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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

supply chain

HWY Haul Brings AI to Automate Fresh Produce Freight and Fight Food Waste

Unless you see one parked outside your grocery store, you probably don’t think too much about the freight trucks that are so vital to getting food onto store shelves. Today, trucking freight, especially produce and fresh foods, from the farm to the store is a pretty complicated and manual process. And HWY Haul wants to change that process with automation and artificial intelligence.

As Syed Aman, cofounder and CEO of HWY Haul explained to me by phone this week, current methods for scheduling shipments require a lot of phone calls and paperwork. Farms need to call brokers to get a trucker, multiple calls must be made to track a load en route, drivers need to stop for temperature checks to make sure produce is kept cold, and once that produce arrives at the store, it can take weeks for a trucker to get paid.

HWY Haul promises to automate this process with what it calls a “managed marketplace.” The company’s cloud-based platform allows farms (or stores or other suppliers) to schedule a vetted driver, determine the cost for each trip, monitor their route in real-time, and keep constant temperature checks (to ensure the food stays cold). Once delivery is made, HWY Haul processes the payment automatically.

In addition to potentially bringing more efficiency to the business of trucking fresh food across the country, Aman said HWY Haul can also help reduce food waste by reducing load rejections. When a load is rejected by the store, that food can wind up in a dumpster. By helping bring loads in on time and always at the correct temperature, Aman said that using HWY Haul can result in fewer of these wasteful rejections.

HWY Haul is actually among a crop of startups working at different points along the supply chain to bring more automation and precision while fighting food waste. AgShift uses computer vision to help establish objective prices for food. Varcode creates blockchain-based thermal stickers to ensure food is kept at the right temperature throughout the cold chain. And Silo automates operations around buying and selling food as well as forecasting supply and demand.

Based in Santa Clara, Calif., HWY Haul has raised an undisclosed Seed round of funding. The company makes its money by charging the shipper a fee per route booked.

Agtech Platform Silo Raises $9M to Fight Food Waste in the Supply Chain

San Francisco-based Silo Technologies announced today it has raised $9 million for its cloud-based platform aimed at cutting down on food waste in the U.S. food supply chain. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from existing investors Capital and Haystack Ventures.

Silo (not to be confused with smart-storage maker Silo) wants to minimize food waste in the supply chain by automating operations within it, including buying and selling food, forecasting supply and demand, and managing relationships between the different players in the chain. The software, which is available to food growers, buyers, distributors, and sellers, also digitizes tasks like accounting, inventory management, and reporting, making them quicker and more accurate tasks.

The company said in today’s press release that while food waste happens across the food system, it’s “particularly heavy in production and distribution.” Examples of this include products that spoil in production process because of inadequate storage and transport and projects that are rejected by buyers. While food loss of this kind is less widespread in the U.S. compared to developing nations, it nonetheless happens with plenty of regularity. 

Given that it’s a global, multibillion problem, food waste in general has seen plenty of new investments and developments of late as the issue becomes more urgent for companies, governments, and consumers alike. Clean Crop Technologies nabbed $2.75 million in June of this year, while major CPGs including Walmart and Tesco recently joined the Consumer Goods Forum’s Food Waste Coalition. And as we outline in a recent Spoon Plus report, a sizable number of companies are coming to market with products and appliances that fight food waste in the consumer home. 

Silo says it will use the new funds to expand nationwide, opening offices in both Los Angeles and New York City. It will also build out its engineering staff and develop tools to better streamline logistics and financial tasks in the food supply chain. 

Afresh Adds $12M in Funding for its AI Approach to Fresh Food Stocking at Grocery

Afresh, a startup that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help grocery retailers manage fresh food inventories, announced today that it has raised a $12 million follow-on to its Series A round of funding. The round was led by returning investor Innovation Endeavors with participation from Food Retail Ventures, Maersk Growth, Impact Engine, Better Food Ventures and existing investor Baseline Ventures. This brings the total amount raised by Afresh to $20 million.

A grocery store’s fresh food sections (think: produce, bread etc.) are trickier to manage than the aisles of CPG products as fresh foods have a limited shelf life and expire. The goal is to keep a store stocked with enough product that they don’t run out, but not so much that there is a lot that goes to waste.

That’s where Afresh says its technology can help out. As we wrote previously:

Afresh’s technology uses machine learning to analyze customer data and forecast product demand. Retail managers can then use the Afresh software to order the exact amount of fresh food that they’ll need — no more, no less.

Of course, maintaining fresh food stocks in-store has only gotten trickier since COVID-19 hit in full force. When the pandemic first started here in the U.S., panic buying translated into lots of empty store shelves. Since then buying habits have shifted too, with record numbers of people buying groceries online. All of these new buying patterns need to be taken into account as we adjust to this current pandemic and brace for any resurgences of the virus.

