Future of Food
Analysis and insight on the future of food. Stay updated as Singularity Hub discusses the most important trends related to the future of food.
This ‘Cow-Free Milk’ Has Real Dairy Protein, but No Lactose or Cholesterol
How close can we get to animal products without actually involving animals? Multiple companies are putting this question to the test, whether by producing plant-based “meat” that uses a soy protein to mimic real...
Walmart Just Invested Big in Vertical Farming
Vertical farming is quickly becoming a popular way to grow organic food close to major urban centers. Indoor “farms” that grow crops in stacked trays using LED light have opened or are underway in...
The World’s Biggest Vertical Farm Yet Is Going Up in Pennsylvania
Four and a half years ago I visited a vertical farming research facility in the Netherlands to learn the basics about growing food indoors without sun or soil. Since then, new vertical farms have...
The Cost of Lab-Grown Chicken Dropped by More Than Half This Year
This year saw significant rises in consumer prices across all sorts of goods, one of them being food. Amid supply chain complications, labor shortages, and plant closures, meat prices shot up, in some cases...
Scientists Are on a Quest to Create the Perfect Cup of Coffee—Without the Beans
Ahh, coffee. Is there anything more delicious, more satisfying? It’s always there when you need it, be it first thing in the morning or for a mid-afternoon pick-me-up. According to the Sustainable Coffee Challenge,...
Watch Robots Make Pizzas From Start to Finish at an Automated Pizzeria
Four years ago in Mountain View, California, a team of robots was cranking out pizzas on a production line that was almost fully automated. The first robot pressed a ball of dough into a...
New Cultured Meat Factory Will Churn Out 5,000 Bioreactor Burgers a Day
In August 2013, food critics in London sampled the world’s first lab-grown hamburger. Opinions on taste and texture varied, but most agreed it wasn’t all that different than meat from an animal. At the...
An Israeli Startup Is 3D Printing Cultured Ribeye Steaks
The market for meat alternatives is booming, but so far most products are only able to replicate the formless ground meat found in burgers, sausages, and nuggets. The world's first 3D printed steak may...
Europe’s Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots
From cultured meat to plant-based foods to robotic kitchen assistants, tech seems to be infiltrating every corner of our food system. And it’s a good thing, because we’re sorely in need of ways to...
Impossible Foods Wants to Make Milk That’s Creamy, Tasty, and Totally Cow-Free
Animal-free foods seem to be steadily growing in popularity. Whether for health reasons or as part of a commitment to the environment, more people are opting to go vegetarian or at least to be...
Alphabet’s New Moonshot Is to Transform How We Grow Food
In the 1940s, agronomist Norman Borlaug was tasked by the US government with improving the yield of wheat plants in Mexico. The thinking was that if America’s southern neighbor had better food security, relations...
A New Factory in France Will Mass-Produce Bugs as Food
Though the world’s population is no longer predicted to grow as much as we thought by the end of this century, there are still going to be a lot more people on Earth in...
This Startup Is Growing Sushi-Grade Salmon From Cells in a Lab
As the ills of factory farming become more pronounced, people are increasingly gravitating towards vegetarian or pescatarian diets. Besides producing a large percentage of our total greenhouse gas emissions, raising livestock uses up a...
A Norwegian Startup Is Turning Dry Deserts Into Fertile Cropland
The UN population forecast predicts that by 2050 there will be almost 10 billion people on the planet. They’ll live mostly in cities and have an older median age than the current global population....
Biotechnology Could Change the Cattle Industry. Will It Succeed?
When Ralph Fisher, a Texas cattle rancher, set eyes on one of the world’s first cloned calves in August 1999, he didn’t care what the scientists said: He knew it was his old Brahman...
The World Food Program’s Coronavirus Fight—and How You Can Help
The coronavirus outbreak has thrown the world into turmoil. On top of the infections and deaths it’s caused, there have been significant knock-on effects on financial markets, supply chains, businesses, and livelihoods.
One of the...
Huge $161 Million Investment Means Meat Without the Animal Is Here
In 1931, Winston Churchill made a bold prediction: “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable...
