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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

How Eva Goulbourne Turned Her ‘Party Trick’ Into a Career Building Sustainable Food Systems

Eva Goulbourne didn’t study food systems in college – she studied the Cold War, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and art history – but her lifelong obsession with food would eventually shape a career that’s taken her across the globe and put her at the center of the global food systems transformation conversation.

I recently caught up with Eva for an episode of The Spoon Podcast to talk about her journey and hear more about her vision for her new podcast, Everything But the Carbon Sink.

“I started subscribing to Martha Stewart Living Magazine when I was about seven or eight,” Goulbourne told me. “What can’t you learn about food systems from Martha Stewart?” That early curiosity became a foundation for what she describes as a “very long-term relationship with food,” one that she would eventually channel into a mission-driven career.

After a short stint at the U.S. State Department, Goulbourne took a job focused on financial services for tobacco farmers in Kenya and Malawi. “That was again like a continued access point to agriculture [and] international development,” she said. The project, funded by Nike Foundation, MasterCard Foundation, and Gates Foundation, introduced her to the role of philanthropy in market development — a theme that would shape her later work.

Her next big step came with the World Economic Forum, where she landed a role on the food security and agriculture team. “That was really, like I was saying, I was off to the races in terms of having access and understanding and helping to facilitate entire regional projects with agribusinesses, the largest retailers in the world, seed companies, fertilizer companies, ministers of agriculture and development banks.”

Goulbourne describes this period (the era after the launch of the UN Sustainable Development Goals) as a pivotal moment when “purpose and profit could very much actually win.” She witnessed corporate leaders, such as Unilever’s Paul Polman, bring ‘net positive’ thinking to global food policy discussions.

But eventually, she wanted to go deeper. “I was really itching to become an expert… I couldn’t be the Jane of all trades.” That itch led her to ReFED, where she became employee number one and helped turn a landmark food waste report into a full-fledged organization. “We didn’t know if anybody was gonna read this thing,” she recalled. “And boy, we didn’t know… hoping that people would receive it well.”

The report was a hit, and Goulbourne stayed on to help raise over a million dollars in philanthropic funding to grow ReFED. But after a few years, a new motivation emerged: motherhood. “I found out I was pregnant… and immediately had this maternal instinct to do more and do something to now protect the planet, the environment, society… So that’s why Littlefoot is called Littlefoot.”

With her consulting firm, Littlefoot Ventures, Eva has guided food brands, startups, and philanthropists through everything from food loss strategies to regenerative ag and capital deployment. “I sort of call food waste a chameleon issue,” she said. “My party trick is that it doesn’t matter what part of the food supply chain you mention, I can convince you and have some access point back to food waste.”

It’s this broad view is that makes Eva such a great podcast host. Her new podcast, Everything but the Carbon Sink, focuses on the intersection of food, climate, and finance , as well as the tough and thorny challenges that prevent progress.

Eva calls these thorny issues no one wants to talk about the ‘ugly baby’ problems.

“For Everything but the Carbon Sink, I decided to have the podcast be focused on this intersection of food… to climate… and then finance, because to answer your question about the ugly baby, how do we pay for this stuff? Why is it so damn hard?”

One thing I noticed about Eva is she works with pretty much every continsituency in the food system innovation. Through her consulting work and now her podcast, Goulbourne is trying to help stakeholders across sectors, from venture capitalists to philanthropists, understand that substantial systems change requires coordinated investment. “You can’t VC your way out of this problem,” she said. “Our food system runs on harvest seasons and weather, and we’re working against and with the climate crisis.”

If you are interested in food system innovation, reducing food waste, or building a career in mission-based investing and fundraising, you are going to want to listen to this episode and subscribe to Eva’s podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can also watch our conversation below.

Blended Capital, Big Impact: Funding the Food System Change With Eva Goulbourne

Combustion Acquires Recipe App Crouton

Combustion, the smart thermometer startup founded by ChefSteps cofounder Chris Young, has acquired popular recipe app Crouton.

Crouton, developed by New Zealand-based software engineer Devin Davies, is a highly rated app that lets users organize all their recipes in one place. After launch, Crouton soon began gaining traction and critical attention (Apple awarded the app its 2024 Design Award for Interaction). Like many independent developers who experience success, Davies soon found himself having to manage the business side of running a startup—something he realized wasn’t aligned with his strengths.

