Editor’s Note: And earlier version of this article wrongly stated that Spoon University has 175 monthly unique page views. 

College students, like all consumers, care more and more about what they eat, and they want to have a say in their dining hall options. But unlike in restaurants, where diners can vote with their dollars, in campus dining students often lack a way to communicate their preferences and influence dining hall menus.

Empowering students to change campus food

To tackle this problem, Applegate challenge winning team Rumble came up with a“Yelp” platform for campus food. The website enables university students to provide feedback on their dining hall food directly to operators. While empowering students to have a voice in their dining experience, the platform also provides institutions with actionable analytics to help them make the most from student feedback.

Next Steps

The duo behind the hack, Sarah Adler and Mackenzie Barth, are cofounders of  Spoon University, the only food publication for college students, by college students. They are not actively developing of the project now, because they’re focused on growing their one-year-old startup. But if and when they choose to build out Rumble, they’ll already have a captive audience, to the tune of one thousand contributors and 250,000 monthly unique page views (and growing).

Needs

Sarah and Mackenzie say if and when they tackle Rumble head on, they’ll need an iOS developer to build out the front end and a back end developer to help them build the analytics system.  So if you’re a dev or data geek interested in making a difference in campus food and want to get involved, email nina[at]foodtechconnect[dot]com. 

In the spirit of Hack//Dining’s mission to drive open innovation, we hosted Google+ Hangouts with the winning teams. Our goal was to showcase their hacks and share their lessons learned and requests for resources and feedback.

The post Spoon University Creates Yelp for Campus Food appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Taking on Restaurant Food Safety

Food safety compliance is a major challenge for restaurants. Last week we shared our hangout with Erica Obersi of Kitchen Check, a platform to help operators streamline the process. And today, we’re excited to share that two other members of Hack//Dining’s B&B challenge winning team, Jonathan Judge and Margot Belgorod, who are attacking the the problem from a different angle.

The duo has set out to digitize the NYC health department PDF document for food safety regulations by turning it into an easy-to-use checklist app. They say this rubric provides helpful information for operators, but it’s difficult to find and it’s buried under a lot of legal jargon.

Progress

After talking with restaurants, the pair says they received overwhelming feedback to focus on mobile first. So the developer and designer team decided to build a food safety regulation checklist mobile app for restaurants. They are tackling NYC first and hope to expand in the future. Their goal is to create an MVP over the next few months.

Needs

Jonathan and Margot would love to hear from restaurants about their health inspection experiences. What caught you off guard? What are your recurring challenges with the process? They want to hear all of your health department stories, the good, the bad and the ugly. Jonathan says the operators they’ve talked with so far have said, “Just tell me what to do…Give me everything I need so I can be as prepared as possible when inspection day happens.” Any feedback they receive from the community will only help them build a more comprehensive app that will do just that. So if you have stories or feedback, please email nina [at]foodtechconnect[dot].com.

Learn all about how they plan to make the check list easy to use in the video below.

In the spirit of Hack//Dining‘s mission to drive open innovation, we have been hostingGoogle+ Hangouts with all of the winning teams. Our goal is to showcase their hacks and share their lessons learned and requests for resources and feedback.

The post Hack//Dining Winners to Build Food Safety Inspection Checklist App appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Every week we curate and deliver the latest food tech news, trends and startup resources to our readers’ inboxes. Tracking the top technology and innovation happenings across agriculture, CPG, retail, restaurants, cooking and health, our newsletter is the absolute easiest way to stay on top of the emerging sector.

From a breakdown of the best city to start a food company to an inside look at the supermarket of the future, these are last week’s top food tech news stories. Like what you read? Feast your eyes on the full roundup here. Or better yet, sign up for our newsletter and get the latest and greatest in food tech delivered to your inbox every week.

1. KitchenCheck to Simplify Restaurant Food Safety Compliance

Hack//Dining winner KitchenCheck is building the TurboTax of restaurant food safety regulations. Get involved to help simplify food safety compliance.

2. Hive Aims to Empower Healthy Employees with Wellness App

Hack//Dining winner Hive is building a food and fitness app that’s focused on empowering healthy employees and communities.

3. Where’s the Best City to Start a Food Company? – Huffington Post

Bandar Foods’ founders analyze the best city for food startups, based on factors like access to fresh ingredients and community support.

4. Packaged Food Industry to Reach US$2.4 Trillion in Retail Sales in 2014 – Wired

Last week, Euromonitor International released new global packaged food data showing 3.6% growth in value sales over 2013.

5. Hampton Creek’s Strategy Chief Abruptly Resigns Amid Fundraising – Wall Street Journal

The egg-free food alternative startup has lost its chief strategy officer, Ali Partovi, only a week after his arrival.

6. Here’s What Your Supermarket Will Look Like in 50 Years – CNBC

Studio Industries is envisioning what your grocery store will look like in 2065, and you’ll only have to wait a year to find out

7. Smart Recipe Platform Yummly Integrates With Apple’s HealthKit – Yahoo

The integration allows users to send recipe nutrition data to health app and uses healthKit data to personalize Yummly.

