More and more restaurants, supermarkets, universities, hospitals, and food service providers are trying to figure out how they begin to source ingredients locally. And while this interest theoretically creates new opportunities to grow local and regional food economies, both farmers and wholesale buyers face a multitude of infrastructural and operational challenges - price, transaction costs, logistics, quality, appearance, food safety, consistency, volume, availability, and knowledge of business, markets, and communications - that must be overcome before local could ever go mainstream.

It is difficult, for example, for wholesale and institutional buyers to find local and mid-sized farms, see what products they have available and place orders. Many of these farms lack websites, and rely on fax, email, and text to distribute their product lists and process orders. Volume and consistency are also major concerns for wholesale buyers, who are often forced to source from numerous farms to get the quantity of food they need. For most, these logistics are simply too inefficient and time consuming.

FarmersWeb, a new wholesale management tool and online marketplace, aims to make it easier for local farms and wholesale buyers to connect. Through their platform, buyers can easily find local farms, see what produce they have available, and order items from multiple farms at once.

“Overall, we’re trying to bring the efficiency and transparency of the Internet to a wholesale process that previously lacked both,” said Jennifer Goggin, co-founder of FarmersWeb. “By creating a tool that makes selling and buying local food easier, we hope to not only boost the local agricultural economy, but also to increase everyone’s ability to eat seasonally and locally, as they shop for food to cook, at work and when they go out to a restaurant for dinner.”

I am always skeptical of startups with business models that rely on farmers regularly updating information through online platforms. The farmers that I’ve spoken with are busy and tend to spend limited time online. Haven been burned in the past by other service providers, they can be reluctant to try out new products. Creating a two-sided market is also never an easy feat, particularly when it involves entirely new behaviors for one of the user groups.

That being said, the founding team does have experience with local food distribution logistics. Two of the three co-founders, Goggin and Aaron Grosbard, met while worked at a local food distributor. There they worked with farmers, and learned about distribution logistics for perishable goods, marketing to a high-end restaurant, and back-office management.

I had a chance to catch up with Goggin to learn more about FarmersWeb’s business model.

______________________________

Danielle Gould: How does FarmersWeb work?

Jennifer Goggin:  When a farm first signs up, they fill out their profile, delivery settings and inventory list. Once everything is complete, their account is activated, which means buyers can now view the farm’s available products. Buyers can either shop by farm or by category, and they can refine their search by any number of advanced filters. Once the buyer has placed all the items they want into their cart, they choose the desired delivery or pick-up date for each farm, and then check out with a credit card. The farms receive a notification that they have a new order, and they log in to FarmersWeb to confirm it. Each side can view the details of pending and past orders on the site, and print receiving and loading slips for each order. The farm can deliver their products in whatever manner they prefer, whether it’s on their own trucks, by shipping, or by using a third-party logistics provider.

DG:  Farmers don’t tend to spend a lot of time online or testing new products. Who is your target market and how are you addressing these challenges?

JG:  Our target market is any farm that has access to the Internet and is looking for a way to simplify and expand their wholesale operation. We designed FarmersWeb so that it is incredibly easy to use—there’s really no training necessary, although we always make sure to walk farms through the site when they first register. The minimal time that the farm spends setting up their account on FarmersWeb is returned many times over by the ongoing efficiencies that the website provides by managing their sales operations.

We’ve actually found that the level of ‘tech savviness’ varies wildly. Some of our farmers need to get their younger sons or daughters to manage the site for them; some are asking us if they can use it on their iPad to update their inventory while they’re in the fields (…this feature is coming). And it’s not just a generational thing—some of our most tech-friendly farmers are the ones that have been doing this for decades.

DG:  How are you addressing the challenges of building a two-sided marketplace?

JG:  While we were developing the website, we gathered a group of pilot users—both farms and buyers—who really liked the concept and were eager to be on the site from its launch. From there, and after we felt confident the website was working as it should, we continued to reach out to individual farms and buyers to slowly build our user base. A number of trade organizations and advocacy groups have been of great help in spreading the word to their members, and many farms and buyers using the site have recommended it to their friends and neighbors. And finally, as much as FarmersWeb is a ‘matchmaker’ of sorts between the two groups, it is also a management tool for farms that already have a roster of current customers. For those farms, it has been much easier for them to say “place your order on FarmersWeb” than to try to manage the process offline.

