Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Michael Wolf

Chris Young on MrBeast: “Everything Just Changed About Restaurants” (Podcast)

If you want to be a chef, the first thing Chris Young thinks you should do before parting ways with a king’s ransom in the form of time and money at culinary school is to just jump directly into the fire.

“If you think you might want to be a professional chef, the best thing you should do is go intern at a restaurant for maybe six weeks,” said Young. “And if you still think that’s a good idea, after six weeks of getting your ass kicked, then by all means be a professional chef.”

This response from Young came during a live podcast interview on Clubhouse where Young and I started talking about the future of restaurants.

One of the biggest changes the onetime Fat Duck employee and coauthor of Modernist Cuisine sees on the horizon is how new models powered by technology, like ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants, will reshape the restaurant. While Young still thinks there will always be demand for places where people can go, sit down, and have great food made by a chef a few yards away in the kitchen, that world – in other words what we’ve known for centuries as a restaurant – will be increasingly upended by the arrival of new models created by the likes of virtual restaurant concepts like that MrBeast Burgers.

“I saw that and went ‘everything just changed about restaurants,'” said Young.

Young pointed to Apple and the consumer electronics industry to explain his thinking.

In the world of electronics, “the people that design the product are very rarely the people that also manufacture it,” said Young. “That’s something we figured out in a lot of things. Apple designs. Apple engineers. Apple does not assemble [products], they have somebody else who specializes in assembly do that.”

But restaurants – unlike most other industry nowadays – remains for the most part vertically integrated.

“Restaurants are kind of weird because you’ve coupled the creative with the manufacturing,” said Young. “You might not think of a restaurant as a factory, but it’s a small micro scale, horribly inefficient factory.”

And according to Young, what MrBeast and others like him has showed is the restaurant can be unbundled.

“What MrBeast showed is we’re going to be able to take apart the creative, the marketing, and everything about the concept and we’re gonna be able to completely divorce that from the manufacturing. If you have a great idea and if you have an audience that gives a shit, then you’re going to be able to do a deal with people who specialize in the manufacturing of recipes and you’ll be able to roll out a national chain of your bagel joints. Within a couple of weeks and everybody who wants one of your bagels can get one of your bagels.”

So what exactly should a young would-be culinary empire builder do if they are excited about this crazy unbundled restaurant future according to Young?

“Learn to cook,” said Young. “But maybe you should [also] build a YouTube channel, rather than trying to invest in a restaurant.”

In other words, you should know your way around a kitchen, but also understand that might not mean a career cooking in a dine-in restaurant.

“My advice is you really want to be thinking about what the restaurant is going to be in the future,” said Young, “and a little less about, ‘do I go get a culinary education and start cooking in a restaurant?’ I think that world is largely over.”

You can listen to my full conversation with Young on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen by just clicking play below.

Chris Young Wants to Bring Cheat Codes for Good Cooking to the Masses With His New Startup, Combustion Inc.

When Chris Young started working on Modernist Cuisine with Nathan Myhrvold almost 15 years ago, their original idea was to simply write a book about sous vide cooking.

“I still have emails where we thought it’d be a few hundred pages, we could get it done in a year,” Young told me in a phone interview.

As most know, Modernist Cuisine would grow far bigger than a hundred pages, and take much longer than a year to write. And while much of the multivolume work is dedicated to sous vide cooking, what Young and other early sous vide enthusiasts knew was that this cooking technique with a fancy name was just a means to a more important end: mastery of time of temperature in cooking.

“If you look at Modernist Cuisine, about half of the book is dedicated towards explaining the physics of heat transfer in the kitchen,” said Young. “Because [the application of heat] often makes the difference between a meal being spectacular and a meal not [being] so great.”

So when Young went on to found ChefSteps and eventually build a sous vide appliance with the Joule, the ultimate goal was always to give the cook mastery over the two elements that are so important in creating good food.

“Time and temperature are just sort of these cheat codes to better cooking,” said Young.

Chris Young

If helping aspiring cooks master these cheat codes was the bigger picture and sous vide was just one means to this end, Young realized at some point he had to go beyond sous vide cooking. That meant launching a new company called Combustion Inc. and making a thermometer.

