Photo Credit: Ken Goodman Photography

From June 2-30, we’re asking our favorite food and technology innovators: “How might we use technology and design to hack a better future for dining?“ And to kickoff the editorial series, we are excited to share our interview with chef and restauranteur Mario Batali.

Mario talks to us about his vision for a better future for dining, including cultivating more informed eaters and reducing food waste. Check out our interview below to learn about his vision and whether we’ll be seeing crickets on his menus anytime soon. 

FUTURE OF DINING Q&A WITH MARIO BATALI

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

Mario Batali: A better future for dining starts when consumers better understand that dining is not just a cook and a server. Or just a grocery store. It’s farmers, delivery folks, health inspectors, maintenance people. A better future for dining requires understanding for how the whole food system works.

FTC: How could technology help make that future a reality?

MB:  By strengthening the connection between the farm and the consumer, technology can help reduce the barrier to entry to good products. It can also help undercut the amount of food that’s wasted getting product to the table.

FTC:  What impact will digital media have on the future of dining?

MB:  There is an unending hunger for new and fresh content for the web. We’ve decided to engage consumers primarily using short-form video content. But it’s not just chop and cook TV. It’s profiles of farmers and timelapse-type videos of how products make their way to the plate.

Media can help frame the conversation about the future of food. So we have to work to create content that demonstrates the right message.

FTC:  In interviews, you’ve spoken about insects as a likely future protein source. Will we be seeing crickets or mealworms on your menus anytime soon?

MB:  Unlikely. Our restaurant have always served classic Italian dishes made with local ingredients. Until we see Spaghetti Carbonara made with fried crickets in Rome, I’ll stick with pancetta.

That said, I had a supremely delicious dish of ant larvae at Pujol in Mexico City earlier this month. It’s only a matter of time.

FTC:  You’re fighting hunger through your work with The Mario Batali Foundation, Food Bank For New York City and Feedie. How can the restaurant industry play a bigger role in addressing hunger or other social issues?

MB:  Perhaps the single best way restaurants can positively impact the food space is by reducing food waste. In the most prosperous country in the history of the world like ours, the fact that any child is hungry is simply wrong. Restaurants and food service providers contribute tremendously to the 40 percent of food that’s wasted between the farm and the plate.

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.

The post Mario Batali on Hacking a Better Future For Dining appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

An eMarketer report released this week outlines how user-generated content is a growing source of food inspiration online, which you probably already know from your Instagram feed, and offers some interesting stats.

• The best path to a consumer is through their friends. The leading influencer of users’ decisions to buy a new food or beverage is that a “close friend recommends it online.” The second leading source is that a “friend other than a close friend” recommends it.
• Allrecipes.com found that 65% of females that regularly used recipe sites bought branded ingredients called for in the recipes at least sometimes. Twenty-one percent said they “usually” do.
• In May 2012, Compete found that food was the leading topic category for interactions on Pinterest; a quarter of users bought a product after discovering it on Pinterest.

Similarly, and in keeping up with the trend, a number of startups are featuring images of food in their visual design. One example is PunchFork; it is a recipe site that primarily features images on the home page (for comparison, see Allrecipes or Epicurious). Another is appetude, which focuses on dish and restaurant discovery. It prominently features photos of the dishes themselves rather than reviews (for comparison, see Yelp). Just looking at them is enough to make you hungry.

The post Food Content is a Hit (and Can Drive Sales), Says eMarketer Report appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Anyone who regularly reads this website or subscribes to our Food Startup & Marketing Newsletter is likely aware of the explosion in food and agriculture-related startups over the past two years. Food-related tech and media companies – technologies that help consumers discover, cook, buy and learn about their food – have experienced significant growth in terms of the number companies created, venture and angel investment, and consolidation.

New research released today by Rosenheim Advisors, a strategic and financial consulting firm, and León, Mayer & Co., an investment banking and private equity firm, indicates an approximate $1.5 billion  has been invested in such companies within the past 18 months. Over 50 investments have been made in 2012 alone. These numbers, however, also incorporate startups with food related or relevant verticals, including Instagram ($50 million), Pinterest ($100 million), Fab.com ($105 million), Living Social ($176 million), Whaleshark Media ($150 million) and Gilt Group ($138 million), says Brita Rosenheim, principal of Rosenheim Advisors.

[Addition: It is important to note that this estimate only focuses on a particular segment of the food tech industry.]

Major technology companies such as Google, Facebook, Groupon, Meredith, Condé Nast, Constant Contact and  Amazon.com have all acquired startups in this space to help them increase engagement and capitalize on new revenue streams from a targeted audience. Google, for example, spent $151 million to acquire Zagat and is now using their reviews and rating system to power Google+ Local’s search offerings. Conde Nast’s acqusition of Ziplist for $14 million and Constant Contact’s acquisition of SinglePlatform for  $70 million, plus a $30 million earnout, are two more examples of the kinds of acquisitions taking place. Rosenheim Advisors and León, Mayer & Co see this as an indicator that consolidation is likely to continue and will be key for the growth strategies of large technology and media companies.

“Whether through ‘Likes,’ ‘Pins,’ ‘Check-ins,’ Sponsored Tweets, group coupons, local ad spend, mobile payments, digital commerce or curated content – every major consumer Internet company is already focused on food as a vertical, and many have been actively acquiring start-ups with significant exposure to the space,” says Rosenheim. “As competition for consumer mindshare intensifies, maintaining a leading edge in this space will be integral to the growth strategies of tech and media giants.”

Rosenheim Advisors and León, Mayer & Co see major opportunities for consumer Internet companies to grow and strengthen their platforms through investments in food-related technology companies focused on social media, mobile technologies, local discovery and commerce.

In an attempt to elucidate and categorize the  startups in this space, the firms created the Food Tech & Media Industry Map featured below. The map features over 300 startup in key sector segments including Recipes and Cooking Communities, Recipe Box and Search, Publishers, Digital Content, Vertical Ad Networks, Product Guides and Discovery, Grocery/CPG Coupon Distributors and Aggregators, Grocery/CPG Mobile Coupons, Grocery/CPG Loyalty Rewards, Mobile/Online Ordering, Commerce, Product Deals/Offers, Restaurant Reviews and Search, Personalized Restaurant Discovery, Online/Offline Communities, Restaurant Coupons/Deals/Loyalty Rewards, Reservations, Next Generation Restaurant Ordering/Payments, and Restaurant Marketing/Analytics.

The post Food Tech & Media a $1.5 Billion Industry, Research Says appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

What can tweets tell us about global food consumption and its impact on emotional well-being?

A lot when combined with country Gross Domestic Product data from CIA World Factbook and obesity level data from World Heath Organization, finds Affect Lab, Ai Applied, and Jana + Koos. The groups recently created FoodMood, an interactive data visualization project that aims to measure global food sentiment. FoodMood applies natural language processing techniques to geo-located tweets about what people are eating and how they feel about their food, and then overlays them with the GDP and obesity data. Users can look at trends within an individual country or compare countries, and can filter by the data by popularity, time, number of tweets.

Block sizes is the visualization above correspond to the number of tweets about that particular food. The various treemap colors represents a range of sentiments from “least happy” to “most happy.”

