Startup Foodini is using AI to help restaurants identify ingredients that could be allergens or restricted under certain diets. Foodini CEO Dylan McDonnell tells "Bloomberg Tech" how the tool works.

Santa Monica

A startup led by a founder with celiac disease is using artificial intelligence to help restaurants provide accurate allergen and dietary information to customers. The technology ingests menu and ingredient data, tags allergens, and offers personalized menu recommendations through QR codes, addressing the needs of the estimated 173 million Americans with food allergies or dietary requirements.

The adoption of this AI solution is increasing as California's Senate Bill 68, effective July 1, 2026, will require major restaurant chains to label all menus with the nine major food allergens. Many large chains are opting for digital solutions, such as QR codes, to comply with the new law, leading to greater interest in the startup's technology.

AI helps tackle allergy riks

Dylan you've got a really interesting story. I think like so many startups it comes from a place of necessity for the founder. Talk to us a little bit about what you've dealt with. Yeah. Firstly Tim thanks very much for having me. Great to be here. And yeah like you mentioned I diagnosed celiac when I was 10 years old and so have a lot of personal experience navigating dining out of home and ordering online while needing to know what's in my food and just over a long period of time got more and more frustrated with how difficult it was to get that information and mistakes and inaccuracies and decided to try and do something about it. So how can I actually help restaurants do this. Because you know when you do look at a menu when you do talk to a server I feel like in this day and age they have a good understanding of at least some of the most common common allergies like gluten for example and people who have celiac. So so what does I allow them to take a step further. How does it do that. Yeah it's a fair point. I think you're right. I think a lot of restaurants have got on top of gluten free vegan vegetarian. The main ones. But there's one hundred and seventy three million Americans who have some form of food allergy or die to a requirement. And the allergens go far beyond just gluten and vegan. And so what we do is we help restaurants by ingesting their menu information their recipe information and the product information. And we have trained large language models to break those down to the ingredient level tag them with the correct allergen and dietary requirements. And then we're able to power a personalized menu solution whereby consumers can see exactly what they can and can't eat on the menu depending on their personal requirements. You have a background in law. You're a former corporate attorney. And you know I wonder about the liability element here. You know mistakes happen. Mistakes get made. A.I. L.L.M. hallucinate. Well how do you protect it around that. And how do you make sure that even if a food says it doesn't have something it doesn't become contaminated somewhere with that ingredient process. Yeah it's a great question. Firstly on hallucinations our technology never guesses if there is. You know it's based on structured ingredient and supplier data. If there's ever a scenario where it isn't sure it will tag in the back end for us that it's there's uncertainty and our dietitian team will come in over the top and do QA and manually intervene. And as you know they make inputs into the system. The LLM learns it gets smarter and smarter over time from a legal liability standpoint. We would argue that not having any documentation on allergens is a much higher risk because right now you have a consumer a member of staff who's likely not trained on all the ingredients and all the allergens and all the menu items. And they're the line of protection for the restaurant between the consumer and a potentially life threatening a life threatening incident. And 54 percent of all allergic reactions in restaurants occur after the staff have been notified. And so that tells us that the current system of dealing with this by word of mouth isn't working. So Dylan how does it work. Is it a two sided market where you have to get the restaurant or the restaurant chain to add your technology but then also get people who have these allergies to use it. Yeah. So we partner with the restaurant chains food service operators. We ingest their menu recipe product technology from various tech stocks. And then how it works typically is they put a QR code in venue on physical menus and menu boards and a digital link on their Web site. This is the most basic integration. And then when consumers come into the physical environment or digital environment they scan the QR. It prompts them to create their dietary profile where they can choose from over 150 different allergens and dietary requirements. And then instantly it will show them here's exactly what you can eat. Here's what you can eat with a modifier and what that modifier is. And here's what you can't eat and why. So it's completely personalized based on their requirements. And the consumer discovers this in the restaurant's environment. Senate Bill 68 in the state of California. This is effective next week. It's going to require major chains to provide detailed allergen info. Many people argue this is a major step toward toward transparency. How has that increased adoption of your product. Yes. So just on that it was signed by Gavin Newsom a month ago. It becomes effective 1 July 26. And so what it in essence requires is every restaurant chain and food service facility with 20 plus locations nationwide where at least one of those in California to label all of their physical and digital menus for the major nine food allergens. So this is obviously a major step change for restaurants. They can do it one of two ways. They can either physically annotate every one of their menu items with those allergens or they can use a digital like a QR code that links out to a digital allergen menu. And that's obviously what we do. And from speaking to a lot of the bigger chains recently as you might imagine there are strong preferences to use a digital mechanism. And so we're getting a lot more inbound than we certainly were a few months ago which is fantastic. But we continue to work with like I said with independence chains food service facilities of all types.

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