There may be no one with more culinary street cred in America today than David Chang. Not only has the New York-based chef won multiple James Beard awards and seen his restaurant Momofuku called the country’s most important restaurant, but Chang himself is widely recognized as an astute observer of the food world who always has his finger on the pulse of the country’s culinary zeitgeist.
And what’s on Chang’s mind these days is a whole lot of food tech, at least if his new series on Hulu, The Next Thing You Eat, is any indication. While the six-episode series isn’t available until October 21st, we do have the video preview, which features shots of everything from food delivery bots to lab-grown meat to indoor robotic farms, so we thought it would be fun to play a game of ‘guess who’ and see how many people and companies we can recognize from the food tech revolution. Below is a list those we spotted in the video. Watch it yourself and see if you can identify the ones we could identify and help us ID those we couldn’t.
Wild Type and its cell-based salmon: Chang talks about how climate issues will impact our food and we soon see Wild Type’s Justin Kolbeck saying, “we’ve come up with salmon without using animals” as Chang and others taste the company’s lab-grown fish.
Upside Foods: As we watch a meatball simmer in a pan, Chang states “we’re going to be eating lab-grown meat.” We then cut to a scene in which he turns to Upside Foods’ VP of product and regulation Eric Schulze and asks, “you could just recreate a geoduck?”. Schulze calmly responds, “you could go even further back and do its ancestor, the dinosaur.”
Serve, the delivery robot: While Chang doesn’t say anything specifically about robotics in the two minute video preview, we do get to see him jump in surprise as Serve Robotics sidewalk delivery bot, rolls up behind him.
Miso Robotics: We see Flippy the robot doing its thing, and then we see Miso’s Buck Jordan saying to Chang, “it can look at a piece of meat, it can know how hot that portion of the grill is. Perfect grilling, every time.” Chang responds that this technology is at least 5-7 years out, to which Jordan replies, “Oh no. We are installing into steakhouses this year.”
Jordan is probably referring to the machine vision technology that pairs with and helps direct Flippy’s robotic arm. While we’re not aware of Flippy currently being used in a steakhouse, it’s not a stretch for a robot that got its start flipping beef patties at Caliburger to move a higher grade of beef.
Impossible Burger: During the course of the video, we see a few shots of juicy alt-meat products, including an Impossible Burger. How do we know it’s an Impossible Burger? Because immediately afterward we have a shot of Danny Preston, owner of Malibu’s Burgers (which serves Impossible products), says, “it’s designed to make the meat eater say…” as Chang bites into a burger and exclaims “Oh God.”
There are a few mysteries in the video such as the children’s cereal as well as a robotic vertical farm, but there’s not enough visual info (for me at least) to confirm the companies behind them. If you can help us identify these or any other food tech innovators we missed, please let us know in the comments.
Either way, the mystery will soon be solved as Chang’s series drops on Hulu on October 21st.
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