But not just any thermometer. This one would come packed with eight different temperature sensors.

Why so many?

According to Young, when cooking a roast or a chicken, it’s important to not only get the temperature inside the meat, but to get the gradient temperature throughout it, including its surface and ambient temperatures. Only then, according to Young, can you properly calculate the true cooking temperature, how fast an item will cook, and when you should take it out.

Like any self-respecting chef-slash-cooking-technology entrepreneur, Young had hacked together a solution for his BBQ that allowed him to closely monitor internal and surface temperatures, but knew the solution with all of its wires and multiple thermometers wasn’t something wasn’t exactly approachable for the average consumer.

“I have a fairly kludged together a bunch of electronics,” said Young. “It’s not what I would call productized.”

Here is where he saw an opportunity to create a thermometer that would give him the type of data to help achieve the results he wanted. While there is certainly no shortage of smart thermometers on the market, Young felt none of them were able to give him the information he wanted to cook they way he wanted.

The Combustion thermometer, kitchen timer and app

“I started building the first thermometer in the world to actually measure the real cooking temperature which can profile your food so that it can estimate things like how big is the food and how fast is it cooking.”

Young wanted to build a thermometer that could be fairly sophisticated when it came to telling temperature and predicting when meat should be done. He also wanted the device to communicate this information with not only a paired kitchen timer (the other initial product from Combustion), but also with apps. He also knew, however, after having built the Joule, connected products can be also have their problems.

“I lived that,” said Young. “I know this probably as well as anyone at this point, because like we were all in on IoT, and we got it working pretty well, and I can tell you how painful it was. When it inevitably breaks, who’s responsible? And so the experience for the consumer is all this IoT shit that is just dumb.”

It was that experience with the Joule and the polarizing responses to connected devices that made Young rethink how to create a connected product. While he wanted to make a thermometer that is connected, with all the benefits that could bring, he also wanted one that worked out of the box without a complicated pairing and set up.

The answer was to make the temperature data freely available by broadcasting it using a built-in Bluetooth capability. That meant instead of going through a complicated pairing experience with its own app, the thermometer can utilize the beacon capabilities built into the Bluetooth spec to broadcast the time and temperature data of the chicken, roast or whatever is being cooked.

“We actually said, ‘Look, there’s nothing super secret about your temperature data,'” said Young, adding that the thermometer “advertises its data every 200 milliseconds” and all that data is just part of a beacon.

The beacon technology built into Bluetooth is what allows products like the Tile tracker other other devices to broadcast messages to your smartphone to give it updates. With the Combustion thermometer, the built-in Bluetooth beacon technology will send cooking data to the Combustion kitchen timer, (the other new product announced today) or its app (Yes, there is an app for those who want one, but Young makes it clear it’s not necessary). The device will also be able to send information to other Bluetooth-enabled appliances, like GE or BSH ovens, that want to communicate with it.

Young spent plenty of time at his last company making sure his device worked with other appliances, but it was painful. There were lots of meetings negotiating complicated technology and business arrangements for the Joule to integrate with other devices. These types of months-long negotiations were exactly what the onetime ChefSteps CEO wanted to avoid at his new company.

“This is sort of a version 2.0 business model,” said Young. “Because inevitably the old way involves a huge tussle between the appliance manufacturer’s desire to have a platform and app and the startup’s desires. I’m simply saying I make my money when I sell thermometers and I make my money when we sell other things.”

Young told me Combustion Inc. will sell the thermometer and the kitchen timer as a pair, but will also sell each separately. He wouldn’t give me pricing, saying only that they won’t be super cheap but also won’t be astronomically expensive. He said they plan to make them available by this summer via their website and not (as of yet) in retail.

In a way, Young’s efforts feel more like he’s making a tool for cooks rather than trying to monetize a venture-funded startup. It’s not unlike Dave Arnold and his Searzall and Spinzall products. That’s not to say Young isn’t looking to make money or doesn’t have big plans; he says the thermometer is only the beginning.

But, after a less-than-satisfying final chapter to the ChefSteps story, I can see why he’d want to get back a bit to the roots of what he started all those years ago with Myrhvold, which is to provide cooks with tools to better use the cheat codes to make good food.

