Food technology

Pair fresh ingredients with the Nosh One – an AI robo-chef currently on Kickstarter – and the busy professional may never need worry about meals, aside from choosing a recipe from a menu of over 500 dishes spanning 11-plus international cuisines.

For anyone who's always eating on the go, you now have another option to manage hot meals while commuting without requiring the use of a microwave oven. The HeatWave Go is a self-heating lunch box that uses infrared technology to warm up meals.

Simon Mildren, an Australian firefighter with a passion for beekeeping, has streamlined the beekeeping process with the Hivekeepers Micro Honey Harvester system. It sounds like it could be ideal for the recreational or small-scale beekeeper.

Scientists have hacked the meaning of a "light meal," creating microlasers that use natural products to emit beams through food. They're also completely safe to eat. It's the first demonstration of laser emission from an entirely edible system.

Adding new meaning to the term "fusion cuisine," robot science and gastronomy united to create an elaborate cake that features edible components and the world's first edible rechargeable battery. (Well, it's rechargeable until you eat it.)

Ultraviolet light is well-known for its ability to kill germs, including ones that cause food to spoil. And while there doesn't tend to be any food-preserving UV light in our refrigerators, a new consumer device is out to change that.

No sick days, bathroom breaks, and no more curly hairs in your buns. Just cold, hard efficiency. More specifically, BurgerBot is a new fast-food joint where robots are doing all the work that humans aren't interested in, like burger assembly lines.

VR is incredibly immersive for sight and sound, touch can be done, and even smell is starting to appear. That just leaves one sense – and whether or not anyone actually wants to taste virtual worlds, a new device is now tackling that final frontier.

Take control of your food and water safety with the first-of-its-kind EcoTracker, a user-friendly pocket-sized device that almost instantly assesses contaminants in fruits, vegetables and meats, as well as the quality of your drinking water.

So, you know you should cut back on salt, but you don't like the bland taste of low-sodium foods. The Electric Salt Spoon may be just what you need, as it's claimed to boost the salty flavor of foods without actually adding any salt.

Major steps towards better, sustainable and affordable food production free of environmental challenges have been taken, with the with the opening of the "world's first farm to grow indoor, vertically farmed berries at scale".

Bill Gates has thrown his weight – and his money – behind a startup making a rich, fatty spread akin to butter, using just carbon dioxide and hydrogen. And this is just the start, with milk, ice-cream, cheese, meat and plant oils also in development.