Afresh isn’t alone in its mission to cut down on food waste and help grocery retailers better manage their inventories. Crisp uses data and AI to offer a similar service to grocers. And online grocer Farmstead is built around algorithms that help it predict and better manage its inventory.

Though the world seems to be in a continuous state of unpredictable flux, we all still need to eat. Hopefully technology like Afresh’s can help mitigate any future shocks to the food system.

Intello Labs Raises $5.9M for its AI-Based Food Grading

Intello Labs, which uses a combination of computer vision and artificial intelligence to grade food quality along the supply chain, announced today that it has raised a $5.9 million Series A. Saama Capital led the round with participation from global agritech funds GROW (Singapore) and SVG Ventures THRIVE (USA), and existing investors Omnivore and Nexus Venture Partners. This brings the total amount raised by Intello to $8.3 million.

Based in Gurgaon, India, Intello Labs offers a suite of computer vision products and cloud-based AI that can be used by farmers, food packers, exporters and retailers to assess the quality of fruits and vegetables. The goal is to bring transparency and objectivity to the food buying and selling business and establish fair prices throughout the supply chain. By having AI judge food grades, you eliminate haggling between biased people over what a particular bushel of apples is worth, for example.

When we first wrote about the company in 2018, it was focused on rural farmers and only used smartphone cameras to capture images of food. Finding that smaller farmers were more apprehensive about working with technology, Intello shifted to work with bigger, more corporate clients last year.

The company offers a number of different assessment tools:

  • Intello Track uses smartphone cameras to capture images of produce, which are analyzed by Intello’s cloud to assess size, color, and defects before returning a food grade.
  • Intello Sort is a machine that separates produce based on quality.
  • Intello Pack can be used to monitor produce as it is being packed for shipment
  • Intello Deep is a handheld scanner that detects Brix , pH , TSS, dry matter, moisture, pesticide residue

Intello isn’t the only company using AI and computer vision to assist with the assessment of fresh fruits and vegetables. AgShift offers similar services and launched its Hydra scanning system for bulk inspections last year.

Quickly and fairly assessing food quality has taken on greater importance during this time of global pandemic. Mass restaurant closings and general upheaval revealed the weaknesses and inequalities in our food supply chain with farmers throwing out tons of food. Tools like Intello Labs’ can bring efficiency to the food buying process and help keep the world fed.

Cool Idea: Varcode Uses Blockchain and Barcodes to Monitor the Food Supply Cold Chain

We often talk about the supply chain when it comes to groceries, but equally as important is the subset known as the cold chain. The cold chain is pretty much what it sounds like: the system in place to ensure food is kept at its proper temperature so it doesn’t spoil as it travels from farm to processing facility to your grocery store.

The problem though, is that food doesn’t always stay cold in the cold chain, whether through refrigeration breaking down or handlers being inattentive. Distributors and buyers want to make sure the food they purchase has stayed at the proper temperature, but it’s hard for them to know it’s been kept cold prior to taking ownership.

That type of automatic auditing is where Varcode comes in. Varcode creates barcode stickers that have a built-in temperature sensors that continuously keep track of the ambient temperature those goods are stored in. The stickers automatically record if there are variations in temperatures outside a certain range (e.g., too warm). When the barcode is scanned that data is transmitted to the cloud where it is kept as a permanent blockchain-enabled record in a database.

Varcodes can be scanned with a regular handheld scanner or a mobile phone, and each link (distributor, transporation, etc.) in the cold chain scans the Varcode when they receive a box and when they hand it off. Each tag is uniquely serialized, with a unique record created for each tag in Varcode’s cloud using the IBM Food Trust Blockchain. This then provides an audit trail that shows what temperature food was kept at at each step along the way. If food gets too warm at any point, Varcode’s system will show exactly when it happened.

It’s costs $2 per tag for the Varcode system, which includes access to the software and cloud. There are a number of preset tags for food like seafood and berries, or customers can create their own customized tags around more specific temperature criteria.

Monitoring food as it travels through the supply chain is becoming more of a focus for startups looking to fight food waste. Other players include Telesense, which acquired Webstech earlier this year. Both of those companies make sensors that monitor the temperature and humidity of grains in storage.

Based in Chicago, Varcode is privately funded and is currently running a number of pilots with different food companies like premium chocolate and ice cream makers. As the company looks to expand, we’ll see if their solution is cool enough to catch on and help prevent food waste.

