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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Welp. Robots Have Knives Now, and Know How to Use Them (to Slice Onions)

Well, fellow humans, we had a good run, but our time is over. Robots have their knives out — literally — and know how to use them.

Terminator-esque teasing aside, IEEE Spectrum has a video roundup of some of cutting-edge (sorry) robotics research being done right now. Included among the videos is “Robotic Cutting: Mechanics and Control of Knife Motion,” by Xiaoqian Mu, Yuechuan Xue, and Yan-Bin Jia from Iowa State University, in Ames, Iowa, USA.

You may think that having a robot to slice an onion mainly entails a big mechanical arm slamming a knife down, but you’d be wrong. The researchers created a program that combines and coordinates pressing, pushing and slicing motions. From the research paper’s Introduction:

Cutting skills such as chop, slice, and dice are mostly beyond the reach of today’s robots. Technical challenges come not just from manipulation of soft and irregularly-shaped objects, but more from doing so while fracture is happening. The latter requires planning and force control based on reliable modeling of an object’s deformation and fracture as it is being cut. The knife’s movement needs to be adjusted to progress in terms of material fracture. Its trajectory may need to be replanned in the case of an unforeseeable situation (e.g., appearance of a bone).

Robotic Cutting: Mechanics and Control of Knife Motion

As you can see from the video, this particular robot won’t be wowing crowds at a Benihana anytime soon, but it shows once again that robots are getting more proficient at higher-skilled tasks. Automation is coming for food sector jobs, and while we think of them right now in terms of flipping burgers and bussing tables, robots will be automating more and more tasks in restaurants, like prepping vegetables.

Dishcraft, for example, is still pretty tight lipped around what it’s working on, but the company has talked about building robots to do specific tasks in restaurant kitchens like prep work. Miso Robotics’ Flippy was created in part to take over dangerous tasks like working the grill and deep fryer in the kitchen, and the company has already talked about Flippy eventually chopping vegetables.

While there are still many issues to work through with the rise of robots, having them handle knives in the kitchen (and saving countless fingertips from lacerations) is probably not such a bad thing.

NPD: Frozen Food Sales are Up (Thanks, Millennials!)

Just about this time last year we asked the question “Are We Entering a Frozen Food Renaissance?” because a wave of startups were transforming frozen foods from just bags of peas and TV dinners into something more high-end and healthy.

Looks like people are paying attention to this renaissance and ponying up for frozen food. According to a recent study from NPD, frozen foods were a part of “9.8 billion eating occasions in home, up 2 percent from a decade ago.” Two percent may not sound like much over ten years, but as NPD points out, that translates into billions of meals, and we would like to point out that can mean billions of dollars.

And in a welcome turn of events, frozen foods appear to be something millennials are not killing off, but rather, reviving. From the NPD press release:

“Demographic shifts, like Millennials moving into the busiest times of their lives juggling spouses, kids, and a career, are fueling a greater need for the convenience that frozen foods offer,” says David Portalatin, NPD Food Industry Advisor and author of Eating Patterns in America. “Manufacturers are also doing their part in increasing interest in frozen foods by innovating around contemporary food values and emerging flavor trends to provide convenience.”

We’ve seen that innovation in frozen food firsthand from companies like Mealhero, which ships pre-packaged frozen food and connected steam cooker to automatically prepare them. Buttermilk sends pre-made Indian food that can be frozen and reheated in the microwave. Daily Harvest goes after millennials directly with its delivery of frozen smoothies and bowls. And companies like Stouffers are creating entire frozen meal kits.

As NPD also points out, more than 80 percent of meals and eating happens in the home, and U.S. consumers are turning to things like frozen vegetables and chicken for cooking convenience at dinnertime. Breakfast is another growing category, thanks to things like frozen waffles and breakfast sandwiches.

With this growth, it looks like frozen food might be moving from a renaissance into a golden age.

NPD: 93 Million American Adults are Meal Kit Curious

The potential market for meal kits isn’t tapped out, as new research from NPD finds that 93 million adults in the U.S. still haven’t tried meal kits, but want to.

NPD said that the move from mail order to retail is attracting new customers, and the research firm lists three reasons why meal kits present a big opportunity:

  1. Users are highly satisfied with their meal kit purchases both online and in-store.
  2. Users are still experimenting with brands and formats, so their habits aren’t set yet.
  3. Meal kits can be more than just dinner, providing an opportunity for new categories and brands.