The Goal?

According to the website:

“As a sentiment analysis tool, FoodMood develops a more informed global picture about food and emotion. As a data visualization project, FoodMood shows the connections, patterns and relationships that exist between the variables — insights that are otherwise practically infeasible. Ultimately, FoodMood helps reveal a hidden layer of digital and social data that pushes the boundaries of awareness and understanding of our surroundings one step further.”

The group’s academic paper, published by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, offers further insight into their goals:

“Food consumption – a naturally social phenomenon –and its reflection in the emotional social web of Twitter becomes a lens to reveal patterns in society. One of the questions FoodMood addresses the growing problem of obesity globally can be reflected with the use this tool. Specifically can these obesity-contributing foods be categorized and quantified? With the affordance of information visualisation tools, that help amplify cognition, researchers and users can gain a better understanding of millions of processes and events as well as uncover patterns that were “hidden” in mountains of facts, numbers, words and percentages. Beyond helping discover new understandings amidst a profoundly complicated world where too much data creates a problem of scaling, a great visualization can help create a shared view of a situation and align people on needed action.

Findings

Currently, FoodMood only uses English-language Tweets, so the tool does not offer much by way of international analysis but the website indicates they will be working on this in the future. Still, the project offers some interesting insights:

• Meat consumption is high all over the world and has very positive sentiment ratings of 70 percent and over.
• In most countries, fast-food companies, like McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC and Chipotle, dominate online food consumption conversation, but related sentiment ratings vary across countries.
• 58 percent of the 50 most tweeted about foods globally have high glycemic index, fat, and sugar content, which are all correlated with contributing to obesity.
• According to the sentiment analysis of the world’s poorest countries, there is no correlation between wealth and happiness when it comes to food.

More detailed information about the project and their findings are included in the academic paper.

The post FoodMood Measures Global Food Sentiment appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

“How do I use the internet to attract more customers?” is one of the most frequent questions asked by restaurant and bar owners. Listing services like Google Places can help restaurants get found on Google. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare and Yelp allow for discovery and interaction. Websites like Seamless, GrubHub, FoodToEat and Delivery.com help drive to-go and pick-up orders.  Restaurants who take reservations can do so with Open Table. Ordr.in, SinglePlatform and OpenMenu help syndicate a restaurant’s content to multiple services.

Listing services and online ordering websites have generally been considered the basics, but now restaurants increasingly see email marketing campaigns, specifically daily deal websites, as effective marketing tools, says new research released by the National Restaurant Association. The study, which was funded by an unrestricted research grant from daily deal site LivingSocial, evaluated current restaurant marketing approaches and consumer insights related to existing marketing tools.

The following is a summary of their findings from a QSRWeb.com article on the study:

Online marketing can elevate a restaurant’s brand and attract new customers.

• Restaurants that use online marketing (emails from restaurants, emails from a daily deal provider and websites) tend to be viewed by consumers as modern (67 percent emails, 59 percent daily deals, 65 percent websites) and popular (63 percent, 59 percent, 63 percent).
• Restaurant operators perceive websites (90 percent), TV ads (87 percent), social media (84 percent), restaurant emails (82 percent), and daily deals (77 percent) as effective in bringing in new customers.

Customized marketing messages that address a consumer’s preferences result in more sales.

• Consumers and operators agree on the importance of savings in customized messaging: 87 percent of consumers would go to or order from a restaurant if provided with a savings offer; and 95 percent of operators perceive savings offers to be an effective marketing tool.
• Consumers would go to or order from a restaurant if they received customized marketing messages that referenced past restaurant patronage (68 percent), allowed them to make reservations (66 percent), and identified them by name (64 percent).

Restaurants understand what marketing tools work; they just need to implement them.

• 84 percent of restaurant operators consider restaurant-specific marketing emails to be effective in increasing revenue for their restaurants, and 78 percent of consumers said an email from a restaurant would motivate them to go to that restaurant. In addition, 63 percent of restaurant operators say they plan to use such emails in the next year.
• 78 percent of restaurant operators consider daily deals to be effective in increasing revenue for their restaurants, and 69 percent of consumers said an email from a daily deal provider would motivate them to go to the restaurant featured in the daily deal. In addition, 40 percent of operators say they plan to work with a daily deal provider in the next year.

Consumers are very sensitive to social media and Internet advertising.

• Consumers perceive the least effective efforts to entice them to go to a restaurant include online advertisements (58 percent), social media (56 percent), and radio ads (56 percent).

As a bar owner and someone who helps bars and restaurants create daily deals that are optimal for their brand, I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing these deals. For restaurants and bars, the appeal is to gain new customers through exposure to a daily deal company’s massive list of subscribers. In return for this exposure, deal companies take a cut of the sale before handing the “new” customer over to the small business.

While this study makes the case for why restaurants should invest in daily deals, how many subscribers actually spend time looking at any of the reported 836 daily deal emails they might be subscribed to? And of that number, how many actually turn into repeat customers? In all likelihood, not many.  I know I delete most of the daily deal emails in my inbox, which you can read more about on my personal blog, Burger Conquest.

“Finding the right marketing mix is crucial to success in the restaurant industry,” commented James Balda, chief marketing and communications officer of the National Restaurant Association, in the QSRweb.com article on the study.

I agree. Nothing could be more true, but relying on daily deal email marketing campaigns to increase profits is only effective in attracting new, repeat customers when used correctly. If the establishment doesn’t “wow” new customers with their services, and find ways to re-engage them for future dining experiences, it’s a loss.

I always recommend restaurants connect directly with these new customers and drive future engagement through social media, in combination with offers and other digital campaigns. A nice push from a 3rd party email marketing partner is a good thing to do 1 to 4 times a year, depending on a restaurant’s particular needs. But it’s important to make sure the restaurant is branded properly,  and that they are not losing too much money per customer.

Once a customer is in the door, future engagement can be accomplished through a restaurant’s social networks or newsletter. Still, knowing which platforms to use and when is the key. My suggestion is to start by looking at the best practices to setting-up and using Google Places, Yelp, FourSquare and Twitter I’ve created called “The Rev Meter for Social Community.”

The QSRweb.com article claims that restaurant owners are overwhelmed with the marketing options available, which is likely because the majority don’t have a marketing or social media background. Taking the time to learn how to use and maintain these tools can feel cumbersome. This is one reason why daily deal sites can feel like a viable option- they take the maintenance out of the restaurant owners hands.

But that is a lazy, lazy, lazy way to operate. If you are going to own and run a bar or restaurant, you should commit the same effort to marketing that you would service and product or hire someone who can! FYI – I am available to help you!

