Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution
It’s the Spoon’s video top 3, recaping three trending stories about the future of food, cooking and the kitchen from the past week.
This week’s we take a look at Bistro Planets’s food truck tech, DoorDash’s pilot program with Marble for delivery robots and whether or not instant aging is the newest trend in wine.
Enjoy!
When it comes to wine, most of us know that time for aging is essential. The last thing we want is what Steve Martin refers to in The Jerk as “fresh wine,” and many fine wines go through extensive filtration processes and years of barrel aging. At Cavitation Technologies Inc. (CVAT), though, researchers have come up with a patented process that can purportedly duplicate and even improve upon the wine aging process — all in a matter of seconds.
Specifically, Cavitation Technologies has a patent on:
“A method and device for manipulating alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages to obtain desirable changes in the beverages, comprising subjecting said beverages to a flow-through hydrodynamic cavitation process and continuing the application of such process for a period of time sufficient to produce a consumable product. In the case of wine, the method includes altering the composition and accelerating the conversion of ingredients to obtain wine with a superior homogeny, an extended shelf life and a mouth feel, flavor, bouquet, color and body resembling those of wine that was subjected to a traditional oak barrel maturation.”
In the following video from MoneyTV, CVAT’s Global Technology Manager and founder, Roman Gordon, demonstrates that it only takes about two minutes for the process to execute, when applied to making cognac:
As noted in the video, the cavitation reactor changes the composition of the beverage at the molecular level, encapsulating the water clusters around alcohol clusters, and simultaneously removing the unhealthy impurities that are in alcoholic drinks, including methanol and butanol.
The folks at CVAT originally developed their patented technology for use in edible oil refining, algal oil extraction, and renewable fuel production. They are now looking into how to bring their technology to market for consumers, and, as the patent notes, it can be applied to much more than just replicating the effects of aging on wine. As reported by Equities.com, CVAT’s leaders also claim that their process can eliminate the hangover effect following drinking. Imagine the market for that.
Beyond the wine and beverage industries, there is also active research underway on techniques for instantly fabricating food customized for your DNA and health needs. And, 3D printing is also giving rise to many new culinary approaches. Take a look at the colorful, geometrically complex sugar-based shapes and concepts seen here, which make your local diner’s sugar cubes look downright unimaginative. Many such concepts have been shown at the 3D Food Printing Conference in Venlo, the Netherlands. Chefs have also created five-course 3D-printed meals, and scientists have created 3D-printed beef.
One of the worst things about opening a bottle of wine and not finishing it – aside from the lack of drunkenness – is the shortened shelf-life that bottle now has. Once air hits the wine, oxidation kicks in and at first may allow the beverage to open up but will eventually cause the wine to go bad.
That is the main problem driving wine startup Plum, a company that’s created and patented a smart wine serving appliance (aka a fancy keg for wine) that preserves a bottle of wine for 90 days, allowing single serving pours for up to three months. Plum has just raised a Series A round of $9 million and plans to ship pre-ordered systems this fall. Similar attempts have been made to create devices to make serving beer more enjoyable and close to an “on-tap” experience but Plum claims to have the first appliance that “automatically preserves, chills and serves wine by the glass” in the home market.
Plum has several unique features and requires very little of the consumer to get started. Place a 750 mL bottle of wine into the appliance’s chamber and close the door. The machine’s specialized (and patent-pending) needle will pierce whatever material surrounds the bottle’s opening and extract wine while also injecting argon gas to prevent oxidation.
The appliance is pretty high-tech too: with built-in cameras along with a cloud database of over 6 million wines, Plum will read the wine label and identify on the touchscreen what bottle is inside. The company claims the device is able to accurately identify wine’s 95% of the time. Plum is a good example of the growth in the use of cameras inside cooking and storage appliances paired with cloud intelligence to enhance the consumer experience with food and beverages.
The machine also chills the wine based on the varietal but can be manually adjusted by the user. And the life of the argon gas chamber is up to 200 bottles (refills are $29) so Plum’s initial longevity can be pretty long, depending on your individual drinking habits. The price of Plum’s smart wine appliance isn’t cheap – one system will set you back $1499 and the company is still taking preorders with plans to ship in “fall 2017.”
