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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Announcements

Some (Bittersweet) Personal News

The coronavirus pandemic is leading to massive shakeups everywhere you look. But my life change was already in motion long before the words “social distancing” even entered our vocabulary.

I’m going to business school! Which, sadly, means that this is my last day with The Spoon. I’m headed to school with plans to continue on in food tech. After graduation, I’ll work to make the way we eat more equitable, sustainable, and delicious. I hope you’ll keep in touch.

Cue the sappy music! It’s flashback time.

I was the Spoon’s first full-time employee when I joined the team over two years ago. My colleagues have been the best part of working here: Mike Wolf, fearless leader, never without his backpack; Chris Albrecht, sharp-witted editor and lover of 90’s alt-rock references; and Jenn Marston, a silver-haired elf who also just happens to be a kick-ass writer.

This team has taught me everything I know about tech reporting: how to always think critically, and most importantly how to get to the point. (Yes, I’ll do that soon, I promise.) I will be forever grateful for their guidance, humor, and wisdom.

I feel especially blue that I’m leaving the Spoon at such an exciting time. We just launched Spoon Plus, which is our premium content platform full of deep-dive interviews, analytical hot takes, and surveys revealing the current state of the food system. Obviously I’m biased, but I think it’s worth subscribing to if you haven’t already.

SKS, our global foodtech summit, is also going virtual this fall! That means you may not get those coveted soft t-shirts (so soft!), but taking SKS online opens up so many possibilities in terms of attendees, speakers, and networking. It’ll be awesome. 

Considering the state of the world right now, we need innovation around food — and people shedding light on the innovators — more than ever. I’m sad that I won’t be able to join the team as they move forward to catalyze and report on the future of food.

But I’m not disappearing into the ether! I hope I can continue to be a resource for The Spoon and our broader community. I really love the group of foodtech nerds we’ve built at The Spoon and will be an active member for life. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn to stay in touch.

Stay safe and stay hungry.

Miss you already,
Catherine

Meet Spoon Plus, Our New Deep Dive Insights & Virtual Events Membership Program

When we launched the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2015, an event all about the rethinking of cooking and our kitchens, we soon realized innovation was happening everywhere across the food system: at the farm, in our favorite restaurants, at the corner grocery store and, yes, in our kitchens.

It felt necessary, almost urgent, to tell these stories. After all, I’d spent a good chunk of the decade prior working for one of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech blogs, where I discovered how crucial it is to nascent markets to find those betting big on turning their world-changing ideas into a changed world. Back then it was technologies like cloud computing and IoT upending established industries like digital media and communication, but it didn’t take me long to realize the reinvention of the food system would be an even bigger deal.

After all, everyone eats, right?

So we started The Spoon in 2016 because we had this idea that we would tell the stories of a new generation of innovators working to reinvent the food system. Now, almost four thousand stories later, we are more convinced than ever about the impact of innovation on food.

Which is why we created Spoon Plus.

What’s Spoon Plus? In short, it’s our paid membership community where we’ll be bringing you deep dive insights in the form of research reports, long-form conversations with innovators, and exclusive online events to help you better understand the world of food tech and food innovation.

We’ll have new content every week, and to start we’ve got a great report from our own Catherine Lamb analyzing the emerging market for air protein. We also have a new report by me analyzing the survey results of food-industry executives about the impact of COVID-19 and their go-forward plans for the rest of 2020.

That’s not all. Early next week, I’ll publish my first weekly intelligence brief looking at COVID-19 disruption on new product launches in the kitchen and housewares space. After that, our editor-in-chief Chris Albrecht will soon have a report on the emerging market for next-generation food vending machines, and our restaurant tech expert, Jenn Marston, will have a strategy guide for cloud kitchens in the post-COVID world.

As part of Spoon Plus, we’ll also have deep dive conversations and interviews with industry executives like this one with Chris Young, the coauthor of Modernist Cuisine and founder of ChefSteps, who opened up to me recently about what happened with the company he founded and where he thinks the next big opportunities are in the world of food.

As part of our launch of Spoon Plus, we’re also announcing that Smart Kitchen Summit 2020 is going virtual, and that every Spoon Plus annual membership will include a ticket to SKS 2020. Our belief is that our events and online content have a symbiotic relationship, where our community engages with the same innovators we are writing about and where we often find the next big story at The Spoon. As we go deeper with Spoon Plus, we want our SKS community to be a part of that.

