Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

News

The Grocery Store is the Food System

For most of us, the food system isn’t a distant farm or a produce distribution center. It’s the grocery store. We push carts through brightly lit aisles where abstract forces—supply chains, agricultural policy, consumer trends—become tangible reality. The supermarket is where the nation’s entire food apparatus converges in a single, accessible arena. The grocery store isn’t just a participant in the food system; it is the food system in miniature.

This is where supply meets demand in its most direct form. Every product on the shelf represents a long chain of decisions: a farmer’s crop choice, a manufacturer’s formulation, a regulator’s approval. And every purchase we make sends a ripple back up that chain. For consumers who are generations removed from farming, the grocery store is our most immediate encounter with agriculture itself. To understand the state of our food system, look no further than your local grocer.

What we find there reveals both the system’s greatest achievements and its deepest contradictions. The grocery store offers us unprecedented abundance while masking troubling uniformity. It promises choice while concentrating power. It connects us to global supply chains while disconnecting us from the sources of our food. Understanding these contradictions is the key to understanding how our food system really works—and how we might change it.

The Paradox of Abundance

Walk down any aisle in an American supermarket and you’ll confront what appears to be infinite variety. Hundreds of cereals crowd the breakfast section. Dozens of yogurt brands compete for refrigerator space. An entire wall of nutrition bars promises everything from weight loss to spiritual enlightenment.

Yet behind this kaleidoscope of branding lies striking uniformity. Those hundred different nutrition bars? Most are built from the same handful of commodity crops—corn, soy, and wheat. The cereal aisle’s rainbow of boxes contains variations on the same basic theme. We’ve created the illusion of choice through brand variety while consolidating actual agricultural diversity into a narrow selection of crops.

This isn’t accidental. It’s the logical outcome of an agricultural system optimized for scale and efficiency above all else. Corn, soy, and wheat dominate not because they’re the most nutritious or delicious, but because they can be grown at massive scale and processed into countless products. The grocery store, in all its apparent abundance, reveals the hidden monotony of American agriculture.

The same consolidation extends beyond ingredients to the stores themselves. While shoppers see thousands of brands, most grocery retail is controlled by a handful of chains. These companies decide which products get premium shelf space, which suppliers get contracts, and ultimately which farmers stay in business. The grocery store that feels like a marketplace is actually a carefully orchestrated system where a few powerful players control most of the outcomes.

Shelf Space Storytelling

In this landscape of managed abundance, brands face a brutal challenge: capturing a shopper’s attention in roughly two seconds with a few square inches of package real estate. The front of a package becomes prime territory where complex stories must be reduced to their simplest essence.

This is where nuance dies. A product made with heritage grains grown by a cooperative of small farmers using regenerative practices might simply become “ancient grains” on the front of the pack. The food system’s infinite complexity gets flattened into marketing slogans that prioritize emotional appeal over substantive information.

The grocery store environment itself works against deeper understanding. Hurried shoppers navigating fluorescent-lit aisles while juggling shopping lists and crying children aren’t in the mood for agricultural education. Those well-intentioned photos of smiling farmers become invisible wallpaper. The little signs explaining sustainable practices can’t compete with the thousands of other messages bombarding consumers.

This dynamic warps the entire system. Brands that master simple, powerful messaging thrive regardless of their actual practices. Those that try to communicate complicated truths often struggle to compete. Over time, the market rewards not the best food, but the best marketing. And consumers, hungry for real information but overwhelmed by choice, grab whatever package speaks most clearly to their immediate concerns.

The Geography of Access

The grocery store’s role as the food system’s public face becomes starkest when we map stores across different communities. In affluent areas, shoppers debate the merits of grass-fed versus grain-fed beef while sipping kombucha from the in-store café. Twenty miles away, families navigate Dollar Generals where the “fresh” section consists of a few bruised bananas by the register, if that.

This geographic apartheid in food access follows predictable patterns that mirror broader inequalities. Wealthy communities get full-service supermarkets with extensive produce sections, in-house nutritionists, and specialty departments. Poor communities get convenience stores and small grocers with limited selection and higher prices. The cruel irony is that those who could most benefit from affordable, nutritious food have the least access to it.

These disparities reveal how our food system distributes power. When some communities get full-service grocery stores while others are left with food deserts, we’re seeing the system’s priorities made visible. Profit drives location decisions, not nutrition or community need.

Yet alternatives are emerging that point toward different possibilities. Some retailers use profits from wealthy stores to subsidize locations in underserved areas. Mobile markets bring fresh produce directly to food deserts. Community-owned cooperatives keep food dollars circulating locally while ensuring democratic control over food access. These experiments reveal what’s possible when we design food distribution around community needs rather than just market logic.

The Collective Action Paradox

Every grocery shopper faces the same psychological trap: “I’m just one person. My choices don’t matter.” This thinking, perfectly rational at the individual level, becomes problematic when multiplied across millions of shoppers. It’s the same psychology that suppresses civic engagement more broadly—one voice rarely changes everything, but when everyone thinks this way, we get the outcomes we deserve by default.

History proves this pessimism wrong. The organic movement started with a handful of “health nuts” shopping at food cooperatives and farmers markets. Today, organic agriculture has transformed farming practices across millions of acres. Fair trade certification, once a niche concern, now influences supply chains for everything from coffee to cotton. These changes didn’t happen because any single shopper mattered, but because enough people decided their choices mattered collectively.

