Looking to launch a kick-ass food, food tech, ag or agtech crowdfunding campaign of your own? Take our Crowdfunding for Food Entrepreneurs Bootcamp e-course, taught by Lisa Q. Fetterman, who raised $1.3 million through two Kickstarter campaigns for her sous vide startup, Nomiku.

Got suggestions for other rad campaigns? Share them in the comments below. Hungry for more? Be sure to check out other food crowdfunding projects we’ve covered in the past here.

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The Fresh Connection, the NYC-based local food logistics company that works with sustainable producers and startups like Norwich Meadows, Quinciple and FarmerWeb, launched a Kickstarter campaign to help buy a delivery van (it currently leases its trucks). With the hope of increasing capacity, scaling its operations and expanding its customer base, The Fresh Connection is looking to raise $49,000 on Kickstarter. It has raised $11,000 so far and has 15 days to go.

Home-growing startup Cloud Farms launched a Kickstarter campaign to bring NIMBUS, its personal farm system, and BIOME, its window greenhouse to market. Together, the products allow you to grow full size vegetables with automatic watering and natural light. Cloud Farms hopes to raise $100,000 to fund the final tooling of BIOME and NIMBUS and to secure a commercial space in Brooklyn for assembly, packing and shipping.

After 14 years of community building and farming, City Slicker Farms is hoping to create a permanent home in West Oakland, CA. It’s looking to raise $25,000 on Barnraiser to transform a 1.4 acre vacant lot into a thriving community space complete with a community garden, fruit tree orchard, playground and greenhouse. It has raised $14,000 of its $25,000 goal and has 2 weeks left in the campaign.

Insect protein continues to gain steam. Crik Nutrition launched an Indiegogo campaign to produce the world’s first cricket protein powder. It’s raising $10,000 to help finance packaging, micro testing, raw ingredient procurement and the manufacturing deposit for its nutritionally dense and eco-friendly bug-based protein powder. With 20 days remaining in the campaign, Crik has raised 150% of its goal.

SaloonBox wants to deliver the makings for craft cocktails right to your door. Its looking to raise $40,000 on Kickstarter to launch its curated cocktail subscription service. It will feature recipes from some of San Francisco’s best mixologists (to start) along with all the ingredients you need to make them. The campaign has raised almost $36,000 and has 11 days left.

The sustainable alternative to the electric kettle, MIITO seeks to reduce energy and water waste with a sustainable, simple and adaptable device that heats liquids directly in its vessel. With 3,500+ backers, MIITO has exceeded its Kickstarter campaign goal of $167,383, raising a whopping $475,931. It will use the funding for an alpha test series, initial manufacturing and preparation for mass production.

Feather Coffee is a mobile-coffee startup that donates a percentage of profits to support rare disease organizations. All funds from its Kickstarter campaign will go towards purchasing the first Feather Coffee trailer and working to prove that its ’cause-brewing’ model is a profitable and scalable business.

Hivemind makes a bee hive scale with satellite communication links and a web interface that helps commercial beekeepers become more efficient. And now, it has launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise $74,000 to integrate WiFi connectivity and build a compatible smartphone app for backyard beekeepers, educators and hobbyists. Funding will go towards R&D, which includes electronics design and firmware, compliance testing and  app development.

Beer tech startup ManCan recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to take its new product, the ManCan 128, from prototype to production. Self described as a brewery in your fridge, the ManCan 128 is a one-gallon personal keg system that keeps beer fresh and carbonated. With two weeks left in the campaign, ManCan has exceeded its $70,000 goal and raised $143,457.

The post Food Crowdfunding: From Cricket Powder to a Craft Cocktail Subscription Box appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

There are many organizations working to reduce food waste through efforts like food banks, composting, and meal planning. And over the past few years, a number of technologies have emerged to reduce food waste across the supply chain. From restaurant waste tracking to leftover swapping, the following 6 technologies are working to disrupt food waste and decrease the amount of food thrown into landfills.

LeftoverSwap

Perhaps one of the more unique, and highly controversial, new technologies combatting food waste is LeftoverSwap, an online marketplace for leftovers. The iOS app allows users to post a picture and description of their unwanted leftovers on its listing database. Other users in the same geographic region can then trade or simply take the remaining food. Users arrange a mutually agreed upon delivery method. There are a lot of potential health hazards in taking food from unpermitted strangers. However, co-founder Dan Newman tells NPR that the exchange is all about trust, similar to Couchsurfing.