NPD also outlined who is buying meal kits:

Meal kit users are more likely to be Millennials, have households with kids, and higher incomes. Online and in-store meal kits appeal to similar demographic groups although in-store kits skew to households with children less than 13 years old and higher income levels.

NPD’s numbers mirror and reinforce a recent Nielsen survey that found that retail outlets have been the main source of growth for the meal kit industry, and that 23 percent of US households would consider purchasing a meal kit in the next six months. Nielsen also found that meal kits were being purchased by more affluent households.

All of this is to say that meal kits are–to paraphrase Monty Python–not dead yet, and in fact have the potential to be very much alive and thrive. The move into retail has been a shot in the arm for the meal kit sector and the shift is just getting underway. Kroger, which owns Home Chef, and Albertsons, which owns Plated, just started the nationwide rollout of meal kits in earnest last year.

With this much headroom to grow, we can expect to see more of a marketing push to parlay shoppers’ store loyalty into meal kit loyalty.

Nielsen: Move Into Retail Making Moola for Meal Kits

The move into retail has been a smart one for the meal kit industry, as the new sales channel helped drive meal kit growth in 2018, according to a report out this week from Nielsen (h/t Grocery Dive).

Overall, Nielsen found that meal kit users (both online and offline) have increased 36 percent throughout 2018 and that 14.3 million households purchased meal kits in the last six months of 2018 (up from 3.8 million household from the end of 2017). And Nielsen says there’s more room to grow, with 23 percent of American households saying they would consider purchasing a meal kit within the next six months.

Nielsen points out that the majority of meal kit sales still happened online in 2018, but growth came from in-store sales, which makes sense as meal kits made their debut in grocery aisles last year: Kroger purchased Home Chef, Albertsons rolled out Plated meal kits, and HelloFresh made a deal with Giant and Stop & Shop. Nielsen says that 187 new meal kit items were introduced at retail outlets last year, and that in-store meal kit sales generated $93 million over the course of 2018 with the number of in-store meal kit purchasers increasing by 2.2 million households in less than a year. This jump accounted for a 60 percent growth in meal kit users.

So who’s buying meal kits? In a blog post, Nielsen writes:

Overall, affluent consumers earning an income of more than $100k drove meal kit growth across online and in-store in 2018. Compared to 2017, these consumers increased their online meal kit purchases by 6 points and their in-store purchases by 9 points. Across both outlets, growth is also being led by consumers between the ages of 35-44, who showed a 4.3 point increase in meal kit purchases online and a 9.2 point increase in those bought in-store. Meanwhile, meal kit purchases from older consumers aged 45-54 declined 2.8 points online and 7 points in-store over the past year.

We are typically pretty bearish on the future of mail-order meal kits here at The Spoon. A lot of that sourness is driven by our own experiences with the product. Mail-order meal kits are expensive, they generate a lot of packaging waste, they are a lot of work to make, and because the ingredients are fresh, you pretty much have to make them as soon as they arrive (whether you still want that recipe or not) or else they spoil.

Meal kits in grocery stores, however, can still offer the same benefits of meal kits — pre-portioned fresh ingredients, introduction to new types of cuisine — but do it in a way that is more convenient and fits into a consumer’s existing daily flow.

And we’re really just at the beginning of what is possible for meal kits at retail as they only started rolling out last year. There is tons of head room for experimentation and innovation, whether that comes in the form of frozen foods, meal kits sold in new retail outlets like drug stores, offices, or even customized meal kits created in stores and brought out to you curbside so they can be made that night.

Study: Gen Z is All About Snack Portability, Restaurant Delivery

I’m at an age where I can recognize the things that are for me (khakis), and the things that aren’t (Snapchat, staying out past 10 p.m.). So I always appreciate market research studies that give me insight into what the younger generations are up to. A pair of reports out recently from NPD Group (h/t to The Food Institute Blog) shed some light on how Genz Z (the eldest of which will be 22 this year) are approaching their food choices.

In its “The Future of Snacking” report, NPD found that what Gen Z cares about most is portability. From the NPD press release: “… regardless of the brand, for Generation Z, if they can’t take a snack with them, it’s not really a snack.” NPD also said, “A large percentage of this generational group have been raised to put a greater emphasis on the quality of food, whether it’s clean, fresh, or nutritionally beneficial, as well as its flavor and function.”