Of course, part of the reason for going virtual with our flagship event is we now live in a world where in-person events that thrive on a global mix of interesting people are going to be difficult, if not impossible, for the next 1-2 years. That said, we’re really excited about the SKS reaching even more people. We’ve been working hard at building our virtual event capabilities (we had a virtual COVID-19 food summit last month with over 1500 attendees), and are becoming more excited by the day about the possibilities of SKS 2020 and other exclusive virtual events through Spoon Plus.

So if you want to go deeper with us through research and reports, if you want to attend SKS 2020, if you want to support The Spoon as we grow, subscribe to Spoon Plus. As a way to help you get started, we’re offering Spoon Plus annual memberships for 40% off for the next ten days only. This one-time discount includes our company plans (that’s right – you can get Spoon Plus for your entire team). Just use the discount code LAUNCH when you are checking out and Memberful (the technology powering our membership offering) will deduct the amount from the total.

And of course, if you want to try out Spoon Plus for a month, you can subscribe to our monthly plan (monthly plans do not include a ticket to SKS). We also offer substantial discounts for students and for anyone who is in the midst of job transition.

If you’d like to learn more about those, just drop us an line.

For those of you wondering about The Spoon’s free coverage, don’t worry. We’re more committed than ever to bringing you the same daily news and analysis of those changing the food system for free on our main site. Spoon Plus is for those who, like us, also want to go deeper and access content that connects the dots from our daily reporting.

Thanks for your support. We look forward to building Spoon Plus together as we look to better understand and engage in the future of food.

Restaurants and Partners Innovating to Survive During the Coronavirus

The COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent social distancing are affecting many folks, but one of the groups that’s been the hardest-hit is the hospitality industry, especially restaurants. So we at The Spoon are putting together a list of companies in or adjacent to the food and restaurant space who are offering ways to help foodservice establishments struggling during the coronavirus.

Please feel free to leave any additional companies in the comments section or email us at tips@thespoon.tech. We’ll be updating the list. Stay safe and healthy out there!

SOFTWARE HELPING RESTAURANTS

Photo: Foodetective

Switzerland: Foodetective

Plenty of restaurants are trying to focus more on takeaway and delivery, but third-party delivery services can charge high fees that cut into restaurants’ already razor-thin margins. Foodetective is trying to let restaurants keep more profits in their pockets by offering free takeaway and delivery platform for restaurants — in Switzerland. Swiss restaurants can go onto Foodetective’s website and set up a profile to sell their food online without having to pay commissions to delivery services.

Maybe (more) third-party delivery services here in the U.S. will take note.

Photo: Bbot

Nationwide: Bbot

Steve Simoni, founder of smart ordering software provider Bbot, told The Spoon that they would be providing discounted setups of their software to help restaurants better support delivery and pickup. Simoni said that they won’t charge the monthly fee for their software until June 1.

“We’re trying to make it cost effective and easy for them,” he wrote to us. However, participating restaurants will need to figure out their own delivery service to partner with to actually get the food to diners’ doorsteps.

Photo: Lavu

Nationwide: Lavu

Restaurant PoS system provider Lavu Inc. just released its Corona Virus Relief plan. According to a Linkedin post by Lavu’s CEO Saleem S. Khatri, the company is no longer charging software payments to restaurants that are shut down in response to the outbreak.

Lavu is also waiving fees for Menudrive, its online ordering platform, so restaurants focusing more on delivery don’t have to pay as much to third-party services.

Finally, Khatri wrote that Lavu has partnered with an undisclosed capital partner to help restaurants in dire straits gain access to short-term capital.

RESTAURANTS REINVENTING THEMSELVES

Seattle: Addo

Chef Eric Rivera is known for his wacky, creative theme nights at his Seattle restaurant addo. But in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, he has started diversifying addo’s offerings to cater to diners who might be cautious to dine out in a group setting.

Seattlites can order to-go meals from addo @ home, which includes three pre-prepped meals plus wine, for pick-up or delivery. Rivera has also created addo pantry, a source of dry goods, hot sauces, and more made in-house which people can pre-order for pickup or delivery (delivery comes with a flat fee). Pick-ups and deliveries for addo pantry start on 3/22.