LeanPath 

One of the original players in the waste tracking field, LeanPath offers an automated system for restaurants, universities, hospitals, and other food service organizations. Its integrated scale and touch screen device allow users to easily record the amount, food type, location, loss reason, and other information about the food being discarded. Kitchen staff can record the information in less than 10 seconds, immediately prior to disposal. The data is uploaded to a reporting dashboard where it can be analyzed to find sources of waste. LeanPath goes one step further and offers training and coaching to translate the data into actionable steps. There are a variety of customizable rental and purchase options available, with the most basic starting at $199 per month. Its list of customers include ARAMARK Healthcare, MGM Resorts, Sodexo, and the University of California. Around 150 of LeanPath’s clients have reduced food waste by up to 80 percent after installing the system, co-founder Andrew Shakman told Modern Farmer last month.

FoodStar

Supermarkets lose  an estimated $15 billion annually in fruit and vegetable losses alone. A significant portion of fresh food from farms never even reaches the grocery store because it has cosmetic imperfections, does not meet the grocer’s size specifications, or is already too ripe. That is where FoodStar steps in. The platform organizes and alerts shoppers of flash sales or deep discounts at their local grocery store on imperfect or already ripe produce. Users can sign up for text or email notifications on FoodStar’s website and receive alerts detailing available products, time, and location of sales. These sales are of financial benefit to both consumers and businesses. Additionally, when the flash sales end any produce that doesn’t find a shopping cart is diverted from landfills to compost facilities.

Love Food Hate Waste

Love Food Hate Waste was launched by nonprofit organization WRAP in 2007 to help reduce food waste in the UK. Earlier this year they created a free iOS and Android app that helps users plan, shop, cook and make the most of leftovers. It includes a variety of recipes and tips for utilizing forgotten and leftover food to create new dishes. Samsung has recently partnered with the campaign to raise awareness and combat food waste by educating consumers about storing and organizing food in a more efficient way.

222 Million Tons

 For the many home cooks that struggle to use all of their groceries before they go bad, 222 Million Tons meal planning iPad app offers a compelling solution. The app allows users to create menus and shopping lists based on their household size. The aim is to optimize planning, while still providing enough variety in their home-cooked meals. The app gets its name from the amount of food wasted every year in industrialized nations according to a 2011 UN study. 

Wise Up on Waste

Capitalizing on the adage of “knowledge is power,” Wise Up on Waste allows restaurants to track and measure how, when, and where waste is produced. Created by Unilever Food Solutions, the free app—available on iOS, Android, and web-enabled devices—makes it simple for chefs to track the type of waste—spoilage, preparation, or customer plate waste—by meal on a per day and per cover basis. The performance data is then compiled and sent to users by email along with industry comparisons to help them identify cost saving opportunities. Wise Up on Waste also contains a plethora of useful information and tips to help chefs utilize this data and reduce waste.

The post Waste Not, Want Not: 6 Technologies to Reduce Food Waste appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Counting your calories may become much easier thanks to The Orange Chef’s new quantified cooking products. The company will soon be releasing Prep Pad, a digital scale that calculates nutritional information in real-time, and Countertop, an accompanying iOS app that presents the information and lets you set goals. Designed for health-conscious home cooks, and riding the wave of the quantified self movement, it provides users with nutritional information about their meals – calories, protein, carbohydrates, and fat content – similar to the information you’d find on the nutritional label of any packaged good.

The device is sleek and beautiful. It does not display any weight data, making it look more like a cutting board than a digital scale. “It’s less about weight, and it’s more about you,” Orange Chef director of communications Michael Tankenoff tells me.

Users place meal ingredients, one at a time, on the scale, and then Prep Pad sends the weight to the Countertop via Bluetooth. Users must then go into the app to identify the ingredient, which can be done through manual selection on their screen, voice command or by scanning the barcode. Once the ingredients are identified, the app calculates the meal’s health profile, leveraging Nutritionix’s database of over 300,000 ingredients, which includes packaged products and large chain restaurant food.

Users can then make adjustments to the ingredient amounts to achieve a better nutrient mix based on their health goals. Countertop compares your meal with suggested protein, carb, and fat levels based on USDA guidelines, and also calculates an overall “balance score” out of 100, with higher numbers representing more balanced meals.

