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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Michael Wolf

So You Wanna Know When You’re Gonna Die? Brent Franson and Death Clock Think They Can Tell You

What do you do when your company’s about to die?

If you’re Brent Franson, you create an app that tells you when you might expect your own expiration date. The app, called Death Clock, was a Hail Mary pivot after his previous product, a health tracking app for which he raised $10 million, had failed.

“It’s probably a really, really stupid idea to actually name it Death Clock,” Franson said on an episode of The Spoon Podcast. “But if it’s a good idea, it’s a really good idea. It’s an 80 percent chance it’s a terrible idea. But there’s a 20 percent chance that it’s a really good idea.”

It turned out the app beat the odds and became a viral sensation, in no small measure due to its provocative name. But behind the provocation was a deeper thesis shaped by Franson’s own entrepreneurial journey and his experience with his company’s near-death moment building apps for a broken health system.

“What I became pretty convinced of in my life is that our healthcare system is just not very good at helping people change behavior,” he said. “It’s not good at preventative health. And that’s really obvious in addiction.”

Like most ideas coming out of Silicon Valley these days, Death Clock has AI at its core, trained on longevity studies in a way that forces people to confront mortality directly.

“We trained an AI on 1,200 longevity studies to make a few predictions,” Franson said. “One, it predicts the day you’re going to die. And two, it predicts how much longer it thinks you can live if you manage your health.”

The reception to Death Clock surprised the company. The app quickly climbed app store charts across multiple countries, tapping into what Franson sees as pent-up demand for preventative health tools that operate outside the traditional medical system.

That vision expanded this week with the company’s announcement of Life Lab, a new AI-powered health concierge embedded inside the Death Clock app. Life Lab integrates nationwide blood testing, biomarker tracking, and uploaded physician records to create what Franson calls a “private doctor quality roadmap” for everyday consumers.

“The number one factor that determines how long you’re going to live is how much money you have,” he said. “Basically, the more money you have, the more you can opt out of the healthcare system and cash pay for good preventative health.”

Life Lab, he says, can help collapse that gap using software rather than elite access.

Perched squarely inside Silicon Valley’s fast-growing longevity movement, I asked Franson what he thinks of the live-forever crowd and the surge of investor interest in longevity. He told me that while he believes the underlying demand is real, he’s sharply critical of what he sees as excess and dishonesty at the fringes.

“Selling immortality is one of the oldest frauds in the book,” Franson said. “If you’re insinuating that if you buy my stuff, you might not die, I think that’s reckless. And I think it gives everybody in the space a bad name.”

Instead, Franson has focused Death Clock on a much more reasonable goal: helping 100 million people live 10 years longer. “That’s not live forever. That’s just being healthier for longer.”

In a longevity landscape increasingly crowded with extreme biohacking and hucksters, Franson and Death Clock are betting that a more realistic goal, and a little dark humor, might prove to be a more durable strategy.

You can listen to my full conversation with Brent below or download on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Where Did Impossible Go Wrong and What Should it Do Now?

When Impossible Foods announced that CEO Peter McGuiness would step down after nearly four years, the company framed the move as a transition “from a position of strength.” For Rachel Konrad, the former head of communications at Impossible Foods, it felt more like the inevitable endpoint of a long strategic detour.

“I would never have moved my whole family back from Europe to go to a CPG veggie burger company,” Konrad said this week on The Spoon Podcast. “I went to join a radical, unusual, category-busting biotech juggernaut.”

Konrad joined Impossible in 2016, knowing the company was stepping into a fight. In fact, those fights were what her former boss, Pat Brown, hired her to help fight. 

Immediately after Konrad started at Impossible, Pat Brown forwarded her an email from someone “very highly placed in the ag sector.”

“It said there was an unlimited budget to destroy this silly little company called Impossible Foods, likely funded by the Cattlemen’s Association. Take it down based on propaganda, fear, uncertainty, and doubt.”

That pressure campaign was real, but Konrad doesn’t believe that’s what ultimately weakened Impossible. “The biggest mistake startups make is they get a little traction and suddenly decide, ‘Now we’re playing in the big leagues,’” Konrad said. “They overhaul the company and adopt the incumbent playbook.”

That usually means conventional branding, big advertising spends, and competing directly with legacy giants.

“If you’re a startup, you will never out-advertise Nestlé or Unilever,” she said. “Once you adopt the chessboard of the incumbent industry, you’re dead. It might take a year or two, but you’re dead.”

Konrad sees Impossible’s pivot under McGuiness, explicitly positioning itself as a tech-enabled CPG company, as exactly that trap. She believes early investors like Vinod Khosla would have never jumped on board if they thought Impossible was going to be another CPG brand. 

“Vinod did not invest in a stupid CPG veggie burger company,” she said. “He invests in things that change the trajectory of humanity.”

Konrad told me that what made Impossible different wasn’t branding, but its technology.  She felt that the company should have aggressively pursued a B2B strategy in which Impossible was the platform for next-generation meat alternatives, rather than trying to conquer the world as a consumer-facing brand. 

“It’s a category-defining biotech company that makes heme,” Konrad said. “Why didn’t Impossible license heme? Why didn’t it go into supplements? Why didn’t it become a major B2B player?”

When I asked her if the company pushing out Pat Brown and going with McGuiness was a mistake – pointing out Brown’s notorious prickly attitude – she said yes, pointing to the example of Steve Jobs. 

“Apple only became Apple because Steve Jobs came back and said, ‘F**k that—we’re not doing SKU management,’” she said. “Impossible needs a Steve Jobs moment.”

I agree with Konrad that Brown is a unique visionary, the kind who is sometimes needed to overcome massive obstacles, but I still wonder if the overall headwinds against plant-based protein were too much for any leader.

Konrad doesn’t suffer from these same doubts and still believes Impossible has a chance to become a long-term success story. “My hope – for the planet, for people, for animals – is that Impossible goes back to that original vision. Without that, it’s going to be very hard to turn this around.”

