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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Industry Perspectives

The Hatchery is an All-in-One Incubator for Chicago’s Food Entrepreneurs

Say you want to start a company to start selling your granola, vegan burgers or world-famous kombucha. How do you make the leap into a bona-fide business?

It’s definitely not easy. Budding food companies have to find an industrial kitchen space, funding, co-packing facilities and distribution partners. It can be really, really expensive.

That’s where The Hatchery, the Chicago-based food business incubator comes into play. “Company owners would normally have to spend 80-100K to build out their own kitchen,” Natalie Shmulik, CEO of The Hatchery, told me as I toured the facilities this week — a huge financial risk when you don’t even know if your product is going to be successful. With The Hatchery, however, nascent food entrepreneurs can rent out kitchen space, coolers, storage space, and other necessary pieces to run their own business, without investing a massive amount of capital up-front.

The Hatchery was founded three years ago when ICNC, a small business incubator, suddenly started receiving a massive influx in applications from food and beverage companies. It didn’t have a suitable kitchen space for these startups so it teamed up with Accion, which provides small business loans, to create a non-profit that would foster food businesses and provide them with a startup space and the potential for investment.

In addition to physical space, members also get free access to The Hatchery’s series of events on topics like restaurant technology, accounting, and branding. The public can attend the events for a fee. Hatchery members also get connections to some of the incubator’s partners, including large food corporations like Mondelez, Kellogg, and others. For example, ingredient provider Ingredion has a permanent chef on-site to help entrepreneurs figure out how to make their products shelf-stable, etc.

The majority of The Hatchery’s entrepreneurs work in the CPG space, but the incubator also has companies in food tech and catering (both Tovala and Farmer’s Fridge are members). According to Shmulik, a few top trends they are currently seeing are ghost kitchens, healthy snack food, plant-forward foods, and even CBD products. (Though CBD food and drink is technically illegal, Shmulk told me that the state of Illinois had approved it for food use.)

Pricing varies, but Shmulik gave me a number of $2400 per month for an entrepreneur, which covers storage, coworking space, kitchen use and member coaching. The incubator currently has about 200 members and 20 businesses operating out of its space.

Lately food business incubators have become quite en vogue. Notable players besides The Hatchery are the Chobani Incubator program, D.C.’s Union Kitchen, and The Kitchen in Israel. However, The Hatchery is different in that it doesn’t take any equity, offer any funding, or limit membership to any sort of timeline. In that way they’re almost more akin to straight-up shared industrial kitchen spaces, like Boston’s Commonwealth Kitchen or Pilotworks, which offered commercial kitchen space for budding food entrepreneurs.

Of course, Pilotworks ended up having to shut down after failing to raise enough capital to continue. This doesn’t seem as much of a risk for The Hatchery, as it’s backed by companies with pretty deep pockets.

That’s a relief for aspiring food entrepreneurs in Chicago. Shmulik told me that there are only two shared kitchen spaces in the city, so it can be very difficult for entrepreneurs to secure a spot. As demand for local food rises and more entrepreneurs step up to fill that need, all-inclusive food incubators like The Hatchery will become even more of a hot commodity.

Natalie Shmulik will be speaking about the food tech startup ecosystem at SKS 2019 this October! Early Bird tickets are on sale now. 

Food Shapers Book Series Travels the World to Highlight Food Tech Innovation

Food tech is a global industry/phenomenon. In every corner of the world, big companies, small startups and individual inventors are working to innovate and improve the way we get our meals. A new book series called Food Shapers, published last month by the Future Food Institute, brings together stories of such innovators from around the world.

The four books in the Food Shapers series cover Agro-Innovation in Smart Cities, Future of Protein, Future of Food Service, and Scalable Sustainability and Circular Systems. It’s the culmination of the work of 20 researchers who traveled to 12 cities last year, interviewing 200 “food shapers.”

We spoke with one of the authors, Chiara Cecchini, US Director and Co-Founder at Future Food Institute (and Spoon contributor) about the books. “It’s an inspirational tool,” Cecchini said, believing that these food shapers can serve as role models for other budding food tech entrepreneurs out there.

Inspiration actually seems like a good word for what Food Shapers is trying accomplish, given what Cecchini learned in the making of these books. “One of the main things we learned is the central role of human beings,” said Cecchini, “There is a lot of technology, but the technology is always rotating around a person or a person in need. So wherever you are, or whatever you are attacking in the food chain, the crucial component of the human being is always there.”

One such story covered in the book is about Green Bronx Machine, which is a program that teaches kids in marginalized neighborhoods how to grow their own produce through indoor farming systems. Cecchini actually shared some other excerpts from Food Shapers earlier this year in a Spoon post about companies doing things like food rescue and upcycling food waste into fashion.

Food Shapers is compiled by The Future Food Institute, which is a non-profit aimed at improving life on Earth through food. Anyone can download previews of the Food Shaper books now, full downloads cost 7,99€ (~$9 USD) for one book or 25€ (~$28 USD) for all four. Cecchini said funds will help support the next edition of the book, part of which will be dedicated to researching more on the future of protein.

Making the Impossible Possible: the Power of Upcycling

Story adapted from Food Shapers, a collection of books produced by The Future Food Institute that follow the journey of 20 food researchers on the 2018 Food Innovation Global Mission.

