Fed up with subpar Thai food abroad, the Thai government sponsored a project to ensure purveyors of the country’s cuisine meet its exacting standards around the world. The Thai Delicious Committee, overseen by the government’s National Innovation Agency, unveiled its “e-delicious” tasting robot in September.
Using 10 sensors to determine taste and smell, the boxy contraption works by tasting dishes and measuring the chemical signature of the food against a government-approved standard recipe for the same dish. It then computes a rating out of 100; any score below 80 indicates inauthenticity.
The project team spent about a year developing e-delicious, developer Krit Chongsrid, PhD, told ABC News. Syncing the smell and taste sensors was the most difficult part of the US$100,000 robot project. “There is a 5 to 10 percent error probability,” Dr. Chongsrid said.
His team hopes to produce at least 100 of the machines, with the goal of selling each for US$18,000 to Thai embassies in countries with many Thai restaurants. In addition to the taster, the committee produced a free app named Thai Delicious that offers officially approved recipes, as well as a logo restaurants can display on menus if they use government-backed recipes.
E-delicious isn’t the world’s first electronic tasting robot—previous projects have delivered a beer-tasting robot in Spain and a wine-tasting robot in Denmark. But it is the first devoted to Thai food.
“We wanted the cheapest and easiest approach to measure food,” Sirapat Pratontep, PhD, a nanotechnology expert who led the robot’s development, told The New York Times. “You just put in the food and you get a rating.” —Brittany Nims