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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Podcasts

Podcast: Navigating The World of Patents As a Food Tech Startup

Like many fast-growing industries, the world of food tech relies heavily on intellectual property.

No matter if your startup is building alternative proteins, cooking technology, automation, or some other food tech product, chances are its future success will depend on its IP. But if you’re like me, you find navigating the world of patents confusing. So, I figured why not bring an expert on the podcast to help me (and you) better understand how to navigate the world of patents?

On this episode of the Spoon Podcast, Anas Alfarra joins us to talk food tech and patents. Anas managed IP for one of the world’s biggest industrial equipment makers, has secured his own patent for a food cooking system, and advises startups on how to manage their IP.

  • Topics discussed on this podcast include:
  • What are the different types of patents?
  • What is a provisional patent?
  • How to understand patent strategies of large companies like Amazon and Microsoft
  • The process of applying for a patent
  • And much more!

If you are at all interested in intellectual property and have questions about how to manage it for your food tech startup, this is a must-listen!

You can click play below or find The Spoon podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Podcast: Building a Next-Generation Ingredient Company with Shiru’s Jasmin Hume

As the former head of food chemistry for Eat Just, Dr. Jasmin Hume thought there was a lot of white space for innovation when it came to food ingredients.

She knew food companies would increasingly need new and novel ingredients they could build plant-based food products around, but felt there wasn’t enough research being done to discover these critical building blocks.

So she decided to start a company to do just that. So far, the company has raised over $20 million and recently hired Impossible Foods’ former VP of R&D and strategic ingredients.

On the podcast, Jasmin and I discuss a variety of topics, including:

  • How the alternative protein market is evolving from early fully vertically integrated brands to companies like Shiru that build ingredients and solutions for a variety of companies
  • The new cohort of food companies utilizing AI and ML to build the next generation of food
  • How what Shiru is doing with precision fermentation is different from that of Perfect Day and others trying to create animal-identical proteins
  • Where Jasmin sees the ingredient industry going in the future
  • Plus lots more!

You can listen to the podcast by clicking play below or you can find it at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Podcast: A Challenging Time for Restaurant Tech

In this episode of The Spoon, we are joined by long-time restaurant and restaurant tech journalist Nancy Luna of Insider to compare notes about what’s been a challenging few months for restaurant tech startups.

Some stories we discuss on the show include:

Click play below or find The Spoon podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Podcast: The Hard Business of Building an At-Scale Restaurant Tech Company

Anyone who’s read Jordan Thaeler’s publication Reforming Retail knows he likes to tell it like it is when it comes to restaurant tech.

No matter whether it’s the business model of payment processors or the difficulties of building an at-scale restaurant tech startup, you can find his no-holds-barred analysis on a wide variety of topics on a website he describes as, “a cathartic output to all the nonsense” he sees in the industry.

We thought it would be fun to have Jordan visit the podcast to talk about some of this nonsense and more. On this week’s show we discuss:

  • The challenges of the restaurant tech market and why there aren’t more publicly traded companies to support a restaurant industry with a total market size of over half a trillion dollars
  • Why point of sale is still the focus and starting point for digital transition in restaurants
  • The ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant market
  • Jack Dorsey’s fixation with crypto and the potential impact of Web3/crypto on restaurants
  • And a whole lot more!

Click play below to listen. As always, if you want more Spoon podcasts you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Podcast: Talking Food Waste Reduction (and How We Can All Do More) With Andrew Shakman

Andrew Shakman had a tough job.

In May, the CEO of Leanpath was asked to give a closing message at the annual ReFED Symposium that would inspire attendees and catalyze action. After two full days of engaging talks and shared insights, he delivered, so we thought we would have Andrew come on the podcast to discuss some of what he shared and to discuss how the food waste reduction space has changed in the 20 or so years he’d been running the company he founded.

Some of the topics discussed on the podcast include:

  • How the food waste technology market has evolved in the past decade
  • Opportunities across the food value chain where innovation can make an impact in reducing overall food waste
  • How food service operators and other food organizations can make a bigger impact than they realize
  • The challenges of the home/consumer market for food waste reduction and where Andrew thinks solution providers can make an impact
  • And lots more!

To listen, click play below or listen on your device via your favorite podcast app. As always, you can find more Spoon podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast.

Food Tech News Pod: The Wendyverse, 15-Minute Grocery Struggles & Roku’s Big Food Play

It’s another weekly food tech new wrap-up.

The stories we discuss this week include:

As always, you can find more episodes of The Spoon Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also just click play below to listen to today’s show.

Podcast: Electrolux’s Kitchen of the Future & Other Food Tech News of the Week

Can the design of your kitchen change how and what you eat? Electrolux thinks so.

In this week’s episode of the Spoon podcast’s food tech news wrapup, we discuss Electrolux’s new kitchen concept called GRO. Other stories discussed on the show include:

As always, you can click below to listen or subscribe to The Spoon on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

The Spoon Podcast: ‘Peach Tree’ Dishes & Restaurants in the Metaverse

It’s been a while, but we’re cranking up the podcast machine to bring you a weekly food tech news wrap-up.

In this week’s show, cohost Ashley Daigneault and I talk about:

You can listen to the podcast by clicking play below or finding it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Podcast: Talking Food as Medicine With NourishedRX’s Lauren Driscoll

NourishedRX provides meals, groceries, and meal kits to individuals, tailored for their individual needs and preferences.

Lauren Driscoll

The company, which recently raised $6 million in seed funding, has developed an AI platform that matches members with personalized meal and grocery offerings. It works with healthcare providers to incorporate food as part of an individual’s long-term health plan.