Compiling all of the ingredients at the start and quantifying nutritional information one-at-a-time may seem daunting to time-management obsessed chefs and home cooks, but Tankenoff says “these additional minutes before one’s meal is ready are worth the informational output.” Rather than reducing time in the kitchen, the Countertop app seeks to enable users to make wiser meal choices and better track eating habits, he says. Apart from health-conscious home cooks, this technology could have larger implications for food service providers with nutrition-sensitive clientele, such as schools, geriatric facilities, and health-conscious restaurants.

The Prep Pad was funded through a Kickstarter campaign launched in May, with 500 pre-ordered units at $149.95 each and an expected delivery in November. The company has also received inquiries from retailers expressing interest in the product, Tankenoff says. The company plans to enhance the software so that the app becomes more of a culinary instructor, allowing the cook to input what they want to prepare and then the software would dictate how much of each ingredient to add. Further down the road, the company seeks to leverage technology to improve other stalwart cooking tools to create a more connected kitchen. “We’re going to look at cornerstones of the kitchen environment and see how we can improve them in a subtle way by using technology to enhance the process,” says Tankenoff.

This is The Orange Chef’s second series of kitchen tech products. It’s first, an iPad protector called Chef Sleeve, launched two years ago and was followed by dishwasher safe iPad stands.

The post Prep Pad Aims to Redefine Calorie Counting appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

From payments to ordering to engagement, the restaurant industry is seeing its fair share of food tech innovation. Much of the innovation seems to be targeted towards large chains who are often earlier adopters of technology, but this innovation foreshadows what could be around the corner for small quick service restaurants (QSR). We decided to take a look at one of the technology companies that’s raised a lot of money to make waves in the restaurant space.

Founded by computer graphic and 3-D animation pioneer Paul Sidlo in 2002, EMN8 offers a selection of customized digital meal ordering and customer engagement services for QSRs. Through online and mobile meal ordering systems, digital kiosks, and call centers, restaurants can update menus universally, suggest add-ons at the point of purchase to increase the average bill per customer, and potentially reduce staff costs by introducing digital menus. EMN8’s technology also lets restaurants track purchase histories so customers can easily reorder previous menu favorites. All of its services create robust data that restaurants can use to analyze customer preferences.

As we noted in our monthly Food Tech Media Startup Funding roundup, in June, ENM8 announced it had acquired Snapfinger, an online and mobile ordering platform for casual dining restaurants. Snapfinger’s latest tool allows in-store diners to open tickets in the restaurant’s point-of-sale (POS) system with their personal mobile devices, which give restaurants more customer data regarding dine-in and take-out meal preferences. Additionally, such technology could reduce service times for customers. The company also announced it had raised $50 million in growth funding, lead by Bass Associates and Allegis Capital, to make the acquisition.

EMN8 was already a major player among the crowded meal-ordering space, working with restaurant giants like Burger King, Domino’s Pizza, Jack in the Box, and Yum! along with smaller chains such as Sizzler and The Counter. By acquiring Snapfinger, ENM8 now provides its services to an increased share of the QSR and casual dining segment. “We really understand the challenges that multi-unit restaurant chains face, including how to balance corporate- and franchise-level initiatives,” says EMN8’s Chief Marketing Officer Hope Neiman in an interview with Food+Tech Connect.

Like MenuDrive and RRT, EMN8 can integrate with the vast majority of POS systems, such as Micros, Radiant, and PAR. What sets the company apart, however, is its ability to act as the sole interface with customers across all channels—web, mobile, in-store, and telephone. “EMN8 helps our clients develop more integrated customer relationship models so that all of their communications are focused no matter which service or platform that customer came through,” says Neiman. This unified touchpoint between the restaurant and customer aims to increase revenue and encourage repeat customer transaction. As such, EMN8 is seeing a lot of interest in its loyalty and offer engines from clients.

Digital ordering accounts for a growing percentage of sales for some companies who have already embraced the technology, representing approximately a third of all Domino’s US orders, for example. Restaurant startups like Sweetgreen are also embracing mobile payment apps and seeing significant adoption and engagement. Ultimately, EMN8 seeks to revolutionize the restaurant industry landscape through further technological enhancements in the mobile payment arena and improved customer engagement models. “I think there’s a big shift in a lot of the technology for ordering really becoming very impactful for guests,” says Nieman.

