Why AI is the key to improving our food, with Riana Lynn

0:00Starting a business comes with its share of ups and downs, which is why staying true to your vision is essential. a non-negotiable for Romeo and Milka Bregali, Capital One business customers and co-owners of Ra's plant-based restaurant in New York. Romeo and Milka took a leap of faith when starting their own restaurant, gutting an empty space and building it from the ground up. Every pipe, every wall, every detail. But building from scratch came with a heavy financial burden, which is when they turned to their Capital One business card. With the flexibility of the card's no preset spending limit, they were able to spend more and earn more rewards while bringing their vision to life.

0:36Today, Raz's success is proof that with passion and the right support, it's possible to make your dreams a reality. Learn more at CapitalOne.com slash business cards. Pioneers of AI is made possible with support from Inflection AI. It's not just enterprise AI. It's your enterprise AI.

1:06I absolutely love being an undergraduate women's athlete. So I ended up being one of the record holders for my undergrad at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. I was actually a javelin and discus thrower. I probably don't look like one now. I had really big shoulders for my size. I was maybe 150, very strong, and 5 '6". But there were women in the ring, you know, 6 '3", 6 '5". And just purely by their genetics, they were able to throw, you know, much further. And so that helped me build confidence.

1:50You know, being up against unfair advantages. Brianna Lynn is a serial entrepreneur. the kind of founder who comes to her business ideas through personal experience. And it's this experience as a student athlete that she credits as a major factor to her success as a founder. I learned how to be strong as an individual, but you need this acuity and you need the strength as a founder, especially as a tech founder, especially as a woman founder. I think I've been able to think of my toes quickly as the same as in a discus or javelin ring. And it's been quite the journey for me to go from student athlete to entrepreneur.

2:37Part of that journey is the company she's been running since 2018, Journey Foods. It's a B2B company that's using AI to help make nutritious and sustainable packaged foods. Rihanna has poured every ounce of her experience into Journey Foods, from her time as an athlete to her upbringing in a family that prioritized healthy homegrown foods. And this is why I'm so excited to talk to her. I'm so passionate about how AI can benefit our health and help reimagine our food systems. So we'll talk about how food companies can leverage her technology for faster product development, more sustainable supply chains, and more.

3:21I'm Rana El-Khalyubi, and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.

3:39Hi, Rihanna. Thank you for being on the show. Absolutely excited to join you. I've been looking forward to this conversation. So we will dive into your company journey, Foods, in a second. But before we do so, I want to just step back and talk about food. Food can be very personal, and it can be nourishing, both physically and spiritually. One of my favorite food memories is I grew up in Egypt around the Middle East, and my grandma would host these amazing dinners for the whole family, and she'd spend days cooking. and she had a mango garden in her house and she would send all the grandkids, all my cousins, we would like run down and pick all these mangoes off the trees.

4:20And I can literally like bring back these memories and I can literally like smell the mangoes. It's really powerful, the nostalgia. I'm curious, what are your favorite food memories and connection to food? Well, Rana, I am so happy that you mentioned that because some of my earliest and favorite food memories have to do with both of my grandmothers, one who has since passed. But she was an early yogi, really helped bring the yoga movement to the United States in the 60s and 70s and have been a vegetarian ever since then. So she taught me a lot about food systems, antibiotics at a very young age, you know, probably third, fourth grade.

5:04My other grandmother, who grew up in the South and migrated to Chicago and Evanston, Illinois, she grew up on hundreds of acres in Alabama. She and her siblings, they all had their own little orchards. I mean, what a beautiful life to have. So she's told me about figs and muscadine, grapes and apricots and all these things that she used to grow up on. But she grew up in an ingredients household. I don't know if you've heard of this, but like an ingredients household is where you have like no snacks, not a lot of processed foods, like everything in your pantry and your fridge and your cabinets are like really ingredients.

5:46So you make everything fresh almost every day. And so I grew up sort of similarly because I spent a lot of time at her house with this small garden that she ended up planting when she moved to Chicago and just all of these memories. So I learned how to make pizza at six years old, like from scratch and plant cucumbers and collard greens at a very young age. And I'm forever grateful for how that changed me. All my grandparents have very deep roots to agriculture and to fresh foods. I absolutely wish that I could have grown up around mangoes. As soon as I had my first mango, it instantly rose to my favorite fruit.