DG:  What is your business model?

JG:  We take a commission from the farm on the amount of sales that go through the site, and the commission percentage lowers as the sales go up. There’s no subscription or sign-up fee, so the site is very low risk—if they don’t sell anything, they don’t pay anything. We wanted to encourage farms to use FarmersWeb for all of their wholesale business, not just from the new customers that might find them through the site. Buyers pay the price listed on the website along with any additional delivery fees that the farm may require.

DG:  What are the most interesting or unexpected things that you’ve learned so far?

JG:  That even the top New York chefs and restaurant groups have been picking up from farmers’ markets if they want local food. We initially expected FarmersWeb to help those wholesale buyers who had not previously been sourcing from local farms. But we quickly discovered the benefits of doing so through an online platform also extend to the buyers who are known for already sourcing locally.

DG:  Why did you decide to focus on local vs. regional? How do you define local?

JG:  Our definition of local is a maximum of 300 miles between the farm and the buyer—essentially what can be delivered in a day’s drive. However, most of our farms are within 200 miles of the New York City area, which is the only area we are operating in right now. As we expand, we plan to implement a feature that lets the buyer decide what their definition of ‘local’ is and shop accordingly.

Most years there is a dominant tech solution at the National Restaurant Association Show (NRA). Not this year. This year, we saw a range of technologies clustered around a common theme: guest experience.

Wait list management apps, tablets for table top ordering,  and customer guest loyalty solutions are all new solutions to old problems — not just incrementally higher-tech versions of the same solutions. Rajat Suri from E La Carte, a tabletop ordering tablet company, said it best: The modern concept of restaurants started in Roman times and has barely changed. But change is coming.

These new technologies are fundamentally different from the last generation of restaurant tools- they are less expensive, more functional and easier to use and maintain. This means for the first time restaurants are not swapping cost elements; they are replacing heavyweight legacy tools for margin-enhancing, operationally better solutions. I’ll repeat to make sure you didn’t miss it: margin-enhancing, operationally better solutions.

Technology and hospitality are no longer separate. Through deep integration we’re seeing restaurants improve the guest experience in ways we never imagined before now. The restaurant you grew up in, is not the restaurant you can run today, and is definitely not the restaurant you will run in a few years. And this is a good thing.

[Editors Note: Check out Pizzamarketplace.com for more insights into how restaurant technology is evolving.]

This post originally appeared on the Ordr.in blog.

** Photo Credit: Marc van der Chijs 

Americans know they are fat. A staggering two-thirds of adults and one-third of children in the United States are overweight or obese, hampering the overall productivity and health of the nation. Obesity-related illness treatments cost an estimated $190.2 billion annually, for example, which is 21 percent of annual medical spending in the United States.  Researchers project this will only get worse, estimating costs will rise to $549.5 billion by 2030, according to a report in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Businesses also suffer, facing an approximate $4.3 billion in losses as a result of obesity-related absenteeism.

A new report released Monday, “Accelerat­ing Progress in Obesity Prevention: Solving the Weight of the Nation,” by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the health group of the National Academy of Sciences, outlines five obesity prevention actions that can accelerate societal-level prevention, including:

• Integrating physical activity into people’s daily lives
• Making healthy food and beverage options available everywhere
• Transforming marketing and messages about nutrition and activity
• Making schools a gateway to healthy weights
• Galvanizing employers and health care professionals to support healthy lifestyles

These strategies are the result of an IOM committee assessment of  800 previously published obesity prevention recommendations and associated strategies, mapping how the relationships between these efforts could improve their individual and overall impacts.

“As the trends show, people have a very tough time achieving healthy weights when inactive lifestyles are the norm and inexpensive, high-calorie foods and drinks are readily available 24 hours a day,” said committee chair Dan Glickman, executive director of congressional programs, Aspen Institute, Washington, D.C., and former secretary, U.S. Department of Agriculture, in a press release. “Individuals and groups can’t solve this complex problem alone, and that’s why we recommend changes that can work together at the societal level and reinforce one another’s impact to speed our progress.”

