Five Ways AI Has Changed the Food Industry Pre-DiscussionGPT
Generative AI has shaken the technology industry to its foundations. For the first time, Google’s search dominance appears to be in jeopardy, while ChatGPT has elevated Microsoft’s Bing from second banana to sexy beta. Meanwhile, hundreds of new startups are creating vertical-focused SaaS offerings powered by OpenAI, and tech companies, large and small, are exploring how to jump on the AI bullet train.
In the food world, we have some early adopters in spaces like restaurant technology software like ClearCOGS and Lunchbox leveraging OpenAI to add more functionality. On the content creators and influencers side, we’re already seeing recipe creators and culinary experts tapping into the power of AI production.
But if you think that the arrival of ChatGPT is the first AI that has the potential to make a big impact on the food world, you’d be wrong. In fact, over the past decade, we’ve watched as artificial intelligence has begun to transform key parts of the food world. Here are five ways AI has revolutionized food over the past decade:
AI Generated Recipes
Over the past decade, one of the most important artificial intelligence milestones in the food world has been the use of IBM Watson’s standard AI to create recipes. About ten years ago, the Watson team realized they needed to do something other than beat human contestants on Jeopardy to demonstrate the power of AI. Before long, Watson had his own cookbook of what IBM called ‘cognitive recipes’. Finally, CPG brands like McCormick partnered with IBM to see how they could use Big Blue’s AI in their business.
A Novel of Food Availability and Nature
In the last few years, a new group of startups using AI to accelerate the discovery of fresh food ingredients or plant-based recipes has emerged, causing disruption in the consumer packaged food market as they present a direct challenge to the traditional – and slow – way in which food companies usually find new food products. Five years ago, companies like Gastrograph started using AI to create predictive models about how different groups of consumers might react to new food products, and more recently, we’ve seen a new generation of food companies like NotCo base their entire road around AI-powered recipes for their plant-based product range. On the innovative side of ingredient discovery, companies like Shiru and Kingdom Supercultures are using machine learning to find new ingredients that can help replicate the functional and taste characteristics of more traditional animal-based ingredients.
Alexa’s Personalized Meal Planning and Recipes
When Amazon introduced Alexa nearly a decade ago, in late 2014, most thought it was a cool home-based voice for weather forecasting and kitchen schedules. But Amazon’s AI-powered virtual assistant has helped launch a new way for shoppers to do everyday things, including buying food and checking what’s in the oven. But it wasn’t long before Amazon started helping me automate and personalize our shopping lists, and eventually started creating personalized recipes based on our past behavior.
Computer vision is everywhere
More than two years after Amazon first released Alexa, it opened its first Amazon Go store with its Just Walk Out technology. Powered by sensors and computer vision, the storefront allows shoppers to take items from the store’s shelves and out without leaving. Soon, a number of unmanned retail startups emerged to provide grocery and store users with convenient platforms to create a frictionless shopping experience enabled by computer vision. We have also seen computerized home appliances that can detect their food in the fridge or oven. Computer vision has also started in the backyard restaurant to find solutions that help reduce food waste and help prepare the menu.
Food Robots
Although robots and AI are not always the same, most robots use some form of AI to help serve us. Whether it’s Google Mineral’s farm robot matching plant traits and phenotyping plant species or server robots dynamically mapping dining room layouts, we’re seeing the rise of AI-assisted food robots moving up and down the food chain.
In terms of generative AI, we are beginning to see how it can change the food industry. The first applications are likely to be in the restaurant markets (like the image created for this post using DALL-E), operations, and customer service systems. But as technology becomes more powerful and creative programmers find ways to integrate productive AI technologies into their platforms, the impact of ChatGPT and similar AI programs has the potential to transform the food industry.
If you’re interested in learning more about how generative AI will change the food industry, you’ll want to attend The Spoon’s mini conference, How ChatGPT & Generative AI Will Change the Food Biz, tomorrow. You can register here.