The $9 million investment, led by Khosla Ventures (Hampton Creek, InstaCart, Consumer Physics) and Las Olas Venture Capital along with other angel investors from the tech, wine and hospitality markets. The company says the investment will be used to take the smart appliance to the hospitality industry, allowing hotels to put Plum in guest rooms to deliver a better “mini-bar” experience and adding another in-room revenue source. Plum has already inked deals with big hotel chains including Four Seasons, Hilton, Marriott and the Hyatt among others.
About a week ago, NYC Media Lab held a demo day for a dozen new startup teams that graduated from the group’s twelve week “lean launchpad process”, a program which prepares the aspiring new companies to move on to “launch new products and services, participate in accelerator and incubator programs, compete for their next rounds of funding, and make their mark across a range of industries, including media and gaming, health, architecture and construction, and more.”
The companies represented an interesting cross section of ideas that include such technologies as virtual and mixed reality, haptics/wearables and AI. One of the startups focused on AI was VinoHunt, a team which bills its product as a “virtual sommelier” for those looking to imbibe. As with each team that pitched during the demo day, VinoHunt presented their concept (a chatbot interface for selecting wine), their target market (people who like wine but don’t know much about it) and their business model (they take a cut from from each sale they assist with from partner wine shops).
One of the company’s founders, Ben Chang, presented where they saw themselves relative to both online and physical wine retailers and marketplaces:
Since I am a fan of using chatbot interfaces to help make food selections, I decided to check the company’s website out where I was surprised I could actually use their alpha stage product to help find a wine. I clicked on a button that took me to Facebook Messenger and boom, I was chatting with the VinoHunt chatbot.
While it’s clearly a work in progress not ready for commercial rollout (this was a startup demo, after all, not a launch), the overall experience was fairly intuitive.
It first asked me what I wanted to do. I told them ‘find a bottle’:
Then it asked me about delivery options and told me they currently only work with NYC wine shop Astor Wine (just remember: they made this clear in the demo, the team clearly didn’t expect a nerdy analyst type to actually find their product and use it). I said I’d pick it up at the store.
It then asked me what the wine was for (I said ‘pair with foods’) and then asked the type of food I was eating (meat):
It asked me what type of meat (fish) and then asked me my preferred price range:
It then surfaced a selection of wines which, at this point, seemed to be the same across the meat types (again, this is a demo). What I did like is they also allowed me to get some info on the wine or request a tasting note. I asked for my details and it gave a nice description of the wine in a casual, descriptive format.
I then selected the wine and it took me to the wine retailers website.
While VinoHunt is the first Facebook Messenger powered wine sommelier I’ve seen, the company is one of many new efforts to bring AI to the world of wine. Companies such as Wine Ring, Vivino and even Google with their Google Assistant are developing AI-powered wine information products.
Long term, I expect to see an explosion in chat interfaces for applications like this. Like voice interfaces such as the one used for Google’s virtual sommelier ‘My Wine Guide’, chatbots make lots of sense for commerce-based decision making. As with voice, chatbots map well with commerce decision trees, but have the added benefit of being able to surface visually rich information such as showing the bottle of wine you may be about to purchase.
If you want to take an early tour of a work-in-progress virtual sommelier, you can check out VinoHunt here.
How do you pick a wine? If you’re like most, you might go by the look of the label or the wine ranking listed on the descriptor card. But neither one really gives you any idea of whether you, personally, will like that wine.
Now there’s a cure for that.
Over the past 5 years there has been a proliferation of online wine clubs. While these are interesting in that they are shifting wine retail from brick and mortar to an online retailer, they are also shaking up how wines are being selected.
Algorithm based wine recommendations
I’ve recently written about how artificial intelligence (AI) is being used in the wine industry to help consumers choose a wine. Some online wine clubs are following a similar vein, using algorithms to determine wine preferences based on a personal taste profile.
New members get started by taking a taste test, answering a few basic questions on their food likes and dislikes. This data is taken and fed into an algorithm to produce personalized wine recommendations. Members are sent the wines to try and also to rank–the more wines you test, the stronger the intelligence gets.
Online wine clubs have proliferated since they initially began appearing around 2010. Different clubs have different styles, some are more formal, others more educational, and some just more fun.
