S9 Ep38: Bytes for Bites: Streamlining Food Innovation with AI with Riana Lynn
“I think consumers and company leaders are becoming more curious as to what the alternatives are and not just following simple workflows and playbooks. The transparency and the ability to educate around the possibilities— the alternative possibilities of manufacturing and ingredients that are available.” —Riana Lynn
Founder Resource Series
“I think consumers and company leaders are becoming more curious as to what the alternatives are and not just following simple workflows and playbooks. The transparency and the ability to educate around the possibilities— the alternative possibilities of manufacturing and ingredients that are available.” —Riana Lynn
The possibilities for AI-powered innovation in the culinary world are truly exciting. Consumers are now more intrigued than ever about the transformative potential of AI-powered solutions in innovation and nutrition.
This week, we are joined by Riana Lynn, the Founder of Journey Foods, a cutting-edge platform that leverages AI to transform the way companies approach food innovation. With a diverse background spanning VC, chemistry, and entrepreneurship, Riana is at the forefront of driving positive change in the food industry.
Tune in as Justine and Riana discuss the role of AI in revolutionizing food formulation and sourcing, the impact of Journey Foods on companies of all sizes, the importance of transparency and education in the food industry, and more.
Connect with Riana:
Riana Lynn, MPH is an entrepreneur, storyteller, and AI consultant dedicated to transforming the global food system through innovative, data-driven solutions as the founder and CEO of Journey Foods. Recognized as a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer and Google Entrepreneur-in-Residence, she has delivered over 230 speaking engagements at prestigious forums worldwide.
As the inventor of the first AI patent for generative recipes and one of the first women with an AI software patent, Riana leads Journey Foods and Journey Labs in setting new industry standards. She combines her focus on creative community building with her commitment to business challenges.
Riana holds degrees and formal training in Biology, Chemistry, Anthropology, Black Studies, Public Health, and Artificial Intelligence from multiple prestigious institutions. Based in Atlanta, she enjoys collecting art, growing fruit trees, and exploring culinary and architectural heritage sites globally.
Episode Highlights:
01:24 Bridging the Nutrition Gap with AI
04:57 Food and Chronic Diseases
09:24 AI in Food Innovation
16:19 Journey Foods’ Services and Impact
21:56 Connect with Journey Foods
Tweets:
Imagine a world where food formulation is faster, more efficient, and better for the planet. Discover how AI is making nutritious options more accessible and affordable for all as @jreichman sits with Journey Foods Founder, @rianalynn. #podcast #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredients #Season9 #JourneyFoods #AIandFood #FoodInnovation #FoodTech #FoodEntrepreneur #FemaleFounder #NutritionFormulation #SupplyChainOptimization #AIinFood
Inspirational Quotes:
04:57 “Majority of the world's malnutrition— whether that be eating too much bad food or eating too little in hunger— most of the deaths attributed with chronic disease are related to food.” —Riana Lynn
07:33 “If you can talk to these people and then they hear your story, it inspires them to create change to make a difference, and be curious.” —Justine Reichman
10:50 “People are getting more comfortable and familiar with AI and integrating that into how we're developing things… Before, it was a little scary and it's still a little scary for some people. There's a lot of unknowns but the potential is so great. It's just a matter of having a little faith and being open to something new, that's what innovation is about anyway.” —Justine Reichman
11:37 “We as founders, we as company managers and CEOs, or just managers of our homes, we want to eat better; we want the world to eat better.” —Riana Lynn
12:49 “Without curiosity, people are not going to better understand why they should make that choice, or how to know that there are other options.” —Justine Reichman
12:57 “I think consumers and company leaders are becoming more curious as to what the alternatives are and not just following simple workflows and playbooks. The transparency and the ability to educate around the possibilities— the alternative possibilities of manufacturing and ingredients that are available.” —Riana Lynn
20:00 “It's great to have that long-term analysis as you scale the life cycle of your company or a product.” —Riana Lynn
Transcription:
Justine Reichman: Hello, and welcome to the Essential Ingredients Podcast. I'm your host, Justine. As always, I'm so pleased to have you all here. We're joined today with VC Founder Riana Lynn. Riana is the Founder of Journey Foods, a tool for CPG Founders that promises to revolutionize recipe development and sourcing. You won't want to miss this one, so stay tuned.
