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From the farm to the table and beyond, small start-ups and large companies alike are churning out futuristic technology that holds the promise of changing the way we produce, consume, and purchase food.
Simple items like cooking oil made from insects and more complex food tech like drone-based precision farming are simultaneously advancing and shaking up the food industry. Many advances, like an artificial piece of fruit that will help keep apples, oranges, mangoes, and bananas from going bad on their voyage from farm to store, are
making the lives of food producers easier and their businesses more lucrative. Technology like a Coke bottle that takes a selfie of its drinker, on the other hand, is proving to be a great means of making consumers’ lives more entertaining.
Here are eight of the most intriguing advances in food tech and how they’re poised to shake up this ever-evolving industry.
1. Forget the Checkout
Walking out of a convenience store without paying for items might seem counterintuitive, but Amazon plans to make it the norm. Amazon Go, the online retail giant’s answer to the c-store of the future, is poised to disrupt the brick-and-mortar retail model by getting rid of the traditional checkout process.
Thanks to a tracking system coupled with the Amazon Go app, customers can choose items from store shelves and simply walk out with them. Technologies like computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning sense when items are taken from and returned to shelves, and each customer’s order is tracked in a virtual cart. Once finished, shoppers simply leave the store and Amazon charges their account and emails them a receipt.
The store, which has experienced a few setbacks during beta testing but is set to open to the public later this year, will offer ready-to-eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack options made by on-site chefs, as well as local kitchens and bakeries. Grocery items will range from bread and milk to specialty items like artisan cheeses and locally made chocolates, plus Amazon meal kits.
2. Robot Restaurants
Momentum Machines, which describes itself as a collective of foodies and engineers with decades of experience in restaurants and robotics, is making use of artificial intelligence to disrupt the foodservice sector. The company’s first offering is a device that makes and dresses up to 400 hamburgers per hour with zero human interaction. The device makes burgers that are freshly ground; grilled to order; topped with customizable sauces, seasonings, and produce; then assembled and bagged.
The technology has been teased for quite some time, and Momentum is finally set to open its first restaurant location in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco with the promise of burger prices that everyone can afford. The technology also claims to be more sanitary and expedient while offering a fresh, customizable end product.
3. Replacing Palm Oil with Insect Fats
Edible insects are being used in everything from protein bars to baking flour, and now they’re poised to disrupt another segment of the food industry. Biteback, an Indonesian start-up helmed by millennial entrepreneur Mush’ab Nursantio, is working toward both helping the environment and addressing global food insecurity issues by creating cooking oil made with superworm fats.
According to Nursantio, the insects are rich in healthy fatty acids and unsaturated fats, and reproduce rapidly enough to surpass palm oil in both yield and efficiency. They’re also reportedly an excellent source of iron, which could help prevent the iron deficiency that plagues more than 2 billion people around the globe. With the prevalent use of cooking oil both in home and in packaged goods, Nursantio believes Biteback could make a significant difference.
The entrepreneur also hopes to end the global dependency on palm oil and even give small farmers an extra source of income with the introduction of the bug-based oil. Large segments of rainforests throughout Southeast Asia are being cleared for palm oil plantations and a fire aimed at clearing the land caused a months-long haze crisis throughout the region. Eventually, the company hopes to create a community empowerment program and sell farming kits to locals and train them on how to grow the insects and sell them back.
4. Service with a Flick of the Wrist
Restaurateur Danny Meyer has partnered with reservation start-up Resy to change the way restaurant employees receive information. Using technology to heighten the dining-out experience is nothing new, but New York City’s Union Square Cafe has integrated reservations, mobile payment, a point-of-sale system, and front-of-house service communications into a system that runs on the Apple Watch.
Union Square Cafe’s managers and sommeliers don the gadget on their wrists to receive alerts every time a VIP enters the restaurant, someone orders a bottle of wine, a new table is seated, a guest waits too long to order her or his drink, or a menu item runs out. The technology is poised to eliminate operational hiccups and unnecessary steps associated with on-the-floor service. When guests have finished their meal, for example, a manager can alert the coat room attendant to fetch the guests’ coats. A manager can also ping the sommelier when a guest orders a bottle of wine instead of printing out an extraneous ticket.
