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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Michael Wolf

Is IFT’s Launch of an AI Tool For Food Scientists an Indicator of Where Trade Associations Are Going in Age of AI?

Interesting news out of IFT First this week, the food scientist expo in Chicago, where the longtime trade association announced its own AI tool called CoDeveloper.

According to the announcement, CoDeveloper is a platform built for food scientists by food scientists, offering a suite of AI-powered tools to help them formulate new products, reverse-engineer existing ones, and tap into decades of peer-reviewed food science research. Branded as a “co-scientist” named Sous, the platform is designed to live alongside R&D teams and support early-stage development work.

It’s an interesting move for the group, and as far as I can tell, the first time a trade association in the food space (or possibly any industry) has launched its own AI tool to help practitioners do their jobs. It also raises a larger question: could this be a sign of where trade associations are headed as AI becomes more integral to how we work?

It would make sense. Trade associations have historically provided value through education, convening, standards development, and general promotion. In a future where most industries are driven in large part by AI, why wouldn’t these associations, especially science-focused ones like IFT, want to get in on the action?

Of course, there has been no shortage of efforts across the food industry to develop food AI models, whether that’s startups looking to sell their AI as a SaaS platform or big food brands creating AI tools to differentiate themselves. Whether an available-to-everyone AI food product development tool is something hyper-competitive CPG companies would be interested in is yet to be seen, but I am sure that it will be something most members of the IFT community will want to take for a spin around the block.

From Red Bull to Zevia, Amy Taylor Shares Lessons Learned From a Career Built Around Buzzy Beverages

In the early 90s, Amy Taylor had dreams of Olympic gold as an elite track and field athlete.

Back then, she never could have predicted she’d spend the bulk of her career in the beverage business. But after moving to Atlanta (where the Olympics were to take place in 1996) and working for a short time for the Atlanta Hawks, it wasn’t long before she started to work for Red Bull, just as the now-famous brand was beginning to define the energy drink business in the early 2000s.

“My stepdad warned me not to take the job because he had never heard of the company,” she recalled. “And I said, I think there’s something special here. I took my Gen X assignment of creating this Red Bull brand with an American lens on it for the American audience.”

Taylor would spent over 20 years at Red Bull, eventually serving as president and chief marketing officer, where her time there shaped her philosophy on building iconic brands.

“What I learned there was about creating a hot brand and sort of becoming a part of or creating communication within and around the zeitgeist,” she said. “Instead of trying to go fast and hard and drive distribution and awareness at all costs… the brand was building relationships.”

Now, as CEO of Zevia, Taylor is applying those lessons to a different kind of beverage mission. “We are going to materially reduce sugar consumption among the population that we serve,” she said. “If a family switches from carbonated soft drinks to Zevia, they can cut their sugar consumption in half with one move.”

Known for its zero-sugar sodas made with stevia, Taylor says Zevia aims to provide an affordable, clean-label alternative for families. She’s also focused on evolving the brand’s taste and product innovation. “There are 20 molecules in the stevia leaf that can sweeten a product,” she said. “Our job is to go extract the ones that perform best within the beverage. For the part of the population that have had a negative experience with stevia, they’re going to need to come back and try Zevia. And I think they’re going to be blown away.”

Like most food brands nowadays, Zevia is embracing AI. Taylor says they are doing it with a “hacker’s approach,” which means encouraging every department to experiment with new use cases.

“Each department head challenges their entire team, not just their senior leadership, to come up with new use cases for AI,” Taylor said. From creating digital consumer prototypes to enhancing operations and finance workflows, Taylor said the company is exploring numerous applications. “We use AI to challenge our thinking and our assumptions. We want to grow faster because of our ability to leverage AI with the people that we have in the building today.”

Part of Taylor and Zevia’s push to leverage innovations like AI is because the company operates lean (fewer than 100 employees), and new technologies can help them punch above their weight.

“We are small and focused,” she said. “And we are scrappy as hell.”

You can listen to my full conversation with Taylor below and can connect with her (and ask her questions) at the Smart Kitchen Summit later this month.

