Original subtitles

- What do French fries, TV dinners

and bottles of baby formula have in common?

Nothing right?

But at one point they were all considered to be

the future of food.

Americans have always had a knack for inventing

and reinventing the future.

We have a long history of pushing food technology

to create new flavors, new textures and new foods.

Like the surprising origins of Cheetos,

launching ice cream into outer space

and adding eggs to a box of Betty Crocker powder

to poof bake your magical cake.

Today we'll get a sneak peek at the delicious innovations

in our food future.

From the sci-fi way to grow veggies without sunlight,

to robots autonomously crafting hamburgers and pizza.

And you won't believe what scientists discovered in plants

that's also found in meat

and creates the delicious meat flavor that we crave.

Come take a ride with me in my flying car,

because this is Modern Marvels: The Future of Food.

[lively upbeat music]

[lively upbeat music]

- [Adam] For a glimpse into the future,

I've come here to Natick, Massachusetts.

- [Presenter] Natick's Generally Equipment

and Packaging Laboratory has both small items and large.

- The military's funding of food research

dates back to World War II and by 1963,

their food research and development mission

moved here to Natick Labs.

These food development efforts by the military

are how American classics like sandwich bread,

the McRib and some would even say Cheetos were created.

[lively instrumental music]

So to see what they do here,

is to see a glimpse of our future eats.

To learn how they do it,

Laurie Oleksyk is taking us behind the scenes

of this vast compound of 50 buildings spanning 78 acres.

Laurie is the team leader of Food Engineering and Analysis

at the Army's facilities..

How are you? - How are you?

- A little bit of patriotic elbow.

[laughing]

You develop everything here?

- Yes, we're the only DOD facility

that conducts the research and development

of all food service equipment.

- So how often are you introducing new product?

- Every single year.

- [Adam] Really? - Yeah.

- [Adam] Laurie's team are the skilled pros,

constantly testing new food technologies

for use by the military today

but soon could be the future of consumer food tomorrow.

And speaking of the future, while I suit up

we're making a pit stop to a company in the Bay Area

that delivers an old favorite with a science fiction spin.

[upbeat dramatic music]

Creator is the first restaurant

to fully automate a major sector of food.

They're making hamburgers by robot.

[lively upbeat music]

- With the app, you can order from the ground up.

You can specify some of the usual customization things

like extra tomatoes, no pickles.

You can also do things you can't do anywhere else.

- [Adam] You choose every item down to the milliliter

of sauces and seasonings that make up your burger.

- [Alex] Finally when you place your order,

the app will even tell you

exactly how long it takes to make your burger

because guess what?

It's all made by a machine,

you know exactly when everything's gonna be ready.

- At full go, it can produce 150 burgers an hour,

but efficiency is only the beginning.

Creator's robot takes a fresh hamburger bun

and guides it through a blade slicing it in half.

A series of motors then butters and moves the sliced bun

through an open view toaster

so you can actually see the browning as it's happening.

A conveyor belt advances the toasted bun

to the next position, the saucer.

Some of their sauce varieties include smoked oyster aioli,

their own take on a thousand island dressing,

sunflower seed tahini and shiitake mushroom sauce.

Then your topping selections are all cut fresh to order

and are carefully placed onto your bun.

The next stop is cheese, your selection of cheeses

is firstly graded onto your bun

and then moves down to a torchlike melter

to give you that perfect stringy yet gooey texture

when you bite into your burger.

While the robot has been preparing

all of your personalized toppings,

it's also been grinding the beef to order.

- We throw cubes of chuck and brisket right in the machine.

Not only does it grind it to order,

after it grinds it aligns the meat to go vertically

along with the way your teeth bite into the patty,

and that makes it more tenderly fall apart into your mouth.

- [Adam] The freshest and most tender of burger patties

is also custom seasoned by you.

You get to choose from 12 different seasonings

and how much of each you'd like on your burger.

And with choreographed timing, your freshly grilled patty

meets your custom dressed bun at the end of the line

where the two are assembled.

- [Alex] All I did was push a button on a phone

and made the freshest, most personalized burger out there.

That's freaking good.

- Americans have loved a good hamburger for decades,

but you'd be surprised to know a lot of other foods we love

exist because of the military.

- To show how much American food has changed

in just 50 years, it's vastly different

even just two generations back what Americans are eating

and what Americans see as even being an American food.