6:28I didn't know why Americans thought apples were the best fruit when the rest of the world knew mangoes were so divine. But no, similar story, just like great grandmother memories. Maybe separate conversation, how to bring real mangoes into the U.S. It's a superfood too. So how did you then decide that you wanted to start a company in the food industry? And how did you also kind of marry it with AI? Before I started Journey Foods, I had an almost eight, nine year career in the food industry between a family juice bar to a traceability app, then spent some time as an entrepreneur in residence at Google and then joined as director of one of the country's largest venture capital firms with the former CEO of McDonald's, Don Thompson.

7:23And through all of those experiences in my 20s, I realized that a lot of this food systems, both in the U.S. and around the world, were very, very behind and very slow. I felt like there was a really, truly broken system that had been developed over the past 50, 60 years in the United States, mostly to feed 350 million people. And many parts of the world had not adopted these ways of researching and building and designing foods. And the ways that we've designed food since, you know, modern grocery stores came about have, for me, been both antiquated on the logistics side, but also very detrimental to our bodies on the science and sort of one-size-fits-all food package side.

8:16And so I felt like if we could design a database and language models and neural pathways that thought like a food scientist, that thought like a culinary expert, then more than likely over a period of time, we could probably make food a little bit healthier or a little bit more cost efficient or a little bit less detrimental to the environment. And now we have Journey Foods a few years later. Why the name Journey? I said, what company would I want to work on for years and years and years? So part of that was like, this is my journey and commitment. Another piece of this is that, you know, food is more global than ever.

9:02So like, how is food making its own journey? And then finally, I've just become a big supply chain nerd. and probably a lot of people in the world have too, you know, during the pandemic, you know, food prices and port strikes and all those things, right? So more and more people are becoming interested in the supply chain. And a lot of those issues are what we can address to improve food as well. And I'm excited to just keep pushing that forward. I love this. One of my personal mantras is embarking on a journey without attaching to the outcomes. because I do believe the entrepreneurial journey is a journey and you don't really know how it's going to pan out.

9:47You're taking a lot of risks, but it's definitely a journey of impact. We're going to take a short break. When we come back, we get into how Journey Foods is helping customers develop more healthful foods. Rihanna's bread and butter, it's the data. Stay with us.

10:39Transcription by CastingWords and now AI agents in Rovo, which connects the dots across your work so nothing gets lost. It's one AI-powered teamwork platform designed for how modern teams actually build. Learn more at Atlassian.com slash TeamChanger. That's A-T-L-A-S-S-I-A-N dot com slash TeamChanger.

11:10So you harness AI to help food businesses in kind of food management processes across the entire, I guess, food production cycle. And your customers are primarily like food businesses, right? Can you give us an example of who your typical customer is and what do they do with your platform? You know, well, the majority of our customers are not sort of your fresh produce farmers or restaurants. we service majority of what you see in the grocery store. So the average grocery store has about 40 ,000 SKUs or, you know, stock keeping units. And those are the items that you see on all these shelves. And so those are packaged processed foods in some way or form.

11:58And so the companies that make all those packaged items and the suppliers of those packaged items, you know, the ingredients that sort of go into these, those are our customers. And most of them at the company are, you know, innovation managers, they're researchers, ingredient makers and artisans, sometimes marketing managers and finance managers at the companies that are looking to make key decisions about new products, about saving costs. This all ranges for us. Some are founders of new food companies, right? Like they may want to start a new type of Pop-Tart, right? They think the Pop-Tarts that we have today are outdated and unhealthy.

12:46There are others that work at multi-billion dollar companies. And we found more recently, there are chemical and oil companies and tobacco companies that have come because they're looking for a new era of consumer products because people are moving away from those items. Journey Foods offer their customers several different services. They provide customers with a rich database on information that can help launch projects from ideation to the marketplace. Customers can get recommendations on things like cheaper, more sustainable supply chains. But probably their coolest offering is helping companies develop nutritious products.

13:29They actually have a patent on an AI recipe generator they developed. So say I wanted to develop a new protein bar packed with my favorite ingredients. Can you guess? Dark chocolate, a hint of mango, and of course, no added sugar. I would just plug in my specs to Journey Foods tool and get recipe and sourcing recommendations. Developing new food products can be costly and time-consuming, but tools like this can lower the barrier to food innovation. When we first started the platform and sort of pitching this idea for some of our early pilots, there were people that were going through like 80 trials just to make like a high-protein chocolate chip cookie, right?

14:14And our goal is to get that down to two trials, right? Right. And that's what it's about. It's like saving time on money on getting the innovation into the market, getting quality innovation into the market. It's not just, you know, a new innovation, but something that's going to work. 85 % of food products fail. They fail for cost, consumer, regulatory, holdups, lack of sales. There's so many reasons why these products fail. And what happens is a lot of the largest companies can sort of throw those costs into just a general bucket, you know, operational bucket. But smaller companies can't really risk that.