• Andrea Cutright, co-founder of  Foodily
• Naithan Jones, founder of AgLocal
• Aihui Ong, founder of Love With Food
• Arram Sabeti, founder of Zerocater
• Rob Spiro, founder of Good Eggs
• Brian Witlin, CEO of  Shopwell

I am a self-proclaimed foodie in New York City. My latest discoveries: Littleneck of Brooklyn for amazing oysters, and tasty Ramps used in scrambled eggs for cooking.  Any city that has such diversity, density, and distractions boast a certain excitement for the culinary universe.  So between the digital tools of Zagat, Fresh Direct and Seamless you won’t go hungry. But this isn’t what I am excited about. There is a new trend that is taking shape and it’s powered by data and APIs.  The way we eat is going to change.

The most important aspect of food is the discovery experience (besides actually eating). An individual needs to uncover these new tastes, foods, restaurants, recipes, and ingredients. Fortunately,  you are now able to harness the power of apps and APIs to save you time, and access relevant information.  Tapping into your Social Graph, all this can be curated for you. For example, I’ve been using Foursquare’s data to discover popular restaurants. Thanks to their Venue API , the mashup MisoTrendy can showcase what restaurant’s are trending – right now. This is a great tool to use in any city to impress your friends.  The discovery experience has certainly got an upgrade.

What entrée should you order? On the micro-scale, things get interesting. Again, Foursquare’s data truly shines with their Tips.  The amount of user-generated advice available is quite trustworthy with the good content bumped to the top. Some advice for you: Clam Pie at Franny’s Fried Green Tomato Bun at Chucko,Rosemary Fries at Nook, and Fried Dumplings at Fried Dumpling (how original).

Another favorite food-curation tool is Foodspotting. With an active community of foodies snapping photos of their dishes, you can certainly make the right decision when the Maître ‘d asks for your order. A great utilization of Foodspotting’s API is with OpenBuildings data set. Great looking buildings + great food = a terrific experience.

All of these APIs are the key ingredients for the future. Because of them, you can look forward to some amazing dining experiences.  However, how is this data-trend changing the way we eat at home (aside from the API-powered refrigerator)? I was fortunate to get some answers from a real pioneer in this field, Mike Lee, the founder of culinary arts group called Studiofeast.

Studiofeast's Open Framework for Bo Ssam

Mike says: “The home kitchen is the last stop on the food chain and there really hasn’t been too much innovation there in a long while. The decision to cook at home is determined by the cook’s education, inspiration, and access to product. Digital plays a huge role in each of those categories, but I think it all needs to come together at home in one nice package.”

The opportunities to bring nutritional, local, and sustainable food information into your home kitchen are huge. No longer are you dependent on your giant supermarket and a dusty cookbook. Times have changed, and digital is enabling a new generation of consumers.  An example community that aims to disrupt and innovate the food chain is this website, Food+Tech Connect, which even host Hackathons that utilize open APIs and government data to create ground-breaking new tools.

Mike continues, “I’d love to see a digital hub at home that pulls in all the data necessary to teach and guide you how to cook, has social, game, and inspirational elements to keep cooking fun.  Much in the same way something like Boxee pulls in all these disparate sources of video into one nice user experience that promotes TV watching, I’m fascinated at the opportunity to do this for the kitchen to promote home cooking. Having open data and APIs to connect all of this is crucial, but I think the best user experience will ultimately have the most impact on home cooking.”

I am sure he has a home kitchen app in the works, and I can’t wait to see what APIs he will utilize. He has already utilized data to create a unique menu (The Last Meal) by crowdsourcing data, and creating open source recipes. It is definitely an exciting time for the chef at home.

APIs are transforming the way we eat.  Whether it’s at home, or when you are dining out, consumers (and developers) are empowered like never before. The combination of a great user experience powered by valuable data will lead to some revolutionary new culinary apps. Now to offset this all with more frequent trips to the gym.

This post originally appeared on the Mashery blog.