“Inspecto” Gadget Promises Real-Time Contaminant Testing in Food Supply Chain

Whether or not you care that your food is organic, locally sourced or non-GMO, one thing I think we can all agree on is that we’d like our food free of harmful chemical contaminants. But testing food for such contaminants requires samples to be sent to a lab, which is a time-consuming and expensive process.

Inspecto is looking to simplify and speed up this process for food producers and manufacturers with its device dubbed, appropriately, Inspecto. Using the small appliance, samples of food can be loaded into a special Inspecto capsule on-site, whether that’s at a farm or further along the supply chain. The capsule is inserted into the machine, which uses Raman Spectroscopy to analyze it for contaminants.

Don’t know what Raman Spectroscopy is? We didn’t either, here’s a quick introduction from Wikipedia:

Raman spectroscopy (/ˈrɑːmən/); named after Indian physicist Sir C. V. Raman) is a spectroscopic technique used to observe vibrational, rotational, and other low-frequency modes in a system.[1] Raman spectroscopy is commonly used in chemistry to provide a structural fingerprint by which molecules can be identified.

The fingerprints Inspecto looks for are the chemical contaminants (more on those in a minute) that can wind up in our favorite foods. After testing the sample, Inspecto beams the physical analysis to the cloud where Inspecto’s algorithms process the findings and deliver results back, usually within a half hour, depending on what is being tested and tested for.

The result is the ability for food producers to test their ingredients for contaminants in the field in real time. So a Japanese coffee company could test green coffee beans for a particular contaminant in South America before the beans ever get on a boat, without needing (or waiting) to send samples off to a lab.

I spoke with Inspecto Co-Founder and CEO, Avner Avidan, who told me that while his company’s technology can be used to detect just about any liquid or solid contaminant, right now, Inspecto is focusing on analyzing big crops like coffee, wheat, rice and soy for chemical contaminants such as acrylamide, which, Avidan says it can detect all the way down to 50 parts per billion.

While Inspecto can be installed along the supply chain, one thing it can’t do is broad scanning and analysis. That means that there won’t be some gigantic Inspecto-beam situated above a conveyor belt scanning food in real-time as it passes underneath like ImpactVision and P&P Optica do using hyperspectral imaging to detect foreign matter. Inspecto is more like the Nima sensor, using a combination of special hardware and capsules that analyze a particular food for one contaminant.

Right now, Inspecto is finalizing its exact pricing plan, but Avidan said the company will sell both the device and single-use capsules. For larger customers, there may also be a data subscription for greater access to analytics.

Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, has raised $1.7 million USD in seed funding and is currently in trials with three food companies in Europe and one in the U.S.. Inspecto’s plan is to continue trialing throughout this year and go to market in 2020.

Three Strategies Companies Are Using to Tackle Produce Waste in the Supply Chain

You’ve probably heard the widely-quoted factoid that the majority of food waste happens in the home. From grocery over-purchasing to over-zealous expiration dates to just plain forgetting to cook that cabbage you bought, it’s not exactly a surprise that the kitchen is where a lot of needless wastage takes place. Consequently, there are quite a few companies tackling home food waste, from Ovie’s freshness-tracking container tags to Mimica’s bumpy food labels.

So where does the rest of our food waste occur? According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, when it comes to fresh produce (the most wasted foods, at least in industrialized countries), almost 1/3 happens along the supply chain. From lack of coordination and communication to inconsistent quality standardization, there are plenty of things that need to go right to get fresh food from A to B without it spoiling — and that doesn’t always happen.

However, there are a few tools and strategies that companies are using to try and reduce food waste at various points along the supply chain. Here are three to watch:

Blockchain

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard of blockchain. (Actually, they might have subterranean blockchain by now, too.) But you might not know that quite a few companies are leveraging blockchain to fight food waste along the supply chain — or are at least thinking about it.

Estonian startup Delicia uses blockchain to create a platform from which retailers can sell nearly-expired food to local restaurants or consumers. Ripe.io is working to forge a “Blockchain for Food,” creating transparency at each step of the food system. Food traceability company FoodLogiQ recently launched an innovation lab which will implement blockchain pilot programs with their partners, who include Tyson Foods and Subway.

Blockchain fights supply chain food waste in a few ways: it helps companies keep track of all the touch points their product has passed through, from farm to shipping truck to retail shelf or restaurant cooler. So if a consumer gets sick from contaminated spinach, suppliers can track exactly which shipment of spinach from which farm caused the problem and dispose of it — without throwing away every bag and bunch in the store. It can also help restaurants and grocery stores track how much food they throw out, so they can adjust their order accordingly.

I don’t want to blow things out of proportion: it’s still early days for blockchain. And even if the public ledger software works exactly as it’s supposed to, it still places a lot of trust and power in each of the players that interact with a tomato as it passes from the farm to the grocery store. But it’s definitely a tool worth exploring.