14:56And so they either take a longer time to get things in the market, they spend a lot more time on research and their ingredient brokers, or they have less innovation over time. I think it's, you know, it's really interesting that you're an entrepreneur in the food space. There is so much innovation happening and kind of a reimagination of what food processes should look like, what food should look like. Can you kind of share some of the trends that you're seeing in the food landscape in general? There's larger trends such as people want more whole foods, they want more natural foods, especially more often than not immigrants or people that have faced chronic disease recently.

15:40So there is a pullback on like the amount of processing that's going into plant-based foods. There's a lot of functional food growth. So foods that are good for your mental health, for your sleep, for your gut health, for optimal muscle building, right? For mood, how can we engineer and find the ingredients in the food recipes that are going to make me feel great and perform great and I don't necessarily need to take a bunch of pills. Speaking of pills, there are foods and food programs that are adjusting to the rising tide of Ozempic and Wegovi and like these weight loss, semi-glutide injections and many more.

16:24I think the most exciting ones are, for me, are the growth of taste pellets out of Africa, which, you know, we have a big chocolate project out of Africa and it's like... Ooh, say more about that. Well, it's like, one, to develop chocolate for the broader African palate, which needs less sugar, right? The average sugar consumption on the continent is much lower. So you don't need a Hershey's bar or, you know, something similar. So we're working on a big project in Ghana around this with some manufacturers. But I love that exploration and seeing where that can spread beyond the continent as well.

17:02One of the areas that I'm really interested in, and you kind of touched upon it, is this idea of food as medicine. I loved what you said, like functional food. What role does Journey Foods play in kind of helping, hopefully, more food businesses create healthful products? You know, Journey Foods set out to focus on nutrition and functional foods first. Like we have three core tenets of our data acquisition, and that is nutrition data, sustainability data, and cost data. But one thing that I've always focused on, as I mentioned, you know, starting with health, we not only sort of look at your standard nutrition label metrics, right?

17:48calories and vitamins and mineral inputs. But we also look at over 200 other variables, dioxins and toxins, as well as functional markers, right? So we're talking to researchers and doctors, but also scanning medical reports and research studies in the U.S. and globally and marking ingredients for, you know, like what's disruptive to your gut, what's good for diabetic consumption. And so we're tagging every single ingredient that we have in our database around those things. So you can develop through working with our team or through your profile settings, products that have those tags both on the dietary or the functional side.

18:37What we leave it up to as well as a customer is you're able to bring in your own data sets or you're able to pay for integrations with our partners that may have even added data that we don't have. Yeah, let's dive into the data for a second because that's going to be kind of a key, I suppose, it's a key competitive advantage and key value proposition, right, for you. Where do you get that data from? How do you, you mentioned data partnerships. What does that mean or look like? Tell us more. So the data is an ongoing process. We're taking in data every single day, every single week. We are talking to ingredient suppliers.

19:21We are looking at medical and research and scientific reports. We are scraping the Internet. There's so many different sources. We have over 23 ,000 sources. and, you know, that grows every month. I think it's very important. As you said, it's a competitive advantage for us. We also, as you mentioned, for our data partnerships, you know, when you log into a software platform or you download an app and they say, like, connect your data, like Apple HealthKit, like connect it to your, like, meal monitor or to your Fitbit or your Oura Ring or, you know, your period track or whatever. Those are the partnerships that we're building.

20:07There's so many more types of data that can help you make quality decisions for your food products that we just go ahead and charge an integration fee. And then that company is happy because they found a new customer. Yeah, that's super smart, actually. Gets you to scale. And of course, there's a data flywheel effect when you do that. I also love you mentioned, you know, there's research about kind of the science underlying ingredients that's coming out every day. And it sounds like you are ingesting some of these new findings into the platform. How do you do that? It must be hard to keep up with all of the scientific discoveries around food.

20:48It can be hard. And there's a lot of changes and there's faster changes coming now when you combine the discoveries with consumer demand, right? Like people on TikTok and shoppers and Instagram want, you know, in terms to hear in terms of scientific data, which like now, for example, more people want to know about like food dye and all that stuff. You know, for us, we have like a prioritization schedule months and years out in terms of like what data we're going to focus on each month. We have a department within the company called Journey Labs. And this is for government and academic, just like special projects, essentially, where these partners are not necessarily using our software or our dashboard on a daily basis.

