Topics such as product safety, food insecurity and supply chain logistics continue to make headlines, keeping very much alive the public’s overall awareness to the fact that despite the proliferation of the world’s food supply, global hunger and food waste are still major issues.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, food product technology is fast emerging as a major focus area. While companies are certainly introducing new technology-driven approaches to cooking, many of the companies exhibiting at CES are also taking a good, hard look at healthy food alternatives, offering products and services designed to improve the overall health benefits of our diet, while also making our approach to food preparation easier and more convenient.
Take, for example, Michigan-based VersaWare, manufacturers of what they call the next generation of smart kitchen appliances.
“VersaWare offers an intuitive alternative to frustrating nutrition apps and cumbersome calorie counting tools,” said co-founder Creed McKinnon. “Our company has democratized nutrition with our smart mixing bowl and cutting board which are enabled with nutrition AI, smart phone connectivity, and a long battery life that make it easy to sync data to VersaWare’s mobile application.”
The brand’s automated nutrition engine, McKinnon said, is built into the sleek, modern kitchen products which, when paired with the app, allows users to custom-create any meal in real time to meet their nutritional goals.
“Here at VersaWare, we are joining an industry-wide movement pioneering an entirely new approach to the health and wellness space centered around simplicity, personalization, and intelligent technology,” he said.
The product, the expected price tag of which will be less than $200, is scheduled to hit the market later this spring.
One Korea-based company has taken a different approach to the same issue.
“The Nuvilab AI Food Scanner is an all-in-one device that scans your food in one second with a camera and then immediately provides you with information about the nutrients — protein, carbs and calories,” said company spokesperson Defne Karabenli. “If you have pre-programmed into the device allergies you may have, the scanner will alert you to the presence of any such elements.”
The Nuvilab food scanner is presently in market in Korea with more than 70 units in operations in hospitals, cafeterias, restaurants and schools. “We are not yet international, but that’s definitely on the horizon,” Karabenli said.
Closer to home, Vermont-based EverCase has come up with a food preservation solution they position under the premise that they “freeze time, not food.”
“As we all know, one-third of all food in North America is wasted at a collective cost of a trillion dollars, and that’s just the food,” said co-founder and CEO Chris Somogyi. “If you start adding in the irrigation water, the pesticides, the human labor, it’s hard to find any aspect of modern civilization that is so inefficient and costly. We designed the EverCase to help with that.”
Developed through nine years of research at the University of Hawaii under FDA funding, EverCase is a smart storage container that preserves food products ranging from meats and fish to vegetables in a soft, pliable condition as opposed to a solid, rock-hard frozen state. Designed primarily as a B2B product, the EverCase is expected to make its public appearance toward the end of 2023.
Other innovative products on display at the CES Food Tech pavilion include:
- The Brava Smart Oven that cooks with high-intensity pulsating lights that can deliver up to 900 degree temperatures through bursting blasts which — when programmed through the company’s recipe library — can cook multiple items which typically require different temperatures and cooking durations at faster-than-normal speeds.
- The GrowUp Cold Brew Plant-Based Home Milk Maker that produces store-quality versions of coconut, oat and nut-based fresh-brewed milk ready to drink in six minutes, complete with a self-cleaning functionality.
- The award-winning X23 wireless meat thermometer from Orka, which measures core, surface and ambient temperatures while calculating the remaining cooking speed and temperatures necessary for an optimal final product.
Steve Winter and Kenny Fried are WTOP contributors who work for Brotman|Winter|Fried, a division of Sage Communications.