** Cover photograph by Steph Goralnick.

According to results of the OTA’s 2012 Organic Industry Survey, the U.S organic food and beverage sector grew by 9.4 percent in 2011, reaching $29.22 billion in sales. The fastest-growing sector was the meat, fish & poultry category, with 13 percent growth over 2010 sales. This is likely related to increased food safety concerns related to our meat supply. The overall industry, including the organic non-food sector, grew by 9.5 percent, reaching a total of $31.5 billion. In comparison, conventionally produced food and non-food items experienced 4.7 percent growth.

The study attributes this growth to improvements in the economy, consumer price inflation due to input price increases and consumer demand for convenience products.

The OTA’s 2011 Organic Industry Survey is available for purchase here.

But brands and retailers should take notice – it is only a matter of time before socially conscious eaters in the United States begin demanding information about farmworker conditions.

The grassroots groundswell has already begun. The foundation arm of Bon Appétit Management Company, which operates more than 400 cafés for companies including Twitter, Yahoo! and eBay,  is already working to educate businesses and consumers of the issues and opportunities to change the status quo through TEDxFruitvale.

While not perfect, many eaters look for a “fair trade” label when purchasing coffee and chocolate products. The new Food Justice Certification, a third party certification for social justice in agricultural and food jobs from the Domestic Fair Trade Association, has yet to make it mainstream, but certainly foreshadows what’s to come.

“It creates a point of comparison for the rest of the food system,” writes Grist Food Editor Twilight Greenway of the new Certification. “We live in a time when consumers don’t have to dig too hard to find examples of really terrible farm labor practices. From documented cases of slavery and other human rights abuses in Florida’s tomato fields, to workers dying from heat exhaustion on California farms, and new data about the plight of women on farms and people of color in the food system at large, the national picture is pretty grim.”

How can we change the system and stop these injustices? Transform the grocery industry, says award-winning documentary film maker Sanjay Rawal.

Rawal’s latest film project Food Chain, explores labor practices within the United States agriculture sector and how the role the policies of large buyers, particularly supermarkets, play in perpetuating these practices. The Food Chain Team have collected over 400 hours of interviews with farmworkers, as well as with food justice thought-leaders such as Eric Schlosser, Bobby Kennedy Jr., Dolores Huerta, Barry Estabrook, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and the UFW.

Now, they are trying to raise post-production funds through Kickstarter to turn their footage into a 70-80 minute film. If you like the short, yet illuminating clip below, you can support the project here.

Featured Image via Food Chain Kickstarter//
Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Fast for Fair Food. March 2012. Week long hunger strike outside Publix Headquarters in Lakeland, Florida.

New York’s first ever Food Book Fair is this weekend, May 4th-6th, in Brooklyn, at Williamsburg’s newly opened Wythe Hotel. The event is a celebration of food writing, reading, and eating and features a number of ticketed panels, free book signings, and other even more festive events. Our gracious host here at Food+Tech Connect, Danielle Gould, will be taking part in our Food+Tech+Content panel on Friday. While their focus will be on the ways food influences technology, she has agreed to let us share with you some low-tech alternatives for engaging with food knowledge. The following publications form the line-up for our Saturday Foodieodicals celebration, a gathering of our favorite food-oriented periodicals where one can eat, meet, and be merry.

ACQTASTE

“ The voice of a food movement around the world,” Acquired Taste aims to not only change people’s perceptions of food, but also their perceptions of food publications. With a web design as sleek as their print design, you know they are at the cutting edge, at the same time ultra-hip and down to earth enough to consider the goings-on of a home kitchen.

The Art of Eating

A classic, The Art of Eating has brought the best of food, wine, restaurants, and more to readers since 1986. Thanks to the careful and caring efforts of founder Edward Behr, the magazine has become one of the most respected food publications around for its dedication to quality and obsessive focus on detail.  In addition to welcoming Art of Eating to Foodieodicals, we welcome Ed Behr as the moderator for the Food+Lit+Mags panel.

DESIGN INDABA

Based in South Africa, Design Indaba is based on the idea that creativity can fuel an economic revolution in South Africa. It culls together the best of the best of people in design and other creative disciplines in the region and around the globe. The magazine did a food issue with the help of guest editor Marije Vogelzang. With her help, they picked the brains of the likes of Ferran Adria and Carolyn Steel while also considering if food can bring world peace.

