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Podcasts

April 15, 2022

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.

February 18, 2022

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.

December 28, 2021

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.

October 11, 2021

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.

October 4, 2021

Podcast: Talking Cell-Based Collagen with Jellatech’s Stephanie Michelsen

Over the past few years, a number of startups have popped up to develop new and more sustainable alternatives to animal-derived collagen.

The reasons are obvious: Collagen is used everywhere, from cosmetics to food to health and wellness applications, and because animal-derived collagen is a by-product of the animal farming industry, it has all the same downsides as factory farming.

While some companies, like Geltor, use precision fermentation technology to create animal-identical collagen, a relatively new arriver to the alt-collagen space by the name of Jellatech is using the same cell-based technology powering many of the new cultivated meat startups’ products. Only instead of using bioreactors to reproduce animal cells for consumption or microbial hosts to generate collagen protein (like Geltor), Jellatech instead uses cells to produce collagen and then harvests the collagen produced by those cells. In other words, the cells are not the end-product, but instead the engine producing Jellatech’s collagen.

It’s an interesting new approach, so I decided to catch up with the CEO of Jellatech, Stephanie Michelsen, to hear more about this young company and its effort to reinvent the collagen industry.

You can listen to the podcast here or just head over to Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

September 24, 2021

Podcast: Building Food Robots with Now Cuisine’s Adam Lloyd Cohen

In the mid-eighties, Adam Lloyd Cohen was in Paris working on a documentary about ancient robots as a project during his senior year in college. After steeping himself in the history of automation during the day and dining on French cuisine at night, he began to think about how we might use robots to make food.

Nearly forty years later, Cohen is finally bringing his vision to life.

In 2018 he got to work on a beta prototype of a food-making robot that he and his new company Now Cuisine trialed in late 2020. That trial helped him secure a deal with a popular burrito chain in Texas called Freebirds World Burrito to run a three-month pilot with six new automated robotic kiosks called Takeout Stations. The robots will be deployed in different office buildings and multifamily housing units throughout Dallas.

Cohen sat down with me recently to discuss his decades-long journey on the Spoon Podcast. In this podcast we discuss:

  • How he came up with the idea for his food robot
  • Why he decided now was the time to bring his vision to life
  • The deal with Freebirds and how he sees his robots being deployed in the future
  • The business model for his unattended food making robots
  • Where he sees the food robotics industry going

You can listen to my conversation with Cohen below or find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

September 22, 2021

Podcast: Creating New Categories in Kitchen Tech With Scott Heimendinger

Scott Heimendinger was ready to talk about his plan.

I’d just spent a half hour talking to the longtime culinary innovator who’d spent much of the past decade bringing some of the first consumer sous vide and steam oven products to market, and after telling me about his journey through starting a company, working for Modernist Cuisine and later Anova, Heimendinger was ready to raise the curtain on what he wanted to do next.

Well, almost.

Heimendinger was ready to talk about the type of product he wanted to build (a category creator) and how he wanted to do it (by doing lots of prototyping and researching). However, what he wasn’t ready to spill the beans on is what he is actually building.

I can’t blame him. The kitchen hardware market is notoriously competitive, a space where something goes from novel to commoditized in a matter of a few years. Heimendinger had that experience with his own company (Sansaire), where he’d helped create one of the first consumer sous vide appliances.

“It’s only a matter of time until you could walk into a RiteAid and buy a sous vide machine on the same aisle that sells the Oster toasters for $25,” he told me.

One way to prevent that fast move towards commoditization – or at least make money before it happens – is to lock up the intellectual property first by filing patents (something Heimendinger has already done) and keep quiet about what you’re building until it’s ready (something he’s doing now).

So while Heimendinger wasn’t ready to give me all the details about the new product he hopes will be a category creator, I was happy to hear about his motivation for starting a new kitchen tech company.

