Digital Gastronomy Software for Food Design and Production

Background

The digital revolution has enabled the significant development of food tech as it relates to growing, manufacturing and processing ingredients. Today, kitchen appliances are more accessible, efficient and connected than ever before - the ease of which allows food chefs more time and resources to advance their culinary creativity. Food engineers are likewise on the pulse of these changing trends and taste preferences. 

Digital gastronomy is an approach that empowers culinary chefs and food engineers and infuses traditional cooking with new computational capabilities. In the Hybrid Lab at the Hebrew University, we deploy existing digital fabrication instruments in traditional kitchens and integrate them into cooking via hybrid recipes. Our hybrid recipes merge manual and digital procedures, and import parametric design tools into cooking, allowing the cook to personalize the tastes, flavors, structures and aesthetics of dishes.

The computational technologies are already advanced enough to create visually attractive and truly personalized dishes.

Our Innovation

Our researcher is developing a software environment for culinary chefs and food engineers.  The “Meta Recipe” module can plan dishes down to the smallest voxel/pixel, allowing for taste to be differentiated voxel by voxel. Ingredients can be inputted to achieve the most miniscule taste and texture variations, while simultaneously defining cooking techniques and codependences. 

The Meta Recipe digital environment harnesses Machine Learning Algorithms to categorize, standardize, and process big data to support a Chef’s creativity. World cooking practices and traditions are taken into account and digitized to serve the recipe creation process.

Benefits of Digital Gastronomy

• Develop tools for chefs to think digitally when cooking.
• Create structures, taste patterns, complex taste transitions, and efficient incorporation of one recipe into another.
• Control taste in a very accurate and localized manner, with the ability to think in resolution of “taste voxels.”
• Enable multiple versions of a recipe to reach production efficiency (e.g. cost, calorie per dish, water & energy consumption)
• Tailor dishes to follow any kind of eating practice (gluten-free, kosher, vegan etc.)
• Reduce the carbon footprint in the production chain by allowing for exact planning

Opportunity

The global smart kitchen will only grow in popularity in the coming years.  Our business model blends

Prof. Zoran is seeking venture funding to spin out a startup company for this interactive software. The company will develop a revolutionary yet grounded culinary practice to promote a human-driven digital enhancement of culinary traditions.