Welcome to this week’s edition of the Food AI Weekly Bulletin, our weekly presentation highlighting important events at the intersection of AI and food. If you would like to sign up to have this report delivered to your inbox, you can do so here.<\/p>\n
Is AI-Washing the Problem of Food Technology?<\/strong> Some predict one-third of startups will incorporate AI as part of their core product by the end of this year. Is stretching the truth about whether your AI-enabled product really is a food tech problem? <\/p>\n Gatorade’s AI Hydration Coach<\/strong>. Is Gatorade’s AI-powered hydration coach a marketing ploy or another sign that health pilots are starting to pop up everywhere?<\/p>\n Researchers Develop RhizoNet, Which Uses a Neural Network to Analyze Plant Roots<\/strong>. A new tool called RhizoNet may provide a major leap forward in understanding root growth.<\/p>\n The Number of Marketers Using AI Doubles in the Last Year<\/strong>. The adoption of AI is increasing rapidly, and marketing appears to be one of the fastest growing sectors.<\/p>\n CaperCart Continues Rollout of AI-Powered Shopping Carts<\/strong>. Speaking of AI in retail, Instacart hopes to do its part to spread the technology through its intelligent computerized shopping carts.<\/p>\n Minerals AI Air Down<\/strong>. In a surprise move, Mineral AI announced last week that they would be discontinuing and licensing their technology to partners like Driscoll’s. <\/p>\n Mars Uses AI to develop 50 product concepts per day<\/strong>. Big CPG is getting the hang of this AI productivity thing. <\/p>\n eGrowcery Launches 70,000 AI-Generated Recipes<\/strong>. Are the recipes set to be almost all types of AI?<\/p>\n Is AI-Washing the Problem of Food Technology?<\/strong> <\/p>\n Whenever a new technology captures the zeitgeist of society, brands always jump on the bandwagon. After all, that’s what brands do, and it’s incumbent on any good marketer to be involved in any potential interactions.<\/p>\n Where it can be problematic is when a company claims to have a key competitive differentiator for a given technology and stretches the truth. Being an early adopter of, say, cloud computing, Web3, or, yes, AI is worth mentioning or making the center of a marketing campaign (even if it might attract attention), but if it’s in your field of view and you exaggerate how central it is to your product, it can be deceptively powerful, at least according to the SEC.<\/p>\n And now the regulatory body has started to resist what they call ‘AI-washing’. While the SEC has focused heavily on claims by investment firms that claim to deliver investor value through AI-powered decision-making, it is clear that they are policing the broader use of claims by companies seeking to profit from the organization.<\/p>\n According to the European investment fund OpenOcean, by the end of the year, one third of startups will include AI in their decks. My guess is that many will have legitimate claims, but as we’ve seen over the past year in food technology, sometimes such claims seem simplistic. It’s a smart move as a founder, especially in a market where raising capital has become increasingly difficult. But with everyone jumping on the AI \u200b\u200bbandwagon, startups should be careful about their claims, and those looking to invest in or partner with these companies should do their due diligence to see if there’s anything real behind the stake.<\/p>\n Gatorade’s AI Hydration Coach<\/strong><\/p>\n A few weeks ago, at the Cannes Lions, the largest international awards gallery in the advertising industry, Gatorade released its AI-powered application that acts as a hydration coach. <\/p>\n From Marketing Dive:<\/p>\n Gatorade’s AI Hydration Coach app used AI to “educate users on the best ways to stay hydrated with an assistant that uses decades of historical data from the sports drink brand’s research center. The concept hinges on the idea that AI has the potential to democratize services that were once specialized, giving everyday consumers the kind of specialized guidance usually reserved for elites.”<\/em><\/p>\n It’s an interesting concept – after all, the future may be filled with AI-powered pilots, assistants will sit on our shoulders whispering in our ears to train us for the rest of our lives – but I’m not sure how seriously consumers will take certain branded assistants. Millennials and Gen-Z are also tool builders when it comes to their health, but they all have a strong sense of smell and brands aren’t always the most trusted advisors in part because it’s easy to question their motivation.<\/p>\n Researchers Develop RhizoNet, Which Uses a Neural Network to Analyze Plant Roots<\/strong><\/p>\n According to the Interesting Engineering article, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Applied Mathematics and Computational Research (AMCR) and Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) Divisions have developed a new neural network tool called RhizoNet to analyze plant roots.<\/p>\n From IE: <\/p>\n It paved the way for scientists to accurately measure root growth and biomass, making it easier and faster to study plant roots in the lab. <\/em><\/p>\n In simple terms, RhizoNet automatically interprets images of plant roots making it easier and faster to understand the root growth process and how it reacts to different conditions.<\/em><\/p>\n According to the report, this system will enable much faster and more accurate analysis of root biomass, especially compared to more extensive (ie human-driven) analysis of plant roots. <\/p>\n The researchers noted that they evaluated the performance of the system through analysis Brachypodium distachyon<\/em>grass type of plants, as they absorb nutrients within five weeks. <\/p>\n “We’ve made great progress in reducing the manual work involved in crop testing with EcoBOT, and now RhizoNet is reducing the manual work involved in analyzing the data generated,” said Peter Andeer, research scientist at EGSB and lead developer of EcoBOT.