- [Adam] Some of the everyday foods Americans eat today

became everyday foods because of the military.

Take for example, soft and delicious sandwich bread.

During World War II, military food scientists

came up with a formula to keep bread soft and fresh

even longer than before,

which is still being utilized commercially to this day.

Plus Cheetos lovers might know during World War II,

the military funded research in dehydrating cheese,

which eventually led to cheese powder.

At the end of the war, the surplus of cheese powder

was sold to food makers like the Frito Company,

which covered corn puffs with the magical cheesy dust.

- [Edward] It's the sort of thing that you just can't stop

having more of you keep having to go back.

And there's just something about the satisfaction

at the very end where you lick your fingers.

That specifically that last moment

is what I most remember growing up.

-[Adam] We may not have had any of these culinary advances

without food technologists like Laurie and her team

who are constantly finding the newest ways

to push food into the future.

- Today what we'll be able to show you

is we're doing a tube food production.

Oh this is something I'm pretty sure you have never seen.

- [Adam] Okay [laughs].

- These are tube foods for U-2 pilots.

- Really? - Yep.

- [Adam] The men and women flying U-2 spy planes

monitor war zones and targets all over the world.

- U-2 pilots fly at very high altitudes

wearing a pressurized suit and helmet

so they cannot eat the food with their hands or utensils.

- [Adam] And they are up there sometimes

for 12 hours at a time.

So, since pilots need to keep their hands on the controls

and their eyes on the ground,

enter one of Natick's most successful

and efficient products, the tube food.

[upbeat dramatic music]

Now I noticed that these don't have labels.

When I see tubes with this kind of applicators it scares me.

- Well after we process them, we do apply labels to them.

But I purposely took these labels off

because I wanted to see if you wanted to try them

and guess what they were.

- Oh, I absolutely want that.

[suspenseful music]

[upbeat dramatic music]

Wait a darn minute.

[suspenseful music]

Is that spaghetti and meatballs?

- It's spaghetti and meat sauce, good guess.

- Oh my gosh. - Yep.

- So is that a piece of pasta? - Yep.

- It's incredible and it's really good meat sauce.

There's clearly onion, clearly has like that rich

sort of umami you get from a good tomato sauce.

It's absolutely stunning.

These foods in tubes really do give the mouth feel

and the experience of actually eating a meal,

which is different than the apple sauce

or pureed beef and vegetables John Glenn was eating

from a tube back in the 1960s.

This is like the three course dinner chewing gum

that Willy Wonka made at his factory.

Now here's number two.

So okay it literally looks like

something like honey mustard.

[suspenseful music]

No way, is this truffle mac and cheese.

- That's exactly what it is, truffle mac and cheese.

- And you guys are using real truffle?

- Real truffle oil, yes.

- It is phenomenal. [laughing]

It's so good, I can't stop eating it.

Round three, fight.

Looks like an aioli.

[lively instrumental music]

[lively instrumental music]

Holy moly.

[upbeat dramatic music]

- [Adam] The year, 1986,

my age 12,

the dream become a fighter pilot like Maverick in Top Gun.

Well, I guess things played out a little bit different.

But today I get a consolation prize,

I'm eating just like the pilot of a U-2 spy plane

and with 21st century technology.

Come on talk to me goose.

Looks like an aioli.

That's apple pie.

- That's apple pie dessert, that's right.

- Holy moly, but how on Earth

did you get the crust in there?

- It's real crust ingredients.

- So do you make a pie and then blend the pie?

- It's more of an apple pie filling with crust blended in.

- The crust is the thing that's breaking my brain

a little bit Laurie.

The folks at Natick totally understand

that hunger is probably best satisfied

by the act of actually chewing food

not just pumping our bodies with calories.

And one day when I go to space,

I'm definitely gonna be hungry for more than apple sauce.

But not all our foods are conducive for space travel

or at least not yet.

- [Nilou] When you think about barbecue or burgers

grilling in the backyard, we love to feed the beast.

The commercial ability of basically making you be able

to have meat at any moment that you want to

by going to the supermarket has made it so that we feel

that it's simple, that it's a natural part of our diet.

- You won't be disappointed in there steaks ma'am.

- That Norman Rockwell image of the table of plenty

with the big turkey is just so incredibly

20th century American dream.

