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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Smart Kitchen Summit

3 Tips to Avoid Failure, from the Man behind Juicero and Amazon Echo

In the hardware startup world, the margin between success and failure can be razor-thin. Malachy Moynihan knows a thing or two about both: He was the Chief Product Officer at infamous kitchen hardware startup Juicero, and also led the charge for Amazon’s Echo and Fire TV devices.

At the Smart Kitchen Summit yesterday, he sat down with the Wall Street Journal’s Wilson Rothman to talk about why some tech products succeed — and why others become a cautionary tale.

So how did Juicero go from a startup darling with $120 million in funds to, in Moynihan’s words, “the poster child for Silicon Valley excess and VC ineptitude?” The infamous Bloomberg story may have been the nail in the Juicero coffin, but according to Moynihan there were significant hurdles much earlier. Getting 20 packs of cold-pressed juice to customers every week is a very expensive process that doesn’t have an efficient supply chain in place. “The logistics just don’t scale,” explained Moynihan, which other companies (such as meal kits) are struggling with to this day.

“We should have stayed in the commercial space,” said Moynihan. “We really went after a fully branded experience… with lots of money spent on Facebook doing influencing.”

Moynihan finished with three takeaways for new hardware startups:

Always think about your consumer first.
“If there’s one lesson I learned from Amazon, it’s to always think first about the customer, said Moynihan. To make a successful product, you have to engineer a perfect consumer experience with the minimal amount of friction. Take the Amazon Echo: It cuts out the step of typing on a phone or computer, and reduces the amount of appliances you need on hand.

The first product doesn’t have to be perfect.
“Think very very deeply about the really critical features that you have to have — and the ones that would be nice to have,” said Moynihan. You don’t have to get everything into the first iteration of your product; patience is key. Patience for failure, patience for roadblocks, and patience for consumer acceptance. “The path to a lot of these products is: ‘It won’t work it won’t work it won’t work — oh my God, it worked!” said Moynihan.

Cultivate the press.
That last one may have been slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it’s important nonetheless. Good press is critical to the success of any product — especially a consumer-facing hardware one.

Look out for more posts on the panels, companies, and news from the fourth Smart Kitchen Summit!

 

4 Things You Need to Know About Crowdfunding as a Food Business

As a word, “crowdfunding” is part of the vernacular at this point. As a thing you do when you’re trying to launch a product, much mystery remains.

At the Smart Kitchen Summit this afternoon, Cheryl Clements of Pieshell and David Rabie of Tovala spoke to Ashely Daigneault and clarified some of the murkier details about crowdfunding. The panelists went on to discuss how a company — especially an early-stage startup — can successfully follow through on a campaign. Here what companies should be thinking about long before they hit the launch button on a crowdfunding endeavor:

1. Think of it as marketing, not raising money.
In some ways, “crowdfunding” is a misnomer. “It should be more focused on marketing because if you come to the table [just] trying to raise money you’ll have problems,” said Rabie, whose own company raised over $255,000 for its smart oven and corresponding food delivery service.

Clements agreed, reminding people they shouldn’t expect any crowdfunding platform to bring the audience to them. Normally, it works the other way around, and that starts with good, thorough marketing.

2. Expect to do a lot of pre-launch marketing prep.
One that note, Rabie outlined a very specific set of tasks the Tovala team did around marketing long before launch ever happened. That included getting specific people to use the product and collecting feedback; building up an email list; building up a relationship with the press, so that at launch, Tovala wouldn’t land on the internet as a complete unknown.

“That pre-marketing is really what’s going to separate you from the masses,” said Clements. Her own food- and bev-focused crowdfunding platform, Pieshell, requires companies to raise $25 percent of their goal privately before the campaign launches to the public. They do this, she explained, because it’s the best way to tell if a company has put in the muscle needed to do effective crowdfunding.

3. Be honest with your audience about delays and other glitches.
One common issue with crowdfunded products is that their release dates are often delayed. The reasons this happens are less important than how you as the company respond to those delays. Both Rabie and Clements agreed honesty and transparency are the two key words here.

“[Companies] have to be brutally honest and transparent,” said Clements. Even when a product is delayed or experiencing some other operational glitch, explaining that to an audience and asking for their support is far more effective than three months of silence. Ghosting them does nothing beyond ruining your company and your product’s reputation.

4. Keep Iterating.
One thing both Rabie and Clements emphasized was that crowdfunding anything is a process, not just a one-off campaign. Rabie in particular left us with some solid advice that would apply to pretty much any product, food or otherwise: “Companies that win are the ones that survive the longest. They keep iterating until they’re really able to find their product-market fit.”

