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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Michael Wolf

Fresco Partners Up With E.G.O. to Accelerate Smart Kitchen Software

As a former semiconductor analyst, I realized one truism of the tech world: makers of component building blocks for any hardware product eventually move up the stack, integrating with software solutions so their OEM partners see them as the preferred foundation on which to build their products.

So it’s not surprising to hear that one of the world’s leading makers of induction cooking hardware, E.G.O., has partnered with Fresco, a company that provides software to enable smart kitchen hardware solutions. The deal, announced at IFA last week, will allow E.G.O. to add smart kitchen functionality to its induction cooking systems and appliance control systems.

For Fresco, the partnership makes it possible to fast-track appliance partner integration. Because the software is integrated at the component level, it will require less customization for each new system powered by their smart kitchen software.

“We realized instead of trying to partner with all of the brands individually, that it’d be much smarter to go to the source,” said Ben Harris, CEO of Fresco, in an interview at IFA. “So we met E.G.O. here a year ago and aligned on the potential future of a partnership. I’m delighted to be here at IFA to now announce the kickoff of the partnership and sort of where this can ultimately go.”

According to Harris, the partnership means Fresco no longer needs to integrate one-on-one with dozens of different brands. Instead, by working directly with E.G.O., Fresco’s technology can come “available out of the box.” Harris explained: “It’s two things, both from a sales point of view, that we don’t need to speak to all hundred brands, but also we don’t need to do the small individual integrations with every one of them. The integration is available out of the box.”

It has been interesting to watch Fresco (formerly Drop) evolve from its early days as a maker of a connected kitchen scale to a software company that, historically, had to do significant customization for each appliance partner. With its new partnership with E.G.O., my guess is this will accelerate their partner growth while also making a smart software/connectivity stack a more standard part of the broader bill of materials for new appliances.

Fresco has remained fairly true to its early focus (post-scale) of being a smart kitchen software ingredient provider, while others like SideChef and Innit have focused more on commerce and, more recently, food and wellness-related AI solutions for CPG partners..

You can watch my conversation with Ben Harris at IFA below.

Fresco's Ben Harris Talks New Partnership with E.G.O at IFA

Apeel Sues Online Influencer In Latest Effort to Stem Tide of Misinfo About Produce Life Extension Tech

Apeel, a maker of produce life-extension technology, announced this week that it is suing an online influencer who had spread misinformation about the company’s product for the last two years.

The company, which earned early recognition in the food waste innovation space for its non-toxic, plant-based coating that helps extend the shelf life of vegetables such as avocados, has faced a growing wave of misinformation in recent years. Conspiracy-peddling online influencers have claimed the company’s product contains everything from gasoline-like chemicals to heavy metals.

Because of this, the company has gone to battle against one influencer in particular: Robyn Openshaw, who goes by the name “Green Smoothie Girl” on Instagram and other platforms. Apeel filed suit on August 29, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, accusing Openshaw of publishing at least 60 posts between July 2023 and May 2025 across Instagram, YouTube, X, Rumble, and her own website. The posts alleged that Apeel’s coatings contained palladium, mercury, arsenic, and other heavy metals.

According to Apeel, Openshaw told her followers to boycott Apeel produce, urged retailers like Costco and suppliers such as Driscoll’s to avoid the product, and even sold a downloadable “wallet card” listing stores not using Apeel.

Openshaw was not the only voice on social media making such claims. Alongside countless smaller accounts, actress Michelle Pfeiffer also posted about the technology and incorrectly claimed it was owned by Bill Gates. After what appeared to be legal and PR interventions, Pfeiffer later posted a correction:

“Ugh! For any of you who reposted or shared my story about Apeel it turns out that I unintentionally reposted inaccurate and outdated information, and I’m very sorry for that,” wrote Pfeiffer via an Instagram story. “@apeel_sciences has informed me that The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded two research grants to Apeel Sciences and Gates has no role with or ownership in Apeel. And regarding their organic product, Organipeel, Apeel told me it was not JUST approved but was first allowed back in 2017, though it has not been offered commercially in any market for over two years because they have been working (through proper protocol) on new organic formulations to meet the evolving needs of the organic industry. … Public conversations about food safety and sustainability matter deeply, but they’re only as helpful as they are accurate. Thank you! Xx m”

And it is not just online influencers and ’90s-heyday actresses that have targeted Apeel:

Republican Congressman Marlin Stutzman’s initial concern was the involvement of the right-wing boogeyman and former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates.

“I think that the red flags went up for me when I saw that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was behind the development of this product,” said Stutzman in a Facebook post.

The Gates Foundation awarded about $1.1 million in research grants to Apeel in 2012 and 2015 as part of its broad philanthropic efforts. In those two years alone, the foundation gave away over $7 billion across a wide range of organizations and projects.