The grocery store makes this collective power visible in ways that other civic engagement doesn’t. When demand for organic produce increases, stores expand their organic sections within months. When shoppers ask for local products, buyers seek out regional suppliers. When customers demand better working conditions, retailers eventually respond. The feedback loops are faster and more direct than in traditional politics.

This responsiveness is both the grocery store’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness as a democratic institution. It can quickly amplify consumer preferences, but it also amplifies inequality. The preferences of wealthy shoppers get heard loudly and clearly, while the needs of poor communities go unmet. Recognizing the grocery store as both mirror and maker of our food system means grappling with this tension.

Practicing Food Citizenship

Grasping the grocery store as the food system’s most visible expression changes how we might approach our shopping. Instead of seeing ourselves as individual consumers optimizing for personal benefit, we can think of ourselves as food citizens participating in a collective system.

This starts with diversifying our food sources. Join a CSA for vegetables. Buy meat directly from local farmers. Purchase grains from cooperatives. Keep shopping at your grocery store for everything else. You’re not abandoning the mainstream system—you’re creating alternatives that keep the entire system more honest and resilient.

Within grocery stores, practice strategic engagement. Ask questions and make requests. Store managers notice when customers inquire about sourcing, suggest new products, or ask why certain items aren’t available. Be the person who asks for a bulk section, requests local suppliers, or suggests worker-owned brands. Individual requests might get dismissed, but patterns of customer interest drive purchasing decisions.

Focus your attention where it matters most. Organic certification has the biggest impact on the “dirty dozen” produce items with high pesticide residues. Fair trade certification matters most for products like coffee and chocolate where farmers typically receive tiny portions of retail prices. Local sourcing matters most for products that travel long distances and spoil quickly. Know where your choices make the biggest difference.

Support policy changes that address the grocery store’s limitations. Back ordinances that incentivize grocery stores in underserved areas. Support policies that make healthy food more affordable. Champion regulations that require clearer labeling about production practices. The market alone won’t fix systemic problems—we need public policies that can address market failures.

The Mirror and the Maker

The grocery store will never be perfect. It will always reflect compromises between efficiency and equity, convenience and sustainability, profit and purpose. But that’s exactly why it matters. The grocery store is both mirror and maker of our food system—it reflects our current priorities while shaping our future possibilities.

Unlike far off farms or corporate boardrooms, grocery stores are where we actually encounter the food system in our daily lives. They’re where abstract agricultural policies become concrete realities. They’re where supply chain decisions show up as empty shelves or abundant displays. They’re where our collective choices about what we value get tallied and sent back up the chain.

Recognizing the grocery store as the food system means taking responsibility for what we see there. The abundance and the inequality. The convenience and the hidden costs. The choices and the illusions. These aren’t just market outcomes—they’re collective creations that we sustain every time we shop.

We are not just shoppers navigating retail spaces. We are participants in a food system that we help create with every purchase. The grocery store is where that participation happens, where our individual choices become collective outcomes, where the future of food takes shape. Understanding this is the first step toward building the food system we actually want.

—

This essay was inspired by Mike Lee’s recent podcast episode “The Future of Grocery” on The Tomorrow Today Show. Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Mike was joined by guest co-host Melanie Bartelme from Mintel, and we spoke with Doug Scholz from the California Grocers Association, Cameron Gould Saltman (ex-TikTok Food & Beverage), Michael Robinov from Farm to People, and Errol Schweizer from The Checkout Grocery Update.

This post was originally published on Mike Lee’s wonderfully written and informational substack. You can find the post here. You should subscribe!

You can listen to the full conversation below.

The Future of Grocery

Nearly Seven Years After Launching Kickstarter, Silo Finally Delivers Next-Gen Home Food Storage System

In 2018, when I saw a company called Silo launch a crowdfunding campaign for a modern food storage system – essentially Tupperware for the digital age – I couldn’t resist. I pulled out my credit card and backed it.

Little did I know it would take nearly a decade for the product to show up at my doorstep. However, last month, I noticed that Silo had finally begun shipping to backers, and just last week, mine arrived.

So what took so long?

Like many hardware startups over the past five years, Silo ran into major headwinds. The first big hurdle was the pandemic, which prevented the team from traveling to China to oversee manufacturing. They also struggled to raise additional funding after one investor got cold feet and pulled out during COVID.

“When COVID erupted globally, I got a phone call saying, ‘Hey, listen, we’re not going to transfer the funds,’” Silo CEO Tal Lapidot told me in 2022.

Eventually, the company secured a new investor, and Lapidot reassembled a team to bring the product to market. Now, three years later, the product is finally shipping.

According to the company, units have been sent to all backers who completed their surveys, and Silo is now also selling the system on its website. When I backed the campaign in 2018, the entry price was a relatively low $199. Today, nearly seven years later, the base system, which features the vacuum seal unit, scale, and four storage containers, sells for $499. A 12-piece version goes for $649.

Early feedback from Kickstarter backers (those who didn’t request a refund) has been mixed to positive. One backer has even started a Facebook group for users. I’ll be testing mine soon and will share a full review in the coming weeks..

What Flavor Unlocks

Sustainable, healthy foods won’t win through guilt trips alone—they need to be irresistible.

