In tandem with the launch of the Food+Tech Job Board, we are thrilled to launch the Food Startup Growth Series. This series will give you an inside look at the strategies, challenges and best practices of fast-growing food startups.

For busy workers, finding a lunch spot that can deliver a quick and satisfying experience can be challenging. For those who want to enjoy a sit-down restaurant but are tight on time, waiting for a table and ordering can be stressful. By allowing diners to pre-book, pre-order and pre-pay for their meals, Allset works with restaurants to create an efficient and enjoyable experience in under 30 minutes.

Founder and CEO Stat Matviyenko launched Allset in 2015. Based in San Francisco, the company has 20 employees, 12 of which are located in Ukraine. Allset has raised $3.35 million through two seed rounds. SMRK VC Fund and private investor Alexander Chernyak led the initial round in 2015.  Compound leading the second round in 2016. FJ Labs, Metaphoric Ventures, Andreesen Horowitz also invested. Allset is currently available at over 400 restaurants in six different cities. Each month, a new city is launched and the customer base grows by 30 percent. By 2018, Allset is expected to have partner restaurants in every major U.S. city and London.

I spoke with Stas managing a company with operations on two different continents, what his immediate and future growth goals are and what are the biggest obstacles he’s faced thus far. He also told me what he values in an employee (he’s hiring!) and what skills team members of Allset can expect to gain.

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Danielle Gould: Why did you start Allset?

Stas Matviyenko: Our team has 5 years of expertise in building solutions for restaurants. We built a mobile loyalty program called Advice Wallet with 500+ restaurants in 4 countries, and a mobile payment app called Settle – the first in Eastern Europe. These two services formed the basis for Allset.

Allset was created to make lunch for our team easier and faster at nearby restaurants. How it works: you book a table and order your meal before you arrive at the restaurant. Upon arrival, the restaurant seats and serves you immediately. The check is paid, so you can leave when you want. It’s that simple.

Every time we dined out with Allset, we felt like VIP guests. We realized that people would love to skip the wait at restaurants and focus on amazing dining experiences, every day. Eventually, Allset has become the favorite way to dine out for thousands of busy professionals across the United States.

DG: What’s innovative about Allset? What differentiates it from its competitors?

SM: Allset is the only service that allows you to both book a table and order you meal before you arrive at the restaurant. Nobody does the same. Unlike table booking services and takeout services, Allset gives diners both the speed of takeout with the comfort of dine-in.

DG: What kind of growth has Allset seen over the last year? What has driven that growth?

SM: Today we serve 13,000+ orders monthly at 400+ restaurants in 6 cities: SF, NYC, Palo Alto, Chicago, Boston, and Austin. Our customer base is growing 30 percent monthly; we have a 70 percent retention rate. We’re launching a new city every month. We will have 14 areas in total until the end of the year: SF, Oakland, Palo Alto, San Jose, Manhattan, Brooklyn, New Jersey, Chicago, Boston, Austin, Seattle, Philadelphia, San Diego, and Los Angeles. Our success is the product of hard work, persistence, and trust in what we do.

DG: What are your growth goals for the next 12-24 months, and how do you plan to achieve those goals?

SM: Seattle will be officially launched in May. After that, we will expand to Philadelphia, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego. By the end of 2017, we will have 14 areas in total with 1,000 partner restaurants. By the end of 2018, we’re planning to launch Allset in all big cities in the United States and serve 100,000 diners monthly. In 2018 we plan to launch our first city in Europe – London. Allset will completely expand beyond weekday lunches and will be serving dinners and brunches as well.

DG: What have been your biggest obstacles to growth and scale? How have you overcome them?

SM: Our biggest challenge right now is to meet the growing user demand for more restaurants to be added to Allset. We sign up and train restaurants online without being physically present in new cities. This allows us to grow really fast. Eventually, when we grow up to thousands of participating restaurants per city, we believe Allset can do to in-restaurant dining what Uber did to transportation and Airbnb did to hospitality.

DG: What does your team look like? How did you make those first hires?

SM: The team in the United States: Founders: Stas Matviyenko – CEO, Anna Polishchuk – COO, Pavlo Tiron – CTO, Dimitri Nikulin – CCO, plus Customer Success and Sales reps. The team in Ukraine: R&D, Growth and Marketing teams. Stas Matviyenko and Anna Polishchuk are experienced entrepreneurs who have been working together for 6 years. Pavlo Tiron, CTO, has 7 years experience in building high-quality products and leading dev teams. Dimitri joined the team 4 years ago and now lead the content and PR sides of Allset. Each one of founders plays a key role and possesses the knowledge, experience, and skills that help push the company forward. All hiring of employees in the company is done entirely through posting jobs on the internet: AngelList, LinkedIn, Craigslist, Indeed, Food+Tech Connect, and social media.