8. Newleaf Symbiotics Raises $17M for Pink Bacteria Technology –AgFunder

Otter Capital led the round and was joined by existing investors. The funds will be used to accelerate its successful R&D program, ramp up production and go to market with its first products.

The post Hack//Dining Winner Updates, Packaged Food Ind. to Reach $2.4T in 2014 + More appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Tackling Restaurant Food Safety

Restaurant food safety compliance can be a nightmare. So we are excited to share the progress of one promising project that came out of Hack//Dining, which aims to streamline the process. We talked with Erica Obersi of the B&B challenge winning team, KitchenCheck (check out the team’s final pitch video here), a software program that described itself as the TurboTax of food safety regulations. The program aims to simplify restaurant food safety compliance by making it easy to find the regulations that apply to your food business, maintenance checklists and expert advice, and it also offers a community forum.

In the spirit of Hack//Dining‘s mission to drive open innovation, we have been hostingGoogle+ Hangouts with all of the winning teams. Our goal is to showcase their hacks and share their lessons learned and requests for resources and feedback.

Progress

Obersi has has made major progress on the project since Hack//Dining. KitchenCheck’s initial landing page is up and running, which you can view here. She’s been getting feedback from restaurateurs and building out maintenance checklists.

If you’re a restaurant operator interested in simplifying food safety compliance, you can sign up to be notified when the beta version launches. 

Needs

In the mean time, Obersi is looking for restaurants and food businesses to join KitchenCheck’s beta testing group. She’s also hoping to crowdsource kitchen inspection checklists from restaurants, which will help her develop a kick-ass, comprehensive inspection list for KitchenCheck users. Finally, feedback from developers and designers is most welcome. So if you’re interested in sharing information or resources email Obersi at kitchenchecker[at]gmail[dot]com.

Obersi is gung ho about bringing the product to market.”Information is power, and we need to make this DOH inspection process transparent and easy to understand,” she says.

The post KitchenCheck to Simplify Restaurant Food Safety Compliance appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

In the spirit of Hack//Dining‘s mission to drive open innovation, we hosted Google+ Hangouts with the winning teams. Our goal was to showcase their hacks and share their lessons learned and requests for resources and feedback.

Building an ecosystem of healthy employees

Today, we’re excited to share our Hangout with Google challenge winning team, Hive (check out their final pitch video here), a curated lifestyle guide meets personal training and nutritionist app with an optional employer reward system to incentivize healthy employees.

We caught up with the team via email recently and learned that its members are independently exploring the project further. They’re on the hunt for potential backers and software developers to help them continue development. They are also very open to feedback from the community. So if you’re a food data nerd and want to help them build their hive (had to slip in one pun) or share feedback or resources let us know in the comments below or shoot an email to nina[at]foodtechconnect[dot]com.

The post Hive Aims to Empower Healthy Employees with Wellness App appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

In the spirit of Hack//Dining‘s mission to drive open innovation, we hosted Google+ Hangouts with the winning teams. Our goal was to showcase their hacks and share their lessons learned and requests for resources and feedback.

Hacking Burritos & Beyond

Today, we’re excited to share our Hangout with Brian Callaway and Alice Yen of Chipotle challenge winning team, Just Right (check out their final pitch video here), an ordering app and rewards program that empowers consumers to “right size” their burritos. Spoiler alert: the team is very interested in piloting their concept with sustainability-focused QSRs. Further down the line they’ll also be looking for developers, designers and restaurant operation experts to help build out the app.

Learn all about their project in the video below. And if food waste and restaurant loyalty apps float your boat and you’re interested in chatting with the team, please let us know in the comments below or email nina[at]foodtechconnect[dot]com.

The post This Ordering App Wants to Reduce Food Waste at a QSR Near You appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

And that’s a wrap on our future of dining series. Over the last 9 weeks we’ve published 53 thought-provoking submissions from Mario Batali, Food52, Mitchell Davis and many more. And the final week of the series was no exception; It’s brimming with standout contributions. Niko Hrdy calls on entrepreneurs to disrupt the food and agriculture industries, Alice Cheng explores 4 ways tech can bolster the 13.5 million U.S. restaurant employees, we chat with Hampton Creek founder Josh Tetrick about why his team’s building the world’s largest plan database and the impact it might have on the future of dining, and so much more.

Don’t miss the final week roundup below, complete with nifty quote images for your viewing (and social sharing) pleasure, and have a look at all 53 series submissions here.

Hack Stories, Not Technology: Why Food Needs Design

Studio Industries explores why design and human experience must be at the center of food innovation.

4 Ways Tech Can Support the 13.5M U.S. Restaurant Employees

Alice Cheng says tech can help restaurant employees grow through virtual mentorship, education and networking.

Hampton Creek Scrambles Big Data + Food Science to Change the Way We Eat

Josh Tetrick on building the world’s largest plant database and how Hampton Creek’s fulfilling its mission to make better food available to everyone.