- What we've evolved into is a culture where we think that

in order for a meal to be complete,

the center piece needs to be a large piece of meat.

[lively upbeat music]

- [Adam] But what if in the future,

science helps us redefine what meat is?

[lively upbeat music]

Impossible Foods, plant-based meat alternatives

have recently been popping up on menus at iconic restaurants

around the country like Burger King, White Castle and more.

They're on a mission to convert avout meat lovers

to plant-based alternatives that look, taste

and even bleed like the real thing.

They're looking at meat not just as a by-product of animals.

They're breaking it down to inspect each and every molecule

so they can figure out what plant-based sources

contain the same molecules.

Then they extract those molecules from plant products

and mash them up together again to replicate the juicy,

tender meaty experience we as meat lovers crave.

- When you actually break it down and ask consumers,

what is the number one most important thing

when choosing the food that they purchase?

Flavor is always their number one choice.

So our first goal was to really understand

what makes meat taste like meat.

Actually, it's a really complex mixture

of like over 200 compounds.

- [Adam] Impossible Foods does this

thanks to this machine right here,

the gas chromatography mass spectrometry machine.

Let's just call it the GCMS.

This thing takes a piece of meat and breaks it down

until it reaches the gas phase.

Then generates a report telling you what aromas and flavors

are detected in the meat sample.

Not just beef, you could put a piece of chicken, pork

or even fish in there and the GCMS will tell you what smells

and tastes are present.

- You can see that the detector is picking up

all of these individual peaks

which represent different flavor compounds and aromas.

So it's our job then to go in and understand

which of those are the most important

to make something that your brain recognizes as meat.

- But flavors and aromas, don't add up to meat.

Where's the beef? Well, that's what comes next.

After the GCMS showed what compounds were present,

the crazy smart scientists at Impossible Foods

discovered something present across all living matters,

including plants.

- They discovered this iron molecule called heme,

which is the key ingredient

that makes meat taste like meat.

And when people crave meat, it's really a craving for heme.

- Heme is the iron containing molecule

that aids in carrying oxygen throughout all living matter,

animals and plants.

It is essential for life and it turns out

heme is what gives meat that flavor we crave.

- If you look at different types of meat,

the only thing that's different

is really the concentration of heme.

So red meat and beef from cows is red

because it has a lot of heme and pork is a little less red

because it has less heme and then chicken even less so.

It also is what's giving you that color

and actually goes through the same exact color transition

when you cook it.

- So once the scientists came across heme,

they got to working on how to sustainably and rapidly

reproduce the molecule in bulk.

And for the science geniuses at Impossible it was simple,

yeast fermentation.

- The process that we use to ferment yeast to make heme

is used to make a beer and wine

and we're utilizing that same process of fermentation

from yeast in order to make our key ingredient.

- And for all of you doubters out there,

Impossible Foods executive chef

has one more thing to show you.

- This is gonna eat, chew, respond, react

just how you cook it just how you eat it;

the same characteristics of any beef hamburger

just made from plants.

- If it looks like a burger and tastes like a burger,

I'm probably gonna call it a burger

no matter how it's made.

Now if they could only just put one into a tube.

Now we're getting a behind the scenes look

at how Natick Labs makes the tube foods

that may one day be the meals we eat on the go,

an entire dish at the squeeze of our fingers.

So what are you guys making right now on the line?

- They're making a caffeinated chocolate pudding today.

- Can I see how it's made? - Yeah lets go.

- Let's go.

Today we're venturing where no man has eaten before,

the future and more precisely the future of food.

I just taste tested the newest meals in tubes

that the military has developed.

And naturally I had to see how they were being made.

- So alright, walk you through the process.

- Laurie and Dan are going to show us

how they make these tube foods which who knows,

one day we may be able to pick up at our local grocery store

as easily as we buy a carton of milk.

To make caffeine dense chocolate pudding, sugar, cocoa,

butter, milk and powdered caffeine

are added to this vat where it heats

just like you'd make pudding on the stove at home.

- Then it goes off and over here into this hopper.

- [Adam] The hopper is attached to several nozzles

pumping the food into tubes, in this case it's pudding

but it could be the delicious spaghetti and meat sauce

that I had earlier.

The food gets pumped into a maximum of 1200 tubes

in just one run.