The post EMN8 Ups Its Digital Ordering and Engagement Game appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

What’s the difference between Grade A, organic, natural and free-range eggs? Amongst a sea of misleading food labels, Buying Poultry hopes to take the guess-work out of choosing the most humane and sustainable poultry products and plant-based alternatives. The company, an initiative of farm advocacy group Farm Forward, is working to create a Real Time Farms– esque online buying guide featuring animal, farm worker and environmental ratings for every poultry producer in the country. Free to use via smartphone, tablet and computer, the guide will help combat the secrecy of factory farm poultry production by providing consumers with easily-accessible, real-time information.

As Executive Director of Farm Forward, Buying Poultry Co-founder Ben Goldsmith was constantly being asked for the best option for finding alternatives to factory farming. But there simply wasn’t an easy-to-use nationwide guide. Farm Forward polled its newsletter subscribers and found that 90% percent of carnivores would “definitely” use the guide. And so they decided to tackle the poultry transparency beast themselves. For the past four years they have been working with high-welfare poultry farmers and animal welfare experts to create the beginnings of the site.

To make this comprehensive project a reality, the team has launched a Kickstarter Campaign to raise $40,000. To date, they’ve secured nearly half and have just under 40 days to go. If they reach their goal, the money raised will go towards site design and development, building and programming the massive database, paying for servers, and an eventual API. Though they are raising money through multiple sources, Goldsmith says they believe kickstarter is great source of support because their product is catered towards “tech-savvy, contentious consumers” who are “likely familiar with kickstarter and hungry for more transparency in the food they consume.”

Buying Poultry hopes to connect good farmers with consumers while bringing accountability back to the poultry industry. If executed, the project will empower conscious consumers with the information they need to make the best choices for themselves, farmed animals and the planet.

Check out their in depth POULTRY PRODUCTION INFOGRAPHIC

The post New Site Brings Transparency to Buying Poultry appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

For anyone that may not be familiar, Ordr.in is an open platform for restaurant menu data that helps restaurants manage their menus online and accept orders, and then offers that data to developers to incorporate in their applications. It recently released a new set of tools for developers that make it easier to use its API, for which the HackFood event was a kind of kick-off celebration.

When I showed up, there was still a bin of leftover golden-brown fried chicken from dinner and the demos were just getting underway. For the crowd of 35 or so developers, who had been at it since 9 a.m., it was time for show and tell. The judges who offered feedback, including Erik Nordlander of Google Ventures, Amanda Hesser of Food52 and Adam Rothenberg of TechStars, settled in.

On display were all sorts of hacks for managing food inventory and ordering. There was one project that enables chat room users to organize and place a group lunch order from within the chat room. Another hack, iFridge, uses sensors to turn a regular refrigerator into smart fridge that knows when you are adding or removing an item and renders that information to a dashboard on your laptop (or other device), and subsequently tracks your nutrition. Another project, a hack built by Andrew Pinzler, helps MTA riders identify restaurants that are along their route home and order for pick up. He made use of one of the tools Ordr.in recently made available.

“I wanted to include the ability to order ahead…so when you get off the subway [your pickup order] is already ready,” says Pinzler. “All the ordering and displaying of menu information is pretty much built into that mustard functionality.”

The “mustard functionality” he’s referring to is the Ordr.in module it just released. It’s a free (available on Github) javascript library that a developer inserts into their page and makes requests of the Ordr.in API. A user just needs to have a server set up that can handle the API requests.

“Mustard handles the complexity of rendering a restaurant list, interactive menu page and order confirmation page and simplifies it to just including a few lines of javascript on your page,” says Ricky Robinett, Ordr.in’s Senior Hacker and API Product Lead.

So, in the case of Pinzler’s hack, users can see what restaurants are on their way home and by clicking on one of them, a screen pops up with the restaurant’s menu and you can order directly from it. I ask Andrew how long it would have taken to build something like that without using the Mustard module. He laughs. “That would be a hackathon all by itself,” he says.

Since the hackathon, Pinzler, who by day works for BBC Worldwide as a product manager, says he’s incorporated a lot of feedback and renamed the service Transit Pit Stop to more accurately describe what it’s capable of (e.g., finding comedy clubs on the way home, bars near your subway lines, etc.). He’s also incorporating Yelp and other data sets. The project is online but still under development. It’s not really meant to be a business, just something fun to work on.

