Food

Researchers at MIT have developed “a battery-operated capsule-like device that’s supposed to make you feel full by stretching out your stomach using vibration,” reports Miriam Fauzia for Inverse. “Considering that diet and exercise are hard to maintain, especially for long-term weight loss, and medical interventions like gastric bypass surgery and the newest wave of injectables cost more than a pretty penny, [Shriya] Srinivasan PhD ’20 and her colleagues want their vibrating pill to be an accessible alternative,” writes Fauzia.

Alumnus Dave Dussault founded Snapchill, a hot coffee company that uses technology to brew, “the best of both hot coffee and cold brew,” reports Grant Welker for NBC Boston. “The technology entails brewing the coffee hot, then dropping the temperature in a matter of seconds from more than 200 degrees to just above freezing,” explains Welker. “It's done using what Dussault said is essentially the same technology used in a refrigerator.”

George Hadjigeorgiou MSc '98 co-founded Zoe, a personalized nutrition program that “aims to improve gut and metabolic health,” reports Julia Kollewe for The Guardian. “Zoe has identified almost 5,000 never-before-seen gut bacteria,” writes Kollewe. “Of those, 100 were strongly associated with health across all 35,000 participants – 50 good and 50 bad. This feeds into the app and members’ personalized scores will be updated over time”

Milena Pagán '11 speaks with Boston Globe reporter Kara Baskin about bringing her Providence-based bagel shop, Reblle, to Kendall Square. “We started the process to move a store to Cambridge about two years ago” says Pagán. “This has really been a long time in the making, to find the right space and to work out a deal. But we’re in a really cool building. We have tenants upstairs. There’s a park across the street that reminds me in a lot of ways of the neighborhood where Rebelle is right now. And being close to MIT is such a dream. That place has really good juju for me, so I’m really excited about it.

Milena Pagán '11 bringing her Providence-based bagel shop, Rebelle, to Kendall Square this winter, reports Kara Baskin for The Boston Globe. “Pagán was a 2023 Best Chef: Northeast James Beard semifinalist for her Puerto Rican café, Little Sister, also based in Providence,” writes Baskin.

In a new MIT study, researchers found that people were less likely to order a menu item when it was specifically labeled as "vegan" compared to when it was not, reports Meryl Davids Landau for National Geographic. “The research is not trying to tell anyone they need to strictly transition into these diets in order to make an impact,” says graduate student Alex Berke. “This is about people eating more sustainably, more often, and what can we do to guide people towards those practices.”

Graduate student Turga Ganapathy is studying the best ways to grow spirulina at home so that the microalgae can be used as a food source, reports WCVB-TV. Spirulina “are complete proteins, meaning that they produce amino acids that the human body cannot synthesize that we usually get from animals or a combination of different plant-based proteins,” says Ganapathy.

Ali Khademhosseini PhD ’05 founded Omeat, a cell-cultivated meat startup, which aims to provide sustainable meat without sacrificing an animal, reports Larissa Zimberoff for Fast Company. “Omeat takes cell biopsies from their cows and uses that to grow muscle cells in the lab, in steel-tank bioreactors that allow the cells to proliferate,” explains Zimberoff.

Jeff Heglie ’85 co-founded For Bitter For Worse, a zero-proof spirits company focused on bringing non-alcoholic cocktails to market, reports Ann Trieger Kurland for The Boston Globe. “They have won medals for their drinks, which are crafted like spirits,” writes Kurland. “Herbs and botanicals are first macerated in alcohol to extract their flavors, then they use a still to remove the alcohol in a process Heglie, an MIT graduate, calls ‘reverse bootlegging.’ Natural ingredients — organic roots and juices, fruit peels, spices, and more — are blended into the robust base to add layers of flavor.”

Researchers at MIT have developed an ingestible pill that can raise levels of hormones to help increase appetite and decrease nausea, reports Maggie Chen for Wired. The researchers “hope that it can one day act as an effective noninvasive therapy for those who experience gastroparesis—or other eating disorders—essentially being a temporary switch that can be activated to drive hunger and digestion,” writes Chen.

Lisa Dyson PhD ‘04 founded Air Protein, a company looking to “bring recycled carbon cultivated into food with the taste and texture of chicken, meat, and seafood,” reports Geri Stengel for Forbes.    

MIT alumni Steve Fredette, Aman Narang and Jonathan Grimm co-founded Toast, an all-in-one online restaurant management software company, reports Aaron Pressman for The Boston Globe. “The Toast founders spent hours talking to restaurateurs and built features such as real-time communication with the kitchen about special orders and dishes that have sold out, and a way of tracking loyalty rewards,” explains Pressman. 

Prof. Benedetto Marelli and his colleagues have created “packaging that can react to changes in the food it contains to better indicate when it has gone bad,” reports Karmela Padavic-Callaghan for New Scientist. The biodegradable plastic-like wrap, which is made from silk, changes color when it is exposed to rotting foods and degrades quickly in soil. 

Prof. Gio Traverso and colleagues at NYU have developed an electronic pill that could stimulate appetite. The device delivers small pulses of electricity that “induce the release of ghrelin, the body’s so-called “hunger hormone,” which is involved in regulating appetite and alleviating severe nausea and vomiting,” reports Joanna Thompson for Inverse.

Researchers from MIT and NYU have “developed a first-of-its-kind treatment to help spur hunger via stimulating hormone levels in the gut—an “electroceutical” ingestible capsule inspired by a “water wicking” reptile,” writes Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “The team explored a novel way to “significantly and repeatedly” induce the production of ghrelin, a hormone that triggers hunger.”