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Podcasts

January 15, 2021

Podcast: The CES & Food Tech Live 2021 Review

On this week’s episode of Food Tech Show, the Spoon editorial team talks about what they found walking the virtual exhibit halls of CES 2021 (answer: not much).

The good news is we also had Food Tech Live, the Spoon’s annual food tech showcase that happens during CES week. Normally we’re in Vegas for FTL, eating cookies with our faces on it and checking out the latest in food tech gadgets, but this year we took things online and had a bunch of cool product demos, interviews and breakout sessions.

Finally, we also talk about the June oven acquisition by Weber and what that means for the smart oven space.

So listen in on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, download direct to your computer or just click play below. And, if you’re a regular listener, we’d appreciate it if you throw us a review to start the year!

December 31, 2020

Talking The Future of Biomanufacturing With Culture Biosciences’ Will Patrick

Will Patrick has spent much of his career thinking about how to build things. During his stints at places like Google[x] where he worked on projects such Project Wing, Google’s drone delivery service, he’d gained an appreciation for the toolsets that helped innovators in the world of hardware and software rapidly innovate and accelerate their products into the market.

Over time, Patrick eventually became interested in the world of biomanufacturing. As his interest in biotech grew, one of the things he realized was that many tools he’d grown accustomed to in the world of mechanical and software engineering to help makers rapidly iterate were not there in the world of synthetic biology.

And so he decided to build them. Out of this Culture Biosciences was born, which offers a digital biomanfacturing platform in the form of cloud bioreactors as a service. Before long, some of the industry’s more interesting future food startups as well as CPGs and big pharma companies were running experiments in Culture’s bioreactors and monitoring them on the company’s data dashboards.

I talked to Patrick about this journey and where he sees Culture going in the future. To learn more about Patrick and his vision for the future of Culture, just click play below or head over to Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

December 23, 2020

Making Honey Without The Bee: A Conversation With Darko Mandich

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that bee colonies are collapsing around the world due to a number of persistent threats such as global warming, pesticides and yes, murder hornets.

And while that may present a challenge to the $7 billion honey industry, the focus on honey production is itself problematic for the broader bee ecosystem, since farmed honeybees compete with wild bees for food and ultimately can hurt biodiversity.

All of which is why a Serbian bee industry executive by the name of Darko Mandich became fascinated with the idea of making honey without the bees. If this sounds crazy to you, don’t worry: Darko’s soon-to-be cofounder, Aaron Schaller, initially thought it was crazy too when they first discussed the idea.

But eventually, Schaller (a molecular scientist from the University of Cal Berkeley) saw the potential in bee-less honey and soon after, MeliBio was born. From there, the nascent startup pitched their concept to Big Idea Ventures and was accepted into the future food accelerator.

Now the company is busy developing its technology to create a honey that replicates the taste, texture and mouthful of real honey, all without bees. As Darko tells me on this podcast, MeliBio is using fermentation to essentially recreate the process through which bees convert nectar to honey. The startup hopes to have its first product on the market by late 2021.

You can listen to the full conversation with Darko Mandich by clicking play below or by subscribing to the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and leave a review if you like the show). You can also download the episode directly to your computer by clicking here. And, as always, you can always find more food tech news and podcasts at The Spoon.

December 16, 2020

The Food Tech Show: Ghost Kitchens are Complicated

In this week’s podcast, the Spoon team talks about some of the lessons learned from last week’s ghost kitchen deep dive.

One of the key takeaways from the day is there are lots of different approaches to rolling out a ghost kitchen strategy. Some operators simply leverage unused kitchen space in their own facility to roll out a single virtual brand, while others partner with a full stack ghost kitchen operator that has everything from the kitchen space to optimized tech to fully realized and operational virtual restaurant concepts ready to go.

The bottom line? The ghost kitchen market is changing quickly and strategies are becoming more nuanced as restaurants explore ways to tap into the benefits of this new model.

Jenn summarizes the day in a couple posts. You can also watch the full sessions here if you are Spoon Plus subscriber. Or, you can just listen to this podcast!