Study: AI-Powered Drones Fuel Advances in Precision Ag for Early Detection of Crop Stress

Early stress detection via precision agriculture just got a serious upgrade, according to new research out of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Led by Dr. Ittai Herrmann, the team developed a drone-based platform that blends hyperspectral, thermal, and RGB imaging with powerful deep learning technology to precisely identify nitrogen and water deficiencies in sesame crops.

Sesame, known for its resilience to climate variations, is rapidly growing in global importance. However, accurately identifying early-stage crop stress has historically posed a significant challenge, limiting the ability of farmers to respond quickly to potential catastrophic challenges. To tackle this, the researchers combined three advanced imaging technologies into a single drone system, creating a robust solution capable of decoding complex plant stress signals.

Hyperspectral imaging provides detailed spectral insights into plant chemistry, including nitrogen and chlorophyll levels, which are critical markers for plant nutrition. Thermal imaging spots subtle temperature changes in leaves that indicate water stress, while high-resolution RGB images provide clear visual context of overall plant health and structure.

What made this study cutting-edge was its use of multimodal convolutional neural networks (CNNs), an advanced AI approach that can unravel intricate data patterns and add context, which significantly enhances diagnostic precision. These advanced techniques unlocked the researchers’ ability to distinguish overlapping signals of plant stress, such as differentiating between nutrient and water deficiency, something that conventional methods often struggle to achieve. According to the researchers, by accurately pinpointing the exact stressor, farmers can now apply resources such as fertilizer and irrigation more strategically, reducing waste and environmental impact while increasing crop yields.

While other researchers have studied using advanced AI techniques with drones to aid in combatting stress in walnut and specialty crops, the use of deep multimodal CNN appears to be a leap forward in precision ag. It remains to be seen how quickly this technology reaches the farmer level, but given the challenges of climate change, its easy to envision that these types of advances in precision agriculture will be invaluable tools for farmers in the future to protect against climate-related crop stress.



Could Lasers Made From Olive Oil Be The Next-Gen Freshness Detector or Use-By Label?

Imagine scanning a tuna steak in your fridge and suddenly a tiny laser pulse beams an expiration date or, surprise, tells you it’s not really wild-caught.

That’s no longer a sci‑fi: new research from a group of academic researchers from the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece published in Advanced Optical Materials discusses how they were able to create edible microlasers crafted entirely from food-grade ingredients, essentially turning food in a tupperware container or on your dinner plate into a data-rich interface with the potential to relay information about freshness, provenance, even safety.

So, how does it work? Researchers created tiny edible lasers by using food-grade materials like olive oil, coconut oil, and sugar-based droplets combined with natural colorants such as chlorophyll or curcumin. The droplets act as tiny optical cavities that trap and amplify light using a principle called ‘whispering gallery mode resonance‘. When excited by an external light source, they emit a laser-like signal. Because the lasing behavior is sensitive to environmental factors like temperature, pH, and chemical composition, these microlasers can be used as sensors that can be embedded directly in food to help detect spoilage, confirm authenticity, or monitor freshness. And, according to the team, this happens without adding anything inedible to the product.

The paper explores different applications, such as edible barcodes, applied onto the food itself and not on packaging. Another idea is food with built-in freshness sensors, salad kits that glow a warning when the pH level shifts, or olive oil bottles that hold internal glow-signatures to confirm authenticity.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of technology for freshness, authenticity or changing chemistry built directly into the food itself. A couple of years ago, a company called Index Biosystems developed a form of invisible barcode called a BioTag, which is created by mixing baker’s yeast in extremely small amounts with water, then spraying or misting it onto products such as wheat. BioTags can later be reach using molecular detection techniques such as PCR and DNA sequencing.

The BioTag is a cool concept, but this new breakthrough from the Mediterranean scientists seems like something that – if it ultimately is commercialized – could be much more approachable for the end-user, who doesn’t have access to tools for things like DNA sequence detection (that’s if you can lasers shooting from your food as ‘approachable’).