That may not happen with the first campaign, or even the second. But if you’re willing to keep building, marketing, and communicating with your supporters, that product-market fit is bound to surface eventually.

Check back for more posts throughout the day, and follow along for a steady stream of updates on our Twitter and Instagram feeds.

SKS 2018: Tyler Florence on Recipes, Groceries, and Why Food Needs Social Media

Tyler Florence caused a a stir at last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit when he declared the recipe was dead. That remains up for debate, but Florence, a longtime star of The Food Network, did clarify his statement when he returned to the stage today for this year’s SKS North America.

“I think the smart kitchen is in that place right now where recipes are a bit antiquated,” he explained to The Spoon’s Mike Wolf. Traditional recipes are static instructions that, as Florence said onstage, in order to use, “you have to have all the items on hand or [the dish] isn’t going to work out.” As he explained, the future of the recipe will be more about cooking techniques and choosing the ingredients you want to include, creating what will ultimately be a more dynamic cooking experience. Think of it as the choose your own adventure of food. “People [have] more choices for cooking options than you have nights on planet earth,” he said.

He also highlighted a couple other areas that will be important to the evolution of the food industry in future: shopping for food and sharing your food.

Shopping for food. As the recipe evolves, grocery stores will need to think about how all the different food items on the shelves might relate to one another. To use Florence’s example, right now, there’s no apparent relationship in the store between chicken, broccoli, and Teriyaki sauce, though all three often wind up in the same dish.

In future, a “choose your own adventure” food experience in store might look like this: you use your phone to scan a QR code on a package of chicken. The app then tells you how to cook the chicken and also gives you three or four ways you might prepare it (e.g., with broccoli and Teriyaki sauce). That kind of connected, personalized experience will help consumers to understand, while they’re shopping, how disparate foods could potentially go together. Call it real-time recipes.

Sharing food. The other area Florence says is especially important to food right now is social media, which has to some degree democratized the food world. Thanks to the enormous exchange of information happening on Instagram and other sites, the food world has “a higher creativity rate than we’ve ever had.” He added that “Social media has done an absolutely amazing job of creating the best generation of chefs.” As we move forward, social will continue to be an essential part of any food business’s strategy.

Check back for more posts throughout the day, and follow along for a steady stream of updates on our Twitter and Instagram feeds.

SKS 2018: Meet the Winners of the SKS Startup Showcase

With so much of the innovation and breakthroughs in food and technology coming from the startups, we’d be remiss if we didn’t highlight the amazing work these companies are doing in the space. Throughout the last day and a half, various startups took the Smart Kitchen Summit stage to present their products. And while it’s never an easy task, our panel of judges managed to whittle the contenders down to a few winners, which we’ve summarized for you here:

Excellence in Design: MoJoe Brewing
ChefSteps co-founder Chris Young awarded the Excellence in Design award to MoJoe Brewing. MoJoe makes a portable coffee brewer and travel mug combo that lets users brew hot coffee or tea on the go, using any temperature water (even cold!). The device can be powered by a wall socket, car charger, or a rechargeable battery, and is slim enough to fit in a standard cupholder.

Best in Innovation: Garbi
Presented by Zorlu Ventures, the Best in Innovation award went to a company called Garbi. The startup makes a smart trash can that recognizes items you throw away and reorders them for you from local e-commerce retailers. The founder, Brandon Bourn, told the audience Garbi is also working on a recycling feature that would let Garbi’s garbage cans “sort” items into trash, recycling, or compost.

Overall Winner: Soggy Food Sucks
Michael Wolf stated that the overall winner solved a big consumer problem with a simple solution. The award went to the wonderfully named Soggy Food Sucks, which makes a patented peel-and-stick patch that absorbs condensation and to keep your food fresh — and never soggy — during transit.

We chatted with founder Bill Birgen (a former aerospace engineer!) a few weeks ago about his company and their mission to do one thing: keep restaurant leftovers and food delivery at its best.

Check back for more posts throughout the day, and follow along for a steady stream of updates on our Twitter and Instagram feeds.

SKS 2018: Robots — the Good, the Bad, the State of Your Job

At the Smart Kitchen Summit this week, panelists talking to The Spoon’s Chris Albrecht had a lot of different thoughts on the role of robots in the food industry. They even had different definitions. To Rishi Israni, founder of Zimplistic, robots are “electromechanical devices that [do] a series of complex steps.” To Cynthia Yeung, COO of Cafe-X, they’re everyday items like dishwashers.

