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

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

Below are five takeaways from my interview with Cuban.

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

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

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

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

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

Cuban Sees GLP-1 Pricing Becoming More Accessible

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

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

He Sees AI as an Increasingly Important Healthcare Tool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Importance of Becoming AI Literate

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

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

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

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

A Conversation with Mark Cuban at SKS 2025

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

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

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

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

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

NotCo Wants to Create the 23 & Me of Scent for our Pets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Posha the Robotic Heir to the Thermomix? The Founders Sure Hope So

For the past five or so years, the emails have landed in my inbox on a steady basis, nearly every month. They’ve included updates on a small startup building a countertop cooking robot named Posha.

The emails, almost always written by the company’s CEO and co-founder, Raghav Gupta, detail progress, both big and small, ranging from software tweaks and field trial insights to news of an $8 million Series A funding round.

The progress has been slow but steady. And over the past year, the company has reached a milestone that most cooking robot startups (especially those targeting the home) haven’t come close to: they’re now building robots using scaled manufacturing, and those robots are arriving in customer homes.

Given that I’ve followed dozens of companies attempting this goal over the past decade, I figured I’d take Raghav up on his invite to see the robot in action and talk with him about what’s next.

So this past Sunday, I headed to an Airbnb Raghav had rented north of Seattle to demo the Posha robot for media and investors. Raghav asked if I wanted to cook a meal with Posha, and within minutes of arriving, the robot was preparing spaghetti Alfredo.

The machine stirred, heated, and timed each step with minimal interaction from me. Posha includes four ingredient containers, multiple spatulas, a spice carousel, and an induction cooktop. A camera watches over the food, analyzing “color, texture, consistency,” and, according to Raghav, provides “human chef-like intelligence.” Users load chopped ingredients, select a recipe, and let the device do the rest. “You just tell Posha you need that, and you walk away,” Raghav explained.

Posha, originally named Nymble (both the robot and the company), has changed significantly from its early days as a college project. “We were two people taking out of our parents’ garage trying to make a cooking robot.”

The first version was a robotic arm, but Raghav said customer feedback led them to pivot. “We had this choice of either repurposing our robotic arm for commercial kitchen use cases or changing our technology altogether to make something that consumers wanted. We chose the latter route because we were in love with the problem we were trying to solve.”

That problem: helping people figure out what to eat on a daily basis. “People like you and me want to eat freshly cooked meals and feed our families freshly cooked meals. But it’s hard to find the time to cook these meals every single day.” He believes this tradeoff, between eating well and having enough time, is what led to a national health crisis. “We are in the middle of a health catastrophe,” he said. “And I think with Posha, it will help America become one of the healthiest countries in the world, at the same time being one of the most productive countries in the world.”

Those are lofty goals, ones I’m pretty skeptical about given the high price tag of the Posha and the nearly non-existent adoption of cooking robots so far. But according to Raghav, he sees his product as a natural evolution of a device that has been quite successful, especially in Europe: the Thermomix.

“I think we have a strong precedent in terms of Thermomix. They sell like a million units every single year, and what Posha is, is actually Thermomix++.”

If there’s a model to aim for, the Thermomix is a good one, and I have to say, the ease with which I was able to make spaghetti Alfredo was reminiscent of the first time I used a Thermomix. In fact, it was essentially what Raghav described, the Thermomix++, in that it required me to do even less once I picked the recipe and hit go. From there, over the next 30 minutes, the Posha added ingredients and cooked the meal to completion.

It’s perhaps this ease of use and the similarity to Raghav’s professed North Star in the Thermomix that helped the company recently raise over $8 million in Series A funding. You’d have to be living under a rock, covered with more rocks, and then some dirt not to realize how hard it is for consumer hardware startups to raise money (let alone a robot cooking startup). The fact that Posha secured funding led by Accel is a sign they may be doing something others in this space haven’t.

So far, Posha has shipped 200 units, with 600 more expected by the end of September. “We’re trying to grow 3X every six months or so,” Raghav said. The product retails for $1,750, with pre-orders at $1,500.

If you’d like to see Posha in action, check out my cooking video below. Raghav will also be speaking about his journey at the Smart Kitchen Summit this week, so if you want to hear more and ask him questions, make sure to grab your ticket..

