S5 Ep11: The Future of Food with AI and Food Science with Kishan Vasani
“The industry as a whole needs to do a better job of coming together. This competing messaging is not helping anyone.” — Kishan Vasani
In this era of technological innovation, one of the most promising solutions for improving our food experience is artificial intelligence (AI).
AI is a technology that allows computers to learn from data and make decisions based on that information. It can be used for a variety of purposes, including personalization of services. For instance, AI is used to identify food trends and predict customer preferences based on moods or other factors such as age or gender which allows restaurants to customize their meals based on changes in customer behavior over time.
Co-founded by Kishan Vasani, Spoonshot aims to determine the future of food through their AI called #foodbrain. They utilize over 28k data resources that include research, articles, social conversations, menus, and more to understand consumer insights, marketing, and product development. This platform aims to help companies and restaurants make better decisions and produce desirable outcomes. Their clients include big companies such as Nestle, Unilever, Mars, Dan One, and Suntory.
Listen in as Justine and Kishan help us better understand the nuances and everything that goes into food personalization, the factors that affect our preferences, how we can be more transparent in the food space conversation, and how companies can work together rather than destroy each other through unnecessary competition.
Connect with Kishan:
Kishan Vasani is the co-founder of Spoonshot, a tech startup that leverages food science and AI to predict food trends for CPG and FMCG companies. He is also the co-founder and chairman of One Cause, an organization investing in education solutions for poverty. He studied management at Ashton University in Birmingham. Kishan loves tech, food, and startups. He is a big sports fan and plays about any sport but football is his number one.
Episode Highlights:
01:18 Personalizing Food
06:28 Understanding the Local View of Food
12:38 Occasions Breed Innovation
17:40 Food and the Age of Information
21:57 Get Ready for Future Food-Tech London!
Resources:
Download Spoonshot’s Whitepapers
Tweets:
AI and food science are revolutionizing the way we eat, and it's not just about convenience—it's about personalization. Listen in as @jreichman and @spoonshotx co-founder, Kishan Vasani discuss how this is already happening and more! #podcast #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredient #Spoonshot #digitaltransformation #foodscience #AI #softwares #apps #innovation #foodpersonalization #foodintelligence #foodbrain
Inspirational Quotes:
04:07 “Even if you're not a foodie, nobody wants a bad meal or bad experience.” -Kishan Vasani
06:50 “Software can only go so far. You have to still connect someone to a real-world experience of eating food.” -Kishan Vasani
08:51 “Trends are local, tastes are personal- that's the basic premise of our idea.” -Kishan Vasani
12:29 “It's not about the eating always. It's about just spending time over food together and not rushing through everything.” -Justine Reichman
13:12 “More and more innovation is happening around occasions.” -Kishan Vasani
17:03 “People now more than ever starting to ask questions. They were grasping for an alternative. They want more information, they want more transparency, they want to know.” -Justine Reichman
18:50 “We live in a society that doesn't read. So getting that messaging absolutely tight and right is absolutely key.” -Kishan Vasani
19:14 “The industry as a whole needs to do a better job of coming together. This competing messaging is not helping anyone." -Kishan Vasani
Transcriptions:
Justine Reichman: Welcome to Essential Ingredients, I'm your host, Justine Reichman. Stay with me. I'm so pleased to have Kishan Vasani. Did I say that right?
Kishan Vasani: Yes.
Justine Reichman: Okay, wonderful. I'd like to make sure that I introduced somebody properly, who is the CEO and Co Founder of Spoonshot. Welcome Kishan.
Kishan Vasani: Thank you, Justine.
Justine Reichman: Wonderful to have you. I believe you're traveling right now. Is that correct?
Kishan Vasani: Constantly traveling at the moment. It's event season and we kind of have operations and things in different countries. So we're just kind of nonstop at the moment, might as well looking, enjoying traveling after two years of being at home.
Justine Reichman: Okay. I do understand that the timezone frosh is a little tricky, and I appreciate you doing this. It's quite early where you are, right?
Kishan Vasani: Yes. I'm here in India today, and it's 8:00 AM, but all is good.
Justine Reichman: Okay. Well, thanks so much for accommodating us. So for those that are not familiar or do not know you, can you tell us a little bit about you? Let's start with that.