With the debate about use-by date labels raging after after California became the first state to create a new approach in years (causing numerous other states to consider following suit), new technology like this shows us that someday our food might actually be able to tell us, via lasers, itself whether it is still good to eat.

With the debate over use-by date labels heating up – especially after California became the first state in years to introduce a new approach, prompting several other states to consider following suit – this kind of technology is a sign that someday our food might be able to tell us directly whether it’s still good to eat.

Leanpath CEO: The Fight Against Food Waste Enters Its ‘Second Act’

At this year’s ReFED Summit in Seattle, Andrew Shakman was in a reflective mood. When asked about the state of the food waste reduction movement, the Leanpath CEO, who has spent more than two decades fighting food waste, compared the moment we’re in to the second act of a three-act play.

“If we go back to Aristotle’s Poetics, the beginning is always gripping. The middle is hard, and I think we’re in act two, where it’s no longer the beginning, but we are not at the end.”

According to Shakman, it’s a moment of transition for the food waste movement. The early momentum that defined the last decade, fueled by sustainability pledges, bold 2025 goals, and a wave of startup innovation, is giving way to a more complicated reality. Some organizations are hitting their targets while many are falling short. And now, for many fighting the fight, the question isn’t just what the next goal should be, but how to keep the movement going.

According to Shakman, that means leaning into the business case for food waste reduction, much as he did when the company first started.

“When we started, I’ve been at this 21 years. It was all about money. It was all about saving money, pulling dollars out of the garbage,” he said. “We came to understand that this was a nexus issue that incorporated issues around climate and food security and land conversion and biodiversity and water resources and everything. Today we’re reverting back to a narrower story that’s more focused on business case simplification, making life as business-focused as possible, because of the environment we’re in right now. There’s less political unanimity around climate and ESG.”

Shakman believes this re-focusing on the business case is happening because many enterprises are deemphasizing meeting sustainability goals, in part due to the political moment we are in in 2025. But just because the Leanpath CEO sees a powerful message in emphasizing efficiency and saving money as key motivators to adopt food waste reduction tech, he doesn’t think those in the industry should abandon talking about how important waste reduction is for the environment.

“You can still have the whole conversation,” Shakman said. “But the emphasis is on the business case at the moment. I don’t think we should allow ourselves to walk away from the moral imperative”

When I asked him about AI, he said the technology is most powerful when it drives action in the kitchen and elsewhere.

“Chefs did not get into food because they wanted to sit in front of their computer,” Shakman said. “They want to touch and make touch, make connect and create experience, and they want to know what’s the fastest path to taking the most impactful action, and that’s where I think AI is going to be very exciting.”

Shakman believes AI is most powerful when it adds context to decision making through triangulating different data sets, but believes the industry – and its data – is in many ways structured in a way that makes creating that contextual nuance difficult. The real breakthrough, he believes, will come from breaking down the data silos in foodservice technology.

“There are POS data assets for what you’ve sold,” said Shakman. “There are inventory data assets around what you bought and maybe what’s on your menu. There are now waste data assets that are actually unique contributors to the data landscape. And with those, when you triangulate with what you sold and what you bought, you now have the ability to see things that you could never see before.”

But even as Leanpath builds toward that integrated vision, one that blends frontline kitchen tools with enterprise-level oversight, Shakman remains focused on the people behind the data. “The changemakers on this issue are the people working in kitchens,” he said. “They’re driven by emotion, by the desire to do good. If you can align action with purpose, you unlock something powerful.”

Shakman’s framing of the food waste battle as a three act play isn’t all that surprising since storytelling runs in the family; his brother, Matt Shakman, is a longtime Hollywood director, directing shows like WandaVision and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and the upcoming Marvel movie, The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

Both Shakman brothers are, in their own way, trying to navigate two very different Act Twos and shape what comes next.

You can watch my full conversation with Andrew from the ReFED conference below and find it later this week on The Spoon Podcast.

The Spoon Talks With Leanpath's Andrew Shakman at ReFED Summit 2025

Nearly Seven Years After Launching Kickstarter, Silo Finally Delivers Next-Gen Home Food Storage System

In 2018, when I saw a company called Silo launch a crowdfunding campaign for a modern food storage system – essentially Tupperware for the digital age – I couldn’t resist. I pulled out my credit card and backed it.

