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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Smart Kitchen Summit

SKS 2020 Day Three: Food Robots, Ghost Kitchens & a Tour of the Modernist Cuisine Kitchen

Yesterday at SKS was jam-packed with great insights and conversation.

Novameat printed meat for us, we learned Pat Brown believes cell-based meat will never be a thing, and Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick outlined a four-phase plan to bring — you guessed it — cell-based meat to market. We also heard from Wired’s Joe Ray and ATK’s Lisa McManus on the proper way to use tech in the kitchen and headed into the labs, homes and headquarters of our Startup Showcase finalists to see what they’re building.

And we’re not done! Here’s what we have lined up for our final day of SKS 2020 Virtual:

Building Resiliency in Restaurants with Tech: We catch up with the leaders of Sweetgreen, Galley Solutions and Leanpath to hear how restaurants are using tech to build more resilient businesses during the pandemic.

The Online Grocery Explosion: Wall Street Journal’s Wilson Rothman talks to Shipt CEO Kelly Caruso about the changing nature of online grocery in 2020 and where it’s going in the future.

I, Restaurant: Chris Albrecht will sit down with the CEOs of Picnic, DishCraft and Bear Robotics to see how the adoption of robotics and automation is changing restaurants in the front and back of house.

The DoorDash Playbook: Brita Rosenheim will talk with DoorDash’s Tom Pickett about lessons learned and new opportunities in the food delivery market.

Ghost Kitchens Everywhere: Jenn Marston will talk with ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant experts about strategies for navigatng this red-hot market.

The OG in Molecular Gastronomy: We just added a early-day debut of my conversation with the guy who kicked off the molecular gastronomy revolution, Harold McGee, about his new book on smells and the state of cooking innovation. (Hint: he’s more excited about some other things going on in food innovation happening outside of the kitchen.)

Let’s Head Into the Modernist Kitchen: Speaking of molecular gastronomy, we’re getting a guided tour of the Modernist Cuisine by head chef Francisco Migoya.

Plus a whole lot more. (See schedule here.)

If you’d like to attend day three, you’re in luck! We’re offering a discounted day three ticket that gets you full access. See all the sessions, network with the community and more for just $99.

Day Two @ SKS: Meet Impossible Foods’ CEO, Print Some Meat & Talk Asia Food Tech

Wow, what a first day at Smart Kitchen Summit. We learned that the recipe is alive and well (sorry, Tyler Florence), hacked together new kitchen products with Scott Heimendinger and saw a live debut of a new pizza robot, not to mention all the great in-person meetings, breakout sessions, vendor demos and more.

And we’re just getting started. Here are a few of the things we have in store for day two:

Impossible’s Pat Brown: Washington Post’s Maura Judkis will talk to Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown about a year of massive growth for the company, the rapidly changing alt-protein market and more.

Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick: We’ll hear from the CEO of Eat Just, Josh Tetrick, about why they are one of the very few companies trying to build both plant-based and cell-based meat products.

Food Waste Innovation: The Spoon’s Jenn Marston will talk to Apeel CEO James Rogers, Chiara Cecchini of the Future Food Institute and Alexandria Coari of ReFED about the impact of COVID on food waste innovation

Meat Printer! We’ll head to Spain for a live demo as Novameat CEO shows off his plant-based 3D meat printer in action

Startup Showcase Show & Tell: The show and tell portion of our Startup Showcase will allow you to head into the labs, home offices and headquarters of the 10 finalists where you’ll get to see things like contactless food kiosks, cellular aquaculture, food robots and much more.

Book Debut: Listen in as IndieBio managing director (and longtime tech journalist) Po Bronson and IndioBio Founder and current partner at Mayfield Arvind Gupta talk about their long journey around the world as they worked on their book, Decoding The World.

Table Talk about Cell-Based Meat With Paul Shapiro : I’ll lead an interactive conversation with the author of Clean Meat and CEO of Better Company about the market dynamics around the cell-based meat industry.