Stutzman went on to claim Apeel was not being transparent about its ingredient list and introduced HR 4737, also known as the Apeel Reveal Act. The bill seeks to amend the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to require disclosure of certain product coatings used on fruits and vegetables.

Despite being pretty open about what is in its coating, the company has spent millions on marketing and PR to combat confusion related to online misinformation, much of which dates back to 2023 when Openshaw and other influencers circulated the ingredient list of an entirely different product: an industrial cleaner from UK company Evans Vanodine that shares the name “Apeel.”

If you’re wondering whether the wave of misinformed influencers and posturing politicians has affected Apeel’s business, the answer is yes. Regional retailers such as PCC have issued statements on their websites noting they believe Apeel is generally safe, but they have nonetheless instructed their distributors not to source produce that uses Apeel. Others, like Sprouts and Publix, have also said they will not purchase Apeel-coated produce.

While many of these retailers probably agree with Apeel that their product is not harmful to humans, you can’t blame them. Trying to educate shoppers in an era where social media is the primary channel for many consumers when it comes to food and nutrition information is a losing battle. Today’s social channels are rife with lots of bad information from self-proclaimed experts, and grocers probably figure this is one less battle they need to fight.

As for Apeel, the lawsuit may reveal whether legal action can help stem the tide of misinformation. In an era where even our own governmetn traffics in misinformation, the company has an uphill battle ahead.

Japan’s Most Successful Food Robot Startup is Eyeing Humanoids As The Next Big Thing

One of the defining characteristics of early successful food robots has been focus.

Whether it’s the Flippy burger-flipping robot, Bear’s front-of-house robotic waiters, or the Autocado avocado-coring and processing robot, the ability of these focused-task robots to automate one or two core functions hyper-efficiently has been a – if not the – key ingredient for success that has set these machines apart from their less successful peers.

But as the world of AI and robotics increasingly talks up humanoids as ready for primetime, are multi-function robots that more closely resemble humans – both in appearance and in their seemingly unending ability to tackle different kinds of tasks – set to take the baton as the next big thing in food robots?

If you ask Yuji Shiraki, the CEO of one of Japan’s fastest-growing tech startups and a darling of the food robotics world, the answer is a cautious yes.

The idea to build a food robot first came to Shiraki during a visit with his grandmother. Over 90 years old, Shirak’s grandmother could not cook for herself, and so he started to think about how a home cooking robot might help her. However, he soon realized that Japanese kitchens were too small to build the type of robot he envisioned, and he started thinking about building robots for restaurants. 

I first met Shiraki in 2022 at his roboticized pasta restaurant in Tokyo, E Vino Spaghetti, located across from Tokyo Station. Inside, its P-Robo robot boiled pasta, heated sauces, plated dishes, and even handled cleanup, all in just over a minute.

After the pasta restaurant, TechMagic built Oh My Dot, a ramen restaurant in Shibuya, where a robotic system prepared noodles using modular flavor packs. In both cases, the goal was to test the products with real customers while showcasing the company’s robotics to potential partners.

And the partners came. The company began working with KFC Japan, Nissin Foods (the company behind Cup Noodles), and most recently announced a partnership with Lawson.

One of the key reasons for the company’s early success was that its robots were highly tailored to specific tasks like preparing pasta, ramen, or bowl food. But now, as TechMagic and Shiraki look to the future, they see a path forward built around robots that are, like humans, much more adaptable and multi-functional.

The company outlined some of those functions in a recent announcement, saying they envision humanoids expanding human “hands” and “judgment.” Specific functions include automating repetitive tasks such as serving, sorting, and transporting food in restaurants and factories; flexible food preparation that uses AI-driven “hand technology” to perform complex cooking tasks; and customer interaction, where humanoids would optimize service and store operations using emotion and behavior recognition.

Shiraki offered clues to his bigger vision for TechMagic’s humanoid plans in a post on Facebook:

“When we began developing cooking robots in 2018, many said the ‘chances of success were slim.’ Yet today, we’ve grown to the point of competing for the top global share of operating units. The hurdles for humanoid robots may be just as high, but in the long term, we believe this is an extremely rational strategy. And beyond that, the development of humanoid robots is full of dreams and romance.”

Part of Shiraki’s motivation is to help position Japan as a leader in developing humanoid robots.

“While China and the U.S. are leading the way, we intend to contribute to labor-strapped industries with a Japan-born humanoid robot and expand globally.”

He says the company is hiring and looking for partners. One of the first steps is working with existing humanoid robots such as those from Unitree in the TechMagic development lab. Shiraki even showed off a video of the Unitree robot on Facebook.

Shiraki told me they are eyeing around a three-year time horizon to develop their first humanoid for the food business and that the company is now busy raising its next funding round to help fund the development.