Little did I know it would take nearly a decade for the product to show up at my doorstep. However, last month, I noticed that Silo had finally begun shipping to backers, and just last week, mine arrived.

So what took so long?

Like many hardware startups over the past five years, Silo ran into major headwinds. The first big hurdle was the pandemic, which prevented the team from traveling to China to oversee manufacturing. They also struggled to raise additional funding after one investor got cold feet and pulled out during COVID.

“When COVID erupted globally, I got a phone call saying, ‘Hey, listen, we’re not going to transfer the funds,’” Silo CEO Tal Lapidot told me in 2022.

Eventually, the company secured a new investor, and Lapidot reassembled a team to bring the product to market. Now, three years later, the product is finally shipping.

According to the company, units have been sent to all backers who completed their surveys, and Silo is now also selling the system on its website. When I backed the campaign in 2018, the entry price was a relatively low $199. Today, nearly seven years later, the base system, which features the vacuum seal unit, scale, and four storage containers, sells for $499. A 12-piece version goes for $649.

Early feedback from Kickstarter backers (those who didn’t request a refund) has been mixed to positive. One backer has even started a Facebook group for users. I’ll be testing mine soon and will share a full review in the coming weeks..

Starbucks Unveils Green Dot Assist, a Generative AI Virtual Assistant for Coffee Shop Employees

While most companies across the food value chain are embracing AI in some form, one major player that’s been notably quiet is Starbucks.

From mobile ordering to Web3 experiments, and computer vision-powered bioauthentication to automated drink-making, the Seattle-based coffee giant has never shied away from tooting its own hard about tech-forward initiatives. But when it came to generative AI, the most hyped tech trend of the past few years, Starbucks had kept relatively quiet, leaving many to wonder what it was working on and when it might reveal its plans.

That wait is over. This week, at a 14,000-employee conference in Las Vegas, the company unveiled Green Dot Assist, a generative AI-powered assistant designed to help baristas and store managers streamline their operations.

So, what is Green Dot Assist? In short, it’s a Microsoft Azure-powered virtual assistant currently being piloted in 35 Starbucks locations. The app assists with a range of tasks, from training new employees on how to prepare specific beverages to supporting shift managers with dynamic scheduling in response to real-time changes, such as last-minute call-outs.

Green Dot Assist even troubleshoots hardware issues. In a demo video shared by Starbucks, a barista named Dave uses the assistant to diagnose an espresso machine that’s pulling inconsistent shots. The AI provides 3D visual guides and prompts Dave to submit a service ticket—an experience that blends visual diagnostics with conversational support.

Packaged in an iPad app (apparently, Microsoft couldn’t convince the coffee chain to use Surface devices), Green Dot Assist combines training, support, and efficiency tools, all powered by Azure’s generative AI capabilities.

Given Starbucks’ longstanding emphasis on employee training, an AI-powered employee training guide and assistant makes sense. But my guess is this is just the beginning. In the longer term, I expect Starbucks to leverage AI to further enhance operational efficiency, particularly given the significant shift in order mix towards mobile ordering, which has led to increased wait times and customer frustration. This next wave will likely include more advanced automation, as we’ve already started to see with the chain’s push to roll out its Clover Vertica machine nationwide this year and – possible – a new point of sale system announced this week at the company’s employee conference.

Impulse Announces Its Battery-Integrated Cooktop Becomes First Certified to Applicable UL Safety Standards

While we’ve all become accustomed to battery-powered vehicles transporting us around town, the idea of battery-powered appliances is still a relatively new concept to most consumers.

But slowly but surely, startups making appliances with batteries built-in are jumping through the necessary hoops to bring these products to market in mainstream channels that will expose them to a broader audience.

The latest example of this is Impulse’s recent certification of its battery-integrated cooktop by Underwriters Laboratory (UL). The company announced that its range had met the UL 858 certification standard in a recent blog post. According to Impulse, UL 858 is the final UL certification needed to make their battery-powered induction cooktop compliant with all safety standards.