Other stories we talk about on this episode include:

  • Sony AI Unveils Trio of Food Projects Including AI-Powered Recipes and Robots
  • Farmers in France Set Up Vending Machines to Sell Food
  • Full Harvest Partners With Danone to Launch Yogurt Made From ‘Rescued’ Produce
  • Capital One Ventures Makes First Impact Investment in Food Waste Specialist Goodr

As always, you can find The Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If you like the show, please give us a positive review!

You can also listen to the show below by clicking play.

December 9, 2020

The Food Tech Show: Cultured Meat’s Big Month

This week the Spoon editorial team got together to talk about the latest food tech news, including whether or not cultured meat would venture into, well, humans.

We all got grossed out (well, most of us) and decided a Mike Burger is a bad idea. But we did agree the food industry will have to address some of the more ethical questions around cultured meat as the ease and cost to replicate cells comes down over time.

Other (not so gross) stories we discuss on the pod also include:

  • The big month that cultured meat has had, including Eat Just’s regulatory approval to sell cultured meat in Singapore
  • Pink Dot using Postmates’ Serve robot in West Hollywood
  • The Wall Street Journal’s look at the future of drone delivery and the impact on home design
  • The Spoon’s holiday gift guide

As always, you can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts) or just click play below.

November 12, 2020

The Food Tech Show: What Would a Biden Presidency Look Like for Food Tech?

It’s another Food Tech Show podcast!

The Spoon editorial team got together this week to discuss our favorite stories of the week, including:

  • McDonald’s announced their new plant-based burger, the McPlant, and everyone was confused
  • The Golden Arches also talked about how technology will change the McDonald’s experience in coming years, especially when it comes to drive-thru
  • Boston robot restaurant startup Spyce Kitchen debuted their 2.0 concept and it’s pretty darn different than the first generation. Also different: no dine-in eating.
  • What a Biden presidency could look like when it comes to food tech?

As always, you can find the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other places you get can podcasts.

You can also hit play below or download the episode direct to your device.

October 30, 2020

The Food Tech Show: Lab-Grown Meat vs. The Internet

Happy Friday!

Heading out early for the final weekend before election day? Listen to The Food Tech Show podcast on your way!

In this week’s editor roundtable episode of The Food Tech Show, we talk about whether lab-grown meat can scale like the Internet, Ordermark’s massive new funding round earmarked to help them build out their ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant strategy, Coca Cola’s acquisition of a coffee robot startup, and whether or not the term “veggie burger” has a future in Europe.

As always, you can find The Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just play directly below.

October 23, 2020

Talking With Harold McGee about Smells, Culinary Gastronomy and The Future of Food

Whether you’re someone who is in awe of the mastery of great chefs like Heston Blumenthal, enjoys the work of The Modernist Cuisine, or are just a fan of modern cutting-edge cooking, you owe a debt of gratitude to one Harold McGee.

That’s because McGee helped change the world of food with the publication his seminal book, On Food And Cooking: The Science And Lore Of The Kitchen, in 1984. The book would go on to influence a generation of young chefs over the coming decades, including the likes of Blumenthal and Alton Brown, the latter of which described McGee’s book as “the Rosetta stone of the culinary world.”

I recently had a chance to sit down with McGee (a Zoom call is “sitting down”, right?) to talk to him about that original book and his new one, NOSE DIVE: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells.

Smells?

“I just got kind of sucked into figuring out as much as I could about the molecules that escaped the things of the world, and fly into our noses and give information about what they are and what their histories are,” McGee told me.

McGee originally planned to write a book on flavor, but changed course after having something close to a religious experience eating a meal of grouse in an English restaurant. That change of course would ultimately take him on a ten year journey exploring the world’s smells.

“I ordered grouse at this traditional English restaurant and the first bite was just so unlike what I was expecting that it knocked me for a loop,” said McGee. “I actually couldn’t speak for 30 seconds. The people I was eating with looked at me and thought maybe I was having a stroke or something. It was it was just the most powerful flavor experience I’ve ever had in my life.”

From there, McGee went on to learn more about grouse and how it makes it to the plate. He realized that unlike so many of the processed foods we eat today, an animal like grouse is presented to the person in a much more primitive form: It’s caught wild, generally has parasites, and is cooked very rare.

The end result is an overwhelming flavor explosion that, if you’re someone like Harold McGee, leaves you speechless.

