The Bezos Earth Fund is awarding a $2 million grant to the University of California, Davis, the American Heart Association and partners to accelerate the development of AI-designed foods through the Swap It Smart project.
The funding backs research to advance a platform developed at UC Davis in collaboration with the Periodic Table of Food Initiative, which is comanaged by AHA and the Rockefeller Foundation. It uses artificial intelligence to redesign food ingredients, recipes and formulations in ways that boost nutrition, reduce the environmental footprint, and maintain taste and affordability.
“We’re not just teaching AI to understand food, we’re asking it to reimagine what food can be,” said coprincipal investigator Ilias Tagkopoulos, UC Davis professor of computer science and director of the USDA AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems, in a news release. “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?”
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The Swap It Smart team will deploy deep phenotyping, molecular data, sensory profiling and generative AI tools to identify sustainable ingredient substitutes and create new combinations. UC Davis serves as the North American center of excellence for the PTFI, which has assembled data on more than 400,000 proteins from 500 commonly consumed foods, plus 27,000 bioactives and other metabolites.
The initiative targets five sustainability pillars: environment, nutrition, health, socioeconomic factors and sensory quality. Researchers will collaborate with food enterprises, schools, hospitals and chefs to bring emerging formulations into real-world settings.
“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,” said coprincipal investigator Justin Siegel, UC Davis professor of chemistry and biochemistry and molecular medicine, and faculty director of the Innovation Institute for Food and Health.