** Featured Image by Marketoonist via Gigabiting.com

The post Online Restaurant Marketing: How to Use Daily Deals appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

• Twitter – I am eating a burger
• Facebook – I like burgers
• FourSquare – This is where I eat burgers
• Instagram – Here’s a vintage photo of me eating a burger in a blizzard
• Youtube – Here I am eating a burger
• LinkedIn – My skills include burger eating and blogging
• Pinterest – Here’s a burger recipe
• LastFM – Now listening to “burgers”
• Google+ – I am a Google employee who eats burgers
• Foodspotting – Look at this burger I am eating
• Untappd – I am drinking this beer with a burger
• Tumblr – When I’m not eating a burger, I’m doing this
• Wikipedia – The burger was created by and when
• Flickr – Here are pictures of the burgers I’ve eaten

My passions for food and social media also inspired me to create The Rev Meter for Social Community, a social community meter for assessing how optimized a bar or restaurant is with social networking. “The Rev Meter” is a points system to assess how well a business is using what I consider to be the 10 most important social networks. My goal here is to educate and assist already great businesses more effectively use these tools.

[Insert Restaurant Name] scores a [number] on The Rev Meter for Social Community

SCORING:
4 points or less: You’ve missed the 5 basics and are less than optimized.
5 points: You’ve covered the basics, which is better than most but far from optimized.
6 to 9 points: You’re doing better than most and on your way to becoming a well respected social community whiz.
10 points: Congrats on a perfect score!

Thanks to Three Ships Media for the inspiration. They did this with a very, very, very funny yet completely correct instagram post about donuts. As per their website: “Three Ships Media is a digital agency that serves ambitious, innovative clients who view online marketing as a critical element of their customer acquisition strategy.” Most of my post was borrowed from theirs with a couple additions. Hilarious.

This post originally appeared on Burger Conquest.

The post Social Media For Restaurants Made Easier Through Burgers appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

There are two interesting pieces of news from last week on the ways social media is being leveraged to share information about food safety concerns, as well as to predict outbreaks earlier.

Twitter + Food Safety

On March 1, 2012, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) launched state-specific Twitter accounts to alert consumers to local recalls of meat, poultry and processed egg products.

“These new Twitter feeds provide yet another mechanism for us to provide consumers with critical updates and relevant information they need to protect their families from foodborne illness,” USDA Under Secretary for Food Safety Dr. Elisabeth Hagen said. “The immediacy of information-sharing through social media is unparalleled, and we believe these timely, targeted updates will better protect public health.”

The media is loving this story- even Mashable covered it– but how many people will actually follow these new Twitter handles? To date only 105 are following the New York handle; 307 the California handle; 41 the Arizona handle and so on and so forth.

Data Exhaust + Food Safety

FoodNavigator.com has an interesting story about how infodemiology, the analysis of information distributed on the internet, could be used to improve food safety. According to the article, Walmart vice president of food safety, Frank Yiannas’, recently spoke about the ways social media and internet searches are creating new opportunities to stop food borne illness outbreaks at the Global Food Safety Initiative Conference.

“But infodemiology, could also be used to track patterns in internet users searching for similar foodborne illness-related terms on search engines, or Twitter users discussing their symptoms via tweet. On of the most recent example of a live-tweeted outbreak involved student journalists in Canada who used Twitter in January to report a norovirus outbreak at a conference in British Columbia.”

The post Is Food Safety Going Social? appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

My Robotic Kitchen Planned This Dinner Party
Hilton Austin Downtown
3/9 | 3:30PM – 4:30PM
#SXcooking

Dinner parties are the ultimate social experience that no digital technology will ever replicate. You sit face-to-face with others, sharing an experience that uses all five of your senses. It’s the original social network.

For many though, hosting your own dinner party — or even cooking dinner for yourself — feels like too much work. There’s too much planning, too many options, too many picky eaters.

In this session, we’ll demonstrate some emerging technologies that make cooking easy and more accessible for both novice and expert home cooks. Things like smart recipes that adjust to your guests’ preferences, multiple recipes that combine themselves into one step-by-step process, dinner party planning tools connected to social networks, cooking classes done via chat rooms, appliances that can’t overcook food, kitchen scales that measure ingredients for you and a few tips and techniques to let you do more in the kitchen.

Seafood Watch vs. Yelp: Future of Social Food
3/9 | 5:00PM – 6:00PM
Hilton Austin Downtown
Room 616AB
#socialfood

World food systems hang in a balance–the latest tech only hints at what’s coming. Consider the future of social tools with us, using a seafood lens. DNA testing, barcode scanning, big data and ubiquitous computing mean we can hack the food system like never before. Corporations have yet to provide consumers with tools to understand the impacts of our food choices. This is a change that we will have to lead. Let’s build it today. The open food system will be social. Disruption from a social food system may be as powerful as social media has been in the media world. We can demassify food like social tools have demassified media. Just as we have increasingly turned to the web to learn about—and influence—world and local events, so too we will turn to an open and social food system, managed online, to learn about and acquire food.

The Rise of Brooklyn Food Scene
3/11 | 11:00AM -12:00PM
Driskill Hotel
Citadel
#bklynfood

Could Brooklyn be to food what Seattle was to music — a hotbed of creative people doing new things? There are tons of artisans finding new businesses and launching new products in the biggest NYC borough whether it be from the Brooklyn Flea or the local store front. Clarkson Potter publishes cookbooks from several Brooklyn food entrepreneurs: One Girl Cookies (Dawn Casale & David Crofton), Brooklyn Brew Shop’s Beer Making Book (Erica Shea & Stephen Valand), The Butcher’s Guide to Well Raised Meat (Joshua and Jessica Applestone), Momofuku Milk Bar (Christina Tosi) and more!

Better Food Through Open Data Standards
3/11 | 12:30PM – 1:30PM
Driskill Hotel
Citadel
#openfood

There is an explosion in the number of services created to help people make better choices about how we produce, consume, and interact with food. Challenges related to the accuracy and completeness of data hamper the rate of innovation.

A panel of leading food, data and technology doers shares their initial framework for an open standard for reporting, recording and sharing food information. Hear how recipe sites, restaurant menu wranglers, open government developers, urban agronomists, provenance geeks and food policy activists are collaborating on an interoperable standard. Panelists will share their unique perspectives and invite new collaborators to expand, refine, and put into practice an open standard. The open food data standard describes all aspects of food, in a way that allows technologists to support and enhance the success of the local food economy. Come find out how you can take part in the generation of an open data standard for food that reflects the values we place in food.

SXSW Create
3/11 | 11:00AM – 6:00PM
Palm Park

Come join creators, hackers, makers, artists, and diy’ers for the first annual Create on March 13th in Palm Park from 11am-6pm. This community event, in conjunction with Dorkbot Austin and the Austin Hackerspace, will be featuring talented artists from the Austin and SXSW communities showing off their creations and discussing what inspires them. From the latest in robotics, funding methods, and even hacking food science come see what it means to create. Featured speakers include Jeff Potter and Justin Jenson. Follow this site for an updated schedule as well as twitter.com/CreateATX for up to date information. If you would like more information please contact createatx@gmail.com

Digital Debauchery with Anthony Bourdain
9/13 | 3:30PM – 4:30PM
Austin Convention Center
Ballroom D
#bourdain

Meet chef, author & television personality Anthony Bourdain and the crew behind the award-winning series Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, who help Tony oversee the show’s social media presence.

Tony and his trusted sidekicks will discuss how he utilizes social media —Twitter, Facebook, blogs, et al. — to directly communicate his unique and unfiltered P.O.V. to fans of the show, and to the world at large.

