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Podcasts

September 1, 2023

Food Tech News: Samsung Heads Into the Kitchen, Robot Meets Artisan Pizza

The Spoon is back for another week of food tech news, and this week Michael Wolf and Allen Weiner talk about what’s going on in the smart kitchen, alt protein, CRISPR and more.

Here are the stories we talk about:

  • Samsung and LG play nice in the kitchen, and Samsung launches food app. 
  • MOTO Pizza, where you wait a month for your pizza order, is crazy about Picnic’s pizza robot
  • Pairwise reups partnership with Bayer for CRISPR-based innovation
  • GFI says plant-based meat sales were up in 2022
  • DoorDash is bringing AI to their apps and call centers

As always, you can just hit play below to listen to the podcast, head to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or listen on your favorite podcast app.

As mentioned in the show, the Spoon is once again leading the charge for food tech at CES, the world’s biggest tech show. If you are interested in showcasing your future food or food tech innovation, head over to The Spoon’s CES page for more info.

Also, on October 25th, we’ll be bringing leaders at the intersection of food and AI together for a day of conversation. Please use the discount code PODCAST for 15% off tickets to the Food AI Summit.

August 25, 2023

Podcast: The Anti-Tech Grocery Store & Food Tech News of the Week

The Spoon Podcast is back after a summer hiatus with a food tech news wrap-up discussing some of the most interesting stories of the week!

In this episode, Spoon contributor Allen Weiner and I talk about:

  • Trader Joe’s says no to self check out
  • The continuing decline of plant-based meat sales
  • Academics are worried about implications for AI and automation on family meal
  • A 20 year success story: Mini Melts selling 30 million ice creams a year through its kiosks
  • Starship continues to grow, deploying sidewalk robots to 50 universities

You can listen to the full episode by clicking below or by finding The Spoon Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts! And while you’re at it, do us a favor and leave us a review!

As mentioned in the show, the Spoon is once again leading the charge for food tech at CES, the world’s biggest tech show. If you are interested in showcasing your future food or food tech innovation, head over to The Spoon’s CES page for more info.

Also, on October 25th, we’ll be bringing leaders at the intersection of food and AI together for a day of conversation. Please use the discount code PODCAST for 15% off tickets to the Food AI Summit.

June 19, 2023

Podcast: How One Operator is Reinventing His Restaurant With Technology

When Andrew Simmons decided to buy a restaurant in January 2020, little did the long-time entrepreneur know that in just a few months, he would be forced to close his doors due to COVID. 

But instead of giving up, he knew he had to get creative to survive. Survive he did, and when he reopened his doors, he kept tinkering, trying to figure out how new technology could make his restaurant more efficient. 

Andrew’s been an open book during the process, open-sourcing his learning as he navigates his journey via posts on Linkedin and a blog. He shares what works and what doesn’t, providing a potential blueprint for other operators thinking about how technology could change their business. 

During this podcast, Andrew and Mike talk about:

  • How the installation of a pizza robot from Picnic completely changed how he does business
  • How one piece of game-changing technology, like a pizza robot, forces other changes and adoption of new technology throughout the restaurant’s workflow
  • The impact of new technology on his unit price for pizzas 
  • How analytics software helped him realize his dine-in business was not profitable and how it changed his thinking about how he ran his restaurant
  • How he was forced to rethink how he used employees through the use of technology and how the employees (and former employees) have reacted
  • His pizza subscription concept and how he believes it can help him pay for opening new restaurants
  • Andrew’s plans to launch a 100-unit restaurant chain built using off-the-shelf restaurant technology

If you are considering using technology such as robotics for your restaurant, this episode is a must-listen! You can listen to the conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or click play below.

June 12, 2023

Podcast: Talking AI & Food With Evan Rapoport

In this week’s podcast, we talk food and AI with Evan Rapoport.

Over the past decade, Evan has led teams in Google Research and other organizations, looking at how AI could impact biodiversity and change. During our conversation, we talked about a project called Tidal, in which he and Google used AI technology like computer vision and applied it to aquaculture, and discussed the impact of AI more broadly on the food system and how Evan thinks newer technology, like generative AI, might have an impact sooner than we think on the world of food.

You can find the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or just click play below!

May 12, 2023

Podcast: 3D Food Printing & Cooking with Lasers!

Close your eyes and imagine the kitchen of the future. Not 100 years into the future, more like 10 or 20.