DG: What does your company culture look like? How have you built your company culture?

SM: Allset is a San Francisco-based company of technology experts and forward thinkers with a focus on improving the restaurant dining experience. Everything we do, we’re committed to helping people live enjoyable and productive lives.

Allset is all about technology and hospitality. On the one hand, we have a strong R&D team headed by experienced technology entrepreneurs. On the other hand, many former hosts, servers, and restaurant operators are working in our company. Moreover, to understand the restaurant industry better, our founders have co-founded a bar. We had an unused space in our office building, and we decided to do something interesting and maximize our return from the rent. We invited to the project our co-minded friends and started the bar from scratch. It was the first contemporary whiskey bar in Kyiv, Ukraine. It was also the playground for testing all our services.

From developers and designers to sales and founders, we’re spending a lot of time as regular diners. We dine out a lot because we love restaurants and food. This helps us better understand and more effectively address our customers needs as well as build our brand around cutting edge technology and amazing dining experiences.

DG: How are you preserving your company culture as you scale up?

SM: People are everything in business. It’s always worth the extra effort to find the right employees and to build your team with professionals who want to contribute with their time, skills and passion. They must share the same views and believe in your company’s mission. We put a lot of time and effort in recruiting people – from the very beginning when you review a resume, and up to the moment when you help a newcomer adapt to the team environment and processes. We’re thankful to have our great team today, and we’re always eager to make new connections.

DG: What will someone who works for you be able to add to their resume?

SM: Work at the company of technology experts and forward thinkers challenging the status quo in the hospitality industry and changing the way people dine at restaurants.

DG: What job(s) are you hiring for, and how will those positions help drive growth in your company?

SM: Designers, Software Engineers, Marketing and Operations Specialists, Sales Reps, and more.

DG: What kind of training do you offer for new employees who may be switching from other industries or who are just out of school?

SM: We mostly hire people with relevant experience from the restaurant and hospitality industry and food and tech startups. We have cheat sheets and training for young professionals who just finished school. It’s not rocket science and we always help new people learn and adapt.

DG: What’s your favorite interview question?

SM: Have you tried Allset?

DG: Why do you think it’s exciting to be working in food right now?

SM: We can talk from the restaurant tech standpoint as we work closely with the hospitality industry. It’s a great opportunity for everyone to support innovation, serve amazing people and change their lives for the better.

Check out exciting food tech, design, management, operations, development and food science positions at Food+Tech Jobs.

The post Wait-Free Dining App Allset is Growing 30% MOM appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Dishes that promote more sustainable food systems: (clockwise from upper left) Bone marrow & parsley salad, St. John; beet infused asian carp, Miya’s; carrot tartare, Eleven Madison Park; rotation risotto, Blue Hill.

In the recent history of fine dining, there have been a handful of notable dishes that transcend the table and make a statement about how our food system should operate. To name a few:

• Nose-to-Tail, Circa 1994: Chef Fergus Henderson, of St. John in London, opens his restaurant and becomes a vocal proponent of nose-to-tail eating. He turns bone marrow into a luxury dish and delights farmers and butchers everywhere by getting the public to celebrate more parts of the animal, reducing food waste and bringing additional income to those who make meat.
• Invasavorism, c.2010: Chef Bun Lai, of Miya’s Sushi in New Haven, Connecticut, starts serving invasive species — like Lionfish, Asian Carp, and Knotweed — on his menu as a way to use aquatic bycatch and to strengthen the local food system.
• Plant “Proteins”, c.2012: Chef Daniel Humm, of Eleven Madison Park in New York City, mesmerizes diners with a beef-tartare-inspired dish entirely made from carrots. The dish is served tableside with your server grinding whole carrots through a meat grinder.
• Rotational Dining, c.2013: Chef Dan Barber, of Blue Hill in New York, creates his seminal, “Rotation Risotto” dish. A mix of “soil-supporting grains and legumes, cooked and presented in the manner of a classic risotto,” it’s a delicious plate that reinforces rotational agriculture that’s better for the soil.