According to Impulse CEO Sam D’Amico, the company has logged thousands of hours working on hardware, software and manufacturing to reach this stage.

“It’s already insane to bring a new product to market, and doubly so if the compliance and regulatory environment *didn’t exist* at the start,” wrote D’Amico in a post on Linkedin. “But this is *required* to legally install. To do this, we had to develop a wholly new power electronics stack for battery-integrated appliances — including the highest performance induction drive system *ever built for a consumer device*. We then had to ensure it was safe under adverse conditions (maybe even deep frying a turkey).”

As D’Amico writes, this type of certification is required for installation by contractors and home builders. By surpassing this milestone, Impulse clears another hurdle to be in the mix when remodelers, home buyers, and their builders or contractors evaluate the products. As I mentioned earlier, most people are not yet aware that products are available that incorporate batteries to enhance performance and increase overall resilience.

Whether we’ll start seeing customers scoop up these types of products in the near future is yet to be seen, but this milestone no doubt clears a hurdle for many retailers to start promoting these products, which should result in greater consumer awareness of them.

After Leaving Starbucks, Mesh Gelman Swore Off The Coffee Biz. Now He Wants To Reinvent Cold Brew Coffee

Mesh Gelman didn’t set out to build a cold coffee company. In fact, when he left his role leading innovation at Starbucks, he didn’t want anything to do with coffee.

“I was interested in the left side of my email address and not the right side, the Gellman part, not the Starbucks part,” he told The Spoon. “I was like, okay, I’m gonna innovate and it’s not gonna be in coffee.”

That resolution lasted about six months.

Now, as founder and CEO of Cumulus Coffee, Gelman is back in the world he knows best, only this time he’s tackling what he sees as one of the most overlooked challenges in modern coffee: cold brew.

Cumulus is a countertop device that delivers nitro cold brew and cold espresso on demand, using a proprietary capsule system. It doesn’t require refrigeration or nitrogen tanks, and Gelman says it produces a café-quality drink in under 60 seconds.

“If we could deliver a premium experience every single time, better than café quality at the push of a button, why would you ever choose to go back?” said Gelman.

The epiphany that set Gelman on his journey to build a cold brew system came during a visit to Starbucks’ Roastery in Seattle, when he tried nitro cold brew for the first time. “I took one gulp of it, and I was like, my God, I’m gonna be in trouble. This is like full of dairy,” he said. “And the barista was like, ‘No, there’s nothing in it.’ It was a transformative experience.”

After three years of bootstrapping the product, Gelman raised funding, including a seed check from former boss Howard Schultz. In total, Cumulus has raised over $30 million.

For Gelman, the mission is clear: bring premium cold brew into the home and beyond.

“We need to take a step back and say, let’s delete everything we know and craft something for cold,” he said.

Cumulus has launched online and in select Williams-Sonoma stores and Gelman says they are targeting both consumer and commercial markets, including offices, cafés, and bars.

You can watch my full conversation with Gelman below or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Building a Home Cold Brew Coffee System with Mesh Gelman

Brian Canlis on Leaving an Iconic Restaurant Behind to Start Over in Nashville With Will Guidara

Brian Canlis didn’t expect to be in the restaurant business his whole life.

But as with so many family businesses – especially hugely successful ones like Canlis, which single-handedly put Pacific Northwest cuisine on the map – life and careers happen before we know it.

And there’s no doubt that the brothers Canlis, Brian and his brother Mark, have done a masterful job since taking the reins from their parents (who themselves inherited it from Peter Canlis, who started the restaurant back in 1950). Today, Canlis is as relevant and forward-thinking as ever, a rare achievement in an industry where even the most legendary restaurants often have a shelf life.

So after nearly two decades at the helm, it would have been easy (and expected) for Brian to continue leading the restaurant, enjoying the perks of running a world-famous dining institution perched above Seattle’s Lake Union. Instead, he decided it was time to blow it all up.