Varying definitions aside, the group onstage, which also included Chowbotics CEO Deepak Sekar, all agreed on a few key facts about robots in the food industry:

Robots are really great at precise, mechanical tasks.
Whether churning out cup after cup of coffee without tiring or running a more hygienic salad station, robots are ideal for helping humans with some of the more rote tasks that go along with any food-related business, particularly those in the hospitality sector. “The number one market robots can address are accommodations and food service,” said Sekar.

Robots are really bad at anything involving emotions.
In a theme that’s been surfacing again and again over the course of SKS, robots aren’t exactly ideal when it comes to doing things that tie closely to human emotions. They can’t help you make a guest feel extra special (yet). They won’t be able to offer a stressed out barista a pep talk during a busy morning rush. This is another reason many believe robots need to work alongside humans, not replace them.

Robots are going to take away our jobs . . .
That said, not every job is safe from the bots. “I’ve lost a lot of sleep thinking about if the thing I’m building is going to take jobs,” said Sekar. While he noted that Chowbotics is “not really reducing labor” with its robot, he agreed some job loss because of automation is inevitable. Israni had a similar response, saying that while his company’s product isn’t blatantly striving to replace humans, it could impact the restaurant industry, since the Rotimatic is meant to be used at home.

. . . but not as many as we think.
Yeung had a slightly different take on the issue of humans versus robots, pointing out that Cafe-X sees its customer base as being two demographics. One group has seen the robot multiple times and just wants to get their coffee. The other wants a more guided experience, wants to ask questions about the machine and the coffee. “True hospitality is about meeting your user where they’re at,” she said. And so far, providing that level of customer service is something the robots haven’t mastered.

Check back for more posts throughout the day, and follow along for a steady stream of updates on our Twitter and Instagram feeds.

SKS 2018: These 4 Things Are Defining the Future of the Grocery Store

Mike Lee, founder of food-concept hub Alpha Food Labs, kicked off his Smart Kitchen Summit presentation this morning by talking about cars. Specifically, concept cars that never actually made it to market but were, according to Lee, “a reflection of the aspirations of that time.”

Food is the new Cadillac, it seems, and Lee sees his company as “food’s answer to the concept car.” Alpha Food Labs creates food-centric products that, while they aren’t available on the market right now, could very well wind up on the shelves of retail stores in the future. So he was the perfect fit for a talk at SKS on the future of the grocery store.

Onstage, Lee outlined four trends that are currently shaping the grocery market, and how they’re essential to the future of this sector:

1. Innovation. Specifically, innovation around “creating a frictionless experience for the customer.” Whether it’s delivery via self-driving cars, same-day pickup, or smart labels, new developments are ultimately meant to “chip away at everything that isn’t the core experience,” according to Lee. In other words, new concepts and technologies are meant to reduce any steps and inefficiencies that stand between the customer and the product they want. Think Amazon Go with its cashier-less payments; a model others are now trying to emulate and build upon.

2. Experience. For grocery stores, the future of the physical store is in how successfully companies can turn brick and mortar into a real experience for customers, rather than just a building where shopping takes place. He likened this evolution to movie theaters, who had to change their strategy after the rise of Netflix. Instead of keeping the same creaky chairs and dirty floors, many theaters have begun to offer things like specialty drinks and reclining chairs — things Netflix can’t digitize. Grocery stores will need to use a similar plan of attack for physical stores.

3. Productivity. The idea of where we grow food is changing and redefining the idea of local. Consider companies like Gotham Greens, who grow produce on rooftops of restaurants, making fresh greens easily accessible and cost effective at the same time. Lee also cited cellular agriculture (“cell-ag”) products like cellular meat, which might eventually be “grown” in the basement of restaurants.

4. Personalization. “Personalization is eating everything,” said Lee. For the first time in history, teens spend more money on food than on clothes; a fact that underscores how important food has become the way many people express their identities. Lee referred to dietary preferences as “food tribes.” For example, Paleo is more a lifestyle adopted by a group of people than just a diet. He predicts we’ll see much more of this as consumer products on grocery store shelves continue to evolve.

Check back for more posts throughout the day, and follow along for a steady stream of updates on our Twitter and Instagram feeds.

Yes, You’ll Still Cook With Recipes in the Future. Here’s How

Despite rumors, the recipe — ya know, the thing you use to compile and cook a meal — is far from dead.