It was a fun conversation and you can listen to it below.

What Should Impossible Foods Do Now?

Why Alex Shirazi Decided the Cultivated Meat Industry Needed a Cookbook

For years, Alex Shirazi has helped tell the story of the cultivated meat industry through conferences, podcasts, and public-facing education. But as these once science-fiction-y products slowly moved from labs toward early commercialization, he began to feel that something was missing.

“While there is plenty of discussion about cultivated meat, very little attention is paid to how it actually shows up in everyday life,” Shirazi said on The Spoon Podcast. 

That realization ultimately led to A Scientist’s Cookbook, a Kickstarter-backed project designed to explore how cultivated meat might actually be cooked and used in real kitchens. Rather than leaning into futuristic speculation, Shirazi said he wanted the book to feel grounded and familiar.

“We’re not talking about some far-off future,” he said. “These products are coming to grocery shelves soon, and now is the time to start cooking with them. This cookbook focuses on that missing step.”

A Scientist’s Cookbook is Shirazi’s second book, launched via Kickstarter this week. His first, Where Do Hot Dogs Come From?, was a children’s book designed to introduce the concept of cultivated meat to younger audiences at a time when commercial timelines were still highly uncertain.

“The idea was that if this technology is actually going to be out in the next 10 to 15 years, a children’s book would allow us to get early readers interested in this technology,” Shirazi said. “And then by the time they’re making food decisions, it will actually be in their grocery stores.”

The cookbook originally started as an idea aimed at teenagers and young adults, but that distinction quickly fell apart.

“I realized that there are a lot of teenagers who have way more advanced skills than some of the adults I’ve talked to,” Shirazi said. “So the line kind of blurred, and it didn’t really make sense to create something that is just focused towards teenagers.”

Instead, Shirazi framed the cookbook as a resource for anyone curious about how cultivated meat could realistically fit into existing cooking habits. The book will be supported by a digital component designed to evolve as products become available, including plant-based stand-ins and future updates as cultivated meat enters new markets.

Shirazi also reflected on the future of the Cultured Meat Symposium, the conference he co-founded in 2018. After several years of organizing the event independently, the founding team decided it was time for a transition.

That evolution led to the sale of the Cultured Meat Symposium brand to the UK-based FutureProof Group, which plans to continue hosting the event in North America and Europe.

“They were really excited to actually continue the brand,” Shirazi said. “For us as a founding team, we saw that they wanted to continue it, and now I’m actually really excited to say that the first Chicago edition of CMS is taking place at the end of this month.”

For Shirazi, the handoff allows him to stay connected to the space while freeing up time to pursue new projects, such as a cookbook focused on making cultivated meat more tangible and accessible.

“Food can be made like this,” he said. “I think it’s actually a good thing to show people that.”

Alex Shirazi Talks About His Cookbook for Cultivated Meat

Fiber’s ‘Signal’ Has Faded in Modern Food. These Two Founders Want to Restore It

For most of its modern history, food deemed healthy came with a tradeoff: it might be good for you, but it probably wouldn’t taste very good, and it would almost certainly require discipline.

Matt Barnard thinks that framing is the real failure of the food system.

“If health requires discipline, it will never be the default,” Barnard told The Spoon in a recent interview. “Virtuous suffering is a system failure.”

Barnard is the cofounder and CEO of One Unlimited, the parent company behind one.bio, a fiber science platform, and GoodVice, the newly launched consumer brand debuting this week. The company’s protein shakes, featuring 10 grams of oat fiber and 15 grams of protein, go on sale tomorrow on the GoodVice website.

Fiber’s Branding Problem

According to Barnard’s cofounder and chief science officer, Matt Amicucci, the seed for the company’s fiber technology was planted when he was working in professional kitchens.

“I actually started my career as a chef,” Amicucci said. “I loved feeding people and seeing how people interacted with food.”

That curiosity eventually took him to UC Davis, where he studied food science and later earned a PhD in chemistry, focusing on dietary fiber and how different carbohydrates interact with the gut microbiome. At the time, he said, fiber was treated as a blunt instrument.

“We didn’t understand how the fiber in an apple or a sweet potato was different from a molecular standpoint,” Amicucci said. “And we didn’t understand how they could influence health in different ways.”

That gap, between how other nutrients were treated and how fiber was understood, continued to gnaw at Amicucci. While vitamins and minerals were broken down into discrete, functional categories over the past century, fiber remained lumped into a single number on the nutrition label.

Out of that realization came what he and one.bio call the glycopedia, a proprietary database cataloging the molecular structures and biological functions of dietary fibers found across thousands of foods.

“We’ve gone through monomer by monomer, linkage by linkage, branch by branch,” Amicucci said. “What the structures of these dietary fibers are, and how the gut microbiome interacts with them.”

According to Amicucci, the goal isn’t just to better classify different types of fiber. It’s to predict the health outcomes they can express. By mapping fiber structure to microbial behavior, the company hopes to identify which fibers drive specific biological outcomes, from blood glucose regulation to immune response. The team has already published research using machine learning models to predict how novel fibers would interact with the microbiome, then validated those predictions experimentally.

“Turns out our prediction was correct,” Amicucci said.

That work eventually led the team to beta-glucan, a fiber found in oats, which became the foundation for one.bio 01, the ingredient now powering GoodVice’s first products.

Underlying one.bio’s approach is the idea that modern food didn’t just lose nutrients as it became more processed, it lost biological signals. According to Barnard and Amicucci, fiber isn’t simply a nutrient but a communication layer between food and the body, one that tells the gut microbiome how to regulate metabolism, immunity, and inflammation. As food processing stripped fiber out for shelf life, texture, and cost, those signals disappeared as well. “Our microbiome takes it in, does work on our behalf, and then creates signals for our gut, metabolic, and immune systems,” Barnard said. Without those signals, he explained, many everyday foods became metabolically chaotic, even if they still delivered calories.