“TechMagic is taking the technology it has cultivated in cooking and service robots to the next level, fusing it with humanoid robotics to create a new ‘future of food’,” said Shiraki. “We aim to build a social infrastructure that frees people from boring, harsh, and dangerous tasks, enabling them to live more creatively.”

How Companies Big and Small are Fighting to Save Chocolate From Climate-Driven Extinction

Sure, food prices are going up everywhere, but as my fellow chocolate lovers know, prices for this universally loved treat are really going up due to the increasing threat from climate change. Cocoa prices have jumped 136% between July 2022 and February 2024, hitting record highs as extreme weather and plant disease devastate harvests in West Africa, where 70% of the world’s cocoa is grown. In the UK, chocolate prices have risen 43% in just three years, highlighting how climate pressures are reshaping supply chains and consumer costs.

With what is a $130 billion industry under increasing threat, we’re seeing startups and (some) of the big players working on ways to ensure they have access to cocoa in an increasingly climate-threatened future, whether that’s through gene-editing, reproducing chocolate cells in big metal bioreactors, or using new more sustainable alternatives that don’t include cocoa beans at all.

CRISPR

One of the key ways in which chocolate producers can prepare for a climate-challenged future in which cocoa may not find the same hospitable conditions is to change the actual resiliency of the cocoa bean itself through gene editing. This is an area in which the world’s largest chocolate company, Mars, is exploring in partnership with Pairwise, the company which has made a name for itself with its CRISPR-based gene-edited food such as mustard greens and stone-free cherries.

The company recently licensed Pairwise’s Fulcrum platform, which includes gene editing tools and a large trait library that allows scientists to toggle plant traits like a dimmer switch, speeding up what once took decades of conventional breeding.

“At Mars, we believe CRISPR has the potential to improve crops in ways that support and strengthen global supply chains,” said Carl Jones, Plant Sciences Director at Mars. “Our focus is to transparently and responsibly conduct CRISPR research in plant science that helps crops better adapt to climate challenges, disease pressures and resource constraints.”

The idea is to breed cacao trees that can thrive in hotter, drier, and more disease-prone environments, preserving the traditional supply chain while modernizing it with cutting-edge plant science.

Cultivated Chocolate

While Mars works to save the tree, California Cultured is working to bypass it altogether. The Sacramento-based startup is producing real cocoa powder by growing cacao seed coat cells in bioreactors, much like cultivated meat.

“What we’re doing here at California Cultured is really crafting real and sustainable cocoa powder with functional benefits without growing the entire tree and waiting years, and also the negative externalities of traditional agriculture impacting the planet,” said Dr. Steven Lang, the company’s VP of Science and Technology, on the Food Truths Podcast with Eric Schulze.

According to Lang, the way it works is that within seven days, the cells are harvested, dried, and milled into cocoa powder. The process not only avoids deforestation, but also allows California Cultured to boost flavanol content, creating chocolate with enhanced cardiovascular and anti-inflammatory benefits.

“This single bioprocess is producing for us two different products,” Lang said, “one with a high flavanol content, and the other more of a traditional cocoa powder makeup.”

Cocoa-Free Alternatives

Another approach to tinkering with the DNA of cocoa beans or cloning them in bioreactors is to try to forgo using cocoa beans at all. This is an approach that startups like Planet A Foods in Germany and Win-Win in the U.S. are pursuing with formulations for “cocoa-free chocolate” that use the likes of oats, barley, carob, and sunflower seeds.

Planet A’s product, ChoViva, is already hitting shelves in Europe. Through upcycled plant ingredients, both Planet A and Win-Win hope to replicate the flavor and mouthfeel of chocolate at a fraction of the environmental cost.

There have been other approaches to replacing chocolate, such as Perfect Day’s precision-fermented cocoa-free whey. The company, which has undergone some financial struggles in recent years, hasn’t made much news as of late, but it did make announcements with both Nestle and Mars, which were interested in using the company’s precision-fermentation technology.

The bottom line is that some of the big players are exploring alternatives to chocolate, but at this point you have to wonder if they’re doing enough. My guess is that if some of these alternatives show enough promise, we’ll see Big Chocolate increasingly hedging their bets through acquisition and strategic partnerships in the coming years.

Paul Shapiro’s Better Meat Company Forges a Path to Success (and New Funding) Through Pragmatism

As meat prices soar to record highs, The Better Meat Co. (BMC) announced this week that it has closed an oversubscribed $31 million Series A round to scale its patented mycoprotein fermentation platform to commercial levels. The West Sacramento–based company plans to bring its Rhiza mycoprotein to market at prices lower than U.S. commodity ground beef by 2026.

The round was co-led by Future Ventures and Resilience Reserve, with participation from Epic Ventures, Sigma Ventures, Hickman’s Family Farms CEO Glenn Hickman, and others. Both Hickman and Future Ventures co-founder Steve Jurvetson will join BMC’s board.

