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You’ve probably seen folks on Linkedin or Twitter posting poems or other examples of content created by the buzzy AI chatbot ChatGPT.
Bad poetry is fun and all, but what if you could actually use generative AI for something useful, like answering back office questions about the restaurant kitchen you manage? What if it could answer questions like “What are my top selling items this week?” or “I only have 20lbs of chicken in inventory, what’s the chance I’m going to run out today?”
That’s what the team at ClearCOGS wanted to achieve with the recent integration of their restaurant operations software and ChatGPT.
I’ve seen other interesting examples of generative AI at work in other food verticals, which is why we’ve decided to bring some of the folks building these tools together in a few weeks to explore how generative AI could impact the food business. If you’d like to attend our free event, How ChatGPT & Generative AI Will Change the Food Biz, go ahead and register here (if you’d like to inquire about sponsorship, drop me a line). If you are working on an interesting project that connects generative AI to food in some way, we’d like to hear more.
CES & Food Tech: Year Two
Speaking of events, CES 2023 was less than two weeks ago, and we’re still busy writing up all the interesting innovations we saw in Vegas. Unlike last year when attendance at the show was light due to the late-breaking arrival of the omicron variant the month before, this year felt like CES was getting back to its old self, with the food tech area being especially active.
It was the second year food tech had its own dedicated area on the show floor, and, whether it was the consistent crowds sampling ramen at the Yo-Kai booth, trying out plant-based cheese at Armored Fresh, or watching the cooking demos at the Tramontina and CookingPal booths, there was lots of energy and excitement about the category.
We also felt the same excitement at the CES Food Tech Conference. This year CES gave The Spoon a full day to program, and we had great sessions on the big stage about everything from the future of farming to cultivated meat to space food. We’ll be getting videos from CES of the sessions this month and will be featuring some of those on The Spoon.
And, naturally, we couldn’t go to CES without having a party for the food tech community. The Spoon Food Tech happy hour was a lot of fun, and it featured one of the first-ever tastings of Pairwise’s gene-edited mustard greens.
As the world’s biggest tech conference, CES sets the agenda every year in the world of innovation, and we are excited to help shine the spotlight on food tech. We’ll be bringing it back again next year and hope you can be involved in some way. Drop me a line if you’d like to get an early start on participating in the CES 2024 food tech program.
As for CES 2023, we are wrapping up our CES Food Tech report, which will publish next week. We’ll be looking at every company that we found showcasing something interesting in food tech, so keep an eye out for that.
Food Tech 2023 Survey
We are going to be sending out our annual food tech outlook survey next week to our newsletter subscribers. The survey will be a part of an ongoing set of surveys this year we’ll be fielding as part of a broader expansion of our research efforts at The Spoon. If you’d like to participate in our smaller focused surveys highlighting specific topics, I’d encourage you to sign up for The Spoon’s food tech research panel.
That’s it for now. We’re excited to bring you news and analysis from the world of food tech this year. On to the stories…
Until next week,
Mike
How will new tools like ChatGPT impact the world of food? We’ll be discussing just that during the Spoon’s mini-summit on February 15th. The event is free, so register here today before the session fills up.
Mill Wants You to Create Chicken Feed Out of Food Scraps
Want to stop sending food waste to the landfill?
A new device and service from a company called Mill will help you do just that while also letting you feed a chicken or two while you’re at it.
Debuting this week, the Mill kitchen bin, a new eponymous device from a company founded by a couple of ex-Nest execs, will take your food waste and shrink & “de-stink” it as it turns into what it calls Food Grounds, something the company says is a “safe and nutritious chicken feed ingredient.”
Here’s how it works:
You sign up for a Mill “Membership,” a $33-a-month subscription service that includes a kitchen bin and a pickup service for the processed Food Grounds. You connect the Mill to Wi-Fi, activate it using the Mill app, and start tossing in your food scraps. Once the bin is full, you put your Food Grounds into a prepaid box and schedule a pickup with the Mill app.
You can read the full story here on The Spoon.
Evigence Raises $18M for Its Food Freshness Sensors Small Enough to Fit on a Packaging Sticker
Food technology company Evigence announced the close of an $18m series B funding round this week. The company, which makes real-time food freshness detecting sensors, plans to use the money to further develop its system’s data collection and analytics capabilities and launch additional commercial partnerships in the US and Europe
Evigence’s sensors, which are small enough to be incorporated into a sticker that goes onto produce packaging, can detect the temperature and time passage and uses that data to calculate the current and projected freshness of produce. Retailers, distributors, and consumers can use them to determine the real-time freshness of a product. Evingen’s sensors can give visual cues such as through color change on the sticker or have an hourglass empty to let the consumer know when a product is no longer fresh.
Read the full story at The Spoon.
Food Retail
These New Scanners Will Help Us All From Squeezing (and Damaging) The Avocadoes
Every year, tens of thousands of tons of avocadoes are thrown into the trash or compost. Whether on the farm or in our fridges, the delicious fruit is one of the most difficult to get right when it comes to determining ripeness, resulting in a whole lot of wasted food.
One startup hoping to help us reduce the amount of avocadoes going to waste is OneThird, a startup out of The Netherlands that has built a line of spectral scanners that determine the freshness of an avocado.