Diner Journal

Lucky Peach

This literary embodiment of the souls of David Chang, Peter Meehan, and the various iterations of the Momofuku concept, is punk and posh, haute and bas, subtle and ostentatious. Their website calls for submissions not only of recipes, but of dirty jokes and tall tales.  Sometimes it’s all about balance. In addition to welcoming Lucky Peach to Foodieodicals, we welcome Peter Meehan as a panelist for our Food+Lit+Mags panel.

Meatpaper

Two vegetarian journalists meet and decide to create a publication about meat. Rather than extolling the virtues of vegetarianism, however, founders Sasha Wizansky and Amy Standen decided to address the exploding meat culture with thoughtful articles that offered deep insights on the polarizing issue of meat consumption. While neither for or against meat, Meatpaper attempts to make sense of the “bone-deep emotions” tied up with this “divisive and universal, delicious and disturbing, funny and dead-serious” concept of carnivorousness.

Put A Egg on It!

Based in Washington DC, The Runcible Spoon presents itself as part art-mag, part food-mag to get you “daydreaming about food and cooking.” Jointly run by Malaka Gharib and Claire O’neill, the zine is a free publication which attracts readers by its artful approach and its uncanny collection of stories personally curated by Gharib. They were recently featured in Saveur and the New York Times as prime examples of zines in the internet age.

Swallow Magazine

White Zinfandel is a collaboration between an architecture firm and an art space to create art and write about food. Self-described as “devoted to the visual manifestation of food and culture produced within the lives of creative individuals,” the work of these artists has landed them a spot in a MoMA exhibit. Abstract, yet appealing, White Zinfandel even includes recipes.

Wilder Quarterly

A periodical for the horticulturally-inclined, Wilder Quarterly takes looks at the gardeners, growers, foragers, and general population of green thumbs among us. It presents an in-depth look at the growing world and how it reflects itself upon all facets of our lives—culture, travel, food, design, and more.

• Twitter – I am eating a burger
• Facebook – I like burgers
• FourSquare – This is where I eat burgers
• Instagram – Here’s a vintage photo of me eating a burger in a blizzard
• Youtube – Here I am eating a burger
• LinkedIn – My skills include burger eating and blogging
• Pinterest – Here’s a burger recipe
• LastFM – Now listening to “burgers”
• Google+ – I am a Google employee who eats burgers
• Foodspotting – Look at this burger I am eating
• Untappd – I am drinking this beer with a burger
• Tumblr – When I’m not eating a burger, I’m doing this
• Wikipedia – The burger was created by and when
• Flickr – Here are pictures of the burgers I’ve eaten

My passions for food and social media also inspired me to create The Rev Meter for Social Community, a social community meter for assessing how optimized a bar or restaurant is with social networking. “The Rev Meter” is a points system to assess how well a business is using what I consider to be the 10 most important social networks. My goal here is to educate and assist already great businesses more effectively use these tools.

[Insert Restaurant Name] scores a [number] on The Rev Meter for Social Community

SCORING:
4 points or less: You’ve missed the 5 basics and are less than optimized.
5 points: You’ve covered the basics, which is better than most but far from optimized.
6 to 9 points: You’re doing better than most and on your way to becoming a well respected social community whiz.
10 points: Congrats on a perfect score!

Thanks to Three Ships Media for the inspiration. They did this with a very, very, very funny yet completely correct instagram post about donuts. As per their website: “Three Ships Media is a digital agency that serves ambitious, innovative clients who view online marketing as a critical element of their customer acquisition strategy.” Most of my post was borrowed from theirs with a couple additions. Hilarious.

This post originally appeared on Burger Conquest.

On April 23, 2012, two student groups tackling hunger and agriculture management challenges emerged as winners in the U.S. Finals of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup Software Design Competition. The annual competition is designed to encourage students to develop technology-based solutions for pressing global issues.

Flash Food, a real-time food donation delivery platform, took first place in the U.S. finals and will go onto to compete in the worldwide finals in Australia this summer. Created by a team of students from Arizona State University, Flash Food helps restaurants or event organizers coordinate same-day food donation deliveries to families in need.  The goal is to get perishable items to families faster and more efficiently.