“We’ve invented and patented our tech, received regulatory approval, scaled to a demonstration plant, and proven demand exists for Rhiza mycoprotein. It’s now time to fully commercialize and introduce our new crop that will help the protein industry cut costs and improve nutrition, all with a much lighter footprint,” CEO Paul Shapiro said in announcing the round.

Shapiro, who has been one of the leading evangelists in the alt-protein space since the publication of his book Clean Meat in 2018, has remained unwavering in his push to end animal agriculture. At the same time, he has taken a pragmatic approach to building alternatives that can gain real traction in the marketplace.

“Even in 2018, I believed that cultivated meat was still something that would be a long time before it made any real dent in the meat market, I wanted to make an impact sooner,” Shapiro told me last year on The Spoon Podcast. That desire for immediate impact, he said, is why he shifted to mycoprotein.

The decision was also shaped by the limitations of plant proteins. “It became very clear that there were a lot of limitations to using plant proteins like flavor, ingredient lists, allergenicity, and volatility in supply chains,” Shapiro said. By contrast, mycoprotein offered better functionality, fewer allergens, and lower costs at scale.

Shapiro and BMC eventually honed in on a strain of Neurospora, which he described as “much more meat-like than Quorn’s product, doesn’t have to be frozen, can be used as a single ingredient, and now has both FDA and USDA approval.”

Shapiro’s pragmatism extended beyond focusing on mycoprotein. He recognized that consumers and mainstream meat brands were not ready to give up animal agriculture altogether, and he saw hybrid products as a way to show early impact and win adoption.

BMC’s early partnership with Perdue Farms led to the successful Chicken Plus line, still on shelves five years later. Shapiro believes hybridization can unlock far greater impact than niche plant-based options. “Imagine if in addition to offering the Impossible Whopper, Burger King were to make the conventional Whopper 20% plant-based. All of a sudden, you’ve got a ten-fold reduction in meat without having to persuade one person to make a different decision.”

With the new round, BMC plans to scale its fermentation facility tenfold and prepare for the commercial rollout of Rhiza in 2026.

At the core, Shapiro’s motivation remains unchanged. His focus on scalability and consumer adoption has now resulted in fresh funding in a difficult fundraising environment and set the company on a pathway toward strong growth.

In a summer when some are claiming cultivated meat is making a comeback thanks to new regulatory approvals, and when highly processed, tech-forward plant-based meats from the likes of Beyond and Impossible are still struggling to find traction, Shapiro has shown that practicality and meeting consumers, retailers, and CPG partners where they are is a winning strategy.

Still, his long-term focus has not shifted. “Maybe in 20 years, people will be shocked if they find out that people are still eating meat from slaughtered animals. They’ll think, ‘why aren’t you using the obviously better innovation that came up with?’”


SKS 2025 Full Sessions

Below are the full session from SKS 2025.

The State of Consumer Kitchen Innovation

Speakers: Scott Heimendinger (Seattle Ultrasonics), Kai Schaeffner (Former CEO of Thermomix North America), Michael Wolf (The Spoon)

What is the state of innovation in the consumer kitchen? How will new technologies change things?

Watch on Vimeo

The Future of Food Innovation

Food futurist Mike Lee will present his vision for the future with his trademark narrative storytelling through a futurist lens.

Navigating The New World Order in Food

MAHA. Tariffs. The venture capital winter. How does a food entrepreneur navigate it all? Join us for this session to find out!

Panelists: Eric Schulze (Food Truths Podcast), Amy Taylor (CEO, Zevia), Sanah Baig (ED, Plant Based Food Institute), Dana McCauley (CEO, CFIN).

The Future of Food Delivery

Speakers: Garrett McCurrach (Pipedream Labs), Zach Rash (Coco), Lee Kindell (MOTO Pizza).

As delivery becomes an ever-more important part of the food service business, innovators are building new technologies to make delivery more convenient, instant, and more sustainable.

GLP-1s, Fiber, Microbiome & The Food Future

Fibermaxxing? GLP-1s? 2025 is proving to be year of immense change when it comes to food and nutrition.

Panelists: Kristofer Cook (Carbiotix), Matt Barnard (One.Bio), Noosheen Hashemi (January AI). Moderator: Carolyn O’Neil

Connected Kitchen Case Study: The Sourdough Sidekick

What happens when a food brand teams up with an appliance company with an innovation hub like FirstBuild? You get the Sourdough SideKick. Join this chat with the team that brought it together

Speakers: John Henry Sidelecki (King Arthur Baking Company), Laura Hammond (FirstBuild), Michael Wolf (The Spoon)

Sure, AI Might End Humanity, But First It Could Help Keep Your Food Fresher

If you ask Steve Statler, our current supply chains are essentially the equivalent of an old-school combustion engine (at best), and at worst something akin to a horse-drawn carriage.

