🧀 Cheese from an astrophysicist
What goes into crafting the perfect cheese? For Climax Foods, it’s taken four years, around 100,000 ingredient combinations, and 5,000 prototypes. And at the heart of it all? Advanced AI technology.
Climax Foods makes cheese with plant-based ingredients. They offer brie, feta, blue, and goat cheese alternatives. The startup was founded by Oliver Zahn, an astrophysicist who led Google's Data Science team and worked on the Falcon 9 launch at SpaceX.
Last year, Climax Foods made a breakthrough by synthesizing casein protein, whose Latin name, caseus, means cheese.
🥛 Casein is a key protein in dairy products such as milk and cottage cheese. Super casein, the official name of the invention, costs 2.5 times less and is indistinguishable in taste and texture. Bonus: super casein is suitable for lactose intolerant persons, and cheese made with it has a significantly lighter carbon impact.
But what about AI?
💻 The company solved the challenge of data scarcity that similar startups confront by creating training data sets to understand cheese flavor, fragrance, and texture.
When we started, there was very little data on why an animal product tastes the way it does — animal cheddar, blue, brie, mozzarella <...> There [was] no commercial reason to understand it.
Climax Foods CEO Oliver Zahn
How are data sets created for training algorithms?
1⃣ First, they use an "electronic nose" — a mass spectrometer. It determines which acid compounds cause the desired olfactory response.
2⃣The rheometer measures cheese's response to physical stress, such as slicing or chewing.
3⃣AI analyzes acquired data to create novel plant-based component combinations.
🏆 Climax Foods cheeses have been included on the menus of Michelin-starred chef Dominique Crenn and celebrity chef Matthew Kenney's restaurants.
Sources: MIT Technology Review, Green Queen, Twitter
Would you like to eat cheese prepared using an astrophysicist's AI recipe?
❤️ — Count me in
🙊 — I'm pleased with my regular gorgonzola
Have a great weekend!
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