Throughout recorded history food has played a central role in the human
experience and central to food's role has been technology: the wheel, the mill,
the point-of-sale too at every fast-food restaurant, all technologies that help
push food into the future. A new generation of technology is set to upend
every aspect of the global food industry: from robotic farm hands to machine
vision technology; from cloud kitchens to autonomous food deliveries. The global
food system of the future faces significant challenges, providing enough
for an additional 1 billion people over the next 12 years is chief among those
challenges. Businesses in the food industry will need to do so sustainably
and in the midst of unpredictable climate changes that grow more volatile
by the year.
FoodForAll is a new marketplace for surplus food where restaurants can sell
their prepared inventory for users that go and pick it up for a discounted price.
And are there any just interesting uses of artificial intelligence or other
technologies that you're seeing to combat food waste that's really caught
your eye? I think the food waste scene now is a
very exciting place to be; there's a lot of innovation being developed across
the entire supply chain right so from farms to fork. So we're talking about
smart scales and software there is really going into analyzing and
understanding what food is produced because that's the first step to
actually be able to prevent food waste. There's also a lot of being developed
for technology in packaging. One of the most interesting things I've seen lately
is edible spray that actually increases food shelf life for up to more than 30
days including meat. This is groundbreaking...this is one of the things that
I was more excited about lately. Have you tested it? I still haven't tested it. They're still waiting for FDA approval and there
are a lot of technologies like food fraud which are more towards the network.
So really activating different agents, people, nonprofit organizations,
institutions just to make sure that we know where food is and that we can
connect it to the right person to actually go pick it up and make sure
that it's consumed. Can you talk a little bit about the work you all are doing
with artificial intelligence or machine learning? We're starting with the pilots
that whenever our user actually allows us to use their location depending on
when they cross a radius that actually has food that is available they are
notified.I think there's not gonna be one hero but really a lot of solutions
working in collaboration.
We're grow to order farm so chefs come to us with a product that they have in
mind for a menu and then we're able to connect our technology which manages all
of our growing kind of secrets and then incorporates it into the space
onto the farm. What technologies that are emerging are you most excited about for
the future of your work? So I'm really excited to see harvesting becoming more
automated also just plant monitoring. I know that in this space we still test
our pH and our nutrients every day but they have automated systems I can do
that for you which hopefully one day we will integrate here and then just seeing
robots come in and pick up a nutrient film technique system and then
you know chop down the lettuce and then it's pushed out for something to package.
All that's like super exciting because it means that food production can then
focus on other things like the problems with climate change, how are we going to
engineer for those? Yeah. This is Stemple Creek Ranch in Tomales, California. I
think some of the most exciting technology that's still in development
would be virtual fencing and where you can actually move cattle without
actually having to physically move them. We could you know make design pastures
basically from a satellite and somehow the cattle get the message to move to
this area and graze the other thing is there's lots of monitoring going on
where you can actually this is going to be happening in the future more and more
you can actually determine which pastures are best to graze at what times
based on the sugar content of the plant and the health of the animal and how
much we should graze, there's a lot of technology that's in the works
right now that can potentially help us sequester more carbon actually the grass
beam or more nutritious for the animals and have them perform pretty well using
technology. How does your organization fit within this forward-looking food
system? Will food workers be displaced by automation? Where AI assisted diet apps
finally putting into the question of what's for dinner? The answers to these
questions revolve around the decision-making that can eliminate food
and security for our ever-growing population,
efficiently, deliciously and more conveniently than ever before. This is
the future of food.