“We’re running our supply chains with 19th-century visibility,” said Statler, the CEO and cofounder of AmbAI and host of the Mr Beacon Podcast. “The future is automating it completely, so we see everything everywhere all at once. We improve safety, we reduce waste, we increase shelf life.”

And while things may be largely stuck in the past, where we track food from farm to fork relying on things like barcodes, manual scans, and occasional checkpoints – the end result of which is blind spots that lead to waste, quality loss, and safety risks – Statler believes we are the precipice of dramatic change.

Statler believes much of the change will come as result of broad deployment of tiny, battery-free Bluetooth “stickers” and AI systems capable of reading, analyzing, and acting on their data in real time. “Basically, the cost of infrastructure to read these tags automatically is going down, down, down,” he said. “Over the next one to three years, these tags can harvest energy from the mobile devices, surrounding us. And that’s the unlock.”

The size of a postage stamp, these ambient IoT tags continuously transmit information on temperature and location without human intervention. We will “improve safety, we reduce waste, we increase shelf life,” Statler said, describing a not-too-distant future where every pallet, package, or even piece of produce is monitored end-to-end.

According to Statler, these types of tags could change the way we track food inventory in our fridge, with “dynamic expiry dates” that respond to actual conditions rather than rough estimates. “You talk to Alexa and you say, ‘when is this milk or this salmon or this shrimp going to expire?’ and it will know,” said Statler. “We will have looked at the temperature over time that the product has been exposed to, and we can come up with a 21st-century model of how long the product will last.”

Statler pointed out that Alexa and other home assistants are capable of this today with a small software upgrade. I pointed out that allowing Alexa to track freshness by accessing Bluetooth data emitted from various devices and smart tags in your fridge would require consumer opt-in, especially given growing consumer concerns about privacy and access to their data.

“I think Amazon is very sensitive to that, and when they do this, and this is just me speculating, then they’ll do it with privacy in mind,” said Statler. ” I believe that privacy, when done badly, can kill products.”

I also asked Statler if these types of small beacons are connecting with other IoT systems, like Strella or others that sense changing food chemistry to better predict and manage freshness, and he said they’re starting to, but it’s in the early stages. Statler says the primary focus right now of these beacon system is on temperature and identity. The tags are also part of a larger trend toward serialization, where every individual product has its digital passport for authenticity, traceability, and freshness management.

Feeding this data into AI could shift the industry from traditional supply chains to responsive ‘demand chains.’

“We can do a better job of making better products that people use,” Statler said. “And we can start to go from supply chains to ‘demand chains’ that are informing the production and distribution to be much more efficient.”

It was an interesting conversation, one in which Statler was clearly excited about the potential for AI in our supply chains and in our lives, but also saw a potential danger lurking.

“I’m a little pessimistic about where AI is going. I sort of have this dual view of artificial intelligence, which is it’s amazing, and this is why I got into computing years and years ago. But at the same time, there’s a real chance it’s going to kill us all or enslave us. And I think we have to kind of live with that duality in our heads and do our best to try and make sure that this technology evolves in a positive direction.”

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


A Software Update Bricked Some Anova Precision Ovens. Anova’s Solution Involves Tin Foil and Tape

On July 28, some owners of the Anova Precision Oven woke up to bricked appliances. According to posts on Reddit and a Facebook group for the company’s high-tech combi-oven, customers reported “black screens of death” and non-responsive ovens after an overnight firmware update.

After a flood of inbound requests for support, the company acknowledged the problem in emails to affected customers: “We discovered an issue with a firmware update that may have affected your oven. On Monday, July 28th, we released a firmware update that caused roughly 145 ovens to fail – displaying only a black screen after startup. We caught this quickly and pulled the update but your oven may have been affected.”

Initially, the company said it would look for a fix, and offered customers a refund if they preferred not to wait.

One encouraging sign for Anova and its users was that the bricked ovens were still connecting to Wi-Fi, which meant there was a chance a new update could be pushed to fix the issue. However, finding a solution was complicated by the fact that the ovens went to sleep about 20 minutes after being powered on, while the firmware download and update process took roughly three hours. To make matters worse, that update window occurred in the middle of the night.

Anova’s customer support recognized that was problematic and not workable for pretty much anyone: “To recover your oven, we need to keep it awake for the full three hour overnight update window, between 1–4 AM in the local timezone where the oven is connected,” wrote the company in an update on their support site. “If staying up all night tapping the oven screen every 15 minutes sounds like nightmare fuel, we have devised an alternative method to keep your oven awake.”

That alternative? MacGyver-ing a fix with tin foil and tape. The company’s proposed solution provided step-by-step instructions showing the size of the tin foil “finger” and how to attach it to the screen to trick it into staying awake during the update process.

“In the morning, remove the foil, and tap the screen. If the oven UI does not display and the screen remains dark, unplug the oven and plug it in again. If the oven has updated overnight, you will see the standard boot sequence, and your oven UI will appear. Otherwise, try the process again.”