Suvie Debuts Second Generation Countertop ‘Cooking Robot’

Suvie, a maker of smart automated cooking appliances for the home, has debuted its second generation appliance, the eponymous Suvie 2.0.

So what’s different about the first and second generation Suvie? A whole bunch.

First things first: Suvie 2 is a heck of a lot smaller. That’s mainly because the second generation appliance has reduced the Suvie from being a four-chamber cooking appliance to a two-chamber machine. This change is made possible because each cooking chamber is now multifunctional, which means instead of having chamber specifically for sauce, protein or veggies, each of the two chambers can broil, steam, sous vide, slow cook as well as roast and bake (these last two cooking modes are new to the Suvie 2).

And just like the first machine, the Suvie 2 has a built in compressor-based refrigerator that chills the food until is is ready to cook. This was one of the draws of the original Suvie — being able to store your food safely in the machine while you were out all day, until it was time to cook it.

While the Suvie 2 has a smaller countertop footprint, the cooking capacity per chamber has actually gone up. According to Liss, cooking pans are 21% larger than in the previous generation.

To help slim down the new appliance, Suvie also removed the “starch’ chamber and created a separate, optional Starch Cooker. The new add-on, which Liss affectionately called “starchie” (but insisted is not the official name), features the same “patented” autodrain capability and can cook rice, pasta, beans and other starchy foods.

The new Suvie will be available for a pre-order price of $399 for the main unit, and $300 for the starch cooking add-on. MSRP for the core unit will be $800. According to Suvie, the company will also offer a significant discount to customers of the first gen Suvie who want to upgrade.

Just as with the first gen appliance, the user will be able to cook Suvie-originated meals or their own food, but with the addition of quartz broiler heating elements (the same type of heating elements used by the popular Breville toaster ovens), which enables more consistent heating and allows for the user to bake and broil food.

To fund the rollout of the new Suvie, company CEO Robin Liss told The Spoon the company has raised a $11 million in seed funding (they previously has raised $725 thousand on Kickstarter). That funding will also help the company continue to expand its associated meal service.

The new funding and the debut of a second generation Suvie is a bright spot in a kitchen tech market that has seen some consolidation over the past few years. Since Electrolux’s acquisition of Anova for a quarter of a billion in 2017, the few exits for venture-funded kitchen tech startups have relatively quiet (like ChefSteps, Brava and June), while others -- like Nomiku and Sansaire -- have shut their doors.

Interestingly, the two startups still making a go of it in this space both eyed the pairing of cooking appliances with meal delivery, a business model that has the potential of long-term recurring revenue for companies also competing in what is a highly cost-competitive hardware market. For its part, Tovala announced a new $30 million funding round this month, less than a year after its previous round.

If you’d like to buy the new Suvie, you can pick it up now and, according to Liss, the product will begin shipping in twelve to fourteen weeks.

You can see the Suvie in action below.

Podcast: Arturo Elizondo on Hatching A Startup That Makes Eggs Without the Chicken

If you were to ask Clara Foods CEO Arturo Elizondo what came first, the chicken or the egg, the answer you’d get is probably not the weighty philosophical waxing you might expect from a former intern for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayer.

Instead, chances are you’d probably hear about how it’s time to do away with the factory farming system we currently use to produce the trillion plus eggs consumed annually and how he may just have the answer for how to do that.

That answer would be Clara Foods, the company Elizondo cofounded with Dave Anchel in 2014 after the two struck up a conversation at a conference. It wasn’t long after that first conversation before the two were working on their idea for using microbial fermentation to create eggs without the chicken as part of biotech accelerator Indiebio‘s inaugural cohort.

Fast forward almost seven years and Clara released their first product in 2020 – a digestive supplement. The company plans on launching its second product later this year, a protein targeted at protein beverage market. After that, the company will release it’s flagship product, an egg white replacement.

But Elizondo doesn’t plan to stop there. When I talked to the Clara Foods CEO for the Food Tech Show, one of the first questions I asked was whether Clara’s technology could emulate more than just a chicken egg. The answer is yes.

“We wanted to have a real kick ass platform that is not just a chicken egg plant protein platform, or an egg protein platform, but a true animal protein production platform, so that we can flex in and out of different products,” said Elizondo.

