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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Study: AI-Powered Drones Fuel Advances in Precision Ag for Early Detection of Crop Stress

Early stress detection via precision agriculture just got a serious upgrade, according to new research out of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Led by Dr. Ittai Herrmann, the team developed a drone-based platform that blends hyperspectral, thermal, and RGB imaging with powerful deep learning technology to precisely identify nitrogen and water deficiencies in sesame crops.

Sesame, known for its resilience to climate variations, is rapidly growing in global importance. However, accurately identifying early-stage crop stress has historically posed a significant challenge, limiting the ability of farmers to respond quickly to potential catastrophic challenges. To tackle this, the researchers combined three advanced imaging technologies into a single drone system, creating a robust solution capable of decoding complex plant stress signals.

Hyperspectral imaging provides detailed spectral insights into plant chemistry, including nitrogen and chlorophyll levels, which are critical markers for plant nutrition. Thermal imaging spots subtle temperature changes in leaves that indicate water stress, while high-resolution RGB images provide clear visual context of overall plant health and structure.

What made this study cutting-edge was its use of multimodal convolutional neural networks (CNNs), an advanced AI approach that can unravel intricate data patterns and add context, which significantly enhances diagnostic precision. These advanced techniques unlocked the researchers’ ability to distinguish overlapping signals of plant stress, such as differentiating between nutrient and water deficiency, something that conventional methods often struggle to achieve. According to the researchers, by accurately pinpointing the exact stressor, farmers can now apply resources such as fertilizer and irrigation more strategically, reducing waste and environmental impact while increasing crop yields.

While other researchers have studied using advanced AI techniques with drones to aid in combatting stress in walnut and specialty crops, the use of deep multimodal CNN appears to be a leap forward in precision ag. It remains to be seen how quickly this technology reaches the farmer level, but given the challenges of climate change, its easy to envision that these types of advances in precision agriculture will be invaluable tools for farmers in the future to protect against climate-related crop stress.



Researchers Create Simulator to Help Robots Wield Knives

Robotics researchers from NVIDIA and the University of Southern California (USC) announced today the first differentiable simulator for robotic cutting, or DiSECt for short. This new simulator can predict forces that will act on the knife as it pushes and slices through soft materials like fruits and vegetables.

Your first reaction might be, why do they need all that simulator science when you can just install a sharp blade on a robotic arm and smash it down? That’s certainly one solution, but part of the reason robot researchers like NVIDIA, and Sony and Panasonic all work with food is because food is oddly-shaped, has different textures and is delicate. If a robot can successfully work with soft objects like food, it can carry those techniques over to other applications like surgery (where plunging knives down is frowned upon).

Cutting through food with precision and care is actually quite complex. It requires feedback, adaptation, motion control and parameter setting as the knife makes its way through the object. Additionally, since each piece of fruit or vegetable is unique, the robot needs to adjust its cutting with each new object.

NVIDIA shared with us an advanced look at an article explaining the DiSECt research that was recently presented at 2021 Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) conference. I’m not going to lie, it is dense and jargon heavy with paragraphs like this:

DiSECt implements the commonly used Finite Element Method (FEM) to simulate deformable materials, such as foodstuffs. The object to be cut is represented by a 3D mesh which consists of tetrahedral elements. Along the cutting surface we slice the mesh following the Virtual Node Algorithm [4]. This algorithm duplicates the mesh elements that intersect the cutting surface, and adds additional, so-called “virtual” vertices on the edges where these elements are cut. The virtual nodes add extra degrees of freedom to accurately simulate the contact dynamics of the knife when it presses and slices through the mesh.

But rather than focusing on the specifics of the research, there are some broader takeaways anyone in food tech can appreciate. First, DiSECt illustrates the continued importance of simulation and synthetic data in training robots. NVIDIA has actually built a kitchen as a training ground for its robots where it uses synthetic data and computerized simulation to virtually teach a robot tasks like identifying and picking up a box of Cheeze-Its. Similarly, DiSECt trains a robot to use a knife through simulation first, which can then be applied to the cutting object in the real world.

Additionally, giving robots added abilities will make them more useful in taking over dangerous tasks like repetitive cutting. Right now, robots in restaurants are frying foods and even making pizzas, but they aren’t doing more highly skilled, precision tasks such as cutting and slicing. A robot can’t get injured while cutting and could bring more safety to restaurant kitchens.

The good news for those interested in this type of cutting-edge research is that NVIDIA and USC are not the only companies doing work in this field. In 2019, researchers from Iowa State University published a similar paper on the intricacies of robot slicing.