We’ll also look at how social media and the digital audience is changing the overall game for TV, and how it directly impacts both the show and how Tony converses with his audience.

From ‘LiveTwatting’ wrap parties on the road (read: shots of toilets abroad) to propagating food porn online to live-streaming a pub crawl — all is fair game as we present an unprecedented & uncensored behind-the-scenes access to No Reservations.

This panel also includes a Q&A with Tony and crew — and as always with Tony, nothing is off-limits.

The post 6 Food Panels Not to Miss at SXSW 2012 appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

It’s social, visual, viral, and easy to use, which are just some of the reasons why brands like Whole Foods, Food52, Chobani, Sustainable Table (GRACE Communications Foundation), Cabot Cheese, and now Food+Tech Connect are flocking to Pinterest. Pinterest is a virtual pinboard that helps you organize and share interesting things you find on the web. TechCrunch broke the story Tuesday that Pintrest reached 11.7 million monthly active users, making it the fastest independent site to reach 10 million monthly uniques in the U.S. and one you will probably be seeing a lot more of in the coming months.

Food brands, non-profit organizations, and media properties are among some of the early adopters, finding the site a new way to humanize their brand and share their favorite resources. The pinboard layout makes it easier for people to consume more content  than is possible on other sites like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook.** Unlike the aforementioned social networking platforms that focus on the social graph, Pinterest focuses on the interest graph- connecting you with people based on your interests rather than friendship. This presents new opportunities to learn about consumers’ likes and interests. The brands mentioned above, for example, have created boards highlighting their favorites, from farms and farmers, recipes, books, gadgets, inspirational quotes, and news sources, among other things.

But brands should beware Pinterest warns, “Avoid Self Promotion: Pinterest is designed to curate and share things you love. If there is a photo or project you’re proud of, pin away! However, try not to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion.” Perhaps, this is why it’s difficult to search for brands on the website. Mashable has some helpful guidelines for those creating an account for their brand.

We at Food+Tech Connect just launched our own Pinterest account after we noticed people were already ‘pinning’ our infographics of the week and videos. As curators, we are excited for a new visual, medium to share our favorite tools, infographics, apps, and resources. We are also excited about new ways to discover new food and technology resources from the Pinterest community.

Dawn Brighid, Project Manager for Sustainable Table, explains, “As we are just getting started with Pinterest, it’s an exciting new space for us to share ideas. It allows us to highlight/pin things that are of interest – and make them easily accessible to everyone on the site (I heard 10 million users?). While we have favorite books, movies, organizations – we have never had an easy way to let others know. Pinterest allows us a place to keep track for ourselves and others. We can also highlight pages/blogs from our sites that feature information that is of interest to others learning about sustainable food – and hope that they pin them to share with others.”

In an interview with Fast Company, Chobani digital communications manager Emily Schildt comments, “Pinterest allows your brand to show different facets of its personality because there isn’t just one. Pinterest gives a more visual look into Chobani’s personality and the core values behind our brand. For example, we compile inspirational quotes on our “Nothing but Good” board and motivational quotes on “Chobani Fit” board. On Twitter, those same quotes would get retweeted, but on Pinterest the visual impact makes content very shareable and shows a lot of different sides of our brand.”

How are you or your brand using Pinterest? Who should we be following?

** This should not be taken as an excuse to pump out more content. Quality is key.

Sign up for Food+Tech Connect Bytes to have stories like this one come directly to your inbox.

The post Eating Your Way Through Pinterest appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

The responses are interesting and express the varied perceptions and experiences people have with “healthy eating.” But the number and intensity got us thinking about the opportunities for entrepreneurship this level of engagement might warrant. It seems people are looking for ways to talk about health and nutrition. Are current startups and blogs sufficient?  We want to know.

Some who wrote wanted to talk about fat:

Nobodyspecial
Fats are *so* important to your body that you literally cannot eat enough (once you consume more than your body needs….it stops desiring more fat, unlike carbs).

Others pointed out all carbs are not created equal:

DanW
Simple carbs are not good, complex carbs ARE good.

While still others brought up the idea that maybe the two are dangerously similar:

Tony
ALL carbs enter the blood stream as either glucose or fructose, no matter how “complex” they were when they started. Glucose calls for insulin to be taken into the cells. Fructose is a ketone and doesn’t affect insulin and is really only metabolized in the liver. The liver converts excess carbohydrtaes inot glycogen OR fat, in the form of lipoprotein (cholesterol). Regular glucose leads to this, too. All carbs, simple, complex,… ALL.

Some readers felt we should not pay too much attention to such infographics:

Marge
The best diet is the diet that YOUR body responds best to. . . . . . The ways to determine this is varied. The best rule that I’ve heard of is everything in moderation

While others felt the need to defend carbs:

I eat 4000 to 4400 calories every day and 75% of my calories come from carbs and I am losing weight and getting muscle at the same time.

One felt I was unqualified to post the infographic in the first place:

Maynardchery
I believe Ms Hoffman’s article is misleading, which probably has much to do with being married to a farmer…soon to be hog farmer.

Currently there is an explosion of technology aimed at helping people monitor their own health and share the results with their family and friends.  From Massive Health’s The Eatery to IBMs new  incentivizing patents, from Fitbit Aria Wi-Fi Smart Scale to Favatars, there seems to be literally dozens of technologies in the works to help people eat better.

But it seems many are also looking share personal stories and opinions about their attempts to lose weight, feel better and improve their eating.  They want to debate the intricacies of eating carbs and fats and their effects fruit has on their body.  They want to point out great research they have found, and create libraries of good nutrition reading.

What digital health and nutrition tools do you use?  Where do you turn to discuss your ideas online? What other kinds of networking or tracking tools would you like to see developed? Share your ideas in the comments section below and maybe, just maybe, someone might build it!

[Sign up for Food+Tech Connect Bytes to have stories like this one come directly to your inbox.]

The post Carbs Infographic Inspires Health & Nutrition Wish List appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

The post Infographic of the Week: Top Tech Trends of 2011 appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

[This article is part of a series of Food+Tech Connect 2011 Trend Reports.  Others in the series include Where Does Your Food Come From? and Meaty Opportunities for Tech]

The home cooking experience is undergoing dramatic changes, in part thanks to the iPad, e-book readers and mobile phones.  In 2011, publishers, bloggers and startups embraced the web to make it easier for people to find recipes based on their personal tastes and preferences. In the process, recipes and recipe recommendation became more social, interactive, and personalized. With the abundance of recipe content and data on the web, curation is becoming increasingly important for consumers looking to make sense of the noise.

The following is a detailed look at the world of recipes in 2011 and our predictions for what’s to come.

Improved Search & Better Recommendations: Customization, Curation, & Aggregation

Spoiled by Netflix and Amazon, in 2011 it became clear that people also want curated and personalized recipe content. Technologists and researchers dug in deep to figure out how to make that a reality.

In February, Google launched a recipe search feature to improve their response to the one billion recipe queries they receive a month.  Yet, unlike more advanced search engines like Yummly who reached over 2 million monthly uniques by allowing for more granular filtering, Google still only allows users to refine their search by ingredient, cooking time, and calories. Amanda Hesser wrote about how their search favors larger websites with the resources to prioritize SEO. The feature is largely seen as a failure by the digital recipe community.

