Bio plastics

The IAAC also employed some unusual materials in the study, including orange peel, coffee powder and shrimp shells. There was a method to this and the material used has a genuine effect on the final plastic. The orange peel infused plastic was stronger, with better heat resistance, while the material containing coffee grounds displayed hydrophobic qualities.

The IAAC concluded that a combination of coffee and orange would make the best bioplastic and the geometry of the structure could then be varied to produce differing behaviour. Not every country has an excess of coffee and orange, but the study notes that each individual country can find their own combinations of food waste and plastic.

The amount of waste can also affect the level of shrinkage and bend over time in the plastic, which can be tuned for the individual purpose.

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Maple to the rescue

Maple, a David Chang-backed restaurant in New York City, doesn’t have any tables, cash registers, or waiters. Instead, its customers order meals through its website or mobile app, and a fleet of bike couriers deliver them. By eliminating the dining room and bringing meals to you, Maple is betting that it can sell more meals per hour, using less real estate, than a traditional restaurant.

The current gold standard for zipping patrons through a lunch line (what the industry calls "throughput") is Chipotle. According to its 2014 annual report, Chipotle manages to serve 300 meals per hour—a transaction every 12 seconds—at its best-performing locations, and the chain is so obsessed with its productivity that it assigns employees efficiency roles with names like "linebacker."

When Maple launched its first location in April, it served around 50 meals per hour at peak times. Less than a year later, on average it is now serving 800 meals per hour from each of its four kitchens. A few days before I visited in February, it had set a new record: 1,100 meals cooked and delivered in one hour...

That’s why continuing to invest in technology that can squeeze every last bit of efficiency out of its modest space and crew is important. Maple recently introduced, for instance, ordering windows that serve a dual purpose of allowing customers to schedule their lunch delivery at certain times and, at some point, helping to manage demand. The app could, for instance, allow people in a building where deliveries are already scheduled to order lunch, while telling a customer in an address not already scheduled in a route that lunch is sold out. Or, it could accept your order for instant delivery of a salad, which can be prepared in minutes and can join a trip to your address that’s almost ready to leave the kitchen, but tell your coworker who wants to order a chicken breast, which takes longer to cook, that his order will need to be slotted into the next hour’s trip.

With data science and smartphones, possibilities for increasing efficiency seem endless. As it scales, Maple even plans to coordinate its couriers so that they don’t need to come back to one kitchen to pick up orders—they can return to a different, closer hub, or receive a new order from another courier they’ll pass on the way.

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More Bompas

The first thing I notice about the Bompas & Parr studio is the human skull on the conference table. As I await my hosts, two culinary entertainers who’ve made a name for themselves in London with their wacky flavor-based experiments, I take the skull in my hands to determine whether it’s real. It is. A loose tooth falls out into my palm. I panic and put the skull back on the table.

A few minutes later, Sam Bompas whirls into the room. He’s a svelte 32-year-old with a tall puff of blond hair, a playful smile, and a rumbling deep voice. He’s wearing a purple suit over a shirt covered in pineapples, which is actually modest compared to his counterpart’s getup: 33-year-old Harry Parr is sporting a bright long-sleeved shirt covered in McDonald’s characters, including Ronald and Grimace. He says his wife made it for him.

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Computer Oven

This new oven is designed to guess the type of food you put in it, and cook it for the correct amount of time and temperature
San Francisco-based modern appliance company June, have taken the guess work out of cooking with the design of their countertop oven.

Looking more like a toaster oven, this smart oven can guess the type of food you put in it, know how long you need to cook it for, and at what temperature.
It has a built-in camera that can also send your device a live stream video, so you can keep an eye on it, and share photos on social media. Plus it will message you when it is done cooking.

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IKEA garden

If you’ve always wanted to grow your own veggies and herbs, but don’t have a yard where you can set up a garden, IKEA has the perfect product for you. The furniture retailer just unveiled its new KRYDDA/VÄXER hydroponic garden, which allows anyone to easily grow fresh produce at home.

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...Shift in How People Eat

...Consumers are walking away from America’s most iconic food brands. Big food manufacturers are reacting by cleaning up their ingredient labels, acquiring healthier brands and coming out with a prodigious array of new products. Last year, General Mills purchased the organic pasta maker Annie’s Homegrown for $820 million — a price that was over four times the company’s revenues, likening it to valuations more often seen in Silicon Valley. The company also introduced more than 200 new products, ranging from Cheerios Protein to Betty Crocker gluten-free cookie mix, to capitalize on the latest consumer fads...

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Thinking Food

The thinking food design project asked a question, what is Food Design?

Participants send a 2-minute video response.

Tagging each, we find convergence and attraction.

Since its creation thinking food design has appeared in food festivals, blogs, catalogues, exhibitions, as well as Wallpaper, le Fooding and Core 77.

This non-profit platform has been consulted by over 20,000 visitors in 100 countries.

explore it here

How packaging can make food more flavorful.

Sitting in a pub one night a dozen years ago, Charles Spence realized that he was in the presence of the ideal experimental model: the Pringles potato chip. Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University, runs the Crossmodal Research Lab there, which studies how the brain integrates information from the five human senses to produce a coherent impression of reality. Very often, these modes of perception influence one another on the way to becoming conscious thought. For instance, scientists have long known that whether a strawberry tastes sweet or bland depends in no small part on the kinds of organic molecule detected by olfactory receptors in the nose. Spence had been wondering whether taste might be similarly shaped by sound: Would a potato chip taste different if the sound of its crunch was altered? To explore that question, he needed a chip with a reliably uniform crunch. The Pringle—that thin, homogeneous, stackable paraboloid—was perfect.