“I’ve realized over my past experiences with MC (Modernist Cuisine),with Sansaire, with Anova and doing my own thing, even with my time at Microsoft, is that I really love zero to one,” he said. “I really love the part that I’m in right now, which is that I’m making something new.”

In other words, Heimendinger likes inventing things. Navigating the unknown.

But while he loves the ‘zero to one’ part, what he doesn’t like is taking a product beyond that. For that, Heimendinger knows he needs a team.

“When I get through prototype and spin up some flashy PowerPoints, bug all of the friends in my network to test this thing and give me feedback and listen to my stupid pitch over and over and over again, then I would like to go to companies that might be able to commercialize it,” he said. “And do what they’re really good at, which is make sure that it can get successfully manufactured and priced right, and marketed right, and distributed right. All that stuff.”

And then what?

“Hopefully, go back to the next zero.”

I caught up with Heimendinger for the latest episode of the Spoon Podcast. If you’d like to hear our full conversation, just click play below or find it at Apples Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you’d like to see Heimendinger at Smart Kitchen Summit 2021 virtual in November talking about how to build category creators, get your ticket here.

September 2, 2021

Podcast: A Conversation With Kevin Brown About Innit’s Google Cloud Partnership

This week I caught up with Innit CEO Kevin Brown to talk about his deal with Google Cloud.

Like a lot of Innit’s deals as of late, the partnership is focused on the grocery space. Late last year, Innit inked a deal with Carrefour to power a personalized nutritional score for 40 thousand products sold online by the European grocery giant. Before that, they’d announced a deal with SPINS to add personalized data to grocery retailer’s websites.

And after this week’s news, Innit is likely to be plugged into more grocery retail partnerships as the food and cooking digitization platform partner for Google Cloud’s retail team.

You can listen to my conversation with Kevin below or any of the usual podcast places.

The Spoon · Talking Grocery and Smart Kitchen With Innit's Kevin Brown

August 30, 2021

Koby Nahmias Knew Cell-Based Meat Had Huge Potential But Was Too Expensive. He Set About Changing That.

Something was bothering Yaakov Nahmias.

The longtime bioengineer had been sitting alongside the Charles River near MIT drinking coffee when he got a call from an investor in Israel who wanted to know what he thought about Mark Post’s famous quarter-million euro hamburger.

“I told him, it’s probably the silliest idea I’ve ever heard,” said Nahmias, who also goes by Koby, in an interview with The Spoon.

It wasn’t the science itself Nahmias thought was silly – the longtime bioengineer knew making a burger in a lab was an impressive scientific feat – but rather the idea that consumers would pay hundreds of dollars, let alone hundreds of thousands, for a burger no matter how science-forward meat the meat is.

Sitting there, Nahmias began to think about what it would take to bring down the cost of growing meat in a bioreactor to result in prices approachable enough for the average consumer.

It wouldn’t be easy. As the founding director of the Alexander Grass Center for Bioengineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a longtime consultant to the pharma industry, Nahmias knew that this type of complicated biotech cell-reproduction work was hugely expensive and – the way things were structured back in 2015 – totally impractical for producing low-cost consumables.

Yaakov “Koby” Nahmias

But Nahmias also thought that maybe it didn’t need to be this way. After all, he had colleagues who ran an insect farm, which had a much lower cost per unit of biomass produced. So why, he wondered, was creating meat using cellular agriculture so much more expensive than other forms of biomass production?

One reason was that cells produced make a lots of toxins like ammonia. And, unlike insects which have livers to remove these toxins, cells produced in bioreactors “essentially grow in their own urine,” Nahmias said.

When he looked around for systems are good at ammonia removal, the obvious example was the aquarium.

“If you’re growing fish, and and you are giving them too much food, there is too much protein that breaks down into ammonia,” said Nahmias. “The only way to treat it is by adding zeolites that will bind the ammonia relatively fast. So using that type of insight, you can design a process that will do it at scale.”

Another early insight Nahmias had was that pharma bioreactors often grew one type of animal cell – hamster ovary cells – which are commonly used for vaccine development. While hamster cells grow easily in traditional bioreactors, that’s not the case with meat like beef or chicken.