Build a Connected Kitchen Product: Microsoft principal IoT engineer Larry Jordan will show you how to build your own smart kitchen device and show off his newly open-sourced hardware and software that will help others get going.

Asia Food Tech: Join us at the end of the day as we head to Asia to talk with others about the fast-changing food tech landscape across Asia and get an update on the Japanese food tech scene from SKS Japan’s Akiko Okada.

If you’d like to join us, you can buy a discounted ticket for days two and three here.

If you missed our coverage from yesterday, here is some of the coverage from The Spoon:

What Does It Take to Build a Cell-Based Protein Business? – What can companies in the space do to help cell-based protein scale to address issues like global food security and environmental sustainability? That’s a topic FTW Ventures’ Brian Frank discussed at this week’s SKS 2020 show, where he was joined by Benjamina Bollag, the founder and CEO of HigherSteaks, and Justin Kolbeck, CEO and cofounder of Wild Type.

Middleby Unveils the PizzaBot 5000, Which Assembles a Pizza in Under 1 Minute – Lab2Fab, a division of Middleby Corporation, unveiled its new PizzaBot 5000 pizza-assembling machine at the Smart Kitchen Summit.

Should We Ditch the Term “Vending Machine?” – Megan Mokri, Co-Founder and CEO of Byte Technologies, Chloe Vichot, Co-Founder and COO of Fresh Bowl, talked with Chris Albrecht about a range of topics impacting the unattended food vending services, including COVID-19, machine vandalism, and whether “vending machine” is a good term.

See 3D Meat Printers, a Pizza Robot and The Modernist Cuisine Kitchen in Action at SKS

Every October, one of my favorite things about the Smart Kitchen Summit — the Spoon’s flagship conference for food tech leaders — is getting to see the latest and greatest technologies in the world of food on display.

Over the years that’s included everything from smart ovens and waiter robots to 3D-printed popsicles as entrepreneurs bring their latest creations to Seattle to show off what they’ve been building and to meet other food tech innovators.

And while nothing can replace getting to see (or taste!) the latest product that could change the world of food and cooking in person, one of the limitations of a physical world conference is what can actually be physically transported to Seattle. Sometimes, it’s just not feasible to get a product — or something like a tech-powered kitchen — on a plane.

But with Smart Kitchen Summit virtual, we can go anywhere in the world to where creators are building their innovations, from the a lab to the kitchen and into a barn. (All of these will happen this year.) And we can have a food tech innovator show us what they’re building first-hand.

Here are some of the things you can expect at SKS this year:

  • Novameat CEO Giuseppe Scionti will show us in a live demo how his company is making plant-based 3D-printed meat.
  • We’ll see a cultured seafood lab in California, food dispensing pods in Maine and food robots in India during our Startup Showcase.
  • We’ll get a guided tour of the Modernist Cuisine kitchen with the Modernist’s head chef, Francisco Migoya.
  • A new restaurant pizza robot will debut live on camera.

Not only that, with the built-in networking features of SKS Virtual, you’ll get to meet, ask questions and even have one-on-one video chats with many of the innovators at SKS 2020.

SKS starts next Tuesday, so get your ticket here. If you’re attending from overseas and can’t watch live, don’t worry: your SKS ticket will get you access to Spoon Plus, where we’ll host all the videos from SKS.

Don’t miss out on seeing the latest in food tech. Get your ticket today and we’ll see you at SKS!

A Quick Walkaround Tour of Smart Kitchen Summit Virtual

Here at the Spoon, we’ve been spending most of our days getting ready for Smart Kitchen Summit 2020, which takes place Oct. 13–15 and, this year, is completely virtual.

One thing that’s become clear over the past few weeks is that many folks haven’t attended, let alone spoke or exhibited at, a virtual summit before. Heck, for us, this is our first big one as well.

