Welcome to the first Food Tech News round-up of April! This week we have news on a cake created by Google artificial intelligence, Kiwibot hitting the streets of Santa Monica, Ember’s new travel charger, and Chipotle’s bitcoin giveaway.
Google artificial intelligence created a cake recipe in partnership with Mars Wrigley
Google Cloud engineers created a machine learning model that uses hundreds of existing baked good recipes to develop a completely new recipe. The result was a “Cakie” (a cake and cookie hybrid) and the components of what makes a cake and cookie were generated with artificial intelligence. For the partnership with Mars Wrigley UK, Maltesers (chocolate-covered malt balls) were incorporated into the recipe to create the first-ever “Maltesers AI Cake.” Google trends revealed that “sweet and salty” was a top search trend, and the cake recipe used a buttercream frosting infused with Marmite. Earlier this year, the same machine learning model was used to create two totally new baked good recipes, the “Cakie” and “Breakie”.
Kiwibot and MealMe partner for food delivery in Santa Monica
MealMe, an app that compares prices and times of food delivery services, and Kiwibot, a teleoperated robot service that delivers food, have partnered to deliver food in Santa Monica. On April 1st, the companies began delivery for Blue Plate Taco and Red O Restaurant on Ocean Ave. Kiwibot’s robots provide contactless food delivery, and so far 100k deliveries have been completed in Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Jose, Denver, Taipei, and Medellin,
Ember launches car charger to keep beverages warm on the road
Ember, the creator of the self-heating coffee mug, has created a car charger to keep Ember Travel Mugs warm all day. The Ember Travel Mug is capable of keeping a beverage warm for three hours, but now it can be plugged directly into a car charger for an all-day charge. The car charger costs $49.95 on Ember’s website.
Chipotle hosted a giveaway of free burritos and bitcoin
For National Burrito Day, Chipotle partnered with the founder of Coil, Stefan Thomas, to giveaway $100,000 worth of Bitcoin and $100,000 in burritos. To win, contestants had 10 chances to guess a six-digit code. The giveaway only lasted for nine hours on April 1st on BurritosOrBitcoin.com. Update: I tried, and did not win.