That much was clear at the Smart Kitchen Summit today, when CNET’s Ashlee Clark Thompson talked to a panel of food entrepreneurs about the state of the recipe and how it’ll change in future. Joining her onstage were Cliff Sharples, co-CEO of Fexy, Yuni Sameshima, CEO of Chicory, and Jason Cohen, the CEO of Analytical Flavor Systems.

“Because there’s such an interest in food, you have to be able to have a recipe,” said Sharples in response to Thompson’s first question, “Is the recipe dead?” In fact, all three panelists wholeheartedly agreed the recipe is fully alive in 2018 and will stay that way for the foreseeable future. Here’s what they had to say:

Shoppable recipes will be highly personalized.
Nowadays, those of us who cook grab our recipes from multiple sources: websites, apps, hard-copy cookbooks, recipes passed down from family members. “There are so many blogs, and influencers and experts out there,” Sameshima noted while onstage.

And those companies offering tools around shoppable recipes need to take those different sources into account. The cookbook isn’t going away (Sharples says sales are actually up 20 percent year-over-year for cookbooks); your mom’s meatloaf recipe will still be relevant when your kids are old enough to cook. The future of the recipe isn’t about replacing those sources, it’s about centralizing them to create a highly personalized experience for the user.

Recipes reflect large-scale shifts in food.
“There’s always going to be a role for tradition,” Cohen said of food and flavors. That said, he noted the large-scale shifts flavors and ingredients go through over time. Consumers in the U.S. have more of a taste for bitter flavors, for example, according to Cohen — dark chocolate, black coffee, etc.. Siracha was once unheard of around home cooks; now it’s a regular staple in a growing number of pantries. More and more shoppable recipes reflect these changes, and will continue to evolve as more of these shifts occur.

Different generations interact differently with recipes.
Sharples noted that one of the differences between generations when it comes to the kitchen is what they focus on with recipes. For example, younger generations “want to know why this is the best recipe and [want to know] new techniques. If there are new tools that challenge what mom said, they’re fine with that.”

Grocery delivery has given recipes a boost.
Few people plan recipes days in advance, something that’s historically been a problem when it comes to using recipes and cooking at home. The advent of grocery delivery has changed that. Whereas getting ingredients to execute a recipe used to require a lot of effort and planning, same-day delivery and pickup eliminates the need to plan while simultaneously making it easier to create a meal in the kitchen.

Check back for more posts throughout the day, and follow along for a steady stream of updates on our Twitter and Instagram feeds.

SKS18: Innit Updates Shopwell App, GE Partners with SideChef and Hestan

At the Smart Kitchen Summit today, guided-cooking platform Innit announced an upgrade to its Shopwell app, which helps users discover personalized food recommendations.

Michael Wolf wrote about Shopwell on the Spoon shortly after it launched in 2017:

“The app, which has been downloaded over 2.5 million times, scans packaged foods at retail and provides a score based on the user’s profile. The app’s patented algorithm helps to analyze packaged food and give real-time matching scores against a user’s personalized nutritional profile which factors in a user’s gender, age, allergies and dietary goals.

The deal extends Innit, which has developed a platform for appliance makers to create connected products for the kitchen, further into the nutritional and shopping portions of the food experience. ShopWell’s database of over 400 thousand packaged food items and consumer facing app allows Innit to touch the consumer’s food experience from the point of purchase to consumption.”

The new Shopwell app will double coverage to encompass over 800,000 items, and also adds more social sharing capability so users can make personalized shopping lists which they can share on social media. If the food doesn’t get a high score, Shopwell can recommend “trade-up” foods to better meet your nutrition goals.

GE cooktop with integrated Hestan smart cooking technology.

Across the Smart Kitchen Summit lobby, GE Appliances had an announcement of their own. Two, actually.

First off, the appliance giant announced they are partnering with mobile cooking platform SideChef. GE’s 2019 appliances will feature 5,000 recipes from chefs and bloggers, and will also have meal planning and guided cooking capabilities.

GE also announced it’s working with smart-cooking system Hestan Cue to create induction cooktops and ranges for their Café appliance line. Using Hestan technology, the cooktops can automatically adjust cooking temperature as users go through video-guided recipes.

Café is the first to offer induction ranges with built-in Hestan technology. Owners can download the Hestan Cue app, which will walk them through step-by-step recipe preparation and simultaneously control the temperature. There are also options that can heat pans to the ideal temperature for common dishes, such as seared scallops or scrambled eggs.

