NotCo is a forward-thinking food-tech company that aims to change the food industry by creating plant-based products with the help of data and artificial intelligence.
The founder, Matias Muchnik, became a health nut during his stint playing rugby and had difficulty in nailing down the best food choices for fitness and well-being, according to a profile by SOSV. Vegan options were confusing and often very processed.
"Whenever an industry is generating that much confusion, it's because the industry is broken and there are conflicts of interest," as Muchnik explained.
After finding success with Eggless Company, a vegan mayo startup, by 2015, the Chile-based entrepreneur reached out to Karim Pichara, a professor and AI researcher who many of Muchnik's friends had studied with, as SOSV detailed.
The newly created NotCo then received the funding it needed to set the company into action, developing plant-based products with the help of its own AI called "Giuseppe."
By creating scalable plant-based versions of animal products, they hoped to reduce polluting gases like methane, a byproduct from livestock farming that accounts for 32% of all human-caused output. The industry generates around 15% of all planet-warming pollution, which is greater than the transportation sector.
The latest innovation to come from NotCo, as Reuters reported, is a dish that tastes like the exotic (and frequently illegal) turtle soup. Using their AI, they aimed to recreate the dish as closely as possible using plant-based ingredients while raising awareness about the endangered green turtle.
"We wanted to generate an impact through artificial intelligence," said Bernardo Moltedo, NotCo's AI culinary science leader, per the report.
"We have been working on this for several years. We always ask ourselves 'why not,' that's why we ended up working to help endangered species, as is the case with turtle soup," he said.
It's been hard going for these primarily vegetarian turtles, which face threats by commercial fishing, loss of habitats due to coastal development, and the changing climate.
NotCo's work is reshaping food research and development by speeding up the process in finding and combining plant-based ingredients. If successful, it could help revive the flagging market for these products, some of which have seen sales fall by 13% in the past two years, as Wired noted.
Switching to more sustainable food sources helps protect the environment and provides health benefits at the same time. Forward-thinking companies like NotCo are choosing to develop meat alternatives using plants, with offerings like faux pork ribs with edible vegan bones to help sway consumers. Others are simply bypassing the cultivation of live animals with lab-grown meat.
If we could replace half of our meat products with plant-based ones, we could potentially reduce pollution by one-third by 2050. As Muchnik shared in an interview with Refrigeration & Frozen Foods, AI may be the key to producing the satisfying food experiences everyone craves while reducing the industry's deleterious footprint.
"By understanding taste at the molecular level and interpreting the emotion our brains associate with it, Giuseppe can recreate these experiences through flavor and aroma using only plant-based ingredients."
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