Flavor is the most powerful force in our food system. Not nutrition labels, not health claims, not environmental impact. It’s flavor. It’s the gravitational force that decides what we eat, what gets produced, and what companies make billions from.

You know how I know this? Because entire industries exist purely because they figured out how to make food taste incredible, with no other redeemable attributes other than their taste. Chips, energy drinks, candy—these products don’t keep you healthy or feed you efficiently. They have little to contribute to a healthier agricultural system. Yet they exist because food scientists cracked the code on making your brain crave them. And it works. These companies rake in billions by hitting our pleasure buttons just right.

If junk food can build empires on taste alone, imagine what we could do with food that actually serves us.

The Business of Bliss

Every ingredient in a bag of chips is there for one reason: to trigger your reward system as hard as possible. Food scientists call these “bliss points“—the perfect mix of salt, fat, sugar, and crunch that makes your brain say “more.”

Companies making healthier or more sustainable foods face a different challenge. They’re working so hard on the nutrition, the sourcing, the environmental impact, that they can run out of bandwidth to make their products truly irresistible.

Many of these companies get so caught up in their metrics and mission that they lose objectivity about how their product tastes. They delude themselves into thinking their product is more delicious than it actually is. There’s almost an implicit assumption that the nutrition label or sustainable certifications it bears will get eaters to overlook that the thing might actually taste like shit. The result? Products that check all the right boxes on paper but fail the most basic test—do people actually want to eat them?

It’s noble to make food that’s healthy and sustainable, but the average eater can’t taste nobility. They need flavor. We need more brutal honesty about how our food tastes. Especially for the foods that are trying to create positive impact on the health of people and planet. Because if those aren’t also the foods that people crave, then that brand’s impact will never be realized. Flavor is the key to unlocking that impact.

The success of junk food actually shows us the path forward. Flavor isn’t the enemy of healthy eating—it’s the secret weapon we’re not using enough. Instead of fighting our love of delicious food, we should be making healthy food irresistible.

Breeding for Flavor

Dan Barber’s Row 7 Seed Company exemplifies this approach. By breeding vegetables primiarly for flavor first, Row 7 is doing what I think is one of the most important efforts in food today—closing the gap between artificially flavored junk food and real food.

The produce industry has spent decades inadvertently breeding the flavor out of basic vegetables to make them more compatible with the demands of industrial food supply chains. Carrots, potatoes, salad greens—most of what you find in supermarkets has been selected for everything except taste. Is it any wonder kids still have trouble eating their vegetables? We’ve created a food system where a bag of chips delivers more flavor excitement than a carrot and it doesn’t need to be that way.

Remember the first time you tried an in-season, heirloom tomato? I do. It completely scrambled my brain about the theoretical flavor potential of common produce. I felt like I was lied to by the mass tomato industry about how good these things could taste.That first bite was a revelation—sweet, acidic, and startlingly complex, as if I’d been eating tomato-flavored water my whole life. It made me think: what other foods had I been gaslit into accepting?

And how lucky was I to even discover this, when so many people go through life never knowing that vegetables don’t have to taste as bland as the specimens lining supermarket shelves? Of course, it’s not practical for everyone to spend $8 on an heirloom tomato—I get that this sounds like privileged foodie nonsense.

But what if we put the same energy into making vegetables irresistible that we put into perfecting snack foods? What impact would we have on the world getting people to eat more vegetables and fruits by showing them more delicious versions of things they didn’t think could be delicious? Imagine how much we could do to convince people to eat more real food if they understood there was a better, more delicious option waiting for them.

The Twilight of Universal Taste

It’s really hard to try and imagine what a critical mass of people can agree on is delicious anymore. In our increasingly fragmented society—split by culture, class, geography, and digital echo chambers—can we even create flavors that almost everyone agrees taste good? Flavor is so subjective and can often be altered by circumstance, mood, atmosphere, story, context, and a thousand other variables. This requires stepping outside your own taste preferences and imagining what deliciousness means to people from different backgrounds, with different genetics, different food histories.

A spice that seems mild to someone used to fresh, high-quality ingredients might taste intense to someone raised on processed food. Products designed for mass appeal often disappoint people looking for more complex flavors. The challenge is creating food that bridges these different flavor worlds without dumbing everything down to the lowest common denominator—but maybe that challenge is becoming impossible.

If this is true, then the basic assumption of Big Food—create standardized food for the masses—might be fundamentally eroding. Is it becoming a fool’s errand to try to make everyone happy? Perhaps the smarter play is to superserve the people we know who will really like something and forget about being everything to everyone. This shift is already slowly happening in our grocery store aisles, with endless micro-targeted products for specific dietary needs, cultural preferences, and lifestyle tribes.

But I wonder: could anyone create a company today from scratch with as much mass flavor appeal as Coca-Cola once had? Or are we living in the twilight of universal taste, where the future belongs not to products that unite us, but to those that divide us into ever-smaller, more satisfied tribes?

Making Virtue Irresistible

We’re facing huge challenges in the food system: climate change, public health crises, food security. Flavor is the key that unlocks the innate potential of any food to address these problems. The most promising food innovations aren’t asking people to sacrifice pleasure for virtue—they’re making virtuous choices more pleasurable.