From there, he and Clara hope to bring forth new flavors and combinations that aren’t even possible with old fashioned eggs.

“We’re truly entering the age of molecular food,” said Elizondo. “Not just molecular gastronomy, but instead how do we leverage the molecular element of it in producing the next generation of ingredients to build food 2.0 with new textures, new properties, new flavors that are not even possible to achieve right now with our current animals as a technology?”

If you’d like to hear about our chicken-less egg future, you can listen to the podcast below, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or on wherever you get your podcasts.

Podcast: BlueNalu CEO on Building a Cell-Based Fish Tech Company

As a long-time food industry exec, BlueNalu President and CEO Lou Cooperhouse knew there were established food industry techniques his company could borrow from when building cell-based seafood.

“It’s a much bigger toolbox,” said Cooperhouse. “You can embrace some of the technologies that industry uses, and create a product that absolutely can meet the sensory expectations and experiences of fish, which will be much more challenging on the meat side.”

One of the tools from the food industry toolbox, according to Cooperhouse, is layering.

“The concept of layering plays itself very nicely with the food industry,” said Cooperhouse. “There’s extrusion technologies, there’s folding technologies and there’s lamination technologies like in packaging.”

But while BlueNalu was able to leverage some of the technologies and processes from the food industry, the company had a much smaller set of knowledge to borrow from when it comes to replicating fish cells. That’s because the vast majority of work in the cell-based meat space has been done with mammal cells, while fish cell replication for human consumption was largely unchartered waters.

“There was little to no intellectual property around anybody ever growing and propagating successfully stable cell lines of fish,” said Cooperhouse. “So we began with a clean piece of paper on the technology side.”

And so BlueNalu set about to build a set of IP to create cell-based fish products, which Cooperhouse describes as an “end game” of a “product that has the same nutritional, functional, and sensory characteristics as seafood.”

Three years later, the company is ready to move to pilot production with the goal of creating up to 500 pounds of fish per week in its new pilot production plant it has started building in San Diego.

If you want to hear about Lou’s story and how he went from concept to pilot production of cell-based seafood, you won’t want to miss this podcast. You can hear my full conversation with Lou Cooperhouse, and all of our podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or by clicking play below.

Smart Oven and Meal Delivery Startup Tovala Raises Additional $30 Million

Tovala, a smart oven and meal delivery startup based in Chicago, announced today they have raised a $30 million series C funding round led by consumer-tech VC Left Lane Capital.

The funding round follows a $20 million series B Tovala raised last June.

So why did the company raise another huge round six months after the last one? The biggest reason, according to Tovala CEO David Rabie, was the company’s continued growth.

“The business has grown 10X over the past 18 months,” Rabie told me via Zoom this week. “A big chunk of that came pre-COVID, a big chunk came post COVID. COVID accelerated some things, but the business was already on pace to grow quickly.”

According to Rabie, the fit with Left Land Capital was another reason. Tovala felt their new lead investor, which focuses on consumer-focused Internet companies (some of the firm’s previous investments include Freshly, Farmer’s Dog and DeliveryHero), had the right expertise to help them scale.

“They have more depth of expertise in the consumer subscription space than almost anyone we’ve talked to, especially especially direct to consumer,” Rabie said. “They were really interested. At some point we were going to go raise another round, and we had gotten to know them pretty well over the course of last year, and felt like it was a great fit.”

So what is Tovala going do with its new growth capital? According to Rabie, the company plans to continue to invest in the product, by which he means everything on both the food and technology side.

“All of it, from you know the app to the packaging to the oven to the food within our walls, those are all products, and each of them are kind of an important part of the customer journey. And you know what we’ve built we think is really good, but we think it can get a lot better.”

A big chunk of the new investment will go to a new food production and packaging facility to serve the western half of the US. Currently Tovala services the entire US out of two facilities in Illinois, and so they plan to lease a new space and build out a new production, packaging and delivery facility “west of the Rockies” to serve the west and parts of the south.

What the funding won’t necessarily be used for is building a new oven, in part because the current model is working pretty well for them.