DiSECt: A Differentiable Simulation Enginefor Autonomous Robotic Cutting

Researchers Develop Lactic Acid Bacterium to Extend Shelf Life of Food

Researchers at the National Food Institute, Technical University of Denmark have developed a new biological method of extending the shelf life of food and fighting food waste. According to a blog post pubished this week on the university’s website, scientists have created a natural lactic acid bacterium that secretes nisin, an antimicrobial peptide, when grown on dairy waste (hat tip: Technology Networks).

This finding has a couple of different applications. First, as the university post writes:

Nisin is approved for use in a number of foods, where it can prevent the growth of certain spoilage microorganisms as well as microorganisms that make consumers sick. It can for instance inhibit spore germination in canned soups and prevent late blowing in cheeses—without affecting its flavour.

In addition to extending the life of foods, Nisin can help utilize existing inefficiencies in dairy production. Large amounts of whey are leftover during the cheesemaking process, and as the researchers point out, this leftover whey can now be used to create nisin.

For a more deep technical dive into this nisin research, you can check out this scientific article in The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

This research could add to a growing number of commercially available products using biochemical approaches to extending the shelf life of food. Currently, Apeel uses a special plant-based coating to cover and preserve fresh food like avocados. Hazel Technologies, which raised $70 million this month, makes a sachet inserted with perishable food shipments that emits 1-methylcyclopropene (1-MCP) gas to inhibit ethylene, which plants produce they age.

Food waste is a big problem around the world. In the U.S. alone, it’s estimated that 54 million tons of food goes to waste every year. Thankfully startups and researchers are making progress to combat this issue. To that end, The Spoon has partnered with ReFED, a US-based non-profit organization dedicated to ending the food waste crisis, to hold a one day virtual summit highlighting some of the solutions coming to market. The Food Waste Insights + Innovation Forum is a free-to-attend half-day virtual event on June 16th from 9 AM to 1 PM PT (12 PM to 4 PM ET) and will feature some of the leading companies and organizations. Get your ticket today!

MIT Research Opens Up Potential of Lab-Grown Plants

By now Spoon readers are most likely familiar with the idea of lab-grown meat. After all, there are a number of companies around the world tackling the issue. But lab-grown plants? That’s something we haven’t heard as much about. However, it’s an idea that got a little boost this week, thanks to new research from MIT (hat tip: TechCrunch).

MIT News reports today that researchers at that university grew wood-like plant structures in a lab from cells extracted from Zinnia leaves. The process is akin to the way meat is grown in a lab: starter plant cells were placed in a growth medium, and then engineers added different hormones and compounds to “tune” the final structure created.

While still very early on, the results from MIT and continued research could have a potential impact on agriculture and the way food is produced. Just as lab-grown meat looks to create actual meat without the environmental strains of raising animals, lab-grown plants could be raised anywhere at anytime, and require less land and fewer inputs.

This new research is actually coming out at a fortuitous time in the agriculture industry. Indoor farms, or controlled ag facilities, are popping up across the country, changing the way our produce is grown. For instance, the first tomatoes grown in AppHarvest’s 60-acre indoor farm in Kentucky hit store shelves this week. The facility is projected to grow 45 million pounds of tomatoes every year.

What if, instead of just controlling the growing conditions of a plant, they could also control the “manufacturing” of the plant as well, reducing the growth time, or developing different nutritional strains on the cellular level. Those controlled ag companies could truly “control” the entire process of growing food from the ground up.

That is still a ways off, but as we’ve seen with cultured meat, innovation in lab-grown food happens quickly.

From the Lab: This Smart Fabric Can Identify Foods You Place on It

Researchers at Dartmouth College, Wuhan University, Southeast University, and Microsoft Research have developed a fabric that can identify what foods and other types of objects placed on it (hat tip to Engadget).

Dubbed Capacitivo, the technology attaches a grid of electrodes to a textile. By applying an electric field to the fabric and some machine learning, objects placed on it can be identified by measuring any shift in capacitance.

The technology can detect different types of food, even when those items are inside containers like water glasses and bowls. According to the paper, the tech also has an average accuracy of 90.71 percent.

You might be thinking, “Why would I need my tablecloth to tell me what’s on it, I can see whatever I put on it.” Well, according to the paper, the readings from the fabric could be integrated with other kitchen and cooking apps. For example, you could place a bunch of fruits on a table and based on that have a smoothie recipe suggested to you. When you eat dinner, your meal could automatically be uploaded to a diet tracking app. Or when making a meal, it could provide some form of guided cooking by telling you which ingredients to add and when.