The Resy operating system will also benefit diners by allowing them to send out a text if they’re running late for a reservation, or use the convenience of Resy Pay to digitally split a check or pay individually on their phones.
5. Food and Beverage for the Selfie Generation
The art of the selfie has taken on new life thanks to technology aimed at integrating food, beverage, and self-portraits. Soft-drink giant Coca-Cola has developed a bottle with a built-in camera that automatically snaps a photo every time the user takes a sip. The selfie bottle has a sensor that detects when the bottle is at a 70-degree tilt and takes a photo that can then be uploaded to social media. While the novelty bottle was only produced in limited quantities by Coca-Cola Israel, it is offering a glimpse of things to come.
Taking the craze one step further, start-up company Selffee is working to open a New York City cafe that gives customers the ability to add a selfie image to menu items like cookies and iced coffee. Using a proprietary app, the image is printed on food items in tasteless, edible ink. The company is currently doing pop-up shops, as well as selling and shipping personalized sugar cookies emblazoned with a selfie.
6. New-School Crop Management
Agricultural practices are constantly evolving, with water management, planting, and even harvesting becoming automated. Now drones and tiny wireless sensors are being utilized to help improve production in everything from grain to grapes.
Student start-up Amber Agriculture has introduced technology that monitors grain being kept in storage. Amber uses pellet-size wireless sensors that are spread across the bin to monitor carbon dioxide, volatile organic compounds, temperature, and humidity, with trend lines and alerts of unusual changes being pushed directly to a smartphone app. The technology also allows farmers to operate a fan in their bins to help prevent wasted crops and lost revenue.
Precision farming is the name of the game when it comes to improving yields in California’s drought-stricken vineyards. North Carolina-based company PrecisionHawk is partnering with Verizon and California’s Hahn Estate Winery to deploy unmanned drones that collect data to analyze the health of its crop. The aerial drones infer canopy cover to determine crop vigor while ground sensors keep track of temperature and soil moisture. PrecisionHawk is then able to run the data against its own analytics to look for patterns and anomalies and make valuable recommendations to the farmer.
7. Fake Fruit to the Rescue
Keeping fruit fresh during transport from the farm to the store shelf can be difficult. Refrigeration within shipping containers can’t always be depended upon and current monitoring techniques sometimes don’t work. Enter the artificial fruit sensor: a faux piece of fruit that collects data about core temperatures during the journey.
While fruit core simulators are not new, this version, created by researchers at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, promises more precise data thanks to a filling made from water, carbohydrates, and polystyrene. Made to look like an apple, orange, mango, or banana, the sensor mimics the exact composition of the fruit it is traveling with in order to get the most accurate readings. When a shipment has gone bad, the data can be analyzed to find out where things went wrong during travel.
Researchers are developing separate sensors for different varieties of fruit, from Jonagold and Braeburn apples to Kent mangoes and Cavendish bananas. The technology is also relatively inexpensive at around $50 per sensor, and it can be used multiple times.
8. Food Photos for Fitness
While it doesn’t work for everyone, counting calories and keeping a food diary is a proven method of losing weight, and the people behind the diet tracker Lose It! are making it even easier for users to log their meals and snacks. The company recently debuted the Snap It feature, which uses advanced image recognition technology to identify foods and report calorie levels in seconds.
When a user takes a photo of a food, the app makes suggestions of what it could be, then offers specific options and serving sizes. After making a few choices, the food is automatically logged. Snap It’s technology includes the foods users care about most and is also able to detect multiple foods from a single image. When a user snaps a photo of a sushi dinner, for example, the app can suggest the sushi, wasabi, and ginger in one fell swoop. The user then chooses the type of sushi and how many pieces they are eating.
These and more tech-savvy companies around the globe are taking on the food industry’s biggest trends and challenges to bring producers, sellers, and consumers the technology they need—or never knew they needed.
Emily Crowe is a regular contributor to Specialty Food Magazine.
from Food Trends http://ift.tt/2iSiUfx
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