So I thought it would be worth while to give a quick guided tour of what our event will look like by giving a tour of Hopin, the virtual event platform where we are hosting SKS 2020.

One of the reasons we chose Hopin is that it includes all of the various “locations” you normally see when you attend in-person events: a Main stage, areas for breakout sessions, exhibit areas and, of course, networking space.

And we plan to take advantage of all of these different features to make for a great interactive three days of conversation, workshops, demos and networking.

Some of the things we have on tap:

  • A live demo of 3D printing plant-based meat from NovaMeat
  • A tour of Modernist Cuisine Kitchen
  • A debut of a new restaurant-scale pizza-making robot
  • Live sessions with Startup Showcase finalists demoing everything from cultured seafood labs to taste-altering cutlery to home cooking robots.

And that’s just the beginning. Add in conversations and one-on-one networking with the leaders of companies in kitchen tech, future food, restaurant tech and more, and we are super excited about helping you come away from SKS with great ideas and the right connections to help you build your next business.

You’re probably thinking that’s great, but what exactly does a virtual event look like? Don’t worry. I did a quick walkthrough of Hopin to give you a better understanding of how it all works. Just click play below to take a quick tour.

Once your done, make sure to get your ticket to SKS because you will not want to miss out!

Meet the Startup Showcase Finalists for Smart Kitchen Summit 2020

While much of the food world has been impacted by the pandemic, there’s been no shortage of investors, inventors and innovators looking to reinvent the food system.

To me, this excitement about food tech is especially evident from the flood of interest in our sixth annual Startup Showcase, which takes place at this year’s (virtual) Smart Kitchen Summit. We were overwhelmed with applications from companies wanting to participate at our annual event that showcases the most interesting new startups building innovative new products for the future of food and cooking.

And so we’re excited today to announce the 10 finalists that will be showcasing at the Smart Kitchen Summit Oct. 13th-15th. These startups are innovating in everything from cultured meat to food waste to restaurant robotics to taste-altering utensils.

If you’d like to watch the founders of these companies pitch and go into a virtual session where they will show off their products and answer questions, get your ticket for the Smart Kitchen Summit today!

Minnow Technologies

Minnow Technologies is making an Amazon Locker for fresh takeout food. The connected food pickup pod can house takeout meals in an antimicrobial environment. Pods can be placed virtually anywhere and restaurants, food halls and other food businesses can leverage them to provide their customers and delivery providers with a safe and way to grab and go.

Cultured Decadence

Cultured Decadence is a cell-based tech startup creating a system that can produce seafood like crabs and lobsters sustainably. It does this using cell culture and tissue engineering techniques for the high-value portions of crabs and lobsters, producing no shells or wasteful organ pieces. It can also potentially eliminate the need for wild harvesting altogether and help create a more sustainable ocean ecosystem.

Satis.ai

Satis.ai is a full-stack operating system for restaurant kitchens. The system uses live camera feeds in kitchens to analyze cooking processes and provide actionable feedback to back-of-house staff in real time as well as give owners/managers business intelligence to help increase efficiency, inventory ordering and customer order accuracy.

Zymmo LLC

Zymmo’s platform is a meal marketplace and foodie social network that gives chefs a place to connect with local food lovers and potential customers. Zymmo allows chefs to publish their menus, promote their events and facilitate ordering and payments all in one app.

Bonbowl

Bonbowl is a small appliance startup making an induction-based heating cooktop along with patent-pending cookware that can be used to cook with and eat from safely. Their induction technology enables power efficient cooking that uses half the power of electric stoves of similar size. The Bonbowl pot doubles as a bowl that consumers can eat right out of, eliminating a longer cleanup process and additional hardware.

Nymble Labs

Nymble Labs makes Julia, a domestic cooking robot that helps consumers cook healthy meals for their families. The cooking robot only requires users to select a recipe, chop up or gather the ingredients for said recipe and insert them into the device. Users press a button and Julia does the rest: heating at the right temps, adding ingredients at the right time, stirring and simmering until the meal is done and ready to be served.