Precision Fermentation: What It Is, and How It Could Make Farming Obsolete
Concerns around the environmental impact of modern farming are causing us to reassess our relationship with food. But are claims that lab-grown food will replace agriculture in the coming decades realistic?
British journalist and environmental...
Will Cultured Bacon Be Delicious? A Dutch Startup Is Developing the First Lab-Grown Pork
The food chain has always worked roughly like this: sunlight feeds plants. Plants feed insects. Insects and plants feed animals. Plants and animals feed people. Then eventually—not to get too morbid here—people feed the...
Food Waste Is a Serious Problem. AI Is Trying to Solve It
Waste not, want not. The proverbial saying has been around for about 250 years, and it refers to wisely using one’s resources or suffering the consequences. It’s also a good introduction to the topic...
In 2030, Our Protein Will Come From a Lab—and We’ll All Be Better Off For It
Could a hamburger grown in a lab from Kobe beef stem cells be cheaper, better tasting, and healthier for you? Can you imagine a future where millions of square miles of pastoral land are...
Can Tech Hack World Hunger? It’s Trying
The feats technology is accomplishing these days have become so impressive and fantastical that real headlines often seem like fake news. Robots can play sports like basketball and soccer. Human-monkey hybrid embryos were recently...
CRISPR Just Created a Hornless Bull, and It’s a Step Forward for Gene-Edited Food
There’s a practice in farming not often talked about. To prevent accidental harm to human handlers and other cattle, bulls generally have their horn-producing cells surgically removed before the horns permanently attach to their...
How 3D Printing, Vertical Farming, and Materials Science Are Overhauling Food
Food. What we eat, and how we grow it, will be fundamentally transformed in the next decade.
Already, indoor farming is projected to be a US$40.25 billion industry by 2022, with a compound annual growth...
Animals Are Out, Alt Protein Is in—and It’s Cooking Up Some Unbelievable Creations
A new food economy is taking root. It’s showing up in the dairy section of grocery stores and in the drive-thrus of Burger King. Plant-based milk, meat, and even sushi are appearing more regularly...
So Far Cultured Meat Has Been Burgers—the Next Big Challenge Is Animal-Free Steaks
The meat you eat, if you’re a carnivore, comes from animal muscles. But animals are composed of a lot more than just muscle. They have organs and bones that most Americans do not consume....
Lab-Grown Dairy: The Next Food Frontier
Lab-grown meat is getting a lot of attention along with plant-based meat substitutes. Technology is driving the industry toward providing alternatives to conventionally produced food products. Dairy proteins may be the next product produced...
What Makes the Impossible Burger Look and Taste Like Real Beef?
People eat animals that eat plants. If we just eliminate that middle step and eat plants directly, we would diminish our carbon footprint, decrease agricultural land usage, eliminate health risks associated with red meat,...
Demystifying GMOs: New Research Shows Unexpected Changes in Plant DNA
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are one of the most contentious topics in science today. But a study from the Salk Institute, published last month in PLOS Genetics, may help clear up some of the...
Eating, Hacked: When Tech Took Over Food
In 2018, Uber and Google logged all our visits to restaurants. Doordash, Just Eat, and Deliveroo could predict what food we were going to order tomorrow. Amazon and Alibaba could anticipate how many yogurts...
Thanksgiving Food for Thought: The Tech Helping Make Food Abundant
With the Thanksgiving holiday upon us, it’s a great time to reflect on the future of food. Over the last few years, we have seen a dramatic rise in exponential technologies transforming the food...
How to Feed Global Demand for Seafood—Without Harming the Ocean
“You really can’t justify tuna in Chicago as a source of sustenance.” That’s according to Dr. Sylvia Earle, a National Geographic Society Explorer who was the first female chief scientist at NOAA. She came...
Tech Can Sustainably Feed Developing World Cities of the Future. Here’s How
In the next 30 years, virtually all net population growth will occur in urban regions of developing countries. At the same time, worldwide food production will become increasingly limited by the availability of land,...