Kishan Vasani: Sure. Absolutely. So I'm about 15, 17 years into my career. I'm a marketer by profession. I guess you'd call me a serial entrepreneur, and I've worked in Pure.tech for the last 10 years. I used to have a marketing agency that was kind of my first big venture, and that was kind of a digital marketing business. This was in the early days of digital marketing before everybody really knew what Google Ads was and all these kinds of things, but lots of different marketing things online like email, affiliate, ads, SEO and things like that. And then moved into tech and food tech. Specifically, I was at Just Eat, which is a lot. It's similar to Grubhub in the US and was there for three and a half years in leadership roles between Series B and post IPO. It was that experience at Just Eat that kind of opened my eyes to the world of digital and food and combining these worlds and the opportunities that were sort of emerging, which led to what is now my current venture Spoonshot, which is now I'm into, I guess, the entrepreneurial journey for this particular round in year seven. So it's been quite some time.
Justine Reichman: Wonderful. And for those of us, for those that are listening and watching that are not familiar with Spoonshot, what is Spoonshot?
Kishan Vasani: Spoonshot is a food and beverage intelligence technology and platform where essentially, we help the industry farm to fork, I guess, with understanding the future of foods, helping sort of predict consumer needs, trends, opportunities, and we leverage two big and important things. One, on one hand, we're an AI first company. So we're using big datasets in the public domain to sort of analyze them and understand what's really going on. And then on the other side, we apply food science knowledge to actually connect all of that big data and find those opportunities and trends as well. So yeah, we're a research company. I guess we're a modern research company.
Justine Reichman: Wow. So what inspired this? I know that you have a lot of experience in food and marketing, but why this niche?
“Even if you're not a foodie, nobody wants a bad meal or bad experience.” -Kishan Vasani
Kishan Vasani: Yeah. I'd love to say it was a deliberate thing that happened. I woke up one morning, oh, let's do food market research and bring it to the 21st century. I wish it was like that, but it wasn't. It was more of an evolution. And that's kind of why this is year seven of this particular entrepreneur journey because as a first time tech founder, while I had a digital marketing business, that's very different space. Obviously, it's service oriented. And this technology and sort of the passion that drove me to start this particular tech journey or food tech journey was because of that time at Just Eat. Having seen lots of different opportunities, I felt like the thing that I was most passionate about was personalization of food. I'm an avid foodie. I always want my meals to be enjoyable. Nobody wants a bad meal. Even if you're not a foodie, nobody wants a bad meal or bad experience. I found it fascinating that across the world of tech in different niches, different verticals, there was a recognised leader in personalization. So in e-commerce, it's Amazon. In music, it's at Spotify. Videos, YouTube. Almost every sector has a personalization leader, Netflix. And yet, food is perhaps the most personal decision that everyone in the world makes three or four times a day and nobody you couldn't really point to a single company and say, oh, they know what they're doing, and they are the guys for food preservation. They know what everybody likes to eat and when.
And so for me, that was kind of the opening premise to the idea in saying that, could we build a platform? Could I build a platform that fundamentally predicted an individual's taste preferences at any point in time and make the perfect recommendation to them when they use that technology? So we actually started as a consumer facing mobile app, that was the beginning of our journey. We were called dish cube back then, this was in early 2016. And me and my co founder, they spent a couple of years actually trying to build an app that still leveraged big data and food science. Those two pillars that I talked about earlier, leveraging that to predict individual tastes preferences. So imagine that you open up the app and it literally makes a set of 10 dish recommendations to you based upon understanding your preferences, the time of day, all these other different things. And actually, it was quite, it was doing pretty well, but it was still small. And we decided that that wasn't the right place for us to go for a couple of different reasons.
One, for scaling consumer apps is very costly, requires a lot of funding. The second thing is it felt more and more like for it to be a complete experience. We would have to connect the user to a delivery platform to go and get the food, and then we felt like we're just becoming another delivery company, which me and my co-founder did not want to do having both come from that universe. Ultimately, long story short, we pivoted away from that. And instead of predicting individual preferences, Bucha is actually about predicting sort of preferences at scale, if you will. So it's kind of an evolution of the idea of first food personalization.
Justine Reichman: And it's so unique and different. I mean, that doesn't exist. Really.