Food systems are complex due to a dense network of relationships between humans and nature: they cover the entire globe connecting local agricultural contexts and the biggest cities in the world, and they involve the entire global population, from farmers to consumers.

The present food system is unable to provide sufficient healthy and sustainable food for the global population. According to The Global FootPrint Network, current human consumption exceeds the Earth’s biocapacity (our ability to regenerate the resources that the global population requires each year) by 1.7 planets and food demand takes up 26% of the global ecological footprint.

And while our food demand continues to increase, an estimated one-third of global food production currently goes to waste, according to The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

This waste occurs throughout different phases of the supply chain, from farmer to consumer, and are influenced by two main factors: process inefficiency (e.g., spent grain discarded in the brewing process), and quality and aesthetic product standards (e.g., only specific potato sizes can be used to make french fries, while the rest are discarded).

One way companies and startups are beginning to tackle waste management is through the innovative concept of upcycling — creating new value by remaking wasted food into new products, starting with acquisition (collecting materials after consumer use to establish pathways to material recycling), reprocessing (upcycling material to create new value-added products), and remarketing (identifying markets to sell the upcycled product).

As part of the Food Innovation Global Mission 2018, our research team and authors of Food Shapers: Scalable Sustainability and Circular Systems identified “reducing food waste” as one of four critical patterns of sustainable food systems, and went in search of the most innovative and impactful upcycling projects in the 12 main food hubs — from The Netherlands to New York to Hong Kong — we visited around the world.

Through interviewing and interacting with more than 200 “food shapers,” we learned how many of these innovators are rethinking value creation by aligning incentives and revenue mechanisms to leverage sustainable solutions. And while traditional circular business models and strategies have tended to focus on the physical aspects of a product (e.g., disassembly, material selection), these companies are adopting a regenerative approach to resource management that also views humans as vital resources in the food system. These case studies taught us that by involving the human element in a circular framework, we can influence perceptions of waste and behavior change to enhance value in our communities.

Here are just some of the inspiring food heroes and new companies that are inspiring us with their unique approaches to upcycling:

De Verspillingsfabriek (The Netherlands)

“Why is a product only worthy if it’s perfect? Doesn’t a vibrant product or a dynamic service have much more value?” says Bob Hutten, General Manager of De Verspillingsfabriek. Hutten first started the food waste factory in 2016 as a collaborative think tank for tackling food waste. Today, De Verspillingsfabriek takes rescued food from big companies from the agro-food sector and optimizes their waste by reprocessing it into delicious stocks, soups, and sauces, adding new value to the market. These upcycled new food products are repackaged with recipes and remarked under fun branding called Barstensvol, meaning “packed with” in Dutch. With the help of their many partners, the food waste factory continues to facilitate projects that close food waste loops. The company Milgro, for example, supplies weighing stations for measurements and data analysis to gain insights on process and capacity. Students at Wageningen University, a knowledge partner, have developed a platform for collaborating on new solutions for preventing waste.

De Verspillingsfabriek serves as an encouraging example of a company that not only upcycles undervalued flows of food waste but undervalued information and human resources as well. In addition to “no wasted food,” De Verspillingsfabriek also stands for “no wasted talent” and “no wasted location” by employing people with disabilities, creating equal opportunity workspaces to prevent a waste of human resource and talent. Moreover, the waste factory is located in the THREE-SIXTY building, an innovation center for the circular economy. The building was abandoned for ten years before Hutten revitalized it to design a space for entrepreneurs and startups to develop innovative concepts in the field of food waste and social innovation.

Instock (The Netherlands)

Instock started as a pop-up in 2014 after the four founders, who were all working at the Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn, formed a team to fight food waste. They started collecting and turning unsold fruits, vegetables, bread, meat, and fish from more than 80 Albert Heijn supermarkets and delivering it to a food rescue center where unsold products (mostly veggies and fruit) are sorted based on quality and then listed on their online store for partner restaurants. InStock has helped innovate manufactured products made from food waste, such as their beer products Pieper Bier made from surplus potatoes, and Bammetjes Bier made from old bread, as well as granola made from spent grain.

Instock now runs three successful restaurant locations in Amsterdam, The Hague, and Utrech, as well as a food rescue distribution center and online platform. The cash flow is invested in rescue center workers who sort food and transport food waste. Instock restaurants use their unsold produce to create gourmet dishes using creative culinary techniques. Their chefs create “harvest of the day” tasting menus with the repurposed ingredients using techniques such as fermentation and dehydration to enhance flavors and increase shelf life. It’s a niche market, but by expanding into food distribution and retail, they are also entering homes and have also published the cookbook “Instock Cooking,” which illustrates how to utilize all parts of the food to prevent waste.

Dyelicious (Hong Kong)

One day, while eating curry and spilling some of it on his clothes, Eric Cheung had an epiphany —  he realized that he could create value from food waste by converting it into colors and dyes in the fashion industry. “My dream is to go out of business because there is no more food waste,” says Eric Cheung, founder of Dyelicious in Hong Kong, which wastes 3,600 tonnes of food every day, according to the Hong Kong Environment Bureau.