When a OneThird scanner looks at the spectral fingerprint of an avocado, it compares the data gathered to its database to determine how ripe the fruit is and then sends the information to its app.
You can read the full story and watch a video of OneThird’s technology at The Spoon.
Drive-Thru Grocer JackBe Opens First Location in Oklahoma City
JackBe, which claims to be the country’s first curbside drive-thru grocer, opened its first location this week in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, according to a release sent to The Spoon. The store will allow customers to place orders via the JackBe app and pick up their groceries at a drive-thru bay, where a JackBe employee will deliver the groceries right to their car.
The new 17,000-square-foot location carries in-demand products across a number of categories, including produce, meat, bakery, deli, and consumables. JackBe is also planning to roll out prepared meals and local brands in the future.
You can read the full story at The Spoon.
Food Delivery
Wonder Pulls a Zume, Drops Futuristic Food Trucks as it Pivots to Lower Cost Operating Model
According to a report this week in the Wall Street Journal, food delivery startup Wonder is laying off employees and will begin to phase out its signature food delivery trucks in the hopes of creating a lower-cost operating model.
This is a massive shift for a company that became the talk of the food delivery business for a high-touch approach built around its delivery vehicles. Wonder not only brought the food to a customer’s home, but it cooked it curbside in vans that had become ubiquitous over the past year and a half in the North Jersey market in which it operates.
According to the Journal, the company will pivot to a more conventional ghost kitchen model, operating ten kitchens around New Jersey and New York. In addition to delivery, Wonder will offer in-location dining and pickup at locations.
Tightening venture capital markets have cast a pall over the startup world over the past 12 months, and today’s news suggests that even superstar fundraisers like Wonder founder Marc Lore aren’t immune to investors’ darkening moods. It had always been an open question whether Lore could continue to raise enough money for an operating model that looked incredibly expensive from the outside, and now it looks like we have our answer.
To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.
Future Food
GOOD Meat Receives Approval in Singapore to Use Serum-Free Media for Cultivated Meat Production
GOOD Meat, the cultivated meat division of Eat Just, announced today that it has received regulatory approval from the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) for the use of serum-free media for the production of cultivated meat.
Many in the industry believe that using animal-free growth media will not only help the cultivated meat industry achieve what is effectively its raison d’être through the severing of reliance on a cruel animal agriculture industry, but it will also lead to greater scalability, lower manufacturing costs, and a more sustainable product. It also paves the way for the production of larger quantities of real chicken made from cells.
GOOD Meat had previously obtained approval from SFA for its first chicken product in November 2020, and subsequent approval for new formats of its poultry in November 2021. With the latest regulatory approval for serum-free cultivation media, Eat Just says its cell ag meat division will soon transition to a more efficient and favorable production process.
You can read the full story at The Spoon.
Aqua Cultured Foods Building Manufacturing Plant to Commercialize Fermentation-Derived Seafood
Chicago-based food tech start-up Aqua Cultured Foods has begun building a new manufacturing facility for its plant-based seafood products in the West Loop area of the city. The facility, nearly three times the size of Aqua’s current base, is already food-grade and requires minimal upgrades to enable the company to scale production of its fermentation-derived protein.
According to the company, their production methods use standard food production equipment, allowing quicker buildout. Aquaculture says its production methods are also space-efficient, comparing their space usage to vertical farming.
To read the full story, click here.
Food Robotics
Watch LG’s Server Robot Bring Dishes to Customers at Popular Korean Restaurant in Georgia
One year ago, LG announced the debut of its new hospitality server robot, and now the Korean tech giant’s CLOi Servebot is showing up at restaurants like the Airang K in Johns Creek, Georgia. Since June 2022, four “LG CLOi ServeBot” robotic assistants from LG have been assisting wait staff by accompanying them to guests’ tables while carrying multiple dishes at once.
Initially, Arirang K had deployed two of the Servebots to help their employees but soon upgraded to four. “Everybody liked the first two so much that we upgraded to four LG ServeBots to maximize service levels and guarantee that every customer gets to see the robots in action,” said Miok Kim, general manager of Arirang K.
The LG Servebot has 11 hours of operating time and three shelves that hold up to 22 pounds. They also feature sensors and cameras that enable autonomous driving, obstacle avoidance, and recognition.
To read the full story, click here!
Google’s Farm Tech Moonshot Mineral Becomes Alphabet Company
Google parent company Alphabet has added a new company to its portfolio this week in Mineral, a farm tech startup that spent the last five years incubating within Google’s X.
The news of Mineral’s graduation to full-fledged Alphabet company came in the form a blog post by Mineral CEO Elliott Grant (previously of Shopwell, a shopping startup sold to Innit). According to Grant, the mission behind Mineral is to “help scale sustainable agriculture”, which they are doing by “developing a platform and tools that help gather, organize, and understand never-before known or understood information about the plant world – and make it useful and actionable.”
According to Mineral, they have analyzed over 10% of the total farmland on Earth, modeled more than 200 plant traits, phenotyped 17 crop varieties, and developed more than 80 high-performance ML models. Mineral’s ag-optimized analysis tools will be used to process large unstructured sets of the world’s agricultural data, sourced from satellite images, farm equipment, public databases, and Mineral’s own proprietary data streams. The company will make this data available to partners to combine this data with their private data to derive insights into yield, genomic understanding, and agronomic discovery.
To read the full story, click here.
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