If you’re looking for a way to pay it forward in these uncertain times, Rivera just launched addo for the people. Through the program you can purchase $9 bowls of take-and-heat food either for yourself or as donations to local charities. The bowls are currently available for pickup at addo and Rivera and his team are in the midst of partnering with charities to coordinate food drop off.

Photo: Canlis restaurant in Seattle

Seattle: Canlis

James Beard Award-winning fine dining restaurant Canlis is completely reinventing itself in the wake of the coronavirus. The restaurant will shut down its dining room starting on Monday, March 16 and will pivot the following day to offer three new dining options: takeout-only breakfast option The Bagel Shed, pickup lunch offering Drive On Thru, and a meal delivery service called Family Meal.

All new offerings will be based on the Canlis restaurant site in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle, and the delivery range for Family Meal will be roughly 7 miles away from the restaurant. “Fine dining is not what Seattle needs right now,” reads Canlis’ new website. “Instead, this is one idea for safely creating jobs for our employees while serving as much of our city as we can. We’ve got this, Seattle.”

CREATOR GOES TAKE OUT

San Francisco’s hamburger restaurant, which already has robots that make its food, has gone to take out and delivery only. The restaurant has also taken on what seems like sci-fi level measures, as the company told us via email:

Our engineers have worked around the clock to create a transfer chamber that protects the inside of the restaurant from outside air yet still allows us to transport completed meals, in their hermetically sealed bags, out to customers. The chamber uses a positive pressure system combined with a self-sanitizing conveyor.

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Do you know of other restaurants/online platforms/services that are helping foodservice establishments survive during the coronavirus outbreak? Comment below or send us a tip at tips@thespoontech!

Save the Date: Smart Kitchen Summit 2020, the Leading Food Tech Event In North America, Returns on October 15-16

Mark your calendars: the Smart Kitchen Summit, North America’s leading event for food tech executives, is back for a sixth year on October 15th and 16th in Seattle.

As the first event to bring together executives across the food, appliance, technology and retail industries to explore how digital technologies and innovation in science will reinvent the world of food, SKS has grown to become a must-attend global summit where leaders connect and map the future of their businesses.

And SKS 2020 will be no different as we continue to dive deep into the future of the kitchen as well as explore how advances in food science, AI, IoT and other innovation spaces will bring about a fundamental reinvention of every part of the food value chain over the next decade.

A sample of some of the topics we plan to explore at SKS 2020 include:

  • Personalization across food retail, restaurants, nutrition and the home kitchen
  • AI, robotics and automation’s impact on food in the home, restaurant and food retail
  • Future food innovation (Plant-based, lab-grown, from the air, molecular, etc)
  • Smart kitchen evolution towards a reinvention of core cooking, interfaces and kitchen business models
  • How innovation could help reduce food waste and build more sustainable food systems
  • Ghost kitchens and the changing restaurant and food delivery market

In addition to dozens of sessions exploring the areas critical to today’s food tech exec, SKS 2020 will also add new opportunities for attendees to discover innovations and connect with one another. This year’s event will feature expanded workshops and how-tos from makers to help you better understand and catalyze creation in your business. We will also include a bigger and better SKS Connect meeting platform where we will no doubt top the 1000 plus one-on-one meetings that took place last year.

Personally, I am more excited than ever for SKS. When we started the event back in 2015, I’d just spent much of the previous decade watching large-scale forces completely change the world of entertainment through digital technologies. We suspected disruptive tech was about to have a much bigger impact on the world of food and – as we can plainly see now – we were right. Everywhere along today’s food value chain — on the farm, in the factory, at food retail, in the restaurant and the consumer kitchen — we’re witnessing a radical reinvention of how business is done and how we prepare, sell and consume food.

And yet so much opportunity lies ahead of us. While we’ve seen food tech join other areas as a key focus area for many forward thinkers, the reinvention of the world of food is still in the very early stages. We have yet to find our Spotify or Netflix for food, and I really believe that it’s just a fairly short matter of time before companies emerge that will become huge platforms upon which the future of food is built.

Chances are these companies will be at SKS, so I’d love to invite you to join us in Seattle on October 15-16th as we figure out the future. Please check out our website to get access to early winter sale tickets, let us know if you want to speak or sponsor, or just sign up for more information.

See you in Seattle!

A Sneak Peek at Customize, The Spoon’s Personalized Food Summit

This week UBS published a report that personalized nutrition could generate annual revenues of $64 billion, and that companies large and small should take note. But how are companies capitalizing on the personalization trend across the food system, from CPG to restaurants to the home kitchen?