Welcome to the Essential Ingredients Podcast. I'm so happy to have you here. What a great opportunity to hear from a female Founder, somebody who's an entrepreneur, and also providing such a great resource to the community. So Riana, welcome.
Riana Lynn: Thank you, Justine, so good to be here. I've been diving into some of your other recent episodes, and happy to have this conversation.
Justine Reichman: Great. I'm so pleased. As an entrepreneur, you kicked off your own initiative, and dreamt this up. And as you were mentioning to me before, ever since you were a little kid, you've been kind of on this journey. Excuse me. So just for those folks so we can get everyone on the same page, we're going to talk to you about being an entrepreneur. We're going to talk to you about being a female founder, and we're going to talk to you about this resource that you built. So before we get into all of it, can you just let everybody know what Journey Foods is?
Riana Lynn: Yeah. So Journey Foods is the modern day consultant to your food formulation and supplier worker needs. When Journey Foods was founded right before the pandemic, we sort of launched full time after a couple years of pilots while I was still working in VC. We sought out first to solve large nutrition issues at a rapid pace. So when you're looking to formulate a product based on consumer nutrition, or allergen, or functional needs? It can take many, many months. And we thought as a team, and just a background being a scientist, how do we use AI powered science to accelerate what several humans take on a lab and on a test kitchen to get the perfect recipe in just minutes or hours. And so Journey Foods launched as an AI white paper with test products around fruit snacks, where we wanted to get the optimal nutrient dense fruit snack that was free of additives and food dyes. And I presented that at San Francisco Future Food in March of 2019, spent a year and a half building the platform. Now today, we are an AI operational scientist for nutrition formulations, sustainability formulations, all paired with supply chain insights and costs. And so we've built the world's most actionable nutrition database that helps companies, that helps companies rapidly formulate their product recipes for the $3 trillion packaged food market, or they can come in and reformulate products that exist today. Whether that be for a supply chain crunch, or to switch out their products to be gluten free, or bring in functional medicine within their food. Lots of different scenarios for our customers today. But our goal has been, from day one, to improve the nutrition and the cost for these products, but save lots of time.
Justine Reichman: Wow. It's huge what you're doing. It's just huge, and it allows smaller organizations even to have a resource that they might not otherwise have the ability to access. So I have to ask, I heard you say you were a VC. I heard you say you were a chemist. I mean, your background is so varied. What drove you specifically here?
“Majority of the world's malnutrition— whether that be eating too much bad food or eating too little in hunger— most of the deaths attributed with chronic disease are related to food.” —Riana Lynn
Riana Lynn: The road was, how do I keep innovating in food? And sometimes, why food? When I was studying biology and nutrition, genetics and chemistry, my goal was to launch into a career that could solve chronic disease, particularly diabetes and cancer. Things that were facing my family members. And the more time I stood in community with my family, with friends, within research communities, I found that the underlying theme was food. The majority of the world's malnutrition, whether that be eating too much bad food or eating too little, and hunger related illnesses and chronic disease. Most of the deaths attributed to chronic disease are related to food, and I wanted to be able to solve a problem to see my grandmother and my parents live longer. Truly, that was just like, what can I do to help my family live longer? And then maybe I can live longer if I have that same genetic pathway. And then from there, you start to realize that it's not just some family members, or a poor family on the south side of Chicago that's in the middle of a food desert. When I launched my first food company with a family member, I started to see that there were wealthy middle aged white women living in some of the most wealthy zip codes in the country coming to us to solve issues with their gut and with cancer, and drink fresh and raw foods, right? And so you see that this issue, especially in the United States, has no socio economic barriers. And it was that turning point in grad school about 15 years ago when I decided that this is really not going to change by me getting a master's in public health and going to DC, even though I spent time at the White House and Department of Health and Human Services where RFK is trying to chop that up right now. But I thought it was really going to be ME as an entrepreneur and working with these more private companies where we were going to see the most change, or where I could be a part of the biggest change here.