Taste Boosters

Taste Boosters is the startup behind SpoonTEK, the world’s first taste-altering utensil. Using taste buds, the human body’s sensors and their patent-pending ionic technology, SpoonTEK can alter and enhance taste and flavor of any food dish.

Vobil

Vobil is a startup that’s developed a voice-based e-commerce technology platform that links food ordering to connected car interfaces, allowing for entirely voice-based ordering, checkout and navigation to the store in real-time.

Kitche

Kitche is a free app for iOS and Android phones that helps users reduce food waste at home by helping change personal habits with what they buy and consume. The app uses a connection with an OCR (optical character recognition) engine and a food ontology database to help users know what they already have at home, even when they’re on the go. The app helps users understand how much money they waste every time they throw food out at home.

Piestro

Piestro is an automated pizzeria startup that has created a standalone, fully-integrated cooking system for artisanal pizzas. From start to finish, it takes three minutes to make a pizza. Piestro will be able to press pizza dough, spread sauce and shredded cheese, add up to six desired toppings, and calculate the perfect cooking time based on the ingredients and humidity. Orders can be placed either in person at a public location (e.g., shopping malls, college campuses, movie theaters, hospitals or airports) and cooked in front of the customer. Customers can also opt to get the pizza even closer to their door by ordering through an app for delivery.

Building The Next Great Food Tech Company? Apply for the Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase!

Are you working on a new alternative protein product that you think will change the world? Building the cooking appliance or food robot of the future? Have an idea for AI could reduce the amount of food we waste?

If so, you’ll want to apply for the sixth annual Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase!

Alumni of the SKS Startup Showcase have gone on to raise raise tens of millions of dollars in funding, appear on Shark Tank, and make some of the most exciting and well-known products in their categories.

And because North America’s leading food tech summit is going virtual this year, the 2020 Startup Showcase will be a truly global launchpad for your food tech company.

Just submit your application no later than September 15 to enter your company for consideration. We’ll be selecting 10 startups to tell the world about their ideas at the Smart Kitchen Summit from October 13 – 15, 2020.

We look forward to hearing about your company and helping you tell your story to the world!

Smart Kitchen Summit 2020 Is Going Virtual. Your Ticket Is Spoon Plus

When we announced Spoon Plus earlier this month, we buried the lede a bit when it comes to our flagship event, the Smart Kitchen Summit.

So here it is: Smart Kitchen Summit 2020 is going virtual.

It goes without saying that a certain pandemic has something to do with our decision not to try and gather 800 or so people together in Seattle in October. But that doesn’t mean we’re not really excited about the possibilities of a fully virtual SKS. We’ve had thousands join us for our virtual event series over the past few weeks and I am more convinced than ever that we can make SKS even better as we explore new formats and ways to bring people together.

SKS 2020 will be the week of October 12th. We’re busy recruiting speakers and talking to sponsors, so if you are interested in speaking or sponsoring, let us know. We’ll also have a Startup Showcase at SKS Virtual, so if you are a food tech startup, check back soon at Smart Kitchen Summit website.

And if you’d like to attend? Just buy a Spoon Plus annual plan and you’re in! Want your whole team to attend? Get a team plan and each subscriber gets a ticket.

We’ve also extended our launch pricing through tomorrow (Wednesday), so if you want to get access, just sign up using the code LAUNCH to get 40% off Spoon Plus.

SKS is what started it all for us half a decade ago. Since then, we’ve launched events in Japan and Europe and offshoot events around personalization and robotics. Now we’re excited to be bringing SKS online to reach audience around the globe. Join us!

Meet Spoon Plus, Our New Deep Dive Insights & Virtual Events Membership Program

When we launched the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2015, an event all about the rethinking of cooking and our kitchens, we soon realized innovation was happening everywhere across the food system: at the farm, in our favorite restaurants, at the corner grocery store and, yes, in our kitchens.