Capacitivo: Contact-Based Object Recognition on Interactive Fabrics using Capacitive Sensing

The technology isn’t perfect. It has a hard time with metallic objects, and researchers said it isn’t very good at identifying specific liquids (e.g. distinguishing a beer from a Coke). But, this is a fist step that it still very much in the lab. With a little imagination, it’s not hard to see how a smart surface like this could be integrated to talk with your appliances to create an even more connected kitchen.

As Menus Move to Mobile Phones, Research Shows AR Could Drive More Sales

Among the countless ways COVID is altering the meal journey is the humble menu. Gone are the germy, reusable laminated menus of the past, and while single-use paper menus are a cheap stopgap, the whole experience will move to our mobile phones.

There’s a problem with ordering through mobile menus, though: they aren’t very enticing. Unless you’re familiar with the restaurant you’re ordering from, you’re scrolling and swiping through a lengthy list of tiny 2D thumbnail images to find what you want.

But new research out of Oxford University shows that augmented reality (AR) could be the way to create appetizing menus on your mobile phone. Oxford’s study, conducted in Oxford, England last year in partnership with the AR company Qreal, a subsidiary of The Glimpse Group, gave some participants traditional menus and others AR-capable menus that presented the virtual food as it would look right in front of them on the table.

Highlights from the study, which were emailed to The Spoon, found that “Participants were significantly more likely to order a dessert if they viewed options in the AR menu (41.2%) versus the control menu (18%).” This was across age groups and sexes, as well as across familiarity with AR, so it wasn’t just tech-savvy folk indulging in a shiny new toy.

Not only that, but participants in the study using the AR menu also “spent significantly more on dessert than those in the control condition, $2.93 versus $1.38 (increase of 112%)”

As Mike Cadoux, General Manager of Qreal, summed it up with me over the phone last week, the addition of AR plays into the old adage that you “eat with your eyes first.”

“It’s like a test drive for a car,” said Cadoux, “Same way when you buy food, you want to think about what it’s like to eat it.”

If the results of this study had been released even six months ago, it probably would have been viewed as more of an interesting idea. A nice-to-have kind of thing, but definitely a can kicked down the road in favor of something more pressing.

The coronavirus, however, could accelerate AR’s adoption in the restaurant industry. First, as noted, even if you can (legally and emotionally) to sit and dine in a restaurant, the menu is moving towards mobile, so restaurants need to rethink their digital strategy and how they present their food to customers to begin with.

But more pressing is the fact that the restaurant business was already moving towards off-premises eating before the pandemic and now relies on delivery and takeout to stay alive. This, in turn means that more people will be selecting their meals from the comfort of their couch via mobile phone.

“Instead of a thumbnail of a picture,” Cadoux said, “You can view it in 3D and move it to an AR experience.” AR gives customers a better sense of what the food will look like, from all angles, when it’s on their own plates on and tables.

In addition to restaurants, third-party delivery services, with their marketplaces and massive audiences, should also be looking closely at providing an AR option.

There are the economics of a shift to an AR menu for any restaurant of delivery service to consider. But thanks to Apple and Google, AR technology is easier than ever to implement. And while the Oxford study doesn’t prove outright that implementing AR menus will guarantee increased sales, the study is a nice data point that seems to indicate it’s worth at least experimenting with it.

Researchers Develop Coating to Prevent the Spread of Foodborne Illnesses on Surfaces

One of the reasons I’ve reduced my meat consumption lately is hygiene. Opening, preparing or handling raw chicken or pork sends me on a frantic tizzy of spraying down every surface in my kitchen with Lysol.

New research findings out of the University of Missouri this month could eventually ensure that some of the surfaces in my kitchen are built to help prevent the spread of foodborne pathogens like E. coli and salmonella.

The study was conducted by Eduardo Torres Dominguez, a chemical engineering doctoral student, with guidance from Professors Heather K. Hunt and Azlin Mustapha. Together they developed a coating made from titanium dioxide, which, when applied to stainless steel and exposed to UV light, is highly effective at killing organisms like bacteria (more than UV light on a regular stainless steel surface). Given that, places like food processing facilities and commercial kitchens could use countertops, cutting boards and even knives made from this coated stainless steel to help deter the spread of harmful bacteria.