Consider the groundbreaking work that Mette Johnsen, CEO of Spora, described in our interview. Spora is a global food research center that emerged from Copenhagen’s revolutionary restaurant Alchemist, bridging avant-garde gastronomy with food science. Her team tackled the 80 million tons of rapeseed cake left over annually after oil extraction—a protein-rich waste stream that looks “more like something you feed a rabbit” and tastes intensely bitter due to compounds that suppress nutrient absorption.

Through fermentation, they transformed this industrial byproduct into what Johnsen calls a “gold standard protein” that’s as nutritionally valuable as soy. The result is a versatile meat alternative that can be formed into burger patties, used in bolognese, or incorporated into spring salads now served at Alchemist.

While Alchemist itself remains a rarified dining experience—accessible to only a privileged few due to cost and location—operations like Spora represent something far more significant: innovation sandboxes where extensive resources and world-class talent can identify patterns of deliciousness that could eventually reach mainstream food channels. The same fermentation techniques perfecting rapeseed protein for Copenhagen’s culinary elite could one day inform products sold at McDonald’s or Walmart. These high-end laboratories serve as proving grounds for flavor breakthroughs that, once refined, can be scaled and democratized.

This illustrates a crucial principle: without solving the fundamental flavor problem first—making something genuinely delicious that people would choose repeatedly—the enormous potential for converting massive waste streams into human food could never have been realized. As Johnsen puts it, they put “deliciousness first” as the essential vehicle for sustainable food choices.

Everyone in the food industry says “it’s gotta taste good,” but how many are actually successful at doing that? The gap between intention and execution is enormous. Too many companies are in denial about how their products really taste compared to what’s already winning in the marketplace.

Sustainable foods won’t win through guilt trips alone—they have to win in the arena of immediate satisfaction. The most exciting food tech focuses on unlocking new flavors that were previously impossible: fermentation that creates entirely new tastes from food waste, growing techniques that concentrate flavor compounds, processing that preserves the sensory qualities usually lost in mass production.

These approaches recognize that flavor isn’t frivolous—it’s the fundamental force that determines which foods survive. Products that taste better don’t just sell better, they reshape eating patterns and ultimately determine the direction of our entire food system.

This essay was inspired by a conversation about The Future of Flavor on The Tomorrow Today Show, featuring host Mike Lee with guest co-host Ali Bouzari (food scientist and co-founder of Pilot R&D), Mario Ubiali (Founder of Thimus), Ori Zohar (Co-founder of Burlap & Barrel), and Mette Johnsen (CEO of Spora).

This post was originally published on Mike Lee’s wonderfully written and informational substack. You can find the post here. You should subscribe!

And you know what? You should also definitely subscribe to Mike’s new podcast, The Tomorrow Today Show, from the Spoon Podcast Network. You can listen to this episode about flavor below.

Starbucks Unveils Green Dot Assist, a Generative AI Virtual Assistant for Coffee Shop Employees

While most companies across the food value chain are embracing AI in some form, one major player that’s been notably quiet is Starbucks.

From mobile ordering to Web3 experiments, and computer vision-powered bioauthentication to automated drink-making, the Seattle-based coffee giant has never shied away from tooting its own hard about tech-forward initiatives. But when it came to generative AI, the most hyped tech trend of the past few years, Starbucks had kept relatively quiet, leaving many to wonder what it was working on and when it might reveal its plans.

That wait is over. This week, at a 14,000-employee conference in Las Vegas, the company unveiled Green Dot Assist, a generative AI-powered assistant designed to help baristas and store managers streamline their operations.

So, what is Green Dot Assist? In short, it’s a Microsoft Azure-powered virtual assistant currently being piloted in 35 Starbucks locations. The app assists with a range of tasks, from training new employees on how to prepare specific beverages to supporting shift managers with dynamic scheduling in response to real-time changes, such as last-minute call-outs.

Green Dot Assist even troubleshoots hardware issues. In a demo video shared by Starbucks, a barista named Dave uses the assistant to diagnose an espresso machine that’s pulling inconsistent shots. The AI provides 3D visual guides and prompts Dave to submit a service ticket—an experience that blends visual diagnostics with conversational support.

Packaged in an iPad app (apparently, Microsoft couldn’t convince the coffee chain to use Surface devices), Green Dot Assist combines training, support, and efficiency tools, all powered by Azure’s generative AI capabilities.

Given Starbucks’ longstanding emphasis on employee training, an AI-powered employee training guide and assistant makes sense. But my guess is this is just the beginning. In the longer term, I expect Starbucks to leverage AI to further enhance operational efficiency, particularly given the significant shift in order mix towards mobile ordering, which has led to increased wait times and customer frustration. This next wave will likely include more advanced automation, as we’ve already started to see with the chain’s push to roll out its Clover Vertica machine nationwide this year and – possible – a new point of sale system announced this week at the company’s employee conference.

Impulse Announces Its Battery-Integrated Cooktop Becomes First Certified to Applicable UL Safety Standards

While we’ve all become accustomed to battery-powered vehicles transporting us around town, the idea of battery-powered appliances is still a relatively new concept to most consumers.

But slowly but surely, startups making appliances with batteries built-in are jumping through the necessary hoops to bring these products to market in mainstream channels that will expose them to a broader audience.

The latest example of this is Impulse’s recent certification of its battery-integrated cooktop by Underwriters Laboratory (UL). The company announced that its range had met the UL 858 certification standard in a recent blog post. According to Impulse, UL 858 is the final UL certification needed to make their battery-powered induction cooktop compliant with all safety standards.