“Software can only go so far. You have to still connect someone to a real-world experience of eating food.” -Kishan Vasani
Kishan Vasani: Yeah. I mean, there's been a lot of people that's, I mean, when I was doing the research for the food personalization piece, a lot of people had tried this, there was a large graveyard of apps that had been done that and some of them have had some medium success. Some had been acquired, but no one had really nailed it. It's complex, right? It's food, it's has to be, it's a tangible thing, software can only go so far. You have to still connect someone to a real world experience of eating the food. And the other thing is, markets are so different. If you're trying to put, it's not like you can build TikTok around it and it's the same user experience globally. You have to have a nuanced localized experience related to what's going on in each country's food market. So there are some big challenges around it. And also, I felt that it was probably more of a vitamin. If I take that analogy than a painkiller solution, I think it's more of a feature to somebody's app than it is an app on its own.
So if Uber Eats wanted to build that in, or DoorDash, or whoever, that would make probably more sense for their business. And in fact, I didn't say, we did a mini pivot before we kind of moved to Spoonshot, and the mini pivot was taking our app and actually turning into a B2B technology. We were selling our recommendation engine, food recommendation engine to other delivery platforms. We actually had a few customers. But ultimately, scaling an API, which is the method of selling the solution, we felt was a bit, again, that painful bit more of a victim and then a painkiller. We just didn't think that was the opportunity that was going to ultimately help us realize our ambition of building a sort of a game changing piece of software. So that's kind of, but it was a fascinating journey just to see, I remember going into start a lot of Starbucks sort of week, every week and asking people to test the app. Ask them to think what did they think of the predictions, and it was a lot of fun. That consumer research and seeing how well we were able to predict individual preferences but--
Justine Reichman: A question for you is, what role did culture play in this? Because I would imagine that if you roll it out in London, and you roll it out in the US, and you roll it out in Milwaukee, if you think macro and you think from continent to continent, then you think country to country, state to state, it's going to change.
“Trends are local, tastes are personal- that's the basic premise of our idea.” -Kishan Vasani
Kishan Vasani: Absolutely. Trends, local tastes, or local tastes, or personal like, that's the exact, that's the basic premise of our idea. And we had to factor in all sorts of things like time of day for meals would change country to country. So for example in the UK, tea time in the UK is a sort of an early dinner. In India, for example, dinner isn't usually till normally like earliest is 7:00 but more like 8:00 and 9:00 o'clock. Just understanding meal occasions, understanding things like the spice preferences of different markets as well. Again, take India versus the US, obviously, big differences in terms of general privacy. You have to really understand a local view on food, you have to have that food nuanced, and that's why it was important for us to really immerse ourselves in each market. Even today, even at Spoonshot, when we're launching data for a new market, we cover three markets today. We actually have a very strong and robust localization process which allows us to fundamentally understand all the food nuances around culture in a market and we also work every time we launch a new market. We work with a sort of innovation in food experts in that market and can help us sort of bring it live. Trends have to be understood locally, and they manifest very differently. Trends in different markets, given a particular region and certain cultural and social preferences.
Justine Reichman: Yeah, I would imagine. When you travel around the world, when you work in different places, when you visit them for work, you start to see that the ways that people experience food in different ways, do business over different meals, they incorporate it into their life and how it can be very different. And food is at the core of all of it. And so standing culture and food, I think, is integral. And so when you're doing this, to me, this seems really relevant.
Kishan Vasani: Absolutely, it was. I remember, when I was at Just Eat, I was working, I was in a role, Head of International Marketing, which means I was traveling around. Just Eat was present in 12 countries at the time, and I was traveling around eight of them. A lot of them in Europe. And it was fascinating to me, even myself as a European from the UK how different food culture even around like a lunchtime in European markets. So in the UK, it's really normal to sit at your desk, have a sandwich, just get on with the work or whatever. And then you go to Denmark, for example, and it's like you get up, you sit together either as a team or a company and you have lunch together. And it's very important part of the social day. And even those kinds of little nuances around occasions and the togetherness factor. And of course, we know that the Nordic societies are much more sort of about the society and the group of the community compared to more individualistic ones. But just those things were fascinating to me in terms of trying, when we were trying to build these apps and understand local preferences, we really had to think about all of these nuances.
“It's not about the eating always. It's about just spending time over food together and not rushing through everything.” -Justine Reichman
Justine Reichman: When we lived in Mexico City for two years. During this time, on Fridays, people would go out for a larger lunch with work with their friends, with their colleagues. And lunch would often be at 2:30, and you wouldn't plan for anything else afterwards because you'd be there for dinner. If there were six, you would just be there. And then there was like Sunday where you'd come in, you'd invite people at 2:00 o'clock, 3:00 o'clock for an afternoon barbecue but they could be there till 11:00. So it's all kinds of things. I often have conversations. We live in California now where, originally, I'm from the East Coast, and I have a conversation with my partner. He's always like, you like to sit there and eat all day long for these events. It's not always about the eating. It's about just spending time over food together and not rushing through everything.