All of these chefs have used their platforms as restaurateurs and influencers to promote mindful deliciousness. For those lucky enough to have been to these restaurants, the ability to dine on something so pleasurable while supporting sustainability feels like you’re getting away with something.

But we (eaters, cooks, farmers, food makers, food media, etc.) can’t let the kind of food you see at those restaurants start and end there. For every cupcake, avocado toast or cronut that catches on like wildfire, we need more dishes that feature offal, bycatch, plant based foods and rotation crops to also dominate menus everywhere.

The above examples are dishes that only a tiny fraction of the world can experience. In their current form, they may never scale beyond the small group they were designed for. It’s great that these chefs have a media platform to talk about the ideas underlying these dishes, but the food system by-and-large doesn’t feed people like this. Outside of major metro areas there are many who have never heard of these chefs and their ideas.

How might we democratize the most high-minded food ideals practiced in Michelin starred kitchens so that everyone can have them? I’m not talking about lobes of foie gras topped with quenelles of caviar, but dishes like Rotation Risotto, which promotes rotational agriculture and biodiversity.

How do we get someone like General Mills to put Rotation Risotto in every Wal-Mart? How do we get Tyson to make offal a billion dollar consumer product? How do we get Red Lobster to serve bycatch? How do we get McDonald’s to put a veggie burger on the menu in America?

We at the Future Market explored this question with our Crop Crisp prototype product. With Crop Crisps, a mass-market cracker was made in four flavors where each flavor was based on a crop in a four-crop wheat rotation.

Crop Crisps are the CPG version of the Rotation Risotto, in cracker form. While our limited edition run was handmade in Brooklyn, the design of the box suggests a mass produced product similar to what you see in a Wal-Mart or Costco. We did this intentionally because we wanted to show what it would look like when progressive ideas make it into the mainstream, like how a Gucci sweater can eventually trickle down to the Gap.

Crop Crisps: a Future Market concept product. Each cracker flavor is based on a different crop from the same four-crop rotational planting.

Great new dishes with the power to shift the food system will always emerge from places like Blue Hill and Eleven Madison Park. But to truly shift the food system we have to move these ideas to the masses.

Everyday eaters can help these dishes make the jump into the mainstream. How? Next time you’re at a butcher shop, ask for an “off” cut of meat. Any butcher worth their salt will eagerly talk you through how to prepare it. Next time you’re eating something with a great story like Rotation Risotto, share the story on your social networks, not just a FOMO-inducing beauty shot.

It may sound like a series of small actions, but remember that the cupcake, avocado toast and cronut all caught on after a steadily growing stream of social posts. These trends tend to go viral once an editor at Food & Wine decides to write about why their Instagram feed is covered in avocado toast, but it all starts with the people making noise.

We as eaters have the power to decide what the next food trends are. Isn’t it time we start promoting more trends that can impact the food system?

This is also posted at The Future Market.

The post Good Food, Trickling Down appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

A lot of people argue that healthy, organic food is expensive and inaccessible to the masses. To challenge this belief and inspire people to rethink their ability to eat better without breaking the bank, Edible Impacts launched a project called #30DAYStoSHINE.

Founders and self proclaimed “edible impactors” Alex Monroe and Brooke Sunness ate all organic, whole food, vegetarian meals on a budget of $5-7 per day for 30 days in New York City. They shopped for ingredients exclusively at Whole Foods and documented their 3 meals a day on their blog including recipes, photographs and daily nutrition and cost breakdowns.

The duo found that it is possible to eat plant-based, organic foods on a small budget, and they published their findings to empower others to eat better too. They drafted a 25 page manual, including recipe ideas, sample shopping lists and tips for eating healthy food on the cheap, as well as a comprehensive budgeting spreadsheet, which helps eaters create cost-plans for ingredients and recipes.

We chatted with Alex and Brooke via email to learn more about their findings from the project, their business model and their current project “exposed,”. Our interview has been edited for brevity.

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Food+Tech Connect: Can you tell me more about the inspiration for Edible Impacts?

Edible Impacts: We both love eating delicious foods including seeds, fruits, leaves, stems and roots, insatiable wild meat from the sea and tree nuts. We spend a lot of time discussing various preparations for these types of foods, shopping for these foods and researching histories of these food. Through our journeys into researching, cooking and consuming whole foods we became inspired by the opportunity to build social communities around food. Our conversations and research then began moving towards advertising, psychology, sociology, and philosophy. Finally, we decided we had some ideas that could create new perceptions about food…and here we are.