“A lot of that flavor is all still right there and right in front of you,” said McGee. “Learning all that made me realize there’s probably a lot like that to learn about many things that we encounter in everyday life, not just foods. And that’s the beginning of the push that ended up putting me into the world of smells.”

A book on smells makes lots of sense if you think about it, since smells make up such a critical part of how we taste food and experience the world we live in. In fact, the way McGee explains it, our sense of smell is our most direct way of actually taking in the world around us.

“I like to remind people that vision and hearing, which are the senses that we usually pay the most attention to, are very indirect. We’re seeing light waves reflected off of things or being emitted by things.”

“The amazing thing about smell is that it gives us detailed information about what it is that that thing is. And smell is this bridge between the outer world and our inner experience of food because we inhale and we exhale.”

In fact, according to McGee, the reason we often taste flavors or smell smells that remind us of other things – what he describes as flavor “echoes” – is that these things often share some of the same molecules.

“Why they echo each other is that they’re both emitting exactly the same fundamental particles of the world. And we’re noticing that. And even though it maybe doesn’t make total sense that a wine would smell like a saddle, our brains are picking up on that fact, and registering it.”

Just as he once broke down and analyzed the act of cooking at the molecular level and unleashed a new wave of culinary creativity, I expect McGee’s new field guide to the world of smells might just help us all better appreciate the world are breathing in and out everyday.

You can find McGee’s book on Amazon and other booksellers, but before you read it, you can watch my entire interview with him below, or listen to it on the latest episode of the Food Tech Show podcast on Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app.

October 1, 2020

The Food Tech Show: Amazon Intros Palm-Pay, Bear’s New Servi Robot

This week the Spoon team got together to talk about yet another potentially controverisal bit of palm reading tech from Amazon and other news from around the food tech world, including:

  • Bear intros their next-generation front-of-house server bot, Servi 
  • Shiok gets more funding for its lab-grown shellfish 
  • A new water vessel that kills germs with UV light
  • A Preview of the finalists for the Smart Kitchen Summit’s Startup Showcase finalists

As always, you can get the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download the episode directly to your device or just click play below.

September 16, 2020

The Food Tech Show: Did The Automat Ever Really Go Away?

In this week’s episode of The Food Tech Show, we talk about those new contactless systems and compare them to a technology from long ago: the automat.

Yep, that old-school idea born in New York City a century ago is back (or maybe it never left?), showing up everywhere from restaurants to condos.

Jenn Marston waxes nostalgic about the automat and other concepts that seem to be getting a second look as the food system looks to reinvent itself in the wake of COVID-19.

We also talk about these stories in today’s podcast:

  • What reducing food waste means rethinking the fridge
  • A new technology that lets you control your cooking appliance with your gaze
  • How companies like Brightseed are using AI to create entirely new food products

As always, you can listen to this week’s podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts. You can also download the episode direct to your device or just click play below.

September 2, 2020

The Food Tech Show: Walmart+ and Ghost Kitchen Robots

It may be the waning days of summer, but there’s still time to get outside for a walk and listen to podcasts and the Spoon team is here to help with our latest episode of The Food Tech Show.

This week, the team discusses the launch of the strategy behind Walmart+, Walmart’s long-rumored membership program centered around grocery and food which will now launch on September 15th.

Other stories discussed on the podcast include:

  • Grabango launches its cashierless checkout with Giant Eagle
  • H-E-B starts a food hall during a pandemic
  • Beastro: A robot for ghost kitchens
  • Making cheese with delicious, delicious data

You can subscribe to the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or wherever you listen. If you’re a regular listener, we’d really appreciate a review!

You can also listen by clicking play below or downloading direct to your device.

August 19, 2020

The Food Tech Show: Steam Ovens, Sustainable Packaging & Paying With Your Face

The Anova Precision Oven was first announced at The Spoon’s own Smart Kitchen Summit in 2016 and now it’s finally shipping. Chris and Mike strategize about how to convince their significant others to fit yet another countertop appliance in the kitchen.

Other stories discuss on this week’s show:

  • Heineken is ditching plastic rings
  • Temperpack raises $31 million for its sustainable packaging as the trend towards home food delivery accelerates
  • Restaurants and retailers launch pay by face network powered by PopID
  • GE rolls out its virtual home cooking class platform called Chibo

As always, you can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also download it direct to your device or just click play below.

If you like the podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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