Let’s Hack Taste Profiles to Personalize Dining

Changing Tastes founder Arlin Wasserman believes technology holds the key to truly personalizing the dining experience for both eaters and chefs.

What an Edible Garden at a Baseball Stadium Means for Our Food Future

Saul Colt believes our food future will be driven by a collective desire to slow down and connect with our food and that new tech should support that mentality.

Performance Dining: Where Food, Tech & Design Converge

Emilie Baltz writes about food as a vehicle for performance, which helps us cultivate a better understanding of both food and self.

4 Projects Building an Open Source Food Web

Rebecca Chesney of Institute for the Future on how BulliPedia, Gitchen, Open Source Seed Initiative and Underground Meats are creating an open source food web.

Entrepreneurs & Educated Consumers Will Disrupt The Future of Eating & Farming

Niko Hrdy calls on entrepreneurs to disrupt the food and agriculture industries and to educate consumers about their food, from farm-to-fork.

The post Future of Dining Editorial Series Final Week Recap appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Guest post by Mike Lee and Meredith Micale of Studio Industries. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of Food+Tech Connect. 

The future of food needs design. We’re not just talking about aesthetics, we’re talking about staying sensitive to people’s needs as food producers, distributors, cooks and consumers. The future will inevitably bring a bounty of innovations in food technology, and in our world with so much transitioning from atoms to bits, it will become increasingly critical to keep people at the core of design decisions around food.

Food, like technology, is adaptable, and the ways in which we interact with it and experience it are constantly changing. With the complexities of interconnected food systems, it will be evermore important to understand people, the context in which they live and work, and perhaps most importantly, to ask the right questions before jumping to solutions. By focusing on people’s needs, instead of technology or a product, we are in a better position to design relevant solutions that have enduring impact.

While it can be tempting to fixate on the shiny new object–the app that tells us exactly what to eat and when to eat it, or the alternative sugar that’s nutritious, delicious and natural–we can’t lose sight of who those technologies are for in our effort to build those products.  Just because we can build it, doesn’t mean that we should.

One example that illustrates the value of paying close attention to the user comes from rural Cambodia, where anemia is a particularly common health problem. In this case, the general solution doesn’t happen to be terribly complex. Cooking with a simple piece of iron in your pot can add enough iron to ward off anemia. So that’s what epidemiologist Christopher Charles did. He created small iron blocks that were handed out to households with instructions to place them in their cooking pots.  Unfortunately, however, the people chose to not adopt this new behavior, and the iron blocks were mostly repurposed as door stops or paperweights instead of cooking accompaniments.

After closer conversation with the local Cambodians with whom he lived, Charles was inspired by the fact that the fish is a sign of good luck in Cambodian culture. Charles quickly refurbished the iron lumps into fish-shaped forms and saw that the usage rate shot up to 92%.

Despite rational understanding that iron could help solve their health issues, it wasn’t until the fish came along that locals had an emotional hook to use the iron. It was a simple solution using existing technology and materials, yet was user-sensitive and impactful. The Lucky Iron Fish was designed for their way of life, and as a result, could be easily integrated into their lives. Anemia was effectively curtailed in all test neighborhoods.

The Lucky Iron Fish story is great design at work. But it’s important to note that the “design” lesson here isn’t just about form-factor design or marketing to local tradition. Fabricating the iron fish was the design output of this project, but the design process started well before that when Charles opened his eyes and ears, and started to pay closer attention to the Cambodians way of life. The fact that a fish is a lucky symbol to Cambodians would never come up in a market research survey or grocery scanner report. These are the details a project’s success can hinge upon, and they can only come from truly understanding the details of life for the people who you’re designing for.

The act of taking a step back and examining the user(s) and their context more thoughtfully can have a huge impact on your eventual solution. The Lucky Iron Fish example is a small lesson on the perils of jumping directly to the solution before truly understanding who you’re designing for. In a world where our society can build virtually anything we put our resources toward, it’s going to be crucial that we continue to ask the right questions before we build the answers.

Recently at Food + Tech Connect’s Hack // Dining event, we were on hand to help guide hackers toward better solutions, by showing them how to ask better questions. We called this process Design Hacking, and it was a methodology we developed to infuse more design thinking into the breakneck pace of a typical hackathon.

Our main message to the hackers was a bit counter-intuitive, especially to veterans of tech hackathons. We emphasized that “you’re not here to hack technology…you’re here to hack stories.” This reframed the challenge for the hackers to not just focus on cool tech for cool tech’s sake, but to design solutions that actually improve someone’s life story.

The Studio Industries team spent the better part of the first day helping the hackers and stakeholders understand the user journeys of the people they were “hacking” for, such as Chipotle customers or foodservice professionals of Batali & Bastianich Hospitality Group. This simple “mapping” helped hackers identify potentially high value moments where the experience could be elevated and improced.  Those high value moments were the focus of the hacking, and often the best solutions didn’t need to be the ones with the most groundbreaking technology.