Winc, a Los Angeles based start-up founded in 2011, was one of the first online subscription based clubs offering personalized profiling. The company initially launched as Club W but rebranded in 2016 as they shifted from being just an online marketplace to both sourcing and producing their wine. The company has raised $30.6 million from five funding rounds, the latest being a Series B round for $17.5 million in May 2016.
Tasting Room is another early market entrant, founded in 2009 and then acquired by Lot18, an online retailer of wine and epicurean products, in May 2013. Unlike some other clubs, Tasting Room starts all new users off with a “tasting” of six custom mini-bottles selected based on your personal taste profile. Lot 18 has had five funding rounds, generating $44.5 million, all of which was raised prior to the Tasting Room acquisition.
A newer market entrant is Bright Cellars, originally founded in Boston in 2014, but relocated to Madison Wisconsin to join a start-up accelerator. Bright Cellars operates as a monthly subscription, with members receiving four custom selected bottles each month for a membership fee of $60. The start-up raised $2 million in seed funding in August 2015.
Online wine clubs are shaking up the wine industry not only in moving retail from brick-and-mortar to online stores, but also in the types of wines being bought and their target audience.
Profile-based recommendations are giving consumers confidence to buy more obscure wines, including unknown varietal as well as small production wines that don’t get a lot of shelf space at traditional liquor stores, but are being featured in online wine clubs. Wineries are also using the taste profile information gathered through these clubs to help tailor wines to consumer preferences, helping to make the wines more commercially successful.
These wine clubs are helping to transform the market of wine drinkers from a smaller affluent group to a broader market, particularly focused on millennials. By making wine and wine knowledge more accessible, these clubs are removing barriers that have held many back.
If you have trouble figuring out what is the best wine to pair with tonight’s dinner, we have some good news: artificial intelligence may soon be able to help you with that age old question, ‘Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc?’ That’s because a new wave of AI-powered virtual sommeliers are now available to help make those decisions.
Old Problem, New Solution
For decades the wine industry has struggled to overcome the anxiety associated with selecting a wine. Now thanks to technology you no longer have to have an awkward conversation with the clerk at the wine store, but can turn to a virtual sommelier to pick the perfect bottle.
There have been many virtual wine selectors available for some time. However, we are now seeing increasing intelligence integrated into these solutions, making them both more powerful and more personal.
Wine Ring, headquartered in Syracuse, New York and founded in 2010, offers one of the most personal wine selection experiences available. Unlike other apps that offer wine suggestions based on pairing suggestions or expert ratings, Wine Ring bases suggestions on your individual preferences. This app uses advanced algorithms to develop a personal profile based on your rating of wines and then recommends bottles based on your taste profile. The more wine you drink and rate, the better the AI and the better the wine recommendations.
Google is also serving up wine suggestions. Google’s new “My Wine Guide” is a conversation action added to Google Assistant for wine pairing suggestions. While My Wine Guide is currently limited in its depth of AI and personalization of wine suggestions, what makes Google’s virtual sommelier most promising is how it integrates easy conversation format with computer based wine queries. Looking forward, “My Wine Guide” could become even more useful is to take the food pairing suggestion and then offer a variety of wines matching that paring at different price points which the user could verbally order and have delivered via a service like Drizzly, all from conversation based commands.
Once you get your recommendation from Wine Ring or “My Wine Guide” you can take it to Wine Searcher, a tool for locating and pricing wine (and beer and spirits) across all online stores. Wine Searcher uses artificial intelligence to classify wines, linking the hundreds of thousands of products and tens of thousands of retailers to produce wine suggestions and pricing based on inputted search terms.
Wine Searcher is also integrating label recognition technology and developing a chatbot to improve user interaction with the site.
Vivino is already using label recognition technology to help guide wine purchases. With Vivino the user simply takes a photo of the wine label they are considering and is instantly provided the wine’s rating, average price and review from the community of 22 million users. The app then tracks which wines you scan and rate, but does not at this point offer suggestions based on your profile.
All of these tools aim to take the age-old mystery out of picking wine by applying artificial intelligence. While the wine industry is steeped in tradition and ancient ways, it could be the very modern application of artificial intelligence that makes wine and wine selection relevant to today’s consumers.
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Image credit: Flickr user a.has
