Improving Food Product Quality and Supply Chain Costs with AI | Riana Lynn, Journey Foods

Each bite of food we eat was prepared using a recipe with several ingredients with varying quantities depending on the food.  Apply that across a global food industry and you can understand the immense amount of data pouring out of this process alone.

 

Interestingly, the food industry still leverages dated processes for producing and delivering high quality food products.  Journey Foods has arrived as a data centric solutions for reducing supply chain costs while also recommending best fit ingredients en route to delivering tasty products.

 

Founder Bio:

Founder and CEO Riana Lynn leads fast-growing software startup Journey Foods. The company is backed by top VCs in North America, Europe and Asia. Riana has served as a top consultant and VC to fortune 500 food and CPG companies. She's currently an angel investor and former Google Entrepreneur in Residence. She is one of just a few dozen black women that have raised more than a million dollars in venture funding.

 

Riana has been featured in Forbes, MIT 35 under 35, USA Today, Fast Company, CNBC, Wired, TechCrunch, Entrepreneur Magazine and more.

 

Riana Lynn is a Chicago native and Austin-based entrepreneur that enjoys growing fruit trees, writing film scripts, and exploring black culinary and architectural heritage sites around the world.

 

TimeStamps:

1:55  Riana’s journey as a serial entrepreneur

4:28  Finding a need for data insights as a solution for supply chain issues in food and package delivery

5:57 Packaged foods – a $3 trillion dollar industry still using archaic processes

7:13  Use case discovery: Where AI and data science could have the biggest economic impact

9:37  Reducing supply chain costs and improving product quality leveraging ingredient/product data

11:57  Reinventing archaic, inefficient processes in the food industry

15:02  Enabling sustainability in food product delivery and packaging

16:10 How startup food product companies are disrupting traditional players

19:22  Accessing GOOD data as an AI startup

21:17  Defining a data methodology at Journey Foods

24:47  Deciding to build as a solo founder

26:42  Initial customer conversations and go-to-market with an MVP

28:50 Moving from SMB to enterprise clients

31:26  Journey Foods fundraising experiences

36:17  Riana’s vision for accelerating Journey Foods growth in South America and Africa

37:52  Journey Fods’ ideal venture partners