“I’m sort of merging publicly data sets, so there’s no real secret sauce…plus, I’m not actually a professional developer,” he says. “In the corporate world getting stuff done takes a long time, at a hackathon, you start with an idea, and in this case in 8-12 hours, you got a functional actual thing.”

In addition to “Mustard,” the Ordr.in team also launched “Tomato,” and forthcoming are “Lettuce” and “Cheese.” Tomato basically allows developers to store data and use it in the other modules, and Lettuce and Cheese provide developers easier access to things like check out functionality and user profiles and payment management.

Who knew data could be delicious and taste so much like a hamburger.

The post Ordr.in Launches New Developer Tools at HackFood appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

The June Food+Tech Meetup featured five startups that are revolutionizing the restaurant industry, including yumspring, Clean Plates, Mirth, Single Platform and BuzzTable. Presenters gave a 5-minute pitch followed by Q&A with attendees. The conversation covered the problems each startup is solving, their business models and their growth plans. Each is taking on a unique slice of the food industry pie:

Until now, there has been no crowdfunding site focused on the needs of food entrepreneurs — enter yumspring. It is a “crowdfunding platform dedicated to foodies” that seeks to improve the success rate of new ventures by helping them:

• raise funds
• connect with customers at an early stage
• find and test new products

The company is pre-launch (with 10 restaurants on deck) and looking for any restaurant owners, food incubators or event spaces that are interested in partnering.

Looking for a vegan, organic brunch? Searching on Yelp might not get you very far. It’s difficult to get granular detail about a restaurant’s menu, including nutrition facts, ingredients, and sourcing — enter Clean Plates. It brings together a food reviewer and a nutritionist to “make it easier and more enjoyable for people to eat healthier,” by:

• publishing a guide to the healthiest, tastiest and most sustainable restaurants in NYC and L.A.
• offering a mobile app that consumers can use to search for restaurants based on select criteria

The company is getting ready to release a new version of its mobile app and looking for beta testers.

Single-proprietor restaurants, bars and retail merchants don’t tend to use daily deal programs and lack a great alternative for rewarding customers — enter Mirth. It offers “rewards for regulars” without the punch cards and:

• helps restaurants reward repeat business from particular customer segments
• is integrated with existing payment infrastructure so customers “sign up” by using their credit cards
• gives businesses an open line of communication with repeat customers

Mirth is piloting the program with 10 venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn and looking for new users (regulars) and participating restaurants.

Single Platform and BuzzTable are also doing some exciting things. There are no videos because they gave information at the meetup that is not for rebroadcast, but Single Platform “helps local businesses get discovered” by, in part, aggregating menus and syndicating that data to publishers, like travel guides, local review sites or mobile applications. Restaurants interested in participating can sign up on its website. And for anyone that has been to Shake Shack or another restaurant that uses buzzers to alert you when your order or table is ready, BuzzTable has a more elegant solution that utilizes your mobile phone and includes a customer loyalty reward program. The platform also serves as a mobile CRM for restaurants, allowing them to collect consumer data on traffic and preferences. Its free mobile app is available for iPhone and Android.

The post 5 Startups Revolutionizing the Restaurant Industry [Video] appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Interactive design agency Teehan+Lax’s “Labs” has developed a milk jug and Android mobile app that alert you when you are low on milk in your refrigerator . The 3D-printed jug has weight sensor attached to it’s bottom, which sends an alert to your phone when the milk “reaches dangerously low levels,” and uses GPS to suggest nearby grocery stores.

You can also check how much milk you have through the app.

The goal of the project is to explore the ways technology influences our daily activities.

“Although this experiment revolved around milk, the idea has broader implications that extend beyond the milk itself,” the Teehan+Lax Labs team wrrote in a blog post. “How can this idea impact the way we organize our lives and the way we interact with objects using the digital capabilities available to us? The possibilities are as endless as our imagination.”

Who knows, maybe a food mailbox – an idea for a refrigerator that uses remote sensors to determine when you are out of a particular food item, and then notifies food purveyors to deliver new items to your food mailbox –  is not that far off.

The post [Innovator Video] Internet of Things: Got Milk? appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Over the past 5 months, Massive Health has collected over 7.68 million food ratings from people in 50 countries through The Eatery, an iPhone app that helps users track and analyze their eating patterns. Today, they are releasing some of their key findings about when people eat, where people eat, what they eat, and who they eat with, as a series of infographics. For more information about the company and  to see the infographic detailing at how people think they eat (and how healthy they actually eat) click here.

