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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

wearables

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presto Raises $30M Growth Round For Its Front of House Restaurant Tech

Presto, whose tech suite helps restaurants organize and manage their front of house, announced today it has raised $30 million in growth funding. The round was led by Recruit Holdings and Romulus Capital, with participation from I2BF Global Ventures, EG Capital, and Brainchild Holdings.

In an interview with The Spoon, Presto founder and CEO Rajat Suri said the new funds will go towards further developing the company’s products, which it expanded earlier this year to include Presto Wearable and Presto A.I., in addition to the company’s tabletop terminal, PrestoPrime.

Suri, who is also the cofounder of Lyft, launched Presto in 2008 after a year spent working in restaurants and prototyping the PrestoPrime based on his observations. The device, which lives on restaurant tabletops, lets guests order, pay, leave feedback and play games while waiting for their food.

If the restaurant is also using Presto’s wearable technology, the terminal can notify a server directly when a guest has a specific need, whether it’s about a soda refill or an undercooked steak.

Those wearables come in the form of an app that’s compatible with any Android device. As Suri points out, wearables like smartwatches make the most sense, since restaurant managers don’t love servers having their phones out and since those devices would be cumbersome anyway during a fast-paced dinner rush. The plus side of having wearable tech sending instant notifications is that it can help a restaurant catch issues as they arise. If that undercooked steak arrives and the guest files a negative comment, it will be able to address the issue in real time, before the customer leaves. If a guest asks for a side of sour cream, the request reaches the server in the form of a digital notification, which is a lot harder to forget and could even help create more accountability, since everything has a digital footprint.

There’s an obvious downside to these real-time updates, though. Guest ratings via technology can affect a server’s bottom line if the manager starts scheduling that person for the slowest shifts due to low ratings. Maybe in some cases that’s justified, but anyone who’s ever worked in a restaurant knows, unhappy customers aren’t necessarily the fault of the server waiting on them.

Suri, of course, has his own restaurant experience, which he’s clearly putting to good use when it comes to how Presto positions these wearables in its array of products. Rather than notify the server (or the GM) about every single activity and issue, Presto Wearable is about important notifications only. “Wearables are meant to cover the biggest gaps, not every gap,” he notes.

And even if an operator wanted their employees to get every last piece of data in the restaurant, that would be impossible for humans to do in any meaningful way. “There’s so much important information coming from various different sources that staff workers can’t make sense of it,” explains Suri of the restaurant operation nowadays. “[Workers] can’t improve on their predictions in a systematic way.” AI, on the other hand, can, and Presto A.I. does the heavy lifting where most of the data is concerned. If it’s Tuesday afternoon, the system can pull weather data or data about external events and make predictions for the Friday night shift. Maybe that college football game around the corner will increase traffic that night. Perhaps bad weather will lessen the number of guests. Presto’s system processes all this data and makes such predictions to help operators better predict and accordingly.

Restaurants who use Presto can pick and choose which of its technologies to use, though as Suri points out, smart restaurants should at this point be making some kind of investment in technology to improve front-of-house operations. “The industry is ripe for change,” he says. “Labor has never had so many options as they do now and the industry has to change because of that to stay relevant. A lot of our partners realize that, and that’s why they’re adopting a lot more solutions.”

Presto currently partners with, according to the company, “five of the top 10 restaurant chains.” Suri wouldn’t go into specific companies (Applebees and Red Lobster are clients), only adding that the company “doubled last year we expect to double again this year in terms of revenues in terms of team size.”

Will Wearable Tech and Artificial Intelligence Help or Hinder Restaurants?

Restaurant tech company Presto dropped a couple new products today for front-of-house operations in the restaurant: Presto Wearables and Presto A.I. These join Presto’s tabletop terminal, on which guests can order, pay, report feedback, and contact the manager if needs be.