After the tubes are filled

the ends are folded and crimped to seal.

Now one puts it together.

- Puts a big fold,

doubles that fold and a third stage turns it around

and completes the fold.

And there's a last station there at the end

which puts the date on it.

- Each of the foods developed here

are created with different goals in mind.

For example, the pudding is to offer a pick me up

for long shifts but other tube foods are meant to be meals.

So how long with the meal last?

- These will last three years at 80 degrees.

- Wow.

- At least. - At least.

- You have to think about weight, volume, nutrition,

shelf stability, you're like that machine on "The Jetsons"

where they could press a button

Well, we may not be "The Jetsons" quite yet

but we are getting closer.

[lively instrumental music]

- Welcome to Picnic headquarters,

we're making the world's first

automated pizza production system

for restaurants and commercial food operators.

- Custom made gourmet pizza doesn't sound futuristic,

but how it's made has the future written all over it.

Picnic is reinvisioning pizza making

with their automatic assembly line

programed to crank out pizza pies fast

and with all the fixes.

- Food service is a hard, tedious

sometimes a dangerous job

and automation can make it easier.

[lively instrumental music]

- [Adam] Picnic isn't selling pizzas,

they're manufacturing and developing this robot

to help make the pizza making process

more efficient, cost-effective and standardized

so you can depend on the same great tasting pizza

every time.

- Our system it's not a robot, it's a cobot

meaning that it is designed to work

in cooperation with human workers

not to fully replace human workers.

- It's true, while this cobot assembles pies like any tool,

it just doesn't work without a chef's touch.

Fresh ingredients are prepared and loaded

into the system's compartments.

And of course, before anything else, there's the dough.

- Our system will handle any dough, frozen, hand-tossed,

any shape, any size, any thickness.

So Brian's gonna enter the order into the touch screen.

And as soon as the system recognizes the order,

it automatically starts moving.

- This sleek piece of futuristic machinery

is outfitted with cameras to make sure

just the right amount of each ingredient is added.

- So because this is a supreme,

it's gonna get every ingredient that's mounted today.

We have fresh sliced pepperoni, right off the stick.

And then we're going to put sausage, onions

and green peppers on this pizza

so it's getting a little of everything.

- And the assembly is whip fast.

- Our system can make up to 300 custom pizzas per hour,

it's part of what makes our system unique.

- No matter how you slice it,

this system seems like the way of the future.

[lively upbeat music]

And Laurie's team of food scientists

is right at the cutting edge of our edible future,

creating teeny tiny, compressed and nutrient dense foods.

- [Laurie] Another way that we hope to show you today

is using a combination of pressure and ultrasonic energy.

- Ultrasonic energy?

- Mmh.

- Show me that.

- [Adam] Where would we be without the technological leaps

that led to our favorite foods, developments

like powdered cheese.

To this day the military is researching

technological advances that could bring us

our future favorite foods.

- [Laurie] This is Dr. Ann Barrett.

- [Adam] Hi doc.

- [Laurie] Ann is an expert in a novel compression technology

called ultrasonic agglomeration.

- [Adam] Ultrasonic agglomeration

was first developed for the plastics industry

but it was Dr. Ann and her colleagues

who adapted that high technology to food.

It uses ultrasonic vibrations and energy

to almost melt powdered foods

and transform it into a solid.

- We are taking the tropical fruit powders,

which actually contain real fruits and vegetables.

- [Adam] Okay.

- [Laurie] And we're going to weld them into a small chewable

candy type of product.

- Alright, I'm gonna watch this happen.

- Alright.

This has the ultrasonic horn, it's vibrating ultrasonically

so it will make sound.

- The sound waves cause vibrations

on the powdered fruit particles

so they rub against each other at a very fast rate.

That causes friction which also causes heat,

making the surfaces melt or soften.

Then the compression component of the machine

forces the heated particles together.

So the softened surfaces can melt together

and form a solid.

Dr. Ann places about 15 grams of dried powdered fruit

under the ultrasonic horn.

[lively upbeat music]

I heard it, I felt it in my teeth, wow.

- See how fast that is?

- The powdered fruit is now compressed

into a chewy vitamin packed candy snack,

giving soldiers the vitamin boost they need.

And now I get the unique opportunity

to taste one of the first foods ever made

with the energy of sound waves.