<\/p>\n “This increases our efficiency and moves us towards the goal of self-driving labs,” he added.<\/p>\n The Number of Marketers Using AI Doubles in the Last Year<\/strong><\/p>\n According to the Food Industry Association’s recently published annual study on the state of food retailing, The Food Retailing Industry Speaks 2024, retailers are increasingly turning to AI to improve parts of their business. The report, which surveyed large and small chains, said 41% of those surveyed said they were using AI in parts of their business. This doubles the number of retailers using AI over the past year. <\/p>\n The doubling of the use of AI in retail is not surprising given the proliferation of various tools, from supply chain optimization to in-store computer vision systems to real-time inventory analysis and theft mitigation analysis. My guess is that next year, many retailers will be deploying AI in other parts of their operations.<\/p>\n CaperCart Continues Rollout of AI-Powered Shopping Carts<\/strong><\/p>\n Instacart has added another shopping cart to its CaperCart smart shopping cart lineup. The company announced that Price Chopper and McKeever’s Market & Eatery have each added \u201cAI-enabled grocery carts\u201d to store locations in Missouri. This comes a week after the company announced that Wakefern announced that it is increasing the number of stores using Capecarrt. <\/p>\n As we have seen over the past few years, the company is increasingly seeking to separate itself from its personal consumer business. The focus is on creating technology platforms for non-Amazon grocers around the world to adapt to the increasingly digital grocery shopping industry. <\/p>\n Minerals AI Air Down<\/strong><\/p>\n Whenever a company graduates from Google’s X month graphics factory to become a subsidiary of parent company Alphabet, most assume that the company will be successful. But the truth is that these graduates, for whatever reason, sometimes don’t get the job they need in a private company and end up dead.<\/p>\n A recent example of this is Mineral AI. Mineral, the ‘computerized agriculture’ company that graduated from X with great success last year, announced last week that it is going out of business. In a post released by Mineral’s CEO, Elliott Grant, he says the company’s technology will continue to be licensed to Driscoll’s and other “leading agribusinesses where it can have the most impact.”<\/p>\n It’s hard to pin down the dynamics of decision-making at a giant like Alphabet, but it’s been clear since the beginning of the year that the company has been pushing back on its month-end plans, both with layoffs and with how much money it’s expanding to fund those plans. A decade ago, X was home to a number of emerging concepts, such as balloon-powered broadband, but with the cheap money drying up and the company using resources to continue the LLM space race, those days seem to be coming to an end. <\/p>\n Mars Uses AI to develop 50 product concepts per day<\/strong><\/p>\n While it’s easy to make big food brands like giant behemoths slow to adapt to new technologies and innovations, it’s becoming increasingly clear that many are quickly building in-house capabilities using AI to speed up product development processes. <\/p>\n The latest indication is the news that Mars has developed its own AI-powered tool called Brahma to develop up to fifty product concepts per day. According to a Consumer Goods Technology report, Brahma “uses data from a CPG consumer survey conducted last year involving 80,000 consumers and 800,000 consumption sessions in 11 countries.” <\/p>\n eGrowcery Launches 70,000 AI-Generated Recipes<\/strong><\/p>\n eGrowcery, a white label e-commerce platform company, announced today that they have launched an AI-powered personal recipe offering for their SaaS customers. The company said their new AI recipe feature uses AI to make recipe suggestions based on regional preferences and store inventory. The company hopes to increase customer satisfaction, sales, and market share for retailers with a suite of more than 70,000 personalized recipes. <\/p>\n The eGrowcery initiative is a sign that affordable recipes are an obvious early candidate for the category to be powered by productive AI. It will be interesting to see how much consumers take from these offerings, because many home cooks are taking inspiration these days from other sources (such as social media) for recipe and food ideas. However, we’ve started to hear that the influencer-recipe space is struggling to keep up with the changing landscape caused by Google’s push to use AI-powered snippets rather than linking to other sites. <\/p>\n In other words, AI is starting to sink its hooks deeper into the food planning and inspiration space from all angles.<\/p>\n Our Favorite AI-Generated Food Photos of the Week<\/strong><\/p>\n Beyond our Spoon Slack community, we’ve had some of our Spoon community drop AI-powered artwork.<\/p>\n First up is this delicious looking dish from Min Fan. You can see all the photos from Min on our Slack. <\/p>\n And we love this upcoming food creation hub from Emma Forman:<\/p>\n If you’d like to have your AI artwork featured on The Spoon, post it in our Spoon Slack. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Welcome to this week’s edition of the Food AI Weekly Bulletin, our weekly presentation highlighting important events at the intersection of AI and food. If you would like to sign up to have this report delivered to your inbox, you can do so here. Is AI-Washing the Problem of Food Technology? 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