Food is just like emotion; it connects to heart very easily when it is finger licking yummy-licious food because our stomach and heart has an inseparable connection. Science and technology have witnessed an explosive and evolving evolution in recent years and showed an astounding impact in every sector of the industry. Food and Beverage industry also has been able to jump to the crux owing to advanced food technology. During 2020, when the whole world came to a standstill, the part and parcel of the food and beverage industry fell down with a bang on its face and met with a huge loss.

How food technology is evolving innovation and creativity?

Innovation & Cost Effectiveness: Technology pushed the idea of innovation by giving the expert chefs and cooks to bring their ideas to the forefront and also helped them to know whether their ideas are profitable or not by the system of customer feedbacks. For the young startups who don’t want to spend much money to set-up a business, they can use technology and set-up cloud kitchen with very nominal cost and deliver the delicacies online and create an identity in the market. In comparison to renting a space, set-up the interior, kitchen, employ peoples it is way too cheap for a business.

Information technology has connected the whole world with data-science, the same way food technology is bridging the gap between the hungry birds with the passionate chefs

Women Empowerment: Previously, women in rural areas, town, or transition area used to fasten themselves behind the kitchen doors, and served their delicious hand-made foods to their families. But, now with the use of technology, women with good culinary skills have been able to come forward and given birth to numerous brands which have become popular. Women, who were busy with their Chulha and Chauka are presently earning millions. This concept has surely triggered the zeal for being a successful entrepreneur, and pushed the concept of woman empowerment.

Promoting Local Home-made Food: Money is very important for making our ends meet, and for earning money, sometime we need to leave our home, locality, the familiar alleys and neighborhood. Then we start missing our local authentic foods that we used to eat. With the advancement of technology, mobile applications and companies have made their presence in the industry who delivers homemade food to their dedicated customers who wants to taste authentic cuisines from their hometown and AI helps to search for the same food nearby if available and notify the person about it. As the result, the local, authentic cuisines are earning applauses and making their presence in front of the world.

How food technology is helping the food and beverage industry to grow?

Before heading towards a food venture, the points about food technology we should know to minimize the difficulties.

Enhances the quality & increases the Shelf-life: Advanced science and technology has helped to increase the quality of food products and increase the shelf-life of them by increasing expiration period. Especially, dairy products are easily spoiled, so these products need a good attention but scientific advancement has helped milk products and liquid milk to continue to be consumable for longer days. Famous brands like Nandini and Amul have introduced processed liquid milk which can continue to stay fine without fridge for a long time retaining all the nutritional values.

Eliminates Bacteria from Food: Food technology is helping to keep a check on the quality of the food products by eliminating the harmful effects of bacteria, virus and minute cellular microorganisms which are difficult to discover with naked eyes.

Delivers personalized Food Products: Personalizing and customizing is one of the top trends in any sector of the industry, food and beverage is not different from them. By using technology, like Artificial Intelligence, cloud data, big data and so on, it helps in connecting to the customer with targeted messages and calls which helps to customize the products perfectly. For example, theme-based cakes are very trending right now.

How food technology is guiding the young entrepreneurs?

Food technology is being used vigorously for upgrading the level of quality of food and making it easily accessible and also easy to pockets.

Let us see different usage of Food technology:

Food Production & Processing: The furtherance of technology is helping to increase the food production by developing the way of cultivating, harvesting, manufacturing, and packaging of food products. Advanced agricultural techniques and chemical fertilizers have revolutionized the food production after M.S. Swaminathan started campaigning for Green-Revolution. Harnessing the effective effects of biotechnology, high yielding crops were created, and pasteurization has helped to consume good purified milk.

Retail & Delivery Business: From 2020 onwards, we started ordering groceries and food online frequently like the chameleon changes its colors, to avoid the ill-effects of pandemic. Food technology has also helped with Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Big Data and Algorithm to send and deliver food products and cooked foods to dedicated destinations.

Real Time Tracking: Artificial intelligence, mapping system with broadband and internet are helping to track the items ordered so that it cannot be misplaced and to have info about when will the order get delivered.

Food Safety: Science and technology ensures that the quality of food remains the highest priority and it is one of the popular and widely used methods of using food technology. Using different gadgets and tools like spectrometers, lactometer, alcohol analyzers, refractometers, titrators, moisture analyzers we can easily identify if the food is consumable or not. It also helps the business owners to avoid wastage of food.

Diet Tracker & Food Sorting: AI based applications now can identify the ingredients of food and aware us about all the ingredients. Diet tracker applications help to keep track of our consumable foods and count the calorie and also notify us if we have maintained the BMI or not. AI automatically finds the food options based on our preferences and saves our time to reach out to our comfort food and it also ask specific questions about our preferences and gives advice on what and how much we should consume to stay healthy.

Future of Food & Beverage Startups:

Presently, the F&B industry is one of the fastest growing industry in the world, and the cutting-edge technologies have fueled up the pace of this industry. Currently, the industry is hitting a hefty profit of 4.5 lakh crore and out of which more than 65 percent of the revenue has come from unorganized sectors or startups. According to the industry experts, the sale will continue to grow with a sturdy CAGR of 11.19 percent and it will hit $79.65 billion by 2028. After the pandemic the effect of environment on us has become more evident and that’s the reason sustainability became a prime concern for all of us. Food technologies have helped to find out tactics and techniques to save the earth by using eco-friendly products. Food plates and containers are being made up of bamboo stems and dry bamboo leaves, processed papers are more sustainable, eco-friendly and cost-effective than plastic containers.

As, winding up statement we can say that, innovation and renovation without harming nature is always a blessing to us and food-technology is the inevitable boon of science which can make our future brighter, healthier and tastier. And it is successfully creating a wide platform for young minds to be creative and innovative.