It's super bendy almost like a fruit roll-up.

[sniffing]

Hmm, it's like a Chewy Granola Bar or Chewy Nature Bar.

I can taste mango very very very prominently.

Hmm, and apple.

- Mmh, so far so good [laughs].

- There's a faint kind of carroty note.

- There's carrot in it, yeah.

- This is crazy, this was powder.

And I've already identified different real fruits

that are in it.

Hmm Hmm Hmm.

Powder manifesting into food

has changed the future of food before.

It's beater-leaking delicious and as easy as pie

except it's cake in a box.

♪ Guaranteed perfect every time you bake ♪

♪ Cake after cake after cake

- [Adam] Boxed cake mix is so common to us today.

But before the 1930s, if you wanted a cake,

you had to make it entirely from scratch.

The box of dried cake mix was officially patented in 1933

by John D. Duff from Pennsylvania.

His molasses company had a supply surplus,

so rather than toss it out Duff figure it out

how to successfully dehydrate molasses into powder,

which he mixed with other powdered ingredients

to make cake!

Like flour, sugar, salt and baking soda.

His original use was for gingerbread cake

and in a subsequent patent, he also introduced mixes

for white, spice and devil's food cake.

But it wasn't until post-World War II

that we learned to love the convenience of just adding eggs.

This act of cracking fresh eggs and mixing them

into a conveniently prepared cake mix

like Duncan Hines or Betty Crocker

made us feel like we actually baked a cake from scratch,

without actually having to bake a cake from scratch.

- [Presenter] A light and tender Betty Crocker yellow cake,

perfect anytime.

- The indispensable convenience of powdered cake mix

revolutionized baking.

It meant that any meal could be as special

as a birthday celebration by just adding eggs.

Dehydrated cake mix isn't the only dried food

that revolutionized the food industry,

the military has been dehydrating foods

since World War II

using what was then a cutting-edge technique,

the freeze-drying method.

And that new technique bled into now famous favorites

like freeze dried fruits or even Nissin's instant noodles.

But now they're working on a new futuristic

dehydration method that sounds

like something out of Star Trek, but it isn't.

- [Laurie] Well come on in, this is the pilot plant here

and I'm going to introduce you to Lauren O'Connor

and she does product development.

Right now she's working on new components

for the close combat assault ration.

- [Adam] The decades old freeze-drying method

has been the military's go-to

for dehydrating and preserving foods

for soldiers on the move.

Today, we'll get to taste something

that has been freeze-dried the usual way.

Then we'll also get to taste that same food

using the newer high-tech method,

which almost no one else has tasted.

The first prototypes haven't even been field tested yet,

but Laurie and her team are giving us

the first look at this mind-blowing technology.

[lively upbeat music]

For decades the US military

has funded the research and development

of culinary advancements that eventually led

to some of our favorite foods.

The team at Natick Labs continues those efforts,

investigating which way the future of food

can be taken to the next level.

Today, I get to taste test their latest discovery

in dehydration.

It could have repercussions on the packaged

and preserved foods that we buy today.

And it could also open up doors

for a variety of unexpected foods in smaller sizes

that keep longer than before.

It's called vacuum microwave drying or VMD.

Food technologists Lauren

is baking a fresh batch of coffee cake today.

- This has all the typical things you'd see

in a homemade coffee cake, which is the great thing

about this technology is you can take a regular recipe

and turn it into a formula for the rations.

- This is pretty great

for several packaged and preserved foods

that even we buy at our grocery stores,

manufacturers and preservatives

that we'd never use in our home kitchens

like sorbic acid or Mono and Diglyceride.

But now Natick Labs is able to use just regular ingredients

like butter and cream because they're preserving foods

using the vanguard of food technology

that surrounds us in this kitchen, like VMD.

For both freeze-drying

and vacuum microwave drying techniques,

the first step is making the food.

In this case, it's preservative free food.

This coffee cake is going into the oven at 350 degrees

and 30 minutes later it's fully baked.

It smells so good and it smells the grandma's kitchen here.

[laughing]

And then like just beyond,

there's a guy with like [laughs] an AR-15 gun,

parachuting in guys with a 50 Cal on a Jeep.

Next, Food Scientist Dr. Tom will slice up this coffee cake

and separate them into two batches for dehydration.

First is the old school freeze-drying method.