LegenDairy, web and mobile platforms that enables farmers to monitor livestock health conditions using RFID technology and Windows Azure Cloud computing, won the new U.S. Windows Azure award. The Brigham Young University group hopes that collecting such data will improve accuracy of data reports, increase production efficiencies and reduce the cost of food.

Photo: Courtesy Microsoft

Zokos is a new startup that aims to make it easier for people to connect in real life – over food- by reducing what they have identified as the “barriers to entertaining.” Last week, the Brooklyn-based startup launched their first tool, a platform designed to help hosts manage an event and share the costs with their guests.

How it works: party hosts set a goal for the number of guests they would like to invite and the amount of money they need to cover the costs of the event.  Similar to  Kickstarter, guests must pay to RSVP, but are not charged until the goal has been met. Zokos charges a 3 percent fee and $.30 per guest.

Zokos grew out of co-founders Christopher Kieran, Bradley Baer and Andrew Hapke’s experience as members of Veggie Dinners, a 300-person dinner club, while in graduate school at Yale.

“We had a lot of fun in Veggie Dinner at Yale,” said  Hapke, co-founder and chief marketing officer. “We learned that with the right collaborative tools, people really start coming together and enjoying each other’s company more  often.”

The co-founders learned the hard way that the Veggie Dinner model was too complicated to scale and built a platform that could facilitate human interaction through dinner parties, wine tastings, tailgating parties, cooking classes and more.

The dinner party market is a tough one. It will be certainly be interesting to see how Zokos fares in comparison to others like Housefed and Gusta, who have developed similar products. Gusta offers more functionality like analytics, but charges a 10% transaction fee. Housefed is no longer in operation.

Danielle Gould:  How much of a pain point is dinner cost for someone when they consider hosting a dinner?

Hapke:  We see our site addressing what we call the “barriers to entertaining” one by one. The fact that it is expensive to entertain is just one of the barriers to entertaining. Other tools we will continue to develop are: tools to help you achieve an interesting mix of guests at your party, tools to help you be more certain about who is coming and who is not, and tools to help you decide what and how much to prepare for your party. A quote from the Food 52 discussion about our site yesterday puts the need perfectly:

“My daughter, who is one of the 52% of college graduates looking for work and underemployed at the same time, just called to tell me that now she can make her beef short ribs recipe for her friends. They have been demanding it, and the money thing was difficult. Now she knows how many people are coming and has the cash to buy the quality of products she knows is necessary. My daughter and her friends have quite sophisticated palates, and this is giving them room to really step out in the food world.”

DG:  What have been the greatest challenges you’ve faced with building Zokos?

AH:  Realizing that our beloved veggie dinner model was difficult for people to understand and wouldn’t scale very well. It was hard to let go and make that change, but we did a lot of collective soul searching and figured out how to keep all the fundamentals of our original intent. We just want people to get together. We want real life social interactions to be better quality and more frequent. It turns out food is the world’s favorite reason to come together and we’re very happy to facilitate that.

DG:  Could you describe why you decided to pivot from a product that supports the Veggie Dinners model to a product that helps hosts share dinner party costs with their guests?

AH: We heard over and over again that the same few people always end up hosting, either because they love to, they have the right space for it, or they are the best cook. Others don’t like hosting and always felt guilty for not reciprocating, but they’re great party guests and they love home cooked meals. With our model we can help make it easier for natural hosts to host more often and buy better stuff. The best part is that it is always cheaper than going out, and (in our opinions) more intimate and enjoyable to entertain at home.

DG:  How frequently does the average person host dinner parties?

AH: We have heard a few interesting statistics. For one the market for “at home social occasions” is 33 billion dollars annually and growing. Forty percent of consumers said they plan to entertain more often in the next year. Two thirds of millennials consider themselves casual cooking enthusiasts. They cook an average of nine elaborate or gourmet meals per year.

DG:  What is your business model and who is your target market?

AH: Right now we take a small transaction fee when a host chooses to have guests share the costs of a party. The first group we are targeting is students and young professionals who love to socialize and love food.

DG: What are the most interesting / unexpected things you’ve learned?

AH:  People are seriously flaky! We are working on that too, don’t worry!

Over the past 5 months, Massive Health has collected over 7.68 million food ratings from people in 50 countries through The Eatery, an iPhone app that helps users track and analyze their eating patterns. Today, they are releasing some of their key findings about when people eat, where people eat, what they eat, and who they eat with, as a series of infographics. For more information about the company and  to see the infographic detailing at how people think they eat (and how healthy they actually eat) click here.

Key Finding on When We Eat

• We eat 1.7 percent less healthy after each hour that passes in the day
• Breakfast is the healthiest meal of the day. Dinner is 15.9 percent less healthy
• People who eat breakfast eat 12.3 percent healthier during the day
• On the weekend, we eat more unhealthy foods – including 1.4  times as many croissants and 1.6 times as much beer

Key Findings On Where We Eat

• Americans who live along the coast eat healthier than those who live in the Midwest and the south
• We eat 12.7 percent healthier when we eat at home (vs. eating out)

Key Finding On Who Eats What

• New Yorkers eat 3.2 times more arugula than other cities (NY’s health rating is a high 83.6 percent)
• Philadelphia residents eat 3.7 times more bagels (Philly’s health rating is a low 28.6 percent)

Key Findings On Who People Eat With

Our friends influence what we choose to eat by 34.5 perent.

[Editors Note: This post includes 1 of 5 infographics looking at how, where , what, when and with who people eat. The remaining infographics can be found here.]

Last February, Massive Health raised $2.5 million in seed funding to help people improve their health through better data, design, social and game mechanics. Their goal has been to bridge the world’s of healthcare and consumer products, using mobile phones as sensors that collect real-time data about a user’s behavior. The company wants to analyze the data collected to tighten the feedback loop for patients of chronic diseases and help them improve their behavior.

Their first experiment with this is The Eatery,  an iPhone app that helps users track and analyze their eating patterns to better understand their strengths, weaknesses and the best places to make changes in their diet. Users snap photos of their food, and then rate its health on a scale from “Fit” to “Fat.” Users then receive crowdsourced feedback on the healthfulness of their eating habits from community members.

Collecting large-scale, real-time data about people’s diets, not just self-reported details about their eating habits, is nearly impossible. Yet, this data could help us and the medical community better address the rising obesity and diabetes epidemics. Over the past 5 months, Massive Health has collected over 7.68 million food ratings from people in 50 countries. Today, they are releasing some of their key findings  about how people think they eat (and how healthy they actually eat), where people eat, what they eat, when they eat, and who they eat with, as a series of infographics.

But can crowdsourced data be trusted?

“Famously, one of the most accurate ways to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar is to average the guesses of everyone in the room,” writes Massive Health co-founder and Chief Vision Officer Aza Raskin on the company blog. “The crowd-sourced method beats much more advanced algorithms. To test our hunch that the same applied in nutrition, we looked at the aggregate Eatery scores for all meals eaten in a city versus the published obesity level in that city. It turns out there’s a strong correlation. Eatery data can accurately predict obesity levels of cities in the United States. That is, Eatery data strongly correlates with the healthiness of its users.”

Massive Health has broken the infographics into five parts. Below is the infographic detailing how healthfully we think we eat. Click here to be directed to the infographics on when, where, what, and with who people eat.

One of the interest key findings is that people eat 12.4 percent less healthy than users actually think they do. In fact, the less healthy the food is, the less accurate users tend to rate it. Pizza, for example, is rated 2.8 times less healthy by others than by the user.

Food gets its fair share of bad press these days, and for good reason. It’s no secret that our food supply chain is often bad for our economy, health, and environment. Obesity and diabetes are on the rise. Food recalls, environmental pollution and food insecurity are all far too common.

Food+Tech Connect wants to help you explore new ideas for how information and technology can be used to change the status quo and accelerate food innovation. The following are a selection of videos exploring ideas about how we source and cook our food. Please let us know if you have any ideas you would like to share in the comments section below.

{Videography for the first three videos was shot by Celia Talbot Tobin, and produced and edited by Sarah A. Maine as part of the Hacking the Food System Series}

Elizabeth McVay Greene of Plovgh talks about how technology can be used to connect farmers directly with consumers.

“Applying technology to models that restore the connection between farmers and the people they feed has the potential to make an already disruptive trend a new standard for agriculture.” – Hacking the Food System: Farm Profitability and Affordability of Food

Will Turnage of R/GA, Ratio & Bread Baking Basics talks about building software for the home cook. Turnage says we’ve only scratched the surface of how we can make the home cooking experience more dynamic and personalized.

“Applying technology to models that restore the connection between farmers and the people they feed has the potential to make an already disruptive trend a new standard for agriculture.” – Hacking the Food System: Re-Imagining Recipes With Data

Emily Cavalier of Mouth of the Border discusses how technology can be used to help ethnic communities create great foods with fresh ingredients.

James Beard Foundation Executive Vice President Mitchell Davis asks,“What does a better food system taste like?” Davis talks about taste as a powerful tool for social change.

Chefs Homaro Cantu and Ben Roche of Moto in Chicago,  explore how innovations pioneered in their restaurant lab can be used to solve global challenges like the world food crisis and cancer.

Sign up for Food+Tech Connect Bytes to have stories like this one come directly to your inbox.

Last Thursday, publisher Condé Nast announced their acquisition of online and mobile recipe box and shopping list platform Ziplist. Ziplist offers food publishers and bloggers fully branded, multi-platform tools that make it easy for their readers to save recipes and ingredient shopping lists to a universal account. Their services are being used by over 6,500 food partner websites and blogs, including Marthastewart.com and Simply Recipes, which has resulted in rapid user aquisition- the startup hit 1 million users in just 9 months (see the infographic below). While Ziplist will reportedly continue to operate independently, the deal has left some like paidContent’s Kevin Fitchard wondering how Ziplist partners will feel about “supporting one of their [Condé Nast] biggest competitors in food and lifestyle media.”

Condé Nast will be integrating the technology into their food brand platforms, including Epicurious and Gourmet Live, but will not be receiving any special treatment. Ziplist CEO Geoff Allen says Condé Nast will have the exact same capabilities as all of Ziplist’s other partners. The difference is that Condé Nast will “share with them on the additional revenue streams our platform provides, which initially is traditional advertising, but will become highly targeted offers reach consumers when they are at the food purchase consideration phase,” commented Allen in an email interview. In fact, Allen does not anticipate backlash from their existing brand partners.

“So far it has been quite the opposite- the response has been fantastic,” Allen commented by email. “Our partners recognize that the only recipe box and shopping list that has value, is the one that is “everywhere” the consumer is- or else it just does not get adopted in any meaningful way.”

In a way, Ziplist turns the the traditional digital publishing model on its head. Rather than making websites a destination, the startup creates new opportunities for publishers to extend the relevance and accessibility of their content beyond their own platform. Last September, ZipList launched a food recommendation engine that takes into account a user’s existing food discovery and shopping habits to deliver future meal inspirations. This is clearly a value add for publishers looking to better understand their users and to deliver relevant recipes to a new audience. It also means that Ziplist brand “partners” benefit from one another’s networks.

“We have never -and will not ever- share user information from one property with another, and our commitment and demonstration of this has led to dramatically increased adoption,” Allen remarked. “A shopping list and recipe box, no matter how capable it is, will never be the core competitive basis of our partners. They inspire and engage their audiences with wonderful content and experiences- we just step in and help their users execute on that. So again, the broader our network, the more the consumer uses it, and therefore everybody wins. This why Condé Nast has gone to such great lengths to keep us as a separate, independent company.”

What’s in it for Condé Nast?

“This acquisition enables to deliver on our commitment to marry quality content and innovative technology, giving unprecedented scale as we focus on creating additional revenue streams in the digital space,” says Condé Nast President Bob Sauerberg. “Our goal is to build ZipList as an independent company while collaborating with our food brands.”

What does Ziplist plan to do with the cash?

Ziplist is sitting on a significant amount of rich, cross-platform data about their users’ tastes, preferences and purchasing intent. Similar to many of the predictions I made in the 2011 Recipe Trends Report,  Allen says we can expect the company to roll out “advanced ways for consumers to save money on their purchases, enhanced content discovery, more personalization, and additional capabilities to help our users more efficiently plan meals and shopping trips.”

With Yummly’s big investment announcement, and now Ziplist’s, 2012 is certainly shaping up to be an interesting year for the future of cooking and publishing.