At the heart of better design in food is the idea that features and technical specs don’t equate to value, people’s experiences do. For food innovators everywhere, we hope the future of food means we all take a stronger design mindset to create the right solutions.  By taking a small, yet purposeful shift in how we think about food innovations, we can begin to look around the food world and ask ourselves: where are we making lumps of metal when we should really be making Lucky Iron Fishes?

Hacking Dining is an online conversation exploring how we might use technology and design to hack a better future for dining. Join the conversation between June 2 – July 31, and share your ideas in the comments, on Twitter using #hackdining, Facebook, LinkedIn or Tumblr.

_______________

Mike Lee is the founder and CEO of Studio Industries, a Food Design & Innovation agency, specializing in the application of design thinking to food products and experiences. Mike’s experience in food design & innovation has covered a wide range over the past 10 years. Most recently, Mike led product development initiatives on the Innovation & New Ventures team at Chobani. At Chobani, Mike focused on building out the Greek Yogurt maker’s product platform into new categories and he drove the product design process from research, insights and ideation, to food, flavor and packaging development, and then finally to business planning and production.

Mike also founded the Studiofeast underground supperclub, the sister organization to Studio Industries. Studiofeast creates unique dining experiences that use food as a medium to design experiences that range from the artful, to the educational, to the hedonistic. In addition, Mike is also the Innovation Director for AccelFoods, an early stage food startup accelerator that cultivates and invests in new packaged food brands. Mike is a Detroit native and was trained in Business at the University of Michigan and Graphic Design at the Parsons School of Design. He now lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Meredith Micale is a design strategist driven by transforming consumer insights into business opportunities. She is passionate about helping brands rethink what value means to their customers, and works with companies to design and deliver meaningful products and services with enduring impact.

Applying a strategic lens across a range of projects, Meredith has created new product innovations for multiple consumer house wares companies, designed a digital user interface of a mobile medical cart for a world leader in ergonomic solutions, imagined the future of microwave cooking for a multinational manufacturer of home appliances, created a new brand and product line for a body care and wellness company, and led design research and innovation workshops for diverse industries and clients.

Previously, Meredith led design research and strategy projects at Smart Design in New York City, and the Global Consumer Design studio at Whirlpool Europe in Italy. She holds a BA in Mathematics from the College of Mount St. Joseph, and an MBA in Design and Innovation Strategy from MIP – Politecnico di Milano.

Meredith is passionate about quality ingredients, clean eating, and enjoying lunch as the main meal of the day.

The post Hack Stories, Not Technology: Why Food Needs Design appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Guest post by Alice Cheng, founder and CEO, Culinary Agents. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of Food+Tech Connect. 

The hospitality industry has changed dramatically over the past 15 years. Media has played a key role in the rise of “celebrity chefs”, new social tools allow experiences to be shared instantly and everyone has effectively become a critic overnight. Technology has ushered in a new level of guest excitement, curiosity and participation.

The landscape has also evolved for the people who work in hospitality. Positions like line cook, server and manager, which may have once been considered temporary roles, are now viewed as fulfilling and viable career paths. Culinary talent is in high demand (like engineers are in the tech industry), and many of the leaders and mentors who have forged non-traditional paths are now at the peak of their careers.

The future of dining will be heavily impacted by the growth and development of employees in the hospitality industry. Technology will enable sharing of knowledge and experiences in a way that motivates and inspires industry talent. Tools and information provided to staff will help them learn and develop new skills, while enabling even better guest experiences.

The difficulty, however, lies in encouraging an industry steeped in tradition to embrace change and adopt new methods of talent sourcing and development. Here are four key areas where technology will have high impact and encourage the evolution of the profession across all categories.

1. Virtual Mentorship: Inspirational advice, an honest look into how industry leaders got to where they are, and the experiential wisdom they have to offer to aspiring talent.
2. A newly comprehensive look at opportunities spanning beyond traditional geographic limitations, to show how truly prolific the restaurant career landscape is on a national level.
3. Tools to enable personal and business branding, setting a new standard for the professionalism of any and every individual or business.
4. Access to skill development courses, technique training and other educational avenues to set an individual, team or business up for success.

Forward-thinking individuals and businesses will prioritize how to further develop the “supply chain of human capital” in the dining industry. A business cannot truly grow without the right people in place to support it, and there is simply no replacement for people, especially in the hospitality industry. By leveraging technology to invest in the further development and growth of the talent in the industry, the future of dining will be spectacular, no matter what side of the table you’re on.

Hacking Dining is online conversation exploring how we might use technology and design to hack a better future for dining.  Join the conversation between June 2-30, and share your ideas in the comments, on Twitter using #hackdining, Facebook, LinkedIn or Tumblr.