This is especially true for the overall sanitary conditions of surfaces found in food processing and preparation facilities. A counter might not get cleaned properly every time on every square inch of its surface, allowing a pathogenic biofilm to form. Having a surface with this titanium oxide coating could help create an overall less hospitable place for bacteria to multiply.

The results of this research are still very early on, and while the material has survived an autoclave, it hasn’t gone through rigorous testing over a prolonged period of time, and there are still questions to answer. For example, researchers don’t know yet how long the coating would last when scrubbed every day for year.

“It’s incredibly stable material,” Prof. Hunt told me by phone last week, “It’s Chemically and thermally stable,” so it won’t break down if you use bleach on it or heat it.

“Titanium dioxide is a food grade material,” Prof. Mustapha said. That way, even if the coating came off, it wouldn’t be harmful if ingested the way something like silver is.

With the COVID-19 pandemic raging across the world, there is a renewed emphasis on sanitation and hygiene, especially as it relates to our food. This research from the Univ. of Missouri comes just months after PathSpot raised $6.5 million for its device that helps ensure food workers have washed their hands properly and removed pathogenic material.

Researchers still have a lot of work ahead of them before they are able to make any kind of leap from the lab to commercial applications, let alone consumer ones. But I, for one, am looking down the line and towards the day when (hopefully) my cutting boards can do some of the work in staying clean.

Robot Learns to Cook Omelets to Your Liking

Whether it’s burgers, tater tots or fried octopus balls, there are plenty of things robots can cook, and plenty of robots out there trying. But those robots are pretty rigid, following a specific set of criteria. The whole point is that they take over the repetitive task of cooking the same thing over and over and prepare it consistently.

But researchers at the University of Cambridge released a paper this week showing how they are teaching a robot to not just make an egg omelet for you, but also learn from how you like your eggs and adjust the cooking accordingly.

Improving robotic cooking using Batch Bayesian Optimization

IEE Spectrum has the full story (and an interview with the paper’s authors), and explains how the robot is able to do this customized cooking:

The researchers employed a solution to this problem called batch Bayesian optimization. The more traditional sequential Bayesian optimization would take a human’s score of each omelet and use it to modify the cooking process for the next omelet, but this approach doesn’t work well because the human feedback is, as the researchers tell us, “often ambiguous and relative.” By running the optimization process only after all scores have been collected, the robot is able to explore many more combinations of variables, yielding a substantially better end result. Instead of the omelets gradually getting better as you go, you’ll instead be tasting them randomly, but you’ll end up with a much tastier omelet.

In this case, the robot is able to adjust a number of different variables such as the amount of salt/pepper, whisking time and cook time.

Adding this type of customization to a robot’s repertoire and being able to apply it to more kinds of food could help automated cooking move from the more mass, industrial-sized food prep of fast food and more into personal cooking. Having your own robo-chef that can cook eggs just as you like them while you get ready in the morning (or have dinner waiting for you when you get home), is an idea that would be welcome in a lot of homes.

Gallup: Curbside Pickup and Restaurant Takeout Show Double Digit Growth During Pandemic

A new survey from Gallup released today shows that more Americans have adopted low-contact methods of getting their food since the COVID-19 pandemic began. The survey found that 44 percent of U.S. adults picked up takeout from a restaurant in May (up from 26 percent at the end of March), and 36 percent used curbside pickup from a store (up from 19 percent in March).

While your first reaction to this news might be “Duh, we were on lockdown,” you’re not wrong. I mean, restaurants across the country had to close their dine-in service, so the only options were takeout and delivery. The Gallup survey is worth pointing out because data is better than anecdotes, and this study adds to a growing body of market research around our pandemic behaviors.

And sure, stats on increased restaurant takeout might not be too surprising, and the growth for curbside pickup is and will something to keep an eye on. Almost double the number of people are doing curbside pickup now since the beginning of the pandemic. And while Gallup’s poll only breaks out curbside pickup “at a store,” and not specifically a grocery store, the survey’s findings are in-line with other recent research on the growth of online grocery shopping.

A Brick Meets Click survey from earlier this month reported that online grocery sales hit $5.3 billion in April, with 40 million people shopping for groceries online. A Coresight survey also from this month predicted that online grocery shopping will grow by 40 percent this year to hit $30 billion in food and beverage sales.

While takeout and pickup have seen big increases over the past couple of months, delivery hasn’t seen a similar spike. According to that same Gallup survey, 23 percent of respondents had food or pizza delivered from a restaurant in May (up from 13 percent in March), and 14 percent had groceries delivered (up from 11 percent in March).