Would You Eat ‘Meat’ from a Lab? Consumers Aren’t Necessarily Sold on ‘Cultured Meat’
It’s been a busy summer for food-based biotech. The US Food and Drug Administration made headlines when it approved the plant-based “Impossible Burger,” which relies on an ingredient from genetically modified yeast for its...
Newly-Decoded Wheat Genome Opens the Door to Engineering Superfoods
Tweaking the DNA of crops to make them hardier and more productive is one of the most promising applications of gene-editing technology. That’s not been possible with wheat because its complex genome has proved...
These 4 Tech Trends Are Driving Us Toward Food Abundance
From a first-principles perspective, the task of feeding eight billion people boils down to converting energy from the sun into chemical energy in our bodies.
Traditionally, solar energy is converted by photosynthesis into carbohydrates in...
NASA Made This Technology for Space—Now, It Will Improve What We Eat
“The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks nature ever pulled.” These were Abi Ramanan’s opening words in a talk called "The Future of the Food Chain," presented at Singularity University’s...
New Film ‘Food Evolution’ Takes on One of the Most Polarizing Scientific Topics
One Tuesday morning, as his family bustled around the house getting ready for the day, Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s phone lit up with a text message from his neighbor. “Can I borrow some organic milk?”...
A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Europe’s Huge New Vertical Farm
The Eindhoven High Tech Campus, a 90-minute train ride south of Amsterdam, consists of two rows of nondescript mid-rise office buildings on either side of a wide, tree-lined road. In typical Dutch fashion, there’s...
How Chemistry Is Making Our Food Safer, Better, and More Abundant
Although food scientists often explore new technologies to reduce the percentage of hungry people in the world today, many also have future-oriented mindsets and look at possibilities that could solve food challenges for future...
The Future of Food: To GMO or Not To GMO?
An organic diet has never been more in style than it is right now, with millions of consumers willing to shell out extra dollars for organic foods. Most of us have a vague idea...
How to Feed 9.7 Billion People? CRISPR Gene Editing For Crops
It’s no secret that we’re going to struggle to feed the rapidly expanding global population. New genome editing technologies could hold the answer, according to scientists.
The number of humans on this planet is expected...
New Burger Robot Will Take Command of the Grill in 50 Fast Food Restaurants
Would your burger taste as delicious if it was made by a robot?
You’ll soon be able to find out at CaliBurger restaurants in the US and worldwide.
Cali Group partnered with Miso Robotics to develop...
Cultured Meat Will Remain a Distant Dream Unless We Do These 4 Things
In 2013 the world’s first cell-cultured hamburger was cooked and tasted live on air.
Following that event, there have been many mentions of cultured meat in the media. With all this discussion and publicity, it’s easy...
Why Drones Are Finding a Home on the Farm
When I hear the word 'drone', the first thing I think of is a top-secret mission: spying, rescues, clandestine deliveries, and other James Bond-worthy uses of a seemingly mysterious technology. Maybe I've just seen...
Surprisingly, Plant Microbes May Be an Answer to Our Growing Food Needs
Organizations as diverse as the United Nations and Monsanto are in agreement that we need to double our food production globally by 2050 to feed the world’s population.
But our current agricultural process is one...
FarmBot Will Grow Your Food For You; Just Press Go
What if you could grow food in your backyard with little to no understanding of gardening? A new robotic system may make this a reality for everybody. Farmbot Genesis is an open source, autonomous...
The Doomsday Vault: An Insurance Policy For the World’s Food Supply
In Norway, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is buried deep permafrost well within the Arctic Circle. The vault was created as a means to preserve human agriculture for an uncertain future. We first wrote...
Your Dinner Is Ready To Be 3D Printed
Over the last few decades, a new wave of science has been infused into the world of food in the form of molecular gastronomy. By definition, food preparation and cooking involve physical and chemical...
In the Future, Our Favorite Animal Products Will Be Animal-Free
A couple years ago, a friend told me he didn’t eat meat because he believed that in the future advanced AI would learn from us and treat humans the way we had treated less...