According to a press release, Presto Wearables are smartwatch-like devices that notify the servers wearing them of a customer’s needs (e.g., refill table six’s Diet Coke). In the event of a bigger issue, guests can also notify the manager via the wearable device. Presto A.I., meanwhile, does real-time data analytics and predictive modeling, both of which typically improve things like inventory management and labor costs.

Presto launched in 2008 after founder Rajat Suri — also a cofounder of Lyft — dropped out of MIT and spent a year waiting tables and testing a prototype device. The ensuing tabletop terminal, dubbed PrestoPrime, allows guests to order, pay, play games, and leave feedback, and is currently at major chains like Outback Steakhouse and Applebee’s.

One thing Suri highlighted was the “easy to use” aspect of the new offerings, which brings up a certain issue. Recently, I had a conversation with someone in the restaurant industry about the burden GMs now shoulder of having to not just manage a restaurant but also act as de facto IT person for the many devices and software systems now part of a restaurant’s operations. Which is to say, wearable tech and A.I. sound great in theory, but it’s too soon yet to tell whether these new offerings will be a blessing or another tech burden for GMs to wrestle with. Plus, rating a server via tablet has gotten an understandably bad rap; I can’t imagine expanding that capability to a device the server is wearing will make the idea any more palatable.

As for AI, it’s currently sweeping the restaurant industry, from voice ordering to more robust POS systems to facial recognition. Given that, Presto will definitely face competition in this area.

The company may stand out more on the wearables front, since that’s an area that hasn’t really entered the restaurant industry as of yet. Oracle’s Restaurant 2025 report from last year found that only about half of restaurant operators surveyed found the idea of wearable tech appealing; fewer than half of consumers surveyed said they would use the tech for things like ordering.
 
Presto’s device isn’t yet primed for ordering capabilities, but it does seem like the logical next step. And if Presto’s watch-like device can grab the same high-profile chains its tabletop device did, we may start to see more wearables on the dining room floor in future.

Klue Launches AI Tech to Identify Eating Behaviors

As the saying goes, you “lose weight in the kitchen and get fit at the gym.” Today, a new company called Klue launched itself and announced its new gesture sensing and analytics technology to help you with the consumption part of that equation.

Used in conjunction with a wearable, such as an Apple Watch, Klue’s software monitors hand gestures and uses machine learning to identify what you are doing, whether that’s eating, drinking or smoking, as well as when and how fast you are doing these behaviors. The point is to create a “consumption graph” of real time information that you can use to adjust behavior.

In a phone interview, Klue Co-Founder and CEO, Katlijn Vleugels said the inspiration for the technology came to her during a time when she had put on 30 extra pounds. To improve her health, Vluegels enlisted the help of a weight loss coach who told her to place a pebble (an actual rock, not the smart watch) next to her plate as a reminder to be mindful about how and when she ate.

The pebble helped, but Vluegels, being an engineer and this being the 21st century, thought there had to be a better way to reinforce healthy eating behaviors. With its software, Klue wants to remove friction from the process of manually logging when you eat and drink.

Vluegels wouldn’t provide many details about the company or product right now saying only that Klue is in private beta, and currently uses accelerometer and gyroscope information from a wearable, to which it applies its AI.

Based in San Mateo, Klue was founded in 2016, and has raised half a million dollars in angel funding. Vluegels said Klue will be looking to add partners to build on its platform and expand the capabilities of Klue’s software. She envisions future versions of the product helping in such areas as elder care, ensuring older people are staying hydrated, for example.

In some ways, the Klue is reminiscent of HAPIfork, a connected fork that helped users track their eating behavior. The HAPIfork used lights and vibrations to give the users gentle nudges about portion size, and while it’s not clear what signals Klue will use to reinforce behavior (and since it’d be kinda weird to bring your own fork to a restaurant), a wearable might be a more practical approach for intake and usage monitoring.

Ease of use is key to creating long-term habits. Since there is no universal eating gesture, Klue has its work cut out for it. But if it can successfully remove the tedious aspects of tracking what you consume, it will be a great help for people looking to lead a healthier lifestyle.