Keep checking in for more news from the Smart Kitchen Summit: new products, platforms, updates, and more! Follow along on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. 

A Plant-based Diet Could Save the Planet — and Your Life

When Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams realized he was headed towards blindness caused by diabetes, he turned to a treatment you buy from a grocery store, not a pharmacy: his food. He switched from the typical “American” diet, heavy on the meat, to a plant-based one, and within the span of just a few weeks he regained his eyesight and had effectively reversed Type 2 diabetes. Better yet, not much later, he convinced his mom to do the same thing, to similar results.

“When it comes to chronic disease, it’s not our lineage, it’s our lunch,” Alexis Fox, CEO of Lighter, explained onstage this morning at Smart Kitchen Summit.

Fox, whose company provides a B2B meal-planning tool to the healthcare industry and to athletes (among others), used Eric Adams’ story as a way to illustrate the impact the right foods can have on our health — and how devastating the wrong ones can be for our bodies. Among the facts Fox cited onstage were: 33.9 percent of adults in the U.S. have pre-diabetes, heart disease is the leading cause of death in this country, and childhood obesity has nearly tripled.

But she, along with her co-founder Micah Risk, believe there’s a way out, and it’s by helping people rethink the way they choose and eat food. Their tool shows users which foods they should be buying, based on each individual user, and how to prepare and shop for a recipe. It’s a personalized food service built around the idea of plant-based eating and sustainability — two things we’re going to see a lot more of, if today’s SKS talks and panels are any indicator.

Given that, you won’t find any recommendations for meat-based dishes with Lighter. The service is about providing 100 percent vegan meal recommendations; something that’s as important for the environment as it is for the human body.

“Most of the energy we put into animals does not get converted into energy [for] humans,” Fox said onstage, as a way of underscoring how unsustainable current practices around animal agriculture are.

And Lighter’s not the only company aware of this. During her talk, Fox cited WeWork — a company currently valued at more than $20 billion — and its recent decision to ban all meat onsite and at company events.

“Our medical community and every entity concerned with sustainability is encouraging us to decrease our meat consumption,” said Fox. And with companies like WeWork also onboard, we may be able to include the startup and tech communities on that list of entities, too.

Check back for more posts throughout the day, and follow along for a steady stream of updates on our Twitter and Instagram feeds.

SKS18: The Ups and Downs of Kitchen Hardware Invention

A word that gets tossed around a lot without necessarily meaning anything is “innovation.” But at the Smart Kitchen Summit this morning, one group took the stage to tackle actual innovation — that is, risky, envelope-pushing ideas and moves — in our favorite place: the kitchen.

CNET’s Ashlee Clarke Thompson moderated the panel, which featured Clay Alexander from Ember, Scott Heimendinger from Modernist Cuisine (and inventor of Sansaire), and Melissa Verzwyvelt from Heatworks. Here are a few takeaways from their discussion:

Patents are a real pain in the a$$.
One thing the panelists could all agree on is that patents are a huge pain. They’re expensive and can take years to get, and often require hiring a lawyer.

“It’s so hard when you have an idea and you want to bring it to people, to realize how much money you need to spend up front on a lawyer,” said Heimendinger. “And then the patent might not be granted for years.”

Heatworks has faced the same struggle with their 60 patents. “We’ve been trying to get our tech to market since 2006,” said Verzwyvelt. “You don’t want to spend so much time and effort to unveil something… and some other company already has the patent for it.”

Don’t just think of typical use cases
Most inventors have an imaginary consumer — and a predicted use case — in mind when they’re developing products. But not everyone will use new products as the inventor intended. “You have to consider abnormal use,” said Heimendinger. Which led him to tell the very humorous story of a Sansaire user who tried to return his device after running it nonstop for six months to create a cannabis butter combination.

IP is king
“We don’t do anything at Ember without thinking about IP first,” said Alexander. Once companies establish a strong IP base, they have options: they can either develop their own product using their patented tech or license it out to other companies.

That’s what Ember plans to do with the world’s first self-heated dinner plate. “We’ll launch the first version, then license out that technology to others,” explained Alexander. He emphasized that licensing was a good way for smaller companies to compete with big corporations.

Will big appliance companies ever be “innovators”?
In short: no. Developing a new and innovative product or technology is a massive risk: it takes tons of capital and time, and in the end there’s no guarantee that anyone will buy it. “Only a hungry entrepreneur will take that level of risk on their shoulders,” said Alexander.

Check back for more posts throughout the day, and follow along for a steady stream of updates on our Twitter and Instagram feeds.

