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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…
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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…
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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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,…
“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…
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…
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…
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…