Food+City Magazine, Issue IV

Food+ City How We Feed Our Cities

ISSUE IV

Fashionable Foods: How Producers Keep Up With Trends page 12 The Evolution of How We Shop for Food page 24 Today’s Takeout: Under the Hood of App-Driven Delivery page 34

IS S UE IV

$18.00

IMAGE COURTESY EPHEMERALNEWYORK.COM

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

FACIAL RECOGNITION FOR CHICKENS If you live in a city but still want to look deep into the eyes of your dinner, you’re in luck. Thanks to blockchain technology being developed by Chinese insurance tech company ZhongAn Online, people will soon be able to use facial-recognition technology to track organically farmed chickens they’ve pre-purchased. They will also be able to monitor their bird’s movement in realtime through GPS tracking bracelets attached to birds’ legs. Welcome to the brave new world of farm-to-table eating in the 21st century.

ZhongAn is billing the program — called “GoGo Chicken” — as a way for health-conscious city slickers to follow the life cycle of their food, giving them an illusory experience of being just a little less displaced from a food system that is increasingly out of sight of most.

Right now only 100,000 birds have been outfitted with GPS bracelets, but the Shanghai-based company plans to incorporate about 23 million birds into project over the next three years, pushing the Internet of Things onto Chinese farms, according to the South China Morning Post.

Once inducted into the GoGo Chicken system, the free-range birds will be attached to devices that track their movement and what kind of food they ate. Because these chickens are slow-grown, they’ll live for four to six months, as opposed to the 45 days most factory-farmed chickens live before slaughter. The facial-recognition technology will ensure that anyone who buys one of these birds will be able to actually see chicken from their smartphones. Technology that can recognize an animal’s face is not new; Google has used it to identify pets in people’s photos.

ZhongAn is trying to take advantage of the growing “farm-based tourism” trend in China, where city-dwellers take weekend trips out to farms where they can interact with food animals. The company has said its technology is a tool for members of China’s surging middle class who are also concerned about food safety and want to keep closer tabs on the sources of what they eat. Those anxieties spread rapidly in China after a 2014 crisis in which a supplier for McDonald’s and KFC was caught selling rotting and expired meats to the fast-food chains.

TEXT BY CHASE PURDY FOR QUARTZ ILLUSTRATION BY ALBERT TERCERO

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Food + City Magazine

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FROM THE PUBLISHER

Food+City publisher Robyn Metcalfe has been an editor and writer at Sunset Magazine, a heritage pig farmer and a food historian. You can find her @foodmiracle on Twitter because she thinks food is a miracle.

THE FUTURE IS NOW

H

eads up! Your food system is changing faster and more dramatically than we ever imagined. We knew technology was improving how we made and consumed food. But now, change isn’t just on the surface — it’s running deep and fast.

We thought sensors in fields would allow for more efficient irrigation of crops. But now, we may be looking at a food system that pulls up its roots from the soil altogether and moves to hydroponic and aeroponic greenhouse systems.

Not to mention all those plant- and cell-based proteins emerging from laboratories, which completely bypass traditional farms and fisheries.

As you can see in this issue, our fourth, we pivot a bit, turning our attention to how technology is shaping the future of our global food supply chain. Drawing on our knowledge of food history, we examine how technology changes food production, safety and security, as well as our cultural and social relationships to food.

This issue features stories about transportation and the cold chain. Jonathan Rees, an expert on refrigeration, makes the case that the cold chain isn’t so much a chain as an interconnected web that ensures our food will be fresh for the entire journey from farm to plate. Nicola Twilley, another refrigeration guru, explains how reefers — refrigerated containers — move perishables on and off trucks and ships.

But it’s not just big containers that move food around. Addie Broyles sheds new light on those portion-size packages that enable us to transport leftovers and prepared foods while defending against food contamination and food waste. The humble plastic box is itself a vital technology that we’ve hardly appreciated, until now.

And while we have an impressive cold chain and more sophisticated packaging, all these activities within our food supply chain must flex and adapt as we follow the latest food trends and nutritional advice. Dakota Kim digs into recent surges in demand for açaí, turmeric and seaweed and finds out how producers have met that demand.

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Robots seem to be everywhere in our new food system. Bots are swarming into warehouses and driving our trucks. Larissa Zimberoff writes about new developments in logistics software and invites us to consider the impact of technology on our own grocery-shopping experience.

What’s up with all those human shoppers that gaze at their smartphones, deciphering our grocery lists transmitted from Instacart or Amazon?

Could that list be a digital version of the old bill of lading? Probably not, but those bills are the basis for this year’s hot tech: blockchain. We offer a road map of this sexy new application to our food system.

Our story about food delivery, from those TV dinners to Uber Eats, shows us how we have moved from the couch to the kitchen table as we order food from a growing number of delivery companies. Jane Black interviews Walter Robb, former Whole Foods Market co-CEO, about his support of new food tech startups and his view that while we produce enough food, we need high-impact innovations to provide transparency and access. Our managing editor, Cory Leahy, writes about how human and digital chefs obsess over ways to use food waste to create appealing recipes and invites us to consider whether software will ever be able to replace humans.

Technology is on our front burner, as you’ll see in this and future issues. We’re highlighting our food-tech startups and Challenge Prize finalists and will increase our coverage of how technology is solving — or creating — problems within our food supply chain. We’ll be diving deeper to learn more about how individuals are using technology to shape our new food system. Join us as we walk through this new landscape of food producers and distributors. Almost anything is possible, now that we have begun pulling up the roots of our old food system.

P U B L I S H E R, EXECUTIVE E D I TO R

Robyn Metcalfe M A N A G I N G E D I TO R

Cory Leahy

DESIGN

Julie Savasky, 508 Creative C O M M U N I C AT I O N S &WEB

Cole Leslie

A D M I N I S T R AT I O N

Karen Thomas

C O P Y E D I TO R

Joan Phaup

RESIDENT DOG

Barbara

G E T I N TO U C H

For info about writing for us or magazine advertising, email info@foodandcity.org.

Food+City magazine is published by Foodmakers, a nonprofit based in Austin, Texas.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without prior written permission of the publisher.

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issue iv

I S S U E I V D E PA R TM E N T S

1 FOOD FOR THOUGHT With facial recognition technology now being used to identify animals, knowing the full provenance of your supper — down to the coop — may be just a click away.

6 BOTS IN THE COLD CHAIN Unlike humans, bots can’t get freezer burn.

That makes them especially suited to work in parts of the cold chain, where heavy lifting and freezing temps are standard.

8 CAN I GET THAT TO GO? Takeout containers have evolved way beyond paper pails and foil swans. As food delivery has become the new normal, restaurant food packaging faces tougher demands than ever

10 ROLLING REFRIGERATORS We wouldn’t have eggs, fresh fruit, exotic fish or almost anything you find in a chilly area of the grocery store without reefers, a crucial link in today’s international food chain.

12 FASHIONABLE FOODS Ever wonder how store shelves brim with that cool new ingredient just as you discover it on Instagram? We learned how suppliers keep up with spiking demand when a food trend takes hold.

48 ON OUR LOADING DOCK Check out these recent books, films, podcasts and other media that are making our brains buzz.

50 STARTUP SPOTLIGHT Now in our fourth year of the Food+City Challenge Prize, we’ve noticed some distinct trends among startups.

Meet the 2018 winners.

55 BEER GAME Learn how little ripples become monstrous mountains in this classic supply chain lesson.

COVERS AND THIS PAGE: KENNY BRAUN

56 CHAIN GANG Just as in cycling, a pack of trucks traveling tightly together increases efficiencies. Now, computers are helping big rigs gang up on the road.

44 RECIPE TRACKER We look at recipe development through the eyes of several chefs, all of whom have different agendas: to eliminate waste, to use discarded ingredients and to create something unique with unexpected combinations. The common thread? Experience and creativity.

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COVER: Cody Torres fills an online order for HEB’s Curbside service in Austin.

He’s one of many people who work in the food supply chain in roles that didn’t exist just five years ago. As we outsource our own shopping experiences to others, people like Cody occupy an increasingly important link in the food chain.

THIS PAG E : Chef Ian Thurwachter has given himself a tall task: His kitchen is no-waste, which means he puts all the vegetable trimmings and meaty bits to productive and tasty use.

For example, this dish features a pesto made from radish tops, carrot tops and almonds. Extra carrot greens top the dish as a leafy garnish.

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had food delivered o her rent-stabilized apartment.

CONTRIBUTORS

JANE BLACK @jane_black

ADDIE BROYLES @broylesa

DAKOTA KIM @dakotakim1

COLE LESLIE @colej_L

JONATHAN REES @jhrees

ALBERT TERCERO @albert_tercero

RACHAEL WHARTON @rachaelwharton

Jane Black is a nationally recognized food writer on culinary and sustainable-food trends.

For nearly 15 years, she has covered the emerging good-food movement with a focus on food politics, nutrition and agriculture. Her work appears regularly in The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Addie Broyles is the food writer for the Austin AmericanStatesman and co-host of the “I Love You So Much” podcast. If left on a desert island, she’d be happy with an unlimited supply of Fuji apples and Laura Ingalls Wilder fan fiction.

Dakota Kim is a nomadic food and TV writer based in Southern California.

Researcher, food nerd and self-proclaimed “bon vivant,” Cole is a graduate student at Tufts University studying sustainable food systems. Along with his passion for sustainability and entrepreneurial spirit, Cole’s keen interest in improving food systems drew him to Food+City’s mission of bold food supply chain exploration.

You can often find Cole with his wife and young son — cooking, dancing, laughing and being outside.

Jonathan Rees is professor of history at Colorado State University–Pueblo.

His books include “Refrigeration Nation: A History of Ice, Appliances, and Enterprise in America” and the just-released “Before the Refrigerator: How We Used to Get Ice.” Learn more about his work at moreorlessbunk.net.

Albert Tercero is a freelance illustrator and designer living in Barcelona, Spain.

Amongst others, he has worked for The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Vice, IBM, Reebok, Institutional Investor, Absolut Vodka, It’s Nice That, Booooooom!, Le Monde, and more.

Rachael Wharton is a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award-winning freelance food writer and journalist with a master’s degree in food studies from New York University. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Saveur, NewYorker. com, Lucky Peach and six cookbooks and counting.

KENNY BRAUN @KennyBraunPhoto Kenny Braun is known for environmental portraiture, landscape and fineart photography.

Music, surfing and photography have been his passions since high school, each influencing the other. His series on Texas Surfers and the Gulf Coast, Surf Texas, was published in 2014.

Other books include the Salt Lick Cookbook (2012), and Jack Allen’s Kitchen Cookbook (2014).

His new book on the Texas Landscape, As Far as You Can See, was published in early 2018.

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Melanie Haupt earned her Ph.D. in English at The University of Texas at Austin. In addition to her academic work, she is a freelance writer focusing on food criticism, up-and-coming dining culture and historic Austin foodways. She is particularly interested in the intersections of feminism and the food industry.

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Cory Leahy — editor, writer, runner, enthusiastic cook and veggie-leaning omnivore — has spent more than 20 years as an editor of books, magazines and websites. She recently stepped out of familiar labels and into unknown territory to reimagine a next chapter that’s all about food.

JULIE SAVASKY @juliehsavasky

KRISTIN PHILLIPS Kristin Phillips never knew that — after half a decade observing how rhesus and woolly monkeys compete and forage for food — she would write about how Austinites procure dinner by tapping their smartphones to order a piping-hot meal from a favorite local restaurant.

Previously the science publicist at The American Museum of Natural History and with degrees in journalism and biological anthropology, Kristin currently writes for the Office of Sustainability at The University of Texas at Austin.

After spending 22 years at international design firm, Pentagram, Julie recently opened her own design consultancy, 508 Creative. Her work focuses primarily on editorial, identity, strategy and web design, and has won awards from Graphis, Communication Arts, Society of Publication Designers, and Texas Institute of Letters, among others. She lives with her family in Austin, Texas.

NICOLA TWILLEY @nicolatwilley Nicola Twilley is author of the blog Edible Geography, co-host of the award-winning podcast Gastropod, and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. She is deeply obsessed with refrigeration and is currently writing a book on the topic, after having explored China’s coldscape for The New York Times Magazine and curated an exhibition exploring North America’s spaces of artificial refrigeration with the Center for Land Use Interpretation. In her spare time, she makes smog meringues.

LARISSA ZIMBEROFF @lzimberoff Larissa Zimberoff is a freelance writer covering the intersection of food and technology. Although she’s lived in New York for over six years she has never had food delivered to her rent-stabilized apartment.

OPPOSITE: IMAGE BY KENNY BRAUN

MELANIE HAUPT @boxingoctopus

CORY LEAHY @coryleahy

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I S S U E I V F E AT U R E S

16 Transcending Seasons As refrigerated transportation became the norm a century ago, the cold chain was born. Defying seasons, cold chains offer consumers access to meats, fruits and vegetables year-round. More complex than a simple food chain, cold chains require refrigeration every step of the way because spoilage is ongoing — one missed link can ruin an entire shipment. Refrigeration expert Jonathan Rees explains why today’s cold chain is actually a cold web that crisscrosses the whole world.

24 The Evolution of How We Shop for Food here was a time, not long ago, when we all just went to T the grocery store or the mall, filled our shopping carts or bought the clothes we’d tried on, then drove home.

But times are changing fast — today, we’re outsourcing shopping of all kinds, instead relying on a complex network of shoppers and shippers to bring us our goods within a week, a day or even an hour. Larissa Zimberoff explores these shipping journeys.

34 Smarter TV Dinners J ust five years ago, home delivery was largely the realm of the pizzeria. But today, consumers can dine on menu items from almost any restaurant at home, thanks to independent apps that function as minilogistics platforms. Kristin Phillips looks behind the scenes of the way we eat now.

38 Investing in Tomorrow’s Food Chain alter Robb is best known as Whole Foods Market’s W former co-CEO, where he helped usher in new ways of thinking about food, from farm to grocery cart. Now, after 40 years in the grocery business, he’s starting a new chapter. Leveraging his deep knowledge about the complexity of the food chain to advise and invest in innovative food system startups, Robb talked to Jane Black about how he is helping to cultivate the next generation of food revolutionaries.

To see these robots in action, check out this story at foodandcity.org.

FOOD MOVER

ROBOTS PART II: BOTS IN THE COLD CHAIN The second installment in our series about food bots focuses on tech in use in the cold chain. It’s not hard to see why robots would be ideal workers within these climate-controlled facilities, where temps often hover just above freezing for most perishable goods. Unlike humans, robots don’t get cold — at least, not yet. R A C H E L W H A R T O N

Ocado’s bots zip around a grid built over crates and crates of groceries.

They pick their orders and deliver them to humans, who do the final packing.

The bots work together, like a hive mind, to uncover buried crates and access items on lower levels. Their real-time communication also indicates which crates need to be refilled.

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The system of robots — which can travel 13 feet per second — can fulfill a 50-item order in less than five minutes.

The stacked grid concept came from the shipping industry, where cranes move containers from place to place.