According to Impulse CEO Sam D’Amico, the company has logged thousands of hours working on hardware, software and manufacturing to reach this stage.

“It’s already insane to bring a new product to market, and doubly so if the compliance and regulatory environment *didn’t exist* at the start,” wrote D’Amico in a post on Linkedin. “But this is *required* to legally install. To do this, we had to develop a wholly new power electronics stack for battery-integrated appliances — including the highest performance induction drive system *ever built for a consumer device*. We then had to ensure it was safe under adverse conditions (maybe even deep frying a turkey).”

As D’Amico writes, this type of certification is required for installation by contractors and home builders. By surpassing this milestone, Impulse clears another hurdle to be in the mix when remodelers, home buyers, and their builders or contractors evaluate the products. As I mentioned earlier, most people are not yet aware that products are available that incorporate batteries to enhance performance and increase overall resilience.

Whether we’ll start seeing customers scoop up these types of products in the near future is yet to be seen, but this milestone no doubt clears a hurdle for many retailers to start promoting these products, which should result in greater consumer awareness of them.

After Leaving Starbucks, Mesh Gelman Swore Off The Coffee Biz. Now He Wants To Reinvent Cold Brew Coffee

Mesh Gelman didn’t set out to build a cold coffee company. In fact, when he left his role leading innovation at Starbucks, he didn’t want anything to do with coffee.

“I was interested in the left side of my email address and not the right side, the Gellman part, not the Starbucks part,” he told The Spoon. “I was like, okay, I’m gonna innovate and it’s not gonna be in coffee.”

That resolution lasted about six months.

Now, as founder and CEO of Cumulus Coffee, Gelman is back in the world he knows best, only this time he’s tackling what he sees as one of the most overlooked challenges in modern coffee: cold brew.

Cumulus is a countertop device that delivers nitro cold brew and cold espresso on demand, using a proprietary capsule system. It doesn’t require refrigeration or nitrogen tanks, and Gelman says it produces a café-quality drink in under 60 seconds.

“If we could deliver a premium experience every single time, better than café quality at the push of a button, why would you ever choose to go back?” said Gelman.

The epiphany that set Gelman on his journey to build a cold brew system came during a visit to Starbucks’ Roastery in Seattle, when he tried nitro cold brew for the first time. “I took one gulp of it, and I was like, my God, I’m gonna be in trouble. This is like full of dairy,” he said. “And the barista was like, ‘No, there’s nothing in it.’ It was a transformative experience.”

After three years of bootstrapping the product, Gelman raised funding, including a seed check from former boss Howard Schultz. In total, Cumulus has raised over $30 million.

For Gelman, the mission is clear: bring premium cold brew into the home and beyond.

“We need to take a step back and say, let’s delete everything we know and craft something for cold,” he said.

Cumulus has launched online and in select Williams-Sonoma stores and Gelman says they are targeting both consumer and commercial markets, including offices, cafés, and bars.

You can watch my full conversation with Gelman below or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Building a Home Cold Brew Coffee System with Mesh Gelman

Brian Canlis on Leaving an Iconic Restaurant Behind to Start Over in Nashville With Will Guidara

Brian Canlis didn’t expect to be in the restaurant business his whole life.

But as with so many family businesses – especially hugely successful ones like Canlis, which single-handedly put Pacific Northwest cuisine on the map – life and careers happen before we know it.

And there’s no doubt that the brothers Canlis, Brian and his brother Mark, have done a masterful job since taking the reins from their parents (who themselves inherited it from Peter Canlis, who started the restaurant back in 1950). Today, Canlis is as relevant and forward-thinking as ever, a rare achievement in an industry where even the most legendary restaurants often have a shelf life.

So after nearly two decades at the helm, it would have been easy (and expected) for Brian to continue leading the restaurant, enjoying the perks of running a world-famous dining institution perched above Seattle’s Lake Union. Instead, he decided it was time to blow it all up.

“When I became a restaurateur in my 20s, I was single and I tried on the shirt called running this restaurant—and it fit,” Canlis told me on the Reimagining Restaurants podcast. “Twenty years later, I have four small kids and the shirt doesn’t fit in the same way.”

So what does a new shirt that fits his 40-something life a little better look like? As revealed in February in the New York Times, it’s a new chapter in Nashville, where he’s joining forces with his best friend from college, Will Guidara—co-founder of Eleven Madison Park and author of Unreasonable Hospitality—on an open-ended creative partnership.

The two have been close since freshman orientation and even worked together in New York during a brief sabbatical Brian took in 2013. Now, they’re reuniting, potentially for the long-term, but with a little ‘try-it-before-you-buy it’ twist: “We said, ‘Let’s date before we get married’,” Canlis said. “Let’s just work together for a year and see what happens.”

The move reflects more than just professional curiosity—it’s rooted in a desire to be more present as a father and partner, and to explore what work and life can look like when untethered from legacy.

“I started to grow an imagination for what it would look like to have a career where I could be more present to these kiddos every day,” he said. “Where I could exercise a different piece of my brain, and maybe move closer to my wife’s family.”

Leaving wasn’t an easy decision, but it was one supported wholeheartedly by his brother and business partner, Mark.