Why Most Fiber Doesn’t Work

According to Barnard, the industrial food system has largely failed to deliver meaningful fiber for three reasons. First, many widely used fibers are synthetic or highly modified, meaning the microbiome doesn’t recognize them. Second, some natural fibers perform well biologically but deliver poor consumer experiences (“You wouldn’t want Metamucil in your soda”). Third, others, particularly inulins and FOS, can be inflammatory or cause gut distress at effective doses.

“The secret sauce,” Barnard said, “is anti-inflammatory fibers that have real function and can be used at high concentrations without affecting the experience whatsoever.”

Before the interview, the company sent me some products to try, including an orange pomegranate seltzer with 20 grams of fiber, as well as packets of the GoodVice protein shake powder. Both tasted pretty good and, as promised, there was no chalky, fiber-y taste.

From Platform to Product

Barnard told me that the GoodVice shakes, which are one.bio’s first consumer-facing expression, are meant to be a reference design. The shakes contain 10 grams of one.bio 01 prebiotic oat fiber, 15 grams of protein, and other nutrients like creatine and magnesium.

But the broader ambition extends far beyond shakes.

“When you go to the grocery store, 70 percent of calories are not whole foods,” Barnard said. “What we’re doing is returning the signals of whole food to those calories.”

He said that could mean oat milk with oat fiber restored, juice with fruit fiber put back in, or baked goods that behave metabolically more like their whole-food counterparts.

When I asked about GLP-1s, Barnard said he while he thinks pharmaceutical responses are necessary for many people, he sees fiber-based products as a way to prevent people from getting to the point where a GLP-1 shot is required.

“What our fibers can do is prevent people from getting there in the first place.”

For others, he sees fiber-based foods as a potential off-ramp.

“There are plenty of people who don’t like the side effects,” Barnard said. “We can give them those signals without pharmaceuticals.”

Looking ahead, Amicucci believes that as fiber becomes better understood, it will enable more personalized nutrition. When I asked him whether that would take a decade to arrive, he said it would happen much sooner.

“I don’t think it’s going to take 10 or 20 years,” he said. “I think it’s right around the corner.”

You can see my full interview with the cofounders of One Unlimited/One.bio below.

Fiber's Signal Has Faded in Modern Food. These Two Founders Want to Restore It

Supper at Home Hopes to Provide Recipe for Home Chefs to Build Businesses from Their Kitchens

For more than a decade, startups have built online marketplaces in hopes of turning home kitchens into legitimate food businesses. Unfortunately, for most of that time, while demand existed, the regulations permitting these businesses did not.

The first serious attempt came more than a decade ago with Josephine, a startup that gave home cooks a platform to sell meals directly to consumers. Josephine raised more than $2 million, attracted a loyal user base, and helped popularize the idea that home cooking could become a marketplace. But in 2018, the company shut down.

“We have simply run out of the resources to continue to drive the legislative change, business innovation, and broader cultural shift needed to build Josephine,” CEO Charley Wang wrote at the time.

Josephine’s failure wasn’t about product-market fit, but about a lack of regulatory policy. While food safety measures and clearly defined rules are necessary to ensure that food made in people’s homes is safe to eat, at the time there was, for the most part, a lack of understanding and a regulatory framework to both protect consumers and guide these businesses. That gap ultimately doomed Josephine and created an uphill battle for those that followed.

Cottage food laws varied widely across states, inspections were costly, and regulatory progress was slow. Even as California debated what would become AB 626, the bill that ultimately created Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operations, or MEHKOs, other states lagged behind.

Over time, regulations began to evolve, in part due to advocacy from platform builders and community leaders who saw an opportunity. In California, AB 626 was passed in 2018 after years of work by organizations like the Cook Alliance, creating a legal pathway for home cooks to sell freshly prepared meals from their primary residence. Since then, MEHKOs have expanded slowly but steadily. A recent Cook Alliance report found that MEHKOs have exceptionally low complaint rates, strong food safety records, and are disproportionately operated by women, immigrants, and people of color.

In a 2024 article, The New York Times documented the shift in Riverside County and Los Angeles, where home kitchens can now operate as legal restaurants, serving everything from takeout to backyard dine-in meals. Still, while MEHKOs work, nationwide the system remains fragmented, highly local, and difficult to scale for both business operators and local municipalities.

That’s where Paul Gerstenberger believes his startup, Supper at Home, can help.

Gerstenberger is the founder and CEO of Supper at Home, a platform that connects diners with home cooks offering private, dine-in meals. The company, which Gerstenberger cofounded with his wife, Celerina Gerstenberger, remains early and largely pre-revenue. For now, Gerstenberger’s focus has been on expanding the number of hosts on the platform and encouraging states across the country to adopt his new framework.

“It hasn’t been a technology challenge,” Gerstenberger told me. “It’s been a regulatory challenge.”

Before founding Supper at Home, Gerstenberger worked as a food inspection specialist in the U.S. Army. Drawing on that experience, he developed a MEHKO-style framework centered on inspection readiness rather than scheduled inspections.

“The primary pinch point for states doing this has been that they have to send out food inspectors to each home,” he said. “By creating a pop inspection, the states don’t have to create a whole army of food inspection specialists.”

Under the model Gerstenberger has been sharing with state and local health departments, home kitchens are subject to surprise or short-notice inspections rather than fixed schedules. The idea is to reduce enforcement costs while keeping kitchens inspection-ready at all times.

Gerstenberger told me he has sent versions of this framework to all 50 states and that elements of it are now under consideration or adoption in dozens of them. In Hawaii, where he lives, he points to recent regulatory changes that allow home cooks to serve meals inside their homes.

“We wrote to the head of health here in Hawaii and also to our congresswoman,” he said. “Two weeks ago, [the inspector] called and said the laws have now changed. You can do it.”

Supper at Home itself takes a narrower approach than Josephine. Rather than delivery or pickup, the platform emphasizes private, dine-in meals for small groups, served at a set time with a fixed menu.

“Just imagine setting a supper for you and your family,” Gerstenberger said. “It’s private just to you. You show up at the door on time… everything’s on the table.”

