Posts tagged future of food
Meal-replacement drinks were made popular by US firm Soylent in the past few years. Founded in 2013 by Rob Rhinehart, the company was shipping 30,000 “meals” a month a year later and Rhinehart told Bloomberg in January this year that sales were up 300 per cent. Soylent is now valued at more than US$100 million.
Its success has seen similar start-ups springing up around the world. India’s SupermealX, Australia’s Aussielent and British-based Huel all claim to offer nutritionally complete drinks.
Shao Wei, who was working as a programmer in Hangzhou, was also intrigued by the idea. As a start-up worker, he had been looking for healthy meal options for those who had little time away from their computers. In 2014, he quit his job and set up his own meal-substitute brand, Ruffood. Its Chinese name – ruo fan in pinyin – means “like rice“.
(via http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2018947/too-busy-lunch-chinas-tech-workers-turn-meal-replacement-drinks )
“What’s that?” says the friend. “That,” I say, “is the future of food.” She sips it and makes a face. “Is it supposed to taste like that?” It’s a good question. It claims to be vanilla flavour but it’s like no vanilla I’ve ever tasted – cloying, artificial, incredibly sweet. The texture is of a thin suspension of powdered grit in water. And then there’s the aftertaste, which manages to be both sweet and bitter and lingers unpleasantly on the roof of the mouth for several minutes.
Huel, a contraction of “human fuel”, is the latest in a long line of products that are tapping into the idea that food is old fashioned, inconvenient and boring, and there’s a more hi-tech, whizz-bang way of delivering the same nutrients more efficiently.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jul/31/huel-human-fuel-hi-tech-food-powder
For the appetizer, the long table of guests shared bowls of seasonal salad from Graze the Roof, a vegetable garden located on the roof of Glide Memorial Church. The main course was a frittata with onions (served in a compostable box) from Sprig, a new dining-on-demand service founded by Nate Keller, Google’s former executive chef. Dessert consisted of lemon curd mousse with strawberries and mint, prepared with Nomiku, which bills itself as the first immersion circulator made for home cooks. These dishes have little in common, except for one thing: They all provide hints of our collective food future, as imagined by the Institute for the Future, which collaborated with Nomiku and Suppershare to put on the dinner.
http://www.fastcoexist.com/3033762/the-future-of-food-mapped-out-for-the-next–10-years?utm_content=buffer14d4f&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer#1