“If you can talk to these people and then they hear your story, it inspires them to create change to make a difference, and be curious.” —Justine Reichman
Justine Reichman: That's amazing, and it really resonates with me. I'm sure it's going to resonate with so many people on so many levels. But as you're saying this, and I'll just share this with you, but I created a sizzle reel for a docu series because my mother had cancer, and my mother had ALS. And I saw all these people, including my mother, go off to places that were not science backed just because of hope, and catching, and trying to hold on to something because they were scared of Western medicine, or they were scared of the unknown, or they're just desperate. And it inspired me to also create this platform because I really want people to be able to be inspired and make a choice, a more informed choice for themselves. And the only way I knew how to support that endeavor was to give people the platform, get the experts and the people that are in this world sharing that information. Because if you can talk to these people and then they hear your story, it inspires them to create change to make a difference, and be curious.
Riana Lynn: Yes. Curiosity was important for me. As I started to dive in and think about the ways we were working to bring new products to the market with these consultants and these manufacturing food technologies, I started to ask questions like, I want to create a gummy fruit. These smoothie cubes, they're not really gummy bears, but these smoothie cubes are fruit snacks. And I was asking, how do we get one that looks just like a white dragon fruit? And they said, you have to bleach it. You have to add some dioxides and other things to it to get this lasting white color that you probably love in white jelly beans and other things. And I said, absolutely not. We're not going to do this. And so I think that many times, my curiosity about myself is like, am I going to get diabetes at 50 years old? Because every generation is getting chronic disease earlier than our parents, right? I'm so happy that you shared that story about your mother because there's probably been times when you're looking at your mom trying to find these decisions and go out to alternative medicine and thinking to yourself, this could happen to me in 15 and 20 years, right? And so you want to have the platform here for yourself. You want to share things that are happening to your mom, but you also want to make sure that people understand these journeys, and you can share your curiosity. And I put my curiosity into building this database. Into building a team of scientists and AI engineers.
Justine Reichman: It's amazing. And so as you've built this over the last few years, what was your journey like in terms of, you went from being a VC to now being an entrepreneur? You're on different ends of the spectrum here, right? What was that journey like for you?
Riana Lynn: I think at first, at times, it's challenging. You leave a nice salary to then have to create your salary. You have to pay other people first to get the product ready and fly all over the country and world to get money. And so I was starting to do that quite a bit, and seeking really creative VCs that understood that AI was going to be two to three years ahead of the AI investment trends. It's a roller coaster, truly, being an entrepreneur. And the highs are just so much higher than what you can get being a VC, I think, being on the ground, being an operator. But it comes with challenges to being a minority woman that said we're going to create AI food scientists five years ago. And the food scientists being like, absolutely not. That's never possible, right? You can't replace us. And I'm just like this, I'm looking at your spreadsheets, and it makes so much sense. I'm seeing what you're charging other entrepreneurs, and I don't understand why there's 200 food scientists at Beyond Meat to create a sausage. Those are the things that I just really didn't understand, and just clearly didn't make sense. And for me, a few years later, I think it is really trying to make sense for people.
“People are getting more comfortable and familiar with AI and integrating that into how we're developing things… Before, it was a little scary and it's still a little scary for some people. There's a lot of unknowns but the potential is so great. It's just a matter of having a little faith and being open to something new, that's what innovation is about anyway.” —Justine Reichman
Justine Reichman: I think people are getting more comfortable and familiar with AI and integrating that into how we're developing things. Because I think before, it was a little scary, and it's still a little scary for some people. They're still not sure what role it's going to play, and how reliable it is, and how much you have to tweak it. There's a lot of unknowns for people, but the potential is so great. And what you're creating is so great. It's just a matter of having a little faith and being open to something new, that's what innovation is about anyway, right?
Riana Lynn: Exactly, exactly. I think that's why we have been so intent on creating operational data supply chain scores, cost scores, because that really drives people's decisions. They want to help people eat better. WE as Founders, WE as company managers and CEOs, or just managers of our homes, we want to eat better. We want the world to eat better. We want the world to have less impact on biodiversity, nature and things. But at the end of the day, it's like, can we afford this? Can I get it? Does it cost me a lot of time and convenience? And now, those are questions that we ask usually first, and that's what we started to really focus on 2021 and 22 is knowing that behaviorally, we need to make sure that people understand our models, at least at Journey Foods, that cost and supply chain availability is just as important.