________________ 

Alice Y. Cheng is a deeply experienced business, marketing and sales professional who is passionate about helping people build careers. In her 13 year tenure at IBM in New York and San Francisco she was one of the core team members who pioneered Big Blue’s Digital Media practice into and across multiple industries globally.  While in San Francisco, she helped tech and media enterprises leverage web and infrastructure solutions, along with research and development innovations to drive growth in a challenging, fast-changing business environment.  Upon her return to the east coast, Alice focused on building and operationalizing sales and business development strategies for the North America sales and services teams. She rounded out her last few years at IBM driving the global transformation and integration of how sellers build meaningful client experiences. Alice has taken and continues to take leadership roles in mentoring all levels of talent in the technology, business and hospitality spaces.

Having spent years studying culinary arts and oenology as a hobby, Alice has taken her knowledge of technology into the food and beverage industry to solve inefficiencies and gaps around job placement and career development.  She is the Founder and CEO of Culinary Agents, a professional networking and job matching site dedicated to the food, beverage and hospitality industry.

The post 4 Ways Tech Can Support the 13.5M U.S. Restaurant Employees appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

From June 2 through August 2 we’ve been asking food and tech innovators: “How might we use technology and design to hack a better future for dining?” We’ve posted 50+ contributions from Mario Batali, Joanne Wilson, Mitchell Davis and many more.

Today, we are thrilled to share our interview with Josh Tetrick, founder of Hampton Creek. Backed by Bill Gates and Khosla Ventures,  Hampton Creek is on a mission to make better food available to anyone, anywhere. It’s using data and technology to find more efficient, affordable and sustainable plant-based alternatives to common foods. Josh and his team started by turning the $7 billion US egg industry on its head by creating egg-free alternatives for products like mayonnaise and cookie dough.

Josh dives into Hampton Creek’s new initiative to build the world’s largest database of plants, the social and environmental mission behind its products and  his advice for burgeoning food entrepreneurs. Check out our interview below to learn about his critical ideas for the future of food production.

Food+Tech Connect: What does a better future of dining look like to you?

Josh Tetrick: To us, it’s truly about making better food choices easier for regular people. That’s it. What we’re doing at Hampton Creek is completely unique from any other food company out there – it’s a wholesale reinvention of how we do things in food in general – not just animal agriculture. Our approach is to merge data with biochemistry with culinary and food science, to build a database of plants that makes food better (i.e., healthier, affordable, convenient, easier, sustainable). And this is truly where the future of better food lies.

FTC: Hampton Creek just announced its plans to build the world’s largest plant database. Can you tell us more about the database and how it will allow you to create this better future? 

JT: Sure. We’re scanning hundreds of varietals of plants every week…and we need to have this data completely and thoroughly organized/categorized so that as we grow and expand, we can go back and utilize what we’re discovering daily. It’s a vast amount of precious information that we will be able to expand and capitalize on down the road. And we’re using very smart data scientists (led by the former head of Google Maps) to make this plant library happen.

FTC: What are some of the other ways technology is making this future possible?

JT: Technology is improving the future in many ways, from food, to healthcare, to travel – it is really the future of everything.

The post Hampton Creek Scrambles Big Data + Food Science to Change the Way We Eat appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Guest post by Arlin Wasserman, founder and partner, Changing Tastes. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of Food+Tech Connect. 

Why do I dine? For entertainment. For fashion. To learn something new. To be surprised. To explore the many nuances of “yummy.”

Dining is different than just eating, where we consume so we can keep on, what we know how to cook and sadly, we what we usually eat.

But many people in the U.S. are fortunate enough to be able to choose dining over eating pretty often.

More than ever as a nation, we’re deciding where to eat before we decide what to eat, and we’re paying culinary professionals more than ever before to assemble and transform ingredients into something delicious. We now spend more than half our food dollars to have culinary professionals and food companies cook for us.

Grocery shopping is going the way of the landline. But some supermarkets are making the move to reinvent themselves as sit down and take out restaurants, complete with buffet selections and self-serve pay stations instead of wait staff.

Despite the move from bags and carts to plates and to-go containers, we still go to grocery stores to eat not to dine. A really good grocery shopping experience is rarely as enjoyable as a really good dining experience, and it rarely surpasses some minimum standard of yummy,^SM and holding far few surprises.

So I want someone to hack how I choose where to dine. Don’t guide me toward what I already know or what most people like. Surprise me, or at least help the chef and the restaurant deliver more surprises and more “yummy.”

Look at what I’m interested in, where I’ve been, and what I like and don’t like. Point me not in the direction of the restaurant that most people like but towards the one that shares my interests and values. Point me towards the one that has the flavors and recipes that I haven’t had but discern that can be discerned by putting my palate, my preferences and maybe even my grocery shopping list through a virtual robot-coupe.

Building off the software programs that now help restaurants develop new recipes based on emerging and trending flavors, maybe this new technology could even let the chef know what flavors are emerging or trending in Arlin.

In an era of increasing customization and millions of possibilities, I need help deciding where to eat. But don’t ask me to choose. Develop a technology that will do the work for me and for the chef. This way I can be surprised by something I didn’t know I wanted until I experienced that first wonderful bite.