“One thing I’ve come to realise about myself over the last wee while, is that what I care about most is designing interfaces that make it as easy as possible to get things done. User experience and what not,” wrote Davies in a blog post announcing the acquisition. “I’m not an entrepreneur or keen business leader. Stepping into full time indie and really trying to steer the ship highlighted to me just how much that jazz isn’t me. I actually really enjoy being just a part of the puzzle, not the whole puzzle.”

Davies had discovered Combustion’s open-source developer tools and had integrated the thermometer with Crouton. That work caught the attention of Young and the Combustion team.

“A year or so earlier, I had added support to Crouton to quickly set up the thermometer and also display its information as a Live Activity alongside your recipe. I jumped at the opportunity to collaborate and spent a few weeks working with Combustion to bring Live Activity support to their app like I had with Crouton.”

Before long, Young and Davies realized it made sense to join forces.

For Young, it’s clear that moves he’s made since starting Combustion – including acquiring Crouton – are based on insights he learned the hard way after building ChefSteps. At his previous company, Young spent millions of dollars creating expensive media-rich recipes for the ChefSteps website and the Joule sous vide app, only to eventually realize most consumers preferred finding recipes on the open web. With Crouton now in the fold, Young’s is now letting organic consumer usage behavior guide his product rather than trying to force behavior change on the consumer.

Young also learned his lesson with the ChefSteps Joule, where any software integration required resource-draining custom work. From the get-go with Combustion, he opened up access to the device’s real-time Bluetooth, which allowed developers, like Davies, to build cool software experiences around the Combustion thermometer.

Post-acquisition, Crouton will remain a standalone site, and Davies will lead both the development of Crouton and the Combustion app. For Davies, it seems like the perfect fit.

“So what is changing? Well, kind of nothing. I’m still very dedicated to Crouton and its future just got a lot brighter! I’ll still be the lead developer but now Crouton is backed by a whole team. A team with a deep knowledge of cooking and technology, that will help Crouton do even more! “

Next-Gen Fridge Startup Tomorrow Shuts Down

Fridge startup Tomorrow will not live to see another day.

Last week, founder Andrew Kinzer cited the difficult funding environment for hardware startups and the headwinds around the uncertainty in tariffs in a post on LinkedIn.

I knew this would be a massive challenge. Consumer hardware is notoriously difficult, and solving shelf-life extension would require a scientific leap. I understood then that I could swing and miss, but I always felt that if I did, I could still be proud I gave it a shot.

In the end, though, timing is everything. Right now — maybe more than at any point in the past decade — consumer hardware is a tough sell for investors, and fluctuating tariffs only add more risk to the equation.

The company’s website also features a going-out-of-business message, citing the same reasons Andrew did in his post and thanking those who helped out along the way:

After much consideration, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Tomorrow.

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.

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.

Though we won’t be moving forward, we’re deeply proud of the work we did and grateful for the community that rallied around our vision.

To everyone who signed up, supported us, or offered guidance: thank you.

When I first covered Tomorrow last year, I was admittedly excited to see a new company take a shot at reimagining such a moribund category. How we store food hasn’t seen nearly as much innovation around how we grow, cook, shop and make food, and so any new startup taking a shot was a good thing as far as I was concerned.

It’s hard to say whether Tomorrow would have succeeded if they had been able to raise funding, in part because I’m not sure exactly what the company’s key technology differentiation was. That’s because the company kept their product details close to their vest, pointing to its intention to keep fresh food fresher longer, leveraging AI and other technologies when asked about specifics.

I can also say I’m not surprised by the reasoning behind the shutdown. Hardware is a hard category to build a business in normal times. Throw in tariffs, which would no doubt complicate the supply chain and manufacturing strategy of a refrigerator startup, and significantly raise the final price of the product. Creating an entirely new product in this space almost becomes a fool’s errand, at least in the current environment (which is also probably why raising funding for this company proved extremely difficult).

