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

RIANA LYNN: I absolutely love being an undergraduate women’s athlete. So I ended up being one of the record holders for my undergrad, 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, 6’3, 6’5, and just purely by their genetics, they were able to throw much further. And so that helped me build confidence, being up against unfair advantages.

RANA EL KALIOUBY: Riana 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.

LYNN: I learned how to be strong as an individual, but you need this acuity and you need this strength as a founder, especially as a tech founder, especially as a woman founder.

I think I’ve been able to think on my toes quickly, the same as in a discus or a javelin. And it’s been quite the journey for me to go from student athlete to entrepreneur.

EL KALIOUBY: Part 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.

Riana 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, home-grown foods.

And this is why I am so excited to talk to her. I am so passionate about how AI can benefit our health and help re-imagine 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.

I’m Rana el Kaliouby and this is Pioneers of AI – a podcast taking you behind-the-scenes of the AI revolution.

[THEME MUSIC]

Hi, Rihanna. Thank you for being on the show.

LYNN: Hi. Absolutely excited to join you. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation.

Copy LinkHow early food memories shaped a founder's mission

EL KALIOUBY: 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 like, she would make 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, and I can literally like bring back these memories, and I can literally like smell the mangoes. It’s really powerful, the nostalgia. I am curious, what are your favorite food memories and connection to food?

LYNN: Well, Ronna, 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, probably third, fourth grade. My 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. What a beautiful life to have. And so she’s told me about like 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 in your cabinets are like really ingredients so 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 these memories, right? 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. I 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.

Copy LinkWhy broken food systems needed an AI rethink

EL KALIOUBY: 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?

LYNN: Yeah, so 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. And through all of those experiences in my twenties, I realized that a lot of these food systems, both in the U.S. and around the world were very, very behind and very slow. I felt like there was a 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 foods since 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.

And 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.

Copy LinkThe meaning behind Journey Foods and its long game

EL KALIOUBY: Why the name Journey?

LYNN: 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 food is more global than ever. So 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, during the pandemic. 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 and improve. And I’m excited to just keep pushing that forward.

EL KALIOUBY: 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 gonna pan out, right? You’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. Riana’s bread and butter? It’s the data.

[AD BREAK]

Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Copy LinkWho uses Journey Foods and where it fits in the grocery aisle

So you harness AI to help food businesses in kind of food management processes across the entire, I guess, food production cycle. Can you give us an example? And your customers are primarily like business, food businesses, right? Can you give us an example of who your typical customer is and what do they do with your.

LYNN: Well, the majority of our customers are not sort of your fresh produce farmers or restaurants, right? We service the majority of what you see in a grocery store. So the average grocery store has about 40,000 SKUs or 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. And so the companies that make all those package items and the suppliers of those package items, the ingredients that sort of go into these, those are our customers. And most of them at the company are 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. There are others that work at multi-billion dollar companies that are launching a new product line, and we found more recently, their 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.

EL KALIOUBY: 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. They 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 – dark chocolate, 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.

LYNN: 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?

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

But smaller companies can’t really risk that. And 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.

Copy LinkHow AI cuts food product failures and speeds innovation

EL KALIOUBY: I think 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?

LYNN: There are 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. So there is a pullback on 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, for mood. How can we engineer and find the ingredients in the food recipes that are gonna 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 time of Ozempic and Wegovy and like these weight loss, semaglutide injections, and many more. I think the most exciting ones for me are the growth of taste palates out of Africa, which we have a big chocolate project out of Africa and it’s.

EL KALIOUBY: Ooh, say more about that.

LYNN: Well, it’s like one to develop chocolate for the broader African palette, which needs less sugar, right? The average sugar consumption on the continent is much lower, right? So you don’t need a Hershey’s bar or 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.

Copy LinkWhere functional foods and global tastes are heading next

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. One 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?

LYNN: Journey Foods set out to focus on nutrition and functional foods first. We have three core tenants 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, starting with health, we not only sort of look at your standard nutrition label metrics, right, calories, 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.

EL KALIOUBY: Amazing.

LYNN: In the U.S. and globally and marking ingredients for, 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.

And 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.

What we leave up to the customer as well 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.

Copy LinkWhy proprietary data is the engine behind better food decisions

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. That’s going to be kind of a key competitive advantage and key value proposition for you. Where do you get that data from? You mentioned data partnerships. What does that mean or look like? Tell us more.

LYNN: So the data is an ongoing process. We’re taking in data every single day, every single week. We are talking to ingredient suppliers, we are looking at medical and research and scientific reports. We are scraping the internet. There are so many different sources, we have over 23,000 sources and 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, when you log into a software platform or you download an app and they say like, connect your data, like Apple health kit, connect it to your meal monitor or to your Fitbit or your Oura ring or your period tracker — whatever those are — those are the partnerships that we’re building. There are so many more types of data that can help you make quality decisions for your food products that we would, we just go ahead and charge an integration fee. And then that company is happy because they found a new customer.

EL KALIOUBY: 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 loved, you mentioned, 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.