It felt necessary, almost urgent, to tell these stories. After all, I’d spent a good chunk of the decade prior working for one of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech blogs, where I discovered how crucial it is to nascent markets to find those betting big on turning their world-changing ideas into a changed world. Back then it was technologies like cloud computing and IoT upending established industries like digital media and communication, but it didn’t take me long to realize the reinvention of the food system would be an even bigger deal.

After all, everyone eats, right?

So we started The Spoon in 2016 because we had this idea that we would tell the stories of a new generation of innovators working to reinvent the food system. Now, almost four thousand stories later, we are more convinced than ever about the impact of innovation on food.

Which is why we created Spoon Plus.

What’s Spoon Plus? In short, it’s our paid membership community where we’ll be bringing you deep dive insights in the form of research reports, long-form conversations with innovators, and exclusive online events to help you better understand the world of food tech and food innovation.

We’ll have new content every week, and to start we’ve got a great report from our own Catherine Lamb analyzing the emerging market for air protein. We also have a new report by me analyzing the survey results of food-industry executives about the impact of COVID-19 and their go-forward plans for the rest of 2020.

That’s not all. Early next week, I’ll publish my first weekly intelligence brief looking at COVID-19 disruption on new product launches in the kitchen and housewares space. After that, our editor-in-chief Chris Albrecht will soon have a report on the emerging market for next-generation food vending machines, and our restaurant tech expert, Jenn Marston, will have a strategy guide for cloud kitchens in the post-COVID world.

As part of Spoon Plus, we’ll also have deep dive conversations and interviews with industry executives like this one with Chris Young, the coauthor of Modernist Cuisine and founder of ChefSteps, who opened up to me recently about what happened with the company he founded and where he thinks the next big opportunities are in the world of food.

As part of our launch of Spoon Plus, we’re also announcing that Smart Kitchen Summit 2020 is going virtual, and that every Spoon Plus annual membership will include a ticket to SKS 2020. Our belief is that our events and online content have a symbiotic relationship, where our community engages with the same innovators we are writing about and where we often find the next big story at The Spoon. As we go deeper with Spoon Plus, we want our SKS community to be a part of that.

Of course, part of the reason for going virtual with our flagship event is we now live in a world where in-person events that thrive on a global mix of interesting people are going to be difficult, if not impossible, for the next 1-2 years. That said, we’re really excited about the SKS reaching even more people. We’ve been working hard at building our virtual event capabilities (we had a virtual COVID-19 food summit last month with over 1500 attendees), and are becoming more excited by the day about the possibilities of SKS 2020 and other exclusive virtual events through Spoon Plus.

So if you want to go deeper with us through research and reports, if you want to attend SKS 2020, if you want to support The Spoon as we grow, subscribe to Spoon Plus. As a way to help you get started, we’re offering Spoon Plus annual memberships for 40% off for the next ten days only. This one-time discount includes our company plans (that’s right – you can get Spoon Plus for your entire team). Just use the discount code LAUNCH when you are checking out and Memberful (the technology powering our membership offering) will deduct the amount from the total.

And of course, if you want to try out Spoon Plus for a month, you can subscribe to our monthly plan (monthly plans do not include a ticket to SKS). We also offer substantial discounts for students and for anyone who is in the midst of job transition.

If you’d like to learn more about those, just drop us an line.

For those of you wondering about The Spoon’s free coverage, don’t worry. We’re more committed than ever to bringing you the same daily news and analysis of those changing the food system for free on our main site. Spoon Plus is for those who, like us, also want to go deeper and access content that connects the dots from our daily reporting.

Thanks for your support. We look forward to building Spoon Plus together as we look to better understand and engage in the future of food.

Save the Date: Smart Kitchen Summit 2020, the Leading Food Tech Event In North America, Returns on October 15-16

Mark your calendars: the Smart Kitchen Summit, North America’s leading event for food tech executives, is back for a sixth year on October 15th and 16th in Seattle.