The company has signed up roughly 900 hosts since mid-2025, driven in part by viral YouTube videos explaining the concept. Gerstenberger says Supper at Home is intentionally building its host base before pushing hard on diner acquisition.

While I’ve always thought the cottage food space represented a potentially exciting new shared-economy micro-opportunity, there are no guarantees of success for either the platforms or the home cooks that use them. As The New York Times reported, a significant percentage of MEHKO businesses shut down within months due to thin margins or marketing challenges. Still, the combination of lower regulatory burdens for agencies and higher revenue caps for cooks suggests this market may finally have a shot at working.

MEHKOs are no longer theoretical. Advocacy groups like the Cook Alliance continue to push for change, and Gerstenberger and Supper at Home believe they have a way to help make the model work for both state health agencies and home cooks.

You can see my full interview with Paul Gerstenberger below.

Are Homemade Meals The Next Big Sharing Economy Opportunity?

CookUnity Partners With Airbnb to Bring Chef-Created Meals to the Short Term Rental Market

For much of the past decade, CookUnity has operated as a subscription-based prepared meal service built around a network of professional chefs. This week, the company made its first major move beyond its own platform through a partnership with Airbnb, allowing guests to order chef-prepared meals directly through Airbnb as part of their short-term rental experience.

“It goes from the subscription model, right, which is what we’ve been doing for a decade, into a new model whereby we’re now taking the chef’s incredible food and making it available through other platforms like Airbnb,” said Morley Ivers, CookUnity’s head of partnerships, in an interview.

According to Ivers, the integration is active across 22 U.S. states and Washington, DC. Travelers can pre-order meals to be delivered ready to heat in their Airbnb rental, turning an empty fridge into a stocked one without a grocery run.

“One of the traditional downsides of selecting Airbnb, perhaps, is you walk in and your fridge is empty,” Ivers said. “The strategic partnership that Airbnb and Cook Unity have set up has changed that for now and for the future.”

Meals start around $15 and are designed to be reheated quickly with minimal equipment, such as a microwave.

Unlike some of the larger ready-to-eat delivery providers, such as Factor, CookUnity does not operate a single centralized production facility that mass-produces meals. Instead, it runs eight regional commissary kitchens across North America, where chefs come in with their own teams and operate independently.

“We have eight very large kitchens with 180 incredible top-tier chefs,” said Ivers. “They come in as their own bosses, as entrepreneurs with their own teams.”

CookUnity supplies the infrastructure—real estate, equipment, packaging technology, ingredient sourcing, logistics, and delivery—while chefs focus on creating and executing menus. This model leads to some regional variability, as each commissary kitchen hosts its own roster of chef partners, though some chefs, as Ivers explains, have begun using the CookUnity system to expand beyond their core markets.

Chefs are not paid flat fees or licensing royalties; instead, their compensation is tied to customer feedback.

“These are not employees inside of our kitchens who are getting a recipe from Cat Cora and sort of executing her recipe,” Ivers said. “This is actually Cat Cora, who’s coming in with her recipe. Our team is working with her on it making sure it meets the parameters of what’s required for an incredible ready-to-eat experience for consumers. But it’s her team that is executing that dish to her standards and obviously our standards as well.”

According to Ivers, chefs on the platform are making an average of $850,000 per year. That figure is striking and suggests that some chefs may increasingly focus on creating meals for CookUnity rather than investing their own capital in opening and operating restaurants.

The prepared meal delivery category continues to grow, driven by consumer demand for convenience. Estimates suggest the broader global prepared meals market could rise from around $190 billion in 2025 to more than $300 billion by 2032, with delivery representing a fast-growing portion of that total.

It remains to be seen how the Airbnb partnership will perform over time, but it clearly opens up a new market for CookUnity’s chefs and creates an additional revenue stream beyond the company’s home subscription model. According to Ivers, this partnership is just the beginning, with more third-party platform integrations expected in 2026 and beyond.

You can see my full interview below.

Cookunity Partners with Airbnb To Bring Chef Meals to Short Term Rental Market

Amazon Pulls Plug on Decade-Long Dream of the Tech-Powered Grocery Store

Today, Amazon announced it had finally given up on the tech-forward grocery store vision it first unveiled nearly a decade ago.

In a press release, the company said it would close its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores. The announcement marks the end of an initiative that began with lofty ambitions. After launching its first store, Amazon said it planned to open as many as 2,000 locations nationwide and experiment with up to three different store formats.

When the first Amazon Go opened in downtown Seattle in October 2016, the idea felt genuinely futuristic. A grocery store where you could walk in, grab a sandwich and a gallon of milk, and walk out without ever talking to a cashier or pulling out your wallet seemed pretty cool. From a technology perspective, the computer vision systems and AI that powered the experience were impressive for the time.

Impressive or not, the concept never really gained traction with consumers. Part of the problem was that, in practice, shopping at an Amazon Go always felt a little strange. Walking out without ever paying felt like you were doing something wrong, even when you knew you were not.

I do think consumers want less friction and appreciate not having to wait in line. But in retrospect, it is fair to ask whether we were ever in such a hurry that we could not tolerate a simple self-checkout flow using computer vision and tap-to-pay.

I do not think we were then, and I do not think we are now. Today, computer vision in retail is growing, but the formats gaining traction look very different. Instead of fully eliminating checkout, the winning models are essentially better versions of self-checkout. Systems like Mashgin, along with smart cart vendors such as Shopic and Caper, are finding real adoption by speeding things up without making the experience feel unnatural.

Amazon, for its part, will continue to invest in Whole Foods. The company said today that it plans to open another 100 locations. My guess is that Amazon will be more restrained with high-tech checkout experiments there. The cultural fit between Whole Foods and dense arrays of cameras and people-recognition technology has always felt a bit off.

The bottom line is this: Amazon’s retreat from physical retail, outside of Whole Foods, which was an acquisition rather than an internally built concept, is largely complete. Amazon Books, Amazon Go, Amazon Fresh, Amazon Style. All going, or already gone.