Once the item is frozen,

the moisture inside will have turned into ice crystals.

Then it's placed in a freeze dryer under a vacuum

where the dry heat is applied.

It causes the ice crystals to vaporize

leaving behind air pockets in their place.

Once these coffee cake slices are dehydrated,

they get packed into airtight pouches,

preserving it for up to three years

for soldiers out in the field.

By eliminating any re-introduction of moisture,

it virtually stops bacteria from forming

thus preserving the foods.

Modern freeze-drying has been the drying technique of choice

used by the military and NASA since the fifties and sixties.

It's the technology that brought us the creamy sweet

yet curiously crunchy astronaut ice cream.

This freeze-dried dessert took flight

on the Apollo 7 space mission in October, 1968,

supposedly.

It turns out after all these decades

of fawning over this novelty treated space museum gift shops

astronaut ice cream might be a farce.

In recent years, Astronaut Walter Cunningham

who was aboard Apollo 7 said, "We never had that stuff."

- So this is a freeze dryer

and we're going to load the sample.

- You know he's a food scientist,

he took a tray of cake and called it a sample.

- Close it, start operating.

- And how long does the process take?

- 48 to 72 hours.

- Two to three days?

- That's why freeze-drying is so expensive.

- And that's why the team at Natick has been working

with a new and improved technology,

vacuum microwave drying.

[upbeat dramatic music]

- I'm now going lower the VMD samples.

- [Adam] Okay, so regardless of freeze-drying

or vacuum microwave drying, everything gets frozen first?

- Yeah. - So how long does VMD take?

- For this product it takes about 15 to 18 minutes, yes.

- 15 to 18 minutes versus two to three days,

why on Earth would you ever do freeze-drying?

- Right.

- Natick Labs is one of few places

preserving food using VMD.

And once Laurie's team has cracked the code,

we could be eating up tons of different food this way.

And it rotates I guess during the process?

- Correct, advantage of this one is

because you use microwave

so you can uniformly dry the product.

- So is this doing both processes at once?

It's a microwaving--

- And vacuuming at the same time.

- Get you a machine that can do both.

- [Laurie] And the other advantage is

we don't have to dry this down all the way to bone dry

while the freeze-dry process takes it completely dry.

Tom can kind of decide how dry he wants to make it.

- With the ability to adjust dryness,

each food item has the potential to be more appetizing.

There's some freeze-dried foods you can just add water to

like a cup of instant noodles.

But it wouldn't be appetizing to add water to coffee cake.

So if this technology succeeds,

it allows for a much wider variety of foods

to be dehydrated and still be delicious.

It's much more cost and time efficient

which means dehydrated foods that are almost identical

to their original form can be more affordable and available

to the average consumer holding more nutrition

and tasting better overall.

For today, coffee cake is the prototype on the menu.

First, we have Lauren's original bake.

Second and third are the two dehydrated slices

via two different drying methods,

which is which we don't know.

But it's amazing because they both look virtually the same

as the original bake.

And if the tastes are comparable,

I could be getting the very first bite

of the future of dehydrated food.

- [Adam] Oh!

- [Adam] Welcome back to the future.

We're at Natick Labs,

where they're pushing culinary technology to the limit.

But while the teams here in the past

have given us some of the greatest advancements in food,

not all futuristic foods from the past

have been so successful.

Let's explore the past future of food

as what they may have predicted right or wrong.

- In the 1950s, a writer for Science Digest

predicted that we would all be grazing our own beef

in our backyards and those cows would be

about the size of dogs.

Radiation would have produced these mini cows

which would be the perfect serving size for our family.

- Maybe it doesn't take radiation,

but some people do eat small cows by way of their calf

aka veal.

Another past vision of future food

that actually became quite the success might surprise you.

And the underlying technology

was developed by the military's food researchers,

the saucy restructured meat phenomenon known as

the McDonald's McRib sandwich.

It originally made its debut in 1981.

It's made by taking primarily undervalued pork trimmings

and sort of gluing it together so to speak

which food technologists originally developed

for the military back in the sixties.

Now if we go back to December, 1900, Ladies' Home Journal

published an article forecasting that in the future

vegetables would be grown with electricity.

But where on Earth can real life plants grow

using just electricity?

Well, it turns out they were right

and the answer is everywhere.

All you need is some water and a shipping container.