The Spoon Cooks a Meal with Posha the Home Cooking Robot

From Aspiring Pro Surfer to Delivery Robot CEO with Coco’s Zach Rash

Zach Rash wanted to be a professional surfer. So much so, that in high school, there was more surfing than academics.

That all changed when Rash reached UCLA and met Brad Squicciarini. It wasn’t long before the two spent every waking hour together in a small room building robots.

“We spent like our entire life in this like box at UCLA with no windows, and we’re just building robots from scratch, and it was the best job ever.”

Eventually, the real world came knocking as Rash and Squicciarini graduated and had to find jobs. After applying for many of the same positions, they eventually decided they should just start their own robot company.

“We just had a lot of really strong opinions about what it would take to get these things into the world and make them useful. So… decided to do it ourselves.”

Coco launched in early 2020. “We started building them in our living room and we couldn’t get more wheels… so it was a bit of a sketchy robot.” Still, their first merchant deployment went smoothly. “The first day of the business, I mean, we gave it to a merchant and Brad and I just took turns driving it and fixing it.”

They faced steep financing challenges: “We didn’t have any money… Even if you’re only building a few, you know, it’s still going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars.” They pitched more than 200 investors before raising a modest $50,000 to start. “We thought that was a lot of money and we built a few robots with that and kind of proved out that we could run a service, not just build the robot.”

Their persistence paid off. In June 2025, Coco raised $80 million, led by angel investors Sam Altman and his brother Max, alongside Pelion Venture Partners, Offline Ventures, and others. 

This brought Coco’s total funding to over $110 million, which Rash says the company plans to use to scale its operations and technology.

“Coco Robotics will use the new funds to improve the technology and to scale up its fleet,” Rash told TechCrunch. “The company expects to go from low‑thousands to 10,000 robots by the end of next year.”

According to the company, Coco bots have delivered over 500,000 items to date, working with retailers like Subway, Wingstop, Jack in the Box, Uber Eats and DoorDash.

It’s only been a few short years since Rash was largely concerned about surfing, but now, armed with funding and lots of interest from retail partners, he’s ready to ride to the wave of growth of his robot delivery company.

“We’re building as many as we can as fast as we can.”

Zach will be speaking at SKS 2025 tomorrow, so make sure to get your tickets. You can listen to our conversation on the latest episode of The Spoon podcast below, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Mark Cuban to Speak at SKS 2025

Smart Kitchen Summit 2025 officially kicks off today! Over the next two weeks, we’re bringing together some of the brightest minds at the intersection of food, cooking, and technology for a virtual global summit exploring what’s next for the kitchen.

This year’s event explores how AI, robotics, new appliances, and sustainability are transforming the way we cook, eat, and connect with food. With two hours a day of sessions running daily through July 31, SKS 2025 features interviews, panels, and product showcases from innovators around the world, all accessible online, wherever you are.

We’re excited to welcome entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban as one of our featured speakers. Cuban is an astute obverver of technology, politics and the forces shaping the world we live in, so I’m super excited to sit down and talk with him about where he sees the broader innovation landscape going.

If you’re curious about the future of food, cooking and the innovation landscape, you won’t want to miss SKS 2025.

Join us! The full schedule and registration are at smartkitchensummit.com.

This Culinary Tech Inventor Thought He Could Build Some Parts For His Latest Gadget in the US. Then He Called Around.

When kitchen tech inventor Scott Heimendinger started prototyping his latest hardware product, he knew that much of it would need to be built overseas. Still, he was curious whether he could rely on local Seattle-based shops to produce some of the parts.

“I contacted local shops here in Seattle. There are a couple of machine and metalworking shops, and I thought, well, I would like to be a good customer, right? Like I’d love to spend money locally, especially on shops that are doing this kind of stuff.”

But when he called around, Scott quickly discovered that not only were the local shops going to be an order of magnitude more expensive, but they’d also take longer to deliver.

“I said, ‘look, I know this is going to be more expensive than what I’m doing in China, obviously, but maybe we can make this up on the time front.’ Before we even got into real pricing, we were already above 10X. So I said, ‘What about turnaround time?’ [They] said, well, it depends how busy we are, but like, you know, one to six weeks.’”