Does that kitchen you’re envisioning include a 3D food printer whipping up a dinner or a snack? And if so, are those printed creations being cooked with lasers?

While the crazy idea might not happen tomorrow, if life follows the example of science fiction (as it often does), there’s a chance a 3D food printer with laser-powered cooking will be sitting on our kitchen counter in a decade or two.

If we’re going to get there, this week’s guest on The Spoon Podcast, Jonathan Blutinger, might have something to do with it. Jonathan is a 3D food and software-defined cooking researcher who is trying to envision what this future world of cooking looks like.

In the podcast, we talk about:

  • How Jonathan got started exploring future cooking technologies
  • What is laser cooking and how does it pair with 3D food printing
  • How the current state of the 3D food printing ecosystem compares to other industries like digital music
  • The difference between printing sweet vs savory products
  • Will consumers ever accept the idea of 3D printed food
  • And lots more!

You can listen to this week’s podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or by clicking play below.

April 5, 2023

How Oliver Zahn Beat AI’s “Cold Start Problem” to Make Plant-Based Cheese That Tastes Like the Real Thing

In big data and artificial intelligence, one of the most well-recognized challenges to success is the “cold start problem.”

The cold start problem refers to when a lack of data hobbles recommender systems in machine learning models. Much like a cold car engine that causes a car to sputter and jerk along as a driver starts their journey, an algorithm built to discover and make accurate recommendations can’t perform well when it starts cold with a foundation of little to no good data.

And it’s this problem – a lack of foundational data around which to build a machine learning model – that often deters scientists, entrepreneurs, and companies across various fields from adopting new technology such as artificial intelligence.

The cold start problem is something Climax CEO Oliver Zahn was well-familiar with. As a world-recognized astrophysicist who worked for Google and SpaceX building complex data science models, Zahn knew that getting over this initial hurdle was one of the reasons established companies didn’t embrace machine learning and continue using the status quo – whatever that may be – to build new products.

So when Zahn decided he wanted to build a future food company using AI, he knew the initial challenge of building a dataset that could be mined to find new and promising building blocks in the world of plants would be his biggest hurdle. Still, it was a challenge he knew was worth taking.

“Traditionally, a lot of the big food companies around today pursue sort of a trial and error approach,” Zahn told me recently when we sat down for our conversation on The Spoon Podcast. “They use human intuition to guess what might work. But that often misses things that are less obvious.”

Zahn knew that the less obvious things could be the key to unlocking food building blocks that could power new types of food. Those building blocks, which come from the hundreds of thousands of different plants – many of them inedible – could then be combined in millions of different ways to provide new functional or sensory features to create something like a plant-based cheese. The only way to get there was to use machine learning, cold start problem or not.

“It’s a huge combinatorial screening problem,” said Zahn. “Even the largest food labs on Earth, if they all joined forces, would not be able to explore all combinations and millions of years.”

He knew AI could if he could get past those initial hurdles. But to do that, he knew Climax would have to begin not by gathering lots of data first on plants but on animal products.

“We started by interrogating animal products really deeply to try and understand what makes animal products tick the way they do,” said Zahn. “Why do they have their unique flavor profile texture profiles? Their mouthfeel? Why do they sizzle? Why do they melt and stretch when you eat them?”

You’d think that a lot of that data would already exist, but according to Zahn, it didn’t. The reason for that, he explained, was there had never been a business reason to build those datasets. But as the environmental impact of animal-based products became more apparent in recent years, there was a business motivation to start understanding how these products ticked so they could then be replicated using more sustainable inputs.

The data the company gathered by interrogating animal products allowed them to create labels for their machine-learning models to describe and characterize a food product accurately. With that in hand, Zahn said the company set about building data sets around plant-based building blocks.

“We built a lot of data sets on plant ingredient functionalities and the different ways of combining them. We then found these trends that can recreate animal products more closely, and sometimes in very non-obvious ways.”

Zahn says the process of creating accurate models can often take a very long time – up to 20 years – particularly if those building them don’t have the good intuition that comes with experience in machine learning.

“From the perspective of somebody starting a food company, that (long time horizons) can be scary, right? Because you need to get to market at some point. And so unless you have a very good intuition and have a lot of experience, in my case, a couple of decades, of trying to derive meaning from messy, large data sets, people don’t even start.”