Justine Reichman: I also think that it's not about saying, can we afford this? It's about, how can we not afford this? How do we make it work? How do we choose us, and our future family, and our next generations to be able to have the best possible options accessible to them? And I think it's through education, information, transparency and also curiosity. Without curiosity, people are not going to better understand why they should make that choice, or how to know that there are other options.
Riana Lynn: I think consumers now and company leaders are becoming more curious on what the alternatives are, and not just following simple workflows and playbooks, but the transparency and in the ability to educate around the possibilities. The alternative possibilities of manufacturing, the alternative ingredients that are available, and how they can be incorporated into our everyday grocery and foods? These are questions that we have to continue to model. Don't want to ask ourselves every single thing that we're running companies, or that we're going to the grocery store to shop.
“I think consumers and company leaders are becoming more curious as to what the alternatives are and not just following simple workflows and playbooks. The transparency and the ability to educate around the possibilities— the alternative possibilities of manufacturing and ingredients that are available.” —Riana Lynn
Justine Reichman: And I think that for the end consumers, it's also different, right? Some end consumers don't know the answers to all of those questions, but make a decision based on what they hear, partial information. So I think it's important also for end consumers to be a little bit more curious, and not just say, oh, organic is better. Why is organic better? Here are some foods that would make it much better without palm oil and with this thing. Now, maybe they've heard this, but they don't know why. And I think it's incumbent upon the organizations that are doing this to really shed some clarity on this,s and light on this, and educate on this. And I think people are doing that, but I still think there's so many people making decisions blindly.
Riana Lynn: I think when you walk into a grocery store and it's like, yeah, you get local, right? You get this, this came from the farmer in the county or the town over, but everything else is very confusing. The coding on our labels to what organic is in the US versus other places. How is it managed? Why does it cost so much more? What is conventional? What is process, unprocessed? What is natural? I mean, these are questions that we have done. Have good education around, and answers too. These are things that we're not taught in school, right? We're just taught our plate features and that we should eat sugar sparingly. And so you try not to eat candy, then you realize sugars and everything because we built the food system around it. So it can be a challenge if you're not that curious. But I think more than ever, consumers have a very unique time to use social media, to use website traffic and have downloads, and purchasing power to push manufacturers and business owners to be more creative and more curious around alternatives. And I think we're closer than we think, but it will take some investment in infrastructure, and these are things that I think are ripe for disruption.
Justine Reichman: Oh, I couldn't agree more. I think people need to just steamroll ahead, almost to continue this progress. Because I think we're seeing some progress, but I still think that we need to see more. So I'm curious. I know that you said you were inspired by your family and trying to solve a problem there, but you created this great solution for all these entrepreneurs. I'm curious if there's any statistics that you could show through what you've built on the amount of people you've now been able to help, serve both to build their businesses, and create a better for you solution.
Riana Lynn: There's several numbers that I can share. So to date, we've helped over 400 companies with formulation, new formulations or formulations for packaged products that are either E-commerce or in grocery stores. A small percentage of them are also restaurants and chefs that have launched packaged products in their restaurants or chains, as well as a good percentage of those being ingredient suppliers that are supplying novel ingredients, additives and dyes, natural extracted dyes, to these many companies. We have hundreds of thousands of ingredients, tens of thousands that have been audited. To date, over 17,000 skew recommendations for improvements. We're now in 18 countries. Just launched in our fourth Asian country over the past couple of weeks. We have saved companies over $12 million in recommendations around cost. I could go on and on with this. Companies range from pre revenue with a little bit of money to spend on some new product, but not as much as you need for a big time consultant to multi billion dollar private label, some of the biggest companies in the world that we've supported in innovation.
Justine Reichman: So if you look at that and you say, okay, you have everything. From small to large, right? What percentage of those people might not have, or those organizations might not have been able to build out without a resource like yours because of lack of funding, or lack of resources?