We’d started talking about the cost and complexity of building in the U.S. because we’d both recently listened to an episode of PJ Vogt’s Search Engine, in which Vogt interviewed YouTuber and engineer Destin Sandlin. Sandlin discussed his years-long effort to manufacture a product in America, and I wanted to get Scott’s take, especially since he’s been navigating the uncertainty caused by new tariffs. As it turned out, he had a lot to say.

One area he pointed to as a critical missing link was the shortage of tooling designers, the specialists who create the molds used to shape plastic parts.

“Tooling fabrication in principle is something that you could just do on a beefy CNC machine… In practice, no. It’s specialized techniques and tools. That knowledge has dried up in the U.S.”

We talked about why capabilities like tooling fabrication and injection molding have largely disappeared from the U.S., and one reason we both agreed on was the lack of trade education, starting as early as high school.

“Some of my favorite classes in high school were sculpture class, learning to use a bandsaw and a drill press,” he said. “I wish more folks in the United States prioritized the hands-on making of stuff.”

I pointed out the strange dichotomy of the past couple of decades, in which Silicon Valley was busy valorizing the maker movement, while at the same time the U.S.’s ability to manufacture at scale was simultaneously being hollowed out. It’s as if we celebrated prototyping, while the infrastructure to mass-produce those ideas was quietly de-emphasized and disinvested in.

“A weird thing that happened, where we talked about, ‘hey, let’s start making stuff and teach our kids to make stuff,'” I said. “But at the same time, America’s ability to make stuff at scale just kind of went up in smoke.”

Scott, for his part, chose to see the upside. Despite the loss of critical manufacturing knowledge and infrastructure, he said it’s still a great time to be an inventor, thanks to how accessible prototyping tools have become.

“I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, like I love physically making stuff. I wish more folks in the United States prioritized the hands-on making of stuff, and I wish that we hadn’t eroded away these capabilities. On the other hand, it is almost point and click to have these things prototyped, if not mass-produced. And that’s an incredible boon to being a scrappy solopreneur.”.

You can listen to our latest episode by clicking play below, or you can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you’d like to ask Scott a question about his project, the challenges of manufacturing a product or the future of cooking, he’ll be at Smart Kitchen Summit next week. You can get your ticket here.

If video is your preferred podcast consumption format, you can also watch our conversation below:

Why It's So Hard to Build Hardware in America

Thermomix Has Long Been a Leader in Cooking Automation, But Now They’re Going Full Robot

For years, I’ve said that the Thermomix is quite possibly the most successful automated cooking appliance in the world. Sure, it’s not a humanoid robot or what we’ve come to expect from cooking robots in recent years, but the TM6 and TM7 are software-powered cooking appliances that automate and sequence functions in a way that feels surprisingly intelligent, especially compared to typical countertop or built-in kitchen appliances.

But now, if recent moves by Thermomix’s corporate parent, Vorwerk, are any indication, Thermomix may be going full robot. At last month’s Automatica conference in Munich, Thermomix and red-hot German robotics startup Neura Robotics announced a partnership in which Neura’s humanoid robot used Vorwerk’s Thermomix and Kobold vacuum cleaners to perform everyday household tasks.

According to Neura CEO David Reger, optimizing his robots to work with Vorwerk’s cooking and cleaning appliances is a step toward building an aging-in-place platform powered by humanoids.

“Together with Vorwerk, we are redefining household robotics – with intelligent assistants that provide concrete relief for people in their everyday lives: from cooking to independent living in old age,” said Reger.

Even more interestingly, Vorwerk also announced a partnership with AI and chip giant NVIDIA last month. According to the announcement, “Vorwerk is post-training NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1, an open robot foundation model, to support families around the home, whether seniors looking to maintain their independence, or busy families in need of an extra pair of hands. To post-train the model, Vorwerk is leveraging the Isaac GR00T-Mimic data pipeline to generate large, diverse synthetic motions data to prepare robots for common household tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and more.

“Together with NVIDIA Robotics we are now taking a significant step towards the connected and automated home,” wrote Vorwerk CEO Thomas Rodemann on Linkedin. “Our goal: creating integrated digital/physical ecosystems that support our community in their everyday lives and make the home more convenient for everyone – whether it’s providing busy families with an extra pair of hands or giving seniors more independence.”