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IMAGES COURTESY OCADO

GROCERY GETTER BOTS Some of the newest bot tech involves what are sometimes called swarms and the hive mind — as in dozens of robots working together (the swarm) to complete complex tasks, wirelessly sharing information in real time (the hive mind). Such is the case with Ocado Smart Platform robots, created

by Ocado, a British online grocery retailer that’s working on making their delivery-only business as automated as possible.

Ocado’s squat, square, battery-operated bots zip about on an elevated grid over room-temp or refrigerated crates stacked several levels high. Each crate is filled with one specific type of grocery, such as eggs, organic apple juice or cheddar cheese. The robots work as a team to deliver the crates to “personal shoppers” — mainly humans, though another kind of robot could also do the job — that put together customer orders. If the hive mind sees one shopper needs cheddar, but it’s in a crate beneath the eggs and the apple juice, one robot zips by to move the egg crate, a second moves the juice and a third grabs the cheese and takes it to the proper shopper … all in a matter of seconds.

Thanks to the hive mind, every robot knows where every product is at all times; the robots are also tasked with refilling the tower of crates — aka “the storage hive” — as crates empty. Plus, when the bots themselves are low on charge, they ferry themselves off to a charging bay before rejoining their swarm.

Whether in a hot warehouse or a cold refrigerated facility, RowPaq can mix and match cartons, shrink-wrapped or foil-wrapped packages onto a single pallet.

RowPaq can bring boxes or crates together into a single, stable pallet — up to 1,000 units per hour. It’s the ultimate Jenga player.

SUPER PAQ BOTS Palletizing robots might not sound revolutionary — palletizing being the unsexy term for the unsexy process of loading and unloading boxes on and off a pallet — unless you’ve worked in a frigid warehouse.

Supplies come in on pallets, and products go out on them, and not always neatly: If a mini-mart orders four cases of sliced turkey, a case of chips and two dozen packs of hot dogs from its supplier, somebody or something there has to put all those boxes together.

Palletizing robots are generally “articulated arm” robots, which means they have a stationary base attached to a robotic arm that can bend and swivel. Hand-like tools attached to the end perform specific tasks — in this case, lifting and moving boxes from one place to another.

A company called Swisslog — they design fully automated warehouses and distribution systems — even makes a palletizing robot called RowPaq that can build a perfect pallet of mismatched boxes in minutes. It’s fitted with a set of giant hand-like grippers that can pick up four different sized boxes at the same time and set them down in a perfect row because it already “knows” how tall, wide and long each box is before it arrives.

THE WELL-BELOW-ZERO BOTS Think of the freezer as the final frontier for robotic solutions in the cold chain. Super-cold, sub-zero conditions — as in minus 18 degrees Fahrenheit — are just as hard on the moving parts and lubricants inside robots as they are on people.

The easiest solution is to put your robot in a protective suit, which is why when you do see the rare robot in a freezer, it’s usually sheathed in puffy white sleeves that look like a cross between a wind sock and a lab coat.

Most robots used in freezer conditions are large, sturdy palletizing machines with fewer small moving parts, such as bots used to stack table-sized slabs of frozen fish on a pallet.

Other companies use spider-like “pick and place” robots to pack things including frozen meat patties and fish sticks into the proper plastic packaging. These bots are usually mounted over a conveyor belt, and the entire process takes place within a sealed, protective, temperature-controlled enclosure.

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A leading food packaging manufacturer like Sabert sells more than 600 products, ranging from food containers to disposable plates and utensils.

FOOD MOVER

CAN I GET THAT TO GO?

PACKAGING FOR VISUAL IMPACT

SOME LIKE IT HOT More than 60 percent of Mama Fu’s business is to-go or delivery.

Customers of this fast-casual Asian chain expect their food to still be hot when it arrives, and they want it in a reheatable container, says Director of Marketing Josh Churnick. The company, with two dozen locations in Texas, Arkansas and Florida, skipped the traditional paper pail and opted for bright red trays that customers can wash and reuse at home. “I hear from customers on a regular basis who have cabinets full of red containers.”

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Modern food packaging containers aim to create a “wow” moment for customers when they unpack their food. That’s why we are seeing Instagram-friendly logos, shapes, colors and clear plastic lids to show off the food, Dyer says.

We eat first with our eyes, but for chefs like Austin’s Rebecca Meeker, food quality is the top consideration. In her fine-dining days, she sent leftovers home in compostable containers. But today, every single food item from her company Lucky Lime is delivered.

She needs containers that won’t get soggy and that will hold temperature so that when the food finally

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arrives, the customer will enjoy their dining experience as much as if they were in a restaurant — the packaging and flavors having fulfilled the website’s promises.

Safety is a concern, too — particularly when your delivery driver may not have a working tie to the restaurant. Manufacturers are working on tamper-evident packaging, such as a takeout bag with a tear strip on the top so a customer can see if someone has opened the bag since it left the restaurant.

COOKING FOR THE ROAD

Few restaurants start out with a plan to meet a growing demand for takeout. But in an increasingly cutthroat industry, many restaurateurs have little choice. Delivery adds expense and opportunity for error, but if a restaurant doesn’t offer its food to go, potential customers will go elsewhere to get it.

Dyer says many restaurants consider packaging a small price to pay to make additional sales from people who aren’t sitting in their dining room.

“Foodservice operators want consumers to have the same experience as if they are in the restaurant,” Dyer says. “If they get the food delivered and it looks like a big mess, you don’t get the same experience.”

DELIVERY, NOT DOGGIE BAG

At Lucky Lime, Chef Meeker designed every dish with delivery in mind. For her delivery-only venture, Meeker developed healthy Asian-influenced dishes — with a French flair — that she knew would hold up during a car ride.

She prefers containers with clear tops (so customers can see the food) that seal securely so spills aren’t a problem.

These days, one spilled container could mean a customer doesn’t come back, or worse: leaves a negative review about a delivery company that can’t deliver. But finding the perfect packaging can be a challenge.

“You want to highlight the food, but it adds expense,” Meeker says. She says she spends about $1 per order on packaging, often more if the delivery includes a drink in a plastic bottle.

Meeker uses about eight different containers for her limited menu delivered cold once a week. If she wants to add a hot menu, that’ll require a new set of packaging. Grease- and moisture-resistant compostable packaging has been around for about a decade, but some businesses prefer recyclable plastic, which can hold heat longer.

Meeker can’t order the compostable, molded fiber containers with the clear plastic tops that she’d really like to use because her sales are too small to meet the required minimum purchase of $750 every other week. For now, the recyclable containers she’s already using will have to do.

ADDIE BROYLES

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IMAGE COURTESY LUCKY LIME

The pressure on food to perform has never been higher.

For decades, pizza boxes, Styrofoam clamshells and the paper pails used for Chinese takeout each filled a specific niche in the restaurant industry. But during the delivery gold rush of the past 10 years, restaurants, food packaging manufacturers and customers are demanding more.

The original delivery foods (pizza, Chinese food, deli sandwiches and burgers, which became delivery staples in the 1960s and 1970s) don’t suffer in quality from the half-hour they might spend en route to your house. In contrast, many dishes offered today at casual eateries or fine-dining restaurants weren’t designed to be served in the insulated boxes of past decades.

Lynn Dyer, president of the Food Packaging Institute in Washington D.C., notices small changes: the tabs that make the containers easier to open, the discreet vents that allow steam to escape, the perfectly clear plastic that enables you to see your food before you open it.

Dyer says the innovation we’re seeing for 21st century delivery demands rivals the changes we saw during the fastfood drive-through boom of the 1970s and 1980s. Years ago, her industry group worked with auto companies to determine how many cupholders a car needed and what size they should be. Those measurements were originally used to design drinking cups, but now French fries, chicken nuggets and salads are packaged in cupholder-friendly containers.

FOOD MOVER

Nicola Twilley has long been interested in the cold chain. She curated a 2013 exhibit called “Perishable: An Exploration of the Refrigerated Landscape of America.” We’ll link to it in this story on foodandcity.org.

ROLLING REFRIGERATORS Originally, “reefer” was nautical shorthand, referring either to the midshipmen typically responsible for trimming or reefing the sail, or to the thick, double-breasted coat worn by sailors. Today, it is old-fashioned slang for what my dictionary describes, even more quaintly, as “a marijuana cigarette.”

But since 1911, a reefer has meant only one thing in the food logistics business: a refrigerated container, capable of preserving perishables as they travel over land and sea.

“We can handle 800,000 reefers a week,” port officials brag, sounding for all the world like aging potheads. “Yeah, we’re reefer specialists,” industry insiders will say, without even so much as a wink.

In the 1850s, those reefers would have been boxcars, bringing California lettuce and Chicago-slaughtered pork by train to America’s hungry East Coast, cooled first by ice hand-harvested from frozen lakes and then by mechanical refrigeration units.

A few decades later, the term might also have referred to the chilled holds of fast-moving refrigerated ships, painted white to reflect the heat, ferrying New Zealand lamb to London and Honduran bananas to New York. Today, reefers are most likely to be special shipping containers, distinguishable from their ubiquitous peers only by the built-in cooling unit at the rear.

PERFECTING THE TECHNOLOGY

Reefers cost six times as much as ordinary shipping containers, even before factoring in the electricity required to run them. They are correspondingly rare: despite the Chilean peaches and Argentinian steaks that fill our supermarket shelves, perishable food accounts for a surprisingly small proportion of global containerized trade. Although shipping companies are reluctant to share exact numbers, maritime industry analysts estimate that of the 25 million shipping containers in the world, only 1.5 million are reefers.

The first reefers with integrated cooling units arrived on the market in 1975, but they were slow to catch on. “Companies were moving these expensive, fragile commodities in lots of 40,000 pounds, and sometimes they would arrive OK, and sometimes they didn’t arrive OK,” explains Barbara Pratt, director of refrigerated services at Maersk, Inc. Pratt spent her 20s living inside a specially equipped reefer, trying to work out why melons from Mexico were rotting en route to Europe, and why General Food’s Dominican cocoa beans kept showing up in New Jersey covered in mildew.

Today, thanks to decades of research, Maersk offers hightech reefers with powerful air handling systems capable of maintaining supersaturated humidity levels to prevent fruit from losing water weight as well as removing the excess carbon dioxide and ethylene gases that contribute to over-ripening.

The company also issues detailed instructions about cooling

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cargo prior to “stuffing” the reefer, to prevent condensation.

In the past decade, reefer design has advanced to the point that specialized freezer reefers can keep sushi-grade tuna intact at minus 76 degrees F, even when the temperature outside is over 100 degrees. Meanwhile, onions and nuts, which prefer an extremely well-ventilated atmosphere, travel in their own bespoke reefers with double the rate of air circulation. Inside these finely tuned microenvironments, tomatoes remain pristine for a month or more. Maersk promises that even peaches can happily spend a couple of weeks at sea.

OCEAN-GOING PERISHABLES

In response, more and more fresh food producers are choosing reefers instead of old-school refrigerated-hold ships or expensive air cargo. Container Management magazine recently speculated that specialized reefer ships might well go extinct sometime in the next few years, as the perishable sector finally undergoes the containerization revolution that transformed the rest of the logistics universe in the 1950s and ’60s.

But improved technology is only part of the reason why the seaborne perishable trade has grown so dramatically over the past decade — a trend that industry insiders expect to continue in the coming years. In the United States, for example, retailers have noticed increased sales of fresh fruit and vegetables, and a corresponding slump in the center aisles, as shoppers increasingly favor refrigerated produce over its canned or frozen equivalent. Meanwhile, in China, a booming middle class is eating more meat, much of which arrives in reefers from Brazil.

Even millennial snacking trends have had an effect on global reefer movements, with Maersk launching a Mexico-to-Yokohama avocado route in 2016.

One fruit, however, remains a constant: the banana. Both Dole and Chiquita call at North America’s biggest banana port, Wilmington, Delaware, twice weekly, year-round, to supply tropical fruit to the 200 million people who live within 24 hours’ drive. Indeed, while any kind of cargo that is sensitive to atmospheric conditions can be found inside a reefer — French wine, high-tech Italian ski equipment, Japanese bonsai — Maersk estimates that every fifth reefer on the high seas is stuffed with bananas. They are cut and transported while green, hard and immature, their development delayed with cold storage until they are just a week away from delivery, when they are warmed up and gassed with plant hormones into artificial ripeness.

It is in the banana’s complicated journey from tropical treat to global commodity — with all its technological progress, economic impact, dietary shifts, agricultural diseases and Central American political instability — that we can see the story of the reefer most clearly, in all its time-and-space-distorting might.

NICOLA TWILLEY

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Maersk estimates that every fifth reefer on the high seas is stuffed with bananas.

#1 On a Reefer RoRo vessel, inside decks are convertible to reefer holds with 10 separate temperature zones, all gas tight. It was specifically designed for the large banana and pineapple trades across oceans. And it meets the newest environmental requirements for a ”green vessel,” with liquid natural gas as a fuel option for both propulsion and onboard refrigeration. It was collaboratively designed by Reefer Intel AG, Naval Architects Kn. E. Hansen A/S, Denmark, and Stena RoRo AB, Sweden. #2 Aluminum or steel sides protect a temperature range from -20° F to 70° F. Double full-swing doors open on one end. #3 Dole reefers unload tropical fruits, including bananas, at the Port of Wilmington, Delaware. The temperature and humidity inside banana reefers are carefully monitored and controlled to prevent over-ripening.

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Of the

25 MILLION shipping containers in the world only

1.5 MILLION are reefers.

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Watch the low-tech harvesting methods Sambazon uses to pick their purple açaí berries in this story at foodandcity.org.

SIDE DISH

FASHIONABLE FOODS

AÇAÍ

Açaí bowls are Instagram shark bait. How can you resist snapping a photo of a beautiful deep-purple smoothie bowl layered with tart red strawberries, fat blueberries and flaky white coconut?

It’s almost unfathomable that just 20 years ago, few Americans had even heard of this tiny Amazonian super fruit. Sambazon co-founder Ryan Black says his açaí company struggled to get people interested in the palm fruit “because they hadn’t ever heard of (açaí) and couldn’t pronounce it.” (It’s AH-SIGH-EE.) Sambazon’s attempts at açaí education have helped drive açaí to the top, as have the influence of social media word of mouth and a surge for health foods. Get enough people declaring something is good, and their Instafriends will want to try it themselves. As of today, #acaibowl is winning Instagram with 885,608 public posts — while the health food of yesteryear, #avocadotoast, nets only 653,172 posts.

In 2016, more than 300,000 tons of açaí products were sold across the world. By 2026, that number should be above one million tons. To keep up with demand, “we have increased sourcing and production in the last few years,” says Sambazon co-founder Jeremy Black. Sambazon owns a processing facility in the Amazon. They have vertically integrated production to streamline their work and protect the delicate fruit, which needs to be quickly processed because it rots.

For a product that feels very 21st century, the harvesting method remains surprisingly ancient of the world’s seaweed and human. Workers scale the is produced in Asia trees, pick the fruit and place it in 55% in China woven baskets to be moved rapidly downstream to the processing fa25% in Indonesia cility. The company has been careful to ensure the sustainability of 9% in the Philippenes its açaí business by hiring locals to 5% in South Korea wild-harvest and hand-pick açaí, as well as to plant new seeds.