If the device still won’t update, Anova says it will work with customers to resolve the issue and, presumably, replace any ovens that remain bricked.

On one hand, 150 or so bricked ovens might not sound like a big deal. On the other hand, it kind of is, since no customer wants their product to have any kind of “screen of death.” To its credit, Anova appears to have acted quickly, containing the damage by recognizing the problem early and rolling out a fixed firmware update to unaffected units.

In the end, customers generally welcome updates that add extra functionality to their ovens. Waking up to discover your appliance can now, say, air fry or perform another new trick is great, just as long as the oven still works afterward (and the company doesn’t abruptly end support for the product).

Drone Delivery is About to Get a Big Upgrade. Here’s Why Part 108 Will Change Food Delivery Forever

For those of you who are skeptical about whether drone delivery will ever become a common way to deliver your pizza or groceries, I’m there with you. Several key factors need to be in place to ensure drones can deliver items quickly, at low cost, and, perhaps most of all, safely.

One of the key hurdles to ensuring all of those things become a reality happened last week with the release of Draft Part 108 for Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) by the FAA. Part 107, introduced in 2016, set the baseline rules for small commercial drone operations, allowing flights within visual line of sight under a certified remote pilot but leaving BVLOS missions dependent on case-by-case FAA waivers.

The new proposed rule brings with it a framework for BVLOS operations that replaces ad hoc approvals with standardized pathways. For industries like food delivery, the new rules could be the regulatory green light that turns pilot projects into citywide services.

Individuals to Organizations: One of the biggest changes from Part 107, which put the burden on individual pilots (requiring each to be certified and limiting most flights to visual line of sight), is that Part 108 shifts accountability to the operating company rather than every drone pilot. This change acknowledges that modern drone delivery (especially BVLOS), relies on automated systems, centralized oversight, and coordinated fleets, not one pilot per aircraft.

Permits vs Certificates: Operators will choose between two regulatory paths designed to match the scale and complexity of their operations. Permits will work for lower-risk, smaller-scale flights in less densely populated areas and come with a cap on the number of drones (such as a limit of 100 for delivery services). Certificates are geared for high-density, high-volume operations in urban environments, and will remove fleet caps in exchange for stricter oversight, safety requirements, and operational protocols.

Operations will be governed by five population density tiers, from rural (Category 1) to major metro cores (Category 5). Permits only allow access to Categories 1–3; Certificates are required for Categories 4–5. For food delivery, that means suburban and exurban rollouts first, with dense city markets requiring the more stringent certificate process.

A New Player: ADSPs. One of Part 108’s biggest changes is the creation of Automated Data Service Providers which are companies responsible for real-time airspace data. This data includes:

  • Drone traffic and location tracking.
  • Weather integration.
  • “Strategic deconfliction” to prevent midair conflicts.
  • “Conformance monitoring” to ensure drones follow approved routes.

Operators must connect to an ADSP, but they can also become their own ADSP if they meet the technical requirements.

There are a bunch of other changes – I recommend you check out this great writeup by Matt Sloane. For drone food delivrey, it will bring big changes, helping to take drone delvery from what is essentially a novelty service today to a scalable service.

The primary bottleneck has been regulatory: BVLOS flights, essential for covering enough ground to make delivery viable, were locked behind an unpredictable and time-consuming waiver process under Part 107. Part 108 changes all that. By creating clear, scalable pathways (permits for smaller suburban rollouts, certificates for full-scale urban operations), the FAA is giving food delivery companies a roadmap to expand without reapplying for exemptions every time they add new routes or drones. The introduction of Automated Data Service Providers means operators will have access to the real-time airspace management needed to safely run dozens or even hundreds of flights at once.

Add in the push toward autonomy, standardization of safety measures, and population tiering, and Part 108 looks less like the regulatory green light that could take drone food delivery from novelty to serious delivery option.

As Robot Delivery Grows, Buildings May Have “USB Ports” to Enable Seamless Delivery Handoff

With this week’s news that Little Caesars pizza is partnering with Serve to deliver pizza, it’s clear that robotic delivery, whether on sidewalks, underground, or in the air, is fast becoming more mainstream.

Despite many of these startups working on technology for close to a decade, the robot food delivery process still has a cumbersome part: picking up the food at the restaurant or handing over to the customer in their home or apartment.

The main reason is that most restaurants and homes were not built for robotic delivery. Sidewalk delivery robots and drones can’t open doors or use elevators, requiring customers to visit designated pickup spots or follow instructions to collect food at the curb.

This might change in the future, according to Garrett McCurrach, CEO of Pipedream Labs. McCurrach believes that in the future, buildings will adapt to robotic delivery. “A lot of buildings in the future are going to have what is essentially like a USB port for accepting and handing off to different modalities,” said McCurrach at SKS 2025.

