data, mobile and social media has created a wave of personalized services for consumers in everything from music and entertainment to news to financial services.

So why is it that the restaurant menu still offers a one-sized fits all offering for guests?

To discuss why the restaurant menu seems stuck in time, I am joined on this episode of The Food Tech Show by Scott Sanchez, CEO of The Fit. We talk about where the menu will go in the future, whether we’ll eventually ever see personalized food profiles and how Scott’s own personal struggles with weight led him to eventually create The Fit.

As always, you can listen to The Food Tech Show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, download direct to your device or just click play below.

Customizable Fast-Casual Chain Vita Mojo Is All About the Software

When co-founders Nick Popovici and Steven Citou first pitched restaurants the idea for a fully customizable meal service a few years ago, they met with a lot of skepticism. “People didn’t think you could make money by doing bespoke meals,” said Charley Gloerfelt, Vita Mojo’s Head of Brand Development. 

Now, London-based Vita Mojo is trying not only to prove them wrong, but to help other restaurants hop on the modular-meal bandwagon, too.

Vita Mojo allows diners to create a fully customized meal via an in-store iPad at any of their three London locations, or using the restaurant’s app. Customers choose their desired base or protein, sides, toppings, and sauces, which are combined into a final plate that’s priced accordingly. So instead of being locked into a prescribed combo, diners can choose their own adventure. Each of Vita Mojo’s dish options also has a fully transparent breakdown of calories, macro levels, and allergens, so you know exactly what nutritional elements are going into your lunch. As of now there are 9 billion possible combinations.

Since they’re modular, Vita Mojo’s meal prices can vary quite a bit. In general, though, they’ll set you back £5-£7 ($6.50-$9.50 USD) for a basic lunch — the norm for most fast-casual spots in London. According to Gloerfelt, diners usually get their meal three to five minutes after placing their order. That timing might be normal at the average lunch buffet — unless you’re really indecisive — but is pretty speedy for a bespoke, high-quality meal. Plus, all of Vita Mojo’s meal components are geared towards health-conscious customers and made with transparently sourced ingredients.

Vita Mojo has also released a business intelligence platform that allows other restaurants to implement the same customizable meal model. They launched it at the end of 2017, just after we first wrote about Vita Mojo’s modular meal service on The Spoon.

Vita Mojo’s modular meal-building software at one of their restaurants.

The SaaS product lets food establishments track PoS data at a granular level. Since all meals created with the Vita Mojo system are modular, businesses can get a better sense of exactly which foods — not just which meals — are most popular. They can also predict future sales, reduce food waste, and see what ingredients are trending (cough, kale) in order to better inform recipe creation. So if they notice a lot of people are ordering sweet potato mash, they can order and prep accordingly — and even develop a few more recipes starring yams. 

So far, a few smaller businesses, like coffee chains and independent establishments, are using their software. Gloerfelt couldn’t give me any details on pricing for using the SaaS product, saying that it varied depending on how much support the restaurants or cafés required and how much customization they were looking for.

But that’s just the beginning. Vita Mojo only started leasing the software towards the end of last year, and they hope to expand the reach quite a bit within the fast casual dining scene. 

If this made you think of eatsa, you are not alone. The fast-casual chain shuttered all of their storefronts outside of their home city of San Francisco last year in an effort to focus on powering other restaurants with its technology. Though Gloerfelt didn’t indicate that Vita Mojo was planning on doing away with their restaurants anytime soon, she did tell me that they’re intended to be a proof of concept. In other words, they want to show that making a customized meal for every diner walking through the door is as cost- and time-effective as serving a set meal.

Vita Mojo is currently expanding their operations within the U.K. and looking at franchising their ordering and tracking software. 

Personalized Nutrition Analytics Platform Nutrino Raises $8M

Yesterday Nutrino, the Israeli personalized nutrition company, announced the completion of its $8 million Series A funding round. Nielsen Ventures, Pereg Ventures, and Gandyr Group joined existing investors, including the New York Angels group, who led the company’s seed round. This latest raise brings their total capital to $10 million.

Founded in 2011, Nutrino synthesizes information from scientific reports, menus, and food nutrition breakdowns and matches that to data points on your health and eating habits, which it gets from wearables, health apps, or information you input directly into their Nutrino app. It feeds all this information into FoodPrint, their analytics platform, which then uses machine learning and AI to create an individualized nutrition profile and personalized dietary recommendations.