“We’re still in the exploratory phase where we’re really trying to figure out if we are going to go pursue a gen three,” said Rabie. ” What does it need to do, because the gen two works quite well. Reviews are really strong customers love it. There are not people banging on our door saying ‘if only the gen two did x, we would buy more of them current price.'”

Regardless of how it plans to spend its new cash infusion, that there is strong investor interest sets the company apart from some of its peers in the consumer hardware space. While others like Zimmplistic and Chefsteps failed to find additional financing, investors have continued to knock on Tovala’s door.

I asked Rabie why they’ve succeeded where others have struggled.

“I think it’s a complex answer,” said Rabie. “Part of it was the problem we went about solving is kind of different from all the other players. For this to work, you have to be good at building physical product, you have to be good at managing food and a food supply chain, you have to be good at marketing, you have to be good at customer service. A lot of things have to go right for it to work.”

The only other countertop smart cooking appliance seeing similar traction is Anova, which continues to sell out of their new precision steam oven. I asked Rabie if this is a sign that steam ovens might be the next breakout category.

“To be totally frank, Anova will have more to do with that than us, because we have different customers,” said Rabie. “My guess is the customer that’s buying the Anova oven is interested in cooking hacks and cooking gadgets. Our customer is like, ‘I’m really busy. I want a high quality meal on a Tuesday night, and I don’t want to keep spending $60 on Doordash.'”

I’ll be interviewing David Rabie about their latest funding round on Clubhouse today at 10 AM PT. Join us to listen and ask questions.

Here’s Why Future Cattle Farmers and Fishermen May Work at an Office Park or Abandoned Mall

As more and more companies in the cell-based meat space migrate from prototype to full pilot production phase, one of the questions that we need to start thinking about is how exactly all this meat will be made at scale.

Sure, scaled production is likely 10 years out for many of these companies, but the reality is re-configuring an industry as big and significant as meat, poultry or fish production will be a herculean task, so it’s worth starting the conversation now.

One of the futuristic visions I keep hearing about is the idea of “meat breweries“, where buildings host giant bioreactors that grow cultured meat.

It’s a weird concept now, but in fifteen years time there’s a good chance we’ll need meat breweries sprinkled throughout the country (and globe) if we plan to get anywhere near the volume of production where cell-based meat can account for 35% of all meat consumed predicted by consulting firm AT Kearney by 2045.

If we’re going to use the brewery concept as a model to frame the conversation, it’s worth comparing the idea of meat “brewing” to that of traditional beer brewing market and ask: will meat breweries be something akin to big high-production beer breweries like those of Anheuser-Busch, producing a bunch of meat centrally and shipping around the country?

Or, alternatively, will meat brewing be something closer to the microbrewery model where meat is made city-by-city for consumption within a hundred mile radius?

My best guess based on conversations with early entrepreneurs in this space is the meat-brewing production model will be much closer to how one makes my favorite local IPA to than, say, Budweiser. In other words: There will be lots of meat breweries around the country and around the world, producing cell-based meat to be consumed locally.

So where will these meat breweries be built? The reality is that while cell-based meat production can certainly be done in a building built on farmland (and I definitely think livestock farmers should consider such a thing), the reality is that meat brewing can and will be done just about anywhere where there is space. Space like in old factories, warehouses, empty office parks and even restaurants. Just as with today’s brewpubs, you can even envision some restaurants that make their meat on site in the future.

And then there’s empty shopping malls and abandoned retail spaces. Retail real estate demand is shrinking quickly and likely won’t come back as more people buy online and work remotely. We’ve already seen some empty retail locations turned into vertical farms, so why not think about turning these spaces into the meat farms of the future?

No matter where we decide to put these future cell-based meat, poultry and fish production facilities, chances are we will need a lot of them. Those developers, entrepreneurs and city planners that start envisioning a future now that includes distributed cell-based meat production could help us usher in the cultured meat farmers and fishermen of the future.

Foodspace is Using AI to Create Better CPG Data So You Find That Spicy Cheese Faster

You ever search for a food product online or at the grocery store but can’t find that exact something that perfectly matches your taste, dietary or nutritional preferences? You’re not alone. One of the big reasons searching for food products can be so frustrating is they are often bucketed under data categories that are holdovers from existing category management systems built fifteen or twenty years ago.