Why Subtle Tech and Countertop Appliances, Not Robots, Are Driving Kitchen Innovation

For much of the past couple of decades, talk of the future kitchen at CES has conjured tech-forward images of robotic arms sautéing vegetables, humanoids flipping burgers, and, more recently, AI-powered assistants hovering over the stove. But during a conversation I had with a panel of kitchen insiders a couple of weeks ago in Las Vegas at The Spoon’s Food Tech conference, they made a compelling case that the future of cooking looks slightly more mundane, yet far more useful.

I was joined by Robin Liss, CEO of Suvie; Jonathan Blutinger, senior design engineer at Smart Design; and Nicole Papantoniou, director of the Kitchen Appliances Lab at the Good Housekeeping Institute. Together, they painted a picture of a near-term kitchen future shaped less by futuristic robots and more by quiet, behind-the-scenes intelligence.

To set the table (sorry), I started the conversation by asking where we’ve actually been over the last decade when it comes to the smart kitchen. Papantoniou said a core mistake made by early smart kitchen products was trying to solve problems consumers did not actually have. “A lot of people were putting smart features into products that you didn’t really need,” she said. “I don’t think people understood why they needed Alexa to make coffee for them.” Instead, she argued, success today comes from friction reduction. “It’s becoming way easier, very seamless, and people use it without even realizing it now”.

That shift toward subtlety was echoed by Blutinger, who said many early smart kitchen products were over-engineered. “Just because you can doesn’t necessarily mean you should,” he said. “It should be coming from a human need”.

Slap Some AI on It

A huge percentage of booths at this year’s CES claimed their product was AI-powered, which had me wondering whether today’s market risks repeating the mistakes of the smart kitchen a few years ago, when everyone was “slapping Wi-Fi on everything.” Liss argued that AI today is fundamentally different from the Wi-Fi-first era of connected appliances. “Almost all these products have embedded software or cloud-connected software,” she said. “The way we look at AI is it’s not some all-encompassing model… it’s integrations into steps of the process”.

Blutinger said AI’s biggest problem may be the overuse of the term by marketers, and that while the AI-ification of products is inevitable, both the label and the tech will eventually recede into the background. “That word alone has created such a stigma around it,” he said. “The technology should not be upfront and personal. It should be invisible in a sense”.

Papantoniou agreed, predicting consumer acceptance will likely be higher once AI fades into the background. “Once people stop advertising that it’s AI and it’s just part of the normal product, it’ll be way more accepted”.

Hold the Humanoids

As with my other session at CES focused on food robots, I asked the panelists when, if ever, we’d see humanoid robots walking around our kitchens. And just as with that other panel, they were skeptical.
“I still think that’s really soon for us to be seeing it in the home kitchen,” said Papantoniou. “Five years is soon”.

Liss said the adoption of food robots in the home would hinge on safety and practicality. “Food is inherently dangerous, and kitchen appliances dealing with high heat are inherently dangerous,” she said, noting that even in commercial settings, “getting the robot not to hurt the workers around it… that’s the hard part”.

Instead of humanoids, the panel advocated task-specific automation.
“We are designed as humans to do so many range of tasks,” said Blutinger. “Like we have to be perfect for so many things. It’s not like cooking takes up 100% of our time. So if we’re trying to optimize for just automation in the kitchen, why do we need these complex articulated (robot) arms doing things? Why not just have like a simple little one degree of freedom rotating thing that just rotates our sauce?”

Why Countertop Appliances Keep Winning

Despite talk of built-in, do-everything cooking boxes, the panelists agreed that innovation will continue to favor specialized countertop devices.

“I would say that probably the reason you’re seeing so many, the proliferation of lots of little countertop appliances, which makes me very happy, is because the innovation is happening there,” said Liss. “And frankly, if you look at the breakout companies, the stock performance of Breville, Shark Ninja, are, you know, Breville is larger than Whirlpool, Shark Ninja is many multiples larger than Whirlpool. It’s because all of the innovation is happening on the countertop because of that replacement cycle challenge of major appliances.”

Papantoniou was blunt about the trade-offs that come with multifunction. “There is that stigma that multifunctional appliances don’t do everything well. And while it’s gotten a lot better, I would say like an air fryer function in an oven is not going to compete with your basket air fryer.”

The Future of The Kitchen Has More Personalization and Less Friction

For my final question, I asked the panelists to look ahead and describe what they see for the kitchen over the next few years, and it was clear they were aligned around a quieter vision of progress.

Papantoniou predicted broader adoption as fear subsides. “People are adopting it more and not being so scared of it and not judging it as harshly, I think, as they did in the past. I think people actually do want their coffee maker to start working while they’re still in their bedroom. So I think that’s gonna just be coming more,” she said.

Blutinger focused on usability. “I think just reduce friction in the kitchen. That’s the biggest thing if you’re trying to innovate in the kitchen space.”

Liss closed with a vision for the future centered on humans, not robots. “I think it’s healthier, more personalized food, cooked how you want it. You’re getting to spend, most importantly, is families getting to spend time with each other happily enjoying meals for those everyday weeknight meals rather than spending an hour, mom spending an hour prepping the food or wasting money on really expensive delivery, right? It’s like a better life for people because they’re eating healthy, good food at home, saving money, and spending time with their loved ones.”

You can watch the full session below.

CES 2026: The Kitchen of the Future: AI, Robotics & Smart Tech

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Gambit Robotics Hopes to Usher In a New Era of Guided Cooking Without Robots (Yet)

Coming out of CES earlier this month, you might think a new kitchen assistant from a startup called Gambit Robotics would look something like the dozens of humanoid robots roaming the show floor in Las Vegas.

Instead, the company’s newest product, launching on Kickstarter tomorrow, is something much more familiar, closer in spirit to the guided cooking systems that began to emerge in the smart kitchen over the past decade, albeit with a computer-vision-driven twist.