LYNN: It can be hard. And there are a lot of changes and there are faster changes coming now when you combine the discoveries with consumer demand, right? TikTok and shoppers and Instagram want — in terms of scientific data — things like, more people want to know about food dye and all that stuff. 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 Lab and this is for government and academic and just like special projects, essentially, where these partners are not necessarily using our software or our dashboard on a daily basis, but 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. And 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.

I think it’s so important for schools now to infuse entrepreneurship into science, into business, into policy, into international relations.

There are so many things, and I’m very proud of what we’ve built with Journey Labs here.

EL KALIOUBY: I think there’s a win win partnership where, 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. I’m a huge advocate for scientists and academics venturing into the start-up 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.

[AD BREAK]

Copy LinkUsing AI and policy to tackle food insecurity more effectively

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 percent 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. There have also been studies that show that these issues obviously disproportionately affect largely black neighborhoods. These are some really depressing statistics. 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.

LYNN: Yeah, before, way back in the day, I worked at the White House and was very involved in different communities around food insecurity, food deserts. And food deserts today affect more than they did 10 years ago. They affect a lot of immigrants, they affect a lot of rural whites. It’s affecting tens of millions of people, especially as you see Dollar Generals pop up 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, hundred million dollar plus, billion dollar plus food teams.

AI 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 a project that’s launching — our partnership with some existing and several launching grocery stores around how to use our nutrition scores in food deserts.

EL KALIOUBY: More.

LYNN: Well, we’re launching first in Atlanta and then in Louisville with smaller size grocery stores where, essentially, our nutrition scores, which is a zero to 100 score, sort of rate it like a test paper, will be on store shelves so that you can compare cereals, for example, or breads, right? So we’re testing that with just a couple dozen product categories. And these grocery stores will launch soon, here in Atlanta, in 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 infrastructure and logistics. And so it’s very important for me to think beyond the traditional SaaS or AI platform. How can our data be creatively used to like really impact other communities you mentioned and so many other communities. 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 traveling to Bali for a couple weeks, right? And you’re just like able to eat very clean, or Peru or somewhere.

And I absolutely love the plethora and the depth of impact that quality and intentional data can bring to so many communities. And that truly has been a journey for me.

Copy LinkWhat it takes to build as a Black woman founder in food tech

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. So one of the other things that I’m personally very passionate about is diversity in AI, because I fundamentally believe diversity fosters innovation. And it’s also one of the reasons it’s our commitment in this podcast to platform voices in AI that you wouldn’t typically hear from. And you started actually our conversation by mentioning that you are kind of a, oh, a woman of color in the food entrepreneurship landscape, and I imagine you’re very much a minority.

And part of me is like bugged that I have to ask this question, but I think it is important. Like, what has your experience been as a black woman founder in the food tech space? And how can we get more of you to take the entrepreneurship path, basically?

LYNN: For me, of course, I’ve had some privilege that comes with this. I grew up around family members that were steeped in agriculture and I grew up in a great town. And went to great schools and had a community of family members around to support me in my lows as an entrepreneur and everyone does not have that. But I do believe that there is more access to communities that can help support and teach best practices and help you skate around as much failure. And so that’s very beautiful. It has been interesting. A lot of people would say that I’ve had some success in like fundraising or some success in scaling. But I cannot imagine — and I see the, not success or impact, but the amount of support that white men have gotten with like less of an idea, or have gotten less pushback on like AI. Because like I came out, Journey has a patent, an AI neural network patent. A lot of software companies don’t have AI patents, right?

They’re kind of just running and that was important for me, like scientifically to think through that and the type of partnerships that we have, but also, it shows people that we were thinking about this years before.

EL KALIOUBY: Early on. Right. Before. Yep.

LYNN: And I think that it’s really important to listen to women, to listen to black entrepreneurs, to minority entrepreneurs, to entrepreneurs that maybe went to community college, that just have like brilliant ideas because they’ve lived it, because they’ve seen it, because their family has gone through it. And I think there’s a lot to prove and a lot of investment and impact to be made.

EL KALIOUBY: Amazing. I love it. Rihanna, that was awesome. Thank you so much for joining us on the show.

LYNN: Thank you, thank you. Wonderful questions. From the beginning, just the connection with our grandmothers picking fruits for us. So thank you. I had a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much.

EL KALIOUBY: Talking to Riana has me thinking more about all the potential wellness applications of AI. As an investor in human-centric AI companies, THIS is the kind of real-world impact I’m looking for.

Riana is not only looking at how AI can transform packaged foods. She’s also looking at how the datasets Journey Foods is collecting can have a larger impact on our food systems as a whole.

This opens up Pandora’s box. What are the other health-related applications of AI that we need to be talking about? How can AI help us learn more about our microbiome? Or how can it help us reduce chronic diseases and increase healthspan?

AND YES, how can AI help us create a decent tasting sugar free, protein packed chocolate?!

Jokes aside, there’s so much more to talk about here. And I am so excited to have these kinds of conversations on Pioneers of AI.