But he soon realized one challenge, he says. Many consumers find food waste, especially from animal feed and fertilizers, unappealing. To attract consumers and involve them in the fight to reduce food waste, Cheung has designed luxury products with the support of popular brands who want to cultivate a more ecological footprint. Dyelicious has since sourced waste from partnering companies in Hong Kong, including Zara, Adidas, Towngas, Starbucks, Calbee, and Hitachio Nest Beer.

For these companies, selling upcycled products portray an image of social responsibility. With the help of the governmental organization Vegetable Marketing Organization (VMO) and other partners, Dyelicious combines stories with food design as a marketing strategy that has powerful impacts. Between 2016 and 2017, Dyelicious has successfully upcycled 500-600 tons of waste. Dyelicious has also partnered with schools to replace their chemical paints with safer, edible products that have no added metallic substances, as well as host workshops for families and kids at retail stores in Hong Kong’s historic PMQ.

 

E-farm (Hong Kong)

KM Chan uses the black soldier fly to solve food waste problems. A former banker, Chan became increasingly interested in the future of protein. He witnessed the problem of food waste in Hong Kong and decided to combine these issues and form new sustainable solution in the agri-food sector.

E-farm raises public awareness of environmental protection through educational workshops, talks, and eco-tours. The farm also conducts research on sustainable agriculture and shares their findings with the public to promote community gardening and strengthen the bonds between organic farmers.

Chan’s 1,000 square-foot facility is located in the middle of E-farm, a 50,000 square foot farm located inside the Pat Sin Leng Country Park and surrounded by a branch of the Tan Shan River. Chan’s team collects food waste from local primary schools and coffee companies each day. About 100 kgs of food are wasted daily from local primary schools. Sorting food waste is the main challenge as food is mixed with plastics and other non-biodegradable materials. Educating students about the sorting and composting process is one of the first steps to creating a sustainable composting model. The food waste is delivered to a shared space on the farm to be pulped and composted. Larvae of the black soldier fly, which consumes the compost, is then harvested and fed to fish. Lab samples have been tested for further research if this method is safe for human consumption.

Rise Products (New York)

Rise Products is a startup based out of New York that converts spent grain from breweries into an upcycled flour. Spent grain is a byproduct of brewing that is rich in dietary fiber and protein.

Around 42 million tonnes of spent grain is wasted, globally. Rise aims at creating these new upcycled products for bakers, chefs, and food manufacturers. Their patented technology will allow them to expand from just brewing waste to grape pomace, coffee grinds, Okara0 soy milk by-product, and fruit pulp and rind.

Rise uses Uber to pick up waste from its facility in Queens. The brewers directly transfer the food waste from the boilers to food grade containers. Once at the processing facility, the grain is pressed to remove moisture and dry it out and decreases particle size to create the flour. Rise sells its products to industries and food manufacturers that use this upcycled flour for creating new products. They market the product as “Super Flour,” which has 12 times the fiber, two times the protein and one-third the carbs compared to all-purpose flour. Rise also sells a barley flour made from the spent grain of IPA or pilsner, as well as a “dark edition” barley flour made from the spent grain of stout or porter. They have also recently introduced a new brownie mix into retail.

Having had the opportunity to explore and be motivated by all these practices around the world, we can spotlight several elements supporting our food system in a positive transition. Impact can be created with three different approaches: standalone intervention, bringing a new product or service to market; system innovation, creating or altering existing systems to bring about change; and cultural transformation, transforming the attitudes and behaviors of a community. Furthermore, the needed expertise involves spans across individuals, organizations with interdisciplinary teams and cross-collaborations across the supply chain. Collaboration and interdisciplinary seem to be the key elements which are constantly needed to create and accelerate a change. Finally, as previously mentioned, the keystone for a successful initiative seems to be the ability to align incentives and revenue mechanisms, making sustainable models not only economically viable, but appealing for businesses.

Fieldcraft is an Online Marketplace Helping Companies Develop New Plant-Based Products

Say a bakery chain wants to add a vegan blueberry muffin to its menu. First, they’d have to find substitutes for butter and eggs — depending on their preferences, maybe even ones that are certified organic or locally made — and ensure that these producers could consistently keep them supplied.

Maybe they should take a look at Fieldcraft. The Austin-based startup, which just launched last month, is an online B2B marketplace for plant-based ingredients. Growers and manufacturers can list their products — everything from specialty grains to kale chips — on the site, and buyers can search the database by production method, certifications (organic, non-GMO, etc.), location, supplier production capacity, and more.

If buyers can’t find what they need, they can submit requests to Fieldcraft for new products or even contract out farmers to sow a certain crop, such as an heirloom grain. On the farmer’s side, this is also a win since it gives them a guaranteed marketplace and, by putting in demands for new/different crops, promotes biodiversity.

Though it’s just over a month old, Fieldcraft already has over 7,000 companies in its marketplace. Yesterday the company rolled out a new solutions tool to help people who might not be sure exactly what they’re looking for — which, according to Fieldcraft CEO and co-founder Michael Chapman, is about one-third of their users. “We want to give buyers the chance to find new products that they didn’t even know were out there,” he told me.

For example, the aforementioned bakery might not know what type of egg substitute would be the best fit for their new vegan blueberry muffins. In this case, they could search Fieldcraft for a list of plant-based egg alternatives, which include minute details about the properties of each ingredient (emulsifying, thickening, etc.), and then determine which one to purchase.