That’s exactly the question we’ll explore at Customize, The Spoon’s NYC summit on food personalization coming up on February 27. We’ve recruited an amazing list of speakers to discuss some of the most cutting-edge topics in the future of personalization.

We’d love to see you there! Here’s a sneak peek at what to expect at the event:

  • Personalized Nutrition & Wellness. How will biomarkers — like the microbes in your gut or your DNA — shape your diet? What’s the deal with food as medicine and how do grocery stores tap into it? We’ll have experts from Kroger, Viome, Genopalate and more weigh in.
  • Making Mass Food Markets Personal. CPGs and retail giants want to personalize their products, but how do they reshape the value chain to make hyper-personalization on a large scale? That’s what we’ll talk about with Walmart, Spoonshot, and Halla.
  • AI & Big Data in the Kitchen. A big piece of the personalization puzzle is data. How are companies collecting that data, keeping it safe, and applying AI to better understand us and shape our food? Folks from Whirlpool, evolv, and more will weigh in.
  • How Personalization Shapes Foodservice. Restaurants and catering operations alike are trying to figure out how to better customize consumer dining options. That’s what we’ll discuss with Compass Digital Labs (part of the massive Compass group) and Sevenrooms.
  • What’s Next for Food Personalization? Finally, we’ll have experts from Mintel, Food-X, and Alpha Labs weigh in on the future of food personalization.
  • … and lots more.

If you’re curious about how customized dining will affect your business — or want to tap into this cutting-edge trend — you’ll want to be at the show. We’ll have plenty of time to network, make connections in the space, and even try cool personalized food samples like 3D printed vitamins.

Spoon readers can get a 15 percent discount if they use code SPOON15. If you’re media and would like to attend drop us a line.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing a series of Q&A’s to introduce you to the Customize speakers. Keep an eye out for those.

Grab your tickets here. We’ll see you in New York!

Meet The New Spoon

You may have noticed The Spoon has a new look.

We launched the Spoon in October 2016. At the time, we didn’t know what it would become, all we knew is that we wanted to tell the stories of the people and companies shaping the future of food and cooking.

We launched the site on the same day as the second Smart Kitchen Summit, and over time it picked up steam. Back then it was just myself, Ashley Daigneault and Megan Giller posting the occasional story. Traffic was in the low thousands per month.

In short, The Spoon was an experiment.

A New Coat of Paint

Not anymore. With thousands of stories published and hundreds of thousands of readers per month, The Spoon is a big part of what we do and we figured it was time the site got a fresh coat of paint and maybe even a new beam or two.

The first version of the Spoon was a very DIY affair, with an off the shelf WordPress theme. For the new Spoon, we had the help of a web design team in Landi Industries, who I came to by way of my friend Chancey Mathews, whom I met at GigaOM where he was the seminal tech blog’s original web designer.

When we created the original Spoon logo three years ago, we wanted to convey the idea that we were all about food tech. Looking back now, our first logo did just that, but now we wanted something a little more professional and a little less on the nose.

We also wanted something both retro and modern. To help us achieve this, we worked with Seattle artist Genevieve St. Charles (also known as Goldsuit), who I had learned of after she created the logo for Eric Rivera’s addo 206 restaurant. In Genevieve’s work I saw an Andy Warhol for the new century, an artist who explored food, technology and pop culture in interesting ways. In other words, I knew I had found my logo designer.

Some Thanks

Thanks again to Jeremiah, Chancey, Sarah and the whole team at Landi. Also, thanks to Goldsuit for helping to create our new look.

And of course, thanks to the Spoon team. From a site that started with couple part time bloggers, nowadays the Spoon is headed up by our amazing managing editor Chris Albrecht who works daily alongside the fantastic talents of Catherine Lamb and Jenn Marston to break news and connect the dots for a fast-changing industry.

I also want to thank our readers for your support and insights over the past few years. Your comments, tips and emails are critical to what we do, and help us become more knowledgable and better writers.

Thanks also to our event and site sponsors. Without your support, we couldn’t do what we do. If you’d like to support us, check out our adverising page or drop us a line.

We’re excited, and a new site design and logo are really just the start. We have lots planned for coming year and we’re excited to continue the conversation with our readers.

Onward to 2020!