Bezos Earth Fund Grants $2M to UC Davis and American Heart Association to Advance AI-Designed Foods

The Bezos Earth Fund has announced a $2 million grant to the University California, Davis, the American Heart Association and other partners to advance “Swap it Smart” as part of its AI for Climate & Nature Grand Challenge. The funding will support research that could help redesign foods, for example optimizing for flavor profile, nutritional properties and lower costs and environmental impact.

Swap it Smart is an AI-powered recipe formulation tool in development by scientists at the UC Davis in collaboration with the Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI), an entity of RF Catalytic Capital co-managed by the American Heart Association and Alliance of Bioversity CIAT and developed by The Rockefeller Foundation. The PTFI provides standardized tools, data and training to map food quality of the world’s edible biodiversity for improved human and planetary health.

“We’re not just teaching AI to understand food, we’re asking it to reimagine what food can be,” said 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?”

The Swap it Smart team will work to advance research that may one day enable food scientists to replace resource-intensive ingredients in food formulations with sustainable alternatives that deliver the same nutrition and sensory experience.

“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,” Tagkopoulos said.

“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 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).

Core to Swap it Smart is the PTFI’s vast and first-of-a kind data infrastructure on the exact chemical composition of thousands of biodiverse foods based on standardized multi-omics tools.

“By combining PTFI’s molecular food composition data, AI and human capacity, we can unlock the intelligence of food itself to design meals and products that nourish people and sustain the planet, working alongside school meals programs, food enterprises and chefs to bring these innovations to the table,” said Selena Ahmed, principal investigator of the Bezos Earth Fund award and executive director of the PTFI. 

Read the full article from UC Davis News