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Spotted: According to food tech company Journey Foods, the global food industry is broken, with supply chain inefficiencies, sustainability failings, and malnutrition adding up to a broken system. In response, the US startup proposes a clear solution: data.

Journey Foods provides a suite of tools to help teams developing new food products understand everything about the lifecycle of their products, from the environmental impact of ingredients, to supply inefficiencies and opportunities for cost savings. At the heart of the offering is a vast database that contains information on millions of products and ingredients – amounting to 17 billion individual datapoints in total. AI is used to sift through all this information and provide recommendations for ingredients based on factors such as nutrition, sustainability, cost, and packaging requirements.

The system is designed to be easy to use, removing the need for huge Excel sheets. A smart dashboard acts as a single hub that allows companies to organise all their product research and development in one place. Moreover, companies can easily upload existing products to get insights and recommendations based on their product goals and customer needs. Journey Food claims that its technology can lead to impressive efficiencies, such as 40 per cent better precision, and significant time saving for product development teams.

At the end of 2021, Journey Food announced a new partnership programme—called JourneyLabs—with a variety of universities. Under the programme, participants are given access to Journey Food data to develop new applications and products. At the same time, the company announced that it would be adding data on packaging to its platform.

Further food supply chain innovations spotted by Springwise include a startup that aims to digitise the supply chain, and a platform that lets food businesses monitor their carbon emissions.

Written by: Matthew Hempstead