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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

personalized food

Survey: 71% of Consumers Are ‘Amenable’ to More AI in Their Restaurant Experience

Well over half of consumers “are amenable” to more artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced tech in their restaurant experience, according to a new survey from ad-tech firm AdTheorant.

The survey of over 2,000 U.S. adults, conducted this past September by The Harris Poll, looks at consumer sentiment and interaction with quick-service restaurants (QSRs) and fast-casual restaurants (FSRs) across a number of areas, AI among them.

Of those survey respondents, 71 percent said they would be “open to QSRs/FSRs incorporating AI into their business.” In particular, consumers would be most interested in AI if it could help drive down the cost of menu items (43 percent) and speed up the ordering process (42 percent).

As to the actual AI technologies that could do that, consumers are most interested in screens, according to the survey. Sixty-six percent said they were interested in using a touchscreen device (phone, kiosk, etc.) to order and nearly half of respondents, 42 percent, said they would like a voice-ordering system. 

Restaurants are already trying to meet this demand. Self-service kiosks are becoming a regular fixture at QSRs and FSRs as chains revamp their store formats to be more delivery- and takeout-friendly. In the last few months alone, we’ve seen Shake Shack, Chopt, Sweetgreen, and Krispy Kreme, among many others, unveil new store formats that feature kiosk ordering. Meanwhile, KFC is reinventing the concept of the drive-thru to be more touchscreen-centric, and McDonald’s leads the pack in terms of AI in the restaurant with its 2019 acquisitions of AI company Dynamic Yield and and voice-tech startup Apprente.

More surprising was the lower percentage of survey respondents who said AI offering more personalized food recommendations was important. On of the goals for McDonald’s when it acquired Dynamic Yield this past March was to make menus more “Netflix-y.” In other words, menus could dynamically generate recommendations based on a number of factors (past orders, trending items) and in doing so offer more relevant recommendations and upsell items.

AdTheorant’s report, however, notes that just 22 percent of consumers said this would be an important driver of their adopting more AI tech during their restaurant experience.

Part of that may be a matter of exposure. McDonald’s aside, many chains are still just getting started when it comes to the AI-driven menu. Dunkin’ is said to be dabbling with it. Starbucks says AI is a key piece of its overall digital strategy moving forward and that it’s Deep Brew initiative, which will (among other things) power better menu recommendations will be a big part of the chain’s focus in 2020.

Newsletter: My Smart Thanksgiving was Kinda Dumb, Ghost Kitchens and 3D Printed Vitamin Gummies

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A couple months back, The Spoon got in a little tiff with WIRED writer (and all around great guy) Joe Ray when he bylined an article that said the smart kitchen is very stupid.

As we’re a publication that’s all about the convergence of food and technology, this, naturally, got our goat. But here’s the thing, though. Ray wasn’t totally wrong. I experienced this firsthand over Thanksgiving when I tried my hand at connected holiday cooking.

Thanksgiving is typically the domain of my wife. But with an abundance of guests and a shortage of ovens, I decided to try my (slow) hand at smoking a turkey.

Armed with a Traeger pellet grill equipped with WiFire tech, and a block of Meater connected thermometers, I figured contributing to the holiday feast would be a snap.

I was wrong. I wrote about the whole experience, but the TL;DR version is this: Between getting the thermometers to actually connect (they didn’t) and a less-than-stellar app experience, my smart holiday cookout actually had to rely on the brains in my head and not in any device.

Thankfully, the turkey wound up tasting great, even if it did take a little more time and manual work than I was expecting. It tasted so good, in fact, that smoking another one next year is probably not a dumb idea (I just won’t be using any smart appliances).

Ghost Kitchens Are Very Much Alive
Everyone, it seems, is looking to get in on some of that sweet ghost kitchen action. Travis Kalanick, DoorDash, Chick-fil-A and now grocery retailer Kroger are making use of facilities that specialize in fulfilling meals for delivery (no dining in).

Yesterday, The Spoon’s Jenn Marson wrote about Kroger hooking up with the (fantastically named) meal delivery service ClusterTruck to launch multiple ghost kitchens. As Jenn wrote:

While the partnership is a high-profile one for a regional company like ClusterTruck, which is available mostly in the Midwest at this point, it’s also a smart move for Kroger. The concept of operating virtual restaurants out of ghost kitchens appeals nowadays to not just restaurants but also lifestyle brands, diet concepts, and celebrity chefs. Grocery stores were bound to follow at some point.

The line between grocery store and restaurant is already blurring, with many retailers offering fully prepared hot meals ready to go. So it makes sense that as off-premises dining continues to grow that we’ll see more retailers jump into the ghost kitchen delivery game. Why not order a hot dinner for tonight and get your groceries for the week dropped off on your doorstep at the same time?

Photo: Nourished

A 3D Printed Vitamin Gummy
Everyone eats their kids’ gummy vitamins, right? Or is that just me?