21:38but they have a need or an investment opportunity for these types of data. And so one thing that we're always doing is partnering with leading research universities around the world. Hong Kong Science Park and McGill University and MIT. So we always have like a cohort of PhD or master's students that are working to build and accelerate the data discovery and tagging for us as well. With these students that we bring in, one thing that's been so important for me is to give them like true entrepreneurial experience. And I think it's so important for schools now to infuse entrepreneurship into science, into business, into policy, into international relations.

22:27There's so many things and I'm very proud of what we've built with Journey Labs here. I think there's a win-win partnership where, you know, academia can be rooted in science and discovery and innovation. But until you bring it to the real world, right, you have to then get really creative about how to really productize some of these ideas and commercialize them. So I love that. This reminds me so much of my own journey as an AI scientist. During my academic career, I was able to create and test emotionally intelligent AI. But it was only once I started my entrepreneurial journey that I was actually able to see these innovations have real-life impacts.

23:06I'm a huge advocate for scientists and academics venturing into the startup space. But for that to happen, we need to increase access so that people from different backgrounds can get their foot in the door. More on that in a minute after a short break.

23:35Meet Nicole Nicholas, Capital One business customer and co-owner of Ansett Uncles, a plant-based restaurant and community space in Brooklyn, New York, that got its start from a need for unity. The inspiration, it was born from the desire to create a space that felt like home, where we can connect community culture, good food, and come together with family and friends. That's how we birthed aunts and uncles. Nicole and her husband, Mike, were fulfilling their dream of bringing people together out of their home kitchen. But they soon learned that the demand for community was greater than they knew.

24:06It became overwhelming and we were like, we need home, but not in our actual home. We realized that there was also a need in our community for something bigger in our neighborhood. So we had to find a place. Moving from a home operation into a storefront was a huge next step. But Nicole and Mike were able to take it on with the help of Capital One Business. It's not for the weak. As a small business, finding resources is super important because that's the way you'll be able to manage and scale. We would have never done that without having Capital One to be able to help us along the way. The cashback rewards are very helpful.

24:41You know, it just gave us that runway to be able to breathe a little bit. Then you get to focus on the cooking of the food and making the experience great. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards. We talk a lot about responsible AI on this podcast, but before we dive into specifically kind of responsible AI and also like broadly food policy, there's a food crisis in the U.S. that goes beyond nutrition. And I'll just quote some numbers. So close to 14 % of households are food insecure, which means it's hard to provide food for all family members. 19 million people in the U.S. live in a food desert, which means they do not live near a supermarket.

25:23There's also been studies that show that these issues obviously disproportionately affect largely Black neighborhoods. These are some really depressing statistics. You know, how does the reality of this food crisis in the U.S. inform some of the work you do at Journey Foods, but also you're very involved in food policy. So tell us more about that. Yeah, you know, before, way, way back in the day, I worked at the White House and was very involved in different communities around food insecurity, food deserts. And, you know, food deserts today affect more than they did 10 years ago. They affect a lot of immigrants.

26:03They affect a lot of rural whites. It's affecting, you know, tens of millions of people, especially as you see dollar generals pop up, you know, across the United States, both in urban and rural settings. And for me, it's important for us to collect data. And that's what we do with Journey Labs. That's beyond just serving the big food manufacturers and big, you know,$100 million plus billion dollar plus food teams. And ethical AI is sometimes as much as the team and the leadership team puts into the intention around the data collection and how that data is used. And for us, one thing that we're really excited about is our partnership with some existing and several launching grocery stores around how to use our nutrition scores in food deserts.

26:57We're launching first in Atlanta and then in Louisville with smaller size grocery stores where, you know, essentially our nutrition scores, which is a zero to 100 score, sort of rated like a test paper, will be on store shelves so that you can like compare cereals, for example, or breads, right? So we're testing that with just a couple dozen products, categories. And these grocery stores will launch soon here in Atlanta and Q1 in Louisville, particularly in communities that face a range of food insecurity. And the goal there is to see how can these scores, both in a behavioral way, but also on a policy side, be used to invest in, you know, infrastructure and logistics.

27:51So it's very important for me to think beyond the traditional SaaS or, you know, AI platform. How can our data be creatively used to like really impact the communities you mentioned and so many other communities? I mean, food insecurity and food practice and food justice for me is beyond socioeconomic levels. I believe that especially in the Western world, especially in the United States, the food that is in our system affects every single one of us every single day. Unless you're, you know, traveling to Bali for a couple of weeks, right? You're just able to eat very clean or Peru or somewhere.