From Starday to Shiru to Givaudan, AI Is Now Tablestakes Across the Food Value Chain

Back in the early days of the cloud computing revolution, my former employer, GigaOM, hosted perhaps the biggest and most influential conference on the topic called STRUCTURE.

One of the phrases that has stuck with me from those days is “data is the new oil,” which I heard declared from the STRUCTURE stage more than a handful of times. At the time, big data technologies were leveraging machine-learning-driven analytics tools to create new correlations and insights from disparate datasets faster than ever before. Those who controlled the data — and could mine it effectively — wielded enormous power.

Now, nearly two decades into the cloud era and three years after the AI “big bang” sparked by the launch of ChatGPT, those early days seem almost quaint by comparison. New AI-powered tools and companies are emerging every day. While much of the “data is the new oil” rhetoric back then felt like spin, today we’re seeing real, transformative progress, especially in new product development.

Food is no exception.

Take the news from Shiru this past week. The company, which uses AI to sort through plant-based food building blocks, announced that it had scaled its first AI-discovered products: OleoPro and uPro. These new approaches to identifying proteins — particularly oleogel structurants (structured fat systems) — are designed to support large-scale production.

As Shiru CEO Jasmin Hume put it:

“This moment is a turning point not just for Shiru, but for the food industry. Even though oleogels have been explored for years (there are over 500 publications on them in the last decade), commercially scaled examples have been elusive — until now. Our AI platform helped us identify the right proteins, but that was only part of the story. Our team then engineered a scalable and entirely new process for producing those proteins with the precise performance attributes required to succeed in real-world formulations.”

But it’s not just next-generation ingredient discovery. New CPG brands are also using AI to decipher early consumer signals and connect the dots before anyone else can launch the next big product. One example is Starday, a startup that recently raised $11 million. Starday uses AI to sift through millions of data points from social media feeds, surveys, point-of-sale data, and more to identify emerging opportunities in food that could lead to future hits.

“Imagine if you had 10,000 consumer insights folks that are watching every video on internet, typing up what’s being said, tagging it, and then kind of building these regression models around how these trends are happening,” said Starday CEO Chaz Flexman in a recent interview with The Spoon. “We’re trying to do that on steroids. We take in about 10 million pieces of content every week, which is very significant.”

In the early big data heyday, companies could look at things like trending tweet mentions. Today, companies like Starday are able to dive into video content, extract context much faster, and build predictive intelligence to guide new product development.

Shiru and Starday are just two examples making headlines recently about how AI is reshaping the food industry. Others are innovating across different parts of the food value chain — from manufacturing optimization (Keychain) to intelligent automation (Chef Robotics), all the way back to the farm with companies like Agtonomy.

Even century-old flavor companies are getting into the act. This past week, Givaudan announced Myromi, a handheld digital aroma delivery device that leverages an AI platform called ATOM.

In short, AI is enabling both startups and established players to move much faster.

And they’re going to have to. In the current MAHA moment in the US, companies are urgently reevaluating ingredient lists and being forced to replace ingredients like food dyes and sugars. This new urgency is adding to what many had already been doing as they see climate change slowly but surely impacting how and what they can source for their products.

Back in 2010, there was a lot of talk about using big data to create better products, but no one was seriously using AI to build food products at that point (heck, Watson, after all, hadn’t even become a chef.) Today, every major food brand has made significant investments — in people, platforms, products — as part of the AI-powered transformation.

In other words, if data is the new oil, it’s now clear that AI is the engine of innovation that is accelerating and driving change across every part of the food system.

Andrew Simmons Shares Lessons Learned as He Launches New Pizza Subscription Platform

A couple of years ago, Andrew Simmons had big plans for his restaurant subscription business.

And why not? After experimenting with a wide range of technologies in a San Diego-area pizza restaurant, Simmons had launched a pizza subscription model that helped him generate $30,000 in a single-day Black Friday sale. Confident in his approach, he figured he could replicate the model in new markets.

But as it turns out, expansion proved more difficult than expected. According to Simmons, the challenge wasn’t the technology or the concept of subscriptions; it was moving too quickly into markets where his restaurants hadn’t yet built relationships with local diners.

“We believed that the pizza subscription program would carry us through,” said Simmons. “But when you move into a brand new market where nobody knows your brand, it doesn’t really matter what you’re offering until people have a chance to try your food and try it for a while.”