FTC: What is your business model?

EI: Through partnerships with small and large businesses and public organizations we are creating non-traditional campaigns and messages, what we call edible impacts, that influence consumers through mainstream marketing channels including online, social, and print media.

FTC: What impact do you hope to have?

EI: We are addressing a need gap that we see in the way in which whole foods are represented (or misrepresented) today. By building greater curiosities around food, challenging the current food system, and rearranging the framework that drives a person’s decisions, we are confident we can reduce the size of that gap.

FTC: What were your key takeaways from the #30DAYStoSHINE campaign?

EI: It’s easiest to write out our findings in list form.

1. How easy it is to cook, shop, prepare and make food once you understand a few insights that the campaign has taught us: Use quality, unprocessed, organic ingredients, pair with a legume or grain and top with quality olive oil and salt/pepper.

2. Organic food is even more affordable than we expected. We have pinpointed which foods drive up the grocery bill (meaning only to be eaten occasionally) and those organic staples that can be turned into many delicious creations.

3. The importance of being curious and willing to take risks in the kitchen – i.e. not following recipes or traditional rules and beliefs like roasting a banana to eat with beans and rice or making pizza out of something that isn’t white or wheat flour.

4. Learning about the short term gains from eating a balanced whole foods diet including increased energy, clarity, satiation, a closer connection to our bodies and a deeper appreciation and gratitude for our food and meals.

FTC: What’s next for Edible Impacts? Can you tell me more about your second project “exposed,”?

EI: We have created a #30DAYStoSHINE Manual, which anyone interested in eating on this budget or taking on the campaign as a challenge can do so. We hope to get more individuals and corporations to take on the effort as a challenge on a larger scale, so our objective is to continue buttressing the American understanding about accessibility, affordability, and tastiness of whole foods.

“exposed,” is the [un]dramatic reintroduction to [good] food.  It is a solution that we believe can create a massive paradigm shift in the way people view [good] food. “exposed,” is a social value collaboration concept–interest groups working collectively to create dynamic social campaigns that represent a shared vision and influence diverse audiences. By collaborating with creative doers, social influencers and industry leaders and aligning them to a cohesive message that challenges our food choices and puts [good] food on the stage, we can make an impact, one that is exponentially influential.

We’ve created three iterations of “exposed,” and are now focused on finding partners who are truly interested in the growth of this message.

• Real People Real Food: challenging identity. what makes you, you.
• Kids Menu: challenging the dismal consistency in children’s food options offered by most restaurants.
• What Lies Ahead: challenging “healthy” food appeal by removing “healthy” from the messaging

The post Edible Impacts Cooks Up Blueprint for Eating Organic on $6 a Day appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

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

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

Hack Stories, Not Technology: Why Food Needs Design

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s Hack Taste Profiles to Personalize Dining

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

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

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

Performance Dining: Where Food, Tech & Design Converge

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

4 Projects Building an Open Source Food Web

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guest post by Saul Colt, Principal – Kinetic Startup Innovations, Kinetic Cafe & Head of Magic!, SAUL! The Idea Integration Company. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of Food+Tech Connect. 

Technology is permeating every aspect of our lives. We use it to find dates, track calories, count our steps and even to manage our sleep cycles, increasingly quantifying ourselves. As we make data and “the future” a part of how we live our everyday lives, we are knowingly or unknowingly giving more and more of the dining experience over to technology. Where to dine is a question that used to be decided by asking a friend. Now it’s common practice to research places online and decide where to eat via apps and blogs, rather than relying on people we know, like and trust. Technology is moving forward so quickly and, admittedly, adding a great deal of value. But at the same time, our bodies can’t keep up, and eventually people will want to slow down.

The logistics of food production are so complicated, and people are becoming so disconnected from understanding where food comes from, that a backlash is inevitable. And now, many people are hungering to achieve more balance in their dining habits, both at home and while eating out.

For example, in response to demand, AT&T Park – the baseball stadium of the San Francisco Giants – recently announced that it has installed a 4,320 square-foot edible garden, the first of its kind in a sporting arena. The garden will grow seasonal produce year-round and will be host to outdoor classes on sustainability, urban farming and healthy eating for Bay Area kids. Additionally, the produce grown in the garden will be used in the Ballpark’s food offerings. Baseball stadiums are the last place in which you’d expect people to request a healthy option, so this example is certainly a strong indicator of the collective desire to slow down.

