Behind the Scenes with Lab@Home
We are home. We are quarantined. And we are doing science! Take a look at what doing real time food analysis at home looks like with our Product Director, Hilary Cunningham. We had to lug our testing equipment, like the spectrometer in this video, home with us to do our tests but it’s been more than worth it. Having our equipment while we social distance means we can still test and gain insights from the food we have in our local grocery stores. We are looking at things like how produce nutrients change over time in our home, and how actual nutrient levels, including things like vitamin C, antioxidants, and fat, differ from what many apps and government guidelines tell us.
While this is giving us valuable insights, it’s also giving us the opportunity to test and verify our methods at home. That means we are able to calibrate our results across our team, in their various homes and apartments in different states, to ensure that our test results are accurate and scientifically verified. These calibrations are also helping us prove the accuracy and validity of our data models, as well as allowing us to improve our implementation processes for testing procedures in the field. When we come out of quarantine we will be able to apply this additional research to make our models run faster and perform even better. We’ll be able to gain valuable insight into what’s truly happening inside our food not only in the lab or at home, but in the grocery store, at farms, and at the various stops food takes as it makes its way through the supply chain.
As we continue to test produce, we also want to keep showing you the work we do, and explain why we do it. Over the upcoming weeks our Co-Founder and CEO, Brent Overash, will be releasing a series of videos to explain exactly why the work we do has been lacking in the food system, how we do our work, and why it is so desperately needed. For us, it comes down to data. Not the buzzword “big data,” but rather the right data. When we have accurate, relevant information, we can ask the right questions, and, most importantly, get the right answers. So follow along as we learn what’s really happening inside our food.