2% in North Korea So far, there doesn’t seem to be an açaí shortage. But what if demand 2% in Japan

99.4%

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exceeds expectation, or if açaí bowls become the new favorite of a huge market like China? Can the Amazon handle the future of açaí?

SEAWEEDS

“Civil Eats,” the 2014 James Beard Foundation Publication of the Year, calls seaweed “the next big thing in sustainable food.” McCormick Spices identifies furikake as a spice to look out for in its 2018 Flavor Forecast. And the World Bank considers it an ecological product that’s also a problem-solving darling when it comes to feeding Earth’s hungry population.

Seaweed is of course a staple in Asia, where kombu, nori and wakame are consumed daily in soups, seaweed rolls and side dishes. According to the FishStat (2014) Electronic Fisheries Database of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, nearly all — 99.4 percent — of the world’s seaweed, is produced in Asia. While Asia has long been seaweed-mad, in the western world nori is suddenly popping up in packaged snacks and in all-American foods you wouldn’t expect, such as popcorn, mayonnaise, smoothies, burgers and hot dogs. Seaweeds are versatile and are produced in many forms to suit many tastes — from a funky fried hijiki tofu burger popular at a New York University student fave called Dojo, to pungent wakame “birthday soup” at L.A. Koreatown’s Hangari Bajirak Kalgooksoo, to Uchi’s clean-cut, nori-wrapped negihama roll in Austin. It’s a far wider array than the leaves of wakame swimming in your Japanese miso soup.

“It is definitely a trend, similar to the recent kale craze,” says Michael Graham, creator of Monterey Bay Seaweeds.

“There are flavored nori sheets and seaweed salad in Costco.

These are not new products, but they are new vendors, and they are reaching new customers.”

Graham, also a biology professor at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories and the editor of a seaweed scientific journal, says he receives dozens of emails and calls a month from people who want to know more about seaweed. “I don’t know if the interest will last many years,” Graham says. “But regardless, it’s positive. Seaweed really is all that it is cracked up to be — so good for you, and good for the environment.”

Seaweed farmers are responding to the demand. From 2011 to 2012, the most recent years for which World Bank figures were available, global production of one of the most commonly eaten seaweeds, red nori (the dry, crispy wrappers of your maki rolls), increased by 13.57 percent, or 82,634 wet metric tons. Global production of an even more popular seaweed, wakame, ramped up by 21.94 percent, or 384,973 wet metric tons. Overall, including other seaweeds, global production in 2012 was approximately 3 million tons dry weight, increasing by 9 percent per year.

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OPPOSITE: IMAGE COURTESY SAMBAZON

When trendy foods pop, suppliers and retailers have to be ready — or figure out how to make adjustments fast — to meet demand. In this age of food as social media fodder, we looked into the reality of getting more açaí, seaweed and turmeric on shelves — stat!

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Açaí berries grow like pearls on long branches at the top of palm-like trees in the Amazon.

The fruit of the berry is limited a thin layer of Food + City Magazine to13 flesh beneath the skin and surrounds a large pit.

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Watch Mike Graham excite chefs with his land-based seaweed farm in Monterrey, California, in this story at foodandcity.org.

By 2050, if the World Bank has its way, we’ll be producing 500 million dry tons of seaweed, adding 10 percent to our current food supply.

That’s definitely all-you-can-eat maki. To do that, we’ll have to augment seaweed farming by 14 percent per year. And the bank thinks we could do that in only 0.03 percent of the ocean’s surface area. More for less is usually a scam, but seaweed may be the bargain store of the sea.

IMAGE COURTESY DIASPORA CO.

TURMERIC

While Americans have just “discovered” golden milk (aka moon milk, golden latte or turmeric tea), its origin is an old Indian drink called haldi doodh. But its new in-demand status as an antiinflammatory health food means turmeric, an ancient Ayurvedic root, has staked its spot in the mainstream American pantry.

Turmeric has hit the big time financially, shooting up from $2,700 million in 2012 to more than $3,160 million in 2016. By 2021, according to a report on Technavio, the global turmeric market is projected to post a compound annual growth rate of 6 percent (other sources list it as 5.5 percent by 2027).

“Volume is exploding for organic turmeric,” says Kai Stark, commodity manager at Frontier Co-op, a cooperatively owned wholesaler of natural and organic products based in Norway, Iowa.

“In the last 10 years, the amount of organic turmeric Frontier Co-op has purchased increased by a factor of 10.” Despite the demand, turmeric farmers are struggling to stay alive, even as golden lattes sell for $15 per cup in the United States.

Approximately 80 percent of turmeric is grown in India, both wild and farmed. But the small margins are leaving some Indian farmers high and dry. To fight this turmeric poverty, Frontier Co-op collaborates with an organization called Peermade Development Society. PDS works with marginalized farmers, especially women and poor rural folks, to develop both the land and the farmers’ budgets sustainably.

“In the past, marginal farmers, who have only one to two hectares of land, would sell their commodities to middlemen for a small price, and then middlemen would sell again, taking the entire margin,” Stark says. “PDS Organic Spices came in to eliminate the middlemen and help these farmers sell directly to companies like Frontier Co-op.”

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SIDE DISH

In 2009, as the turmeric craze began to take hold, Frontier supported a PDS program to scale up their farmers’ organic turmeric production.

PDS, with Frontier’s help, began trials to grow a variety of turmeric with a higher content of curcumin, the potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory in turmeric. Frontier also diversified its organic turmeric supply chain, adding suppliers from Central America.

Sana Javeri Kadri, owner of Diaspora Co., a sustainable, single-origin, direct-trade turmeric company, also cuts out the middleman to bring maximum profits to her turmeric farmer, Mr. Prahbu, in Andhra Pradesh.

Javeri Kadri founded Diaspora Co. as a small side project but was inundated with high demand from the start. When her first four batches of turmeric sold out within hours, she contacted Mr. Prahbu and asked for everything he had. Her last batch sold out in about six weeks. Between filling 20 to 100 orders a week, she closely manages 12 wholesale accounts, asking buyers for six-month projections so Mr. Prahbu has adequate time to plan.

Javeri Kadris says turmeric is planted between May and June, before monsoon season, when it soaks up all the rain. Harvest happens between January and February, so the timing is important — as are the seeds.

“Find the seeds your grandma was using, before the British showed up,” Javeri Kadri says.

“If you don’t protect biodiversity, you end up with the heartiest tomato that will survive the grocery store but doesn’t taste very good. It’s the same with turmeric — we’ve already got this mass-marketed bright yellow turmeric with a mild smell, with no biodiversity or cultural history.” Her explicitly political mission is to preserve pre-colonial biodiversity, create the best-tasting, most diverse array of turmerics and reward turmeric farmers in India while doing it.

Still, we can expect the inevitable when it comes to trends: strange products like turmericflavored coffee creamer, croissants and cronuts, and frozen turmeric shakes (despite Ayurvedic wisdom that turmeric should be eaten heated for optimal benefits). Because when a trend takes hold, reason may exit through the pricey gift shop, in the form of a chai golden milk donut that screams, “I <3 turmeric.”

DA KO TA K I M

Diaspora Co. opened in 2017, but owner Sana Javeri Kadri has seen demand for turmeric skyrocket in the past year.

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Transcending Seasons IMAGE COURTESY BALL STATE UNIVERSITY, SPURGEON-GREENE PHOTOGRAPHS COLLECTION

BY J O N AT H A N R E E S

Prior to the late 19th century, families around the country ate only what they could grow or what nearby farmers had to offer. For people who lived where winters were frigid, that meant a limited winter diet consisting of food preserved in a root cellar. But that all changed when refrigerated rail cars enabled cross-country shipping of meats and produce from faraway farms. Access to a wider variety of foods year round changed the American diet permanently.

In 1927, the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd published the first of their two classic studies of modernization in a midwestern community they called “Middletown.” Among the topics considered by the citizens of what was actually Muncie, Indiana, were recent changes to their diet. “In 1890 we had meat three times a day,” explained a Muncie grocery store owner.

“Breakfast, pork chops or steak with fried potatoes, buckwheat cakes, and hot bread; lunch, a hot roast and potatoes; supper, same roast cold.”

This would have been impossible even a decade earlier because the mass production of beef had only just become technologically viable.

What made the mass production of beef possible? Refrigerated rail cars, thanks to Gustavus Swift’s efforts in the 1880s. By 1890, steers and pigs slaughtered in Chicago stockyards arrived

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in cities and towns across the country, chilled by ice for the entire route.

“Steaks, roasts, macaroni, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips, coleslaw, fried apples and stewed tomatoes.” This is how a Muncie housewife described her family’s “winter diet” to the Lynds before refrigeration arrived there during the late 1920s. No strawberries. No eggs.

The winter diet was nothing but bland winter fare. Before fruits and vegetables were protected by similarly refrigerated rail cars, producers faced substantial spoilage and could never ship in winter because delays caused by freezing weather could doom whole shipments. (While some spoilage happened during warm months, too, ventilated rail cars allowed cooling breezes, mitigating damage.)

Consumers in Muncie faced what was known

Through the late 19th century, most Americans relied on what they could grow and store to get them through the winter. By the 1890s, refrigerated rail cars brought meats and produce from around the country and changed diets dramatically.

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We’ll link to an amazing visual collection of antique ice boxes on Pinterest in this story on our website, foodandcity.org.

“COLD CHAIN” A “cold chain” is a modern refrigerating engineering term that refers to the path of perishable foods from the point of production to the point of consumption. Unlike regular food chains, cold chains require refrigeration along the entire path to prevent spoilage.

as “spring sickness” because they lacked access to the vitamins they needed for months on end every year. By contrast, with the advent of refrigeration, perishable produce could arrive from California all year or be kept in cold storage for winter use when those fruits or vegetables had been grown nearby.

The year-round availability of meats and green vegetables that we now take for granted requires an infrastructure. The turn of the 20th century brought the inception of this infrastructure, which changed the American diet forever.

As refrigerated transportation became the norm, a new type of food chain was born — the cold chain. While a food chain requires no special technologies to store and transport foods of all kinds, cold chains require some form of refrigeration every step of the way because spoilage is ongoing. If one link in the chain fails, the product becomes inedible. What was true about cold chains during the early 20th century remains true today.

COLD CHAINS AND THE AMERICAN DIET

Technology has always had a tremendous effect on what people eat. Some technologies have made it possible to overcome distance by making cold chains longer, while others have made it economical to get better-tasting perishables by making cold chains shorter. As cold chains

HISTORY OF THE COLD CHAIN From ice harvesting in New England to home refrigerators that can monitor their contents and send a text when you’re low on eggs, milestones along the cold chain have transformed how and what Americans eat. There was a time when pineapples and bananas were rare sites outside of tropical climates. And the idea of eating fish caught in Japanese waters yesterday while sitting in a Texas sushi restaurant today was unimaginable. No more.

Check out some of the more memorable moments of the last two centuries of the refrigeration revolution.

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1806

(and the transportation systems associated with them) have improved, the perishable food we eat has become fresher as delivery has become faster.

Cold chains even let consumers defy seasons, allowing us access to fruits and vegetables that the people of Muncie seldom saw at any time of year.

With so many cold chains for so many different foods now available, it seems much more accurate to describe our perishable-food provisioning system as an intricate cold web. The refrigerated strands of that web crisscross not just America but the whole world. Their size, their speed and, most importantly, their efficiency have an enormous impact on what we eat because they help determine how much every kind of perishable food costs, or whether that food is available at all.

EATING FARAWAY FOOD: MAKING THE COLD CHAIN LONGER

Meat was just about the most expensive food you could buy during the late 19th century. As such, it was the perfect guinea pig for testing cold chain technology — success would bring the greatest financial benefit to the pioneers. Meat producers tapped into a huge market of consumers who wanted to add more meat to their diets as both a status symbol and because of the superior nourishment meat provided, compared to their earlier diets. When technology brought down the price

Frederick Tudor sends the first commercial shipment of ice by sea in world history from Boston to Martinique. Most of what survives the trip melts because the customers don’t know what to do with the product. Below, Tudor’s workers divide a pond into a chessboard pattern and cut ice into two-foot square blocks.

(Wikimedia Commons)

1851

Florida doctor John Gorrie patents a commercial ice machine he developed while trying to invent what we now know as air-conditioning.

It does not prove commercially viable.

WIKI COMMONS

1878

of meat, consumers responded quickly.

After the cold chain for meat came similar protections for fruits and vegetables, starting in the 1890s. Fast refrigerator cars full of produce grown in California could get melons or lettuce to the East Coast for consumption in about a week.

Iceberg lettuce was bred specifically during this period because it could hold up to refrigeration better than the alternatives. Refrigerated shipping and cold storage made these products common all year round and ended “spring sickness” forever.

In his 2006 book “The Walmart Effect,” journalist Charles Fishman describes how lengthening the cold chain for salmon — all the way to South America — brought down the price so much that Americans can now eat that once-uncommon fish on a regular basis. While Atlantic Salmon are not native to Chile, they are now being farmed there and flown to the United States in huge quantities.

As a result, writes Fishman, “[S]almon farming has transformed the economy of southern Chile, ushering in an industrial revolution that has turned thousands of Chileans from subsistence farmers and fishermen into hourly paid salmon processing-plant workers.”

Fishman stresses the importance of deboning machinery to making shipping cheap salmon economical — but that’s just because the low costs of refrigerating fish and transporting the product by air are so entrenched that they can

Meat-packing magnate Gustavas Swift hired engineer Andrew Chase to design an ice-cooled rail car that would enable the shipment of processed carcasses across long distances. The result was a well-insulated yet ventilated car, in which the meat was packed tightly at the bottom of the car, and ice was kept at the top, allowing the chilled air to flow naturally downward.

be easily taken for granted. Thanks to advances in the cold chain that have made it possible to market fish of all kinds worldwide, Chilean salmon arrives in the continental United States faster than salmon from Alaska. Walmart has paid for preserving and marketing much of that Chilean salmon once it arrives.

“Thanks to advances in the cold chain that have made it possible to market fish of all kinds worldwide, Chilean salmon arrives in the continental United States faster than salmon from Alaska.”

Long cold chains for fish do not have to involve airplanes. Refrigerated packing crates and gigantic barges have made shipping costs so cheap that fish caught off Norway can be efficiently shipped to China for processing (taking advantage of low labor costs) and then shipped again across the Pacific to America for consumption. Cold chain shipping — by air or sea — has played a particularly important role in fish farming of all kinds, making it possible to market

1880 & 1890

The first ice famine grips the Hudson Valley. The New York market turns to Maine for its ice, leading to vast growth in the infrastructure for providing ice there and the growth of ice for domestic consumption in the United States in general.

A second ice famine grips the Hudson Valley. In response, ice equipment makers work hard to improve the efficiency of commercial ice machines and largely succeed by 1900.

1916

The total number of electric household refrigerators sold in the United States tops 1,000 for the first time.

1927

General Electric is responsible for bringing the cold chain into homes. In 1927, the “Monitor-Top” fridge cost around $520 — equivalent to $7,000 today — and helped lucky families keep leftovers fresh.