People will certainly continue to utilize technology and productivity tools in every part of their lives, but increasingly, they will want to keep eating and dining simply. As we look backwards for inspiration, instead of forwards, the slow food movement will continue to grow and the demand for local, organic ingredients will increase.

The same mindset that provoked the edible garden space at the stadium will carry over to the home. And by using products like our Windowfarm and plant subscriptions, people have an opportunity to go back to nature, even if they live miles from green spaces. Growing food in their homes allows them to put an end to wasted produce that goes bad in the refrigerator and teaches them agricultural skills that have been lost to many.  While most people don’t have the time and resources to commit to large scale urban farming, growing a few plants for food at home is an easy way to nurture the connection to food, slow down a little and make a difference in our day-to-day lives. What it really boils down to is that growing our own food can make us feel good: physically, intellectually and emotionally.

Gone is the notion of a science fiction-esque food future, in which entire meals are condensed into single pills. Dining is a sensory experience, akin to art, and maybe one of the most passionate things people can do together (in public). We all need to preserve that. The food industry should not leverage technology to replace fresh ingredients, prepared with love. Instead it should embrace technology to help source better food and improve the dining experience.

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

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Saul Colt is the Head of Magic at SAUL! The Idea Integration Company. In his career he has been named as one of the iMEDIA 25: Internet Marketing Leaders & Innovators as well as been called one of Canada’s best community builders/experiential marketers. NYT Best selling author and Internet Pioneer Chris Brogan once referred to Saul as “exactly who you want representing your company” and that message has been echoed by media properties ranging from Inc to Forbes Magazine. In a previous life Saul was the first international employee of Zipcar and the person responsible for launching Zipcar into the Canadian marketplace, was a key person in the growth of FreshBooks.com (The #1 Cloud Accounting service for Small Business Owners) and even knows what it is like to work for a large corporation from his time in a leadership role at Rogers Communications. On top of all that Saul is also a Professional Speaker and Consultant specializing in Social Media, Customer Service, Community Building and Word of Mouth Marketing. Saul loves all people, especially women and is tired of people asking him to remove his shirt. In his free time he collects Nike Air Force One sneakers, watches lots of Movies and just happens to be the Smartest Man in the World.

The post What an Edible Garden at a Baseball Stadium Means for Our Food Future appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guest post by Niko Hrdy, President at Valley Oak Investments, LP. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of Food+Tech Connect. 

I grew up on a farm that nestles up against the coastal range on the western side of California’s Central Valley, which spans some of the richest ground in the history of civilization. By rich I don’t mean money-rich. Rather, I mean that provided you can access and apply water, the ground around where I grew up will yield more than 50 tons of tomatoes per acre.

As a boy, I helped my dad by spreading turkey manure in his organic walnut orchards, and when the sheep got loose did my part catching them. It comes naturally for me to visualize where artichokes and arugula are grown and where my lamb chops come from. But this is no longer the typical experience growing up in America. As our society has continued on the path of urbanization, people have lost that connection to the food they eat.

The secret sauce missing from the dining table is understanding where food comes from and what’s really healthy and what’s not. We live in a country where “chicken fingers” count as dinner and children ask: “Daddy, how many fingers does a chicken have?” Assuming you can even read the small print, food labels reads like pages from a chemistry text. Obesity coupled with horrific waste have become the norm, fueled in part by misinformation about which kinds of foods are healthy and why.

At the same time, many of this country’s farmers are co-opted to meet consumer and industry demands that are out of line with the coming demand for healthier produce. Farmers end up planting the highest-yielding seed varietals and using the cheapest and most effective chemical pesticides and herbicides even if some of these practices are neither healthy nor sustainable. This has led to a lack of genetic diversity in our crops and has permanently damaged the environment. There has to be a better way.

I envision a future of dining where consumers—starting young!—are educated about the food they eat: what foods to eat, how the food got on their plate, and how our agriculture and food production systems affect the world in which we live. Do you have a kid who is a picky eater? The best way to get them to eat vegetables is to have them pick, or better yet, grow the lettuce or broccoli themselves. Kids, it turns out, love to be involved in growing and harvesting their own food. Even if that’s not practical, have them join you at your local farmer’s market. Educating diners (the younger the better) is only part of the fight.

We also need better farm-to-fork transparency so consumer choices shape supply. As consumer demand for healthier, more sustainably produced foods grows, farmers are empowered to do what many are already aware that they should do.

