Kentucky Fried Chicken is moving beyond chicken.
Beyond Meat and KFC announced Monday that they’re working together on “Beyond Fried Chicken” — meat-free “chicken” nuggets and boneless wings meant to mimic the taste and texture of the real thing.
KFC will be testing the plant-based chicken products for one day only on Tuesday at the chain’s Smyrna, Georgia location — just outside of Atlanta. Customers that purchase any item that day will be given a free sample of Beyond Fried Chicken and asked for their thoughts.
“Customer feedback from the Atlanta test will be considered as KFC evaluates a broader test or potential national rollout,” the chain said in a statement.
The move comes as a number of different fast-food chains have started offering plant-based burgers in stores.
Beyond Meat is currently available in the form of the Beyond Meat Marinara “meatball” sub at 685 Subway locations in North America, and Carl’s Jr. sells a Beyond Meat burger.
Beyond Meat’s competition, Impossible Foods, has a large footprint in the fast-food world as well. Recently Burger King made the move to roll out the Impossible Whopper to all of its stores in the United States and White Castle is offering an Impossible Slider.
Plant-based “meat” is the next big thing for food technology. Digital Trends named Impossible Burger as our Top Tech of CES 2019. We were impressed not only with the flavor of the burger but also that it “bleeds” when you bite into it.
Products like Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat are designed to be environmental wins rather than health ones. While the veggie burgers are in most cases just as bad for you as their regular meat counterparts, the plant-based meat alternatives are significantly better for the environment.
The idea behind both companies is to encourage eaters to swap a meat product occasionally (or more) for a plant-based one. Since plant-based burgers require fewer resources such as water and oxygen to produce, if a number of people made the occasional swap it could make a dramatic difference in the world’s environment.
While Impossible Foods has largely targeted restaurants with its plant-based meat products, Beyond Meat sells a number of its products, such as ground “beef,” in grocery stores.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.