Recipe curation site Gojee launched in July, featuring high quality, hand-curated recipes from top bloggers. The site makes recommendations based on the ingredients a user already has in their “pantry” by linking to their supermarket loyalty card or from what they manually input. Gojee’s popularity among consumers and the media is attributed to the simplicity of the website. Gojee is also one of the few companies that raised money this year.

Punchfork launched with a whole new approach to recipe recommendation and discovery: leveraging social data to personalize search. The site aggregates participating publisher’s recipe mentions across Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon and assigns each recipe a score based on how many times it’s been shared. The idea is that the more a recipe is shared across social networks, the more likely it is worth trying.

Recipe Recommendations Using Network Analysis, a study by University of Michigan Associate Professor Lada Adamic, Chun-Yuen Teng and Yu-Ru Lin, analyzed Allrecipe.com‘s 46,337 recipes, 1,976,920 user reviews, and data from approximately 530,609 users to understand the fundamentals of cooking and user preferences. Among the study’s findings were that user comments are a largely untapped source of insight about ingredient combinations and optimal substitutions.

Also of note, Gilt Group launched an online magazine and marketplace Gilt Taste, a curation experiment combining products, journalism, and recipes. ZipList, the online and mobile shopping list and recipe management service, also launched a food recommendation engine taking into account a user’s existing food discovery and shopping habits to deliver future meal inspirations. Foodpair.com also launched offering personalized search and filtering.

The Social & Mobile Kitchen

Social networks for home cooks matured in 2011 to accommodate the needs of their growing communities. Many launched mobile products to make it even easier for users to share their cooking experiences with their networks.

Food52 Hotline App

Two and a half years ago, Food52 was created to produce the first ever crowdsourced cookbook. In the process, a rich community of home cooks organically emerged. In 2011, Food52 launched a newly designed site focused on discovery, inspiration, and engagement to better accommodate this community. They also launched the Food52 Hotline app, allowing users to get personalized answers for all their cooking questions from experienced home cooks and food authorities. The app is powered entirely by the Food52 community.

Foodily is also attempting to get more social with the launch of their first iPhone app, which allows users to take photographs of their dishes and post them on Facebook. The app includes a photo enhancement filter to improve photo quality- a must for foodie content producers.

More recently, Evernote launched Evernote Food, a free app that allows users to record their food experiences – restaurant dishes, recipes, diet, and other nuggets of information – in a visual, timelined, and tagged format.

Others like  Recipe Relay are using the web to iterate and crowdsource recipes, while exploring local food systems.

Recipe Bookmarking

This year, a number of websites set out to help consumers access recipes and shopping lists wherever they are and through a variety of platforms.

Ziplist, the online recipe box and grocery shopping list service,  launched several new services to make it easier for users to find and save recipes from any property using their technologies. The service goes one step further than others in the market by adding ingredients to a users shopping list. One such service is text-to-RECIPE , a technology that allows viewers of select television shows to save featured recipes to their account by simply texting the show’s code, instead of searching the show’s website.

Other social recipe bookmarking sites that launched this year include include Foodfolio, CookItFor.Us, KeepRecipes, and Evernote Food.  Paprika launched a bookmarklet feature and Yumm launched an iPad app.

Recipe Publishers Go Digital

Publishers are being forced into looking for new, interactive ways to engage consumers and to put out content in digital time, rather than the typical two year time frame for traditional publishing. Simply having a website is no longer enough.

Chronicle Books went digital this year with four food and drink apps. When asked why, publishing director Lorena Jones answered, “The user reviews, social media components, and app-driven traffic to our website, Twitter, and Facebook enable us to develop a direct connection to the consumer so we can better understand their preferences and know what they want us to publish.”

Other traditional publishers are finding themselves venturing into the app and e-book space as well. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, for example, released Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking as an e-book this past fall. Random House recently partnered with Epicurious to sell digital cookbooks through their app.  Publishers are also partnering with aggregator sites like Punchfork and bookmarking tools like Ziplist and KeepRecipes to spread their content.

The Most Interesting Business Models

With all this activity, it’s surprising to see that very few – three companies to be exact – were funded this year according to crunchbase.  2011 was a year for experimentation when it comes to products and business models. It will be interesting to see what comes of the following approaches:

Publishing

This year Food52 published  Food52 Holiday Recipe & Survival Guide, which they created in 9 weeks from start to finish, using their site’s contest system to crowdsource recipes. One of the most innovative features of this app is the ability to purchase a number of the ingredients and cooking tools directly from the app. The app is available for $9.99 on iTunes. Food52’s Amanda Hesser said the project broke even, a rarity in book sales.

With the site’s redesign, they also launched Food52 Offers, collaborating with local and national shops and artisans to provide their community with exclusive Food52-curated products, services, and packages.

API’s

Like media websites, monetizing a recipe website is immensely challenging, with most relying on advertising. Punchfork is taking a different approach by offering paid access to their API, which allows developers to easily integrate recipes from all of Punchfork’s participating publishers into their own website or app.

Advertising, Deals & Coupons

Ziplist’s data about what users are searching for and purchasing across multiple properties gives them the ability to help advertisers provide consumers with more relevant advertisements, coupons, and other offers. “There is no better indication of purchase intent that a user putting something on a shopping list,” commented Ziplist Founder Geoff Allen in an interview earlier this year. “The ad inventory we create by helping consumers do this is quite attractive to advertisers.”

Publishing company Meredith bought EatingWell Media Group and launched Recipe.com to expanded its food media business. CEO Steve Lacy commented in a TechCrunch article that food is one of their top advertising categories, serving “the 75 million American women they engage every month.” According to the article, digital sources, licensing and custom marketing make up more than 60 percent of EatingWell’s revenues.

In the future, Punchfork hopes to leverage data about a user’s tastes to provide them with targeted coupons and other offers. Foodily also plans to explore opportunities to monetize by offering personalized deals and coupons targeted to users’ tastes based on their Foodily activity, said CEO Andrea Cutright, in an article on GigaOM.

E- Commerce

Cooking.com raised $13.5 million in growth capital financing to accelerate their “Powered By Cooking.com,” which will allow branded partner stores to use their e-commerce platform to sell kitchen products.

Gilt Taste blends editorial content, recipes, and an online marketplace of ingredients from top food and wine artisans. They are Flipboard’s first and only shopping feature, allowing users the ability to purchase ingredients directly from the recipes and articles they are reading.

Selling Content

KeepRecipes is hoping to build a social “iTunes for Recipes.” They sell digital copies of best selling cookbooks from Harvard Common Press. They also charge a small fee for digital recipes from food personalities including Mark Bittman, Anita Lo, Masaharu Morimoto, Eric Gower, and Lauren Bush.

Products & Services: Recipe Delivery & Tasting Boxes

Lilly’s Table, a weekly subscription service that offers seasonal recipes and meal plans, makes it easier to incorporate local ingredients into your cooking by providing a weekly meal plan of seasonal recipes along with a host of other interesting offerings including a customized shopping list and ideas on how to use leftovers.

There are a number of similar services popping up like Feast Upon and Freshocracy.