Riana Lynn: Yeah. Over 18%. And we think that number is going to grow quite rapidly in the coming months and years. There was a little bit of pull back in 2020 because people were scared about fundraising and logistics, but things have started to shift up. Now, there's a little bit of change in funding, and so entrepreneurs are a little scrappier. They want to spend less money and get things to the market faster. So now that our data is much more efficient, we've seen a lot more small companies come for demos and prepare to get in our pipeline. And we want to continue to lower the cost of entry for them. So the more data we have, the more we raise money. The more I feel comfortable with the access to the platform, the faster we're going to get more small companies from around the world to sign up and scale with us.
Justine Reichman: What is the budget for entry?
Riana Lynn: You can enter as little as $60 a year where you just list a couple ingredients on the platform, and you can get a dashboard that helps you understand what kind of companies are trying to buy your ingredient. That's very basic if you're just a supplier. Now, if you're a CPG company, it starts at a few hundreds and goes to about 2800 a year.
Justine Reichman: Wow. But that sounds a lot less expensive and a lot more accessible than going to get a chemist, and trying to get your own, and trying to get everything built with lots of minimums, etcetera, to be able to do this. And time and effort.
“It's great to have that long-term analysis as you scale the life cycle of your company or a product.” —Riana Lynn
Riana Lynn: And even if you want additional services like test kitchens and other pathology reports and things, we have a partner network with big discounts, and we support you through that as well. So it's great to start with us and then branch out as you get ready to launch. But we do monitoring over time as well, so you can monitor for pricing updates, or know regulatory changes. Maybe one of your ingredients is going to be banned, or perhaps consumers are looking for a change. And I think it's great to have that long term analysis as you scale the life cycle of your company or a product.
Justine Reichman: It's amazing to have those resources and to have that information, it's like you have an on demand news release.
Riana Lynn: Yeah. On demand food scientists, that is really well read.
Justine Reichman: Yeah. That's amazing. Because I think that sometimes, we get our news and then things happen later. But to be able to get that as fresh news, it allows people to be at the forefront and to create greater change based on what the research is saying so early on.
Riana Lynn: Yes. And I think that we're just going to get better. Our models are just going to get better at supporting companies here, and would love to offer discount code to your listeners.
Justine Reichman: Oh, that would be amazing. Thank you for that.
Riana Lynn: Suppliers, or CPG founders, or managers, they can check us out. We have some really big launches coming up this year. I don't know, assuming it's gonna be a few weeks after these launches, but we're launching packaging AI, the first company to really have packaging AI recommendations based on everything from dioxins in your film, right? That could be polluting the body too, things that are more based around structure. We're also launching a large partnership to get funding through the platform. So if you have to increase your inventory, or buy new products, or machinery, we support our testing. We're testing the co-underwriting process so that you can get a loan for that healthy update to your product recipe.
Justine Reichman: Amazing. There's so many resources, and I'd love to be able to share them with the community. Is there a list you might be able to include for us to share with the community?
Riana Lynn: Just check out Journey Foods.
Justine Reichman: Best if we send them to your website.
Riana Lynn: Yes. Send them to our website, journeyfoods.io. You can follow me and our Journey Foods newsletter - The Pie for updates. We'll be sure to share this interview there, and follow up with a discount code as well.
Justine Reichman: Awesome. We will make sure to follow up with you so we can throw that in the show notes for our guests, for those guests that are tuning in today. But Riana, thank you so much for joining us today. It's so exciting to hear what you're building and the opportunities it's going to be able to provide for so many people that might not otherwise have had that access to be able to do that. I'm grateful to have had you on as a resource, and as a female founder. And I look forward to meeting you next week at Expo West when we're both there.
Riana Lynn: I look forward to trying out all the snacks, and hopefully seeing you within the Expo hall. But thank you so much, Justine, for your time, and for the questions, and for this platform.
Justine Reichman: Awesome. Thanks so much, Riana, we'll talk soon. I want to thank our guests and our community that tune in each week, whether it's to be inspired, or to hear a new story, or to check out our resources.
