Artificial intelligence is breaking into the fast-food business. Shake Shack partnered with NotCo to use its AI-generated dairy-free milk, called NoMilk, to make a new chocolate milkshake and frozen custard. NoMillk was created by'Giuseppe' - the AI system - which can analyze any food product on a molecular level and then replicates it using only plant-based options. The New York-based burger joint is also releasing a veggie burger to all 260 locations Friday to complement the newly available plant-based desserts. The plant-based boom has taken over the US and many fast-food companies are taking full advantage.

Chile's NotCo claims that Giuseppe, its patented AI technology platform, has perfectly mimicked the taste of real chicken in a vegan format. The pea protein-based development will be used to create a range of products. Initial chicken launches will take place in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. Timely expansion into the U.S. and Canada is expected to follow. No confirmation of existing restaurant partner uptake has been offered.

NotCo, a food technology company making plant-based milk and meat replacements, wrapped up another funding round this year, a $235 million Series D round that gives it a $1.5 billion valuation. Tiger Global led the round and was joined by new investors, including DFJ Growth Fund, the social impact foundation, ZOMA Lab; athletes Lewis Hamilton and Roger Federer; and musician and DJ Questlove. Follow-on investors included Bezos Expeditions, Enlightened Hospitality Investments, Future Positive, L Catterton, Kaszek Ventures, SOSV and Endeavour Catalyst. This funding round follows an undisclosed investment in June from Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer through his firm EHI. In total, NotCo, with roots in both Chile and New York, has raised more than $350 million, founder and CEO Matias Muchnick told TechCrunch.

Chilean food-tech start-up NotCo uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify the optimum combinations of plant proteins when creating vegan alternatives to animal-based food products. The company, set up in 2015, has attracted investment from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Future Positive, a US investment fund founded by Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter. NotCo's machine learning algorithm compares the molecular structure of dairy or meat products to plant sources, searching for proteins with similar molecular components. NotCo has a database containing over 400,000 different plants, including macronutrient breakdown and chemical composition. These factors are used to predict novel food combinations with the target flavour, texture, and functionality.

The plant-based food industry is booming, but there is still some disconnect in how plant-based options look and taste compared to their animal-made counterparts. Experts in the food industry believe artificial intelligence (AI) is that missing ingredient. Food-tech company NotCo recently released its plant-based milk, called NotMilk, that looks and tastes like dairy milk, to Whole Foods stores nationwide. The company has mastered the art of creating plant-based foods that taste, feel, and look just like their animal-based counterparts using AI. "To me, you have more than 400,000 species of plants in this world that you can explore, and we have no idea what they can do," NotCo founder and CEO Matias Muchnick told Lifewire in a phone interview.

Remember the last burger you really enjoyed – try to summon up its rich, juicy taste in your mind and its chewy, firm-yet-soft-yet-crunchy texture. Try to recall how the taste filled your mouth with flavour as you bit into it. Remember how satisfying it was. Now think about how it might have tasted without any meat in it. Farming the meat for beef burgers takes a hefty toll on the environment around the world.

The San Francisco–based accelerator IndieBio's Demo Day is delightfully awkward. Finally, with the room settled and the house lights turned down, the CEO of each of the 12 science-focused startups in the program steps to the stage, stumbles through a breathtakingly dense five-minute pitch of mind-bending products like 3-D-printed kidneys, lab-grown fish, and pheromone-based insecticide, and then asks for funding. The halting presentations are symptomatic of the program at IndieBio, which strives to turn scientists with big ideas into successful CEOs within four months. So this September, at IndieBio's Demo Day (the three-year-old accelerator's fifth fundraising event), it was staggering when Matías Muchnick, in a Tasmanian Devil–adorned Hawaiian shirt, gave a clear, concise, funny presentation about the way his company, NotCo, would change the food industry. Most of the IndieBio companies are speculative (the 3-D-printed kidney could be available in seven to 10 years), but NotCo entered the accelerator with a product ready for market. Included in the pitch from Muchnick and his two cofounders--Karim Pichara and Pablo Zamora--was a sample of NotMayo, a vegan mayonnaise currently sold in 220 stores throughout Chile.

SANTIAGO (Reuters) – A Chilean startup that has built artificial intelligence software to help recreate animal-based foods using plants is looking toward U.S. multinationals after signing deals at home to sell its products, the company's founders said. NotCo, founded around a year ago by three Chileans, has already persuaded Cencosud's Jumbo supermarkets to stock its'Not Mayo' across Chile, and has signed a deal to supply a national food manufacturer with one of its products, said Chief Executive Matias Muchnick. The company has also spoken to international companies including Hershey, Coca-Cola and Mars about creating new versions of chocolate and soda. "We want to promote these products as mainstream. It will only have an impact if meat-eaters who don't care about sustainability buy them," said Muchnick, adding that they can be retailed at the same price as the non-vegan version.

The future of food looks a lot like advanced animal product substitutes; we've already gone beyond tofurkey to plant-based burgers that "bleed." Down in Santiago, Chile, a five-person startup is using machine learning to figure out how to create its own versions of vegetarian substitutes for animal products. Called the Not Company (or NotCo), the one-year-old company is rolling out its first products -- NotMilk, NotMayo. "All I can tell you is that there are some star ingredients ranging from legumes to flowers," NotCo cofounder Matias Muchnick tells Tech Insider. Machine learning, the programming technique where algorithms learn from data sets, has become the hot new thing in Silicon Valley.