AI and Personalized Nutrition

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts Hi, I'm Xing Singh, and I'm Simon Jack, and together we host Good Bad Billionaire, the podcast exploring how some of the world's richest people made their fortunes . And we're back for a new season with a brand new lineup of billionaires. Yeah, global pop icon Beyonce. Hollywood movie director Steven Spielberg. Football superstar Christiana Renalo, anyone? And as ever, we're asking you to decide whether they're good, bad or just another billionaire. That's good, bad billionaire. Listen first on BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Greg Foot and welcome to Dough, the show that explores future wonder products that might rise to success and redefine our lives. Each episode I sit down with entrepreneurs and experts to discuss where the businesses of today may be tomorrow . This time we're looking at the future of food , asking what will we be eating in a hotter, more unpredictable world ? Will it be ancient grains, three D printed food or AI personalized diets? And do we have the appetite and legislation for lab grown meat Joining me to serve up some culinary conjecture, some predictive plates, some edible expectations . It's futurist on cheese right, hello Tom. Bolshore Greg and Bolappiti. I feel I should have called you Chef for this episode because you used to run a hotel kitchen. Yeah, chef might be a bit generous. Cook might be more accurate, but it was my summer job and at one point the head chef walked out . So at the age of nineteen, I ended up running a hotel kitchen for a few months , which was a baptism of fire. I don't think I've ever worked harder, but it was very good fun. Yes, we do hear that about kitchen work. Well, cook, cheese right. I know that as part of your work now, you advise global food brands on what is coming down the road from precision fermentation to AI designed ingredients. So this topic remains close to your heart. Oh, enormously, enormously. It's one of my favorite subjects. Today we're asking what could be on our plates of the future and I've got three guests on the line to help us explore just that. Let me introduce the first, a trained chef with over thirty years of experience across food service, fine dining brands, and retail, and the partner and managing director of global trends agency the Food People. Charles Banks. Hello, Charles. Hi, Greg, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for joining us. You've worked with some impressively big players in the food industry on your CV I can see Starbucks, Mars, Gregg's Innocent Subway, Coca Cola. Why do they get you in, Charles? What do they want to know? We're here to bring some predictive clarity, I suppose, to make sense of the future. We analyze what's happening in independent stores and supermarkets and consumer media. We're continually tracking things like socials and cultural shifts, demographics and geopolitics. And I suppose it's our job to ask what's happening, but also why and join those dots to help businesses identify possible opportunities. And what trends are you seeing? What consumer trends are you seeing right now, Charles? It's a really really bro,ad spectrum from how technology is shaping food choices to , you know, GLP one appetite suppression and personal nutrition . You know , the age of kind of grazing and the fact food's getting more kind of casual and more portable . But then we've also got new global ingredients and heritage brains you've already mentioned, I' smort of balancing those big shifts, health, longevity . But also there's some joy going on in there as well. Be's all about joy. It's got to taste delicious, right? Well, let me bring in someone from the industry who has to consider these very things on a day to day basis, the global vice president of research and development at Mars Food and Nutrition, Karina Zimmerfeld, welcome Karina. Thank you. When people hear the name Mars, most will instantly think of Mars bars and sweets, but the company produces a lot more than that, don't they? Absolutely. You're right. Mars actually has three different segments, a snacking segment, snacks, confectionery, and chocolate seed , also a pet care segment , which includes p et nutrition, but also veterinary and diagnostic services for pets . And then us in Mars Food and Nutrition, which basically hosts some of the loved food brands in the world for example, Menzor Regional, Domo , Master Food in Australia or Kevin's Natural Food, Seeds of Change , and many more across thirty different markets. In the introduction, I asked, What will we be eating in a hotter, more unpredictable world . What I was talking about there is the need to consider the impact of climate change and geopolitical unrest on our food system. Karina, how are climate pressures and geopolitics impacting your supply chains right now , Mars . There is only one certainty that we have, is that the disruptions and the volatility is only going to be exacerbated . I think probably what COVID created as a m assive disruption continue to put pressure on every single supply chain. And it's around multiple factors, right? As you were saying . The fact is we cannot control those factors. I can't control climate. I can't control geopolitics. What I can do is to on creating the scenarios so that we can plan and adapt. We use supply rise for Europe predominantly from Spain , well due to shortage of water , it just didn't rain enough throughout the whole year. Farmers did not seed any rice, which means if you are attached to one variety of