“He said, ‘You should only be working here as long as you are flourishing as a human,’” Brian said. “‘Our values are only our values if they cost us something.’”

That ethos – prioritizing people over plates – is the red thread throughline of Brian’s journey. Whether it was converting Canlis into a burger drive-thru during the pandemic or hosting wild, pink-painted Barbie-themed fundraisers, the Canlis brothers infused hospitality with heart and a willingness to take creative risks.

Their guiding principle? That a restaurant should be a place where people are inspired to turn toward each other.

“We’re not in the food business,” Brian told me. “We’re in the people business.”

As for what comes next, Brian is embracing the uncertainty. He and Will haven’t put anyting in concrete just yet, just an agreement to explore new ideas and opportunities in hospitality, with Nashville as their testing ground.

It’s a leap. But then again, so was opening the first restaurant in Seattle with a liquor license in 1950. So was putting a fine-dining spot on a cliff above Lake Union. So was painting the walls pink.

Turns out, reinvention runs in the family.

You can watch my full conversation Brian below or find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or where you listen to podcasts.

Brian Canlis on Leaving an Iconic Restaurant Behind to Start Over in Nashville With Will Guidara

Food Waste Gadgets Can’t Get VC Love, But Kickstarter Backers Are All In

It’s a mystery (kinda). While traditional venture and strategic capital haven’t shown much enthusiasm for backing food waste-fighting technology, the category is thriving on crowdfunding site Kickstarter.

Two current campaigns, in particular, are crushing it, blowing past their initial funding targets with weeks still to go.

First up is the Shelfy Lite, the second fridge gadget from Italian startup Vitesy. The campaign has already raised over $300,000, more than ten times its original goal of around $28,000.

How Shelfy Lite's technology works

The Shelfy Lite works similarly to the original Shelfy (which I wrote about here), using a ceramic filter to purify fridge air and capture bacteria. The company claims that the pollutants are not just mechanically retained, but also destroyed, through a process called photocatalysis. This new version is smaller and more affordable, with a retail price of €100 (currently available at a 30%+ discount during the campaign). While the original Shelfy earned mixed reviews on its Kickstarter page, that hasn’t stopped even more backers from jumping onboard for the latest iteration.

Now on Kickstarter: Ion 2.0: Saves Money, Reduces Food Waste, Helps The Planet

The other gadget that’s tracking towards a successful campaign is the Ion 2, another fridge gadget promising to extend the life of your food. Like the Shelfy, it claims to purify the air, but it does so by filtering water through a silver-coated filter to ionize the air. The creators say this ionized air kills bacteria while remaining safe for humans at low concentrations.

I can’t speak to whether the Ion 2 will work as promised, but it’s clearly resonating with backers: more than 400 people have supported the campaign, which has raised over $68,000—nearly 20 times its original goal of just $3,500..

Meanwhile, the broader home food waste reduction category, from next-gen fridges to reimagined Tupperware, continues to struggle to attract venture investment. Part of the challenge is that most VCs aren’t interested in consumer hardware. But the problem seems deeper than that: few investors appear willing to bet big on fighting food waste.

Take the Tomorrow Fridge. The company shut down in April after failing to raise enough capital. CEO Andrew Kinzer shared the challenges in a candid LinkedIn post:

“When we set out to build a next-generation fridge—one that could extend the life of your fresh produce, reduce waste, and help make healthier eating easier—we knew we were taking on an ambitious challenge,” wrote Kinzer. “Unfortunately, the current climate for consumer hardware—especially for capital-intensive, science-forward products like ours—has made it incredibly difficult to bring something like this to life.”

Tomorrow is just the latest in a line of startups that have struggled to survive, including Silo, Ovie, and even Tupperware, which faced difficulty attracting strategic investment as its financial health declined.

Some might point to Mill as a rare example of traditional investors backing a food waste company. While technically true, I see Mill more as a waste management solution, at least until they launch something that prevents food waste (which I suspect they eventually will). The need for waste management is, in a sense, a validation of the significance of the problem for everyday consumers and the broader food industry.

So does the success of Shelfy and Ion 2 signal a shift? Maybe, but I’m still skeptical. Their success appears to be largely tied to the fact that both creators are veterans of the crowdfunding space, with proven records of launching hardware products in adjacent categories.

Still, you never know. With consumers feeling the pinch of higher grocery bills, the demand for ways to stop throwing money into the compost bin is growing. Perhaps, just perhaps, that rising interest will finally push more investors and founders to take consumer food waste seriously.

Report: Restaurant Tech Funding Drops to $1.3B in 2024, But AI & Automation Provide Glimmer of Hope

After a multi-year boom fueled by the rise of delivery apps and the broader digital transformation of the restaurant industry, venture capital flowing into restaurant tech has sharply slowed, according to a new report from PitchBook.

The report, titled Q2 2025 Tech Landscape: Restaurant Technology, shows that total VC funding in the space dropped to just $1.3 billion in 2024, down from a peak of $14.5 billion in 2018. Restaurant tech accounted for only 12% of total food tech venture investment in 2024, compared to a commanding 60% in 2018.

Restaurant tech’s shrinking share of food tech investment isn’t entirely surprising, given the maturation of delivery marketplaces, a sector that drew a wave of generalist investors during the 2010s. As once-scrappy startups like DoorDash, Deliveroo, and Grubhub evolved into established players and opportunities in the delivery space dwindled, many of those tourist investors moved on.