When Jensen Huang showed up at CES in January and said that the ChatGPT moment for robotics is right around the corner, I’m not sure if he was thinking about cooking food with the Thermomix, but maybe he was. Vorwerk would be a logical candidate to build true home robot assistants, since progressing rightward on the simple tool to fully-capable robot continuum already and they’ve been the most successful at integrating software with home cooking automation

You can watch the video of the NVIDIA-powered robot making food with the Thermomix in the video below.


Is IFT’s Launch of an AI Tool For Food Scientists an Indicator of Where Trade Associations Are Going in Age of AI?

Interesting news out of IFT First this week, the food scientist expo in Chicago, where the longtime trade association announced its own AI tool called CoDeveloper.

According to the announcement, CoDeveloper is a platform built for food scientists by food scientists, offering a suite of AI-powered tools to help them formulate new products, reverse-engineer existing ones, and tap into decades of peer-reviewed food science research. Branded as a “co-scientist” named Sous, the platform is designed to live alongside R&D teams and support early-stage development work.

It’s an interesting move for the group, and as far as I can tell, the first time a trade association in the food space (or possibly any industry) has launched its own AI tool to help practitioners do their jobs. It also raises a larger question: could this be a sign of where trade associations are headed as AI becomes more integral to how we work?

It would make sense. Trade associations have historically provided value through education, convening, standards development, and general promotion. In a future where most industries are driven in large part by AI, why wouldn’t these associations, especially science-focused ones like IFT, want to get in on the action?

Of course, there has been no shortage of efforts across the food industry to develop food AI models, whether that’s startups looking to sell their AI as a SaaS platform or big food brands creating AI tools to differentiate themselves. Whether an available-to-everyone AI food product development tool is something hyper-competitive CPG companies would be interested in is yet to be seen, but I am sure that it will be something most members of the IFT community will want to take for a spin around the block.

From Red Bull to Zevia, Amy Taylor Shares Lessons Learned From a Career Built Around Buzzy Beverages

In the early 90s, Amy Taylor had dreams of Olympic gold as an elite track and field athlete.

Back then, she never could have predicted she’d spend the bulk of her career in the beverage business. But after moving to Atlanta (where the Olympics were to take place in 1996) and working for a short time for the Atlanta Hawks, it wasn’t long before she started to work for Red Bull, just as the now-famous brand was beginning to define the energy drink business in the early 2000s.

“My stepdad warned me not to take the job because he had never heard of the company,” she recalled. “And I said, I think there’s something special here. I took my Gen X assignment of creating this Red Bull brand with an American lens on it for the American audience.”

Taylor would spent over 20 years at Red Bull, eventually serving as president and chief marketing officer, where her time there shaped her philosophy on building iconic brands.

“What I learned there was about creating a hot brand and sort of becoming a part of or creating communication within and around the zeitgeist,” she said. “Instead of trying to go fast and hard and drive distribution and awareness at all costs… the brand was building relationships.”

Now, as CEO of Zevia, Taylor is applying those lessons to a different kind of beverage mission. “We are going to materially reduce sugar consumption among the population that we serve,” she said. “If a family switches from carbonated soft drinks to Zevia, they can cut their sugar consumption in half with one move.”

Known for its zero-sugar sodas made with stevia, Taylor says Zevia aims to provide an affordable, clean-label alternative for families. She’s also focused on evolving the brand’s taste and product innovation. “There are 20 molecules in the stevia leaf that can sweeten a product,” she said. “Our job is to go extract the ones that perform best within the beverage. For the part of the population that have had a negative experience with stevia, they’re going to need to come back and try Zevia. And I think they’re going to be blown away.”

Like most food brands nowadays, Zevia is embracing AI. Taylor says they are doing it with a “hacker’s approach,” which means encouraging every department to experiment with new use cases.

“Each department head challenges their entire team, not just their senior leadership, to come up with new use cases for AI,” Taylor said. From creating digital consumer prototypes to enhancing operations and finance workflows, Taylor said the company is exploring numerous applications. “We use AI to challenge our thinking and our assumptions. We want to grow faster because of our ability to leverage AI with the people that we have in the building today.”