[lively upbeat music]

Freight Farms is a company

that somehow created hydroponic farms

scaled to fit into 320 square foot shipping containers.

Today, we're getting an intimate look at one of those.

Wiseacre Farms.

In these tight quarters, Aviad Scheinfeld and his dad Sam

are growing two acres of traditional farm land.

Meaning the equivalent amount of land you'd need

for the same amount of crops would take over 270 times

that of this container.

All together there are about 8,000 living plants in here,

thanks to 88 plant panels

hanging vertically against the container walls.

And all of this can be done without sun,

just like Ladies' Home Journal predicted back at 1900.

- So in this farm instead of depending on sunlight,

we make our own with the led panels.

- That means the plants sunbathe every day,

starting at 4:00 PM till 8:00 AM

when the led lights go out and the work lights come on

at which point Aviad and his dad

can tend to the plants, harvest as needed

and plant and sow new seeds

without disrupting the natural growing process.

It allows Aviad and his dad to deliver fresh produce

directly to people's homes within hours of harvest,

rain or shine.

- Back my good days we had to plow the ground

then we had to plant waiting for the rain

and then in the end of spring, we came back to harvest,

it took about six months.

With a lot of grain in here, it takes us five, six,

seven weeks between the time we seed

and the time we harvest.

So I know exactly when I'm going to get

and what I'm going to get.

- The technology behind container farming

could mean we may all be Dr. Greenthumbs one day,

never killing a plant and always having access

to fresh produce even when the sun isn't shining.

But now that we've had our vegetables,

let's get some dessert, high tech dessert.

Natick Labs is at the brink of cracking the code

to the future of food dehydration and preservation

with the latest technology of vacuum microwave drying.

And I'm getting a sneak peek at their latest prototype

with this coffee cake.

- [Tom] There you go have fun.

- [Laurie] Thank you, Tom.

- [Adam] Thank you.

I am on a blind taste test of different coffee cakes.

One will be Lauren's original bake,

the other two will be two different dehydrated versions.

One is freeze-dried, the dehydration method

that's been used in the food and pharmaceutical industry

for decades.

The other was dehydrated in a machine

that looks like it's from "2001: A Space Odyssey",

the vacuum microwave dryer.

If Laurie's team can make a great-tasting dried coffee cake

using this new method, we could all be seeing a cornucopia

of preservative-free dehydrated foods

in every grocery and convenience store.

So this is the fresh one that Lauren made.

- That's correct.

- [Adam] Okay, it feels so moist.

Well done, Lauren.

That's so good [mumbling] [laughing]

- It's like kind of like pound cake

in terms of like the richness and that stickiness.

Oh, okay so number two.

And this still smells like when you had the ingredients out.

[suspenseful music]

Yeah I can't...

It blows my mind that this has been dried

and still smells like coffee cake.

Okay, now the next one.

Again, you would look at this

you immediately know it's coffee cake.

[suspenseful music]

And I remember what you said

that the VMD has a little more give,

which leads me to believe this is probably the freeze-dried,

then I would say VMD in the middle.

- [Laurie] That is exactly correct, you got it.

- [Adam] What's also crazy is that in my mouth,

I have that butter feeling and like,

you think it would only be manifesting the fresh one,

but as you chew it comes out in all of them.

What's so amazing about this is, is that the VMD coffee cake

tasted so much like Lauren's original coffee cake

and without any preservatives or chemicals,

which several packaged foods at the grocery store need

for shelf stabilization.

There's no telling what this could mean.

Not only for the types of food

that may be added to our grocery isles,

but also without having to worry

about eating a ton of additives.

If this is what the teams at Natick have been researching

and developing all these years,

the future of food is boundless not just for the military.

We can't forget

that the technology explored at Natick Labs

often becomes the food industries advances

that the American public gets to enjoy too.

And as long as we stay inspired and keep innovating,

the sky is the limit.

But I think we're in pretty good hands right now.

We've seen how facilities like this one

are constantly pushing the technological envelope

when it comes to feeding our military,

we've seen the impossible become possible

with meat that isn't meat.

We have seen robots flipping burgers

and we learned that size isn't everything

when it comes to the farms of the future.

So make sure your DeLorean has a cup holder

because the future of food looks delicious.

Oh my God that's pizza.

[upbeat dramatic music]