On the other hand, for those who know exactly what they’re looking for, Fieldcraft can get pretty granular. So instead of just searching for broad “egg alternatives,” users could track down a “clean-label, non-GMO upcycled aquafaba.”

With so many new players — both young startups and veteran food corporations — entering into the plant-based protein space, I think there’s certainly a market for Fieldcraft’s, well, market. It offers a couple obvious benefits: it cuts out the middleman and gives suppliers instant access to new audiences.

But Fieldcraft’s greatest asset is its opportunity for discovery. When I visited the JUST offices last year I was wow-ed by their high tech plant research center, where the company tests plants sourced from around the world to suss out their properties: if they foam, thicken, etc. A resource like Fieldcraft, with its wide-ranging database, could help smaller startups who don’t have the warchest or lab space of a JUST to discover new ingredients that could lead to better plant-based products.

There are certainly other wholesale ingredient supply companies out there, including major players like Sysco or U.S. Foods, which carry plant-based ingredients. However, Fieldcraft is targeting buyers who want a more direct relationship with their supplier or need hard-to-find ingredients with exacting specifications. As of now, they sell to CPG brands, meal kit makers, bakeries, brewers, and even food manufacturers.

From my conversation with Chapman, it seems like the size of growers and suppliers using Fieldcraft varies pretty widely. I’ll be curious to see if they ever run into the problem of a grower running out of an ingredient (or just having a bad harvest) which a supplier relies upon for its product. That being said, his cofounder (and wife) Kristy Chapman, CPO of Fieldcraft, has a background in data science, so maybe they’ll be able to set up a backend that can nimbly adjust based on suppliers’ yield.

Fieldcraft is free for buyers to use and costs $195/year for suppliers. The company currently has four employees (including the Chapmans) and has yet to seek any external funding.

Obviously, Fieldcraft isn’t for everyone. Big players like Tyson or even Beyond Meat clearly have their own ingredient supply chains nailed down. But for newer startups, or even medium-sized players looking to develop new animal-free products, Fieldcraft could be a valuable resource.

There also seems to be a new trend of pick-and-play plant-based ingredient companies, like Motif Ingredients, a new company that makes ingredients for vegan products from genetically engineered yeast. With the plant-based market as red-hot as it is — sales grew by 20 percent in 2018 alone — I imagine we’ll see a lot more food companies and manufacturers looking to develop their own animal-free products over the coming years. Fieldcraft seems to be entering the market at just the right time.

home coffee roaster

Home Coffee Roasting Gear Is Booming, But Will It Last?

We’ve seen espresso machines sized down to fit home kitchens. We’ve seen pour over cones transition from a snooty barista tool to home coffee bar essential. And now, it seems, coffee roasting is undergoing a similar adaptation.

Home coffee roasters have existed for years, with Behmor, Hottop, and Gene Cafe leading the space (behind Grandma’s repurposed popcorn popper, of course), but a new wave of home roasting gear is making waves—and raising lots of money.

Back in 2013, over 2,000 backers raised $600,000 to bring the Bonaverde Berlin—an $800 home roaster and coffee maker combo device—to life (you can read our review here).In 2015, London-based Ikawa raised just over $200,000 to bring its app-controlled roaster to prosumer homes. The device pre-sold for $650, was released in 2017, and now sells for just over $1,000 at retail.

And more recently in 2018, IA Collaborative Ventures’ Kelvin raised $400,000 to make coffee roasting even simpler and more affordable for casual coffee lovers, with devices pre-sold for just $250. A few weeks later, the Singaporean Power Roaster raised another $50,000 with roasters for $280 a pop.

For those of us in the coffee industry, this home roasting gear boom is a bit surprising. Roasting coffee is far more complex than most consumers imagine. Getting hold of high-quality unroasted beans can be a challenge. After roasting the beans, you have to wait days for the beans to release carbon dioxide before they even taste good. And when you finally get a great flavor profile you’re proud of, it’s hard to produce a second time.

Can home roasters engage casual coffee lovers enough to make the growth we’re seeing sustainable, or is this another fad that consumers will grow tired of once they’re confronted with the hidden complexities of coffee roasting?

I interviewed Alex Georgiou, Ikawa’s Head of Marketing, to discuss how he sees this niche market evolving over the next few years.

“The global home roasting audience is all in different places,” he pointed out. Taiwan has a well-developed tradition of home roasting with low-tech tools. Europe’s traditional cafes still maintain the monopoly on coffee beans. And America has “really deep pockets of home roasting enthusiasts.”

ikawa coffee roaster

But even in parts of the world where exploring new kinds of coffee experiences is commonplace, Alex admits that home roasters are still a very niche audience, largely because the equipment isn’t very intuitive. “For a lot of people it’s a little bit like wrestling with a vacuum cleaner in your garage. It’s hard to do well and it’s not really an enjoyable process.”

To combat this challenge, Ikawa ships six bags of green coffee beans with every Ikawa At Home roaster. When users open the app and pick a bean to start roasting, they then can choose from six roast profile options—each highlighting different flavors and aromas. “Even if you’ve never roasted coffee before, you’ll be able to get great results, and then you can explore that going forward.”

This eliminates the friction of sourcing green coffee and figuring out how to roast for the first time, but is it enough to get casual coffee lovers on board? At just over $1,000 for the Ikawa At Home, many in the industry have voiced concern that it’s priced too high to open the home roasting floodgates.