For Zahn and Climax, the models they have built have already started yielding impressive results, enough to help them begin making what will be their first product – cheese – using artificial intelligence. What helped them get there so quickly was Zahn’s experience in building these models that told him to start with trying to understand and describe certain features of animal products – be it taste, mouthfeel, or nutritional benefit – and then find combinations of plant-based building blocks that achieved the same result.

“To look in the plant kingdom for something that is chemically identical to the animal ingredient, like a protein that you might be after, is a little bit of a red herring,” said Zahn. “Because it doesn’t need to look identical microscopically, or the sequence doesn’t need to be identical, for it to behave the same. There could be other ways to accomplish the same functionality.”

Now, after just two and a half years, Climax is ready to start rolling out its first products, a lineup of cheese that includes brie, blue cheese, feta, and chèvre (goat cheese) made from plant-based inputs. It’s an impressive feat, partly because, as a first-time entrepreneur, Zahn also faced the challenge of learning how to build a company, in itself another “cold start problem.”

If you’d like to hear the full story of Zahn and Climax Foods’ journey to building plant-based dairy products, you can do so by listening to our conversation on this week’s episode of The Spoon podcast. Click play below or find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

March 28, 2023

Podcast: Becoming a Kitchen Tech Reviewer With Wired’s Joe Ray

In this week’s episode of the Spoon Podcast, we catch up with Wired’s Joe Ray.

Here at The Spoon, we’re fans of Joe’s kitchen tech reviews, where he cuts through all marketing blather and hyped-up features and tells the reader exactly why he or she should (or shouldn’t) buy a product. 

In this episode, we take a look back at how Joe got started in food, why he picked up one day and went to France to become a writer, his tutelage under the famous restaurant reviewer François Simon, and his approach to kitchen technology journalism.

We also talk about the current state of kitchen tech, the smart kitchen, and where we see it all going.

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

March 17, 2023

SideChef’s Kevin Yu Eyes Next Phase of Growth After Raising a $6 Million Series B

I first encountered SideChef’s CEO Kevin Yu at a rooftop party during CES in March 2015. At the time, SideChef was in its early stages, having been founded just a couple of months prior, and I was beginning to explore kitchen technology. The first Smart Kitchen Summit would take place only eight months after our meeting.

In November, Yu traveled to Seattle to participate in the inaugural Summit and subsequently became a regular attendee at SKS events. After some time had passed since our last catch-up, I invited Yu onto the podcast to discuss his company’s recent funding and inquire about his vision for its future.

I first encountered SideChef’s CEO Kevin Yu at a rooftop party during CES in March 2015. At the time, SideChef was in its early stages, having been founded just a couple of months prior, and I was beginning to explore kitchen technology. The first Smart Kitchen Summit would take place only eight months after our meeting.

In November, Yu traveled to Seattle to participate in the inaugural Summit and subsequently became a regular attendee at SKS events. After some time had passed since our last catch-up, I invited Yu onto the podcast to discuss his company’s recent funding and inquire about his vision for its future.

Originally, SideChef was a recipe app designed to assist users with cooking. In those initial years, SideChef and similar companies like Innit and Drop/Fresco concentrated on connecting various appliances and developing a tech-driven guidance system for kitchen use.

“We started as just a recipe app to teach a person how to cook,” said Yu. “But then that grew out, and it was like, ‘Hey, wait for a second’, we can help you with not just how to cook, but we can also help you with meal planning, we can help you get your groceries, we can connect that into a smart kitchen device and make that automatic as well, too.”

As SideChef formed partnerships with appliance brands, retailers and CPG brands also expressed interest in connecting and digitizing the shopping experience. This interest intensified with the onset of the pandemic. Consequently, Yu and SideChef focused on shoppable recipes, as it was a more straightforward revenue generation method.

“I think shoppable recipes themselves are just the tip of the iceberg,” Yu commented. “We sent out over 3 million online orders to our retail partners last year through this experience.”

The company plans to use its new funding to leverage the infrastructure it has developed over the past decade. Image recognition technology is one area that could help them do this, as it has potential applications across the entire food ecosystem, from inventory management to automating cooking settings on smart kitchen appliances.

“We believe image recognition is a catalyst-type technology that we hope to continuously build upon the partnerships that we have,” Yu stated.

I’ve been somewhat down on the smart kitchen recently, as it seems companies—especially big brands—have not been innovative. When I asked Yu his thoughts about this, he acknowledged the issue but attributed it to a normal stage in market evolution.