The eponymously named Gambit, described by the company as an “AI sous chef,” uses an AI-powered computer vision system mounted above the stove to detect heat patterns and track cooking progress. Positioned above the cooktop, the device can see what’s happening in the pan, monitor burner activity, and sense temperature changes. According to the company, users can drop in almost any recipe, whether from a website, a photo of a handwritten card, or a family favorite, and the system will break down the steps and follow along as you cook. The home cook will be guided by a “conversational” voice interface and an associated Gambit app.

Company cofounder Nicole Maffeo says Gambit provides guidance and coaching you “can turn on or off,” including educational nudges designed to help users improve over time. “You can leave the kitchen,” she said.

The Future of Cooking Starts Here

As for the company’s longer-term ambitions, Maffeo says Gambit’s vision extends well beyond a single device. She and cofounder Eliot Horowitz see an eventual ecosystem of kitchen assistants, including devices that understand what’s in your pantry or fridge and connect shopping, planning, and execution.

The company is building on top of a platform created by Horowitz for his company called Viam, which I described as something of a “WordPress for robotics” when I interviewed him in November. Down the road, that ecosystem could include robotic arms or deeper appliance integrations. In the near term, however, Maffeo says the company is also exploring software licensing opportunities with appliance makers, particularly around its computer vision and thermal sensing stack.

“We don’t need to own every piece of hardware,” Maffeo said. “If there’s a hood above a stove, that software should be there.”

Gambit plans to price the hardware at roughly $500 at retail, with early Kickstarter backers receiving a modest discount. The company is pairing the device with a monthly subscription, expected to land between $9 and $15. Maffeo says Gambit is targeting Q3 of this year for shipping products to consumers.

Rather than a walking, talking kitchen robot chef, Gambit strikes me as much closer in function to the guided cooking systems that were a major focus of smart kitchen startups a decade ago. Companies such as Hestan, ChefSteps, and Thermomix paired software, sensors, and cooking hardware to create cooking assistants. While guided cooking eventually faded as many of those products failed to find the level of success their creators hoped for, Maffeo believes the timing is right this time around, thanks to advances in AI systems that can make these tools work better.

She may be right, but a couple of questions remain. The first is whether consumers will understand what this product actually does. Gambit is not a cooking device, but a cooking guidance system. The promised benefits are similar to those offered by earlier guided cooking products, such as the Hestan Cue, except Gambit delivers those benefits through a device mounted above the stove rather than through smart cookware or appliances.

The second question is whether consumers will be willing to pay for those benefits in the form of a $500 device and an ongoing subscription. Consumers have historically been reluctant to spend on entirely new kitchen product categories, and this is not an insignificant price tag.

There’s little doubt the technology itself is impressive, and it’s encouraging to see experienced entrepreneurs like Horowitz and Maffeo looking to the kitchen as a place to apply AI-enabled technology. I’ll be watching closely to see whether Gambit can help usher in a new era of guided cooking, this time powered by AI and, eventually, robotics.

The product launches on Kickstarter tomorrow, January 27th.

Will Giving Everyone a Blood Sugar Monitor Lead to Better Health Outcomes? Maybe, But Only If We Tell People What to Do With The Info

Last year, I used a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) for the first time, and it completely changed how I eat.

After a couple of weeks using an over-the-counter Stelo CGM, I learned that sugary snacks shoot my blood sugar into the stratosphere, salads and veggies keep it at a manageable level, and light exercise, even a short walk after a meal, helps bring it down almost instantly.

This information was so revelatory that I began to wonder whether putting CGMs and the information they provide into the hands of a broader set of people could help us better manage societal health over time. After all, if it changed the way I eat, could it do the same for millions of others?

One way to explore that question is to talk about the technology with smart people. Last week at CES, I did just that when I moderated a session titled “From Brainwaves to Blood Sugar: How Next-Gen Tech Shapes Diets” during The Spoon’s Food Tech Conference at CES. I purposely programmed the session with a mix of panelists to bring medical, startup, investor, and researcher perspectives to the conversation.

After sharing my experience with a Stelo CGM on stage, I asked Howard Zisser about the importance of over-the-counter CGMs. Zisser, a physician and longtime pioneer in diabetes technology who worked on some of the earliest CGM systems in the early 2000s, when the technology was designed almost exclusively for people with diabetes, said the value of these newer CGMs lies in the data and what you can do with it.

“Instead of one or two readings a day, you suddenly have 300, 500, 600 readings a day,” Zisser said. “You start to see trends. What happens when you fast, when you exercise, during a menstrual cycle. IYou get a rich data set that’s your data personally.”

When I talked about how jarring my own experience was in seeing my blood sugar spike, Zisser argued that the shock is part of the value. Unlike biomarkers such as cortisol, which are difficult to influence in real time, glucose is actionable.

“You see it, and you can change your behavior,” he said. “Next time, you make a different choice.”

He likened glucose feedback to learning how to drive with a speedometer. Without it, he said, you’re guessing. With it, you can learn how your actions translate into outcomes.

But not everyone will wear a sensor on their arm. Noosheen Hashemi, founder and CEO of January AI, argued that while hardware CGMs are powerful, they are not scalable to the hundreds of millions of people with undiagnosed prediabetes or metabolic dysfunction. She said technology like that developed by her company leverages machine learning models trained on years of CGM data to predict glucose responses without requiring buying a hardware sensor.

“Our claim to fame is creating the world’s first continuous glucose monitor with AI,” Hashemi said, explaining that the system can generate directionally accurate predictions using inputs such as age, weight, activity level, sleep, and food intake.

But for all the data and actionable insight these tools can provide, they do not guarantee lasting change. Sherry Frey, VP of Total Wellness at NielsenIQ, shared research showing that even after receiving a diagnosis and initially adjusting their diets, behavior often reverts within months.

“We actually see about nine months in that a lot of behavior reverted,” Frey said. “When people were maybe less engaged and a little tired of of having to eat differently.”

That drop-off highlights both the opportunity and the challenge for health technology. Sustained engagement requires more than numbers on a screen. It requires context, interpretation, and motivation.