Refrigerator design saw an update to the more familiar integrated box style in the 1940s.

large amounts of fish produced in what would otherwise be isolated locations. In fact, whether there will still be enough fish in the seas to satisfy this new demand has become an open question.

QUICK HISTORY OF CONSUMER ICE In the early 19th century, ice took long journeys across the globe.

Cut from lakes around Boston and packed onto ships, it might be sold as far away as India.

Today, anyone can get all the ice they need on demand at local convenience stores. The Ice Factory, developed in 1992, was the first of a new breed of automatic ice machines. It manufactures ice on demand and even bags it for you automatically. This eliminates both delivery and storage costs.

It allows people to stock up on ice when they need it for parties and barbecues, yet still use their home freezers for their day-today needs the rest of the year.

Prior to the Ice Factory, one ice manufacturing plant could pack enough bags to satisfy demand within a 100-mile radius.

HARVESTING, STORING AND PROCESSING: MAKING THE COLD CHAIN SHORTER

Orange juice is a good example of how cold chains can be physically shortened to preserve a fresher taste. “Fresh-frozen” orange juice from concentrate dates from 1952. Not-from-concentrate orange juice dates from the 1990s. Ironically, this apparently “fresh” product can be stored for up to a year before the necessary processing occurs. Once taken out of storage and pumped with flavor enhancements, fresh juice has a shorter shelf life than juice concentrate — one to two weeks. Since it bears a much closer resemblance to fresh-squeezed it can fetch a higher price than the frozen juice concentrate sold in cans.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the local food movement has revived somewhat the idea of shorter cold chains. But it may be a moot argument. Consider the pros and cons: One reason people were supposed to buy more local food is that the energy expended on refrigeration contributes significantly to the warming of the planet. Yet, as Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimzo have explained, one

1924

Thomas B. Slate applies for the US patent on dry ice. A year later, the DryIce Corporation of America trademarked solid carbon dioxide, giving it a moniker that has lasted nearly 100 years. The company began marketing dry ice for deep refrigeration.

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1925

Clarence Birdseye patents a better form of flash freezing, which will eventually make mass-marketed frozen foods possible.

study found that “transporting a large volume of broccoli in a refrigerated container that had been moved around on a boat, a railroad car, and a truck to a distribution point required a lot less energy than a few thousand consumers bringing the same volume of broccoli back to their homes.”

Food miles have lately fallen out of favor as a unit of analysis because they oversimplify the environmental costs of eating perishable foods.

Besides the efficiency of transport, another problem with food miles is that the energy expended to keep perishable food fresh also keeps that food from ending up in a landfill where it would give off the deadly greenhouse gas methane as it rots — a scenario in which the costs of refrigeration are less than the costs of spoilage.

Similarly, the refrigeration costs associated with eating local beef may be lower, but what about the greenhouse gasses expended to raise the cow in the first place?

SPECIALIZING AND PERSONALIZING: MAKING THE COLD CHAIN FASTER

Nonetheless, some refrigerated indulgences should give any environmentally minded person pause. For example, the highly endangered bluefin tuna is an Atlantic and Mediterranean fish, yet it is regularly shipped as fast as possible to the Tsukiji fish market in Japan, where one specimen alone recently fetched $632,000. In this

1940s

Before the refrigerated rail car became a key part of the cold chain, leafy greens like lettuce were too delicate to survive a long journey packed in ice. The solution?

Iceberg (or crisphead) lettuce, introduced for commercial production in the late 1940s to be hearty enough to reach salad bowls hundreds of miles away.

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WIKI COMMONS

Read our story about how bananas go from tropical farms to New York City bodegas, stopping in ripening rooms along their journey. We’ll link to it in this story at foodandcity.org.

case, refrigeration has enabled the creation of a market that provides the perverse incentive to hunt a species to near extinction. Similarly, the Costa Di Mare restaurant inside the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas daily flies in fish caught and frozen in Italy’s coastal waters.

One way to move faster is to travel long distances at higher speeds; another is to eliminate steps along the way. The freezer packs inside ready-to-eat meal kits allow people to enjoy their “Beef Medallions & Brown Butter Caper Sauce” and “Thai Curry Chicken with Carrots & Bok Choy” in pre-measured portions without ever having to go to a grocery store. Blue Apron, the most prominent of these ready-to-eat meal companies, sends out millions of six-pound ice packs filled with sodium polyacrylate, a powder that when mixed with water melts much more slowly than water alone. This created both a personalized cold chain and an environmental disaster, due to excess packaging.

The historian Jenny Leigh Smith has described the practices of the Soviet ice cream industry in similar terms. Unable to afford the creation of an elaborate cold chain based on mechanical refrigeration, Soviet vendors during the 1950s and 1960s simply put dry ice in their insulated pushcarts and used that to keep their product cold as they sold it on the streets. It’s a good reminder that effective refrigeration tech-

1950s–70s

Railroads gradually stop using ice for refrigerated shipping as mechanical refrigeration technology becomes cheap and small enough to install in individual railroad cars.

nologies are not always expensive — they just have to meet the particular needs of the situation at any point in the cold chain.

Another way to make the cold chain move faster is by using refrigeration to speed natural processes that need to occur before perishable products are sold. When the food and science writer Nicola Twilley visited one of New York

“the energy coming off just a single box of ripening bananas could heat a small apartment” City’s four main banana distributors, he told her that the energy coming off just a single box of ripening bananas “could heat a small apartment.” The firm’s ripening room was designed to control output by blowing cold air through the boxes. The ripening of some fruit is accelerated, while in other cases it gets slowed down.

It all depends upon matching supply with market demand.

TRANSCENDING SEASONALITY: MAKING THE COLD CHAIN SLOWER

When perishables are harvested in season but need to be distributed out of season, cold storage is

1958

1982

Frigidaire introduces the first frost-proof refrigerator, eliminating the need for customers to defrost their appliances at all. “Frigi-Foam” insulation allowed for the first Frost-Proof refrigerator-freezer.

The Radio Cap Corporation introduced the Koozie™, a Styrofoam sleeve designed to insulate a chilled beverage from warming up due to conduction or heat radiation. Many a cold beverage will be kept cold.

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required. The idea of cold storage dates to around the turn of the 20th century, when mechanical refrigeration was just becoming reliable enough for producers to entrust their livelihoods to these third parties along the cold chain. While new fast train lines could bring fresh-picked strawberries from Florida or melons from California to areas with harsher climates, the easiest

“Everything from eggs to apples (apart from canned, pickled or dried versions) would be seasonally unavailable without cold storage.” way to defy seasonality was to store local produce in newly built refrigerated warehouses for perishable foods of all kinds.

The effects of these changes were noticeable immediately. “Twenty years ago,” explained a reporter for the New York Sun in 1894, “[p]ears which sell today two for five cents were 40 cents apiece, and black Hamburg grapes…were only to be had from hothouse growers and were worth $1 a pound. The luscious great cherries which were so plentiful a few weeks ago were unknown

1992

Jim Stuart invents the ice factory, the first ice machine that produces and bags ice cubes on demand. This eliminated the need for centralized ice production in regular, larger ice factories.

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in our markets, prunes were known only as a dried fruit, and apricots and nectarines were rare enough to be but a tradition among the greater part of the people.” At that time, rare meant expensive, but not impossible to purchase for special occasions — for instance, buying oranges only at Christmastime.

Storage itself can be expensive even now because of the energy it requires, but it remains an essential component to using refrigeration to transcend seasonality. Everything from eggs to apples (apart from canned, pickled or dried versions) would be seasonally unavailable without cold storage.

The final link in the cold chain, the electric household refrigerator, is a kind of personal cold storage. When the first reliable, affordable, electric household refrigerator went on the market in 1927, it became an instant sensation. It meant that people no longer had to buy food quite so often as before. This was cold storage for your home. By 1960, there was a modern fridge in nearly every home in the country.

Refrigerators allow consumers to time their purchases far better than they would otherwise.

In countries like France, where refrigerators are far smaller than they are in the United States, many consumers gladly visit local markets every day so that they can be assured the best flavor

1998

The introduction of the Internet-enabled or “smart” refrigerator. Not enough people have decided that refrigerators that tell you what should be on your shopping list are worth the added expense and potential problems of buying yet another Internetenabled device.

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possible from their perishable products. By contrast, in the United States, grocery shopping only once a week is a common way to avoid the inconvenience of driving to the Walmart Supercenter and waiting in the checkout line more often. Stores like Costco, which sell huge packages of frozen goods, thrive on this American tendency to favor convenience over taste.

WIKI COMMONS

INCREASING FRESH ACCESS: MAKING THE COLD CHAIN MORE EFFICIENT

Future technological developments in our web of cold chains will likely occur in the parts that we don’t see. Bring the cost of storage and transport down, and producers can enter new markets or lower costs for consumers so that more people can afford to eat fresh. These changes will require increasing the scale of what travels through cold chains. Perishable products that are still too expensive for most consumers to buy regularly might become more accessible.

Dragon fruit (pitaya), for example, is wellknown enough to be a flavor of VitaminWater, but just try buying an actual dragon fruit in the produce section at even a store like Whole Foods.

Maybe it can be done in some places at certain times of the year, but it is far from easy. Grow the supply and cultivate the demand, and a cold chain could evolve to service it.

2006

High-end cooler brand YETI was founded in Austin by brothers Roy and Ryan Seiders. Their new design for a heavy-duty cooler that could stand up to abuse during fishing trips and retain ice for hours started as gear for serious outdoors people and has evolved into a multi-product cult brand. And it keeps your beer cold for a long time.

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Apart from refrigeration itself, many important developments in cold chain history have involved improvements in transportation — airplanes or refrigerated containers for transoceanic shipping. With all the links in the chain fully refrigerated now, what might future technological improvements look like? Will your meal kits soon arrive via drone? That depends on whether it can be done efficiently and cost effectively.

Improvements in the energy efficiency of refrigeration will also help increase the availability of foods to people at all economic levels if those savings are shared with consumers in a meaningful way.

Increased access to perishable foods of all kinds has been a sign of growth in our food provisioning system ever since the advent of ice refrigeration in the early 19th century. The web of cold chains this process has created stretches across the planet. Even countries that do not benefit from being the endpoint of a cold chain probably produce perishable products that could not be sold elsewhere without refrigeration technologies. While it is unlikely that the changes in diet promoted by future changes in technology can surprise middle-class Americans anymore, anything that can be done to bring the same food choices and relatively low prices to the rest of the world will benefit all of humanity.

2012

Blue Apron begins shipping meal kits, including meats and seafood items sandwiched between ice packs to ensure freshness past delivery.

MODERN TIMES COLD CALLING? Expensive “smart” refrigerators, like the Internet of Things in general, are really just a way to convince consumers that they need to replace appliances that work perfectly well as-is with new ones hooked up to the World Wide Web so that they can impress their friends with how modern their home is. At this moment in time, the benefits of owning a networked refrigerator do not justify its cost. If you can send email from your computer or your phone, you have no need to send it from your fridge.

Refrigerators have certainly gotten bigger since 1960. However, they don’t keep food any fresher.

2014

Internet-enabled refrigerators, which first made an appearance in 1998, now have cameras and the ability to text you with messages about what might be running low inside. In the same year, both Wired and Forbes magazines published stories lauding high-tech fridges and wondering if 2014 was the year they’d finally take hold.

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IN DEPTH

The Evolution of How We Shop for Food

BY LARISSA ZIMBEROFF

In 1900, the “eat local” movement wasn’t a movement — it was harsh reality. Just over a century later, advances in technology — from shipping to inventory management — allow us not only to eat Japanese sushi so fresh it’s practically flapping, but also to restock our fridge with delivered groceries we ordered two hours before. How did our food get here?

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Read our story about early NYC’s network of markets, located so people could access provisions as part of their daily routines. We’ll link to it in this story on foodandcity.org.

IN DEPTH

says they’ll be expanding to a third location soon.

“The business is going really well,” he says.

“Huge.” FreshDirect is not alone. A McKinsey & Company report on the state of parcel delivery notes: “The last mile is seeing disruption from new business models that address customer demand for ever-faster delivery.”

While speedy delivery is what everyone says they want, consumers are mostly interested in the cheapest option. What will bring down the cost of same-day delivery? Scale, automation and robots.

THE ROOTS OF FOOD SHOPPING

How did we get here? While today’s passionate consumers debate the merits of local versus organic, in the early 1900s everything was local.

Markets were small areas where carts, farmers, buyers and sellers gathered together to buy, sell and trade. In cities, if you couldn’t pick it up within a 10-minute walk from your home, it wasn’t in your bag. Markets were open six days a week, and notions like refrigeration were pure space-travel fantasy.

Eventually, these loose outdoor areas moved under roofs and inside buildings to create permanent spaces for vendors, which enabled more PREVIOUS SPREAD IMAGE BY KENNY BRAUN; THIS PAGE: COURTESY GOOGLE MAPS

This is a grocery store.

But the public isn’t allowed inside — only Foodkick’s personal shoppers, who gather provisions ordered online and send them via bike or car to customers.

The so-called dark store enables same-day deliveries in Manhattan.

Located in a gritty section of Manhattan called Hell’s Kitchen is a large grocery store stocked with everyday essentials — but it’s not open to the public. The building is leased by Fresh Direct, the largest online grocer in the northeast; it’s part of a new hybrid of on-demand shopping and is called a “dark store.” Products on the shelf of a dark store are picked and packed by employees and sent off in cars or on bicycles to fulfill sameday deliveries. In today’s grocery store parlance, same-day has ousted Fed-Ex priority overnight as the new gold standard.

For FreshDirect, creating a new sub-brand to serve consumers’ last-minute needs was vital to remaining competitive. The idea was tossed around in 2011, when the team did a market assessment of its conventional model. Online grocery stores offered a wide spectrum of where and when you get your food. But if you needed something the same day — maybe because you hadn’t thought about dinner or you didn’t know where you would be — well, you were high and dry. The resulting concept, named Foodkick, launched first in Brooklyn in November 2015 and then in Manhattan in 2017.

The private company won’t share numbers, but Jason Lepes, vice president of merchandising,

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reliable sourcing and a greater selection of foods offered. Over time, improvements in transportation and shipping also increased selection.

Before cars overhauled our diet — allowing consumers the ability to drive longer distances to stores and buy more than one could carry home by hand — trains did. First, by moving commodities around the country, increasing selections and lowering prices at markets. And then, by incorporating refrigeration technology.

“The refrigerated rail car made meat affordable for average households by allowing companies to ship carcasses rather than live animals across the country,” writes Marc Levinson in “The Box,” his book about the shipping industry. Once refrigeration became an everyday reality, food products could be shipped farther from their origin. (Learn more about the importance of refrigeration in the food supply chain on page 16.)

But before shipping could become fully globalized, our food cargo had to transition from rails to trucks, a trend that began in the 1940s and firmly took hold in the 1950s.

Once trucking became the de facto interstate transit (complementing trains but surpassing them in goods delivered), leaders in the industry began retrofitting the human side of delivery, tackling shipyards first. Trucking magnate Malcom McLean realized that quicker loading times could improve every stage of logistics. He helped create a streamlined container, leveraging what he knew of trucks and trains. This shipping container became the industry standard and rapidly made delivering goods by boat an affordable idea. In the 1960s, once mechanical cranes transformed how containers were loaded and unloaded, removing traditional dockworkers from the process almost completely, goods from every continent, such as kiwis from New Zealand, Italy or China, could reach the world.