A new startup called Foodspace wants to eliminate this annoying experience by helping the CPG and food retail industry update their old-school category management systems with technology that makes sure that every conceivable product attribute a consumer may be searching for is documented and assigned to products headed to a physical or digital shelf.

The Boston-based startup plans on doing that by using machine vision technology that analyzes scanned images of new product packaging introduced by CPG manufacturers and uses AI to synthesize and assign attributes based on its understanding of the product packaging and label data. The attributes go beyond the typical high-level product categories such as organic or gluten free, and factors in things such as sensory preferences (creamy, grainy, etc) and consumer taste and lifestyle archetypes. All told, Foodspace’s system can assign nearly three thousand different attributes to a product.

The end result should be faster, more personalized searches for consumers. If, for example, a person who likes cheese, loves spicy food, and has a gluten allergy heads to the deli section of an online grocery store, they shouldn’t have to drill down five categories deep within the deli category to find that gluten-free habanero cheddar. With Foodspace’s AI-powered synthesis and matching of different attributes, a consumer finds a product match much faster, perhaps almost immediately, depending on the understanding the online grocer has about the shopper.

Of course, this move towards more granular, highly-consumer centric data is something that CPG and retail industries recognize is important, but have been slow to evolve away from because of the huge magnitude of switching towards systems that have thousands of product attributes. The Food Industry Association (which goes under the acronym FMI), has been working on a new framework called Shopper Centric Retailing that would update product information in the more detailed way, and this week at FMI’s annual midwinter meeting, the industry consultant who developed Shopper Centric Retailing framework, Winston Weber, announced Foodspace as a “premier” strategic solution partner to help food product companies transition their products to the new format.

In short, Weber sees Foodspace’s technology as an enabling platform to help food brands migrate to the future.

Foodspace’s technology is “helping translate products in the online space, to the benefit of brands, retailers and the end consumers,” said Weber CEO and namesake Win Weber in the press release. “Their technology is the conduit for which the Shopper-Centric Retailing business model can optimize consumer satisfaction.”

As I thought about better product data that could personalize my food product searches, I started to wonder if this could help usher in the personalized food profile concept that I’ve been thinking about ever since I heard Mike Lee talk about the idea at Smart Kitchen Summit in 2017.

Foodspace CEO Ayo Oshinaike thinks so. “The universal data set that enables that is not there,” Oshinaike told me via Zoom. “That’s the piece that’s in the middle that Foodspace is trying to solve with the breaking down of the information accuracy and how we’re able to relate products to consumers.”

Culture Biosciences Announces High-Throughput Mammalian Cell Culture Capability for Cloud-Based Bioreactors

One of the big challenges in developing cell-cultured meat products is the sheer amount of lab time needed to develop and optimize the manufacturing process so cells can be produced at scale.

This optimization process can involve working to develop the right growth media, finding the optimal growth conditions for the cells, or evaluating ways to genetically modify cell lines for better reproduction.

Traditionally much of this cell culture process development takes place in-house using a benchtop stirred tank bioreactor. But a startup called Culture Biosciences wants to take this process off the hands of cell-meat makers and allow them to utilize Culture Biosciences’ cloud-based bioreactor systems.

To demonstrate its capabilities, Culture Biosciences recently announced its high-throughput mammalian cell-culture capabilities have been proven out using CHO (Chinese Hamster Ovar) cell cultures.

The news, announced via a white paper written by the company’s senior bioprocess engineer Michael McSunas, shows the results of the work they had done using CHO cells in the company’s 250 ML cloud bioreactor. According to the white paper, Culture Biosciences was able to grow the cell lines from a customer and show reproduceability alongside internally developed cultures, as well as the ability to scale-down results from a customers 1 L glass bioreactors.

In short, Culture showed that results produced on-site are consistent, can be reproduced and scaled using their connected bioreactor technology, all important proof points for the company’s “bioreactor-as-a-service” model for cell-based meat development.

In such a model, the customer sends in vials with cells and growth media and allows Culture to thaw them and perform the studies in their 250 ML connected bioreactors. The data is then uploaded to the cloud for the customer to analyze.