Key Finding on When We Eat

• We eat 1.7 percent less healthy after each hour that passes in the day
• Breakfast is the healthiest meal of the day. Dinner is 15.9 percent less healthy
• People who eat breakfast eat 12.3 percent healthier during the day
• On the weekend, we eat more unhealthy foods – including 1.4  times as many croissants and 1.6 times as much beer

Key Findings On Where We Eat

• Americans who live along the coast eat healthier than those who live in the Midwest and the south
• We eat 12.7 percent healthier when we eat at home (vs. eating out)

Key Finding On Who Eats What

• New Yorkers eat 3.2 times more arugula than other cities (NY’s health rating is a high 83.6 percent)
• Philadelphia residents eat 3.7 times more bagels (Philly’s health rating is a low 28.6 percent)

Key Findings On Who People Eat With

Our friends influence what we choose to eat by 34.5 perent.

The post Infographics of the Week: What 7.68 Million Food Ratings Tell Us About Our Eating Habits appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

[Editors Note: This post includes 1 of 5 infographics looking at how, where , what, when and with who people eat. The remaining infographics can be found here.]

Last February, Massive Health raised $2.5 million in seed funding to help people improve their health through better data, design, social and game mechanics. Their goal has been to bridge the world’s of healthcare and consumer products, using mobile phones as sensors that collect real-time data about a user’s behavior. The company wants to analyze the data collected to tighten the feedback loop for patients of chronic diseases and help them improve their behavior.

Their first experiment with this is The Eatery,  an iPhone app that helps users track and analyze their eating patterns to better understand their strengths, weaknesses and the best places to make changes in their diet. Users snap photos of their food, and then rate its health on a scale from “Fit” to “Fat.” Users then receive crowdsourced feedback on the healthfulness of their eating habits from community members.

Collecting large-scale, real-time data about people’s diets, not just self-reported details about their eating habits, is nearly impossible. Yet, this data could help us and the medical community better address the rising obesity and diabetes epidemics. Over the past 5 months, Massive Health has collected over 7.68 million food ratings from people in 50 countries. Today, they are releasing some of their key findings  about how people think they eat (and how healthy they actually eat), where people eat, what they eat, when they eat, and who they eat with, as a series of infographics.

But can crowdsourced data be trusted?

“Famously, one of the most accurate ways to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar is to average the guesses of everyone in the room,” writes Massive Health co-founder and Chief Vision Officer Aza Raskin on the company blog. “The crowd-sourced method beats much more advanced algorithms. To test our hunch that the same applied in nutrition, we looked at the aggregate Eatery scores for all meals eaten in a city versus the published obesity level in that city. It turns out there’s a strong correlation. Eatery data can accurately predict obesity levels of cities in the United States. That is, Eatery data strongly correlates with the healthiness of its users.”

Massive Health has broken the infographics into five parts. Below is the infographic detailing how healthfully we think we eat. Click here to be directed to the infographics on when, where, what, and with who people eat.

One of the interest key findings is that people eat 12.4 percent less healthy than users actually think they do. In fact, the less healthy the food is, the less accurate users tend to rate it. Pizza, for example, is rated 2.8 times less healthy by others than by the user.

The post Massive Health Analyzes How Healthy We Think We Eat [Infographic] appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

That’s when ScanAvert, a mobile application that helps consumers with dietary restrictions to choose safe groceries, was born. Available for both iOS and Android devices, ScanAvert is much more than a mobile grocery advisor, allowing users to find and track their purchases based on their manageable disease or condition.

In the Fall of 2011, ScanAvert recieved a patent that allows for automated compatibility notification, and for recommendations to virtual or physical groups, based on a subscriber’s dietary and health preference/avoidance  profile. This means that ScanAvert can be the pre-eminent portal for food manufacturers’ coupons to be pushed directly to members based on their dietary preferences, intolerances, and allergies. Because of this, ScanAvert is HIPAA compliant.

How ScanAvert Works

ScanAvert allows users to store personal health information and preferences on the website. Then, users can scan food, medication and beauty product barcode labels with their smartphone to have items cross-checked against their personal health specifications. ScanAvert pulls from its database of over 300,000 product entries and shows a RED or GREEN alert depending on the user’s needs. Additionally, the technology issues push notifications on vital recalls, a particularly important feature for people with anaphylaxis.