Well, my days of stealing vitamins may be soon be a thing of the past, if Nourished makes it to these shores. As my colleague, Catherine Lamb wrote about today, Nourished makes 3D printed gummies layered with vitamins personalized for your needs.

The vitamins won’t be cheap ($51 for a month’s supply), but Nourished says its 3D printed approached improves the pills’ efficacy. As Catherine writes:

Typically, active ingredients that show up in vitamins — like ashwagandha and Vitamin A — interfere with each other when combined into the same capsule. However, by printing these ingredients on top of each other, Nourished can fuse them into the same bite-sized supplement.

Nourished is only available in the U.K. right now, but the company is heading for the U.S. next year. Just don’t tell my son.

Nourished is actually part of a wave of startups bringing more personalization to the food we eat. The Spoon is giving a nod to that space with Customize, a new one-day summit in NYC in February that will bring together leading innovators across the restaurant, retail, grocery, food and consumer industries to explore how personalization is changing these markets. Get your (personal) ticket today!

Analytical Flavor Systems Raises $4M for its AI-Powered Flavor Prediction Platform

Analytical Flavor Systems (AFS), which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help companies predict and personalize flavor for new food products, announced today that it has raised $4 million in Series A funding led Leawood Venture Capital and Global Brain. VentureBeat was first to report the news. AFS had previously raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding through Better Food Ventures and Techstars.

Food personalization, powered by advancements in AI and machine learning, is a big trend we’re following at The Spoon. Earlier this year we named AFS as one of our FoodTech 25 companies changing the way we eat, writing the following:

Analytical Flavor Systems’ AI-driven Gastrograph platform helps packaged food companies achieve greater success in a saturated food industry that has an over 80% failure rate. Gastograph moves CPG brands’ development process beyond traditional tasting panels; it surveys each product with a flavor profile engine that is predictive, anticipating how new foods will perform in different markets, over a long time horizon, and against various demographic archetypes. Food companies are struggling to launch new products in an era of rapidly shifting consumer tastes, and an AI-driven platform like Gastrograph gives big food a more accurate map with which to navigate into the future.

Think of Gastrograph almost like Flavor as a Service. Using data from “regular” people and professional tasters to power its analytical engine, Gastrograph can help food companies determine which flavors will be popular with different people or in different regions etc.

AFS Co-Founder and CEO, Jason Cohen spoke at our Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle last month, and gave a presentation where he talked about personalization of food versus customization, and also provided a nice walkthrough of how AFS and Gastrograph works.

AI and Personalized Flavor

AFS told VentureBeat that it will use the money to build out the team and further develop its technology. The company’s fundraise comes at a good time, as it is among a raft of startups using AI to power flavor and food recommendations. Other players in the space include Spoonshot (formerly Dishq), Plantjammer, FoodPairing, and Flavorwiki.

Suggestic Experiments with Augmented Reality to Help You Stick to Your Diet Plan

What if you could wave your phone over a restaurant menu and see “through” the descriptions, instantly assessing which dishes are best (and worst) for you to eat?

That’s exactly what Bay Area startup Suggestic is working on. When users first open the free app, they set up their goals (lose weight, have more energy) and dietary preferences or restrictions (vegetarian, no dairy, allergic to peanuts). The app then recommends a series of dietary plans to match those preferences and goals, such as Anti-Inflammation or Low-Carb Mediterranean.

After selecting your plan, the app will create weekly meal plans with 3 to 4 recipes per day. “All recipes are found via machine learning,” Suggestic’s co-founder Shai Rozen told me over the phone. In fact, after they started the company four years ago, they spent the first year and a half applying for patents (which are currently pending) around their recipe-curating analytics. For a $100 annual fee, Premium members get access to food recommendations and recipes from selected health influencers. Users can turn their weekly meal plan into a dynamic grocery list, and Rozen said they’re working on making it shoppable.

Suggestic also provides videos and tasks to keep you on-track with your selected health program, a chatbot to guide you through meal and restaurant selection, plus a place for users to log their sleep quality and water intake. Its restaurant feature uses algorithms to analyze menu items at over 500,000 restaurants in the U.S., and will give each dish a score 1-10, depending on how well it’ll fit into your chosen diet. They’re also working on integrating genetic insight with DNA sequencing service Helix.

But the coolest part isn’t what they already offer — it’s what they’re working on. Suggestic is currently beta testing an augmented reality (AR) feature that allows users to point their phone camera at a menu and see color-coded indications of which dishes are best for their diet. “Then you can interact with the menu as if you were RoboCop or Terminator,” said Rozen. As of now, this service is available in 10% of the restaurants Suggestic covers.

It’s a little further out, but Suggestic is also developing tech to integrate AR into their grocery shopping service. So if you pick up a bag of gluten-free crackers and want to see how well it fits into your diet, all you’d have to do is bring out your smartphone and Terminator it.