2012 Predictions

1.  Recipes and cooking will get even smarter, easier, and more cost effective for the average home cook as technologists figure out how to better digitize the cooking experience. Books such as Modernist Cuisine and  The Family Meal: Home Cooking With Ferran Adria provide a wealth of detailed data about cooking process, and are just waiting to be digitized. Foodpairing, an online tool for food industry professionals to create new combinations of ingredients for dishes or drinks, is a great example of the kinds of technologies that will power future online recipe tools.

In the video to the right, Will Turnage, developer of Michael Ruhlman’s Bread Baking Basics and Ratio apps, talks about what he envisions for the future of recipes.

2.  Health and sustainability will be more prominently featured in existing and/or new sites and apps. This may include a focus on traceability or “knowing where your food comes from.”

3.  Business models behind recipe-related websites and apps will get more interesting as people explore ways to link recipes with the actual purchase of ingredients, to offer services and products, and to begin syndicating content to service providers or e-commerce sites. Given that there was very little investment in the recipe space in 2011, this will be increasingly important for those sites looking to scale in 2012.

4.  Learning how to cook recipes will get more interactive as publishers and websites use services like Google+ Hangouts to facilitate easy and inexpensive video conferencing.

5.  We are going to see more smart, connected appliances over the next year.  Samsung, for example, launched the App Fridge this year, featuring 8 apps including the Epicurious app that allows consumers to search for recipes right from the LCD screen located on the refrigerator.

For more ideas on the future of recipes and cooking check out Hilary Mason, Will Turnage, Jeff Miller,  and Emily Cavalier’s responses to the Hacking the Food System Series. A number of ideas were also explored at The Social Kitchen Panel during the NYC Internet Week FOOD 2.0 series Food+Tech Connect hosted.

Don’t miss our other 2011 trends reports on meat+ Tech and traceability.

** Featured image by Emil Ovemar.

The post 2011 Trends: Recipe Websites, Apps, & Publishing appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

One year ago, Anne-Victoire Monrozier and Grégoire Japiot, a wine company owner and a tech professional, decided to create a BarCamp – an open, participatory, workshopping event – to gather together the various actors within the wine sector. The idea was to create a space to discuss the difficulties the new technology could present, and the opportunities it could create. Thus, Vinocamp was thus born.

Anne-Victoire – also known as MissVickyWine – is a co-organizer of the event and answered my questions.

___________________

Jérome Seillier: Can you explain to us – what is Vinocamp?

Anne-Victoire Monrozier: Vinocamp is a BarCamp dedicated to wine and information technology. As you may know a BarCamp is a user-generated conference that appeared on the tech scene some years ago. We decided to use this type of format because we wanted to maximize the sharing of ideas. Vinocamp is not a conference, it’s a place to discuss how the technology can help to promote the passion of wine. This last edition took place in Paris on October 24, 2011.

JS: What was the inspiration behind this approach?

AVM: Gregoire and I realized that a lot of things occur on the web with blogging, social media, e-commerce, and that the wine market has encountered a lot of changes. However there was no event gathering people from the tech scene and the wine scene together. The first edition took place in July 2010 and a lot of bloggers, developers and representatives of e-commerce participated, but there was not enough winegrowers, in our opinion. So we decided to visit different French regions to be closer to them and that worked. We travelled almost all over France. We went to Bourgogne, Bordeaux, Languedoc and we even visited Portugal to meet cork producers and local winegrowers.

JS: Could you explain us, what is a typical day at Vinocamp?

AVM: At first, everybody introduces themselves very quickly. Then, about ten workshops dedicated to different topics are spontaneously written by participants on a white board, and people go to work on each. After several sessions, a representative of each group gives an oral sum-up of the discussion. The day ends with a live tasting and a dinner and we enjoy a Sunday in the vineyard. We make sure to pick a winemaker that is active in social media.

JS: Can you give us an example of a theme which was debated?

AVM: We talk a lot about the new role of blogs, web and mobile apps in the wine promotion or wine tourism. We try to innovate, introducing producers of content with producers of wine – users and creators of apps.

JS: Do you have a particular message to send to the readers of Food+Tech Connect?

AVM: Yes of course. I know there is a lot of international events about wine and technology that come out of US. For example, we all participated to the Cabernet day created by Rick Bakas. But as far as I know there was no american Vinocamp yet. We’d be pleased to participate or organize one there… so if anybody is interested let us know !

The post Vinocamp: France’s Wine+Tech BarCamp appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Physic Ventures co-founder and Managing Director William Rosenzweig says the future is personalized food and health.  The venture capital firm plans to invest in and support five to eight entrepreneurs at the intersection of food, health, and technology.

An early pioneer in the health food space as the founder of The Republic of Tea and later of Odwalla, Rosenzweig is no stranger to understanding the innovation trajectory. His firm did a deep dive into the food and tech world this past summer exploring the “universe of innovation in this space.”  Wharton MBA intern Ella Merjanova identified 120 companies working in different stages or facets of what they term “food at home,” to help Physic become clear about what ventures will succeed.

Rosenzweig says we are at the beginning of the innovation wave for this sector and sees significant business opportunities for better curated educational content around food, personalized food discovery, and disruptions in the fundamental ways people make decisions about cooking at home

He cautions that many of the early ventures have focused on building cool apps, rather than solving actual problems. Physic is looking to invest in disruptive technologies, leveraging their network of relationships with large companies to help entrepreneurs succeed more rapidly.

If you’re developing a game-changing technology and hoping for investment from Physic, says Rosenzweig, your team needs vision, pragmatic experience to execute, a clear idea about strategic choices related to potential business models, competitive advantage, capital efficiency, and to be committed to collaboration.

Read our interview below…

_____________

Physic Ventures Co-Founder & Managing Director William Rosenzweig

Danielle Gould: How did you get interested in the food and tech space?

William Rosenzweig:  I’ve had experience in both fields. My first corporate job out of college was working for a technology company called Nakamichi, a Japanese audio company that invented the cassette deck and advanced technology in the audio industry. In the latter part of my twenties I decided to start a tea company called The Republic of Tea, born out of the frustration of feeling like I couldn’t get tea in the United States. As an entrepreneur I tried to reinvent high quality tea for a new audience and the timing was very good, starting in 1990, because there was a confluence of several key trends in the US market. One was that the natural food movement was just beginning. Along with that Whole Foods was starting to become a national distribution channel for high quality, natural and gourmet products. So we swept a wave that was both taste, culture and market, and grew very quickly.

Since then I’ve been very interested in building companies and working as both an entrepreneur and as an investor. Any venture that is going to have some kind of rapid scale dynamic, which is what’s attractive to venture investing, is likely to have some kind of enabling technology at its heart. Whether it’s the product itself or whether it’s the platform [mobile and social media] in which the product exists. And I think that’s what is so exciting right now to see the work that you’re covering, the food and tech renaissance and all the entrepreneurs that I’m getting to know now who are combining passions for both food and technology in new ways.

DG:  Where do you see the large opportunities for growth in this space right now?