rice , odds are you won't be able to produce any rice for any consumer in the near future because the crop takes an extra year for you to actually be able to seed it again. So preparing yourself for those disruptions, ensuring that you are ready to pivot when they arise and when they emerge is I think the number one job to be done for myself and my team. There's a whole another factor here as well because current estimates put us reaching close to ten billion people on the planet by the year twenty fifty. It's an extra what? One and a half billion people in just fifteen years time. It boggles the mind. But to feed those people, global food output needs to rise. Add that on top of the climate press ures and the geopolitical unrest, and we're going to be dealing with a food system under ever increasing strain. It's very important context for today's conversation about what food we may all be eating in the future . Charles , let's talk about plant based food. It's already reshaped supermarket shelves and restaurant menus, but looking ahead, how do you think plant based foods will change in the future? Well, I think the first thing to say is that I think plant based eating is something that is absolutely here to stay . And yes, we're absolutely starting to see some of that sort of rapid growth starting to kind of plateau as that it becomes part of everyday kind of eating repertoire, I'd expect to see plant based foods become less ultra processed. I think that's one of the kind of forces that's going on out there. All of the hype around, you know, it's better for you, it's better for the planet, but not at any cost. That's a really interesting point, isn't it? Tom? Because there has been a growing movement against ultra processed foods UPF, but the tension here is that plant based foods can still be heav ily processed . If we involve more technology in the future, is there a danger that our food will become even more processed? I mean, yes, absolutely. Some of the alternatives we're looking at are heavily processed, but we have to look at this through a historical lens . Food is always a compromise. It's a compromise between what we love to eat. I'm sure we'd all love it to be freshly cooked by a home chef, pulled out of our little garden and put together . It's a nice dream. It's not very realistic. So I think we have to be care a bitful about being too dismissive of ultra processed food and especially as we try to move away from some of the higher carbon foods, we might have to accept a certain level of processing. Charles, you mentioned GLP one appetite suppressing drugs earlier They are often known as weight loss drugs. They can treat type two diabetes but also are used for obesity. They mimic this GLP one hormone and that can reduce appetite. So they are appetite affecting drugs. We did a recent episode of Sly Bread on Weight Loss Drugs. Really interesting, worth a listen on BBC Sounds. If the popularity of these powerful appetite affecting drugs continues to grow, what shifts, Charles do you expect to see in the nation's eating habits and nutritional health in the future? I think the reality is over the next few years is we're going to see the next versions, the next generations of these GLP ones that perhaps target very specific outcomes challenge some of the current sort of side effects. I think once we reach that stage, I think they change consumption patterns very quickly. I mean, we're already starting to see that Many retailers have released GLP one friendly convenience meals and maintenance and also I think we'll expect to see quite a lot from natural GLP one inducing foods into the future. There's a lot of work, a lot of research going on in that space as well. Corinna, it feels like for a long time there have been a lot of quote healthier products that were essentially just the original product s with some of the salt or the sugar or the saturated fat taken out. For a brand like yours, when you take a heritage product , a classic product , and you take something out or you add something in . How can you ensure that people are still going to like it? Is the bigger commercial risk changing a classic product or not changing it at all? You could think both ways. The risk is not listening to what your consum ers actually want because yes you're right, heritage brands have an even more enhanced sense of responsibility towards their consumers. But consumers also evolve. They get exposed to new realities, new products, new censorial spaces . So for me, it's more of a risk if you stay stagnant because you don't know. If you stay stagnant, you need to stay stagnant because you've listened to your consumers and that's what they actually expect from you. Charles, you mentioned joy earlier. When you're working with brands, how much attention do you suggest that they pay to this emotional side of eating? We've got a trend called Comfort Rules and Sweet Tooth and Snack attack and those types of things. And I think what that tells us is that there's a really important emotional side to food. It's something that you can't ignore as a brand. You can't innovate in a vacuum. You got to understand people eat. Karina, I can see you smiling at that. Taste is important and taste brings joy. You want to experiment and to understand what's exciting about that food. That's the joy. That's part of human nature. Tom, as Charles said, one consumer trend is likely to be towards alternative sources of protein. Driven not just by a human health angle, but also a planetary health angle, what is potentially on the menu? It's