Hacking Dining is an online conversation exploring how we might use technology and design to hack a better future for dining. Join the conversation between June 2 – July 31, and share your ideas in the comments, on Twitter using #hackdining, Facebook, LinkedIn or Tumblr.

________________

Arlin Wasserman is founder and partner at Changing Tastes. Changing Tastes is a consultancy that finds value and opportunity at the intersection of the five major drivers of change in our food system:  sustainability, public health, information technology, demographics and the changing role of the culinary professional. The firms insights are the basis for the strategy, innovation, sustainability and performance management services it provides to Fortune 100 and growth stage food companies, government sector and private investors, and civil society institutions.

Arlin also is a fellow at the Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability at the Virginia Polytechnic University and chair of the Sustainable Business Leadership Council for Menus of Change, a joint initiative of the Culinary Institute of America and the Harvard School of Public Health.

Arlin previously served as Vice President of Sustainability at Sodexo, the world’s largest institutional foodservice company, and was awarded a fellowship at the Aspen Institute and a Food and Society Fellowship funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.

The post Let’s Hack Taste Profiles to Personalize Dining appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Guest post by Emilie Baltz, founder of Baltz Works. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of Food+Tech Connect. 

“Show me what you eat and I will show you who you are,” this line by Brillat Savarin, the great french gastronome, is the motto of culinary creatives, educated consumers and adamant locavores around the world. In a single phrase, Savarin seamlessly defines the relationship between food and identity; yet, as we enter an age of greater access, and as information and technology become ever more ubiquitous parts of our daily lives, I wonder if this phrase needs a revamp? Savarin’s definition is linear, a simple translation of identity from material to man, which is perhaps better represented in contemporary times as:

“Show me HOW you eat and I will show you who you are.”

We are at a moment in time when experience is king and information rampant. If we can use technology to better illustrate the relationship between behavior and consequence, experiences will become ripe spaces for the cultivation of self, moving beyond representation and into understanding, revealing that the HOW is more important than the WHAT.

As an act, dining is a robust, complex and (hopefully) delightful process filled with multisensory touchpoints that, together, orchestrate the symphony of eating.  Every bite, and every dining room, is host to information in the form of sound, smells, texture, sight and taste that communicate with our brain. These messages, in turn, affect our perception of the experience at hand, shaping our world as we know it. This intersection in the dining experience provides ample space for technology. Defined as “neurogastronomy”, this space reveals the power of the sensory information inherent in every morsel of a meal and forges a new relationship between (wo)man, material and eating.

Imagine a dining experience in which the ingredients went beyond the traditional, where the taste of a carrot could be changed by a sound from your childhood or the temperature of a glass optimized perfectly for your personal wine tasting profile? Dining has the potential to become an even greater vehicle for performance, both as an act and entertainment, in which we learn not merely about our relationship to the world, but also our relationship to ourselves.

Hacking Dining is an online conversation exploring how we might use technology and design to hack a better future for dining. Join the conversation between June 2 – July 30, and share your ideas in the comments, on Twitter using #hackdining, Facebook, LinkedIn or Tumblr.

________________

Emilie Baltz creates experiences that provoke new connections within the 5 senses as a means of stimulating the individual and the collective.

A non-traditional creative, Baltz works at the intersection of design, performance, strategy and the visual arts, her process mirroring that of a chef in the kitchen, mixing ingredients of expression by blending photography, product, environment and intention with the human senses to provoke new points of entry into the individual and collective experience.

As a personal passion, she uses the eating experience as both lens and machine for cultural reflection and creation. In this sector, Emilie works to reframe, requestion and remind us of the fundamental place food occupies in our life as a portal into both the primitive and the civilized.

The post Performance Dining: Where Food, Tech & Design Converge appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Weeks 7 and 8  of our future of dining series were chock-full of thought-provoking submissions covering everything from streamlining home-cooking to bringing tech to wine making. Klappo dives into how we can harness big data to build better health and wellness apps, Sea to Table gives us an inside look at how it’s using tech to grow the sustainable seafood movement and Look & Cook envisions a community of smart, linked cooking apps, to name a few.

Don’t miss our  roundup of posts from the last two weeks below, complete with nifty quote images for your viewing (and social sharing) pleasure, and have a look at the 40+ (phew) submissions we’ve posted so far here.

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Designing Our Way to a Community of Smart, Linked Cooking Apps

Yael Raviv of Kinetic Art envisions a world of smart, linked cooking apps that use a shared database to making food apps more financially sustainable.

Making Healthy Home-Cooking Easy, Affordable & Accessible

Chef Hollie Greene wants to get people cooking more healthfully. She’s using technology to help families learn how to cook meals with more veggies.

Jetsons-esque Products like Soylent are the Food of the Future

Pills and shakes won’t replace food all together, but tech and design will help alternatives like Soylent become more mainstream in the future of food.

Sustainable Wine Making & Technology: The Perfect Pairing

St. Francis Vineyard shares how it uses data and technology to improve vine health and make its wines more sustainable.