Frey also noted that adoption of wearables and health-tracking technologies is expanding beyond affluent early adopters. One of the fastest-growing user groups, according to NielsenIQ data, includes consumers on SNAP benefits, many of whom are using these tools for chronic disease management rather than fitness optimization.

“The addressable market is much larger than people with diabetes,” Frey said.

As we discussed what makes behavior change stick, I asked whether giving consumers more data, as the Nest thermostat did starting a decade ago, would prompt lasting change. Peter Bodenheimer, U.S. venture partner at PeakBridge VC, said yes, but only if the insights are actionable.

“Insights that tell you, ‘if I do this, then something good or bad happens,’ tend to be the things that people respond to and maintain.”

The panel also acknowledged the downside of constant feedback. More data can mean more confusion, anxiety, and misinformation. Hashemi shared an example of a user who believed their glucose should never rise above 110, a misunderstanding fueled by social media rather than clinical reality.

“Metabolic fitness is how you go from fasted to fed efficiently,” she said. “It’s a preposterous idea to keep your blood sugar the same all the time. So yes, there’s a lot of misinformation.”

Zisser reinforced that interpretation depends heavily on individual context, goals, and physiology. The same glucose spike can mean very different things for a professional athlete, a person with diabetes, or someone trying to lose weight.

We also discussed other technologies that can help us understand what’s happening inside our bodies, such as neural implants and other next-generation sensors. Hashemi pointed to implantable sensors capable of reading multiple analytes for years at a time, as well as emerging efforts to continuously measure substances like lactate, ketones, alcohol, and eventually insulin.

“Yeah, there’s definitely implantables,” said Hashemi. “There’s one that reads 20 different analytes, including glucose. It lives, you have to inject it under your skin. It can live 900 days. And it’s still in animals. It’s not in humans yet. But these things are coming.”

As the number of measurable signals grows, so do concerns about privacy, trust, and data ownership. Frey noted that while many consumers want their health data integrated in one place, roughly half remain uncomfortable with embedded sensors and worry about how their information might be used by insurers, governments, or corporations.

Others felt that the benefits of these technologies may ultimately outweigh more abstract fears. When people see tangible improvements in sleep, energy, or focus, trust can follow.

“No government, no doctor can make somebody healthy,” Hashemi said. “The only person that can do that is yourself.”

As we wound down the session, we talked about personalized nutrition, a topic that has long been a point of heated discussion in the world of food and health. The panelists agreed that while personalized nutrition may never be perfectly precise, the combination of biological data, AI, and human context is moving the industry closer to that goal.

“The gold lives in the combination of data,” Hashemi said, suggesting that consumer-generated health data will increasingly merge with clinical care, especially as value-based healthcare models expand.

In the end, the promise of next-generation health tech may be less about perfect prediction and more about empowerment. One idea that Zisser suggested was possibly getting these types of technologies into the hands of young students as we are teaching them how to eat.

“When my dad taught me how to drive, he didn’t put me in a car without a speedometer, right? It’s like, have feedback, I have information. And so to give people that access to that, and not that they would need it all the time, but so they can learn how their choices impacts their glucose.”

Not a bad idea. I can only imagine what my long-term health outlook might be different if I’d had insight into the impact of certain foods on blood sugar when I was much younger.

If you want to hear my conversation with these smart people, just click play below.

CES 2026: From Brainwaves to Blood Sugar: How Next-Gen Tech Shapes Diets

Hold The Humanoids: Why a Couple Robot Experts & a TV Chef Think The Humanoid Takeover of Food May Never Materialize

Ten years from now, CES 2026 may be remembered as the year robots took over the show floor. Humanoids folded clothing, boxed items, played games, and talked like product marketing managers.

Against that backdrop, I led a conversation on the food tech stage about whether robots may soon take over the kitchen. In a session titled “Robot vs. Chef: Will AI Augment or Replace the Cook?”, I brought together longtime TV chef Tyler Florence with a pair of robot builders: Nicole Maffeo of Gambit Robotics and Ali Kashani of Serve Robotics.

And when I say “pitted,” I mean I let everyone jump into a wide-ranging conversation about the future, one in which most participants were largely in agreement about how robots should be used in home and professional kitchens, though not always.

While tens of thousands of attendees were checking out robots on the show floor and seeing what they could theoretically do, I asked my panelists what robots should actually be doing. From the get-go, they rejected the idea that humans will be replaced by AI or robotics in the kitchen. Chef Tyler Florence framed AI not as a creative force, but as a responsive one, noting that its output is entirely dependent on human input.

“As great as AI is right now,” he said, “it’s really all about the prompts. It’s not going to do anything if it’s just sitting there by itself.”

Rather than replacing chefs, all the panelists agreed that AI and robotics are far better suited to working alongside them, handling the repetitive and unglamorous work that drains time and energy from kitchens.

But what about boring, dangerous, or repetitive tasks? Clearly, not all jobs are fulfilling or even ones that many humans want. And when people do those jobs, there is always the risk of injury.

According to Kashani, repetitive, injury-prone, and hard-to-staff tasks are already being automated.

“If you have that job, like coring an avocado, that’s not a great job,” he said. “It’s actually dangerous. People cut their fingers.” In those cases, Kashani argued, a robot can reduce injuries while freeing humans to focus on creative and guest-facing work.

This idea of using robots that are often focused on a single task and look nothing like a human stood in stark contrast to what we saw on the show floor, where humanoids seemed to be everywhere. When I asked the panelists whether a human-like form factor made sense, all agreed that we would not see humanoids in restaurants or home kitchens anytime soon.

“No one wants a man coming out of their closet to come and cook them dinner and then going back in,” said Kashani.

Maffeo agreed. “We don’t need someone coming out and doing all these things for us,” she said. “Just help us solve these simple pain points that waste so much of our time.”

Maffeo said she believes distributed, specialized robots are both cheaper and more practical than generalized humanoids, at least for the next decade.