GLOBAL GOODS

Each year, 817 million tons of foods are shipped around the world, with distances increasing over the last 50 years to an average of 1,300 miles.

More than $50 billion worth of goods is moved every day by cars and trucks, a journey that depends on shipping containers. We need look no farther than our morning cup of coffee for an illustration of those miles.

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“By the time you enjoy the beans back in L.A., they had traveled more than 30,000 miles from field to exporter to port to factory to distribution center to store to my house — more than enough to circumnavigate the globe,” writes Edward Humes in “Door to Door.” “Thousands of man-hours and billions of dollars in technology and infrastructure — along with the efforts of countless unsung heroes who pack, lift, load and drive and track it all — combined to bring that cup of coffee to my lips.”

FAST VERSUS INSTANT

Ten years ago, the Natural Resources Defense Council reported that a “typical American-prepared meal contains ingredients from at least five countries outside the United States.” What’s in our refrigerator today represents an even bigger diversity, and the last mile these far-flung foods travel is being compressed into a sandwich of instantaneous desire.

While many companies and startups are focusing on speeding up the last mile, only a fraction of consumers are ready for it. In a survey of almost 5,000 people, McKinsey reported that only 23 percent wanted to pay for the same-day option. Despite that, “same-day and instant delivery will likely reach a combined share of 15 percent of the market by 2020,” McKinsey asserts.

Evidence of this burgeoning trend is everywhere: Amazon expanded its same-day delivery service to Prime members in 8,000 cities in early 2018. Around the same time, Target purchased Shipt, which has more than 20,000 personal shoppers, for $550 million. Instacart, which works with almost every major supermarket, has expanded to 69 regions across the U.S. and by the end of 2017 was serving 60 percent of American homes. Jet.com, owned by Walmart Inc., offers its same-day service for free, and soon, Walmart will pilot the same service in New York.

While everyone from big brands to startups attempts to tackle the challenges of same-day food logistics — a problem that involves route optimization, staffing, merchandising, scheduling and supply chain — the concept still relies on old-world delivery methods like trains, trucks and ships. Whoever dramatically changes that network — getting food delivered to our homes in game-changing ways — will also own that well-worn cliché: I reinvented the wheel.

817 million tons of foods are shipped around the world

1,300 miles

average shipping distance

>$50 billion

worth of goods is moved every day by cars and trucks

5 countries

the typical American prepared meal contains ingredients from at least this many countries outside the United States

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ROUTE OPTIMIZATION THAT ALLOWS FOR CONSTANT CHANGE

LAYLA SHAIKLEY Wise Systems co-founder Layla Shaikley isn’t your run-of-themill MIT architecture grad. Yes, she co-created a tech startup that’s improving the way logistics companies optimize deliveries.

But she also interned at NASA, co-founded TEDxBaghdad and co-produced a video featuring #mipsterz, aka Muslim hipsters.

Creativity and impact are guiding themes for Layla and key pieces of a lesson her own Muslim parents instilled early on. “They had one rule for me growing up: Do whatever you want, just be the best at it.”

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But when they began asking around, they learned that companies of all sizes had a more pressing problem: navigating day-to-day deliveries. While routing solutions such as Roadnet® — one of the largest — do exist, these technologies planned routes the night before. They couldn’t make real-time adjustments if a snowstorm hit, traffic got snarled, loading docks filled up or the customer didn’t turn up to receive delivery.

Along with potential customers voicing their needs, MIT advisors noted the same challenge existed in the U.S. Using harvested data as a backbone, the team tackled the complex problem of route optimization for the shipping and logistics industry. Here was the answer to their assignment: a technology to offer nimble routing using big data, machine learning and cell phones.

The first thing they discovered was that most traditional delivery routing systems weren’t accounting for the volume of available open-source data that could reveal historical patterns such as traffic and weather. The team created several algorithms that take in passive data, including historical service times or traffic patterns as well as direct feedback from drivers using their prototype — a straightforward mobile app for drivers to follow, paired with a web-based tool for managers to review.

The students searched for companies willing to share data so they could test it. That part was easy.

“We would cold-call companies on LinkedIn and say, ‘MIT and big data,’” says Shaikley with a laugh. Apparently, that combination was enough to pique interest. To better understand drivers’

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challenges, Shaikley rode along with them. “I’d hop in these giant trucks and watch them use our app,” she says. “It was like standing in front of a crowd naked. Drivers are sharp and they know what they’re doing.” And they had immediate feedback: Drivers were critical of the abundance of in-app messaging. How could they deal with a ton of pop-ups while on the road?

After two years of fine-tuning their proof of concept, the team made it official, incorporating the business and naming it Wise Systems. After graduation in 2014, they joined an MIT startup accelerator. When they wrapped that, they searched for paying clients.

Through an advisor at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, they were introduced to Anheuser-Busch. They walked the beer giant through their process, explaining that by using data such as traffic, cancellations, late customers and weather, the Wise algorithms adjust drivers’ schedules on the fly. This means “they can make the most efficient decisions possible” about navigation and order of delivery, according to Chazz Sims, Wise Systems CEO and co-founder.

In 2016, Anheuser-Busch agreed to run a pilot using Wise Systems in two locations: Seattle and San Diego. The company still used Roadnet, its existing technology, for its route pre-planning, but it used Wise for day-of routing. Several months later, when Anheuser-Busch reviewed the metrics — driver satisfaction, shorter routes, quicker work time — they were impressed enough to roll the Wise launch out to every single U.S. wholesaler, plus two locations in Canada.

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IMAGE COURTESY OF MITAA

When Layla Shaikley began brainstorming with three classmates, it was to fulfill an assignment in a class on entrepreneurship at MIT. The professor had challenged them to devise a technology that could change a billion lives. Focused on developing countries, the foursome looked at how to use data from volatile zones to draw conclusions about crime and personal safety. They decided to target cell phone data and searched for partners outside the U.S.

IMAGE COURTESY WISE SYSTEMS

Keep up with the latest in logistics entrepreneurship and follow Layla Shaikley on Twitter @laylool.

Wise’s success with the beer giant demonstrates the novelty of their solution — real-time route optimization.

“People think this is solved, but it’s not,” says Sims. Case in point: UPS spent billions to create its in-house system, called Orion. Initiated more than a decade ago, the system didn’t launch until 2016, with the help of 500 staffers working on the technology. In contrast, Wise has a staff of 15.

While UPS has incredible numbers — handling 15.8 million packages on an average day — imagine how much technology has changed since Orion was initiated. A UPS spokesperson noted that real-time optimization, including real-time navigation and updates after each stop, won’t be fully deployed until 2019.

Wise’s app makes extensive use of thirdparty tools — including mapping, weather, traffic and navigation — and focuses solely on the algorithms that take in the data and create flexible day-of schedules.

“We pull real-time traffic, we look at history, we make projections of what the rest of the day will be like,” says Sims. Taking into account that specific route’s history, the software determines that if a driver continues with his or her current route, a delay is likely. At this point, the Wise app

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IN DEPTH

alerts the driver to a route change, which the driver can accept or reject based on his or her experience with the trip.

Shaikley calls drivers’ collective experience “tribal knowledge.” A driver who hits the same stop week after week knows some customers have good and bad times for deliveries. Maybe the Coke delivery guy will be there at the same time, maybe parking will be terrible, perhaps the customer is out for his daily coffee.

“They [drivers] can add their own knowledge and insight into the app, and we can take in the feedback,” says Sims, noting that future algorithms for a specific route would include those updates. Shaikley emphasizes their goal of being a driver-first solution.

With several new contracts on the horizon, Wise Systems expects to be profitable in 2018.

They will have helped the delivery of 10 million packages by the end of this year by homing in on a single part of the puzzle: flexible routing.

For a project that started as a grad school lark, Shaikley says they’re chipping away at the original goal of changing a billion lives by focusing on drivers. “Understanding what is in their heads is the most valuable.”

Wise Systems analysts monitor logistical data from multiple sources, including Internet maps, weather forecasts, customer schedules and driver inputs, to ensure delivery routes are optimized in real time.

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IN DEPTH

WILL TRUCKS EVER VANISH?

FOODIE ROBOTS Don’t be surprised when you begin to notice your sidewalk cluttered with electronics instead of people. DoorDash, an on-demand food delivery service based in San Francisco, is testing out robots as an addition to its food-delivery workforce. (Read more about DoorDash on page 34.) With pilot programs that began in Redwood City in 2017, the self-driving robots deliver goods to customers within a two-mile radius. The futuristic helpers come from Starship Technologies and look like small refrigerators on wheels.

The self-guided machines use nine cameras and sound waves to create an imaginary bubble around them, which allows them to go around objects or make a full stop. It’s not all rose-colored glasses, though, as cities like San Francisco attempt to enact restrictions limiting these pesky bots.

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EDIBLE DRONES The future of delivery, according to everyone, is drones. But that reality — drones dropping boxes out of the air — is a long way off, despite stunts pulled off by Google and Amazon. However, two designs are delivering food in meaningful ways.

Windhorse Aerospace has developed a one-use drone, nicknamed Pouncer, to bring food and other supplies to disaster zones. The device, made of lightweight plywood that can be used for firewood post-delivery, incorporates meals wrapped in thin plastic that could be reused in disaster shelters once the meals are finished. According to founder Nigel Gifford, the drone will feed about 100 people for one day. Inedible components, such as the electronics, are being kept to a minimum. One day, Gifford’s crafty engineers could wrap those components in bouillon cubes. Sounds delicious, right?

Another forward-thinking drone test is happening in our national parks. The pilot program is aimed at rescuing prairie dogs. The cute rodents have been hit by a disease that, if left untreated, could spell disaster for their primary predator, the black-footed ferret, an animal on the brink of extinction. This is where the drones come in: They’re dropping peanut-butter pellets — the size of blueberries — laced with vaccine for the sick prairie dogs on the ground. The beauty of the drones in both examples is the distance they can cover and their ability to serve hard-to-reach spots.

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EDIBLE DRONE IMAGE BY NICK WILSON; FOODIE ROBOT IMAGE COURTESY STARSHIP TECHNOLOGIES

While trains, trucks and ships continue the global movement of our food in what is now a decades-old system, the evolution of that last mile to our front door is vaulting forward. Here are a few innovations that might become old hat within the next few years.

TOP: COURTESY DOMINOES; BOTTOM: AMAZON ILLUSTRATION VIA USPTO

Read more about the self-driving Domino’s vehicles in MIT’s Technology Review. We’ll link to the article in this story on foodandcity.org.

UNDERGROUND DELIVERY In the distant future we may see the return of pneumatic tubes making their way back into the world as we know it. Several years ago, Amazon filed for a patent for a dedicated system of underground tunnels that could bring packages closer to home — a system that “may avoid congestion experienced by traditional transportation networks.” Late in 2016, the patent was awarded. Other companies are tinkering with similar ideas: Elon Musk is developing technology to bore tunnels below street level in Los Angeles, and Mole Solutions Ltd, an English company, has tested similar systems with government funding. But there’s another more obvious use for our underground spaces, and that’s for our salad bowl. So far, we’ve got greens growing inside giant warehouses, in shipping containers and on rooftops, and it won’t be long before we see hydroponic cells — microfarms, if you will — cropping up underground. When the lettuce is ready for harvest, it can be delivered quickly to surrounding areas, keeping the carbon footprint as tiny as a microgreen.

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A customer retrieves her pizza from an autonomous Domino’s delivery car. The rear “seats” were actually a locked heating compartment keeping pies warm. As the car arrived, the waiting customer received a special code via text that unlocked the warmer.

AUTONOMOUS PIZZA For six weeks in late 2017, Ford partnered with Domino’s to deliver pizzas to randomly selected customers in Ann Arbor, Michigan, via its Ford Fusion Hybrid Autonomous Research Vehicle.

Customers who agreed to be a part of the test could track their pizza on the Domino’s delivery app, receiving text messages as the car approached. When it arrived, customers received a text with a unique code to unlock the heating compartment inside the vehicle and retrieve their pizza.

Ford’s test cars use lidar, a method for measuring distance to a target using pulsed laser light detected by both radar and camera sensors. While the test did include an engineer behind the wheel, the windows were blacked out so there was no interaction. Despite these depersonalization measures, the team found people wanted to interact with the car, even saying hello to it and waving goodbye. As the second-most-profitable pizza company in the world, behind Pizza Hut, Domino’s is paying close attention to what role self-driving vehicles may play in the future. While Ford won’t begin building its self-driving vehicles until 2021, you can already order a pie from Domino’s simply by tweeting the pizza emoji to your local franchise.

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HANDOFFS: BILLS OF LADING AND THE CARGO CUSTODY RELAY We’re hearing more and more about high-tech ways to track and trace our food as it moves through the supply chain to our plates — from barcodes to blockchains. But the practice of tracking food shipments isn’t new. It has long been a way for shippers to make sure their cargo is safe and secure throughout its voyage.

At each step along the supply chain, anyone who handles a shipment has custody, a specific term that connotes legal responsibility. The chain of custody confirms the identity and quantity of the shipment (e.g., 400 bushels of Italian pears), declares that the pears were continuously controlled and transported by the carrier and identifies everyone who handled the pears throughout the shipment. Having a clear record of this chain makes it possible for the shipper to track any theft or contamination of the cargo on its way to the receiver.

The documentation that authenticates the movement of food between a shipper and a freight carrier is known as a bill of lading. It’s a receipt that confirms the transition of goods from one link in the chain to the next. This document notes the details of the cargo and its intended path to you, including the type and quantity of a shipment. It’s provided at the end of a shipment to verify delivery of the goods shipped and is the basis for payment for the goods at the receiving end of a shipment. Without these bills of lading, neither the farmer nor the exporter gets paid.

Going back to maritime practices — before planes, trains and automobiles got involved — the bill of lading would have been prepared by a merchant to indicate that the shipper was responsible for delivering the items consigned to him. These receipts were originally called “bills of loading” as far back as the Middle Ages, and they listed what a merchant actually loaded onto a ship. It was a sort of contract between a merchant and a shipper that confirmed the receipt and safe transport of a specific cargo list.

Since shippers often lost ships and their cargo at sea, the bills of lading helped account for losses and reparations. Like today’s tracking

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tools, bills of lading indicate a transfer of responsibility throughout the supply chain. They are legal documents that confirm ownership of the goods and, as such, are assets the shipper can use to secure credit against expenses.

As the bill of lading moves through the supply chain with a shipment of, say, bags of coffee beans on pallets, the legal notion of ownership and custody travels with the chain.

But the cargo list and a receipt are only two tools that leave footprints along a supply chain.

These days, we need much more data than these documents provide to effectively track food through our chain.

Newer tools include smart labels with barcodes that communicate harvest dates and times.

Scans of smart tags indicate precisely when food passes through the supply chain, when a USDA inspector has certified a meat shipment or the temperature of the interior of a shipping container or a tractor trailer. All this data is being gathered as food travels to our plates.