How Sea to Table Is Using Tech to Grow the Sustainable Seafood Movement

Founding Director Michael Dimin explores how tech is helping chefs and eaters from across the country begin to support independent fisherman and sustainable fisheries.

Bridging the Gap Between Chefs & Sustainable Producers

Julie Ann Fineman chronicles FoodShed Exchange’s farm-to-fork launch dinner and how it exemplifies the platform’s goal to connect chefs with sustainable suppliers.

Harnessing Big Data to Build Better Food & Wellness Apps

Klappo looks at how we can leverage semantic data to create food and wellness apps that help consumers truly understand what is in their food.

Using Tech to Cultivate Community & Improve Environmental Health

Brooke Singer and Stefani Bardin of La Casita Verde say using tech to build better food systems and informed communities, will improve environmental and public health.

The Orange Chef Co. on Using Tech to Streamline Home Cooking

CEO and Founder Santiago Merea explores how hacking recipe selection and ingredient sourcing can create a healthier, more customizable future for home cooking.

How Food Data is Personalizing the Feedback Loop

Ingredient1’s co-founders believe tech can help food makers better understand customer needs and trends, while making food info more accessible to consumers.

The post Future of Dining Editorial Series Week 7 + 8 Recap appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Guest post by Rebecca Chesney, communications and research manager, Institute for the Future. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of Food+Tech Connect. 

In their contribution to Food+Tech Connect’s future of dining series, Food52 Co-Founders Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs advocated for a GitHub approach to home cooking, a way for cooks to track changes to recipes and build on each other’s ideas. Think of it as a collaborative and dynamic global cookbook, created by everyone from a Michelin starred chef to a student learning to eat on a budget.

The ability to connect the digital and physical worlds gives us opportunities to link people, skills, and knowledge together in ways we’ve never seen before. Indeed, when Institute for the Future’s 2014 Ten-Year Forecast set out to imagine ten projects that would change our paradigms in the next ten years, we included a Wikipedia for Making, a universal grammar for making anything.

By sharing code and tracking adaptations in a standardized format, GitHub fundamentally changed the way people interact with code. It created a shared grammar for the many programming languages housed in its nearly 14 million repositories. Now the open source, collaborative approach is starting to reshape how we organize materials, resources, and knowledge to make objects in our everyday lives. GitHub includes repositories for things like this taco recipe, which currently has 67 contributors. In answer to the Hack Dining challenge, the platform now has gitchen.org, a single place for cooking repositories—perhaps a precursor to the larger shift in home cooking Hesser and Stubbs propose.

Top chefs understand the potential of codifying cooking. Ferran Adriá closed his elBulli restaurant to launch the elBulli Foundation, which is creating BulliPedia—a shared archive of culinary knowledge that aims to stimulate creativity. Adriá believes that the cuisine of the past 50 years has evolved so much that it requires a new coding, a Cuisine Genome, to track flavor combinations, techniques, and technologies for cooking. Led by “the most influential chef of our time”, this top-down effort from gastronomy’s most brilliant minds combined with bottom-up sharing of recipes from home cooks represents a transformation in the ways we interact with culinary knowledge.

The signals of an open source, codified model extend beyond the kitchen to the entire food web. Learning from its own difficulty interpreting and complying with USDA standards, Wisconsin’s Underground Meats crowdfunded an open source guide to meat curing safety standards. Produced under a Creative Commons license, the guide will be modifiable by anyone, and will include instructional videos to share production processes.

Imagine a universal grammar extended to check recipes against food safety compliance and regulation—a mashup between a cookbook and regulatory code. We could track the number of times someone builds on a process, discover gaps in regulation, or study ingredient nuances to assess local availability or cultural differences. Turning processes into a shared resource would reduce complexity, create new alliances throughout the supply chain, and build better feedback loops with regulators.

Another signal, the Open Source Seed Initiative, aims to build openness into the food system from the ground up. Packets of seed with a “free seed pledge” contain genetic resources that cannot be legally protected, creating a perpetual seed commons. If information about each seed was coded online and easily duplicated, tweaked, and reproduced for local conditions—and linked to repositories for processing and cooking methods—we would have a true seed-to-fork understanding of the processes by which we produce the food we eat.

“Eating is an agricultural act,” Wendell Berry reminds us, and it is increasingly just as much a technological act. The ways in which we engage with technology to grow, cook, and eat our food will undoubtedly change in the coming years. We have the opportunity to harness technology to create truly open, shared, and cherished knowledge and resources for our global food web.

Hacking Dining is an online conversation exploring how we might use technology and design to hack a better future for dining. Join the conversation between June 2 – July 30, and share your ideas in the comments, on Twitter using #hackdining, Facebook, LinkedIn or Tumblr.