“When I became a restaurateur in my 20s, I was single and I tried on the shirt called running this restaurant—and it fit,” Canlis told me on the Reimagining Restaurants podcast. “Twenty years later, I have four small kids and the shirt doesn’t fit in the same way.”

So what does a new shirt that fits his 40-something life a little better look like? As revealed in February in the New York Times, it’s a new chapter in Nashville, where he’s joining forces with his best friend from college, Will Guidara—co-founder of Eleven Madison Park and author of Unreasonable Hospitality—on an open-ended creative partnership.

The two have been close since freshman orientation and even worked together in New York during a brief sabbatical Brian took in 2013. Now, they’re reuniting, potentially for the long-term, but with a little ‘try-it-before-you-buy it’ twist: “We said, ‘Let’s date before we get married’,” Canlis said. “Let’s just work together for a year and see what happens.”

The move reflects more than just professional curiosity—it’s rooted in a desire to be more present as a father and partner, and to explore what work and life can look like when untethered from legacy.

“I started to grow an imagination for what it would look like to have a career where I could be more present to these kiddos every day,” he said. “Where I could exercise a different piece of my brain, and maybe move closer to my wife’s family.”

Leaving wasn’t an easy decision, but it was one supported wholeheartedly by his brother and business partner, Mark.

“He said, ‘You should only be working here as long as you are flourishing as a human,’” Brian said. “‘Our values are only our values if they cost us something.’”

That ethos – prioritizing people over plates – is the red thread throughline of Brian’s journey. Whether it was converting Canlis into a burger drive-thru during the pandemic or hosting wild, pink-painted Barbie-themed fundraisers, the Canlis brothers infused hospitality with heart and a willingness to take creative risks.

Their guiding principle? That a restaurant should be a place where people are inspired to turn toward each other.

“We’re not in the food business,” Brian told me. “We’re in the people business.”

As for what comes next, Brian is embracing the uncertainty. He and Will haven’t put anyting in concrete just yet, just an agreement to explore new ideas and opportunities in hospitality, with Nashville as their testing ground.

It’s a leap. But then again, so was opening the first restaurant in Seattle with a liquor license in 1950. So was putting a fine-dining spot on a cliff above Lake Union. So was painting the walls pink.

Turns out, reinvention runs in the family.

You can watch my full conversation Brian below or find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or where you listen to podcasts.

Brian Canlis on Leaving an Iconic Restaurant Behind to Start Over in Nashville With Will Guidara

Food Waste Gadgets Can’t Get VC Love, But Kickstarter Backers Are All In

It’s a mystery (kinda). While traditional venture and strategic capital haven’t shown much enthusiasm for backing food waste-fighting technology, the category is thriving on crowdfunding site Kickstarter.

Two current campaigns, in particular, are crushing it, blowing past their initial funding targets with weeks still to go.

First up is the Shelfy Lite, the second fridge gadget from Italian startup Vitesy. The campaign has already raised over $300,000, more than ten times its original goal of around $28,000.

How Shelfy Lite's technology works

The Shelfy Lite works similarly to the original Shelfy (which I wrote about here), using a ceramic filter to purify fridge air and capture bacteria. The company claims that the pollutants are not just mechanically retained, but also destroyed, through a process called photocatalysis. This new version is smaller and more affordable, with a retail price of €100 (currently available at a 30%+ discount during the campaign). While the original Shelfy earned mixed reviews on its Kickstarter page, that hasn’t stopped even more backers from jumping onboard for the latest iteration.

Now on Kickstarter: Ion 2.0: Saves Money, Reduces Food Waste, Helps The Planet

The other gadget that’s tracking towards a successful campaign is the Ion 2, another fridge gadget promising to extend the life of your food. Like the Shelfy, it claims to purify the air, but it does so by filtering water through a silver-coated filter to ionize the air. The creators say this ionized air kills bacteria while remaining safe for humans at low concentrations.

I can’t speak to whether the Ion 2 will work as promised, but it’s clearly resonating with backers: more than 400 people have supported the campaign, which has raised over $68,000—nearly 20 times its original goal of just $3,500..