WR:  I think there are a lot of different niches, particularly in the food business where it’s always been a matter of individual tastes, that are exciting. I want to be careful not to minimize or denigrate any idea that is not necessarily a billion dollar idea, but it’s also very important for an entrepreneur to be realistic about what the size of an opportunity might be, as well as the right size of investment and effort.

What’s happening now that is a little dangerous is that people are raising a lot of money for opportunities that are probably fairly niche in scope. I encourage entrepreneurs to focus on capital efficiency, particularly at the very beginning. Once they have a strong proof of concept, then they should raise more capital to scale. And the best entrepreneurs do that.

One of the areas I think is most exciting now in the food and tech area is certainly educational content. We’re migrating from the static food network, half-hour show of Ina Garten teaching you what she wants to teach you that day, to highly personalized content and delivery on mobile devices and iPads. Having the content that matches your personal interests when and where you need it is a huge opportunity. Companies like Rouxbe and Culinapp and similar folks are just starting to, I think, scratch the surface. The Callaway guys with the Martha Stewart cookies are another example.

Another area I that think is going to be really big is food discovery and personalization through network referral. Food Spotting is onto this. Yelp and OpenTable do it a little bit.  But better ways to discover, vet and choose, maybe even actually transact, are going to be a big area open for disruption. A lot of the solutions we see these days offer a piece of this, but not necessarily a comprehensive platform.  It will be interesting to see who’s able to conceive a truly comprehensive platform that delivers real value and has a monetizable business model.

Another area we are particularly excited about is the whole decision infrastructure for cooking at home. Given continued pressure on discretionary spending, movement toward health and personalized experience, and increased desire for covering the social dynamics of dining together, the kinds of companies that help you make decisions about what, when, and how to cook while curating that content or enabling you to personalize your own interests very efficiently are going to be exciting. Companies like Yummly, Cookstr, and Foodily are doing things like this. It’s going to be very interesting to see how the landscape between large incumbents in the publishing business like Recipe.com, Emeritus, and Conde Nast fair relative to entrepreneurs who are creating more disruptive business models.

One of the things we are studying very carefully is the incumbent’s role relative to the entrepreneur’s role, and even figuring out where there may be opportunities. One of the things we do at Physic Ventures is to look to our network of relationships, and we work with some very big companies, to figure out how we might be able to borrow or apply resources or insights or expertise from some of those big companies to accelerate the disruptive path of entrepreneurial companies. Maintaining their independence, but creating innovative partnerships.

DG:  Could you talk about some of the problems you would like to see solved that you haven’t seen tackled?

WR:  An area that we’re interested in is the convergence of food, fitness and health. There are a lot of food apps and there are a lot of fitness apps, companies, and approaches, but we haven’t really seen a compelling integrated solution yet. On the nutrition and diet front, linking lifestyle to life science or health systems is something we’re keenly interested in that we haven’t seen anybody really bring a lot of work to yet.

Do you know what Kaiser Permanente is? It’s a big healthcare provider system, integrated health system that does a lot of prevention and wellness. So how do you make Lose It credible and useful not only to the individual who’s trying to manage their weight, but also credible and useful to a health system that at some point is going to determine your insurance rate based on your personal behaviors?

There are two things I’m concerned about in the food and tech space. One is there’s a lot of solutions that are in search of a market, meaning people come up with an idea and it’s sort of like oh, isn’t it cool that we can do this?

This is not uncommon at the very early stages of waves on innovation, but it is something that I think is maybe one of your jobs, to help to impose the rigor with the entrepreneurs to think about what need are you really solving for here? Not just coming up with a cool app.

The other risk is that wherever there’s a high amount of idealism there can be a tendency to have tension with pragmatism. You get people who are excited about something and they’re so passionate about it that they either haven’t built their team in a way where they’re bringing the kind of rigor and expertise that they need or they’ve just fallen in love with their own idea. I saw this with social entrepreneurship, and I’ve seen it with social impact and corporate social responsibility.  So I always encourage entrepreneurs to maintain their passion, but also maintain their pragmatism. I like to call it :walking the visionary path with practical feet” and managing that creative tension.

DG:  What kinds of criteria are you considering when evaluating potential investments in the space? Does the criteria for food tech startups differ from investments in more traditional tech companies? 

WR:  I don’t think so. It’s a great question and it’s one I asked myself going into this exploration – is this food segment going to be different in some way? At the end of the day from a venture capital investment perspective, it’s not. In our case, we are managing institutional funds that have a high expectation for return. We are looking for really big markets and we are looking to get in at a time where there is leverage to obtain scale.

The things we look for are, first and foremost, a team that has the vision and experience to execute. Usually that capability to execute is wrapped around a number of prior experiences, where they learned a lot, which accelerates their ability to be successful now. One of the weaknesses in the food area is that you have a lot of people who love food and while they did something in technology before, it’s not really applicable and doesn’t really add competitive advantage to their current food-related venture.

We are looking for leaders who have a clear idea about the strategic choices they’re going to make to get from here to there, and at what time it’s appropriate to identify a business model and test that business model. We are prepared to invest before there’s a clear business model, but we would like to at least understand or be aligned with the team about what those possible business models are and what their pros and cons might be. For instance, when we invested in GoodGuide.com, we didn’t have a clear business model yet, but we had an idea for six different approaches and we had benchmarks in other industries where big successful companies had been built with certain attributes of that business model.

The third thing we look for is some kind of proprietary IP or technology, or competitive advantage that’s not easily replicable, that puts up a barrier to entry, a quick barrier to entry that’s really meaningful. And again, this is something that I think is quite difficult for a lot of the food and tech companies to really bring us.

Having a capital efficient strategy, being able to prove your concept quickly and affordably is also something we really look for. One of the things I really like to talk to entrepreneurs about is what is proof of concept to you? Is it 8 of your friends using your product once, or is it 8,000 people using it and you demonstrating that you can get 8,000 people to use it regularly, only spending 10 cents per person acquiring them as a customer.

I like people who think in terms of quantifiable metrics and indicators of scale.  We see maybe 1,400 business plans that fit our scope a year and we probably make 5 or 6 investments. We are very upfront with people – ‘this is certainly something we’re interested in, but it’s highly unlikely we’d be able to invest at this stage. Why don’t you go do this, this and that and keep us posted. And if we can be helpful…” So, it’s more about a relationship than a transaction. My advice to entrepreneurs is to develop relationships early and demonstrate that you do what you say you’re going to do, and you demonstrate that you learn quickly, and that you really understand focus and impact

If you add up those 3-4 things I just spelled out the best in class company is going to have all of those. From an investor perspective, we would be looking for one that has all of these things.

And then the fifth thing I think we particularly look for, and I don’t know if this goes for general rule of thumb, but we really like collaborative teams. We look for entrepreneurial teams that are also open to partnering and collaborating and feel like they’re going to benefit.

DG:  Do you have a target IRR? If so, what is it?

WR:  We don’t think about things like that at all. We think about creating great companies. And great companies that come to life at the right time and create a new category are going to be rewarded — either by the public markets or through strategic acquisition. Our aspiration is to build the greatest company in the space.

DG:  Are you looking to invest in food tech startups or have you already identified the companies you’re interested in investing in? If you are interested, how do you like to be approached?