The subscription idea was simple: sell a year’s worth of pizza upfront. Customers could purchase a plan, like $197 for 52 pizzas, and redeem one each week. It created recurring revenue and served as a buffer against unpredictable walk-in traffic.

While the concept didn’t translate as well in new locations, Simmons believes it could work for restaurant operators who already have a strong local following. That’s why he’s launched a new venture and website to help established restaurants offer their own subscription plans.

He says the key to a successful subscription business goes beyond the initial funding. Operators need to manage the funds wisely, track redemptions and subscriber communications, and plan inventory accordingly. His new platform is designed to handle all of that.

“This is crowdfunding meets foodservice,” Simmons said. “You raise money upfront, but you also take on the responsibility to deliver that product across 52 weeks. You have to be smart. Or you’ll crash the car.”

You can listen to my full conversation with Andrew to hear about his plans for his subscription business below or on The Spoon Podcast.

Andrew Simmons Reflects on Past Year, Talks New Pizza Subscriptions Platform

Join Us Today as We Discuss How Artificial Intelligence Will Impact Culinary Creation

Admit it: you’ve probably played around with making recipes using AI. At this point, most of us have.

If you’re like me, the early results were… rough. But over time, general-purpose LLMs have become surprisingly good at whipping up recipes. Still, there’s a long way to go before AI becomes a true sous chef in our kitchens, and plenty of questions remain about where this is all going.

To help us explore what’s next in this month’s edition of our Food AI Co-Lab, we’re joined by two people who’ve been working at the intersection of AI and cooking for nearly a decade: James Briscione and Lav Varshney, co-creators of Chef Watson—the world’s first culinary AI. Their latest project, CulinAI, is an AI-powered app designed to create personalized meal plans.

Want to join the conversation, ask questions, and see where AI cooking is headed? Register for today’s Food AI Co-Lab here.

Introducing The Tomorrow Today Show With Mike Lee

Back in 2017, I wrote a story exploring the idea of personalized food profiles. The piece explored whether, someday, we might walk into restaurants, shop at the grocery store, or have dinner at a friend’s house and be able to communicate our food preferences and dietary restrictions in advance, shaping our entire meal journey accordingly.

The inspiration for that article came from Mike Lee, who had just spoken at our Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle that October. During his talk, he introduced the idea of a “food passport” that could someday help personalize food experiences wherever we go. I had gotten to know Mike through his work at The Future Market, where he developed a concept store of the future for the Fancy Food Show. It didn’t take long for me to realize that Mike has a rare ability to imagine the many possible futures of our food system and to understand how technology and social change might intersect to bring those futures to life.

However, it wasn’t until he published his book Mise: On the Future of Food that I fully appreciated the breadth of his thinking and the ways he can masterfully get his ideas across. In Mise, Mike not only describes big potential technologies and changes we will wrestle with in the future, but he gave us stories of how these changes might unfold in our lives.

In short, Mike is not only skilled at identifying early signals and trends, but he’s also a master of using storytelling to illustrate how these futures might unfold, which is why I’m super excited to welcome his new show to The Spoon Podcast Network: The Tomorrow Today Show.

In his new podcast, Mike takes listeners on a weekly deep dive into the future of food, whether it’s restaurants, farming, consumer products, nutrition, or even food hedonism. Each episode features long-form conversations that go beyond surface-level takes, offering nuanced insights from some of the most thoughtful voices in the industry.

In this first episode, The Future of Restaurants, Mike has a roundtable conversation with Kristen Hawley (Expedite), Elizabeth Tilton (Oyster Sunday), David Rodolitz (Flyfish Club), and yours truly. We explore everything from the role of empathy in hospitality to why chefs are trading molecular gastronomy for comfort food like pot pies.

Season one is launched, and you can watch the first episode below or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to subscribe, rate and review!

Mike is my guest on this week’s episode of The Spoon Podcast, so make sure to listen to that as well to hear a little more about Mike’s background.