With these data points in mind, it’s not hard to envision a growing market opportunity for upstart, upcycled snack companies like ReGrained, Render and Pulp Pantry, as these socially conscious startups tick off a lot of the boxes Gen Z are looking for.

The convenience Gen Z craves extends to their restaurant habits as well. According to NPD, Gen Zs made 14.6 billion restaurant visits in 2018 and now make up 10 percent all foodservice traffic. But they are also a generation raised on the internet and apps, so they are quite keen on ordering delivery from restaurants. In its Delivering Digital Convenience report, NPD found: “In the year ending December 2018, foodservice delivery orders by Gen Zs amounted to 552 million, just a million shy of Millennials’ delivery orders and only a portion of Gen Zs are old enough to order their own delivery.”

That last bit about age is important. Delivery already makes up 30 percent of the restaurant business. As more Gen Zs become old enough to order their own meals (and booze!), the convenience of delivery is only going to grow. This market lying in wait helps explain DoorDash’s $7.1 billion valuation and why we’ll need more robots and drones to help keep up with delivery demand.

Which is fine by me, as long as they don’t make any noise past 10 p.m.

Tech From MIT Uses RFID to Reveal Food Contamination

Given the job I have, my parents like to tell me about food tech-related news they come across. Last night they were trying to explain a story from CBS This Morning that aired yesterday, but they had trouble relaying it. “It’s a scanner, you use it at the market… something about e. coli and…”

Intrigued, I found the report they were talking about. It’s no wonder they couldn’t explain it: the story was vague and provided almost no details as to how the technology works. So, for my parents and anyone else who saw the CBS Story and wanted a little more information, here are some details.

The technology in question is RFIQ (radio frequency IQ). Here’s a brief explainer from the MIT RFIQ research page:

Our system leverages RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) stickers that are already attached to hundreds of billions objects. When an RFID powers up and transmits its signal, it interacts with material in its near vicinity (i.e., inside a container) even if it is not in direct contact with that container. This interaction is called “near-field coupling,” and it impacts the wireless signal transmitted by an RFID. Our system, RFIQ, extracts features from this signal and feeds it to a machine learning model that can classify and detect different types of adulterants in the container.

You can read the full RFIQ paper.

According to the research overview, the technology can detect fake alcohol (like if methanol is mixed into a drink) with 97 percent accuracy, and tainted baby formula with 96 percent accuracy. In the CBS story, MIT Assistant Professor, Fadel Adib said RFIQ could be used for a broader set of applications including finding lead in water or e. coli on lettuce.

The bones of RFIQ sound akin to hyperspectral imaging, which studies how light reflects off objects to assess freshness, quality and foreign objects. But companies like ImpactVision and P&P Optica, which use hyperspectral imaging, don’t tout the technology as a way to detect foodborne illnesses.

The drawback to the RFIQ technology as it is envisioned now, is that in order for it to work, each item has to have a RFID sticker on it, and the user would have to carry around a small device that would plug into their phone to scan each item. This seems cumbersome and a big ask for food producers and consumers alike.

I’m sure Mr. Fadel and his team have thought about this and way beyond what I’m pondering. There is probably a more industrial grade solution that can be implemented in bulk throughout the supply chain. The RFIQ technology is still five years out from reaching the market anyway, so who knows what breakthroughs and advancements the MIT team will make by then.

For now, I’m just happy that there are researchers going about solving the problem of food contamination from different angles, and I’m happy to help fill in the blanks of my parents’ news watching.

Good Food Institute Announces Winners of $3M Grant to Revolutionize Meat Alternatives

Back in September, GFI called for applicants for a $3 million grant to fund research into plant- and cell-based meat. Yesterday, the company named the 14 winning scientists, each of whom will receive up to $250,000 over the next two years to fund their investigations.

The chosen projects are pretty evenly divided between cell-based meat (six companies) and plant-based meat (eight companies). Some topics were broad, like how to scale up cell-based meat production, how to improve texture in plant-based meats. Others were quite specific, like a project exploring the potential of red seaweed as a meat substitute, or a Norwegian research center building out a “farmyard” of animal tissue for cell-based meat.