As the mother of a food allergic teen, and having food allergies and intolerances myself, this has been an excellent addition to our arsenal of tools for managing our day-to-day life. For example, when I was recently at a new spa, I scanned the masks and lotions and found that many contained ingredients that were not safe for me. I can imagine making sure our caregiver has the app, and recommend that my children’s grandmother use it when she shops the grocery aisles for us before a visit. Camp directors could input my child’s dietary preferences to help them build a safe menu for my child. I also look forward to soon being able to get push notifications with coupons for foods that are safe for me and my family.

Eventually ScanAvert, with the assistance of major sponsors, will make the app free to everyone. Until then, there is a $1.99 charge for one month, or $9.99 for six months. Ellen’s long-term goal for the product is “…that Doctors and health professionals will eventually use it to track a patient’s diet, check for other interactions with medications and see where diet might directly relate to their overall health care and management before disease sets in. Additionally, it can be used for public recalls on a massive scale.”

The post ScanAvert: The Future of Shopping with Dietary Restrictions appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

The dust has settled and another SXSW is in the books. If you’ve been following along along, you may have known that I presented this year with Will Turnage something called, “My Robotic Kitchen Planned this Dinner Party.” The talk outlined how technology in the kitchen needs to be used to analyze the holistic cooking experience rather than just focusing in isolation on a few discrete tasks. We had a great turnout and a receptive crowd, and you can listen to a full audio recording of the talk and see the slides embedded below from Slideshare.

In the talk, we demoed a rough prototype of a dinner planning app we built as a proof of concept. The app empowers a dinner party planner to customize, scale, and shop for a menu, then organize all of the required steps into one master to-do list. The central inspiration for what Will and I created is essentially a digitized version of the professional chef’s mind, where flexibility and adaptation are the hallmarks of the cooking approach…

We think that this approach represents a different way of looking at cooking instruction from what you typically find out there today. For instance, anyone can easily discover 3 recipes on any recipe site, but each of those recipes still exist in their own silo. The roast chicken recipe has no idea its being cooked with the roasted brussels sprouts and a side and apple pie for dessert. You still need to make your own mental leap to unify the steps of these dishes into one single to-do list and have a meal that’s efficiently prepared and well timed.

Someone who’s an experienced cook or professional chef naturally knows how to get all three of these things onto the table with minimal drama, but for most people, this kind of thing presents a challenge. Herein lies the gap in showing you how to plan and execute a dinner party and we think there’s real value in figuring this and many other problems out with technology.

There’s much more to be done, and the playing field is wide open for where this can go. At the end of the day, I believe that great things happen when you cook for those you care about. Knowing that, I wish everyone could cook more for the people in their lives and have the same great experience I’ve had doing the same. To the extent that I can help lower the barriers to cooking through technology, content, and inspiration, I will, and this is just the start.

Take a look/listen to the presentation and let me know what you think. Would this approach be valuable to you? Leave us a note in the comments.

All presentation photos by Steph Goralnick

The post My Robotic Kitchen Planned This Dinner Party at SXSW appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Local Dirt and Locavore recently launched a free search widget and API for their farm, farmers market and CSA mapping data.  Local dirt is an online marketplace for buying and selling local food directly from the family farm. Locavore is a free iOS and Android app that helps users locate local, seasonal food. There are over 35,000 United States and Canad-based farms, farmers markets and CSAs in their combined databases, which you are now able to integrate into your own website or mobile app.

I got a chance to speak with Local Dirt founder Heather Hillern to learn more about their data, how they ensure it’s current and accurate, and how they navigate privacy concerns related to sharing user contributed data.

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Danielle Gould:  Why did you decide to launch a widget for Local Dirt and Locavore’s farm and farmers market mapping data, as well as the in season data?

Heather Hillern:  Local food systems everywhere are based off of relationships. Local relationships. Every area has their own way of connecting the dots. Our goal is to make it easier to access local food, and support family farms, by offering the tools to support local efforts.

Last week we changed our Locavore app to enable individuals to promote their local farms, markets, and CSAs, as well as connecting with other locavores. Offering the widget is just giving back the information that communities gave to us.

DG: What kinds of data are available through the APIs? How many farms, farmers markets, and CSA’s do you have in your database?

HH:  We have 35,000 farms & farmer markets, some tagged as a CSA. We have the products they sell. We have photos to go with the products and sellers. We have in season data for all locations in the United States, Canada, and soon the UK.
The data is changing every day as people use the Locavore app, and our local food organization partners update their member’s information.