I also reached out to Dan Kraemer, Founder and Chief Design Officer at IA Collaborative and creator of the Kelvin roaster, to get a different perspective. Like Alex, Dan sees accessibility as the key to enabling demand for home roasting gear to grow.

“Consumers just need to know it’s an option,” Dan said when I asked what it’s going to take for roasting to go mainstream. “The complete roaster and green bean delivery solution we offer through Kelvin will make home coffee roasting super easy and accessible.”

The Kelvin is priced at just $249 for pre-orders and will be around $330 after devices ship this Spring—a significantly more affordable option for aspiring home roasters. Rather than allowing consumers to control every aspect of their roast profile via an app like the Ikawa At Home, Kelvin users simply turn a single dial on the device to set their roast time.

“You can create myriad combinations of flavors and profiles just by varying the amount of time that you roast the coffee,” Dan said. “It’s a very simple entry-point for people who’ve never roasted before.”

The standard Kelvin Starter Pack will ship with a single pound of green coffee, but most pre-order customers actually opted to order three to six pounds of coffee. Dan is confident that most Kelvin users will continue to use the Kelvin app to source coffees that are tailored to their taste and brewing preferences once they’ve gone through their initial bags.

kelvin coffee roaster

Ikawa and Kelvin tackle the issue of home roasting differently, but there’s one belief they both share: fanatics are always finding new ways to explore the world of coffee, and roasting at home is the natural next step for millions of people around the world—they just need the right accessible equipment to start this next segment of their coffee journey.

We’re still in the early days of home roasting, and at this point, it’s hard to tell whether it’ll remain an activity for super-enthusiasts or if consumer-centric devices like the Ikawa At Home and Kelvin will be able to capture the attention of more casual coffee lovers.

McCormick and IBM are Using AI to Develop Better-Tasting Spices

Today spice giant McCormick announced that it is partnering with IBM to create a research coalition to explore how artificial intelligence (AI) can improve flavor and food product development.

According to the press release, McCormick will use IBM Research AI for Product Composition to “explore flavor territories more quickly and efficiently” and “predict new flavor combinations from hundreds of millions of data points across the areas of sensory science, consumer preference, and flavor palettes.” In short: McCormick is applying IBM’s AI/machine learning power to their own taste data in an effort to develop better-tasting products more quickly — and with fewer duds.

The first product platform, called “ONE,” will debut mid-2019, and will include a set of one-dish Recipe Mixes, which I’m assuming are spice packets. The mixes are meant to season both a protein and a vegetable and come in flavors like Tuscan Chicken and New Orleans Sausage. McCormick is aiming to have them on grocery shelves by spring of this year.

To learn more about the ONE platform, we spoke with McCormick’s Chief Science Officer Hamed Faridi. “This technology uses multiple machine learning algorithms that are trained on information, including hundreds of millions of data points across the areas of sensory science, decades of past McCormick product formulas and information related to consumer taste preferences and palettes,” he told the Spoon. “What distinguishes the new system is its ability to learn and improve every time [it] is being used by our product and flavor developers.”

Unlike McCormick consumer-facing Flavorprint, which drew on recipe search histories to recommend new flavors and recipes, the ONE platform is purely internal. However, Faridi made it clear that the ONE platform would not replace consumer taste testing. “AI can’t taste flavors in the same way a human can,” he said. However, it will seriously up the speed of new product development. Faridi said that the AI system would let McCormick create new flavors up to three times faster, giving the company more agility so it could quickly develop products to take advantage of new dining trends.

Anytime the term “AI” — or the even trendier “machine learning” — is used by a Big Food company or fast food chain, it’s wise to take it with a grain of salt. As buzzwords, AI and machine learning can sometimes be more of a marketing gimmick than a value add.

That’s not to say that there aren’t several companies successfully leveraging AI to improve flavor. In fact, last year I wrote a piece predicting that services combining flavor and AI would be a new food tech trend. Analytical Flavor Systems has an AI-powered flavor prediction platform to help companies develop new food products with less trial and error. Plantjammer uses AI to help home cooks make better plant-based dishes. And Foodpairing applies AI to its flavor database to help professional chefs develop more innovative recipes. But these are smaller, tech-driven startups that have built their service based around AI from the beginning. For Big Food, AI is sometimes as much of a promotional tool as an actual service.

Since McCormick is working with IBM, its new platform seems more like a serious effort than, say, Dominos’. But is McCormick, as it states in the aforementioned press release, “ushering in a new era of flavor innovation and changing the course of the industry”? Probably not. But then again, I haven’t tried that New Orleans Sausage recipe mix.

Food Community Rallies Around Those Impacted by Pilotworks Shut Down

Given the state of the world and the steady stream of negative garbage that flows through our news feeds every day, acts of kindness and generosity have an outsized impact and seem to shine that much brighter.

When commercial kitchen space Pilotworks abruptly shut down over the weekend, it wasn’t just employees and investors of the company that were impacted. Because Pilotworks was trying to build the “AWS for kitchens,” it’s closure sent shockwaves through the food entrepreneur community. The closure of the Brooklyn Pilotworks location alone impacted 175 food vendors working out of there, and Pilotworks had locations in Newark, Chicago, and Dallas (not to mention the Providence and Portland, ME locations that it closed earlier this year).