Nutrino isn’t the only company out there offering personalized nutrition. Just a few weeks ago we wrote about Sage Project, a platform which breaks down nutritional information for a variety of products and will soon offer individualized dietary recommendations. Habit uses personalized nutrition information to create customized meal kits. And last year, Amazon partnered with EatLove to offer meal planning and recipes tailored to personal health profiles.

Photo: Nutrino blog.

Two things seem to set Nutrino apart. First is its specialization in curating dynamic nutrition profiles for people with diabetes. In 2016 Nutrino launched a partnership with Medtronic, a producer of continuous glucose monitors and insulin pumps, to help people with diabetes better customize their diets. Users could sync their monitors and pumps to the Nutrino app, which would use data from the person’s glucose and carbohydrate levels to offer food suggestions. They can also use the app to scan grocery barcodes and get a nutritional breakdown of each item, or, if they’re in one of the 200,000 restaurants that fits with Nutrino’s technology, get personalized menu recommendations based on their glucose and carbohydrate levels.

Which, if you’re someone suffering from diabetes, is critical. There are an estimated 415 million people around the world living with diabetes, and the number is expected to grow to 642 million by 2040. Managing diets is a key part of staying healthy with the disease, and Nutrino’s responsive app seems like a helpful tool.

The second thing that sets Nutrino apart from other personalized nutrition platforms is its food database, which collates information on the eating habits of its millions of users. Companies in food & beverage and fitness use this data to shape their products and marketing strategies. So Nutrino doesn’t only serve individuals; it also uses their data to market its services to companies who want more data on nutrition and consumer eating habits (though promises to protect user confidentiality).

Nutrino will use its funding to expand its database, grow its personalized nutrition services, and explore new partnerships in food analytics for diabetics.

Personalized nutrition and meal recommendations are getting a lot of buzz right now. And Nutrino’s recent funding raise seems to indicate that these trends aren’t going to slow down anytime soon.

PepsiCo’s Drinkfinity: Bad Name, Tasty Beverages.

The inescapable feeling I got upon receiving my Drinkfinity package was that its parent company PepsiCo was trying too hard. Drinkfinity feels like your dad spinning a baseball cap backwards and suddenly beatboxing in some misguided attempt to connect with you on the way to soccer practice.

Which is too bad because independent of that, Drinkfinity is actually pretty good.

Basically, it’s a way to create flavored drinks. You buy a special “Vessel” (ugh) that comes with a piercer on top. You then buy special flavor pods that you press down on the piercer to transform your water into a colorful beverage.

You can see why PepsiCo is trying this out. Soda sales are declining as people turn away from sugary drinks and a raft of natural upstarts like LaCroix are taking market share.

The company is also really pushing a conscious capitalism type of message with Drinkfinity. The pod-infused drinks range from 30 to 80 calories (though some still contain 11 to 17g of sugar). PepsiCo says the reusable vessel and smaller sized pods use up to 65 percent less plastic than a 20 oz. ready-to-drink bottle, and you can recycle the pods via mail.

I ordered the “One for Me” bundle, which came with the Vessel plus four flavor packs (each containing four pods) for $35. Fill the Vessel with water, pick your flavor, push the pod down on the top of the bottle and shake. I tried Pomegranate Ginger Flow and Oatberry Flow, and of the two, Oatberry Flow — which includes whole oat flour — tasted better. Additional four packs of pods cost between $5.95 and $6.50 (so roughly $1.50 per drink).

But it’s when you examine the flavor pods that you can start to see Pepsi turn its hat backwards and slide in the Biz Markie cassette. Flavors are grouped into modes like “Charge,” “Flow,” and “Chill” depending on whether you want to energize or relax or, one presumes, hang with Poochie.

Popping the flavor pod, you can almost hear the Pepsi marketing department say “millennials love to chill.”

Then there is the name, Drinkfinity. I can’t won’t bring myself to say it out loud.

Again, this is too bad because, despite all the over marketing, I kinda like Drinkfinity. The water bottle’s a good size, and features a magnetic holder to keep the lid in place. The two pods I tried were pretty tasty. And I like the idea of having a bunch of drink choices taking up a small footprint in my pantry.

But then again, I’m a bit older (and a dad), and this product is clearly not aimed at me. Which is fine, though perhaps I’ll re-up my initial flavor pod order when I’m done with this set. Beatboxing can leave you pretty dehydrated.