Still, PitchBook sees pockets of opportunity in restaurant tech, particularly around AI and automation. The report highlights emerging tools that use AI for personalized marketing, demand forecasting, and operational efficiency. AI-powered, human-language interfaces are also gaining traction, with companies like Hi Auto, ConverseNow, and Slang AI bringing automation to drive-thrus and phone-based ordering. Major chains such as Wendy’s and Yum! Brands are doubling down on these systems, even as McDonald’s recently pulled back from its AI ordering pilot and its experimental beverage-focused brand.

PitchBook is cautiously optimistic about robotics and automation in restaurants, a sector that has seen high-profile flameouts like Zume. According to the report, the market has shifted from startups trying to build full-stack systems to more targeted point solutions being tested and deployed by established players. Companies like Hyphen and Miso Robotics are among those providing modular automation tools now being adopted by operators.

On the consumer-facing side, startups focused on guest management and loyalty platforms have also emerged as bright spots for investors. Blackbird Labs and Dorsia each raised $50 million in early 2025, while SevenRooms announced a notable exit with a $1.2 billion acquisition by DoorDash.

Looking ahead, PitchBook expects deal flow to remain measured. The restaurant industry’s notoriously thin margins—combined with ongoing economic uncertainty—will likely keep tourist VCs on the sidelines. However, startups that leverage AI and automation to drive operational efficiency are expected to continue drawing investor interest.

Don’t Forget to Tip Your Robot: Survey Shows Diners Not Quite Ready for AI to Replace Humans

If you’ve eaten out much over the past couple of years, chances are you’ve experienced a growing number of dining experiences that use AI and automation. Restaurants across the U.S. and worldwide are adopting artificial intelligence and automation at the drive-thru, in the kitchen, at the register, and other parts of the business.

But how do diners feel about this shift? According to a new survey report from Dynata and restaurant tech startup Par Technology Corp., most consumers aren’t quite ready for a full AI takeover of their dining experience.

The online survey, fielded in March 2025 with 1,000 U.S. respondents, revealed that while a slim majority of diners are comfortable with restaurants using some AI to improve efficiency, most aren’t ready to hand the reins entirely to robots.

Figure 1: Do you believe AI should replace human restaurant workers if the technology provides more efficient service?

Source: Dynata/Par Technology, March 2025

According to the results, 52% of respondents are open to a limited use of AI in restaurants, but only 26% support AI fully replacing human workers. Age plays a significant role in attitudes: just 3% of Baby Boomers and 9% of Gen Xers strongly agree that AI should replace humans. In contrast, Gen Z and Millennials show slightly more openness, with 17% and 16% respectively strongly agreeing with the idea, but only if the technology improves efficiency. Still, half of Gen Z (49%) and Millennials (51%) somewhat or strongly disagree with replacing humans altogether.

Gender differences also stood out in the findings. Men (33%) were nearly twice as likely as women (17%) to support AI replacing restaurant workers.

For restaurants planning to ramp up AI and automation, the survey suggests you might want to tread carefully. One-third of respondents (33%) said they’ve already avoided restaurants that relied too heavily on self-service tech, and another 26% said they haven’t yet, but might in the future if tech use becomes excessive.

Finally, are diners ready to tip their robot server? The majority are not on board. According to the survey, 56% said they would not tip an AI system, while 22% said they might consider it, especially if the service was exceptional or if some portion of the tip went to human staff.

You can see the full results here.

A Week in Rome: Conclaves, Coffee, and Reflections on the Ethics of AI in Our Food System

Last week, I was in Rome at the Vatican for a workshop on the ethical and social implications of artificial intelligence and automation in our food system.

The workshop was part of an ongoing three-year NIH-funded project focused on the ethics of AI in food. It took place at the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, the same institution that played a pivotal role in 2020 in getting Microsoft, IBM, and others to sign the Rome Call for AI Ethics, a cross-sector commitment to develop AI that “serves every person and humanity as a whole; that respects the dignity of the human person.”

I was invited to provide an overview of AI in the food system to help set the stage for the day’s conversations, which featured Michelin-starred chefs, Catholic priests, journalists, authors, and professors specializing in ethics, artificial intelligence, and more. I walked through some of the developments I’ve seen across the food system—in agriculture, next-gen food product development, restaurants, and the home. As I wrote recently for The Spoon, today “every major food brand has made significant investments — in people, platforms, products — as part of the AI-powered transformation.”

I posed questions like: What happens when AI dictates what we eat? Or if it engineers the “perfect sandwich”—something so addictive it floods demand and strains supply chains, as Mike Lee has imagined? What does it mean when a company builds a proprietary food AI trained on global culinary data? Does that dataset become the intellectual property of one corporation? And if AI can tailor nutrition down to the molecule, who controls those insights?

These are not just technical questions. They’re questions with deep implications for humanity.

One thing was clear throughout the day: everyone in the room recognized both the promise of AI as a tool for addressing complex challenges in the food system, and the risks posed by such a powerful, society-shaping technology. Among the questions raised: How do we balance the cultural and inherently human-centered significance of food—growing it, preparing it, sharing it at the family dinner table—with the use of AI and automation across kitchens, farms, and wellness platforms?