The bigger question looming over all of this data, of course, is how many of these behaviors will become permanent. As states around the country start to relax their shelter in place orders, we’ll have to see if people revert to the pre-pandemic patterns or have adopted totally new ones.

Meet Spoon Plus, Our New Deep Dive Insights & Virtual Events Membership Program

When we launched the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2015, an event all about the rethinking of cooking and our kitchens, we soon realized innovation was happening everywhere across the food system: at the farm, in our favorite restaurants, at the corner grocery store and, yes, in our kitchens.

It felt necessary, almost urgent, to tell these stories. After all, I’d spent a good chunk of the decade prior working for one of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech blogs, where I discovered how crucial it is to nascent markets to find those betting big on turning their world-changing ideas into a changed world. Back then it was technologies like cloud computing and IoT upending established industries like digital media and communication, but it didn’t take me long to realize the reinvention of the food system would be an even bigger deal.

After all, everyone eats, right?

So we started The Spoon in 2016 because we had this idea that we would tell the stories of a new generation of innovators working to reinvent the food system. Now, almost four thousand stories later, we are more convinced than ever about the impact of innovation on food.

Which is why we created Spoon Plus.

What’s Spoon Plus? In short, it’s our paid membership community where we’ll be bringing you deep dive insights in the form of research reports, long-form conversations with innovators, and exclusive online events to help you better understand the world of food tech and food innovation.

We’ll have new content every week, and to start we’ve got a great report from our own Catherine Lamb analyzing the emerging market for air protein. We also have a new report by me analyzing the survey results of food-industry executives about the impact of COVID-19 and their go-forward plans for the rest of 2020.

That’s not all. Early next week, I’ll publish my first weekly intelligence brief looking at COVID-19 disruption on new product launches in the kitchen and housewares space. After that, our editor-in-chief Chris Albrecht will soon have a report on the emerging market for next-generation food vending machines, and our restaurant tech expert, Jenn Marston, will have a strategy guide for cloud kitchens in the post-COVID world.

As part of Spoon Plus, we’ll also have deep dive conversations and interviews with industry executives like this one with Chris Young, the coauthor of Modernist Cuisine and founder of ChefSteps, who opened up to me recently about what happened with the company he founded and where he thinks the next big opportunities are in the world of food.

As part of our launch of Spoon Plus, we’re also announcing that Smart Kitchen Summit 2020 is going virtual, and that every Spoon Plus annual membership will include a ticket to SKS 2020. Our belief is that our events and online content have a symbiotic relationship, where our community engages with the same innovators we are writing about and where we often find the next big story at The Spoon. As we go deeper with Spoon Plus, we want our SKS community to be a part of that.

Of course, part of the reason for going virtual with our flagship event is we now live in a world where in-person events that thrive on a global mix of interesting people are going to be difficult, if not impossible, for the next 1-2 years. That said, we’re really excited about the SKS reaching even more people. We’ve been working hard at building our virtual event capabilities (we had a virtual COVID-19 food summit last month with over 1500 attendees), and are becoming more excited by the day about the possibilities of SKS 2020 and other exclusive virtual events through Spoon Plus.

So if you want to go deeper with us through research and reports, if you want to attend SKS 2020, if you want to support The Spoon as we grow, subscribe to Spoon Plus. As a way to help you get started, we’re offering Spoon Plus annual memberships for 40% off for the next ten days only. This one-time discount includes our company plans (that’s right – you can get Spoon Plus for your entire team). Just use the discount code LAUNCH when you are checking out and Memberful (the technology powering our membership offering) will deduct the amount from the total.

And of course, if you want to try out Spoon Plus for a month, you can subscribe to our monthly plan (monthly plans do not include a ticket to SKS). We also offer substantial discounts for students and for anyone who is in the midst of job transition.

If you’d like to learn more about those, just drop us an line.

For those of you wondering about The Spoon’s free coverage, don’t worry. We’re more committed than ever to bringing you the same daily news and analysis of those changing the food system for free on our main site. Spoon Plus is for those who, like us, also want to go deeper and access content that connects the dots from our daily reporting.

Thanks for your support. We look forward to building Spoon Plus together as we look to better understand and engage in the future of food.

Survey: Spurred by COVID-19, Online Grocery to Grow by 40 Percent in 2020, Hit $38B in Sales

It seems obvious that mandated sheltering in place because of a global pandemic has been a big driver of online grocery sales. But thanks to a new survey from Coresight Research, we now have some numbers to back that obvious assertion up, and show how big grocery e-commerce is getting.