“More and more innovation is happening around occasions.” -Kishan Vasani
Kishan Vasani: Sunday brunch. Absolutely. We see Sunday brunches in other parts of the world as being important. Sunday roast in the UK, for example, is another important meal time. So yeah, I've really enjoyed immersing myself in these different elements to kind of understand how that plays out, particularly in the case of where we are today as a company in terms of trends and opportunities, I think it's fascinating because we're seeing a lot of trends emerging around the occasion. I think that the occasion is becoming, whether it's the meal occasion, the festive occasion, the seasonal occasion, more and more innovation is happening around occasions.
Justine Reichman: Yeah, I agree. When I lived in London, we used to go on Friday nights to a pub. I used to work at somebody's house, they'd invite somebody over to have food, and I really enjoyed that. On Sunday night, we'd have our curry. Wherever it is that you live, there's all these different kinds of occasions like you're saying. I think culturally, they're all a little bit different. But the idea that threads us all together is the same. It's the family, the friends, the idea that you're spending time together, and the food is just bringing us all together. So that being said, I know that you were at Future Food Tech, I'd love to hear a little bit about your experience there and what you guys talked about?
Kishan Vasani: Absolutely. We've been a partner with Future Food Tech series, actually, for a long time now. And this year in particular, we were their intelligence partner. And what that means is we're kind of going into every one of their events. So there's three major events in which the most recent one was New York called protein. Around each event, we're launching a piece of thought leadership associated with the kind of themes of the event. So last year, old proteins when we were there, we actually did an overall sort of old protein state of the landscape booklet, if you will, or a data catalog. This year, we decided to dive into a specific space. In this case, it was the future and the urgency around plant based, the need for plant based seafood and being driven largely by the fact that fish is extremely popular as regular fishes and seafood is extremely popular.
But of course, ocean populations are dwindling and overfishing is happening. That love for fish and seafood is driving the urgency for plant based seafood. And yes, there's definitely some companies that have been out there in these last few years, and it's definitely a space that's increasing attention. But it needs far more attention versus, it's perhaps causing in terms of the fake plant based meat alternatives, whether it's the Impossibles or the Beyonds. And it's far more traffic. And so we did a presentation and then insights on that. And in fact, if any of your readers want to follow us on the podcast, want to get into that, then they can go to spoonshot.com/whitepapers and it'll be there as well. So they can download that for free. So yeah, that was one element of it. We found that the audience was really receptive to that, and really agreed with the importance in this space. And another element of our venture there was actually to really understand what else is going on in the space. And I think one of the interesting things that we're seeing old proteins as a whole in the community is, perhaps there's a lot of sort of insiders just telling each other things that we already know. Preaching to the choir essentially, I think on some level, I think we need to, as an industry, get out there more to sort of bring in a wider audience. I mean, everyone who's in the space, of course, wants to make their brand a winner.
And I think one of the downsides of this is the fact that because there are so many technologies and sort of approaches to sort of old proteins and the different sub variants, everyone's vying for mindshare in a fairly small audience. Even though it's growing, of course, it's still a small audience versus the mainstream, trying to convince them about their technology, their methodology, their claims, their approach to solving this problem. And I think what we're seeing in the data is mass consumer confusion around pack labels. What am I eating? Is it a meat? Is it something that was made in a lab? And not to mention all the regulatory headaches that are coming in, and the sort of legacy industry is trying to protect themselves through government lobbying, all this kind of stuff.
“People now more than ever starting to ask questions. They were grasping for an alternative. They want more information, they want more transparency, they want to know.” -Justine Reichman
Justine Reichman: Just to add to your point, people now more than ever actually starting to ask questions before. They're like, oh, it's plant based. And that's a positive thing because people didn't want to eat the fish or this or that. They were grasping for an alternative. But now, because we're getting more information, more options, people are trying to, they want more information, they want more transparency, they want to know. And when we got original options, there were more fillers, more oils, more things that maybe weren't as good for us but we didn't know that. And now, people are a bit more educated, have more information.
Kishan Vasani: Yes. Did they have more information, that's a double edged sword as well. Because we live in the information age and more often than not, we're all feeling whatever it is, whatever choice we're making, going to a supermarket can be an overwhelming experience. You don't know where to look.
