He doesn’t want to be, but Rocket is the face of Vermont’s food scene. Wearing all black and a beaming smile, the mononymic storyteller, producer and social media personality spends his days crisscrossing the state to eat at small, locally owned food businesses. Then he tells Eat Vermont‘s 28,900 Instagram followers all about it.
In videos posted almost daily, the 32-year-old champions farmers and restaurant owners, giving them about 45 seconds to share their stories. He chomps into an Italian sandwich or throws back a shot of maple syrup before signing off with a reminder to support local establishments and — you guessed it — “eat Vermont.”
Rocket snagged the @eatvermont handle in 2015, shortly after earning an economics degree from Middlebury College. Since then, the account has evolved from a creative outlet for sharing food photos — and a way for the guy behind it to get some free food — into a go-to source for happenings in the state’s food scene, with short- and longer-form videos, job postings, and event listings.
For a long time, Eat Vermont was a side project that didn’t make money, Rocket said. But through filming hundreds of on-the-spot video clips, he’s gained an understanding of how hard it can be to run a small food business in Vermont.
“It just strikes me as fundamentally wrong, like when you’re a child and you feel some injustice has been done,” he said of the treatment of food producers and purveyors. “There’s so much opportunity for us to better understand how hard they work and how important they are to the quality of life we enjoy.”
When Rocket graduated from Vermont Law & Graduate School in May, Eat Vermont became his main gig. Recently, he produced an eight-part series for Vermont Public’s Made Here Fund, diving deeper into the work of small-town food and drink luminaries such as Elmore Mountain Bread’s Blair Marvin and Babes Bar co-owners Jesse Plotsky and Owen Daniel-McCarter.
Followers who watched his “2024 Vision” video in January will already know his next step: Over a cup of Jenna’s Promise Roasting coffee and gluten-free crackers topped with Vermont Creamery goat cheese and Fat Toad Farm caramel, Rocket announced that his wildly popular social media account was “moving into technology.”
“These are 7-year-old ideas that I’m finally getting to implement, in large part because of AI.” Rocket
This week, the Eat Vermont app went live. It does what longtime followers expect: highlights and champions the state’s food and farm businesses. But it will also host up-to-the-minute information about food-focused events; a comprehensive list of restaurants, complete with current menus; available community-supported agriculture shares; and other soon-to-come features meant to connect folks in Vermont’s food scene.
“These are 7-year-old ideas that I’m finally getting to implement, in large part because of AI,” Rocket said. Both generative artificial intelligence and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) are embedded in the app and in the process the Eat Vermont team has used to bring it to life.
The first building block was Stellar, a separate app Rocket has been building over the past year with one of his neighbors in White River Junction, software developer Biraj G C. It started as an experiment to see how the duo could use AI in a recipe-focused mobile app — similar to NYT Cooking, Rocket said, but personalized for each user.
Stellar is now a major part of the Eat Vermont app’s functionality.
After a preliminary meeting this fall with the Fund at Hula — a potential funding source — Rocket and G C accelerated the larger project’s timeline, leading to the launch this week.
“Stellar’s an English muffin, and Eat Vermont is the breakfast sandwich,” Rocket said.
That English muffin uses generative AI, pulling from trained large language models (think ChatGPT). Users can ask for recipes to fit specific ingredients or even moods; a request for “fall stew,” for instance, might yield a recipe with root vegetables, hearty grains and warming spices that is billed as “comforting and seasonal.”
The AI can quickly rescale recipes based on the amount of ingredients on hand, and user-created profiles for dining companions help customize further, taking dietary restrictions into account to make sure the resulting dish is something everyone can eat, whether vegan, low fat or gluten-free.
“Is it going to be the most epicurean, incredible thing? Probably not, because of the constraints you’re giving it,” Rocket said. “But it’ll give you something you can all eat, and it’s personalized to the home-cooking experience.”
The recipes come with a disclaimer: They were created by large language models and “may not have been tested in a kitchen.” Still, potential partners see the recipes’ value, especially in helping CSA customers figure out how to use the myriad and sometimes obscure vegetables that come in their shares.
Emma Hileman, program director of Rutland-based Vermont Farmers Food Center, includes a weekly recipe or two in the newsletter of her organization’s Farmacy Project. The free 15-week “food as medicine” CSA provides fresh produce from local farmers and just completed its 10th year.
“We always have requests for more [recipes], because we’re giving people a bag of vegetables, and they might not have used some of them,” Hileman said. “It would be great for our participants to have a profile on Eat Vermont and be given different recipes they can use for that week’s share.”
Hileman hopes the food center will partner with Eat Vermont when the project returns next growing season. She sees potential for the app to help people get both food and information.
“Having one central app where people can go and say, ‘Hey, I need a meal today in Rutland County’ will be a really good resource for local food access,” Hileman said.
The foundation of such features is “just-in-time information delivery,” Rocket explained, which uses AI to gather facts online and make updates as they’re posted, whether it’s a rain delay to an event or a restaurant closing unexpectedly due to burst pipes.
The app will include statewide listings for every restaurant, general store, co-op, farm and food business, Rocket said, as well as a separate “support” tab for nonprofits, food banks, fundraisers, available grants and other community resources. Also soon to come are suggested itineraries for day trips, curated by Rocket and other content creators, with a variety of regions and themes.
The RAG framework limits the AI’s source material to ensure factual accuracy and prevent it from inventing nonexistent restaurants and the like, Rocket said. Next month, the team will create tools that give businesses some control over their listings on the app. Farmers will be able to upload weekly CSA lists to generate relevant recipes. Eat Vermont’s wider-ranging features are still in development, including a job board that will allow business owners to vouch for employees seeking to fill in at short-staffed establishments.
The app will be supported by membership fees rather than ads. Rocket is still determining the cost, he said, and is willing to waive it for those who can’t afford it.
“Any app that sells ads is selling your data,” he said, noting that the Eat Vermont team won’t sell — or even see — the hyper-personalized data from its users, such as dietary restrictions or wellness goals they may input. “It would feel really invasive if you go on Instagram and see ads for weight-loss pills after you use the app,” he added.
In addition to the app, membership will include access to Eat Vermont’s web portal and newsletter, and opportunities to get event tickets early.
Rocket said he’s put “every dollar” of his life savings into Eat Vermont’s expansion, including retirement accounts, and can self-fund it for only about another month. Meanwhile, he’s seeking funding sources beyond user subscriptions, including private investors and partnerships with chambers of commerce.
“I’ll be broke by the end of November,” he said. “But I’m sprinting to the cliff with a smile, because I really believe in what I’m doing.”
The risk he runs, he said, is no worse than what Vermont’s small food-business owners face every day.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Ready for Launch | Eat Vermont founder Rocket aims to help small businesses with a new AI-powered app”
This article appears in The Tech Issue 2024.
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