In its US Online Grocery Survey 2020 (subscription required), Coresight predicted that the online grocery sector will grow by roughly 40 percent this year. The report states “That would equate to almost $38 billion of online food and beverage sales in 2020, or around 3.5% of the total market.” That’s up from 2.6 percent in 2019.

As you can probably guess, the coronavirus has spurred this surge in e-commerce. Coresight’s survey found that 49 percent of respondents said they started buying or were buying more groceries online because of the outbreak. It should be noted that this survey was conducted in mid-March, relatively early on in the mandated shelter in place orders. Those numbers may have actually gone up in April as the virus continued to spread.

In addition to more people buying groceries online, people are buying more types of items (produce, meat, alcohol) online. Coresight found that people are buying across an average of five different grocery categories online, up from 4.4 categories last year. Coresight says this indicates people aren’t just buying one-offs, but doing full-basket shopping online.

And finally, it looks as though demand for online commerce could remain strong over the next year. Coresight found that while 52 percent of respondents said that they had bought online groceries in the past 12 months, 62.5 percent expect to do so in the next twelve months.

Coresight’s numbers add to a growing body of market research that illustrate just how online grocery shopping has accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this month, Brick Meets Click reported that grocery e-commerce sales hit $5.3 billion in April. NPD Group found that third-party grocery delivery sales jumped nearly 300 percent in April alone. And last month, a C+R Research study found that 60 percent of US shoppers were “fearful” of physically going into the grocery store.

Grocery stores have been considered essential since the start of this pandemic, so they have remained open the entire time (thank you, grocery store workers!). But even though some states are relaxing their stay at home restrictions, grocery stores are implementing new measures to help curb the spread of the virus. Going forward, grocery shopping isn’t going to be what it was just a few months ago. Plexiglass shields at checkout, fewer people in the stores, masks worn by employees and customers. The in-store experience may just make shopping at home online more attractive.

Technomic Survey: Three in Ten Consumers to Eat Out Less Amid COVID-19 Fears

Even as the outbreak of coronavirus/COVID-19 continues to evolve and grow, we still don’t have a clear idea of exactly how much it will fundamentally change our entrenched, traditional behaviors. Are handshakes a thing of the past? Is working from home the new normal? Will we travel less for both work and fun?

While we can only wait to discover the answers to those bigger questions, a whitepaper from Technomic this week outlines some of the more immediate ways COVID-19 is impacting consumer behavior as it relates to how we get our food.

Technomic surveyed 1,000 consumers between Feb. 28 and March 2 and found “more than three in 10 consumers say they plan on leaving the house less often, not go to restaurants as often or not order food or beverages at away-from-home venues as often.” Additionally, of those refraining to eat out, “31 percent say that decreased frequency will last for between one and three months.”

Image via Technomic.

This isn’t great news for full-service restaurants, which are already having to work harder to attract foot traffic as off-premises grows more and more popular.

You might think this decrease in on-premise eating would translate into a wave of delivery orders from restaurants, but Technomic found that of people eating out less, only 13 percent think they will order more restaurant delivery because of the outbreak.

Technomic is quick to point out that there are still a lot of unknowns when it comes to the virus’ spread, so it’s too soon to tell exactly what its full impact will be. However, the survey does point out a couple of areas where the food industry could face the biggest impacts.

On the negative side, as alluded to earlier, Technomic says on-premise dining at restaurants could face the biggest downturn as people hole up at home and avoid crowds.

And while it’s weird to think of an “upside” to a global pandemic, Technomic rightly points that that if people do refrain from sitting in a restaurant to eat, drive-thrus and delivery restaurants (think: pizza) could become more popular.

Additionally, supermarkets, which have already seen a surge in panic shopping, could also see their foodservice items benefit as people grab meals while grocery shopping.

And while they don’t mention it specifically, an increase in food delivery could bring with it a boom in ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants as restaurant brands look to pare down their physical footprint and infrastructure costs.

We’ve been chronicling how COVID-19’s spread is already altering how the food industry does business — whether it’s food conferences being canceled, reducing human-to-human contact with delivery, using robots to deliver food, or Kickstarter projects being delayed.

But when it comes to this outbreak, there’s not a whole lot we can do but wait (and wash our hands!). Technomic’s survey certainly won’t be the last word as this crisis evolves, but at least it provides some numbers to help businesses prepare.