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mega food parks

42 mega food parks to start operations by 2019: Harsimrat Kaur Badal 

The Mega Food Park Scheme, based on the cluster approach, is modelled on hub-and-spoke architecture, which follows principles from the spoke-hub distribution paradigm.

It aims at facilitating the establishment of a strong food processing industry backed by an efficient supply chain, which includes collection centres, a central processing centre (CPC) and cold chain infrastructure. 

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food inventions

7 food magicians who'll melt your mind

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compost bowls

The FOODSCAPES project tackles the problem of food waste in a completely different way. Rather than expending efforts to decrease food waste, they are utilizing food waste to be a functional piece of tableware.

FOODSCAPES is created by WHOMADE.IT and Michela Milani. It uses edible leftover materials and reconstructs a seed-shaped bowl that can hold dry foods. It is free of any additives, preservatives, colorants, thickeners, correctors, and artificial agents. Once you’re done with it, it can be dissolved in water and act as soil fertilizer.

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processed food cubes

At a casual glance, they look like colorful toy blocks. But look closer, and you'll recognize a grapefruit, an onion, a kiwi and a piece of tuna, among other bite-size morsels.

"Nowadays everyone seems to be obsessed by where does the food that I eat come from. Is it locally produced? Am I only eating non-processed food, etc.?" the Dutch artists wrote in an email. "So we decided to aesthetically process the unprocessed."

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Ecotrust's The Redd to bring small food-makers together with social justice bent

Ecotrust has a long history working with Oregonians in rural areas who are producing food and resources, but have always struggled to connect that work with urban consumers.

Nathan Kadish, director of investment strategy at the conservation organization, said the recent purchase of a former foundry in the Central Eastside will help bridge the two. The Redd, named for the riverbed nests where salmon spawn, will host small food-makers -- the people between farmers and diners -- who often don't have consistent use of kitchen space or room to store ingredients.

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urban architecture in the UAE

“Food is a very good barometer of how successful we are at managing our relationships with the climate, temperatures, sun, water, everything.”

Mr Rodriguez said although the use of rooftops for farming was an attractive idea, “there are fundamentals that have to be guided by a submission to the conditions”. Farming indoors could be an option to avoid the intensive heat, given the existing technology for viable production, he said.

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Sprouted 3D treats

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: food designer Chloé Rutzerveld has produced a concept for “wholesome and sustainable” 3D-printed treats that sprout plants and mushrooms for flavour .

Rutzerveld’s Edible Development venture consists of 3D-printed shapes containing a mixture of seeds, spores and yeast, which will commence to expand soon after only a couple of days.

“Edible development is discovering how 3D printing could transform the meals industry,” she says in the movie. “It is about 3D printing with dwelling organisms, which will produce into a completely grown edible.”

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The Kitchen that can do it all

Cameras in the oven, weight sensors in the fridge and monitor screens in the backsplash are just some of the high-tech gadgets integrated into the ultra-smart FutureHAUS kitchen.  

Designed by a team of Virginia Tech architecture students, in collaboration with the Modular Building Institute

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Urban Bee Hives

Although the drop in mortality is a positive, as is the fact that CCD does not seem to have afflicted Australia, two-thirds of beekeepers surveyed by the USDA still see any losses greater than the 18.9 per cent level as unacceptable and non economically sustainable. 

All of these statistics highlight a threat to bee colonies which will in turn affect global food security, agriculture jobs and pollination across the green environment. These statistics have prompted architects to create sustainable structures to house bees particuarly in urban areas. 

Many of these projects are designed to replicate the “hive” environment. Norwegian design firm Snøhetta’s Vulkan Beehive is made up of two birch veneer hexagonal volumes that aim to house bees while also educating city inhabitants on the current threat of CCD. 

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Food Hacks

I was familiar with "design hacks" more in terms of IKEA products than architecture or food. But, this act of 'hacking' - or taking something with an intended purpose or function and using it in an uncoventional way to recieve an intended, personal outcome - has been thrown around more and more. It's incredibly creative and can have an impact of personalization, customization, and optimization by getting more or better out of something that you already have. 

Design does this. We could learn a lot about architecture and design from hacks. Where are architecture hacks in our everyday world?

Here are some pretty cleaver food hacks.

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Furniture that is Alive!

GreenTowers specializes in urban agricultural design.  We create self-contained ecosystems that allow you to grow food at home, at work, and everywhere in between.  Our focus is on unconventional and soilless growing techniques, ranging from ornamental aquaponic indoor gardens to hydroponic vertical farming production.  Relax and revitalize by surrounding yourself with a healthier and more natural environment.

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Ice Cream and Architecture

"Case’s creations seek to bridge the gap between architecture and public awareness. After years of schooling, where she found the subject lacking a human face, she set out to show that architecture can be fun and interesting. Her method: Using food to explore structure and teach customers about the field. Popular flavors include Im Pei-nut Butter, Mies Vanillie Rohe and Mintimalism. The name “Coolhaus” itself is a pun: The triple entendre references the Bauhaus design movement, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and the anatomy of the ice cream sandwich itself—a “cool house”—according to the company’s website."

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