Meanwhile, the broader home food waste reduction category, from next-gen fridges to reimagined Tupperware, continues to struggle to attract venture investment. Part of the challenge is that most VCs aren’t interested in consumer hardware. But the problem seems deeper than that: few investors appear willing to bet big on fighting food waste.

Take the Tomorrow Fridge. The company shut down in April after failing to raise enough capital. CEO Andrew Kinzer shared the challenges in a candid LinkedIn post:

“When we set out to build a next-generation fridge—one that could extend the life of your fresh produce, reduce waste, and help make healthier eating easier—we knew we were taking on an ambitious challenge,” wrote Kinzer. “Unfortunately, the current climate for consumer hardware—especially for capital-intensive, science-forward products like ours—has made it incredibly difficult to bring something like this to life.”

Tomorrow is just the latest in a line of startups that have struggled to survive, including Silo, Ovie, and even Tupperware, which faced difficulty attracting strategic investment as its financial health declined.

Some might point to Mill as a rare example of traditional investors backing a food waste company. While technically true, I see Mill more as a waste management solution, at least until they launch something that prevents food waste (which I suspect they eventually will). The need for waste management is, in a sense, a validation of the significance of the problem for everyday consumers and the broader food industry.

So does the success of Shelfy and Ion 2 signal a shift? Maybe, but I’m still skeptical. Their success appears to be largely tied to the fact that both creators are veterans of the crowdfunding space, with proven records of launching hardware products in adjacent categories.

Still, you never know. With consumers feeling the pinch of higher grocery bills, the demand for ways to stop throwing money into the compost bin is growing. Perhaps, just perhaps, that rising interest will finally push more investors and founders to take consumer food waste seriously.

Report: Restaurant Tech Funding Drops to $1.3B in 2024, But AI & Automation Provide Glimmer of Hope

After a multi-year boom fueled by the rise of delivery apps and the broader digital transformation of the restaurant industry, venture capital flowing into restaurant tech has sharply slowed, according to a new report from PitchBook.

The report, titled Q2 2025 Tech Landscape: Restaurant Technology, shows that total VC funding in the space dropped to just $1.3 billion in 2024, down from a peak of $14.5 billion in 2018. Restaurant tech accounted for only 12% of total food tech venture investment in 2024, compared to a commanding 60% in 2018.

Restaurant tech’s shrinking share of food tech investment isn’t entirely surprising, given the maturation of delivery marketplaces, a sector that drew a wave of generalist investors during the 2010s. As once-scrappy startups like DoorDash, Deliveroo, and Grubhub evolved into established players and opportunities in the delivery space dwindled, many of those tourist investors moved on.

Still, PitchBook sees pockets of opportunity in restaurant tech, particularly around AI and automation. The report highlights emerging tools that use AI for personalized marketing, demand forecasting, and operational efficiency. AI-powered, human-language interfaces are also gaining traction, with companies like Hi Auto, ConverseNow, and Slang AI bringing automation to drive-thrus and phone-based ordering. Major chains such as Wendy’s and Yum! Brands are doubling down on these systems, even as McDonald’s recently pulled back from its AI ordering pilot and its experimental beverage-focused brand.

PitchBook is cautiously optimistic about robotics and automation in restaurants, a sector that has seen high-profile flameouts like Zume. According to the report, the market has shifted from startups trying to build full-stack systems to more targeted point solutions being tested and deployed by established players. Companies like Hyphen and Miso Robotics are among those providing modular automation tools now being adopted by operators.

On the consumer-facing side, startups focused on guest management and loyalty platforms have also emerged as bright spots for investors. Blackbird Labs and Dorsia each raised $50 million in early 2025, while SevenRooms announced a notable exit with a $1.2 billion acquisition by DoorDash.

Looking ahead, PitchBook expects deal flow to remain measured. The restaurant industry’s notoriously thin margins—combined with ongoing economic uncertainty—will likely keep tourist VCs on the sidelines. However, startups that leverage AI and automation to drive operational efficiency are expected to continue drawing investor interest.