University California, Davis, American Heart Association, and others granted $2 million in funding for AI-designed foods
The Bezos Earth Fund is granting $2 million to the University California, Davis, (UC Davis) the American Heart Association, and other partners to support the development of AI-designed foods.
The funding will support ‘Swap it Smart’, an AI-powered recipe formulation tool currently being developed by scientists at UC Davis in collaboration with the Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI), which is co-managed by the American Heart Association and the Alliance of Bioversity CIAT and developed by the Rockefeller Foundation.
The Swap it Smart project aims to advance research that may one day allow food scientists to replace resource-intensive ingredients in food formulations with more sustainable alternatives, while delivering the same nutrition and sensory benefits.
“We’re not just teaching AI to understand food, we’re asking it to reimagine what food can be,” explains Co-principal Investigator Ilias Tagkopoulos, Professor of Computer Science at UC Davis and director of the USDA AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems (AIFS).
“Can we harness the power of AI and computational science to design foods that actively promote human and planetary health, without sacrificing taste or affordability? By integrating deep phenotyping, molecular data, and generative intelligence, we can create better meals and consumer products for our schools, our hospitals and everyday lives.”
The project covers five sustainability pillars: environment, nutrition, health, socioeconomic factors, and sensory quality.
“Our mission is to create a tool that could be used by anyone from farmers and commercial kitchens to home cooks to develop new foods,” adds Co-principal Investigator Justin Siegel, Professor in the UC Davis Departments of Chemistry and of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine and Faculty Director of the Innovation Institute for Food and Health (IIFH).
