Nicolas Maire is the model of a professional French chef with years of experience and 18 Michelin stars under his belt, a man who dominates his kitchen dispensing nuggets of culinary wisdom as he prepares food for his guests. Today, this kitchen is buried inside a sprawling corporate HQ on the outskirts of Geneva. Mr Maire works for Firmenich, a business with a perfume industry pedigree stretching back to 1895. Firmenich's nose for a new market saw it diversify into food ingredients as the public appetite for alternatives to meat led to a scramble to put plant-based food on supermarket shelves. The company says there is a global market for plant-based meat substitutes of $25bn (£19bn) and believes this will grow to $200bn by 2030.

New Zealand-based artificial intelligence company IMAGR announced today that it's upping the grocery game by launching its innovative solution SMARTCART to a Four Square store in the Auckland suburb of Ellerslie. The move comes as retailers around the globe look for ways to give consumers more streamlined methods and checkout-less options for shopping, including the recent launch of Amazon Go in Seattle. The New Zealand store will be the flagship Foodstuffs retail outlet to trail SMARTCART, a computer vision technology retrofitted to shopping baskets and carts that recognises products as soon as they are placed inside, eliminating the need for barcode scanning, checkouts and queueing. "We're delighted Foodstuffs is the first retailer in the world that we're partnering with to make this happen This is the first significant step in enhancing the way we do our grocery shopping here in New Zealand and abroad," said IMAGR founder William Chomley. "It's great to see Foodstuffs embracing technology like this to empower customer experiences."

It may well turn out, as technologists are already suspecting, that AI makes everything better. But plenty of startup founders are still in the experimental phase of figuring out whether -- or maybe how much -- machine learning can improve an existing app category. The label that will probably end up being prefixed here is'smart'. Here's one example: FitGenie, an iOS app whose ex-Georgia Tech co-founders bill it as a "smart calorie counter" -- on account of applying machine learning algorithms to simplify nutrition planning for people wanting to achieve a certain weight or fitness goal. "Our self-adjusting diet algorithm is based on a model we created that maps and forecasts the progress of an individual user and makes intelligent weekly adjustments based on the data we gather," says co-founder Keith Osayande, explaining how it's applying AI to calorie counting.

Do Happy Meals really make us happy? Do salads make us blue? Is cake our comfort? FoodMood is an interactive data visualisation project that gives citizens a rare opportunity to engage and reflect, acknowledge, and understand the connection between emotion, obesity and food. The project explores the opportunities presented by the data-sharing world of today’s cities using global English-language tweets about food coupled with sentiment analysis. It aims to gain a better understanding of global food consumption patterns and its impact on the daily emotional well-being of people against the backdrop of country data such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and obesity levels. A key finding is that tweets can be used to find a relationship between certain foods, food sentiment and obesity levels in countries. Overall FoodMood shows a majority positive sentiment towards food. Other findings, although constantly evolving, indicate trends such as: globally meat enjoys a high sentiment rating and is often tweeted about; fast-food companies dominate the food consumption landscapes of most countries’ tweets although not all of them enjoy equal sentiment ratings across countries. Ultimately, FoodMood reveals a hidden layer of meaningful digital, social, and cultural data that provide a basis for further analysis.