The most interesting part of the grant awards, however, is the purpose behind the grant itself. According to an email from GFI to The Spoon, the grant was created in order to establish “a base of scientific inquiry” in the meat alternative space. The email goes on to say that the science of plant-based and cell-based meat “skipped a step,” leaping immediately from idea to product in development by private companies. That means that there’s no scientific basis for the technology, so meat alternative companies end up doing duplicating a lot of scientific legwork.

Which is actually true. Many cell-based and plant-based companies are very protective of their technologies (the exception being Shojinmeat’s open source clean meat initiative), so any new company in the space basically has to start from scratch. That means a lot of trial and error, a lot of wasted money, and a slower route towards the end goal: making a product that tastes as good as — and costs less than — traditional meat.

But if the GFI’s chosen scientists can help establish some base framework for the technology used to create plant-based and cell-based meats, alterna-meat companies new and old could use it as a resource to optimize R&D and eventual product scaling. And with $250,000 in their coffers, hopefully the winning scientists will be able to do just that.

What’s Up Post-Doc? Researchers Use Carrots to Create a Fricken Laser

Carrots are no longer just the scourge of toddlers and fuel for Bugs Bunny. Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology – Madras (IIT-M) have used the vegetable to create a laser. That’s right, pew! pew!, a laser.

This gets a little (read: a lot) above my pay grade, but the New Indian Express reports that the IIT-M researchers have used carrots cooked in alcohol as an eco-friendly lasing material. The discovery came about when Professor C Vijayan, Assistant Professor Sivarama Krishnan, and PhD researcher Venkata Siva Gummaluri were having after-work hours fun “pumping light” through a variety of organic materials.

What made carrots work well was the carotenoids, which are an optically active bio-pigment found in the vegetable. The cellulose fibers in carrots were also beneficial for optical amplification and photo scattering and other stuff that I, a non-physicist, do not fully understand, but that’s less important because it’s carrots creating lasers.

Before you think this is just a goofy discovery, the New Indian Express explains why this orange-hued breakthrough could be important:

The laser generated through this technique, has immense potential in the field of bio-imaging. Currently, the most common lasing materials, such as Indium-Gallium-Arsenic and Gallium-Nitrates, are manufactured using toxic chemical processes which are harmful to the environment.

In other words, as the researchers point out, this green (err, orange) lasing material is safe to handle and can even be eaten after a day of experiments. What’s up doc, indeed.

Brookings: Food Service Jobs for Humans in Jeopardy as Automation Takes Hold

The Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program released a new report yesterday on the future and impact of automation on the U.S. workforce. Predictably, food service jobs do not fare well.

Automation and Artificial Intelligence: How machines are affecting people and places forecasts automation trends across industries through 2030. From that report:

Approximately 25 percent of U.S. employment (36 million jobs in 2016) will face high exposure to automation in the coming decades (with greater than 70 percent of current task content at risk of substitution).

Among the industries with the greatest share of tasks susceptible to automation, food service comes in second highest, behind production.

That food service is so greatly impacted by automation is not that surprising. The Brookings’ study follows a report last year from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that predicted 14 percent of jobs worldwide were “highly automatable,” including food services.

But you also don’t need a fancy research paper to see the automation happening across the food service industry right before our eyes: Bear Robotics has Penny bussing tables, Flippy is grilling burgers, Cafe X is slinging lattes, Spyce is almost entirely robot run. And that’s just here in the U.S.

Definitely check out Brookings’ full report for more details on how automation will impact minorities in particular, as well as different states across the country.

Thankfully, the Brookings report doesn’t just dish out dire predictions, it also makes suggestions for how to deal with all of those soon-to-be displaced workers. Brookings suggests that governments should lean into this coming wave of automation, writing:

One response to the trends detailed here might seem to be to curb technology-driven change. Leaders should resist this impulse. Instead, while committing to a just and beneficial transition, they should embrace tech and indeed automation to generate the economic productivity needed to increase both living standards and the demand for labor in non-automated tasks. By embracing technology-based growth, the nation and its regions will have the best shot at ensuring that there are enough jobs

To be sure, automation is not uniformly bad. Robots can perform manual, repetitive tasks with greater speed and precision than a human. They are don’t get injured doing more dangerous work like operating a hot oven or deep fryer. Robots doing those tasks also free up humans for higher-skill and more customer-facing work.

Robots are coming, the process now will be managing the transition throughout the food service industry from our current, human-centric workforce to an automated one.

