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 makes a speciality of creating a novel mixture of {hardware}, software program, and cloud providers aimed toward precisely measuring meals servings and waste in environments akin to cafeterias, eating places, buffets, and hospitals. Through the years, Nuvilab has amassed substantial knowledge, enabling the delicate coaching of its AI software program, resulting in the newest AI Meals Scanner 3.0.

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

The info may be utilized to gauge meals consumption to create an correct report about meals consumption for an individual or group. Nuvilab avoids making “weight-reduction plan suggestions” as a result of extra context (private info) can be required. Nonetheless, it may well rapidly floor info that might curiosity nutritionists or medical doctors.

The scanning units use two cameras. In lower than one second, they seize a stereoscopic view that produces picture and depth knowledge. By combining each info, the AI can categorize the kind of meals within the picture 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.

Totally 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 digicam area of view is totally different, and the buffet bin is a barely totally different use case because it tends to include a single sort of meals in substantial quantity.

There are some options to Nuvilab within the trade, however the ones I’ve heard of depend on scales to measure the amount of meals. That call tends to be extra approximative but additionally has a destructive influence on the system deployment, which is why Nuvilab opted for a vision-based strategy. This additionally occurs to be ~50% cheaper to deploy and preserve, in accordance with the corporate.

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

The corporate talked about working with Aramak in Korea. The identical firm can also be a big supplier of catering providers, together with right here in Silicon Valley. Having such companions might be nice for the service’s world growth as each corporations can work carefully 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 (probably the most stringent worldwide), and believes that the Center East will see probably the most development within the quick time period.

At CES 2024, Nuvilab will present its newest providers and show totally different options, together with vitamin consumption, kitchen optimizations, eating corridor use circumstances, and extra. You will discover our full dialog within the video beneath:

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