 

It’s Fresh! sheets at work.

Hands On

Some companies are tackling food waste along the supply chain by turning to the food itself. Apeel creates non-toxic protective barriers for fruits and vegetables, made out of crops left behind in farm fields. With the coating, produce can stay fresh for nearly twice as long — which means less spoilage en route to retailers. Their tech is already being tested on avocados in some Costcos, and I fully expect to see it grow to more locations and perishables soon.

Across the pond, It’s Fresh! has a product which also extends produce life. The company, which started in 2010, makes sheets which absorb ethylene, the hormone which makes fruit and vegetables rot. The sheets can be cut to fit produce-packed palettes or small containers on grocery shelves. According to Simon Lee, one of the founders of It’s Fresh!, their sheets can extend produce life by 1-4 days in the home, and 1-4 weeks in transit. They’re working to integrate their technology into the film around the produce itself, so they can reduce packaging waste as well as food spoilage.

 

AI & Machine Learning

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been playing a growing a role in the food system, from robotic food delivery vehicles to dairy farming. (If you’re curious about how AI is affecting food startups, check out our podcast The Spoon: Automat.)

So it’s no surprise that companies are leveraging AI to reduce waste along the food supply chain. Agshift harnesses computer vision and machine learning to standardize produce quality ratings. By taking objective human ratings out of the equation, vendors and buyers don’t waste time or valuable produce over quality disputes, which can lead to canceled orders and unintended food waste.

In the same vein, Intello is using a combination of AI and computer vision to generate produce ratings. Their goal is more to help farmers get a fair price for their crops, but the outcome is the same; clear, objective quality assessment for fruit and veg means less bickering, fewer dissatisfied customers, and less overall wastage.

Walmart’s Eden technology harnesses machine learning to quantify freshness, so it can divert soon-to-expire produce to nearby stores and make sure it gets eaten before it’s past its prime.

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None of these technologies is a cure-all in and of itself. And when it comes to food waste along the supply chain, we definitely still have a long way to go. But these three areas are definitely ones to keep an eye on — and, when combined, can hopefully reduce the amount of produce destined for the landfill.

Building A Common Language For Food

Perhaps the most overused buzzword in the past several years is IoT – Internet of Things. We’ve even seen IoE (Internet of Everything) and IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) emerge – but this year at SKS 2017, we were introduced to another Internet of phrases – one that has a chance to completely transform how we interact with food in our lives.

IoF stands for the Internet of Food, an effort to create a digital language and infrastructure for food. At the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit, Dr. Matthew Lange of UC Berkeley and IC-Foods presented on the beginnings of IoF, describing it as “bring[ing] a common data language and ontology to the world of food and the impact on activities, such as food shopping and cooking.”

Despite its name, the Internet of Food is not just about food; it’s about every process and industry related to food, such as the environment, agriculture and health. The idea is to create a language to operationalize all food-related data pertaining to these subjects and impact every industry that may touch the food chain.

This means thinking about food outside of the kitchen—before it gets into the kitchen, and after it leaves the kitchen before we eat it. Lange explains that IoF is about annotating these processes and building a vocabulary that can explain the likes of flavor components, nutrient components, energy usage, etc. By developing an ontology about how food moves through the supply chain, farmers, for example, can be given more appropriate advice about how to best grow, store, and deliver food.

When it comes to smart things in the kitchen, most people immediately jump to thinking about appliances. But Lange insists we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Suppose, for instance, you have a sensor that measures the precise humidity and temperature of a drawer in your refrigerator. Seems handy, right? “But this doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know at what humidity and temperature that spinach should be stored,” notes Dr. Lange.

This is where the Internet of Food comes in. When we bring smart into the kitchen, we have to think one step before appliances and gadgets and get smart about food itself first—and we have the data to do it.

There is already a plethora of food data available: there are traditional data sets harvested from governmental and private researchers, and there is data about food sourced from the Internet of Things. The vision for the Internet of Food is to combine all these data sets and develop an ontology to tag the data, making it interoperable between scientific disciplines and different people on the supply chain.

Beyond technical efficiency, the IoF also aims to improve perhaps the best part about food: its flavor. The question is: How can we know which flavors go well together? Lange makes an analogy to musical notes; if you dissect a musical scale, you’ll see that C plays in harmony with E, but no so much with F#. What if we can apply this systematic principle to food and food flavors? According to Lange, with a developed ontology for food, we can find an algorithm to make sense of why certain flavors are in harmony with one another.

The Internet of Food expands “smart” out of the kitchen into every process related to food harvesting, shopping, and cooking. Watch Dr. Matthew Lange’s full talk from the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit: