>> Intro Man: From the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Food IT: Fork to Farm, brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin here at the FOOD IT: Fork to Farm event at the Computer History Museum talking with amazing guests, from farmers to technologists, helping to increase the sustainability and the food chain. Next, we are joined by Michiel Bakker, the Director of Google Food. Michiel, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. It's great to be here. >> Well, so we're in Google's backyard here at the Computer History Museum, and I've always heard of Google Food as fantastic. You're going to hear it here first, Michiel did invite me, I have his card. I've never been able to eat at one of the restaurants, but now I have it on film. >> Michiel: Check! (Lisa Laughs) >> So, but tell me about ... You come from a hospitality background. Google Food, what was your segue into hospitality to being the Director of Food for Google? >> So, I worked for many many great years for Starwood Hotels and Resorts. For fifteen years over in the U.S. and my last two years with them, I was responsible for Food and Beverage operation in Europe, Middle East and Africa. So ... amazing times in Europe. At the time we were building out our hotel portfolio in the Middle East, and while I was there I got this call from that company out of Mountain View, Google, and said, "Would you be interested in having a conversation "with us about our food program?" That peaked my interest. I had never heard of their food program and how they were thinking and running food, so that led to a very fascinating interview journey, and, a year after the initial call, I started over here March of 2012, and I have loved every minute of it since. >> Well, your passion I was telling you I've seen some videos of you online, and your passion for it is really clear. What was it that Google was looking for you to help facilitate five years ago? >> So, prior to my arrival, we had three great regional teams that were responsible for everything that they were doing with food in their respective regions. My bosses at the time were very aware of how we would continue to grow, and they were aware of both the challenges and the opportunities of growing our program with the same rate of the growth of Google. So they were looking for an individual who could bring structure as well as capability options for our program. So, my role was, in the beginning, to really think through "How can you get Google Food ready "for ongoing growth for a great number of years?" >> So, one of the things that's interesting about this event, and I kept thinking I was misreading the title "Fork to Farm," and we're so used to, in the trend of Farm to Table and Fork to Farm, the consumer, the tech-savvy consumer, being very influential, organic, cage-free, hormone-free. Of course, you're now at the hub of technology. Everyone in the world knows Google. Everyone's got a million devices. Talk to us about how you're using technology at Google to improve the relationships with suppliers, the type of supply of food that you get. >> Yeah. So, it starts really with the user. So, we believe that our role is to enable individuals to make personal, informed food choices. So, personalization truly has to do with how we live and work these days. It's about me. I want it now. I want it whenever I want it and whatever I want, and I think that technology can play a great role in that. So, we've developed, internally, an app that will help, actually, users to find whatever they are looking for. So that will be one. But, if you then go further back into the food chain, then you get the question, "Is there data, "technology or platforms out there that might help us "with what do we call that food transparency "or food insight." Where we can really think through: "How might we help a consumer "to determine where food is coming from?" "What is in my food?" "What are the nutrients?" and I think, just as importantly, we don't speak about this much: "Where does my food waste go to?," because we're very focused on what I get but less interested today where it is actually going to. So we're thinking through: "What can we develop internally?" "What is already available "in the broader Google or Alphabet portfolio?" If you think about Google Search, if you think about Youtube, there are a lot of platforms or tools out there that can help individuals to make those informed food choices. And then, I think, what is harder, if you go further up the food chain, in really determining how can you trace a product from the farm or from the boat all the way back up to the consumer, and I think that is a journey that many partners, many stakeholders in the food system continue to work on. >> That's a big challenge because there's a tremendous amount of money that can be lost. I was reading that California supplies 90% of the world's almonds, and in the last three years there's been over 35 truckloads of almonds that have disappeared. >> Michiel: Yeah. >> And the trace-ability being a massive challenge, and that's tantamount to 10 million dollars. But you touched on something really interesting, and that's the personalization. We want it with everything, right? We are so tech-enabled and tech-savvy and ... we want it. You mentioned transparency. That's essential. So, talk to us about what is it that you're learning from, so I presume it's an app that Googlers have access to. How are you using that big data and analytics to influence the next generation of Google Food? >> So we'll think to the beginning of that. So, with the Eat app, that's the app we have internally, you have a profile as well, and you can set up your profile in such a way about the foods you like and the foods you like to avoid. So, you can apply the filters. So, what we now get the more people within our organization that would use the app the better insight we're going to get off. What ultimately, what percentage, is vegetarian, or what percentage is actually vegan or flexitarian? So, we get a better insight of where do you have what percentage of your population sit, so you can ultimately develop offerings that resonate with your population. >> And, so, you also talked about food waste. I was reading a McKinsey & Company report that reports that about one third of all food produced in the world is lost or wasted, which accounts for about 940 billion dollars world wide. And we kind of think, oh, we get a little, me, overzealous at the grocery store. We have these plans. So, how are you using the data that you're gathering from your Eat app to reduce food waste across Google? >> We don't really use that app for that yet, but we're working with the great company called LeanPath. So, LeanPath is a technology platform company that enables you to track food waste in a kitchen environment. So, every time when a chef throws something out, we wait, we take a picture of it, and we tag it, and as a result of having done that now for a couple of years, we have a very large global database with these food waste moments, and then what you can do in an individual kitchen you can analyze of actually what is driving food waste in your kitchen. And I think what we've learned, Two things happened: so the first one is, because you're paying attention to food waste, you get the Hawthorne Effect. People pay more attention to it, and, as a result of that, you will reduce food waste with that, but, secondly, you have ultimately learned of what is driving food waste in a specific kitchen. And then, I think, with that we've learned, as well, that it becomes complex. For example, we really would like our users, the rest of the world, to eat more vegetables and more fruit. So, we've learned that in our kitchens a big part of our food waste is driven by vegetables. So, now you get these two interesting conflicts, because you can say that on the one hand, if I want to reduce food waste, I should actually be scrappier with the vegetables, but, at the same time, we would like our users to eat more vegetables, so, ultimately, what is more important? And I think with that we've learned it's about the value of the product and then to think through we're probably better off focusing on reducing the waste of meat, versus ultimately reducing the waste of a carrot. The environmental impact of meat is significantly larger and, therefore, you need to, ultimately, focus your efforts on where can you make the biggest impact within the available capacity that you have. >> Now, have you, this is so interesting. Have you gone on, like, the speaking circuit to educate other, not just tech companies or businesses that want to scale, but there could be so much from the learning that you've done with big data and analytics to educate other businesses, even down to the farms. Is that something that's part of your ... >> So, our team and I would actually attend, will attend, various conferences around the world, but I think we're very focused on learning more and making a bigger impact and then sharing at the right opportune moment, because you can spend your whole life chatting about what you have done or are thinking of doing. Ultimately, we're an organization that is feeding a lot of individuals on a daily basis in a very responsible way, and we're going to learn more. We're only at the beginning of figuring out where we can make a bigger impact. >> And ... How have you been able to facilitate this scale? You were mentioning, before we went live, when you started, five years ago, the number of people you fed then that you feed now. How has cloud computing, big data, analytics, machine learning helped drive that scale that Google wanted to see? >> So, I think we are very focused on collaboration. So, it's actually finding partners who are either just as excited about the opportunities, are better at what you do, and are willing to do stuff together. Because, I think, by working more with others, you increased your overall reach, you'll learn more together, and, therefore, you become better at what you do. So, I think an interesting opportunity for us is we're feeding a wide variety of teams at Google and Alphabet on a daily basis, and they are engaged with food. So, sometimes you find a team or an individual that might not necessarily be as focused on food, but they're looking actually in an real world challenge that they can use for their emerging technologies. So, you can find different starting points to ultimately bring people together to address a common challenge. Food waste is an interesting one. So, we now have the database, and now the question is; how might you deploy machine learning to learn stuff you've never thought about? We're at the beginning of that, so, we have a long way to go. >> Beside food waste, what's, maybe, kind of the next thing on your horizon for the rest of 2017 to influence? >> How can you move your population to move to more balanced, planned, forward diet but do it in such a way where people actually are willingly and excitingly joining you on the journey, versus it getting stuck in the conversation as you're telling me what I cannot do, or you're taking something away from me. So, it really becomes: how can you make the alternative, which might be a cuisine type, or a concept where meat is not necessarily the center of the plate, just as exciting, or if not more exciting, than what we're doing as of today. >> Wow, so interesting. Well, I'm looking forward to my lunch with you at one of the Google restaurants. Michiel, thank you so much for joining us here and sharing what you're doing at Google. >> It's been a pleasure. >> And we want to thank you for watching as well. Again, Lisa Martin live at the FOOD IT: Fork to Farm event in Silicon Valley. Stick around. We'll be right back. [futuristic music]

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Food IT, Fork to Farm. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, with Jeff Frick, and we have just spent a really interesting educational day at the Fork to Farm event, Food IT. Jeff we've spoken with investors, ag-tech experts, folks in academia who are training the next generation of farmers, to Campbell Soup, who's been around since the late 1800s, are really focused on helping the agriculture and food industry combat the challenges of environmental sustainability, of climate change, of labor shortages, it's been a really, really intriguing day, where tech meets food and agriculture. >> Yeah and just a huge opportunity. One of the themes that kept coming up over and over again, is the average age of the farmers today. Heard 70 something, 60 something, whatever, they're getting old, so there's going to be a huge turnover in this industry, so both a challenge as well as an opportunity for the next generation of ag-people to make some of these changes, and change the way the industry works. The other thing that's really interesting that I found Lisa, is that there's really big social issues that are at play here. We talked about water, we talked about labor, that play into this whole thing, sustainability. And again, tying it back to their theme of its fork to farm, how much of that's now driven by the consumer and the industry, it's kind of a reaction to the consumer, which we see over and over and over in all the other shows that we go. The consumerization IT, driven by younger people's interactions with their phones, is setting an expectation of the way they want everything to work. And so, it sounds like the food industry is really at the cutting edge of this, still really early on, but as we saw in some of those market maps, and the innovation is rich, feels like we're really at the start of this thing. So even though this show has been around for a few years, they have the big show in Salinas next week, the Forbes show, that's still really early days of leveraging tech, innovation, to change the food industry. >> It is, and you brought up that the labor shortages, and that was echoed quite a bit today, for a number of reasons. One, the aging population of farmers as you mentioned. Two, also in California, the minimum wage going up, and that's not only going to be a problem Jeff for farmers, but it's actually now pervading into the retail space, where they're going to have to start depending on robotics to be able to create, or to reduce their cost, to provide even fast food. That was something that was quite interesting to me, I hadn't really quite thought about, from that channel perspective. >> Right, right. >> And then as you mentioned, on the tech enabled consumer side, I was talking with Jeff earlier, I kept thinking farm to fork, 'cause farm to table is so trendy now, right? There's a lot of apps. And you gave me this a-ha grasshopper look, and it was really because as consumers we've really demanded so much. We want transparency, we want to know exactly what's in things, and we want organic, and hormone-free, and we also want things delivered whenever, and wherever we want them. We think of the distribution model, has really become very decentralized, and a lot of that being driven by the consumer. On the farm side too, regarding the attrition, there's also a lot of antiquated, especially in the post-harvest supply chain, things that are still written down on paper, traceability is a huge challenge for them. And I think from some of the things we heard today, a lot of the farming, especially in California, they can't really quite see all the data that they have, but they are sitting on a lot of information, that not only could make their farms more efficient, but could also facilitate you think, even knowledge transfer to the next generation of farmers. Right, right. Yeah a lot of talk about kind of there wasn't a lot of data, now it's a data flood. So how do you use those data sources to be more intelligent in what you do? And I specifically asked some of the guests, you know, are kind of the classic big data players participating in this space, and she said, "Not really." They're all kind of holding off on the side waiting to get in. But these are big numbers, this is a big impact. The professor from St. Louis Episcopal talked about a billion dollars worth of strawberries that you got to get off the field, and if you don't have the labor to get it off, and the data to get the labor and to time it right, it's a billion dollars worth of strawberries, and these are big numbers. And the other thing that just fascinated me, is again, this power of the consumer. The Google guy who took basically what was a service just to feed employees and keep them around so they write more code, but using that as a platform to drive much more thoughtfulness and intelligence. And supply chain changes around food, and even called it food shot in reference to the moon shot. >> The moon shot, yes. >> Enabled better diets, shift diets, food transparency, reduced loss and waste, accelerate transformation to a circular food economy. So, and they said, I think he's been at it for 15 years or thereabout. So really an interesting kind of a twist, on what you would not expect from the food service people, you think of them just supplying food. >> Exactly. >> Not trying to drive