From Cafeteria Trays to Buffet Bins: Nuvilab’s Innovative Approach to Food Measurement

Nuvilab, established in 2018, is an award-winning “Meals Imaginative and prescient AI” startup. It focuses on growing a novel mixture of {hardware}, software program, and cloud companies geared toward precisely measuring meals servings and waste in environments resembling cafeterias, eating places, buffets, and hospitals. Through the years, Nuvilab has amassed substantial information, enabling the subtle coaching of its AI software program, resulting in the most recent AI Meals Scanner 3.0.

Nuvilabs service depends on a number of scanning gadgets that sense the sort and amount of meals served (or discarded) in numerous locations. The aim is to precisely monitor nutrient consumption, carbon emissions, and meals waste.

The information will be utilized to gauge meals consumption to create an correct report about meals consumption for an individual or group. Nuvilab avoids making “weight loss plan suggestions” as a result of extra context (private data) could be required. Nevertheless, it will probably rapidly floor data that might curiosity nutritionists or docs.

The scanning gadgets use two cameras. In lower than one second, they seize a stereoscopic view that produces photograph and depth information. By combining each data, the AI can categorize the kind of meals within the photograph and consider “how a lot” of it (= quantity) was served or discarded. From there, the software program can cross-reference a meals database and infer extra dietary particulars.

Completely different scanners are used relying on how the meals is served, for instance, cafeteria trays or buffet bins. That’s as a result of the required digital camera discipline of view is completely different, and the buffet bin is a barely completely different use case because it tends to comprise a single sort of meals in substantial quantity.

There are some options to Nuvilab within the business, however the ones I’ve heard of depend on scales to measure the quantity of meals. That call tends to be extra approximative but in addition has a detrimental impression on the system deployment, which is why Nuvilab opted for a vision-based strategy. This additionally occurs to be ~50% inexpensive to deploy and keep, in keeping with the corporate.

Nuvilabs operates a cloud service for its clients. Knowledge from the scanners is shipped to a safe cloud (hosted on Amazon AWS) the place clients can get insights from their information. New options added just lately embrace an Stock Supervisor to optimize purchases, however many different actions will be derived from the info.

The corporate talked about working with Aramak in Korea. The identical firm can be a major supplier of catering companies, together with right here in Silicon Valley. Having such companions might be nice for the service’s international growth as each firms can work intently at each degree, together with updating the meals database since Amarak is aware of exactly what goes into the meals so far as I do know.

Nuvilab representatives talked about that the corporate is trying on the hospitality market in North America, evaluating compliance wants within the European Union (essentially the most stringent worldwide), and believes that the Center East will see essentially the most progress within the quick time period.

At CES 2024, Nuvilab will present its newest companies and display completely different options, together with vitamin consumption, kitchen optimizations, eating corridor use instances, and extra. You could find our full dialog within the video beneath: