This article was first published in the April 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
A capsule containing cocoa-like powder is inserted into a Nespresso-style machine and a photograph of a chocolate soufflé is touched on an iPad screen. Forty seconds later, after a sequence of whirs and buzzes, the machine’s drawer is opened to reveal a steaming-hot, perfectly risen soufflé. Sure enough, beneath the soft airy sponge surface, the dessert features layers of moist cake and a rich liquid chocolate base. And the taste? Yum.
This is Genie, a food “replicator” being launched in 2016 initially via coffee shops, hotels and offices in Israel and Australia to allow preservative-and-stabiliser-free freeze-dried meals to be cooked anywhere that lacks a kitchen. The chef-designed cartridge meals, including couscous and vegetables, chicken with rice, and ramen, are made with only natural ingredients and have a shelf life of up to two years. What brings them back to life is the desktop cooker that uses three forms of heating, multiple motors, and up to four connected bottles of liquid, such as water, oil, milk and alcohol, whose proportions are customised for each dish.
“We were here with [behavioural economist] Dan Ariely and were hungry, and my co-founder Ayelet, who loves Star Trek, started laughing and said if only we had the replicator here, where you put a capsule in, push a button, and you have a meal,” Doron Marco, the founder of ten-person self-funded R&D company White Innovation, explains at its Rishpon headquarters, 15km north of Tel Aviv. “After an hour, she said, ‘Hm, we're an R&D team - we can do that.’”
After an early prototype turned cartridges into cakes at a Google X event, the company received so much interest that it established a machine-manufacturing plant at Karmiel, northern Israel, that is now producing “hundreds of units a day”, according to Ayelet Carasso, White Innovation’s CEO. “We already have 10,000 orders – with interest from hospitals, universities, even Nasa,” says Carasso, 39. “We just came back from a road trip in Australia, where there was interest from coffee shops, offices, motels. In Israel, we’re making soup, desserts, mac-and-cheese, banana bread, quinoa salad – and for Australia there will be extra dishes tailored for local tastes. Eventually we'll manufacture cartridges all over the world.”
“Our goal is to offer personalised food,” says serial inventor Marco, 47. “Everyone has their own microbiome that reacts to food differently. We're preparing a bracelet that shows if this food will be good for you personally.”
The ten-person self-funded company outsources manufacture: once industrial units have been rolled out, the company intends to market machines for the home. Food cartridges will be produced locally in each market: once a chef has designed a meal, a proprietary algorithm will determine how it should be freeze-dried and then reconstituted, Marco says. No preservatives or stabilisers are used.
Marco’s previous inventions include a catheter that delivers drugs to the heart (“It saved my daughter’s life”), as well as plastic screen displays. Carasso has a background in communications. They have patented the Genie’s workings, and say their mission goes beyond building a product business: “We want to change the way people eat,” Marco says. “Every coffee shop that doesn’t have a kitchen can become a restaurant.”
This, he says, is just the start. “We’re working on Genie 2, which will do extrusion and will make snacks. We're thinking big. We told the manufacturer we want a line that can produce 400 million capsules and a few million machines. It will amaze the world.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