The stress associated with an office location shutting down is bad enough, but when your business is food, there is an additional layer of anxiety because your inventory and product are perishable. All the ingredients (literally) that make up your business need to be stored properly, and might require specialized equipment that can be large and bulky. Basically, when Pilotworks closed its doors so quickly, people had to scramble and come up with a solution fast.

This is where it all gets heartwarming. Out of the ashes of Pilotworks arose a vibrant community that immediately sprang into action to help.

We at The Spoon were inundated with comments and tweets and emails from kitchens near Pilotworks locations offering space. A Slack channel and resource website were set up. But we are on the outside, looking in. Nick Shippers of Ube Kitchen sent me the following note that really captured what went on from someone who was directly impacted:

What we learned through this chaos is that the soul of Pilotworks had always been the makers who created a coalition within hours. We jumped into pools of rides, with equipment still our laps, to tour other kitchens and process a transition as soon as possible. Slack channels filled with help as it came in from all over the city and country to help shift operations and provide resources for everyone’s needs. The outpouring of support, at all hours of the day, reflects that there is still a very organic force of food makers in New York City that will come back stronger.

Right now, most of the help seems to be centered around NYC/Newark, NJ businesses, though we have heard from a few Dallas and Chicago operations offering their help.

I’m sure all the entrepreneurs impacted by Pilotworks would have preferred it if Pilotworks stayed open and everyone could have gone about their business as usual. But it’s the worst moments that define us, and from what we can tell, the food community will only get stronger from this.

Dana Cowin Thinks Technology Will Make Us Cook More, Not Less

Dana Cowin needs no introduction. But we’ll give you a quick one anyway:

Best known for her 21-year stint as Editor in Chief of Food & Wine Magazine, Dana Cowin has since branched out to become a food consultant, author, lecturer, and all-around food media expert. She currently hosts the Heritage Radio Network show Speaking Broadly, and is the Chief Creative Officer at farm-sourced restaurant chain Dig Inn.

We’re thrilled to have her at the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) in Seattle this October, speaking about how technology is shaping the future of recipes, home cooking, and food media. To get you excited, we asked Cowin a few questions about delivery, automation, and her last meal on earth.

Read the full Q&A below.

Q: With online platforms, voice assistants, and guided cooking tools, there are more ways to find and catalog recipes than ever before. How have you seen this change the way that people cook?
A: There’s an ongoing evolution in the way people cook; online platforms, voice assistants, and guided cooking tools all play a role. The move is toward simplicity, convenience, personalization, and speed — whatever makes your busy life easier. So in as far as technology can help you achieve those goals, in a right-for-you way, I think that tech is a wholesome enabler.

Q: Do you think that food delivery, meal kits, and, looking even further, automation will completely replace home cooking?
A: I don’t foresee a time when home cooking will disappear completely. That said, because there are so many options for how to get meals (from delivery to meal kits to automation), cooking in the future will become the province of the passionate. It will be a lifestyle choice, a leisure activity like camping that brings friends and family together. Cooking will less frequently be a quotidian chore to provide sustenance.

Q: What’s the most exciting way you see technology transforming the way we discover, cook, or talk about food?
A: Technology enables us to go far or near, narrow or wide and shallow or deep in terms of our information, choices, and inspiration. It brings the entire world closer. I love tripping into a video of some arcane, authentic way to make a soup dumpling, seeing images of the foods of far-off Belarus or just discovering a recipe that a neighbor has tried with hyper-local ingredients. Tech makes me more knowledgeable, more adventurous, more confident, and less fearful.

Q: What’s your last meal on earth?
A: Crispy fried chicken, fluffy biscuits with strawberry butter, pickled spicy okra, mint iced tea, peach cobbler, vanilla ice cream.

Thanks, Dana! If you want to see her speak more about how technology will influence the future of cooking, recipes, and food media, snag your tickets to the Smart Kitchen Summit on October 8-9th in Seattle.

The Weekly Spoon: Laboring over Labels and Go Go Robo Restaurants!

This is a the post version of our weekly (twice-weekly, actually) newsletter. If you’d like to get the weekly Spoon in your inbox, you can subscribe here. 

By now we are all inured to the “fake news” label casually thrown about on a daily basis. But now the discussion over what is real and what isn’t is seeping into the labels we give our meat and milk. Science has brought about a wave of innovation in those fields, and traditional makers of those products are none too happy.

Groups representing cattlemen and ranchers sent a letter to President Trump asking his administration to bring regulation of lab-grown, or cultured, meat under the USDA. This follows a different letter from farm bureaus and agricultural groups sent to the FDA asking them to crack down on what types of drinks can actually be called milk. (The hullabaloo over milk even earned a mocking segment on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show.)

These moves reveal that we are on the cusp of a societal leap in how we eat, and incumbents are digging in. While cultured meat hasn’t hit store shelves yet, it’s a hot sector for investment and the technology keeps improving and coming down in price. Meanwhile sales of plant-based milks have soared over the past five years while the dairy industry grapples with surpluses and falling prices.

To be fair, having a discussion over what we officially label the food we put into our bodies is a worthy one to make sure we know what we are consuming. Case in point: this week the FDA gave the green light to Impossible Foods saying its heme-burgers are safe to eat, and Beyond Meat can officially slap a “non-GMO” label on its pea protein burgers.