There are few industries larger or more vital than the food and agriculture industries, and there has never been a better moment for aspiring entrepreneurs to disrupt these two industries. The decreasing costs of launching a new company, increasing internet and smart phone penetration, and the emerging application of big data have led to opportunities to bring about a newly empowered dining experience and farming reality.

Even with few resources, I anticipate young companies quickly building empires in areas like B2B and B2C marketplaces for sourcing and purchasing food, cloud-based farm management software, or marketplaces for purchasing farm equipment, soil additives, and crop protectants. These companies can be built quickly and at little cost, and yet they will have the power to enact some of the most radical change in this country and secure a better future for the next generation. And so I urge these bold entrepreneurs to think beyond the bottom line and remember that there will be more at stake than just tomorrow’s earnings.

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.

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Niko grew up on a commercial walnut farm in Northern California that his family still operates today. He is the President of Valley Oak Investments, an investment firm focused on early-stage food, agriculture, and health & wellness companies.  He has worked with companies from idea through IPO and prefers taking hands-on roles with the companies he works with.

Niko received an A.B. in economics from Harvard University                                                                   and is currently pursuing his M.B.A. at the Harvard Business                                                                 School.

The post Entrepreneurs & Educated Consumers Will Disrupt The Future of Eating & Farming appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guest post by Chef Hollie Greene of JoyFoodly. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of Food+Tech Connect.

What if parents knew how to build their families’ dinner plates around vegetables and fruits, first? And were able to learn how to cook those vegetables quickly and easily online? The debate rages on around whether parents are up to the challenge. I say, resoundingly: Yes! How? By building cooking skills that take out the fear and add the fun to vegetable and fruit preparation, using technology to facilitate the task.

The Problem

While the produce section at local supermarkets is colorful and engaging and farmers market produce is especially sexy this time of year, national data tells us what’s actually being consumed on American families’ dinner plates is unequivocally not vegetables and fruits.

Despite myriad studies pointing out that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables can help prevent cancer and chronic disease, only 5 percent of Americans younger than 50 are consuming the recommended amounts of produce—as Michael Moss pointed out in his New York Times article on the challenges of marketing produce. There is a huge disconnect between the best-intentioned dietary recommendations and what Americans are really eating: soda, chips and fast food. Our goal at JoyFoodly is to narrow this chasm, by offering parents simple techniques that build cooking confidence and motivation to enjoy trying and eating fruits and vegetables.

The food industry sets up parents as the responsible parties when it comes to establishing eating habits in children. But for parents who were never taught to cook and are competing with irresistible salty, sweet “kid” food,” that’s full of sodium, fat, and sugar, that proves difficult. The industry is asking a parent to run a marathon without shoes. And sadly, too many parents collapse before the finish line when it comes to getting a healthy dinner on the table. Is this a question of will or skill for parents?

As a culinary educator who has taught and engaged with thousands of parents, I would argue that it’s the latter. Most parents begin with tons of will and the best intentions to create good eaters.  At some point, they just give up—whether because of busy family schedules, or finicky eaters, shared meals become a relic. But as Mark Bittman points out in his New York Times op-ed, “The core problem is that cooking is defined as work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch.”

Given the rising tide of obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related diseases, creating a generation of good eaters is an imperative. Giving up on good food isn’t an option, because the cost is much too great. Teaching people crucial life skills, like cooking, has the power and potential to profoundly re-shape our nation’s health.

I always tell parents of young children that potty training is non-negotiable, and I look at teaching kids about vegetables and fruits in the same light. That learning should start at home, with their overstressed, time strapped and truly doing-their-best parents. If marketers can create a potty training Elmo, it’s time we leveraged technology to make solutions to the cooking conundrum simpler, more manageable, and affordable.

The Solution

How can we make that family-eating marathon achievable for parents? Expecting everyone to take in-person cooking classes or learning from entertaining cooking shows just isn’t realistic. That’s why we hedged our bets on the online platform. Parents can learn anytime – after the kids are in bed, before they wake up, and most importantly, alongside their kids by jumping into the kitchen with a smartphone or a tablet and asking their 7 year old to follow along.