The Future of Restaurants

ClearCOGS Raises $3.8M its AI-Powered Forecasting Software That Helps Restaurants Reduce Waste

AI-powered restaurant forecasting startup ClearCOGS has raised $3.8 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by Closed Loop Partners, with participation from Myriad Venture Partners and Hearst’s Level Up Ventures. The funding includes $2.3 million in new capital and the conversion of $1.4 million in pre-seed investments. The company’s software provides predictive analytics to assist operators in making decisions around food prep, ordering, and staffing, with an emphasis on reducing food waste and improving operational efficiency.

Company CEO Matt Wampler told The Spoon that he came up with the idea of ClearCOGS during the pandemic. He’d been being laid off and was exploring coding and analytics, when he discovered his cousin who ran a Jimmy John’s franchise was still using a decade-old Excel forecast. Wampler wondered if AI could help create a better predicitve forecasting tool, and before long he had teamed up with Osa Osarenkhoe to build a solution that uses machine learning and time-series forecasting that currover 100 million data points a day.

When ClearCOGS participated in our first virtual Food AI Summit a couple of years ago, Osa and Matt had started experimenting with leveraging large language models (LLMs) like those from OpenAI to create an interface for their forecasting tool. I asked Matt how those experiments with LLMs had gone.

“We did a whole big thing with it… It didn’t go well,” said Wampler. “And it wasn’t from a technical standpoint. It was from the standpoint of the restaurant brands we were talking to… they were like, ‘Look, my general manager can either just get on and play with your AI bot and it’ll tell them, or you can just send it to them? Just send it to them.’”

Wampler said the LLM interface wasn’t the problem. It was just that operators didn’t want to interact with it at all. Instead, they just wanted the answers delivered to them, simply and directly, through email and integrations with solutions from Toast or SevenRooms. This experience reaffirmed Wampler’s belief that proprietary forecasting (and not LLM-powered conversational AI) is where ClearCOGS can deliver the most value.

“LLMs are kind of a commodity at this point. Proprietary data sets are what really matters… You still have to be able to provide a fundamental business value before that AI is really helpful.”

While many platforms offer dashboards or raw analytics, ClearCOGS focuses on delivering direct, decision-ready insights to restaurant managers. This is central to how he differentiates the company:

“If you’re a brand, you probably have 20 or 30 questions that you have to answer every day… We go really deep on those and provide a systematic way of delivering those to your operators every day.”

With the new capital, ClearCOGS plans to accelerate its product development and customer acquisition efforts, with an emphasis of better positioning itself in the food service sector. The company currently serves a customer base of 100 brands in four countries, and Matt says they plan to continue building a lean team, prioritizing automation and AI over headcount.

Vow Gets Greenlight in Australia As It Hits 1,200 Pounds Per Week of Cultivated Quail Meat

Vow, the Australian-based startup making foie gras and parfait from the cultivated cells of Japanese quail, announced a couple of big milestones this week, including what it claims to be the biggest ever production run of cultivated meat after harvesting 1,200 pounds of Japanese quail in a single week. This milestone was achieved using the company’s custom-designed 20,000-liter vessel designed entirely in-house.

This news comes the same week the Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) officially approved Vow’s application to add cultivated quail to the Food Standards Code. The final step is a 60-day review period by ministers from each jurisdiction within Australia and New Zealand. If no objections are raised, Vow could begin selling its cultivated quail products across ANZ as early as June.

According to CEO George Peppou, the secret to Vow’s rapid progress isn’t just about bigger tanks—it’s about rebuilding the entire factory model from scratch.

“Pharma infrastructure just doesn’t work for food,” Peppou told me in a recent episode of The Spoon Podcast. “We designed our second factory using a completely vertically integrated approach—engineers, welders, software, everything in-house—and built it for a fraction of what others have spent.”

Vow believes its new plant can make cultivated meat at a cost that is 20-50 times cheaper than its competitors, and now Peppou says that the company is now being approached by others as a potential manufacturing partner who see their approach as one that could scale.

“We’ve seen this sort of interesting uptick recently of other companies approaching us to ask about contract manufacturing. We’ve got the capacity. We’re selling continuously and we do have some excess capacity that we can provide to other companies. So we’ve got a few projects underway at the moment, which has been a very interesting insight into how other philosophies have played out.”

You can listen to my full conversation below.

A New Approach to Cultivated Meat with Vow's George Peppou