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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Publisher Note

Dark Days, Resets and the Eventual Birth of Good Things

If you’re old enough to remember 9/11, you remember how crazy and upended everything felt in the days, weeks and years following that day.

There was the immediate shock of watching the planes hit the buildings – I still remember the sound of my wife’s voice when she called me into the room and pointed at the television – and then there was the long period of uneasiness in the following days of entering a time where there was no defined playbook.

It’s been a couple decades since and memories have faded, but I’ve never forgot how that moment in time not only altered things in a big societal way – politics, travel, international relations – but also how it set into motion lots of smaller changes in so many lives, changes that ultimately sprouted into new relationships, careers, and even new businesses.

One former coworker of mine quit his job as a technology analyst and went into the FBI to fight terrorism. Another woke up and realized he needed to get serious about his life and went on to start one of tech industry’s most well-known tech blogs. There are million other stories like this of lives inalterably changed across the country and around the world.

And while it’s too early to tell just how extensive the damage of the COVAD-19 coronavirus will be, it’s pretty obvious at this point that there will be many more deaths, economies will continue to slow and many jobs will be lost.

My suspicion is the impact will be big, on the scale of what we saw in 2001, and because of this we’re going to go through a reset that we’ll all have to grapple with. Resets can be bad in many ways – sickness, death and job losses are all very bad things – but I hope down the road we’ll also see some good.

We talked on this week’s podcast about the potential ways in which the coronavirus could accelerate change in the world of food, increasing adoption of fairly new technology and ways of doing things such as human-less check out, automated food dispensing and more.

But I think the bigger impact in the world of food and most other industries will be realized over a longer time horizon, in ways that only come with the way a reset makes us, societally and individually, rethink things in meaningful ways.

Forced to say home, cancel travel, and social distance? Difficult, no doubt, but such down time also means an opportunity to think about what it all means and to reassess. New business ideas, many of them taking into account our new mutual reality, will spring up and over the next year, two years, decade.

We still need to be realistic. There could be many dark days ahead. But, while many of us are going to have to grapple in the near term with potentially big disruptions to our lives, careers and businesses (I run an event business and I’m thinking about what this all means), I am still hopeful for what will be millions of inspiring stories of human resourcefulness and ingenuity that spring out of this globally shared experience in the coming years.

Why We Are Partnering With WeWork Food Labs

This morning WeWork made news by announcing a new initiative called WeWork Food Labs.

Jenn has the full story here, but as the publisher of The Spoon, I wanted to write about the news for a slightly different reason: We’re a launch partner with WeWork Food Labs.

What does this mean?

In short, we’ll work with WeWork to possibly co-create events, tap into each other’s networks and collaborate on programming and other opportunities.

More tangibly, the partnership will mean the following:

  • We have interest in doing events across the US, including the east coast. This partnership means we will have access to WeWork event facilities. WeWork Labs has also expressed interest in our ability to bring interesting food innovators together, so we will explore ways to co-produce events in the future.
  • WeWork Food Labs also recognized our strength in bringing together innovators in the food and cooking worlds through our Startup Showcase. Because of this, WeWork will offer placement in the WeWork Food Lab to a mutually agreed upon SKS 2019 Startup Showcase finalist.
  • We will help WeWork Labs to tap into our network for food and cooking innovators as well as serve as a resource for programming for foodtech.
  • Our NYC-based writer, Jenn Marston, will work in the WeWork Food Labs flagship space.

As the publisher, it’s crucial for me to be transparent about all aspects of a partnership like this. But more importantly — and because we work hard to earn the trust of our readers — we also want to make sure we put guardrails in place for our editorial coverage going forward.

More specifically, here’s what this means:

  • We will continue to cover WeWork Food Labs companies, which means we will cover both the good news and the bad news. In other words, we will call it as we see it, uncompromising and analytical, just as we always do.
  • WeWork asked us to periodically donate a couple “office hours” a month to members of the WeWork Food Labs network, which means someone from The Spoon answering questions about the foodtech market. While the core editorial team for The Spoon will not participate in office hours, as Publisher and former market analyst, this is something I felt I could do (and wanted to do). However, that means I will not write about the companies that I interact with for office hours.
  • We will disclose our membership in the WeWork Food Labs on a permanent disclosure page which we will link to when we write about any stories in the Labs.

In reality, this partnership is something new for us, but one we felt was something worth doing. Why? In part, because of all of the benefits outlined above, but the bigger reason is WeWork holds a similar view to us about the future of food. This view was best captured by a single slide in a presentation the WeWork team made to us about Food Labs. The slide illustrated how food innovation has lagged behind that of other spaces:

“The Food industry is decades behind other sectors in adopting technological innovation. Technology startups related to food systems are attracting a fraction of the capital of those in the health sector. The food sector has only attracted $14 billion since 2010. While the healthcare sector attracted $145 billion in investments.”

I made a similar point when I got on stage at the first Smart Kitchen Summit four years ago. I talked about how cooking, food and the kitchen has lagged behind that of other life spaces like the living room, where disruptive technologies have completely changed how we entertain ourselves in under a decade.

It turns out that people wanted to have that conversation as they realize that reinventing food and cooking is a 10X opportunity. Today WeWork – a company that changed the way people think about work spaces – let the world know they want to join the discussion.

That’s something I thought we should be a part of.