cultural change. >> Exactly, and trying to scale, but they're using data from their own googlers, to help determine and evaluate what people are doing, what they want, preferences, making it more personal, and using data in that way to also then facilitate some of the upstream, you know from the supply perspective, making things, meeting those challenges that the consumers are demanding, but you said he's been at Google for five years, and when he first got the call being in hospitality for so long, he just thought, "Google, what do they want to talk to me for?" And how revolutionary they've been, and you can think of how much education can happen from Google Food alone. I was quite blown away by that. >> Yeah, the other kind of theme is unused resources. So, one of the food trucks that they had seaweed. Why seaweed? Because it takes no fresh water, it takes no fertilizer, and it's carbon negative. So not really about how does it taste, but some specific reasons to try to make seaweed a better food, a more satisfying food. Talked about kale, and really again what a great example of a, can't say it, Fork to Farm tradition, 'cause before kale was a throwaway, nobody grew kale, now suddenly everybody wants kale smoothies, and so there's nothing, plant became something of importance, driven by the consumer, not necessarily by the producers. So, very dynamic times. I think again, the trend we see over and over and over, finding the hollowing out of the middle. You know, you don't want to be just a generic provider in the middle, you better have massive scale, or you better be a real specialty provider. And then finally the ramifications of the Amazon purchase of Whole Foods, really validating, yes you want digital, yes you want data, yes you want to provide better customer service. But at the same time, you still need a physical presence, kind of validating the physical presence of the store like Whole Foods. So really a very dynamic activity going on in this space. >> And it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next five to 10 years, as farming generationally changes hands. And there is technology that's available today, right? We talked about big data, there's many, many sources of public data, whether it's satellite imagery, water data that can be utilized and then paired with private data that a farm has. Or using GPS devices on tractors and combines, robotics. You talked to the inventor of the Sally Salad machine, there's a lot of technology that might be, I don't know if I'd say ahead of its time, but I think from a farming perspective, there's a little bit of a gap there right now. So it'll be very interesting to see how farms evolve from a technology perspective. I love how the Forbes AgTech Summit, I think it's tomorrow and Thursday in Salinas Valley, what a great juxtaposition of Silicon Valley and a world hub of technology innovation, to Salinas, which is the salad bowl of the world. I think that is quite interesting, and some of the dynamics that they've seen, I think this was their fourth event tomorrow. >> Jeff: Fourth event, right, right. >> Really starting to get more farmers interested in understanding the potential that ag-tech can have on profitability, efficiencies, reducing waste, even things like discovering and preventing foodborne pathogens. >> Right, and robots, we need robots, we don't have enough labor. Michael Rose said there's going to be a shortage of hundreds of thousands of line cooks. Just regular, ordinary line cooks at restaurants, and that's really kind of one of the applications of the salad machine, because as you hit the button below that cook, you can hit the button to load that salad, while you run off and pull the rest of the entree meals together. So, again, it's really fun to see the consistent themes that we see over and over, that's computing cloud and data-driven decision making, applied to what's arguably one of the most important things going on, which is feeding us a lot of conversation about the world's population getting to 10 billion in the not too distant future, that have to be fed. And again, with the aging of the population, the traditional farmers, a real opportunity to do kind of a refresh with a bunch of people that have grown up with these things. So, really cool show, a great day, hope you had fun, I had fun. >> Oh, I had a great time, it was really educational. I think that you hit the nail on the head, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. I think what the Mixing Bowl is doing, along with Better Foods, is really bringing the people that are creating food, and producing it together, and connecting them with the people that are creating technology. So, I think this is the tip of the iceberg head of lettuce, maybe? So, I am excited to see what happens over time, but not only was it a great event, but I'm now very hungry. >> Now you're very hungry, there's more food trucks outside. Alright Lisa, well thank you again for hosting. >> Thank you. >> Again, another great show. I think last time we were together was at the NAB. >> NAB. >> Talking about media entertainment, so the digitization, transformation continues, driven by all these huge macro-factors of cloud, big data, so the beat rolls on. >> It does. >> Alright, she's Lisa Martin, and I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCube. Thanks for watching, we've got a busy spring coming to an end. Had a little bit of a lull in the summer then we'll hit it hard again in the fall, so thanks for watching siliconangle.tv, youtube.com/siliconangle, and siliconangle.com for complete coverage of a lot of stories beyond just theCUBE. I'm Jeff Frick, signing off with Lisa Martin from Food IT, from Fork to Food, thanks for watching.