I caught up with NourishedRX CEO Lauren Driscoll recently to hear how the company got its start and what she sees as the current state of the current food-as-medicine market.

You can listen by clicking play below or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hyphen Wants to Be The Shopify for Restaurant Robots

Imagine you’re a culinary student with dreams of owning your own restaurant.

In days past, that journey towards restauranteur would take 10 to 20 years as you cut your teeth, gained experience, and saved enough money.

But imagine if you could build a restaurant today or in the near future leveraging automation and software? There would be no big location remodel and a big loan to pay for it. Instead, you’d use a virtual restaurant model powered by fractional pay-as-you-go food robotics, food ordering apps, and third-party delivery, all allowing you to bring something to market in months instead of a decade?

That’s the kind of world that Stephen Klein wants to build. Klein’s company Hyphen announced this week that they’d raised a $24 million Series A funding round, and so I decided to catch up with him to hear about his vision for the company and the food robotics marketplace.

In short, what Stephen and his co-founder Daniel Fukuba believe they are building a Shopify for restaurant robots.

“Instead of enabling merchants to compete with the likes of Amazon, we’re enabling restaurants to compete with the likes of DoorDash,” said Klein.

According to Klein, the big delivery companies are sucking up data from smaller restaurants and using that to compete with them. He believes if the smaller and regional players – as well as new food entrepreneurs – were able to use Hyphen’s automation technology to scale up new offerings, they’d have a much better chance to compete with the big players.

“We’re basically removing the overhead of starting and scaling a restaurant,” said Klein. “You can kind of just do it from your home effectively. And that’s just a really cool place in our mind.”

That’s the vision, but the company first has to scale its own business to get there. From the looks of it, they’re off to a good start as the company has already taken preorders from 11 customers, a list which includes restaurants, ghost kitchen operators, food service companies, and copackers. The company plans to use its new funding to build its manufacturing factory, develop new capabilities, and deploy to customers.

And once they do hit scale, Klein believes Hyphen can help create that democratized food creator future by renting out food production capacity on their Makeline to aspiring food operators. He pictures everyone from culinary creators operating from their dorm to food influencers on TikTok and Instagram building a restaurant brand or multiple brands.

“You could do different categories or brands of bowls or salads and eventually burritos,” said Klein. “You can run Yum brands 2.0 from one location.”

If you’d like to hear my full conversation with Klein about his vision for the future of restaurants and food robotics, click play below or find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Podcast: Creating the Anti-Ghost Kitchen Ghost With Kristen Barnett

While the fast growth of the ghost kitchen industry is exciting, it has some downsides. The industry’s rapid expansion has often meant low-quality food, a lack of transparency, and, even health code violations.

Kristen Barnett wants to change all that with her newest venture, Hungry House. Barnett, who was formerly with Zuul, wants to be transparent about where the food is made and who is making it and to have tight control over the quality. That means growth will be purposeful in the beginning as the company builds its business one kitchen – and chef – at a time.

Last month I caught up with Kristen Barnett to talk with her about her goal of building an anti-ghost kitchen ghost kitchen. You can hear our full conversation in today’s podcast. Just click play below or listen to it on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Podcast: How Kingdom Supercultures is Using AI to Create a New Generation of Novel Ingredients

Last week, Kingdom Supercultures, a company that assembles new novel combinations of naturally-occurring microbes into a new class of ingredients called supercultures, announced a $25 million funding round. The new funding round comes after a $3.5 million round the company raised in 2020.

Unlike many computational biology startups that have emerged in recent years, Kingdom doesn’t use precision fermentation technology or genetic engineering to build its new ingredient building blocks. Instead, the company is applying artificial intelligence and statistical analysis to analyze a massive database of existing cultures to discover new and interesting potential microbial combinations that provide new functionality, flavors, and more.

“What we’re building is really trying to recapitulate what we already find in nature,” said Ravi Sheth, who sat down for the latest episode of The Spoon podcast with cofounder Kendall Dabaghi.

To do that, Kingdom has assembled what the company claims is the world’s largest biobank of cultures in the world. The goal, according to Sheth, is to create a much faster path to discovery than traditional microbiology.

“It’s not dissimilar from a farmer cultivating different crops and choosing the best ones and putting them in the right places in the field and growing them and delivering them,” said Sheth. “In a very similar manner, we’re looking to nature embracing and learning from everything that natural biology has to offer. And we’re applying cutting edge kind of approaches in science and technology and computation, to then select them intentionally, really accelerate this process that we’ve already been able to do as a society.”

In a way, the company’s fusion of advanced computational techniques with culture development is largely a product of the two founders’ backgrounds. Dabaghi co-founded a cybersecurity firm in the early 2010s which used advanced computational technology to scan websites for security vulnerabilities. Sheth was on a more traditional microbiology academic track, pursuing his Ph.D. with aspirations to become a professor. However, the two met at Columbia University and, after working on different research projects in the area of microbiome, started to discuss ways to work together.

“I knew that I very much wanted to try to build a skill set that was at the intersection of both computation and microbiology,” said Dabaghi. “Which I think is reflected also in Ravi’s background and the way that we think as a company, which is that we don’t want to repeat a lot of the manual microbiology approaches that have been that have been like the primary focus of industry for the last like 50 years, but instead to use all of these new advances in computation, artificial intelligence, different statistical approaches to basically then be able to scan through all these microbes in different potential combinations and a much more efficient manner.”

You can hear my full conversation with the cofounders of Kingdom Supercultures on the latest episode of The Spoon podcast. Just head over to Apple Podcasts, Spotify or just click play below.