WR:  We’re approached by dozens of people a week. We like to develop relationships before people need capital and before it becomes transactional, where it is more relationship based. I’m in conversation right now with 7 or 8 different folks in the food space. My partner, Andy, is in conversation right with 3 or 4 companies that are in the quantified-self area. And quantified self and food and tech like I said earlier, are going to converge at some point.

We like entrepreneurs that have done their homework – both on us and determined that we’d be a good fit, and have done some really good work on their own in terms of their business plan. Right now, it’s funny, there’s a lot of emphasis on the pitch deck. I see a lot of pitch decks that are really long on concept and really short on strategy or plan or tactics. Like okay, here’s the idea, so I get a lot of decks that are here’s the big idea and I think that’s really nice. And people are getting really good at making very nice looking, compelling decks because there’s a lot of demo action right now you know?

I just got a deck this morning. I met the entrepreneurs at 500 Startups. I thought they were really nice and I think they’re really passionate and then they said here’s our deck. And I read through the deck and it was just all concept and there was no plan. So I had to write them back and say please send me your plan for implementation. What’s going to make you guys uniquely capable of executing this? What gives you guys the confidence and the mojo that you’re going to be able to execute on this idea? Because everybody can have the idea and it’s a nice idea, but what makes you uniquely qualified? So I’m looking for what’s the unique qualification, where’s the unique competitive advantage and what’s so special about your strategy that is going to make you likely to succeed? And there’s not frankly a lot that is proprietary in this whole food and tech area, so people have to kind of get over that you know, and they have to work harder.

DG:  Why don’t you think there are many proprietary opportunities?

WR:  Well, unless you’re creating a new gene for a new pear or something that you’re going to propagate, there’s not a lot of competitive advantages that little entrepreneurs have at making a new food that Unilever or Pepsi doesn’t have. And there’s not a lot of search capability that a startup has that Google doesn’t have.

You may come in and tell me well, Google is not focused on this and I might agree with you, but then you need to tell me, why is your team going to be able to out-Google Google when they’re asleep at the wheel. You still need a compelling approach, strategy.

DG:  That’s great advice. How many investments are you looking to making in this space over the next five years?

WR:  Between five and eight company relationships over the next five years.

Related articles

• 500 Startups Hosts Investor Discussion on Future of Food and Tech
• Investor Q&A Series Launch: Ali Partovi on Investing In Sustainable Food & Agriculture

The post Investment Strategy- William Rosenzweig’s Plans for Food & Health Tech appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

The recent “Food Dialogues” – organized and funded by the year old U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance – took on this challenge, launching “a new effort to bring together different viewpoints on farming and ranching and the future of food.” To meet this goal, the group hosted four panel discussions, and is utilizing popular social media tools like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.  But thus far, despite the group’s $11 million annual budget, the effort seems to have made little actual headway.

The Alliance, in an email exchange with Food+Tech Connect, called their social media strategy “straightforward.” “USFRA continues to strive for a two-way dialogue through various channels including Facebook and Twitter by answering questions and comments from consumers and facilitating conversation with farmers and ranchers.”  Chris Galen of the National Milk Producers Federation and a founder of USFRA wrote to Food+Tech Connect:

“Today’s consumers are online – engaging in social media activities from Twitter to Facebook to individual blogs. This medium wasn’t heavily utilized five years ago and now we have a great tool to truly connect farmers and ranchers one-on-one with consumers who want to know more about their food. The Food Dialogues Town Hall event engaged 4,000 people online in just one day – and continues to engage even more through all the information archived on the Food Dialogues website. Never before could farmers and ranchers so seamlessly engage with the American consumer than via social media.

But the data actually suggests a different reality.  Despite the group’s claim of 4000 “people online,” the group has only 798 followers on Twitter (as opposed to Monsanto’s 11,000+, or the similarly mandated AgChat with more than 16,000).  And its YouTube views are downright embarrassing, with a whopping 37 tuning in to watch the “Full video recap of the successful Food Dialogues Town Hall”

Perhaps most striking is the group’s Facebook site.  Aside from the dramatic photo of moderator Claire Shipman and Chef John Besh, the wall is full of articles like Monsanto is secretly poisoning the population with Roundup, and has less than a handful of farmer responses on it.

One Facebook question put forth by reader Trish Wright asked why no farmers appeared to be involved in responding to questions on the site.  USFRA responded:

Trish, USFRA conducted the Food Dialogues in late September to begin the dialogue with consumers about how food is grown and raised. Farmers and ranchers were not the audience to which USFRA was wanting to reach. We had initially planned to conduct the Food Dialogues earlier, but we delayed them a month to allow Congress to complete their important business regarding the debt limit. USFRA wished to avoid that major distraction.

(Wright responded by asking if the harvest in September wasn’t more of a distraction for farmers than the Congress debating debt.)

Aside from not answering Wright’s question as to why no farmers appeared involved on the site, the interaction is interesting because of the Alliance’s insistence that “USFRA is not a policy-making organization and therefore does not lobby.”

Yet in a former iteration of the group’s mission statement found on their website just last week, and in their stated goals as reported in Agri-Pulse  last February, the group outlined its purpose less as a consumer “dialogue” and more as a lobbying campaign.

“The goal: annual commitments of $20 to $30 million, considered the minimum amount needed to launch a credible, sustained national campaign capable of shifting public perceptions, legislative priorities in Congress, and policy implementation at USDA, EPA and other government agencies.

Now, in order to come to an agreement between its various member farming groups and commercial interests, USFRA’s says it will not have an “official opinion” on controversial topics like GMO seed.

But clearly the Alliance is not shying away from its support of large-scale agribusiness over smaller scale farming.  In perhaps its best use of social media so far, the group has produced a series of documentaries it released on YouTube at the end of September.  Professionally shot and focused on some of the more decisive issues in agriculture like feedlots and confined hog operations, the series has received a bit more attention from viewers, ranging from 120 views for the Soy Documentary, to almost 1650 for the Beef.

The “Beef Documentary” bills itself as “an emotional portrayal of farmers discussing the science behind a cattle feedlot and the care involved in raising the cows.” Set on a feedlot in the golden glow of sunset, owner Rick Stock talks about topics such as feed (without ever mentioning the word “corn”), manure and environmental practices. Soft music plays throughout, and Stock chokes up at the end of the video while telling a story about giving out beef at the Food Bank for Thanksgiving.

The video, and the others like in the series, emphasize the “science” behind the operation and discuss repeatedly the amount of data that is collected and used to raise animals in such confined circumstances.  “The amount of information we gather is really unbelievable,” says Stock in the video.  “Every day’s feed, every treatment they have, every review they have….we know exactly what has been treated, how much and when.”

Yet this is exactly the kind of information the public currently does not have access to and could make all the difference for the USFRA. Whether trying to influence congressional delegates or the general public, the Alliance might dispel more “myths” by releasing actual data of antibiotic use, the impact of feedlots on the environment and what exactly cattle are fed, than by tweeting.   Stock and the USFRA would be more convincing if they stopped recording “emotional” videos and conducting Facebook “dialogues,” and instead became truly transparent.

The post Social Media and the USFRA “Food Dialogues” Campaign appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.