These new tools go far beyond those old bills of lading, but the intention of those bills and the chain of custody remain the same.

Just wait until blockchain technology picks up where bills of lading and custody left off. Then you’ll be able to see the passage of ownership of your carrots all the way from the farmer’s plot to your pot, who handled your carrot and why, when, where and maybe even the weather outside when the carrots moved between buildings.

Be prepared for some surprises.

BLOCKCHAIN EXPLAINED A blockchain is a distributed, digital ledger used to track shipments. Rather than a single document — the old bill of lading — traveling throughout a supply chain, the information contained in that one document exists in many computers in the network along the way. So every time a bushel of apples moves through its supply chain, information about its steps are recorded, including who moved it, when, why and what resulted from the movement. The data form blocks that leave unique “fingerprints” along the chain. Any attempt to change a fingerprint travels throughout the entire chain, alerting everyone that the integrity of the chain was compromised.

If someone steals an apple, the blockchain will know where and when it disappeared. For the food industry, blockchain appears to be a way to prevent food fraud and ensure food safety. Real-time awareness of inconsistencies in the chain will enable faster and more precise responses to foodborne disease outbreaks. Consider the Romaine lettuce contamination in early 2018. Blockchains would have enabled investigators to track back all the way to rows of lettuce growing in the field.

At least that’s the theory.

ROBYN METCALFE

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IN DEPTH

One party requests a transaction

Requested transactions are funneled into a P2P network and broadcast to each individual computer (or node).

Individual nodes receive the request and validate the transaction using an algorithm.

Once the block is added to an existing chain, transactions are complete and permanent.

Approved transactions are represented as blocks and added to a public ledger.

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CASE STUDY

Smarter TV Dinners

BY KRISTIN ELISE PHILLIPS

Remember when you had to leave your house to eat restaurant fare? Today, eateries and delivery companies are working together to bring the restaurant dine-in experience straight to your dining room. Eating out in is just a click away. Here’s how it works.

“I ‘favor’ all the time.” Like many Austinites, Pete has co-opted the name of the local food delivery service Favor as a verb.

Exhausted after a multi-city business trip, he sinks into his gray green leather couch and plants stockinged feet onto an oversized ottoman. Plucking his smartphone from a row of remotes, he opens an app and scrolls past bright photos of tacos, pancakes and pho. He settles on an upscale neighborhood Italian restaurant and, within seconds, has sent an order into the ether.

Almost immediately he receives notification that a runner named Joshua has grabbed his order.

Pete grins. “I cook at home when I have someone to cook with and for, but tonight it would cost me just as much to go to the store to buy food for a meal. And I’m lazy.” Pete’s not alone.

Favor, along with other meal delivery services like DoorDash, Uber Eats and GrubHub, is part of a rapidly growing niche within the foodservice industry. And they’ve become a boon to an otherwise mildly stagnant sector of the economy — restaurants. A recent study by industry analyst Bonnie Riggs, of market research company

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NPD Group, finds that half of meals purchased at restaurants are now eaten at home. She predicts that the future trajectory of the industry could improve if restaurants focus on providing consumers with the choices and fast delivery times they need and want.

In short, people from young professionals to busy families are increasingly taxed for time and stressed. One solution is to recover time typically devoted to shopping and cooking by browsing delivery menus.

Five years ago, home delivery was largely still the realm of the pizzeria. In fact, Favor’s origin is intertwined with pizza through the college job experience of the company’s founders.

“Ben Doherty and Zac Maurais admit that they were probably the geekiest pizza delivery guys,” says Keith Duncan, senior vice president at Favor. “They were constantly calculating on spreadsheets the most efficient delivery routes.”

Favor, like many of its competitors, started about five years ago. Austin was its first market; now the company is concentrating on expanding

Hungry for dinner? Pull out your smart phone — but not to call in an order to go. That’s so 2012. Today’s takeout is likely to come via a delivery app that’s partnering with dozens of restaurants to bring exactly what you’re craving to your doorstep.

Each app offers a wide selection of cuisines; each has a unique tracking interface; and users can rate everything from the quality and accuracy of the food to delivery performance in the app.

Will we ever cook again?

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CASE STUDY

7 MILLION food deliveries

90 PERCENT of these were prepared meals from restaurants.

B E LOW: A customer favorite from Tyson’s Tacos.

OPPOS ITE: Favor delivery man Ronald Kaase swings by Tyson’s Tacos in Austin to pick up an order for delivery.

Tyson’s Tacos has seen its business grow 30 percent over a year ago — a result of increased Favor orders.

cities using their own cars, scooters or bicycles.

The benefit of this flexible workforce to restaurants — and pizza parlors! — is huge, since the delivery team is made up of on-demand contractors rather than regular employees, who would need to be paid by the hour regardless of whether they were out making deliveries.

More traditional restaurants also benefit by taking advantage of what is, essentially, a new revenue stream. According to a 2015 study by the delivery company GrubHub, restaurants that add digital ordering average a 30 percent increase in revenue from takeout. Anecdotally, Favor’s Duncan knows of hundreds of restaurants that avoided closing by capitalizing on this new revenue stream. Digital meal delivery is so successful that there is now a new trend in some cities: “ghost restaurants,” which are essentially just kitchens, with no table service or wait staff.

The growth of the meal delivery industry is also a boon to the companies who develop the digital apps. All seem to be capitalizing on the service provided by the flexible workforce. Favor delivers more than meals — everything from milk to medicine — which will only expand now that the company was recently acquired by regional supermarket chain H-E-B. DoorDash is no exception. Headquartered in the Bay Area, this company has expanded into numerous cities across the country to efficiently deliver any purchase.

“The vision for DoorDash is not just [being] a food delivery company but instead a logistics platform, [striving] to become experts in delivering anything in a city from point A to Point B,” says regional general manager Benjamin Lipson.

“We get increasingly sophisticated and learn from our experience, incorporating it in our algorithms and focusing on optimizing travel time.”

Twenty-seven minutes after placing his order, Pete’s doorbell rings. There is Joshua, plastic carrier bag in hand. The exchange is seamless and short because Pete has already paid for his meal, delivery fee and tip through the app.

He now has the ultimate TV dinner for his night at home: delicate rounds of roasted beets and oranges resting amid bright specks of fennel and mint, followed by a perfect portion of beef nestled in polenta, shallots and savory gremolata.

Can you smell the sweet, layered herbs in the vinaigrette? Yum!

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IMAGES BY KENNY BRAUN

Since launching in 2013 Favor has completed more than

into additional Texas cities. Duncan estimates that, since launching in 2013, Favor has completed more than seven million food deliveries — and 90 percent of these were prepared meals from restaurants.

“On the front end, we have a consumer app for placing an order, and on the back end there is a system that makes sense of all the orders and assigns them to delivery folks — runners — who can communicate with the customer once they accept the order,” says Duncan. “We are constantly optimizing the experience to increase the speed of delivery, and we encourage customers to order within a certain radius of their home because proximity is really important for the quality of what is essentially takeout.”

How has this new business model developed so quickly? A confluence of several factors — including the normalizing of cashless, online retail over the past decade, the fact that three people out of four Americans now own smartphones and a trend that sees half of all Americans using their phones for online purchases — has led to a rapid increase in mobile commerce. In fact, it is predicted that by 2020, m-commerce will catapult to include nearly half of total U.S. digital commerce, reaching $284 billion.

Even more critical to today’s digital meal delivery system is a new workforce made up of independent contractors. Favor, for example, uses more than 25,000 runners who snatch orders when they want to and deliver meals in

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C O N V E R S AT I O N

Investing in Tomorrow’s Food Chain

BY JANE BLACK

IMAGE BY MIKE McGREGOR; GETTY IMAGES CONTOUR COLLECTION

Former Whole Foods Market co-CEO Walter Robb acknowledges that during his 26 years with the company the grocery giant helped usher in a new way of thinking about food — from farming to grocery shopping. Today, as an investor and advisor to food system startups, Robb is poised to influence the conversation again.

Walter Robb is the first to admit that it was not pre-ordained that he would become one of the modern era’s gurus of good food. After graduating from Stanford, he planned to become a lawyer, but he only lasted a week at law school.

Next he tried being a teacher, a soccer coach and a farmer. None was the right fit.

In 1978, he borrowed $10,000 to open a natural-food store in an old garage in Northern California. He later sold his second store in 1991 to Whole Foods Market. By 2010, Robb was coCEO with John Mackey, the visionary founder of Whole Foods. Sam Kass, the former White House chef and policy director for Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” program, says Robb has done as much to change the food system as anyone in America.

With Amazon’s 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods, Robb, 64, is starting a new chapter.

Through his firm, Stonewall Robb, he’s an investor and an advisor to innovative food startups. It’s a natural next step for him — after all, he got a $10 million payout when he left Whole Foods. But his acolytes will not find Robb a typical investor. He is thoughtful, rather than brash and obsessed with disruption. And unlike many technology investors, he is not search-

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ing for silver bullets. After 40 years in food, he understands the complexity of the food chain and knows that culture and conversation will be as powerful as technology in creating a more just food system. Robb talked to Food+City contributor Jane Black about what he looks for in a startup, the importance of creating a company culture, his hopes for the Amazon-Whole Foods deal and the future of grocery stores. Excerpts, condensed and edited for clarity, follow: Jane Black: If you Google Walter Robb, the one thing you’re definitely going to learn is that your favorite food is lentils. Lentils?! Have you always been a healthy eater?

Walter Robb: No, I wouldn’t say. I grew up in a typical upper middle-class family. We had piggies in a blanket and we had Bird’s Eye frozen vegetables — stuff like that. It wasn’t really until I got to college that I opened my eyes to some of the healthier foods and started making my own bread and that kind of thing.

Black: College isn’t usually where kids start to eat healthy.

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Watch Walter Robb discuss business culture, a leader’s vision and how to find your passion in a Duke University video linked in this story at foodandcity.org.

Robb: Well, in my sophomore year I started really reading [about food]. I read Wendell Berry’s book, “Culture and Agriculture, the Unsettling of America.” And that was pretty exciting for me.

And I read Frances May Lappe’s “Diet for a Small Planet.” Frances was speaking in San Francisco at Food First on Mission Street, so I went to hear a couple of her lectures.

Then I also met Alan Chadwick (a pioneer of organic gardening in California). And I spent time apprenticing with him. Between all those

“Culture is the sum total of the humanity of the company. It’s where the culture and values come alive with a presence.

It’s: How does it feel around here?

How do the customers feel? How do the team members feel? That’s what culture really is. It’s an alive thing.” things, my interests in healthy eating, the soil and healthy living overall sharpened up. It kind of started me down the path.

Black: Jumping ahead, you joined Whole Foods in 1991 and rose through the ranks. In 2004, you were named co-president. In 2010, you were promoted to co-CEO. What do you think was your biggest contribution?

Robb: It’s always tricky to say stuff about yourself. But look, I think I was part of the core team that really helped Whole Foods change the conversation about food in America. So, I’m very proud of that. I think I’m a good retailer — at the craft of retailing. I love it. My number-one quote over the years was this: “We’re not so much retailers with a mission, as missionaries with retail.”

I think I’ve definitely helped to shape the retail and culture of Whole Foods, which, as you know, is one of innovation and experience.

Black: Which leads perfectly to my next question. As the food world shifts to be much more technology focused — Amazon’s purchase of

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Whole Foods is just one indication of the trend — how does the culture you created survive?

Robb: Well, I think you start by realizing that culture is a living, breathing thing. Culture is the sum total of the humanity of the company.

It’s where the culture and values come alive with a presence. It’s: How does it feel around here?

How do the customers feel? How do the team members feel? That’s what culture really is. It’s an alive thing. It continues to evolve in a way that’s malleable, and, at the same time, that it’s anchored in the values.

So now the great question is: Will two wonderful companies [with their own strong cultures] have the courage, the wisdom and the humility to learn from one another, to learn from one another’s cultures?

At Whole Foods, we acquired 19 companies under my tenure as co-CEO. It takes about two years for two companies to really come together.

So the answer to your question is, it’ll happen over time. But it will require efforts on both sides to really be thoughtful about how it’s happening.

Black: What are the big issues you see coming up in food?

Robb: There’s a new set of issues up on the table.

Like food waste, like imperfect produce, like farm worker health, like full transparency on product. This new generation is going to look for a more, if you will, whole foods system. In other words, one that is more fully transparent, more responsible, [with] more options.

Black: What are you working on to address these new issues?

Robb: I’ve picked some companies to invest in and serve as a director. Food Maven [a Colorado startup that sells excess food acquired from producers and distributors to restaurants and institutions at a discount] came through Grant Lundberg, the CEO of Lundberg Family Farms.

He reached out to me and asked me to talk to his cousin Patrick Bultema, who’s the CEO in Colorado Springs. And I guess it was just meant to be.

I’ve been troubled as a grocer for a long time about the food that gets thrown away. About 40 percent of food grown is wasted. It’s produced,

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there’s too much supply and about one third of what goes to landfills is food. It’s time for that to be met with some sort of thoughtful solution.

I realized, “Wow, this is something we haven’t really worked on.” Here’s an area [in which] we can make a real change. I was drawn to that. I like working on things that matter. I like working on things that have a purpose, and [working with Food Maven has been] a great opportunity to work with people I enjoyed and to try to work on something that I know needs to be done. So that was an easy one.

Heat Genie came through Danielle Pruitt, my other half. She knew Mark Turner, the CEO. It is a technology that allows a can to self-heat in about a minute and a half. Think about it. Not only do you create new products for customers [such as self-heating coffee, soup etc.], but … think about disaster situations where hot food is needed.

I liked it for that reason. I thought the company had a missionary aspect. It’s a leading-edge technology for something that hasn’t been done before, but with applications where it could make a real difference in people’s lives.

company’s work and a commitment to building a culture that’s good for the people at the company. They need to understand and appreciate those things.

I think I look for something that’s a forward movement into the future, right? So we’re creating something that doesn’t yet exist and that is going to help shape the world. Not just something that’s been around forever that’s just kind of trodding along, but something that’s going to open new opportunities and new growth.

Black: So it’s the fact that all of these companies has a mission that drew you to them?

Black: OK. The questions everyone wants answered: What is going to happen with the Amazon purchase of Whole Foods? What can Amazon do, given their position, to take good food to the next level?

Robb: I think number one is transparency.

Number two, I’d say, is quality. I’d say quality and standards so that the transparency leads us somewhere, that it’s not just an obfuscation exercise.

[Adaptation] to the digital world is also important so that it’s easy for customers to access that information and to inform their choices, and this will also help companies to evolve faster.

The last big thing is the food waste.

IMAGE COURTESY HEAT GENIE

Robb: The criteria are a great young entrepreneur or CEO, a sense of mission or purpose in the

Black: What parts of the supply chain do you feel really need the most attention in food?

One startup in which former Whole Foods Market co-CEO Walter Robb has invested is HeatGenie. Its innovative self-heating container safely warms the package’s liquid contents — coffee or soup — within a couple of minutes, right in a consumer’s hand.

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C O N V E R S AT I O N

TELEGRAPHING THE HIGH PRICE OF CHEAP FOOD Walter Robb argues that consumers need help to make more responsible choices about what they eat. But how?

