FIR 123: Nutritional AI That YOU CAN EAT !‪!‬ Financial Investing Radio

In this episode, I have a guest who discusses nutritional AI that you can eat.

Grant
Everybody, this is Grant Larsen. Welcome to another episode of ClickAI radio. Wow. Today I have in the house with me. Mr. Daniel DeMillard, he is the CTO of FoodSpace, and I am just honored for the opportunity to meet him and to get to hear his story and what he and his organization has been doing with AI. Alright, let's jump into this. Okay, so, Daniel, first of all, welcome.
Daniel
Thanks for having me, Grant. Great to be here.
Grant
It is, it is really great to have you here and to have another another patriots in AI, right things that you guys are doing, as I got to know you. And before we started this recording, I was fascinated with the kind of work that you guys are doing and where you focus your use and application of AI. But before we get too deep into that, would you step back in time and tell us? Who's Daniel, where do you come from? And what is it that's brought you to this point to be CTO applying AI in such a cool way?
Daniel
Yep, so I actually studied economics and finance in school and came across an online class by Andrew Yang on Coursera. And at that point, I just absolutely fell in love with machine learning and artificial intelligence. And I was like, wow, this is absolutely what I'm wanting. Yeah, with my life. So, you know, started studying a lot. Got a job eventually at IBM Watson, and worked at a small company doing what type classification, then I was doing some consulting on the side, where I actually got connected with iosshare, Nike, the CEO of foods, but at the time, it was a lunchbox. And they were developing a consumer facing app that, you know, they were trying to pair people with recipes. And you could set up a diet profile for yourself, and instantly order things online through instacart, based on recipes that you find. And I initially got engaged with them, building a wine pairing recommendation application, where, given a certain recipe will automatically recommend a wine pairing that would go well, really well I
Grant
...need that certain kind of food, you're like, Hey, this is the right, right,
Daniel
...we're gonna wanna medium red wine with that right or a very sweet dessert wine.
Grant
Until it this where lunchbox started, they were focusing on solving that problem.
Daniel
They were focused on solving the one stop shop for keeping all of your recipes together, ordering food very easily. And then also being able to manage your diets, and allergens, and just make making sure all of that was really seamless. And they also had a great mission of trying to mitigate food waste, so that they could recommend given all of the stuff that you have in your fridge that would normally sit there and forget about they could recommend a recipe and for you to make of the things that you've already selected. And so
Grant
all right, very good. All right. So so then you bumped into them, and you started to work with them. Tell us a little bit about the transition over to food space. How did the vision change?
Daniel
Yeah, it was actually pretty serendipitous, and rather abrupt. So back in 2019, io was a part of grocery shop, which is a big conference in the CPG space and food industry. And he's trying to pitch this idea of lunchbox to brands and retailers to get them to sign up for it. And they all have basically kept telling them the same thing of like, hey, it's a great idea. It's super interesting. I would love to but what you're asking for with all of these like dietary profiles, and The information necessary to build these types of recommendation algorithms. It's we just don't have it, we don't have ingredients and digitized nutrition labels. And, you know, we have the very minimum. So given that that information is like, Okay, well, we've got to take a step back. So he calls me up. And he says, you know, hey, Daniel, would it be possible given a bunch of computer or a bunch of e commerce image