According to McCurrach, the goal on the restaurant and ghost kitchen side is to solve the coordination challenges of last-yard logistics, especially in environments where speed and efficiency matter most. “Being able to get things out quickly into the right modality, whatever the modality is, is going to be super important,” he said.

Will Buildings Have 'USB Ports' for Robot Delivery in the Future? This Founder Thinks So.

While drone landing pads and delivery hubs have already been deployed in the early stages of the drone delivery market, some are exploring how drones could deliver vertically within a building itself. A group of researchers at the University of Tokyo looked at potential scenarios of drone delivery in high-rises, essentially through what is a “USB port” at the top of the building.

Looking further into the delivery future, another potential big challenge is enabling multi-model (or multi-robot) delivery. Sure, delivering via a drone might make sense to some places, but a more realistic option might be drone to sidewalk robot or, eventually, a humanoid.

For McCurrach and Pipedream, he’s had to think about handoffs to other automated forms of delivery since the beginning, in large part because his delivery system – which consists of an underground delivery with specialized delivery robots – almost by definition will not reach the end-users home or work since the company’s network only delivers to drop-off points in building lobbies or other specialized locations.

“We build the underground networks to move things quickly to get to that end node. And then portals that hand off to a self-driven car, a Coco robot, a Zipline drone, whatever the right modality is to get it to its end destination,” said McCurrach.

But, if early USB technology is any example, over time, universal connections via coordination across ecosystems become more prevalent, as both physical infrastructure and robot-to-robot coordination increase, I expect the arrival of multi-modal robot delivery to be set to arrive at our doorstep sometime in the next decade.


From AI as Health Advisor to Leaving Shark Tank, Here Are 5 Takeaways From My Conversation With Mark Cuban

Last week, I sat down with Mark Cuban at the Smart Kitchen Summit to talk about how he sees AI changing innovation and medicine, his motivation for starting Cost Plus Drugs, and why he decided to step away from Shark Tank after this upcoming season.’

Below are five takeaways from my interview with Cuban.

Cuban’s Frustration With the Healthcare System Led Him to Start CostPlusDrugs.com

Cuban’s motivation for starting Cost Plus Drugs was rooted in frustration with a complex and often predatory prescription drug system. “First off, at Cost Plus Drugs, we sell more than just generics,” he said. “We do have brands. We just don’t have all of them yet.”

But Cuban made it clear that the economics of generics where the company has made the most significant impact. “We’ve cut prices down for chemotherapy drugs like Imatinib from $2,000 or more to $21 to $40,” Cuban said. “And so those guys, those big guys, they don’t like us.”

By “those guys,” he means pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), who are powerful intermediaries he says are actively limiting access to drugs. “PBMS basically control the entire pharmaceutical industry. And they see us as competition.” Cuban said the company’s pricing model is completely transparent: “We only mark it up 15%. If you prefer mail order, the cost is $5 for the pharmacist and $5 for shipping. Or we have local pharmacies, and you can do a pickup there.”

Cuban says his target customer is anyone stuck in the cracks of the healthcare system. “If you have a high deductible plan, you don’t have insurance, there’s a good chance that we carry your medication, and there’s an even better chance that you can pay cash through us and it’ll be cheaper than your deductible and out of pocket.”

Cuban Sees GLP-1 Pricing Becoming More Accessible

I asked Cuban about where he sees pricing going for GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. He recognizes the importance (and consumer demand) and feels they will become more accessible – including via his site – over time.

“As it applies to GLP-1 drugs, there’s a drug that costs, that we carry that costs $50. It’s a brand drug. And it costs $50 a month instead of $400 or $1,300 a month,” he said. “I think those will come down in price because of the competition, and I think you’ll see new forms of GLP-1s and pills come out as well, which will also put the pricing down. And we’ll carry everything we can.”

He Sees AI as an Increasingly Important Healthcare Tool

Throughout our conversation, Cuban repeatedly came back to the disruptive potential of AI, suggesting it’s the biggest potential harbinger of change in tech and more broadly than anything in his career. This includes in healthcare.

Cuban belief in AI’s potential in health support tool isn’t theoretical – he already uses it himself.

“I do it all the time, right?” he said. “I have to take this thing called Synthroid for hypothyroidism, and I also need more iron after I got my blood tested. I had no idea that taking them both at the same time didn’t work. My doctor didn’t even realize that.” Cuban said he turned to ChatGPT, asking if he could take them both at the same time? “It said, ‘hell no, do not take them at the same time’. It said you have to have three hours between them. And so now my TSH went down to right where it’d be perfect numbers. And my iron levels are going up as well.”

Cuban also said he’s still skeptical of ChatGPT’s responses, so he’ll check responses against a site designed for doctors called Open Evidence. “It’s my way of checking ChatGPT’s work.”