But if we spend all our time and energy (and money) dithering over details over what we call something, before you know it, the robots will have taken over and they will decide for us.

Don’t believe me? We broke the news this week of the launch of robot food startup, Ono Food Company, which is headed up by the former VP of Operations at Cafe X. Details on Ono are slim, but it’s backed by Lemnos, Compound and Pathbreaker. It joins other restaurant robots coming online like those in Spyce Kitchen, Ekim, and Bear Robotics’ Penny.

Robots and automation are expanding into more of our everyday routines. Long John Silvers announced plans to make its drive-thrus fully automated, Pizzametry is working to put pizza vending machines in high-traffic areas like airports and dorms, and Flippy just got a new job making chicken tenders at Dodgers stadium.

Finally, there were some unexpected moves in the meal kit market this week. True Food Innovations is breathing new life into Chef’d, which abruptly shut down earlier this month. Chef’d 2.0 actually involves a number of ex-Chef’d execs, who plan to forego e-commerce and focus on retail. And Chick-Fil-A, of all places, announced an experiment to offer meal kits at a limited number of its stores in Atlanta. While I applaud the effort, I’m not sure it will work.

Whew. It was a big week! And that was just the news. We’re also hard at work assembling an awesome Smart Kitchen Summit: North America. The lineup of speakers is fantastic, the schedule is thoughtful and forward looking for food tech and tickets are on sale now!

As always, we’d love to hear from you! If you’ve got news, send us a tip, or join our Slack channel.

Have a great weekend!

Be kind. Always.

Chris

In the 07/27/2018 edition:

Traditional Meat Producers Lobby Trump Over Cultured Meat
Agricultural professional groups including the American Sheep Industry Association, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, National Chicken Council, National Pork Producers Council and the National Turkey Federation fired off a letter to President Trump today, asking for parity when it comes to the regulation of cultured meat.

Got Milk? Are You Sure? Labeling Debate Moves on to Plant-Based Drinks
It looks like the debate over what we label cultured/lab grown/clean “meat” will not be isolated to the deli case. If the comments made by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb today are any indication, there will be another drawn out battle over what we label as “milk.”

Stephen Colbert Mocks FDA’s Crackdown on Plant-Based Milks
On The Late Show host Stephen Colbert turned his biting wit towards a subject that’s been generating a lot of media buzz lately: the question of what to call dairy alternatives. He was referencing last week’s Politico Pro Summit, in which FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced that his agency would start cracking down on the use of the term “milk” for non-dairy products.

Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods Get Label Wins, Score Big for Plant-based Meat
Plant-based burger startup Impossible Foods officially got the green light from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that their patties are safe to eat. Impossible voluntarily submitted their burger to the FDA for testing last year and was surprised when the regulatory body came back to them with a big red flag concerning the burger’s not-so-secret star ingredient: heme.

Lemnos Backs Robot Restaurant Startup Ono
Restaurant robots are kinda hot. The latest evidence of this? Yet another robot restaurant startup called Ono Food Company just got funded, this time from Lemnos, Compound and Pathbreaker ventures. The amount of the funding round was undisclosed.

Now That Delivery Is All the Rage, What Happens to the Drive-Thru?
Long John Silver’s, that bastion of quick-service seafood, made a bold claim today by announcing their intent to “install the most technologically advanced digital drive-thru platforms in the restaurant industry.”

Will You Try Pizzametry’s Pizza Vending Machine?
The Pizzametry is the size of a beefy vending machine. For around $5 – $6 (prices will vary depending on location), you can order either an eight-inch cheese (no sauce), or cheese (with sauce) or pepperoni pizza. The machine is pre-loaded with canisters of frozen dough which are then thawed, cut, pressed, topped and cooked at 700 degrees to make a pizza in three and a half minutes (that time actually goes down to 90 seconds on subsequent pizzas if you order more than one).

Chef’d Assets Acquired by True Food Innovations, to Focus on Retail
True Food Innovations, a food technology, CPG and manufacturing company, today announced that it has acquired the assets of meal kit maker, Chef’d, which abruptly shuttered operations earlier this month. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Chick-fil-A is Paving the Way for Fast Food Meal Kits
Each Chick-fil-A box will contain fresh, pre-measured ingredients to make one of five meals, from chicken enchiladas to chicken flatbread to pan-roasted chicken. (Sense a theme here?) The kits will cost $15.89, feed two people, and can be prepared in 30 minutes or less.

Chick-Fil-A’s Uncanny Valley Problem with Meal Kits
When popular fast food chain, Chick-Fil-A announced it would be experimenting with meal kits next month, I agreed with my colleague, Catherine Lamb, that this could pave the way for a new meal kit sales channel. But in the days since the announcement I’ve soured on the notion. Now, I think consumers will have certain expectations of what a Chick-Fil-A meal kit should taste like, but will instead experience the uncanny valley.

Meet Angela Malik: Chef, Disruptor, and Food Tech Influencer

Angela Malik is the wearer of many hats. A self-described “food innovator and design thinker,” Malik has, throughout her career, worked in Michelin starred restaurants, launched her own cooking school focused on Asian cuisine, and consulted for corporate catering companies. She’s also currently part of the London Food Board, where she advises Mayor Sadiq Kahn on food strategy for the city.