Justine Reichman: They run with a little piece of it. My goal with this platform is to give people, like yourself, the chance to amplify their message because I'm not an expert. But the goal is a little bit here and there. I didn't mean to get in there, but I really think it's an important conversation to have because there's some information. And I think the point that I was trying to make and just connect with you on was the importance of transparency that's going on now.
“We live in a society that doesn't read. So getting that messaging absolutely tight and right is absolutely key.” -Kishan Vasani
Kishan Vasani: Yeah. Transparency is a big one, especially on a lot of these claims and sort of unpack labels that you see which, frankly, historically have had some questionable and tenuous links. There's also the flip side of this, which is that, we've seen data that suggests that consumers are not even reading much. I think we live in a society that doesn't read. I mean, we've all dismissed every single message that comes on our apps and notifications on our phones without really paying any attention to them, but that's just generally the way the world is right now. So getting that messaging absolutely tight and right is absolutely key. And then being able to be authentic about this as well. That authenticity is definitely the need of the hour across the board in this space. But I think the industry as a whole, the protein industry needs to do a better job of coming together and really saying, look, us with this infighting might be too strong a word but this kind of like competing messaging is not helping anyone. All the ships can rise with that tide rising. So we need to make sure that we're encouraging things for the tides so that all ships rise as well. So agreeing common terminologies around this space so that consumers really clearly have at least a close to a singular message coming through in the marketing and the positioning. Then it's a question of the things that matter to consumers, which is about the taste. Ultimately, if you're going to win over the mainstream Joes and Janes of the world, then you have to, they honestly will not care about the plant based element of this, or the sustainability element, or the climate based element, whatever these things are, they will care that this tastes great. And that's what's ultimately going to win them over, taste and price probably will be the two determining factors. And the other stuff is sort of, if anything, just an icing on the cake for the mainstream audience.
Justine Reichman: I would agree. This was a great partnership that you have going on with Future Food Tech that we have going on with Future Food Tech because it allows us to continue to amplify what they're doing to help promote their past and their future conversations. I'm curious, what was your greatest takeaway from future food tech when you were there at the last conference?
“The industry as a whole needs to do a better job of coming together. This competing messaging is not helping anyone." -Kishan Vasani
Kishan Vasani: Great question. I think for us, we're seeing a lot of interesting things happening in sort of the potato space, actually. And I think you'd be surprised to say that and we obviously all use the potato in everyone's familiar with it. Everyone uses it and consumes it all the time in various forms, but there is an increasing amount of interest in the other ways that you can use potatoes to solve all sorts of sustainability problems. And I think that was one of the sort of, it wasn't it, I guess, perhaps the biggest thing that we saw coming out of the conference, but it was perhaps the newest and interesting thing. And then we went to another conference called trade show, the IFT first in Chicago a few weeks ago, which was perhaps even more amplified at that event. So there are a lot of interesting things happening in this space right now which are exciting for the industry.
Justine Reichman: With Future Food Tech London coming up, do you guys have another partnership coming up? And what will your role be if you do?
Kishan Vasani: Yeah, absolutely. Really excited about Future Tech London. And the thing that we were just discussing actually is about how we're going to present there, what topics. And so we're gonna do something a little bit different this time, and perhaps slightly riskier, which is to actually do a trend, a new trend discovery live on stage. So we're gonna literally leverage the power of our platform, research platform, literally just fire it up on the screen and we're just going to poll the audience on the day, the attendees from a set of topics and what they would like us to dive into. And then we'll take the one that wins the poll and just go deep and do live trend discovery, and pull out real time insights, and see what happens. It's gonna be fun.
Justine Reichman: Okay, that sounds amazing. Kishan, thank you so much for joining us today on Essential Ingredients. It was great to meet you. It's great to learn about Spoonshot. I look forward to meeting you at Future Food Tech. And if our guests wanted to connect with you, what would be the best way to learn more about Spoonshot?
Kishan Vasani: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. It has been great having a conversation with you. Obviously, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to connect there. And also in terms of Spoonshot, go to our website, spoonshot.com. We have a free version of our platform so you can get all sorts of free research and insights if you get a spoonshot.com/start.
Justine Reichman: Wonderful. Thanks again. I want to thank our guests for tuning in today, and don't forget to check out our show notes. And for additional information on Future Food Tech, we will have more information on how to sign up for the events that's coming up and any additional information that you may be interested in.