“I think part of the plateau you’ve observed is because some companies, after taking their first swing, have felt that it’s not worth it to try again right now,” said Yu. “Maybe they don’t want to be the leader in this area. Or maybe they don’t have a confident route or sometimes even a confident group to be able to leave those charges internally.”

Despite the obstacles encountered by some players in the smart kitchen industry, Yu remains optimistic about the future of smart kitchen innovation.

“This is about unlocking the value and entering the next chapter, which is where most of this additional investment funding will be directed,” Yu said.

You can hear my full conversation with Yu below.

February 24, 2023

Podcast: How the DeSci Movement Will Change The World of Food

Do you know what DeSci is?

Don’t feel bad if you don’t, especially if, like me, food is your primary focus.

A16Z’s publication Future describes DeSci as a movement in which “a growing number of scientists and entrepreneurs are leveraging blockchain tools, including smart contracts and tokens, in an attempt to improve modern science. Collectively, their work has become known as the decentralized science movement, or DeSci.”

Dr. Jocelynn Pearl

If you haven’t heard of DeSci by now, the reason is that while the trend’s caught the attention of the biotech and research funding worlds, it hasn’t entirely made its way into the future food conversation just yet. 

But it’s only a matter of time, so I figure there’s no better time to learn than now. To help us do that, I invited Dr. Jocelynn Pearl, a biotech scientist, entrepreneur, podcaster, and DeSci expert, onto the podcast. 

In this episode of the podcast, Dr. Pearl and I discuss the following:

  • What is DeSci?
  • How DeSci is changing the insular and outdated world of research publishing
  • The benefits of using Web3 tools like DAOs, blockchain, and NFTs in science research
  • Why DeSci hasn’t yet reached the future food industry just yet and why that may soon change
  • What the future of science research may look like with these types of tools

If you’d like to hear more from Jocelynn, you can find her podcast, the Lady Scientist Podcast, and read some of her writing on her website.

As mentioned in the episode, we are having an event next week on the state of food robotics, and we’d love for you to join us. So get your free ticket here. 

You can listen to the podcast by clicking play below or at the usual podcast spaces such as Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

February 10, 2023

Podcast: How Will We Feed Astronauts in Deep Space?

Up until now, every morsel of food an astronaut eats in space was created and packaged here on earth. However, as we embark on a new era of long-term space flight, NASA and other space agencies realize that will need to change. 

As the Senior Project Manager for Space Crop Production and Exploration Food Systems for NASA, Ralph Fritsche has been thinking about this problem for the past decade. Ralph and his team work every to try and figure out how exactly they can provide sustenance to space travelers for multi-year space missions that are out of reach of re-supply from the space shuttles they rely on today.

In other words, they are trying to figure out how to feed humans on a mission to Mars.

In this podcast, we talk about the evolution of the NASA space food program, how they are discovering new ideas for possibly feeding space travelers, and the timeline for sending systems up in space to feed astronauts as they embark on multiyear missions to the far reaches of the galaxy.

If you’re a space nerd like me, then this is the podcast for you. Just click below or find this and other Spoon podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

February 4, 2023

Podcast: 3D Printed Meat, Drone Delivery and Spy Balloons

This week’s guest for Food Tech Friday is long-time food tech entrepreneur and investor Peter Bodenheimer. Peter talks about his role at cultivated meat startup Steakholder Foods and what he’s building at Super Kingdom.

Peter joins Carlos and Mike to talk about the food tech news of the week, including:

  • Are we comfortable with autonomous retail?
  • Do we want drone delivery?
  • Space food is happening. Should it?
  • The growing number of layoffs in food tech 
  • Amazon is adding a thousand robots a day. Could surpass workers by 2030
  • The acceleration of food tech M&A 

And, of course, because how could we not, Chinese spy balloons

As always, you can get the Spoon podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts, or you can also just click play below!

January 27, 2023

Podcast: The Bloomberg Alt-Meat Hullabaloo With Rachel Konrad

In this week’s episode, we catch up with Rachel Konrad, a former journalist who spent the last decade-plus working for Tesla, Impossible Foods, and now the Production Board.

Rachel joins Mike and Carlos Rodela to talk about her background, the recent controversy surrounding Bloomberg’s article declaring plant-based meat a fad, and how she helped Impossible bring food tech to CES in 2019 with the launch of the Impossible 2.0 burger.

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