DG:  Where do you get the data? How do you ensure it is accurate and current?

HH:  Farm & FM data:
We get a lot from Local Dirt. Every year we ask farms & farmer markets to renew their account. If it doesn’t get updated, the listing is removed until they log back in. For the rest we partner with local food organizations that update their data every year. According to the USDA, small & midsized farms (revenues of $1K-1M), go out of business at the rate of 365 every week. There are many databases out there; ours is the most up to date.

In Season data:
Originally, we used an API from a nonprofit that identified what was in season for each state. We now have created our own database that identifies what is in season based off of lat/long location. It is much more accurate. This is updated based off of our ongoing research and crowd sourcing. Unfortunately, global warming is causing some changes in seasonality.

Most of all, people use the Locavore app. As they post about farms, markets, CSAs and local food, we use the tags to update the database.

DG:  What if any privacy issues have you faced with sharing user contributed data from your sellers and groups?

HH:  We are very sensitive to privacy concerns. Possibly because of that, we have never faced privacy issues. In Local Dirt we preemptively put in different privacy setting for profile pages, hid email addresses behind messaging, and set up a way to “block” other users from messages and showing information.

DG:  Have you faced any other challenges with launching the widget? If so, please describe.

HH:  We announced an API, the same one we use ourselves for Locavore. What we found is that organizations actually need a widget.

DG:  Who and how do you anticipate the widget will be used?

HH:  So far we have been contacted by community organizations, bloggers, and food hubs. They all have the same goal in mind: to support local farms by making it easy for people to find what is available in their local area.

DG:  Will you be charging for use of the widget? If so, what pricing structure will you offer?

HH:  There will not be any charge for the widget. For the API, the only instance we would consider charging is if an organization is making money off of the information.

The post Get Your Local Farm & Food Data: Local Dirt & Locavore Launch Widget & API appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

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The company currently has product information from over 2,400 supermarkets and images for over 150,000 grocery products, including Whole Foods’, Trader Joes, Safeway, Cosco and Wal-Mart. The API allows companies to search by product name, item ID, city, state, zipcode, and store name. According to founder Curtiss Pope, the data is updated every two months to ensure it’s accuracy.

Why would they want to make this data freely available when it is so valuable?

Pope wants to engage the developer community and make it easier for them to start companies in the grocery space. Commercial ($99/month, $399/year) and educational ($45/year) licenses are also available.

It will be interesting to see how companies like Shopwell and Fooducate think Supermarket API compares to the grocery product data they already spend significant resources to license. Even more interesting is the potential impact this could have on the antiquated food data market- one that is ready for disruption.

I spoke with Pope to learn more about how he managed to get his data and why he’s making it available, for free, through their Supermarket API.

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Danielle Gould:  What was the inspiration behind Supermarket API?

Curtiss Pope: The Foo Fighters. Them and wanting to have a platform that we can share with the developer community. We love that people can build on top of our platform, in anyway they want.

DG:  A lot of companies have tried to get supermarket and grocery product data. How did you get 2,400 supermarkets to share product information and images for over 150,000 grocery products?

CP:  A little bit of Secret sauce , however we initially make relationships with each and every individual supermarket to gather data. Then, we do a 3 minute interview.

DG: Who do you interview and how do you ensure the data is correct?

CP:  Most of the time we interview store managers. We check the data every two months from the date of entry and keep checking the data to make sure it’s still accurate.

DG:  Why are you open-sourcing the API?

Being a developer and designer myself, I wanted developers to have a real taste or what our platform offers. We also have some commercial, and educational options as well.

DG:  How are people using the API?

CP: So far I have heard quite a few ideas and I think now we are giving the developers time to build. I have seen some interesting queries made so far, but I am not going to spoil it

DG:  Who else has this data and why haven’t they open sourced it?

CP:  Some big companies have this data, its like the holy grail, and none of them are giving it away as we have. They want you to pay close to $100,ooo a year just to have access. It’s ridiculous!

DG: What is your business model?

CP:  We have a few ways that we are financing our business, so far: consulting, product analytics, brand promotions, and coupons.

DG:  What’s next?

CP:  Make more data available. Get more stores. Launch another API in the same space. Stay tuned

The post Supermarket API Could Save Companies $100K+ Annually appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.