Still, there is no doubt that robotics and AI are advancing quickly across the food system. So where does that leave someone like Tyler Florence, who has long made a name for crafting recipes and cooking for people in their own spaces without the help of technology? According to Florence, as robotics becomes more prevalent, the value equation flips, and people begin to crave food crafted entirely by humans. In other words, while machines can do many things well and cheaply, the scarce commodity becomes human judgment, taste, and presence.

“Human-made will become the new luxury item,” Florence said. “Things that feel like this is made by a human being, thought of by a human being, produced by a human being.”

In high-end dining especially, Florence predicted that automation would remain largely invisible, while human interaction becomes a premium experience people are willing to pay for.

But what about the home? Restaurant kitchens and front-of-house operations are businesses where people are accustomed to paying premiums for food prepared by others. The vast majority of meals, however, are eaten at home and made from food in our own pantries and refrigerators. What role will automation and AI play in the home of the future?

According to Kashani, we will increasingly see intelligence from technologies like computer vision, IoT, and automation integrated into everyday appliances to help people plan meals, reduce food waste, and prepare food more easily.

“Every step of that process, we can be assisting people with the help of AI and robots.”

Kashani also pointed to aging-in-place scenarios as an area where automation and AI could be especially helpful. Maffeo agreed and said she believes we will see more technology embedded in pantries and refrigerators to help people better plan meals.

As we closed out the panel, we talked about what the rise of robots and AI in food means for culture, jobs, and society over the long term. I was surprised that, by and large, everyone was cautiously optimistic. Kashani pointed to history as a guide, arguing that productivity gains tend to create new work rather than eliminate it outright. “Every such prediction in the past has been wrong,” he said, noting that employment has historically grown alongside technological change.

I disagreed to a point, suggesting that jobs will be lost, though this was not the place for a deeper conversation about universal basic income.

Florence raised a cultural concern, arguing that food is memory and identity, something passed down through families and communities. “We’re all defined by what our grandparents cooked,” he said. “And that really defines us as people.”

It was a fun and thoughtful conversation, one that explored the implications of what might happen if what we saw on the show floor ultimately becomes the norm. You can watch the full session below.:

CES 2026: Robot vs Chef: Will AI Augment or Replace the Cook?

Why the Most Interesting Knife at CES Launched Without Its Inventor

This week at CES, a new ultrasonic chef’s knife picked up write-ups in The Verge, Mashable, and a handful of other outlets after debuting at Unveiled, the opening press event for the big show in Las Vegas. With all the coverage rolling in, the product’s inventor, Scott Heimendinger, could feel confident that everything was going according to plan after six years of work to bring the knife to market, with one small exception.

He wasn’t there.

Of course, Heimendinger had always planned to be at CES. A presence at Unveiled was a core part of his launch strategy, a plan that crystallized over the long six years it took to bring the product from idea to reality. But life intervened in the form of excruciating pain caused by cervical radiculopathy, a condition in which nerves are impinged by discs and bone growth in the neck. The pain became so acute that when Heimendinger was offered the chance to move his surgery up by two months last December, he took it.

Not that the decision came easily.

Last fall, Heimendinger was on a call with his longtime friend, Rand Fishkin, who was not pleased with how he was handling things.

“I was laid up in bed, and all I could do was take out a laptop, totally just drowned in high-dose pain and nerve meds and stuff, and Rand and I had a little video chat,” Heimendinger told me over Zoom yesterday from Seattle. “And (Rand) basically threatened to speak at my early funeral if I didn’t take better care of myself. Like, actually focus on my health.”

Slowing down didn’t come naturally. After all, you don’t nearly single-handedly launch a new consumer hardware product without being wired to push through discomfort.

“That’s a hard thing for me to do,” Heimendinger said. “I’ve kind of been in power-through mode forever, right? Like my whole life, it’s just like, ‘Oh, what do you do? You power through.’”

Eventually, Heimendinger relented, knowing his friend was right. From there, he began making plans for his small team – a single marketing lead and a part-time PR representative – to handle booth duty at Unveiled without him. He was bummed. CES would be the first time many members of the press would get hands-on with the knife he’d unveiled online in the fall, and he knew how easily a small team could get overwhelmed by the roughly 2,000 journalists cycling through Unveiled during its three-hour run.

When Heimendinger told Fishkin how disappointed he was to miss CES and how much the moment meant to him, Fishkin made an unexpected offer: he and his wife would go in his place.

“And, you know, normally I would just say, like, ‘Oh, that’s so nice of you guys, thanks so much, but no, it’ll be fine,’” Heimendinger said. “But I said, I’m going to try something new and try accepting a little more help when it’s offered. And I said, ‘Actually, if you’re serious, that would be incredible.’”

It made sense. As Heimendinger’s first investor and sole board member of his company, Fishkin was deeply familiar with the product and its backstory. He’s also a seasoned marketer known for his viral videos explaining technology and business trends, while his wife, Geraldine DeRuiter, is a professional author with a strong communications background.

“So they’re well-versed in how to talk about the knife and can do so authentically,” Heimendinger said. “And so I said yes and accepted their help, and they were serious and made good on it.”

In the end, the knife didn’t need its inventor physically behind the table to make an impression. Journalists lined up to try it, coverage followed quickly, and the resulting long-tail coverage Heimendinger had hoped for came off as planned.

For those interested in the knife itself, it uses high-frequency vibration, oscillating 40,000 times per second, to reduce resistance as the blade moves through food. Heimendinger says that the knife can reduce cutting effort by up to 50 percent. When powered off, it functions like a traditional, high-quality chef’s knife.

The C-200 is made with Japanese AUS-10 san mai stainless steel, can be re-sharpened like a conventional blade, and is now available for presale at $499, with deliveries expected in January 2026.

For a product six years in the making, CES didn’t unfold exactly as Heimendinger imagined. But sometimes, even for someone who’s spent a lifetime powering through, the most important step forward is learning when to let someone else take the wheel — or, in this case, the knife.