Part of Taylor and Zevia’s push to leverage innovations like AI is because the company operates lean (fewer than 100 employees), and new technologies can help them punch above their weight.

“We are small and focused,” she said. “And we are scrappy as hell.”

You can listen to my full conversation with Taylor below and can connect with her (and ask her questions) at the Smart Kitchen Summit later this month.

Study: AI-Powered Drones Fuel Advances in Precision Ag for Early Detection of Crop Stress

Early stress detection via precision agriculture just got a serious upgrade, according to new research out of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Led by Dr. Ittai Herrmann, the team developed a drone-based platform that blends hyperspectral, thermal, and RGB imaging with powerful deep learning technology to precisely identify nitrogen and water deficiencies in sesame crops.

Sesame, known for its resilience to climate variations, is rapidly growing in global importance. However, accurately identifying early-stage crop stress has historically posed a significant challenge, limiting the ability of farmers to respond quickly to potential catastrophic challenges. To tackle this, the researchers combined three advanced imaging technologies into a single drone system, creating a robust solution capable of decoding complex plant stress signals.

Hyperspectral imaging provides detailed spectral insights into plant chemistry, including nitrogen and chlorophyll levels, which are critical markers for plant nutrition. Thermal imaging spots subtle temperature changes in leaves that indicate water stress, while high-resolution RGB images provide clear visual context of overall plant health and structure.

What made this study cutting-edge was its use of multimodal convolutional neural networks (CNNs), an advanced AI approach that can unravel intricate data patterns and add context, which significantly enhances diagnostic precision. These advanced techniques unlocked the researchers’ ability to distinguish overlapping signals of plant stress, such as differentiating between nutrient and water deficiency, something that conventional methods often struggle to achieve. According to the researchers, by accurately pinpointing the exact stressor, farmers can now apply resources such as fertilizer and irrigation more strategically, reducing waste and environmental impact while increasing crop yields.

While other researchers have studied using advanced AI techniques with drones to aid in combatting stress in walnut and specialty crops, the use of deep multimodal CNN appears to be a leap forward in precision ag. It remains to be seen how quickly this technology reaches the farmer level, but given the challenges of climate change, its easy to envision that these types of advances in precision agriculture will be invaluable tools for farmers in the future to protect against climate-related crop stress.



Could Lasers Made From Olive Oil Be The Next-Gen Freshness Detector or Use-By Label?

Imagine scanning a tuna steak in your fridge and suddenly a tiny laser pulse beams an expiration date or, surprise, tells you it’s not really wild-caught.

That’s no longer a sci‑fi: new research from a group of academic researchers from the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece published in Advanced Optical Materials discusses how they were able to create edible microlasers crafted entirely from food-grade ingredients, essentially turning food in a tupperware container or on your dinner plate into a data-rich interface with the potential to relay information about freshness, provenance, even safety.

So, how does it work? Researchers created tiny edible lasers by using food-grade materials like olive oil, coconut oil, and sugar-based droplets combined with natural colorants such as chlorophyll or curcumin. The droplets act as tiny optical cavities that trap and amplify light using a principle called ‘whispering gallery mode resonance‘. When excited by an external light source, they emit a laser-like signal. Because the lasing behavior is sensitive to environmental factors like temperature, pH, and chemical composition, these microlasers can be used as sensors that can be embedded directly in food to help detect spoilage, confirm authenticity, or monitor freshness. And, according to the team, this happens without adding anything inedible to the product.

The paper explores different applications, such as edible barcodes, applied onto the food itself and not on packaging. Another idea is food with built-in freshness sensors, salad kits that glow a warning when the pH level shifts, or olive oil bottles that hold internal glow-signatures to confirm authenticity.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of technology for freshness, authenticity or changing chemistry built directly into the food itself. A couple of years ago, a company called Index Biosystems developed a form of invisible barcode called a BioTag, which is created by mixing baker’s yeast in extremely small amounts with water, then spraying or misting it onto products such as wheat. BioTags can later be reach using molecular detection techniques such as PCR and DNA sequencing.