Silo Comes Out of Stealth at the Smart Kitchen Summit

Today at the Smart Kitchen Summit, a new kitchen hardware company emerged from stealth mode. Silo makes a countertop vacuum-sealer system they claim will keep food fresh up to five times longer than your average plastic container.

The system consists of a vacuum base and a set of plastic containers, and integrates with Alexa. Founder Tal Lapidot first got the idea for Silo when he was looking for a better way to keep food fresh at home. Applying his engineering background to vacuum storage, he decided to try the technology on containers instead of plastic bags, which are single-use and less environmentally friendly.

“I wanted something fast and easy,” he told me. “Take a container of food, place it on something, and get it vacuum sealed with one touch.”

Since the product he wanted didn’t exist yet, he decided to invent it. Lapidot filed a patent for his technology, and in 2016 he quit his job to pursue Silo full-time.

From the beginning, he knew he needed to make his product smart. “Many of us don’t remember what food we put in the fridge one week ago,” said Lapidot. “The device can give you a stamp of approval that that food is still good… It’s the missing piece.”

Originally, Silo used an app to track food freshness. But users didn’t always have their phones when cooking, and there’s also the whole “sticky fingers in the kitchen” issue. To solve that, the company decided to turn to voice.

Users tell Alexa what food they’re storing with their Silo and the technology will track how long that food lasts. If you ask Alexa what you have on hand for dinner, it will list off what items in your fridge are ready for cooking. You can also ask it about the state of specific foods.

According to Lapidot, Silo is the first company to make a device that has Alexa built in, which means that there’s a fully enabled Alexa Dot in the base of the device. Not only can Silo vacuum seal your food, it can also read you the news, dictate a recipe, or play some tunes.

The company will launch its Kickstarter campaign on October 16. Lapidot said he couldn’t yet disclose prices, but told us that backers could purchase the Silo vacuum seal device plus bundles of containers.

Silo turned to Kickstarter to source funds because the product attracts early adapters. “We want to make waves,” said Lapidot. They’re planning to ship by Q3 of 2019.

As we know all too well at The Spoon, crowdfunded kitchen appliances can have a tricky time making the leap from concept to shipment. Lapidot, however, is confident that won’t be an issue for his company. “Many times, hardware companies work very hard developing a prototype, but they don’t always understand the realities of manufacturability,” he said.

Silo already has two manufacturing partners, one of which is the largest manufacturer of food-grade plastics in China. Many on their team also hail from the manufacturing sector, so they understand potential pitfalls and can avoid them.

Keep checking in for more news from the Smart Kitchen Summit: new products, platforms, updates, and more!

SKS 2018: Pablos Holman Thinks 3D-Printed Food Is the Key to a Better Food System

When a problem needs to be solved at scale, we usually turn to tech. And right now, there’s a big, big problem looming: the world’s population is about 7.5 billion people and counting, and we need to find more efficient ways to feed them.

Inventor Pablos Holman is betting on 3D-printed food as the solution to that issue. Onstage at the Smart Kitchen Summit 2018, Holman, who currently works with Nathan Myhrvold at Intellectual Ventures, gave us hints about what that might look like — and it’s less weird than you might think.

Holman asked the audience to imagine a machine with three settings (“What I ate yesterday,” “What my friends like,” “I’m feeling lucky,” he offered.) At the press of one of those buttons, a printer, such as those from Makerbot (which Holman worked on), could customize a meal based on the user’s dietary needs and/or restrictions, including any pharmaceuticals they might be taking. For example, if a vegetarian with thyroid issues wanted a burger, a 3D printer could produce that meal — nutrients and necessary medication included.

While “post-post-modern cooking” might seem like an appropriate moniker for this way of getting food, Holman pointed out that creating food from powder is something we already do. Consider ground wheat, which we powder and turn into bread and pastas.

Right now, 3D-printing technology is in its “early-80s-dot-matrix” phase, according to Holman. In other words, it’s early days, and printing smoothies and nutrition bars is the extent of 3D-printed food right now. That’ll change, and in a not-so-distant future printers will be cranking out steaks and strawberries in addition to those smoothies.

Holman ended his talk with a reminder that even though most of us imagine all our meals should be Thanksgiving-grade or higher, in reality, 20 of our weekly 21 meals are typically so-so and could be brought to us a whole lot more efficiently. “They’re fuel,” he said. “Let the robots make them.”

Check back for more posts throughout the day, and follow along for a steady stream of updates on our Twitter and Instagram feeds.