an exciting time because we've got so many options now that we can make proteins, program these little organisms into tiny factories that make things like alternatives to milk proteins. So you get the output of a cow without the burps and farts, basically, which we know are not very good for the environment. But beans as well, you know, we eat very few beans relatively to what we could. There's loads of different varieties of beans. They don't make up a huge part of our diet. Beans legumes leaves new varieties all sorts of options there. Also insects too. I mean, humans all over the world have been eating insects for thousands of years. They're not yet a staple on our plates . Do you think they might be in the future? Recognizably as insects, probably not, but I did a project a few years ago where I was asked to design the future pizza and we actually replaced a third of the flour in the base with insect flour from ground up cricket. Cricket flour. Yeah, that went down really well with people. So as an ingredient that boosts your protein, like we've talked about, adding protein into things, absolutely, as you know, something that's insect shaped on your plate, probably not so much. Let's explore lab grown meat, cultured meat or cell cultivated meat. I'd like to welcome a third and final guest onto the show to tell us more about this. He's an innovator and an entrepreneur who leads the first company in the UK to get European approval to produce lab grown meat for pet food at the moment, the chief executive of meatlee Owen Ensor. Welcome, Owen. Hey, Greg, thanks for having me on this chair. Could you start Ow,en by explaining what cultured or cultivated meat is ? Cultivated meat is real meat and it means that we can make animal proteins and meat without using an animal. And immediately we're creating chicken and what we have done is taken a single sample of cells from one egg one time and from that we can create an infinite amount of meat forevermore without ever invol ving another allon. So how we make cultivated meat is we take the single sample of cells from one egg one time and we put it in a large vessel. It's normally steel and we call those bioreactors. They're very similar to what you might see in a microbrewery. We add in the nutrients those cells need. So those are amino acids and minerals and vitamins and the cells then grow and after about a week or ten days you above far more than you put in and you can harvest those cells and incorporate them into delicious meat products. Cultivated meat made by other companies is on the menu for humans in places like Singapore , where companies are now selling it commercially . Why have the regulatory bodies in the UK not permitted it? Different regulators have different approaches. Traditionally, the US has allowed things to market and then regulated if there's issues. And in Europe, we've taken the opposite approach of regulating first and only allowing things to market that are very safe. But really it's about how quickly regulators are learning what is happening. So Singapore put a lot of time and money and effort into learning about cultivated meat. And we're now seeing the UK do that as well. So the food standards agency here in the UK has a two year program to learn about cultivated meat and start putting these regulations in place. So twenty twenty seven or twenty twenty eight, we'll likely see the first cultivated meat sold for humans in the UK. Oh, and here's a question that I'd like to put to lots of entrepreneurs who join us on the show. What is the core problem that you think lab grown meat could solve? There's actually a lot of problems that cultivated me could solve. The one that drew me to it immediately was the fact of just how many animals we kill every day. It's hundreds of millions of animals. And I think that there is a better, kinder way for us to produce meat. But also as Karina was saying , there are increasing supply chain issues about where can we find consistent resilient products because we're producing this the other side of the planet. We're not dependent on the weather conditions or certain environmental aspects. We can have complete control, flexibility and transparency on what we're producing, how we're produc ing it and when we're doing that. But then you will need ingredients for your bioreactor, which would still have supply chains that could potentially be impacted. I mean, there are always supply chains, but when we're using our pretty fundamental vitamins, minerals, amino ac ids, which are plentifully available from numerous sources, so are less dependent on specific inputs. It is an option that at the moment is more expensive than regular meat. When do you think you might reach price parity ? Price parity has always been the goals and aim of the cultural baby beat industry. Over the last ten years, we've built a lot of the kind of fundamental technology blocks that we need to. So we talked about bioreactors, those were very expensive. So immediately we developed our own low cost ones. The nutrients we're feeding the cells typically are also very expensive so we had to spend about a year or two coming up with low cost versions of those. And now we're at the point where we're about to scale. So later this year, we will move into our pilot facility. And that is where we can start approaching commercially viable price points. And as we scaled a full industrial scale , then we aimed hit price parody. Tom, we talked about the potential acceptance of insects. Do you think consumers would be more readily or less readily