If this idea of moving away from a completely “roll-your-own” infrastructure model and pushing some of development process to a service-based cloud model sounds like a concept from the Internet technology world, you’re right. That’s because Culture Biosciences CEO Will Patrick, who previously worked at Google, wondered why the world of biosciences didn’t have the same type of toolsets and accessible infrastructure such as the cloud industry with AWS or semiconductor industry with manufacturing fabs like those from TSMC.

Patrick eventually decided to build some of these tools himself in the form of his cloud-based bioreactor, and now he hopes they can act as a platform for mammalian cell development.

“Culture can help optimize the manufacturing process,” Patrick told via email. “This is important because optimizing the manufacturing process such that production is cheaper is one of the biggest R&D challenges that face cell-based meat companies.” 

Audio Social Network Clubhouse Is Hot and It’s Serving Up Lots of Food Tech Conversations

Have you joined Clubhouse yet?

Don’t worry if you haven’t. For most of its life, Clubhouse has been a secretive, invite-only app used mainly by tech industry insiders, celebrities and influencers.

But the app isn’t such a secret anymore. Since the beginning of the year, Clubhouse has flung open the doors with lots more invites and said last week there are now two million users using the app. Moving forward, the founders have stated they want to make Clubhouse available to anyone and announced they’ve raised more money to help them achieve their goal.

So what is Clubhouse? In short, it’s is a drop-in conversation social network where users join rooms to discuss everything from space travel to politics to plant-based food.

If a social network app without video sounds a bit different in 2021, that’s because it is. But, as someone who’s been listening to podcasts since before the 2010s, I’ve found it completely refreshing and more than a little addicting, in part because I’ve grown used to having such a large part of my information diet come via audio. Only, unlike podcasts, Clubhouse is realtime and allows you can be a part of the conversation.

This weekend I decided to wade in. On Saturday I joined a room where a group was discussing feeding the global population with new approaches like plant-based proteins and regenerative agriculture. I “raised my hand” within the app (how you ask to talk on Clubhouse) and asked a question about government involvement in future food policy and learned a bunch from the ensuing conversation.

There are also the conversations where you just want to listen. I recently dropped into a dinner party room where Ben Horowitz and Katie Haun of Andreesen Horowitz and other tech industry folks talked bitcoin and virtual currencies with hip hop legends Fab 5 Freddy and MC Hammer.

It was great.

You’re probably asking yourself what this has to do with food tech? Not much, other than there are lots of deep conversations already happening about the future of food (I attended once about space food), alt protein and more. There’s also a flood of food tech leaders filing into Clubhouse, so much so Arman Anatürk’s already made a Google list.

If you’re skeptical about joining yet another social network, I can’t blame you. Over the past decade, for every TikTok or Whatsapp, there’s been dozens of Vines, Ellos, Google+’s that have shot out of the gate only to fizzle out or fade away. There’s also a chance Clubhouse will get copycatted by Zuckerberg, Dorsey or one of the big social media robber barons (Twitter’s already working on something similar called Spaces).

Despite all that, if you can get an invite, you should give Clubhouse a try. That’s because it feels like it’s something different, coming at a time when many of us are primed to learn more via deeper conversations, but probably not by getting on another zoom screen.

You can read this great guide by Michael Stelzner’s Social Media Examiner as a good starter how-to if you want to learn more.

If you do join, make sure to add me (michaelwolf) as a connection and join The Spoon’s new club, Food Tech Live. And if you do join one of our conversations, don’t be afraid to raise your hand. I’ll be sure to call on you.

Podcast: The Future Grocery Store

While I may have missed my annual sojourn to sin city for CES this year, I may soon be able to get something akin to walking the Vegas strip just by heading on down to my local grocery store.

That’s because, at least according to The Spoon’s Chris Albrecht, grocery stores will soon resemble the floor of a casino with all the screens that will show up there in the future. Whether it’s smart carts with a touch screen or digital displays up and down the aisles, we can expect lots more digital signage and screens in our lives as shopping becomes more connected and digitized in the future.

And, as I say on this week’s editor podcast, I’m totally on board with more tech in the corner store as long as it includes bread-making robots filling up the aisles with the smell of fresh-baked loaves.

In addition to talking about smart grocery carts this week, we also discuss:

As always, you can check out the Food Tech Show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Soundcloud, or just click play below.