But perhaps the biggest challenge Nahmias saw was the cost of growth medium used to feed the cells. After consulting to the pharma industry for the last decade, he knew it took about 10 liters of culture medium to make 1 kilogram of biomass. At what he estimated to be $20 per liter for medium at that time, he thought even with the world’s most advanced tech, they’d start hit a cost floor of around $200 per kilogram.

He would spend the next six months focused on reengineering the process of cell-based meat production. But this was only the beginning. Nahmias knew that it would take some time to commercialize his work.

So not long after, he would start a company called SuperMeat with a couple of other cofounders, where he further developed these early ideas. That company would eventually split up a year later and Nahmias would go on to found his current company, Future Meat Technologies, where he set about creating a scaled system for making low-cost cell-based meat.

Fast forward to today and he’s doing just that. Future Meat regularly makes news about reaching ever lower prices for its cell-based chicken, which is why I wanted to talk to him about how he achieved cost milestones that many have thought wouldn’t be achievable for at least half a decade.

You can listen to my full interview with Nahmias on the latest episode of The Food Tech Show. Just click play below or get the episode at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

August 9, 2021

The Food Tech Show: Mystery Food Boxes, A Tiny Dishwasher and Restaurant Tech

Need something to listen to on your Monday morning commute?

Good news: The Spoon gang got together after a little summer podcast break to talk about some of the top food tech stories of the week.

The stories discussed on this weekly food tech wrapup include:

  • JOKR and Too Good To Go Team Up to Help Eliminate Food Waste with Mystery Boxes
  • You Can Now (Finally) Preorder The Tetra Countertop Dishwasher
  • Helaina is Developing Immune-Boosting Breast Milk Through Precision Fermentation
  • Lunchbox Acquires Online Restaurant Marketplace Spread
  • A Look at the Restaurant Tech Innovators at Restaurant Tech Summit

Click play to listen to the podcast or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

August 4, 2021

The Food Tech Show: Talking Alt-Meat with Better Meat Co’s Paul Shapiro

Paul Shapiro wears lots of hats – CEO, founder, advisor, podcaster, author – but the one constant through in all those roles is that of evangelist.

This is obvious to anyone who follows Shapiro on social media; the author of Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World will cheer on pretty much anything and everyone who is working towards the end of factory farming.

This goal of moving to a post industrial animal economy is also what drives the Better Meat Company, Shapiro’s startup that sells plant-based ingredients for food companies. The way the company does that today is through creating ingredients for meat producers like Perdue to create hybrid meat/plant-based food products (plant-based and meat in one product). In the past those plant-based ingredients relied primarily on pea protein blends, but as the company moves forward they are hoping many of these new meat products will be based on their proprietary fermented fungi-based protein called Rhiza.

I sat down recently with Shapiro to talk about the creation of their new mycoprotein production facility for Rhiza and how the technology works. We also discuss the current state of plant-based proteins, how those who work in plant-based space need to overcome their own biases and whether cell-based meat skeptics like Pat Brown are correct.

You can listen to the full conversation by clicking play below. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

July 12, 2021

Food Tech Show: Talking Food as Medicine With Dr. Robert Graham

You get sick, you take a pill right?

Not according to Dr. Robert Graham. As a Harvard trained physician and a trained chef, Dr. Graham wants to get at the root cause of our illnesses through diet.

Ever since I met Dr. Graham in Japan at the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2019, I’ve watched him work with food companies and retailers to build scalable approaches to food as medicine and have realized he’s perhaps the industry’s leading advocate and voice for food as medicine.

Dr. Graham joined me on Clubhouse to talk about food as medicine where we discuss:

  • The current state fo food as medicine
  • How new approaches like DNA-driven medicine and microbiome testing fit within food as medicine
  • The role food brands and retailers play in food as medicine
  • And much more!

As always, you can find more Food Tech Show podcasts at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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