reaching for lab grown or cultivated meat. I think it's a really interesting challenge. Diets have become much more flexible. People have cut down the amount of meat in their diets, become parts of flexitarian, you know, eating bit of fish, bit of meat, but mostly vegetarian. But at the same time, it comes into this environment where we're very conscious about levels of processing and it's hard not to look at this as quite a processed food. So even if the sourcing is brilliant, the tracing is brilliant, the perception people might have is that it fits into that sort of process category. Iron, what do you think? If someone said to you I won't eat that because it's UPF Almost every food goes through a process. What we're doing fundamentally is very natural cell expansion. And then we don't do any processing beyond that. So it is just cells growing as they have always grown for millennia. It certainly wouldn't put me off. Oh than ink you, so much for joining us on Dough . That conversation nicely takes us from human health into planetary health. So let's continue this thread. Charles, the Food and Agricultural Organization, the FAO says ninety percent of global calories consumed by humans come from just fifteen crops . So with so much of the world's diet relying on actually just three grains, rice, maize, and wheat , is it time to rethink that dependence? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are literally hundreds of varietals that we can consume that are really exciting to eat. We're starting to see this now. We're starting to see tef and phoneo and some really interesting grains come through because they're more resilient from a climate perspective. They're better from a soil regeneration perspective and they're more nutrient dense. Some of them also are more allergen friendly. So it is absolutely time for us to reconsider the role of alternatives in our food system . Yeah, there are these long lists of potential tough climate friendly crops the like of Marama, which is a drought proof bean from South Africa. So Krina, we've talked about how you need to consider whether the ingredi ents in your supply chain are coming from. You mentioned earlier that you switched your rice supplier from Spain to Uruguay because of supply chain issues . Is that the same rice variety and if it is, are you considering switching to a more resilient crop in the future ? It's a new rice variety and that's the biggest challenge from an R and D perspective because every time that you're dealing with a new variety and you need to produce products that come with that new rise , it means you need to rethink your whole processing, your whole recipe . That is really where the magic sits is having that knowledge, understanding how the plant will not only perform in the field, but then how it will also perform the moment that you're cooking, as you're producing the products that you want to supply to your consumers. And every time that we're looking for a new variety, we're also looking at varieties that would be more resilient and lower impact from an environmental perspective. Did the consumers notice that it was a new variety of rice ? Absolutely not not. And that's the objective because it's just helping us with making these products with a new variety of rice , we contributing positively to the environment. We also ensuring the supply , otherwise we will be out of stock and consumers would not be able to buy . But they did not tell us they wanted something different. Well, the future of food is clearly about health. It's about taste . It's also about tech. Technology and AI are beginning to influence everything from how our food is grown to how it's designed, personalized and delivered. Karina at Mars, how are you using AI in your day to day work? It's already helping us to identify concepts, areas of opportunities , spot trends earlier in the process rather than later in the process. It also helps us throughout the development in itself . If I have to prototype thirty different prototypes to put in front of consumers so they tell me which ones they prefer from an appearance perspective, what is the length of the pen ri'als ogin noodle they want or what is what is the ratio between the noodle and the vegetables? You want to see those. If I can create that all through AI and expose consumers to that , I will speed up the process tremendously. I have a much, much faster and much more effective way of testing multiple things with actual consumers. And just to explain that, what you're talking about there are synthetic customers , I believe, is the phrase. So you can go to as simple as creating prototypes that don't really exist . You create prototypes using AI, leveraging the insights and identifying the different combinations of what a meal could look like so you can test with actual consumers . But ultimately the ultimate goal is to be able to have iterations with synthetic consum ers. And AI is already enabling companies to do that. So essentially it's which length of AI noodle does the AI consumer most want to eat? Absolutely That's an interesting but you will always put the product in front of consumers in the end. But if I have to be iterating that process to get to the most optimal recipe that really is combining all the elements I was talking about, it needs to be tasty, it needs to be healthy, it needs to be convenient, it needs to be accessible . How do I combine all of those elements? So if I can leverage power of AI to identify ways for me to design that in the best optimal approach that will accelerate and