Above: The signed Rome Call for AI Ethics

As some attendees expressed, there’s a growing concern that the “soul” of food—its role in connection, tradition, and creativity—could be lost in a world where AI plays a central role.

For obvious reasons, being at The Vatican and in Rome at this time was a bit surreal, as the two days of the workshop and the Vatican came during the same week that the College of Cardinals gathered to select the next Pope after last month’s passing of Pope Francis.

As we wrapped up our discussions, the Conclave began. And just as I was leaving Rome, white smoke rose from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel, signaling that a new pope had been chosen.

In his first address, Pope Leo XIV made it clear that he is thinking deeply about AI’s role in society, so much so that he chose his name in homage to a previous pope who guided the Church through an earlier technological upheaval.

“… I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII, in his historic encyclical Rerum Novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.”

Also present at the workshop was our friend Sara Roversi, founder of the Future Food Institute. The Spoon and Future Food Institute co-founded the Food AI Co-Lab, a monthly virtual forum where experts across disciplines explore the intersection of food and AI.

Sara, Tiffany McClurg from The Spoon, and I grabbed coffee at a small café in Rome to reflect on the workshop and what it means for our ongoing work. We launched the Food AI Co-Lab in early 2024 as a space to gather our communities and talk through how AI is impacting the food system. So far, much of the conversation has focused on education—helping people understand what AI is and how to thoughtfully implement it in their organizations.

But we all agreed: the world has changed rapidly since we began. Nearly everyone is now seriously considering how to integrate AI into their companies, institutions, or personal lives. And so, the Co-Lab needs to evolve too. Our hour-long sessions, often featuring guest speakers, have been great for tracking innovation, but now it’s time to elevate the conversation. Ethics. Labor. Equity. Sustainability. These aren’t side topics—they’re central to how AI will shape the future of food.

If the world feels more chaotic than ever, one thing is certain: we need to prepare for faster, more unpredictable change. At the first workshop two years ago, most attendees were just learning about AI. There was plenty of fear about a runaway system invading the food chain.

Today, there’s greater recognition that AI is inevitable and that it can be a powerful tool for solving some of the food system’s most complex problems. There was even a bit more optimism this time.

But above all, there’s a clear understanding that we still have a long road ahead to strike the right balance: embracing AI as a tool while preserving what makes food so deeply human, so critical to our culture, communities, and shared existence.

You can learn more about the Food AI Ethics project led by Cal Poly at San Luis Obispo [here]. If you’d like to join us for future Food AI Co-Lab events, you can sign up via our LinkedIn Group or The Spoon Slack. We’ll keep you updated on upcoming events and speakers.

How ReShape is Using AI to Accelerate Biotech Research

“Biology is so complex, it’s like the most complex piece of technology in the entire world,” said Carl-Emil Grøn. “There’s nothing that’s remotely close. You start from one cell and then you grow into a Michael Wolf who’s now hosting a podcast together with me. That is crazy when you think about it.”

When this former single-cell turned human podcaster caught up with the CEO of ReShape Biotech this past week on The Spoon Podcast, Grøn’s excitement over the miracle of biology and biotech was palpable. But he made it clear that wasn’t always the case. In fact, when he first saw his university friends building a tiny robot for a biotech professor, he told them it was a waste of time.

“I was sure this was not something anybody would need,” Grøn recalled. “But then I started getting a little bit curious about it.”

That curiosity eventually led him to co-found Reshape Biotech, a Copenhagen-based startup that’s automating the slow, manual processes still common in biological research. While new technologies like automation and AI have transformed fields like software and transportation, Grøn saw that many biotech labs were still stuck in the past.

“We have self-driving cars and AI tools that can do crazy things, but biotech workflows look kind of like 1990.”

Reshape’s platform combines robotics, computer vision, and machine learning to help food and biotech companies run hundreds of thousands of lab experiments. The ReShape system uses cameras to monitor petri dish experiments, running AI-powered image analysis on mold growth or bacterial reactions, and helping researchers rapidly test natural preservatives, food dyes, and more. This means research that once took months or years can now be done in days or weeks.

“We have this one company that used to do between like 800 and 1000 experiments per year,” Grøn said. “Whereas with our platform, they’re running more than 450 thousand every single year. So you get this like complete step change difference in how much you can actually do.”

That kind of increase in throughput is becoming more critical as food companies face new pressures, whether that’s from consumers demanding clean labels to a new administration looking to restrict artificial ingredients.

“Nowadays, they (food companies) are going to have to do it right,” he said. “When regulatory pressure comes to push, you have to do it.”

Grøn believes the companies that embrace AI and automation today will have a major advantage tomorrow.

“If we do this well, these companies will be set up to basically take the lead on developing new products in the future,” he said. “They will be the ones who have the data that’s necessary to make AI models that actually work.”

As a startup, Grøn says ReShape is focused on getting their tools into the hands of big players like Unilever and Nestlé, but long-term he has a broader vision, which is to open up the world of biotech data to help make companies big and small more productive.

“My dream, maybe one day, is to open source all of this data and just make it available to the world,” he said. “Because I do think the world needs something like this.”

Grøn was vague on when exactly that would happen, as he said first he has a few constituencies (like his investors) which he needs to serve first. But over the long term, he’s excited about the possibilities.

If you’d like to listen to my full conversation with Grøn, you can click play below, or find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Future of Biotech Discovery in the Age of AI