One idea: True Cost Accounting, an emerging method that tries to pin precise dollar figures on the social, environmental and public-health consequences of food production. It’s a way to price a steak to include the costs of raising and slaughtering the animal as well as, say, the cleanup costs of associated water pollution.

How to account for these “externalities” is tricky. In 2016, some 600 economists, farmers, policy makers and advocates gathered in San Francisco to discuss new ways to categorize, quantify and monetize the food system’s externalities – and, equally important, how to message it to consumers. “We need to provide the context behind stories without overwhelming our audiences with complexity,” said the Consumers Union’s Urvashi Rangan. “You give the bad news, but you also have to give people a message that empowers them and puts them in the driver’s seat.”

Robb: Well, I’d love to see them continue to reach the full potential of Whole Foods. Whole Foods was built to endure, to be around for hundreds of years. Built to make a permanent shift in the food landscape. I’d love to see Amazon continue to honor that and accelerate it into the future.

That may be self-serving because I was there so many years and it’s so much a part of me, but I’d love to see that happen.

The second thing would be to propel a more nuanced conversation about food. This often is a conversation about “Is it cheap enough?” But the reason food is not “cheap enough” is there are so many tradeoffs in the production of the food that folks don’t always know what they’re getting.

So how do we more, I don’t know, more articulately, more intelligently, more holistically approach this question about cost and quality?

In the end, there always is a set of choices for people. How do we make organic food, more natural food, less expensive, but not so cheap that it loses the reason for being? How do we make people more aware of the costs that in cheap food are really not being reflected, and the costs that are happening as a result of having it? So how do we raise the quality of the conversation about that?

Black: What about all the drones and robots we hear about? Will there even be grocery stores?

Robb: Absolutely, because the need and desire for human connection is ever-present. What’s exciting about robotics is that they are already being used extensively in distribution and in physical stores as a partner to team members, doing things like checking store conditions and out-of-stocks. In Wake Fern, a grocery chain out of the southeast, you’ll see robots going up and down the aisles doing their work, increasing the productivity of the human workers. It’s already part of the grocery store. But there’s a tendency to overstate the high-tech narrative right now — that everything will be replaced.

Black: What will grocery stores of the future look like?

Robb: The world is tilting toward fresh and artisan and the true craft of food production. Soon, we’ll see [stores] in different forms and sizes. I think the big stores are in trouble; people don’t

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want to shop at them anymore. The whole way people get food is changing. We have so many options for food, whether it’s a meal kit, pickup or eating out. You don’t have to go to the store all the time. The grocery store is just one option.

There will always be a market, but even more, it has to serve as the town square.

More broadly, the grocery store of the future will have no boundaries to it. Even though it’s a physical store, it will reach all the way into your home and even walk around with you. Imagine a Whole Foods refrigerator. You set it up on an app, pull it up on your phone, order what you want and have it there when you get home. There are also virtual reality technologies, like one from a company called Spacee, that allow you to project images of the store onto, say, a wall and enable delivery from that image.

Black: So much of this is about convenience and more personalized food. What needs to be done to create a better food system?

Robb: We need a true north. I believe in the quality of food and the transparency and the access of good-quality food, and an inclusive food system for workers and eaters. I don’t know if everyone would agree with that.

Customers are pushing hard for transparency and more information, more choices. But there are different sets of customers who can afford different things, and they are supported by commodity suppliers. These two [food systems are] running in parallel. They have different value systems.

History suggests from our experience at Whole Foods that change is possible. There are setbacks, of course. The current White House shelved a rule around animal welfare for organic that was in the works for three years. It’s two steps forward, one step back.

But directionally we aren’t going to go back.

It’s a combination of things, over time, that will lead to change. But if there’s one thing we need to keep working on, it is these gaps of access and availability. We produce enough food, but it’s not finding its way to the people who need it. I would hope that the north star is an ever-increasing availability and accessibility of food that nurtures and sustains our bodies and our communities and our country. That’s what I’m going to keep working on.

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Check out Chef Watson (www.ibmchefwatson.com) and invent your own novel dishes with what’s lingering in your fridge.

RECIPE TRACKER

COOKING OUT OF THE BOX

“Bread is Gold” and “Cognitive Cooking” approach recipes from opposite ends of the spectrum. One shares stories and recipes by chefs who fed hundreds of people using food deemed unfit to sell. The other shares stories and recipes by IBM’s Chef Watson, which generates recipes from any combination of ingredients.

The key to success for both? Human chefs who applied their knowledge and experience to effect a delicious outcome.

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Have you ever had a compost bin full of bits and druthers that you think are almost edible?

You know, the thin peels of broccoli or carrots or apples? What about a refrigerator drawer with wilted greens or the selection of cheeses you got for that cocktail party a month ago? Do you just chuck them out, concerned that they’re not fresh enough to use or be delicious?

And what about the money you spent on those ingredients? Or the costs of producing them? Does tossing no-longer-fresh food take a toll on your grocery budget, as well as your environmental conscience?

As landfills are increasingly brimming with food that was produced but never consumed (for a variety of reasons), it may be time to reconsider the ways in which we assign a value to ingredients. After all, in less affluent eras — or areas of the world and the U.S. — people couldn’t afford to waste food products that could still contribute to a tasty and nutritious meal. Think of it as a really good time to figure out how to be creative with your organic kitchen matter.

The good news is lots of people, including some of the world’s best chefs, are working on ways to address this very issue. In fact, two recent cookbooks — or, let’s say, sources of recipes — approach the notion of creating a dish from opposite ends of the spectrum. One, “Bread is Gold,” by the world-renowned chef Massimo Bottura, is a collection of recipes and stories by and about a variety of chefs who were called to cook using only products that arrived at a popup soup kitchen during the 2015 Milan World Expo as excess, day-old or deemed insufficiently fresh to sell.

The Expo’s theme, “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life,” spoke directly to Bottura, who worked with a parish priest in the city to transform an old theater into a dining hall that could accommodate, restaurant-style, 100 guests each day — serving lunch to area school children and supper to local homeless people.

For the fancy chefs who came to Milan to cook for a day or two at the Refettorio, their constrained ingredient lists were the catalysts to their creativity. Deliveries included days-old bread, produce in various states of maturity or discoloration, cheeses and other dairy products

Food + City Magazine

that were nearing or past their sell-by dates. Each day’s supplies were different and unpredictable.

After the initial shock of the arbitrariness of that day’s delivery wore off, the enterprising chefs got straight to work, creating delicious and comforting meals for their guests.

“Something of apparently no use could become a secret weapon in the kitchen, a super power that could magically transform a dull dish into a vibrant one,” Bottura writes about the solution Chef Cristina Bowerman devised for using the outer — and often discarded — leaves of vegetables: Dry them and grind them into intense powders that add stealthy flavor to dishes.

(She’s not the only one who makes savory powders from dehydrated vegetable peels; read on.)

The chefs wasted nothing because very little was available to start with. Even banana peels were used to make a chutney. It was a revelation, even to one of the world’s top chefs, Bottura. “If you open your mind and start thinking differently about ingredients, then you no longer have to throw away a banana peel ever again,” he writes.

By contrast, for Chef Watson, developed by IBM — yes, that Watson — the sky’s the limit when it comes to ingredients. Through machine learning and algorithms, an online app called Chef Watson will take in up to four ingredients that you suggest (whether or not you see how they might result in something delicious) and output a set of instructions that it “believes” will create an edible dish. Chef Watson offers a never-ending source of combinations for any ingredient under the sun.

The computer ingested the entire archive of Bon Appetit magazine, as well as a huge dataset of different ingredients and their detailed flavor profiles. From there, Chef Watson learned to recognize synergies — ingredients that seem to go well together (understood perhaps by frequency of pairing or through the logic of their marrying profiles). Garlic and tomatoes. Mushrooms and butter. Pork and apples.

As the recipe appears on screen it displays three graphic measurements — synergy, pleasantness and surprise — that help the user determine how the hypothetical dish might turn out. Just as constraints fueled the chefs at the Milan Refettorio, the search for novelty drives Watson’s recipes.

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While the platform is available online for anyone to use, Chef Watson has been on a few roadshows, employed by featured chefs to make novel dishes. The chronicle of these events is a book called “Cognitive Cooking,” another collection of experiential narratives and try-ityourself recipes.

Central to the recipe successes shared in the book are the chefs — the human cooks — whose expertise and creativity helped shape Watson’s “suggestions” of unusual ingredient combinations into viable outcomes. For instance, an early trial was a pastry recipe for Spanish Almond Crescent.

But the ingredient list included more liquids than would work to make a stable dough. A chef at the

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Institute of Culinary Education tweaked the recipe, substituting some ingredients for others to ensure a satisfying outcome but still maintain the flavor profile Chef Watson suggested.

“This is the nature of the human-machine collaboration,” the book notes. “The computer doesn’t dictate. It suggests.”

For IBM Watson Group Engineer Florian Pinel, Chef Watson has great potential to help people eat more healthfully by personalizing recipes according to dietary constraint and personal preference. It also could help reduce food waste by making suggestions based on what lurks in your refrigerator, finding ways to use the last of those beets along with the remains of the star

If you have unused ingredients lingering in your fridge and pantry, don’t toss them — type them into Chef Watson’s ingredient fields and await a recipe generated just for you. You can refine outcomes through filters such as cuisine type, dish type or even holiday. Dinner solved!

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IMAGES BY KENNY BRAUN

RECIPE TRACKER

fruit and ground pork you bought for last weekend’s cooking project.

“People can create new, personalized recipes on the fly,” Pinel said in a 2014 TED@IBM talk.

“People can cook food that’s flavorful and healthy without ever eating the same thing twice.”

Whether you come to your starting line with leftovers and remainders or a motley collection of ingredients for your next unique Watson creation, a key component is a human willingness to see the value in every piece of the puzzle. Whether it goes into tonight’s dinner or becomes part of the stock for tomorrow’s sauce, just about every edible thing on Earth has a value that should prevent it from simply being next week’s landfill fodder.

That’s certainly the philosophy that drives Chef Ian Thurwachter of Intero, an Italian- themed fine-dining restaurant in Austin.

Fine-dining restaurants are often known for their pristine ingredients and precise techniques, the combination of which should result in a mind-blowing dining experience that’s hard to replicate at home. But often, there’s a cost to this level of quality, and it’s not only found in the prices on the menu.

For example, to create carrot brunoise, the delicate ⅛-inch dice that often garnish soups or stews, one must start with an irregular, round vegetable and make it square. In the same vein, to get to the heart of a broccoli stem, arguably the sweetest, most tender and delicious part of the green brassica, the outer peel must be removed first.

In both instances, once you’ve finished cutting and have the finished ingredients, ready to sprinkle or roast or puree, you also have a pile of peel and other trimmings — byproducts that often end up in a compost bin, or worse, the garbage.

Not so at Intero, where Chef Thurwachter operates a no-waste kitchen in which every stem, peel, animal organ, off-cut of meat or other commonly tossed odd and end is put to flavorful use.

Take the humble, fibrous broccoli peel.

At Intero, they pack it with salt and sugar and leave it to ferment for several days. “It balloons up, is intensely pungent, with a very off-putting smell. But the flavor is really awesome — it’s got this tart saltiness,” Thurwachter explains. “We take all that and dehydrate it and turn it into a powder that’s got this background funkiness.

It’s intensely savory, and we use it as a season-

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ing.” (Another clever dehydrated use for vegetable peels….)

The idea for this transformation came from a sous chef who had seen some something similar with mushrooms. Thurwachter engages his team in regular brainstorming sessions to figure out how best to use all the scraps.

“About once a week it’s a necessity,” he says, “but we try to make it an ongoing thing. Every day we have projects.” Projects such as dehydrating the smoked carrots his bartender used for a cocktail. The resulting powder will go into a pasta dough. Or using remnants from artichokes that were served as a bar snack in a stock that pairs with a rabbit tortelloni. “It’s just constantly trying to move these puzzle pieces around,” he says about the challenge of using all the parts.

It’s a challenge that resembles the no-waste reality of Italian farmers of earlier generations. “I love Italian cooking more than I love Italian food because it’s really a cuisine that historically is based on poverty,” Thurwachter says. He explains how veal farmers used to sell their prime cuts to fancy restaurants in Milan and keep the off-cuts — the lower-valued and harder-to-sell cuts — such as the shanks and head, for themselves.

But just as Bottura’s chefs made scrumptious meals from undervalued ingredients in Milan in 2015, Italian farmers of yore tapped into their own creative wells.

“They came up with things like osso bucco milanese (using the veal shank), which is the quintessential Italian dish,” Thurwachter explains. And it didn’t stop there. Arancini, fried rice balls, are made from leftover rice, stuffed with leftover veal and fried the next day for yet another meal originating from humble ingredients. “And then there are these really elaborate preparations where the farmer’s wife took the time to completely bone out the veal head and roll it up into this beautiful roulade and braise it and then slice it super thin and serve it with bitter greens and a salad. I would take that veal roulade with a salad over a veal chop any day of the week,” Thurwachter says, vividly illustrating an alternative way to value ingredients.

While he’s set a different challenge for himself than Massimo Bottura or Florian Pinel, Chef Thurwachter relies on a similar asset: “Our biggest resource in the kitchen is our collective creativity.” C O R Y L E A H Y

CLO CKW I SE F ROM TO P L EFT: At Austin’s Intero, chefs waste not.

Case in point: lemon powder made from dehydrated lemon peels; a branzino fish entree dusted with lemon powder; Yum Yum powder (dehydrated fermented broccoli scraps) sprinkled over a dish that highlights the rest of the broccoli plant, grilled florets and thin slices of pickled broccoli stem.; homemade vinegar-in-process using carrot tops and leftover wine from bottles sold by the glass; paste made from fermented broccoli peel before being dehydrated; Intero Chef Ian Thurwachter.

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ON OUR LOADING DOCK

Our nightstands are loaded with books to read and our laptops are packed with websites to explore and unpack some wisdom about the global food supply chain.

BOOKS Before the Refrigerator (Jonathan Rees)

Before the refrigerator, there was the icebox. But if you didn’t live in the frozen tundra, getting ice required a complex choreography. Jonathan Rees traces the process of ice harvesting and distribution — a key method of preserving perishable foods — as it evolved in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As the country moved toward mechanical cooling, widely available ice played a vital role in transforming the American diet.

Coffee Lids: Peel, Pinch, Pucker, Puncture (Louise Harpman, Scott Specht)

Some things just seem like they were always there, as if no one could possibly have spent time inventing them. The ubiquitous plastic lid on the humble paper coffee cup is just such an item. But take time to consider its nuanced and varied design features, as architects Louise Harpman and Scott Specht have in this delightful mini-primer on industrial design, and you may enjoy your morning joe even more.

Barges and Bread (Di Murrell)

It’s not every day that a historian has lived the life she’s writing about. But for Di Murrell, barging has been her way of life for more than 30 years. Her book looks way back to 13th century London and the history of the grain trade on the Thames. Grains and bread — not coincidentally, a synonym for money — were staples for all citizens because, as a commodity crop, grain was stable, and large quantities could be transported efficiently over even the shallowest waterways. Take a trip back in time with the historian bargemaster.