Really, though, Malik is someone with a welcome (and underrepresented) voice in conversations around food innovation: she’s a professionally trained chef who fully embraces tech, and wants to use it to make what we eat more sustainable, more equitable, and more collaborative.

Malik will be presenting a 15-minute TED-style talk at Smart Kitchen Summit Europe in Dublin next week, but we spoke with Malik over on the SKS Europe blog so you can get to know this culinary engima.

P.S. Early Bird tickets are on sale now through June 30th for Smart Kitchen Seattle! Come join us on October 8-9th to join the conversation about the future of food and cooking. 

Come Explore The Future of Meat at our May Food Tech Meetup

It’s time for the next event in our monthly food tech meetup series! We’ll be exploring a subject that’s been making a lot of headlines recently: the future of meat. Join us on Thursday, May 24th at Galvanize Seattle for drinks, snacks, and some rousing discussion. (Bonus: it’s free to attend, thanks to our sponsor ChefSteps!)

The Future of Meat

We’re at a crossroads: meat consumption is on the rise, but demand for meat alternatives has never been higher. And technology is changing the way we create, market, and eat animal products. From plant-based chicken nuggets to lab-grown burgers to transparent distribution channels for high-quality steak and pork, our panelists will discuss how technology is disrupting the meat industry — and what they think meat will look like in 5, 10, and 50 year’s time.

The panel will include:

–Christie Lagally, Seattle Food Tech

–Dr. Isaac Emery, the Good Food Institute

–Ethan Lowry, Crowd Cow

-Catherine Lamb, The Spoon

There will be drinks and snacks, so come hungry and ready to meet the Seattle food tech community — and bring a few business cards while you’re at it. Register here to reserve your spot!

Highlights From The Future of Recipes Food Tech Meetup

We had our first food tech meetup last night! And thanks to our sponsor ChefSteps, tech-brewed beer from PicoBrew, and our awesome venue Galvanize, it was a rollicking success. Plus we had a very cool panel: Alicia Cervini from Allrecipes, Cliff Sharples from Fexy Media, and Jess Voelker from Chefsteps had a great conversation with The Spoon’s Michael Wolf.

If you missed it, here are a few topics and points that really stood out to us. Prepare yourself: the future of recipes is very dynamic, very shoppable, and tastes good — every time.

P.S. Mark your calendars for our next meetup on the future of meat on May 24th! Register here to make sure you get a spot.

So what’s the future of recipes then?
All of our panelists agreed that in the future, recipes will be very responsive and dynamic:

Allrecipes’ Alicia Cervini said they are exploring completely customizable meal kits based on their recipes. They have a relationship with Chef’d to work on their vision of “making a dynamically generated meal kit on the fly,” pairing convenience with customization.

Fexy’s Cliff Sharples predicted that as people take a deeper interest in food (he said that 50% of millennials consider themselves “foodies”) recipe customization would become more and more popular. He also had an interesting app idea where users could plug in their dinner guests with all of their eating profiles and plan a menu.

ChefSteps’ Jess Voelker envisions a future where technology can help people become a better cook. She brought up the interesting concept of using AI to troubleshoot their recipes. So if your cake went flat or your food was too salty, ChefSteps could help you figure out where you went wrong. 

Voice interfaces alone are incomplete
All of our panelists agreed that, when it comes to cooking from a recipe, voice alone isn’t all that useful — cooking is just too visual. Sure, if the recipe instructions are short enough, you could cook an entire recipe just with a voice assistant. And, as Voelker pointed out, “it can solve some real problems just in time, like if you have chicken grease on your hand and need to know something.” But without a visual guide, like a connected screen, you often end up having to break down steps into even smaller steps, which takes more time than if you’d just read the recipe. 

So while voice assistants like Alexa may be a helpful tool if your hands are mucked up in the kitchen, as of now they’re most useful for playing news or podcasts while you cook. The panelists did, however, seem optimistic about the combination of video and voice. (Or maybe an all-in-one robot chef assistant?)

Are recipes just data?
During the meetup Sharples likened recipes to code, which is the driving force behind smart appliances, the shoppable recipe journey, and recipe search tools. If you’re a regular Spoon reader this might remind you of Jon Jenkin’s talk at last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit, where he made the claim that we are all eating software. 

Mike Wolf made the point that with recipe integration and connected appliances like the Joule, you could essentially have a celebrity chef cook your meal for you in your own kitchen. Sort of.

For example: you could select a steak recipe from kitchen gadget-loving chef Kenji Alt-Lopez on your connected app and your device would precisely follow his cooking instructions, giving you a consistent, high-quality result. It’s almost like having Kenji himself sous vide a steak for you, every time. (Which, for many food nerds, is a dream come true.)

Recipes are becoming more important, in different ways
All of our panelists agreed that the recipe is not the least bit dead. In fact, they argued that the recipe is becoming more important; it’s the core atomic unit of the rapidly evolving meal journey.

The hardest part, which isn’t surprising, is making recipes that tick all the boxes for such a wide variety of needs. But with apps like PlantJammer and Ckbk, plus the convenience of services like 2-hour grocery delivery and meal kits, it doesn’t seem like the recipe is going anywhere anytime soon.