make the whole process a lot more effective. Charles, across the food industry, where do you think AI could have the most impact . I think where AI and other technologies really accelerate being able to pick up foods that are personalized to us, our own genetic makeup . That together with advan ces in supply chains and robotics and all sorts of other things will mean that our food becomes much more about us rather than broad food categories. Personalization, we're going to see a lot of that. It's already a hot topic. Absolutely. If you combine all the information from your smart scales, smart watch , the exercise you do, your personal preferences, the food you shared on social media, put all of that into your personal AI and it does the shopping for you and says this is what you should be eating. This is where you'll get your joy from eating and there's where it's sort of the sweet spot in terms of what you can afford. Can it cook it for me as well, please? Maybe at some point in the future. I know that is a big source of joy for a lot of people, but not me. I think it's time for the final question. When you consider the future of food, what one thing do you think we will see rise to success and fall into obscurity . Carina , I do think we're going to see a bit of a continuity around flotein and around fiber. We just talked about AI and I think that will be probably the breaking point where consumers will become a lot more knowledgeable and be able to understand their specific needs and leverage technology with sensors, devices, et cetera in the fut ure to enable themselves to make better choices . That's the rise. What do you think's going to fall? We were talking earlier about insects. I don't think that insects will be there as a category. I just cannot see the consumers shifting not within our generations from where we've been for so long into that, except with cultural specificities because there are cultures in which insects are there and will continue to be there. Charles, what would be your rise and fall? Rising, I think snackific ation, this fourth, fifth mealtime, I think snacks are no longer just that kind of in between meal, that in between food. They are the meals themselves. It's just because our lives are more fragmented, there's cost pressure and this sort of whole kind of relaxation of rejection of rigid meal times. Any of your listeners that have got teenage kids as an example as I have will see that playing out kind of in practice . I feel like snacking is a trend that has very much risk for me. I've got that one dialed in . And if I had to ask you for what's going to fall, what would you say? I think this shift from and I agree ultra processed food is always going to I think,, be part of the repertoire, but I do think over time we'll move to a place of what I would call sort of better processing, all enabled by technology and science. I'd expect to see it'll still be in the repertoire of our food and drink, but probably less dominant. And also things like diet foods, very visible restrictions. It was all about low this or no that. The point I made earlier on is we want delicious , nutritionally dense food, perhaps a little bit less of it, but no one wants to be miserable eating food. Charles, Carina, thank you both so much for joining me. I need to go off for a snack. Well, Tom, it's just you and I left for dessert, I guess. So my final question to you as always, what do you think our food could be like in five, ten, and fifty years' time? There is one big new cuisine which is already showing early signs of taking off and that's particularly Africa, particularly Nigerian Ghanaian food. We've got a big very successful African fast food chain in London now with multiple branches and growing. Loads of early signals on social media that particularly view African staples, Nigerian, Ghanaian staples are starting to take off, people starting to make them in the UK. So I think that's probably the next big food trend for the next five years of here, particularly because it encompasses some of those sort of new grains, alternative sources of protein that we've already talked about. Ten years, I think alternative and genetically modified grains are going to be part of our diet. We'll get over our worries about GMO s and start to accept that we need to make some of those changes in order to combat climate change and keep our supply chain really robust . And then fifty years I think real meat's going to be a total luxury by that point . It'll take that long. There are lots of scale up challenges with cultivated meat, cultured meat and some of these other things. The cultural shift it requires for us to drop it from our diet for many people , but I do think that that st willeak be an occasion, a real occasion in the restaurant rather than something that you're picking up in the supermarket. Massive thank you to you, cook cheese right and also to Charles Banks, Karina Zimmerfeld, and Owen Enser for joining me at the dinner table today. Which of these potential foods of the future will prove successful? We'll just have to wait and see. That is it for this series of dough. We will be back later in the year to explore another batch of future Wanda Products, and I'll be back next week with a new episode of Sliced Bread investigating a current Wanda product. See ya . This episode of Dough was presented by me, Greg Foot and produced by Linda Walker. You can find all our previous episodes on the sliced bread feed on BBC Sounds, and Dough is a BBC Audio North Production for BBC Radio four and BBC Sounds.