The BioTag is a cool concept, but this new breakthrough from the Mediterranean scientists seems like something that – if it ultimately is commercialized – could be much more approachable for the end-user, who doesn’t have access to tools for things like DNA sequence detection (that’s if you can lasers shooting from your food as ‘approachable’).

With the debate about use-by date labels raging after after California became the first state to create a new approach in years (causing numerous other states to consider following suit), new technology like this shows us that someday our food might actually be able to tell us, via lasers, itself whether it is still good to eat.

With the debate over use-by date labels heating up – especially after California became the first state in years to introduce a new approach, prompting several other states to consider following suit – this kind of technology is a sign that someday our food might be able to tell us directly whether it’s still good to eat.

Leanpath CEO: The Fight Against Food Waste Enters Its ‘Second Act’

At this year’s ReFED Summit in Seattle, Andrew Shakman was in a reflective mood. When asked about the state of the food waste reduction movement, the Leanpath CEO, who has spent more than two decades fighting food waste, compared the moment we’re in to the second act of a three-act play.

“If we go back to Aristotle’s Poetics, the beginning is always gripping. The middle is hard, and I think we’re in act two, where it’s no longer the beginning, but we are not at the end.”

According to Shakman, it’s a moment of transition for the food waste movement. The early momentum that defined the last decade, fueled by sustainability pledges, bold 2025 goals, and a wave of startup innovation, is giving way to a more complicated reality. Some organizations are hitting their targets while many are falling short. And now, for many fighting the fight, the question isn’t just what the next goal should be, but how to keep the movement going.

According to Shakman, that means leaning into the business case for food waste reduction, much as he did when the company first started.

“When we started, I’ve been at this 21 years. It was all about money. It was all about saving money, pulling dollars out of the garbage,” he said. “We came to understand that this was a nexus issue that incorporated issues around climate and food security and land conversion and biodiversity and water resources and everything. Today we’re reverting back to a narrower story that’s more focused on business case simplification, making life as business-focused as possible, because of the environment we’re in right now. There’s less political unanimity around climate and ESG.”

Shakman believes this re-focusing on the business case is happening because many enterprises are deemphasizing meeting sustainability goals, in part due to the political moment we are in in 2025. But just because the Leanpath CEO sees a powerful message in emphasizing efficiency and saving money as key motivators to adopt food waste reduction tech, he doesn’t think those in the industry should abandon talking about how important waste reduction is for the environment.

“You can still have the whole conversation,” Shakman said. “But the emphasis is on the business case at the moment. I don’t think we should allow ourselves to walk away from the moral imperative”

When I asked him about AI, he said the technology is most powerful when it drives action in the kitchen and elsewhere.

“Chefs did not get into food because they wanted to sit in front of their computer,” Shakman said. “They want to touch and make touch, make connect and create experience, and they want to know what’s the fastest path to taking the most impactful action, and that’s where I think AI is going to be very exciting.”

Shakman believes AI is most powerful when it adds context to decision making through triangulating different data sets, but believes the industry – and its data – is in many ways structured in a way that makes creating that contextual nuance difficult. The real breakthrough, he believes, will come from breaking down the data silos in foodservice technology.

“There are POS data assets for what you’ve sold,” said Shakman. “There are inventory data assets around what you bought and maybe what’s on your menu. There are now waste data assets that are actually unique contributors to the data landscape. And with those, when you triangulate with what you sold and what you bought, you now have the ability to see things that you could never see before.”

But even as Leanpath builds toward that integrated vision, one that blends frontline kitchen tools with enterprise-level oversight, Shakman remains focused on the people behind the data. “The changemakers on this issue are the people working in kitchens,” he said. “They’re driven by emotion, by the desire to do good. If you can align action with purpose, you unlock something powerful.”

Shakman’s framing of the food waste battle as a three act play isn’t all that surprising since storytelling runs in the family; his brother, Matt Shakman, is a longtime Hollywood director, directing shows like WandaVision and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and the upcoming Marvel movie, The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

Both Shakman brothers are, in their own way, trying to navigate two very different Act Twos and shape what comes next.

You can watch my full conversation with Andrew from the ReFED conference below and find it later this week on The Spoon Podcast.

The Spoon Talks With Leanpath's Andrew Shakman at ReFED Summit 2025