Shark Tank Will Remain The World’s “Best Commercial” Even After Cuban Leaves

After 15 seasons and hundreds of deals, Cuban announced he’s stepping away from Shark Tank. It wasn’t because he’s starting a new business or running for president. He just wanted to spend more time with his family.

“I did it just because of family time,” he said. “Because right about now, I might be shooting Shark Tank, right? And this is the time to spend with my family.”

Cuban still believes in the show’s power to help entrepreneurs: “On Shark Tank, you can have somebody from Idaho, from New York, from wherever, somebody who’s 18 years old, somebody who’s 80 years old, standing on that carpet, telling millions of people about their product.”

It’s the “world’s greatest commercial,” said Cuban.

The Importance of Becoming AI Literate

For Cuban, becoming AI literate is essential. “Learn everything you can about AI because it changes everything,” he said. He said that regardless of whether it’s starting a business, working a trade, or building a career in any field, understanding how to use AI will be required. “There’s going to be two types of companies,” he said, “those who are great at AI and everybody else.”

“There is no job that won’t be touched by artificial intelligence,” he said. “Whether it’s an optimization, in some cases replacement, some cases creating new jobs because you know how to use AI—it goes in all directions.”

Cuban may have stepped away from Shark Tank and sold the controlling interest in the Mavericks, but he definitely hasn’t slowed down. After 30 years in tech, helping to build the world of streaming and becoming one of the world’s most famous tech entrepreneurs, he’s excited about learning and adapting to the future.

You can watch our full interview below, on YouTube, or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Mark Cuban Talks Leaving Shark Tank and AI

NotCo’s Next AI-Powered Innovation? Replicating Human Scent to Make My Dog Happy

As far as my family’s small Pomeranian, Zeus, is concerned, I’m a very distant second banana when it comes to the humans in his life. Sure, he’ll let me feed him and pay the cheese tax, but the reality is he’s only got eyes (and a nose) for one person in his life, which happens to be my wife.

Like many loyal dogs, when my wife is out of the house, Zeus finds comfort in lying on blankets, sweaters, or anything that may have a whiff of his favorite person’s scent. Where things get rough for the little guy is when we have to travel, but someday soon we’ll be able to bring a bottle of “mom” fragrance to provide a little canine aromatherapy when we drop him off at the dog sitter.

That’s at least according to NotCo CEO Matias Muchnick, with whom I sat down this week at the Smart Kitchen Summit to talk about what his company and the journey of being a pioneer in leveraging AI to develop new food (and now pet) products.

 “We’re partnering with one of the biggest pet companies in the world to generate human scent,” said Muchnick. “Literally, it’s like a 23andMe for your smell.” The idea according to Muchnick is to use an AI model to do scent profiling to create a mist that replicates your scent, helping ease separation anxiety for pets when their humans leave home.

NotCo Wants to Create the 23andMe of Scent for our Pets

There’s no doubt that this new direction is leveraging some of the work that NotCo has done in building out a “Generative Aroma Translator”, which the company unveiled at the Spoon’s Food AI Summit last fall. “The system intakes your prompt, such as ‘an ocean scent on a breezy summer day on a tropical island’ to create a novel chemical formulation of that scent in one-shot,” said the company’s former chief product officer, Aadit Patel.

Only add in an extra layer of personalization, which includes your odor and all the notes you pick up as you travel through the world.

“We will get you a report of your top notes of your own body whenever you get back home,” said Muchnick. “If you work in an office, it’s going to be an office, depending on the office that you work in. If you’re a mechanic, you’re going to have a lot of other odors.”

Muchnick kept quiet on who the partner is or what the actual product would look like, but did indicate this project is one of hundreds of new projects since the company doubled-down on being an AI-powered innovation engine for CPG brands.

“Our first investor decks in 2016 were all about AI,” Muchnick said. “But no one believed in it
back then, so we had to prove the model ourselves.” NotCo’s path to validation came by launching its own consumer products, such as mayo, ice cream, burgers, and capturing market share in Latin America and North America, after which big players couldn’t help but take notice.

Today, NotCo is firmly in phase two of its journey. Through partnerships with companies like Kraft Heinz, Starbucks, and PepsiCo, the company is showing how Giuseppe can help brands rapidly create new product formulations and adapt to regulatory or consumer-driven upheaval, such as the recent push to remove synthetic dyes or respond to GLP-1-driven shifts in eating habits. He said the company has over 50 active color replacement projects.

The different between now and just a couple years ago is drastic when it comes to big food’s receptivity to working with AI. Curiosity and hesitation has melted away and turned to eagerness and a sense of urgency.

Who he’s talking to has also changed. What used to be R&D director conversations are now CEO-level discussions. “AI is no longer optional,” said Muchnick. “If they don’t adapt, they’ll face the blockbuster effect. They’ll become obsolete.”

You can watch the replay of the full interview at The Spoon next week.