As the first event to bring together executives across the food, appliance, technology and retail industries to explore how digital technologies and innovation in science will reinvent the world of food, SKS has grown to become a must-attend global summit where leaders connect and map the future of their businesses.

And SKS 2020 will be no different as we continue to dive deep into the future of the kitchen as well as explore how advances in food science, AI, IoT and other innovation spaces will bring about a fundamental reinvention of every part of the food value chain over the next decade.

A sample of some of the topics we plan to explore at SKS 2020 include:

  • Personalization across food retail, restaurants, nutrition and the home kitchen
  • AI, robotics and automation’s impact on food in the home, restaurant and food retail
  • Future food innovation (Plant-based, lab-grown, from the air, molecular, etc)
  • Smart kitchen evolution towards a reinvention of core cooking, interfaces and kitchen business models
  • How innovation could help reduce food waste and build more sustainable food systems
  • Ghost kitchens and the changing restaurant and food delivery market

In addition to dozens of sessions exploring the areas critical to today’s food tech exec, SKS 2020 will also add new opportunities for attendees to discover innovations and connect with one another. This year’s event will feature expanded workshops and how-tos from makers to help you better understand and catalyze creation in your business. We will also include a bigger and better SKS Connect meeting platform where we will no doubt top the 1000 plus one-on-one meetings that took place last year.

Personally, I am more excited than ever for SKS. When we started the event back in 2015, I’d just spent much of the previous decade watching large-scale forces completely change the world of entertainment through digital technologies. We suspected disruptive tech was about to have a much bigger impact on the world of food and – as we can plainly see now – we were right. Everywhere along today’s food value chain — on the farm, in the factory, at food retail, in the restaurant and the consumer kitchen — we’re witnessing a radical reinvention of how business is done and how we prepare, sell and consume food.

And yet so much opportunity lies ahead of us. While we’ve seen food tech join other areas as a key focus area for many forward thinkers, the reinvention of the world of food is still in the very early stages. We have yet to find our Spotify or Netflix for food, and I really believe that it’s just a fairly short matter of time before companies emerge that will become huge platforms upon which the future of food is built.

Chances are these companies will be at SKS, so I’d love to invite you to join us in Seattle on October 15-16th as we figure out the future. Please check out our website to get access to early winter sale tickets, let us know if you want to speak or sponsor, or just sign up for more information.

See you in Seattle!

SKS 2019: Food Retail is Evolving Fast, but Some Things Aren’t Going Anywhere (Hint: Brick & Mortar)

The next time you step into a grocery store, take a look around and think about how much work went into orchestrating the selection. Which CPG products should the store stock? How many? And how does fresh food factor in?

Those questions don’t have an easy answer, and they’re the reason that food retail is such a tricky business. Thankfully, there are companies trying to reinvent the space with the help of tech, innovation, and creative thinking. And we heard from a few of them onstage last month during a panel at SKS 2019.

In the panel, Brita Rosenheim of Better Food Ventures spoke with Stefan Kalb of Shelf Engine, Mike Fogarty of Choice Market and Andreas Wuerfel of METRO Group about how companies are re-imagining food suppliers to be more sustainable, more efficient, and be better at serving quick-shifting consumer demands. 

You should check out the video below to get a deeper look into how companies are leveraging tech to transform food retail. First, here are a few high-level takeaways:

Food retail is changing — and fast
 Kalb kicked off the panel by pointing out that the grocery space is in the midst of rapid transformation. “Because it’s a highly commoditized industry, changes spread quickly,” he said. His company Shelf Engine helps retailers stay on top of fast-moving trends by crunching customer data to forecast exactly how much of each SKU needs to be ordered. The more retailers they work with, the more data they get, the better they can help grocers optimize selection. Which, in today’s incredibly competitive food retail market, is crucial. 