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Rebecca Chesney is a communications and research manager with Institute for the Future, a Silicon Valley nonprofit foresight organization. She researches topics that range from the future of food security to augmentation of human sensory experiences. Rebecca is particularly interested in using food as a lens for exploring ways to reinvent the way we live, work, and connect with one another. As part of IFTF’s food futures team, she helps organizations and individuals take a long-term systems view of the tensions and possibilities for the global food web. Rebecca previously worked with the World Bank and wrote financial accounting standards for the United States. She is an award-winning food and travel photographer and a Certified Public Accountant, and she holds degrees in accounting and finance from Texas A&M University and an MA in the Anthropology of Food from SOAS, University of London.

The post 4 Projects Building an Open Source Food Web appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Guest post by Yael Raviv of Kinetic Art . The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of Food+Tech Connect.

Historically, people learned to cook by being in the kitchen with an experienced cook, watching and imitating their actions. A grandmother or an acclaimed chef would open their kitchen to a young, aspiring cook and share their secrets.

In recent years we seem to have lost that intimate connection, the ability to have someone by our side in the kitchen, and we’ve been left to our own devices with the aid of recipes. With television (Julia Child), we began recapturing that close-up view of the kitchen and a sense of mentorship, but it was a one sided conversation. Blogs allow us more interaction; comments and responses create a conversation and virtual communities that sometimes even translate into real-life meetings.

At Kinetic Art, we design apps that aim to push this journey forward. We combine the elegance and beauty of cookbooks and television shows with the close-up, intimate experience that helps you through complex recipes and new techniques. We also provide new social media and sharing capabilities. Unlike blogs, these apps allow a tailor-made, individual experience, that considers factors like: beginner or experienced chef, metric or US units, inspirational skimming or I’m-in-the-kitchen-lets-go mode.

We are translating recipes by some of the most acclaimed American chefs into step-by-step guides for home cooks in our upcoming James Beard Foundation (JBF) Vegetable Recipe app. All recipes are created by JBF award winning chefs like Mario Batali, Thomas Keller, Alice Waters and Grant Achatz. We also offer our platform as a tool to publishers, allowing them to repurpose print material, giving it new life and a fresh audience. We strive to add value to printed books while keeping all the details that make them unique and beautiful. We achieve this by maintaining the ability to make specific graphic choices, while adding features like built-in timers and sharing capabilities. Even more significant are the tools we have developed (and are still honing) to aid cooking apps distribution and exposure to make commercially viable.

We believe creators and publishers should be able to make money and that app production has the potential to be a sustainable practice. When we launched our fist product, Look & Cook, we discovered that this was our biggest challenge. Creating beautiful products meant high production costs, while app distribution and sales were difficult and uncertain. So we developed flexible monetization options that can be integrated into apps. These options allow creators to pick and choose the right solutions for their product. By creating direct links to sales and elegant native advertising solutions we found flexible monetization options that don’t compromise the quality and integrity of the final product.

People think of sustainability as “good” when it comes to food products, but what about culinary apps? We think that writing, photographing and designing food projects should be a sustainable, money-making enterprise. And we think that the way to do it is not necessarily by tacking banner ads and product promos all over your project, but by using elegant, thoughtful design solutions to integrate monetization tools with your content.

Apps are always competing. Getting noticed in the App Store or on Google Play is a challenge in and of itself. How can a culinary app compete with Angry Birds? Instead of each app going out there on its own, struggling to capture the public’s attention, we believe in cooperation and mutual support. We are building a world of smart, linked apps with shared databases that support each new addition, offer creators extensive analytics information and sustain a growing shared community. Instead of having apps compete for attention each new project benefits from its predecessors and supports them in return.

The idea of the virtual world generating new communities is obviously not new, but we want to extend it beyond an individual blog or site and create communities across project lines. For example, we want to expand the James Beard Foundation Community to include small communities that support the most avant-garde foodiodicals and to expose Mario Batali or Daniel Boulud’s followers to Tom Mylan’s (The Meat Hook) recipes.

We believe in beautiful design and attention to details. In order to really influence the way people cook, to enter their kitchens and create those new links, we think it essential to not lose track of where you started and what inspired you in the first place. So, we worked to develop a platform that allows the creation of tailor-made culinary apps that are grounded in traditional ideas: learning to cook by being in the kitchen with an experienced cook, presenting beautiful, inspiring dishes to leaf through, creating and expanding a community of recipe users and, finally, making cooking apps financially sustainable.

Hacking Dining is an online conversation exploring how we might use technology and design to hack a better future for dining. Join the conversation between June 2 – July 30, and share your ideas in the comments, on Twitter using #hackdining, Facebook, LinkedIn or Tumblr.

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Yael Raviv is currently VP Content Partners at Kinetic Art Ltd. Yael wrote her Ph.D dissertation at NYU’s Performance Studies Department on nationalism and cuisine in her native Israel. She has written on food and nation and food and art in publications such as Gastronomica and is an adjunct professor at NYU’s Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health Department. Yael founded Umami food and art festival in 2008 and served as its Director.

The post Designing Our Way to a Community of Smart, Linked Cooking Apps appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.