The startup currently has a staff of around 20. Rozen told me that they have raised “around $3 million” over two funding rounds. The app launched about two months ago and has roughly 20,000 downloads.

AR is starting to pop up in more and more places throughout the food system. Huxley is combining AR, AI and machine learning to help increase indoor agricultural outputs. Big Food companies like Campbell’s are also exploring AR as a way to engage consumers from the grocery store to guided cooking, as is Williams Sonoma. Chinese startup Coohobo is using AR to make the grocery shopping experience easier and more social. App Waygo translates menus around the world into English, complete with pictures. And down the road, virtual reality (VR) in nutrition, cooking, and grocery shopping will be pretty common, too.

At the end of the day, Suggestic might be trying to do too much — they’ve got the buzzwords down (algorithms, AI, etc.), but combining them into a useful tool that can actually enable longterm healthy lifestyle changes will be a big lift.

That said, dining out can be a minefield for people with specialized diets or food restrictions; if Suggestic can nail the augmented reality aspect of their app and expand it to more restaurants, that could have huge benefits for those trying to watch what they eat.

 

Pablos Holman Sees a Future Where We Print French Bread & Strawberries

While 3D food printing is still in its early stages, inventor/hacker Pablos Holman believes we’ll eventually live in a world where printers in our homes spit out complicated foods like French bread and even something resembling strawberries.

“This isn’t as weird as it sounds,” said Holman, who spends his days working in the lab at Intellectual Ventures, Nathan Myhrvold’s invention and research organization that has become one of the most prolific invention centers – as measured by patents filed and issued – in the world.

According to Holman, wheat and other materials within bread could be stored in “printer” cartridges and turned into bread at the push of a button.

“What a chef is doing is putting wheat through a complicated process to manage texture,” said Holman. “What my 3D printer would do is put down a pixel of wheat, hydrate with a needle, zap it with a laser to cook it, rinse and repeat for every pixel, and it’s going to print you a meal.”

While it’s weird to think of foods traditionally cooked by humans instead being printed on printers, Holman thinks this method is vastly superior to the one-sized-fits-all production method of traditional kitchens.

“The (3D printed) meal is customized and customized for you,” said Holman, who before working at Intellectual Ventures helped to start Jeff Bezos’ space travel company, Blue Origin. “It avoids your allergens, and dietary restrictions and injects your pharmaceuticals.”

In short, Holman believes 3D printed meals could be optimized for each person’s specific dietary requirements and taste profile. “Now we have a way of correlating your diet to health effects. If you have to get off of sodium, we’ll drop it by one milligram a day for months, and you’ll never feel it happen.”

“Unless you have a personal chef, it’s almost impossible for people to do that kind of thing right now,” Holman continued. “What we really want to do is have the computer to know what you ate, know what health effects you are experiencing are, know how to tune your meals so that they’re optimized for you.”

In Holman’s view, the biggest challenge to ushering in a world of personalized printed food will be managing texture. But, he believes, it’s a challenge that is hardly insurmountable: “When you think about what a chef is doing, they’re managing flavor, managing aroma, managing nutrition and they’re managing texture,” said Holman. “I can buy flavor in a bottle. I can buy aroma in a bottle. I can both nutrition in a bottle. What’s left is managing texture.”

And, as Holman sees it, developing 3D food printers that can create food textures that are pleasing to the human tongue is just another step forward on centuries-long creativity continuum that brought us food like French bread and pasta. “We learn new textures are the time,” he said. “God did not invent pasta or French bread. Those are inventions. Humans make those.”

Holman is not shy about sharing this view. Five years ago he went to Parma, Italy, the birthplace of pasta, to speak at Barilla headquarters where he “told a room of full of twelve hundred Italians that God did not invent pasta.”

While Holman hasn’t been invited back, Barilla may have gotten the message anyway: The world’s largest pasta company has since launched its own 3D pasta printer.

If you want to listen to the full conversation with Pablos Holman to hear his views on the evolution of 3D food printing, the development of Intellectual Ventures lab and more, you can download the podcast here, get it on Apple podcasts or just click play below.

Podcast: The Personalized Kitchen

Advancements in molecular sensors, real-time analytics and food production are laying the foundation for a world where consumers will consume food tailored specifically for them based on their own biomarkers, past behavior, and environmental data.

And while we may not be living in a futuristic world with personalized food manufacturing machines just yet (though we are getting closer), there’s no doubt one of the year’s biggest trends in food innovation centers around personalization.

Which is why I was excited to take the Smart Kitchen Show on the road last month to talk about the personalized kitchen.

My guests for this live taping of the Smart Kitchen Show at Target’s Open House in San Francisco included Shireen Yates (CEO of Nima), Kevin Brown (CEO of Innit), and Jae Berman (Head Coach and lead nutritionist for Habit). Friend of the show Brian Frank of FTW Ventures also stopped by to help with interviewing duties.

Enjoy the podcast by clicking below, subscribing in iTunes or downloading directly.