The Flavor Thesaurus (Niki Segnit)

As we investigated IBM’s Chef Watson, another source of clever food pairings sprang to mind: Niki Segnit’s “The Flavor Thesaurus.” Structured like Roget’s classic, the book lists ingredients — such as beets, blueberries, oysters — and offers classic and novel pairings based on flavor themes. Recipes and other suggested preparations are included in the text. It’s a fantastic resource for moving off the beaten path and developing your own recipes.

Fishing Lessons (Kevin Bailey)

Bailey provides a glimpse of the future of the global fishing industry, documenting the rise and fall of fish populations, the loss of indigenous fisheries and the arrival of fish farms. He makes the case for a future seafood industry that includes “new” artisan cultures while incorporating new ways of selling direct to consumers. He says that his book provides “a fine-grained view of the larger issues in the world’s fisheries — too many fishermen with too few fish, conflicts with other resource users, loss of fishing rights and degraded habitats.” There’s room for hope, according to the author.

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The Long Haul (Finn Murphy)

Finn Murphy dropped out of college in the late 1980s, much to the chagrin of his parents, and became a long-haul trucker. He’s a furniture mover, but his experience driving the nation’s highways — and navigating the small lanes of Lower Manhattan or the mountain passes in Colorado’s Rockies — runs in parallel to the thousands of other haulers who transport our food, our packages and everything else we buy and ship.

This catchy memoir offers multiple tableaux, and lots of juicy slang terms, of one life on the road.

PODCASTS Sourcing Matters

Host Aaron Niederhelman takes listeners with him as he examines problems with and solutions for feeding ourselves into the future. He finds leaders focused on food system reform and reducing environmental impact who tell stories worth pausing for. “Our goal with this show is to celebrate leading voices committed to promoting food values through proper natural resource management,” says the podcast’s website. “It is, after all, the sourcing which matters.”

FILM Rotten (Netflix)

This series of six episodes dives into various parts of the food supply chain, exposing some unsavory realities of the industrial food complex. Mass deaths of honeybees, the plight of peanut farmers in an age of allergies, the economics of dairy farming and the dwindling global fish supply are among the tough topics the filmmakers tackle. It may leave you wanting to move to the country and grow all your own food.

MAGAZINE Eaten: The Food History Magazine

Social and economic historian Emelyn Rude launched a new magazine in the fall of 2017 with a focus on the history of food. Filled with luscious eye candy, rediscovered recipes and gastronomic essays, the magazine transports readers through time on a common vehicle — food.

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CALLING ALL STARTUPS! MassChallenge can help take your business to the next level.

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Learn more about the Food+City Challenge Prize online at foodandcity.org/prize. Read about the 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 finalists and their innovations.

S TA R T U P S P O T L I G H T

TOP LEFT COURTESY TRANSAERA; MIDDLE LEFT COURTESY STOWGA; MIDDLE RIGHT COURTESY VINDER; BOTTOM LEFT COURTESY AGRIPULSE COMMUNICATIONS

WHERE ARE FOOD+CITY STARTUPS HEADED? If the 2018 Food+City Challenge Prize entrants are any indication, we’re well on the way toward improving our food system.

Four years into our competition for food supply chain startups, we’ve noticed some interesting trends, including changes in the way entrepreneurs think about innovation. Progress is apparent despite food regulations, a lack of consistent data standards and the companies’ need to achieve scale while remaining small and agile.

For many startups, technology is central — but it’s not necessarily all about apps anymore.

Instead, futuristic tools that bring new rigor to agriculture and warehouse management are on the horizon. UAV-IQ Precision Agriculture, one of three $10,000 Food+City Prize winners, provides precision crop monitoring for farmers using drones and sensors. The new technology enables farmers to use the gathered data to make decisions about resources to maximize their yields and reduce crop losses.

“UAV-IQ is attacking the fundamental lack of precise knowledge of where variability exists within fields,” says co-founder Andreas Neuman, former assistant director of operations for the U.S. Air Force’s Global Hawk Unmanned Aerial System. “This lack of knowledge and suitable toolkits to first identify and then manage variability leads to massive inefficiencies due to one-size-fits-all approaches, which often result in over-usage of water and chemicals.”

Another high-tech agriculture solution is Transaera, which is commercializing a material developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that absorbs moisture within greenhouses. The product gives indoor farmers more control over their growing environments and enables them to reduce plant disease and increase yield while also reducing energy consumption.

“To feed nine billion people by 2050, we need new agricultural systems,” says founder Sorin Grama. “Indoor agriculture could be an answer, but it is an energy-intensive operation that will not scale unless we figure out how to grow foods using less energy and water.”

Entrepreneurs are also using technology to connect links in the food supply chain. For example, Stowga, a London-based business-to-business

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startup, connects retailers to unused warehouse space. This “Uber for warehouses” helps firms with excess storage use their space more efficiently; and it offers below-market options to businesses that may need space for only a short time.

Team mentor PJ Tanzillo, head of product at Favor Delivery, has high expectations for Stowga, led by CEO Charlie Pool. “Charlie and team are not your typical early-stage startup,” Tanzillo says.

“They have a clear line of sight to a sustainable business, and they have achieved product and market fit. I’m confident their success will continue.”

Making connections across chain links continues to be a key draw for startups. Vinder is a digital platform that connects home gardeners who grew more than they can eat with community members who seek freshly grown food. Sam Lillie launched Vinder by going door to door in his hometown of Port Townsend, Washington, asking residents whether they had home gardens and if they ever had extra produce they’d be willing to sell. It wasn’t long before Lillie connected dozens of home gardeners with produce-hungry families, moving more than 300 pounds of fruits and vegetables among them.

“We have been trained over the last 70 years to buy our produce and processed goods from a giant supermarket chain that sources products from all over the world,” says Lillie. “Vinder reduces the food waste that happens in every city across the country while efficiently reducing delivery miles because you are buying from your neighbor and not some farmer in Argentina.” With the Vinder website and app, consumers in dozens of cities in 11 states can connect with nearby growers to buy the produce they seek, reducing food waste and putting money back into their communities, literally at the grassroots level.

If you don’t have a garden but want to grow your own food, Indiana-based Aggressively Organic, one of three Prize winners, can help.

It offers micro-gardening systems for people without access to earth-based gardens. Users can grow lettuces, tomatoes and other fresh veggies in just one square foot of space in their homes. Anchored by cardboard “micro-growth chambers,” the hydroponic systems use a mere 16 ounces of water to grow a head of lettuce. In

CLO CKW I SE F ROM TO P L EF T: Transaera’s technology absorbs moisture in greenhouses; founder Sorin Grama makes his pitch; Vinder founder and CEO Sam Lillie; Prize winner Andreas Neuman of UAV-IQ (left) with Food+City’s Robyn Metcalfe; UAV-IQ’s monitoring technology in use; map

by Stowga representing available storage space in the United Kingdom.

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C LOC K W ISE F R OM TO P LEFT: F+C’s Robyn Metcalfe congratulates Dominique Kavuisya, Taimba founder and Prize winner; Grit Grocery founder Dustin Windham visits with a supplier in the field; Robyn with Prize winner Jonathan Partlow, principal of Aggressively Organic; Grit Grocery truck; the Grit Grocery team presents to the judges; Aggressively Organic’s hydroponic growing system with leafy greens.

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contrast, conventionally grown lettuces require 25 gallons of water per head.

“Instead of cut-and-kill or pull-and-ship — like all other current modalities of agriculture that end up shipping already dead and dying goods that end up being wasted — our stuff stays living, and we harvest when hungry,” says founder Jonathan Partlow.

Vinder and Aggressively Organic aren’t the only companies working on solutions to curb the growing amount of food waste. The 2018 submissions included ideas for moving excess food to consumers and methods for repurposing waste such as spent grains from beer breweries as ways to limit the amount of waste that ends up in the landfill.

The most tenacious and complicated problems that startups try to solve involve aggregating and transporting food from local producers to markets, restaurants and grocery stores. It’s a problem that food hubs have tried to solve for years. Today’s startup teams are working on a range of platforms: from apps that aggregate farm inventories to hauling and logistics businesses that focus on the transport of food from local producers to consumers. One of our contestants, GrubTubs, retrieves food waste from restaurants, turns it into compost for local chicken farms and then provides eggs back to the restaurants.

Another, Houston-based Grit Grocery, brings the grocery store right to your neighborhood, using a food truck model. Consumers no longer have to travel to the fringes of their communities to shop at energy-gobbling big-box grocery stores. Instead, Grit Grocery trucks bring locally grown produce, local honey and meal kits — featuring, for example, shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico — right into communities, shortening the last food mile and cutting the distance from farm to table.

“The shopping experience fundamentally shapes the flow of food, not only by creating limitations on what kind of food can be supplied but also by subtly creating demand for certain foods or even entire categories of food,” says Dustin Windham, who founded and operates Grit Grocery with partners Michael Powell and Jamal Ansari.

“Building on that, we want to develop a new kind of localized supply chain that is specifically tailored to retail experiences, which is more curated, community-driven and socially intimate.”

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Some of these startups rely on volunteers and are modeled more like nonprofit organizations that rely on grants and donations. Others are attempting to create value for both farmers and consumers by charging either the farmer or the consumer for their logistics services. These startups are responding to increasing consumer demand for local food from small producers. But it’s not clear if this local supply chain can find a way to make money without working with the larger food distributors.

In Kenya, where large food distributors aren’t as common in the food system, Taimba seeks to tame a chaotic and fragmented supply chain by connecting farmers with retailers and vendors through a cashless business-to-business app. Vendors order their produce via the app, then Taimba retrieves it from the farmers and delivers it to the marketplace. Farmers receive a fair price for their goods, and vendors receive inventory at below-market prices.

“The ability to offer a market and good prices to small-scale farmers has really boosted farmers’ earnings by reducing wastage and paying promptly,” says founder Dominique Kavuisya. Taimba went home with one of three $10,000 Prizes.

While consumers everywhere want more local food, the system to deliver the goods is still awkward, unsustainable and encumbered by capital equipment expenses and the lack of technology and tracking on the small-producer side.

We are anxious to see how our finalists work on solving these issues.

Through the innovative work of our contestant startups, we are optimistic that we will see more locally produced fresh produce reach consumers, less food waste in the landfill and better and safer products in our food system.

ROBYN METCALFE AND MELANIE HAUPT

FOOD + CITY CHALLENGE PRIZE Innovation in food takes all forms, from making improvements to pallets to creating new avenues for delivering food or designing packaging that increases shelf life. Since 2015, we’ve hosted a challenge prize for startups in the food space that are challenging our notions of how the supply chain works. The 2018 Challenge Prize was awarded on March 13, 2018, at SXSW Interactive.

Visit foodandcity.org/prize to learn more about this year’s entrants and winners.

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TOP RIGHT IMAGE COURTESY GRIT GROCERY, MICHAEL RAMOS; BOTTOM RIGHT IMAGE COURTESY GRIT GROCERY, EMILY JASCHKE

S TA R T U P S P O T L I G H T

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HISTORY

THE BULLWHIP AND THE BEER GAME Only at MIT would students play a “Beer Game” to understand a supply chain phenomenon called the Bull Whip Effect.

When you’re holding a whip, a small flick of the wrist creates ever-increasing amplitude down the length of the whip. It’s a problem food distributors deal with all the time because even the smallest variation in consumer demand can increase chaos and unpredictability upstream.

Jay Forrester, a professor at MIT from 1956 to 1989, devised the idea in the early 1960s to illustrate how supply chain forecasts can create inefficiencies. In the Beer Game, a single item — a case of beer — travels through a multilevel distribution system in a supply chain. Players operate four stages of the supply chain, and the objective is to order beer and deliver it to customers. Sounds simple, right? Not so fast.

The simple act of a player changing the amount of beer ordered sends a ripple throughout the supply chain.

As consumers — the demand side — change their behavior, the supply side adapts inventory and warehousing activities.

Players also blame each other for feedback failures that result in a lack of beer. But a build-up of supplies in a warehouse also reflects a communication breakdown between consumers and producers. You lose if you create a large inventory while trying to adjust to the change in orders. Product sitting in a warehouse costs money, so having a stable supply chain and deftly adapting to changes in demand is the winning play.

Research shows that a variation of as little as 5 percent can lead to a variation of 40 percent up the chain. For example, if consumers order fewer bottles of beer, the grocery store will send a message up the supply chain. (“Up” in supply chain lingo means moving from farm to the table; “down” means moving from table to the farm.) That 5 percent decline in beer sales in

April could lead to inventory build-ups within the chain, overordering of packaging material, and misguided communication between brewers and ingredient producers and processors.

Another way this concept affects the food supply chain is when weather forecasters predict bad weather. A prediction of icy roads in Texas leads to a rush on grocery stores to purchase food while roads are clear. Store shelves empty, and the store’s procurement team returns to its inventory system to squeeze out more stock, while suppliers downstream scramble to find additional ingredients or sources.

As Beer Game players discover, one strategy for variation in consumer demand is to have extra inventory on hand so they can absorb a temporary uptick in demand. But storage costs money, and many food suppliers, intent on creating a “lean” supply chain, want to minimize inventory to save money and avoid food waste. Sometimes, when consumers stop buying a product, stores offer discounts and promotions, but that may cause unpredictable surges in sales that create more problems downstream. You can only hold onto tomatoes for so long.

Forecasts seem to be the culprit here, and the bullwhip effect is more about the problems in forecast-driven supply chain than in supply chain dynamics in general. If your supply chain depends less on forecasts and is more aligned with actual consumer behavior, the bullwhip effect may be dampened.

Food companies that link point-of-sales data and supply chain planning can tighten the loop between consumer behavior and other activities throughout the supply chain.

If nothing else, the Bull Whip and the Beer Game reveal the systems effect of the food supply chain. Everything is connected, and one failure has dire consequences. Lack of beer is just one of them. R O B Y N M E T C A L F E

THE BULLWHIP EFFECT CUSTOMER Customer order spike

WAREHOUSE Warehouse increases orders

DISTRIBUTION CENTER DC increases orders

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FOOD + CITY MAPS

CHAIN GANG Pelotons are not just for bikers.

Truckers are bringing their rigs in line with packs of other trucks to save on fuel costs and increase road safety. Companies such as Peloton and Daimler Trucks are entering the market with their connected truck platforms, enabling convoys of trucks to travel together in close proximity while sharing software and connectivity. A compromise between driverless trucks and human drivers, these new systems still include a human driver that steers each rig. But the entire convoy accelerates or brakes based on the movements of the driver in the lead truck. Tesla is also joining the pack with its autonomous, electric trucks. Convoy software can perform real-time route optimization from the cab and provide truckers with an alternative to spending hours, days and weeks at the wheel, navigating traffic and avoiding collisions.

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IMAGE COURTESY EPHEMERALNEWYORK.COM

Food+ City How We Feed Our Cities

ISSUE IV

Fashionable Foods: How Producers Keep Up With Trends page 12 The Evolution of How We Shop for Food page 24 Todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Takeout: Under the Hood of App-Driven Delivery page 34

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