To help displaced workers and society at large with this impending transition, Brookings says we should adopt a “Universal Adjustment Benefit.” This benefit would include career counseling, retraining, and “robust income support.”

But I highly doubt our current political leaders are equipped and empathetic enough to take these suggestions seriously, or even recognize the issues related to automation and worker displacement already happening.

We at The Spoon, however, are encouraging this exact type of conversation and trying to help those up and down the food stack deal with automation. The ethics surrounding robots and automation in the food industry is one of the topics we’ll have experts chatting about at our Articulate conference in San Francisco on April 16th. You should join us there and share your thoughts, and more importantly, solutions.

Study: Carbon Footprint Labeling Impacts Shopper Behavior

The COP24 United Nations Climate Change Conference wrapped up last week, and while the outcome of the conference was generally positive, the world is still facing an increasingly dire future for our planet.

One change people can make to help save the world is altering what they eat. Transitioning away from meat to a more plant-based diet can help reduce the global greenhouse emissions that come from food production. And a new study from the University of Technology Sydney and Duke University shows that simply labeling food with its carbon footprint may be a way to get people to eat less meat.

It turns out, many people don’t understand the carbon consequences of their food choices, and the study found that they greatly underestimate the carbon footprint of the foods they eat.

“With an appliance such as a heater you can feel the energy used and see an electricity bill at the end of the month, so the impact is quite salient, whereas the impact of food production is largely invisible,” said the study’s lead author Dr. Adrian Camilleri in a statement.

So the study created a carbon footprint labeling system for food similar to the five star energy ratings given to appliances. From the press release announcing the study’s findings:

They presented 120 participants with a choice of soups to buy. When the soups had a carbon footprint label, participants bought fewer beef soups and more vegetable soups than when there was no label provided.

The research suggests that the introduction of carbon footprint labels on food items could be a simple intervention to increase understanding of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions from food production, and thus reduce environmental impacts.

While not comprehensive, this study fits in with previous market research that shows grocery shoppers today want more information about the products they buy. Millennials in particular care about more social issues like animal welfare, fair trade, and, it would stand to reason, environmental impact.

If carbon footprint labeling were to catch on, this would presumably be a boon to alternative or “fake” meat companies like Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods and Seattle Food Tech, which are creating plant-based simulacra of our favorite meats. But more importantly, it looks like a small thing like a food label could have a big impact on our planet.

Survey: Half of U.S. Adults Cool with Robots Making their Food

Robots are playing an increasingly bigger role in what we eat, and for half of the people in a recent survey from Study.com, that’s just fine.

Study.com conducted an online survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 60+ asking them whether they’d trust an artificially intelligent (AI) powered robot to conduct a number of different tasks.

The robotic tasks presented ranged from delivering packages and cleaning your house (73 percent said yes to those) all the way to more personal scenarios such as defending you in court (only 14 percent would) or picking your spouse (a mere 8 percent said yes).

Robots “Preparing your food” came in at a 50/50 split, which, to be fair is a lot more than the number of people who would let a robot cut their hair (20 percent). As with a lot of surveys and studies, this information should be taken with a grain of salt.

First, an online survey would lean towards people who are more tech savvy to begin with. Second, and more important, “preparing your food” is vague. Is that making your food in a restaurant, or in your home? However you envision the scenario would probably impact what answer you give.

Robots are on the rise in fast restaurant experiences, where their consistency and inability to get tired make them ideal for cranking out food all day. There’s Spyce in Boston, which just raised $21 million to expand its robot restaurant experience. Cafe X just raised $12 million for its robot-baristas-in-a-box. Flippy spent the summer frying up ten thousand pounds of chicken tenders and tater tots. Food robots are popping up around the world like Alibaba’s Robot.he restaurant in Shanghai, MontyCafe in Russia and Ekim Pizza in France.

It’s also worth pointing out that different people may consider different things robots inside their own homes. The Moley probably most closely resembles what people would consider a kitchen robot, with its futuristic arms and hands chopping and stirring. But Zimplistic makes the Rotimatic, which automatically makes flatbreads — is that considered a robot in this scenario? My June automatically cooks meals using AI without much effort or input from me. Is that a robot?

Regardless of any shortcomings in this survey, it’s important to start asking these questions. As robots and automation displace millions of workers around the globe, we will need to be in a constant dialogue about them and our relationship with food.