Our goal in founding JoyFoodly in 2013 was to make learning how to cook vegetables and fruits not only pleasurable, but also economical, easy and readily accessible. For scale and ease of use, only a tech solution could convert this goal into a reality. As a chef, I have years of experience teaching thousands of kids and adults my proven methods to love cooking and eating produce in season. My Creative Director Michelle Venetucci-Harvey brought the design savvy. Collaborating with Julian Tescher, co-founder of WillCall, the prototype of our Joyful 12 online kitchen learning lab was born last fall at the San Francisco Food Hackathon. At the food and technology crossroads, we are providing solutions for the three areas where families struggle the most in converting their will into cooking chops in the kitchen—and eventually into their families’ diets:

1) The skills of how to buy, prep, and make fresh produce taste so good it knocks prepared foods off the shelf

2) The strategies to engage kids around it in a fun, cool, and tasty way

3) The platform to learn at their own pace, and exchange knowledge with other home cooks beyond the classroom materials

The summer season of the Joyful12 launched on June 30, 2014.

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

________________

Chef Hollie Greene is passionate about bringing the joy of good food to the family table. In 2013, she founded JoyFoodly, a San Francisco-based company that helps families joyfully get more vegetables and fruits into their diets. Her newest venture is the  Joyful 12, a one-year online crash course in seasonal eating that teaches vegetable and fruit preparation skills missing in many families’ kitchens, and converting “yucks” into “yums.”

Chef Hollie is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City and has taught over 2,000 public school children in New York and California through her work with non-profit programs such as Wellness in the Schools and The Sylvia Center, and in partnership with Rachael Ray’s Yum-O!, Mayor Bloomberg’s Office and others. When she’s not creating recipes in the JoyFoodly kitchen, Hollie teaches and volunteers with national and Bay Area organizations including 18 Reasons, CUESA, Bay Leaf Kitchen, Y.U.M Chefs, and A Little Yumminess.

The post Making Healthy Home-Cooking Easy, Affordable & Accessible appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

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

Dining as we know it is already changing. We’re busier, but we want to eat more healthily. Good takeout, while highly accessible in New York City, is not an option in most other places. We can order meal kits from companies like Plated that get shipped to our doorstep, or watch cooking tutorials on our tablets to prepare elegant, healthy meals without knowing the first thing about cooking. That’s pretty incredible.

But it’s far from the future we imagined as kids watching The Jetsons. Some of us probably thought that we would all be eating steak and potato pills one day. But, eating, let alone cooking (and shopping, and cleaning, and taking out the garbage, and…) is very time-consuming, and for those of us that enjoy other things more than preparing food, that pill would be a game-changing technology.

On the flip-side, it seems like food keeps taking on a larger role in our lives. Celebrity chefs, food porn Instagram accounts, food blogs, Whole Foods, food trucks – amazing food has never been so accessible or such a big part of our culture. What you eat, where you eat, and why you eat in large part defines who you are.

But at the end of the day, the goal is to fill our stomachs in a way that is healthy, affordable and fulfilling, as well as convenient.

I see companies like Soylent taking a step back to understand the basic principles of eating. Soylent makes a complete-nutrition powder that you combine with water. You mix it once in the morning and drink it throughout the day instead of eating. They’ve definitely managed to cover convenience, health and affordability in their product, which is going to appeal to a growing consumer segment that wants to spend their time and money on things other than eating.

Soylent is just taking a first step, though. There is a long way to go before it hits the mainstream, i.e you don’t have to explain to your coworkers why you are going to drink your lunch instead of grabbing a sandwich with them. It’s definitely still “weird,” like those hippy toe shoes people wear (full disclosure, I’m a hippy toe shoe wearer).

That’s where design and technology comes in. How do you make that cool? How do you make it accepted? How do you make it more appealing to more people? Do you make a carnitas taco flavor and a kale salad flavor? Or do you leave the indulgent and fulfilling aspect of food to other food businesses? These are challenging technology and design questions that companies like Soylent are grappling with.

There will always be a balance between convenient healthy products and the indulgence of the 5-course meal, which can bring you back to your childhood or open your eyes to what food and flavor can be. But I see the convenient, healthy and dead-simple alternatives improving and becoming more prevalent in the future.

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

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Lev is the founder of ReciPal. ReciPal makes simple web-based software for food businesses to do their own nutrition analysis and labels, recipe costing, and inventory management. Prior to ReciPal, Lev co-founded SlantShack Jerky, did Hacker School, and took a stab at a couple other tech startups. In a prior life, he was a consultant for Oliver Wyman after graduating from Princeton University. Lev loves all board sports, handstands, and spikeball.

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