Brick and mortar isn’t going anywhere
“In retail, the physical space is always going to be a quintessential part of people’s lives,” Fogarty told the SKS audience. Right now, only a small percentage of grocery sales happen online (though that number is growing). Physical retail space, he argues, will be an “anchor” for all the different sales channels that are emerging now, like pickup, delivery, vending machine, and more. 

Food retail is a slippery challenge. Tech can help
Wuerfel pointed out that optimizing retail in a company with a global presence (Metro has 750 stores in 35 countries) is, unsurprisingly, incredibly tricky. They have to “cater to every possible palate out there,” all while ordering the right number of products to reduce waste and maximize profit. To do so, Metro knew it would have to leverage new technologies. So it teamed up with TechStars to make an accelerator program to catalyze outside-in innovation for the company. That, according to Wuerfel, has helped their company stay on the cutting edge of food retail.

Check out the full video below to hear more insights from these three thought leaders in grocery and food sales. It’ll make you think a lot more the next time you set food in your local grocery store.

SKS 2019: Re-Imagining Food Retail

From Edible Spoons to Adaptogen Chewing Gum, Here are 8 Startups Shaping the Future of Food

Super nutritious noodles. Cricket-based seasoning powders. Edible spoons to replace single-use plastics. Chewing gum that’s actually good for you.

These are just some of the awesome companies that pitched at the inaugural SKS 2019 Future Food Competition last month. Check out the video below to see the 8 finalists describe their company and explain why they’re the next “it” edible CPG company.

Once you’ve determined which startup you think should be the winner, click here to see if our judges agreed with you. And keep an eye on The Spoon to follow along as these companies grow, head to market and continue their efforts to shake up the way we eat.

SKS 2019: Future Food pitches

SKS 2019: Disrupting Large Food Corporations from the Outside In

When you envision a company that’s “disruptive,” you probably picture young startups tinkering away in a garage. But major food corporations also want to earn that title and keep a pulse on the newest consumer trends.

So how do large organizations that have been around for decades and span continents stay fresh and new? That’s exactly the question that Larry Portaro, Director of GE’s FirstBuild and Victoria Spadaro Grant, CTO of Barilla and President of Blu1877 tackled during a recent panel at SKS 2019. 

If you’re part of a large company trying to emulate the agility and creativity of a startup, you should watch the whole panel video below. Here are a few insights into how large corporations successfully disrupt from within:

Independence is key
Firstbuild is a rapid-production hardware company that also happens to be a subsidiary of GE. While they may be part of a giant appliance company, Portaro emphasized on the SKS that having some level separation — their offices are actually 8 miles away from GE’s HQ in Louisville, KY — is key to building an innovative culture within their company. By establishing themselves as a separate entity, Firstbuild can have the freedom to experiment and really “mix up the DNA” of their parent company, as Portaro put it onstage.

Leverage resources for good
Just because these innovation arms operate independently from their parent companies doesn’t mean they can’t take advantage of their parent company’s resources. Blu1877, the venture arm of Barilla which fosters and invests in early-stage sustainable startups, was founded to “reach out for innovation that would not be in the mainstream,” according to Spadaro-Grant. While it’s a separate entity from Barilla, she made it clear that that doesn’t mean that one can’t help the other. In fact, Blu1877 depends on the “bigger machinery” of its parent company to help grow smaller startups within their incubator.

Add value to the parent company — and challenge them
“Our purpose is to… do the things that are a little crazy,” Portaro said at SKS. That’s how Firstbuild adds value to GE; by thinking outside the box, developing products outside GE’s typical scope and keeping the large company tapped into new hardware trends.

Sparado-Grant went one step further. She noted that innovation arms like Blu1877 don’t only exist to add value to their parent companies, but also to “challenge” them to reexamine their values and paradigms. That means not only sourcing new ideas from within, but also using their resources to foster young startup talent and help grow a new generation of sustainable food companies.

Disrupting a Large Food Company From Within