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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Announcement

Some (Bittersweet) Personal News

The coronavirus pandemic is leading to massive shakeups everywhere you look. But my life change was already in motion long before the words “social distancing” even entered our vocabulary.

I’m going to business school! Which, sadly, means that this is my last day with The Spoon. I’m headed to school with plans to continue on in food tech. After graduation, I’ll work to make the way we eat more equitable, sustainable, and delicious. I hope you’ll keep in touch.

Cue the sappy music! It’s flashback time.

I was the Spoon’s first full-time employee when I joined the team over two years ago. My colleagues have been the best part of working here: Mike Wolf, fearless leader, never without his backpack; Chris Albrecht, sharp-witted editor and lover of 90’s alt-rock references; and Jenn Marston, a silver-haired elf who also just happens to be a kick-ass writer.

This team has taught me everything I know about tech reporting: how to always think critically, and most importantly how to get to the point. (Yes, I’ll do that soon, I promise.) I will be forever grateful for their guidance, humor, and wisdom.

I feel especially blue that I’m leaving the Spoon at such an exciting time. We just launched Spoon Plus, which is our premium content platform full of deep-dive interviews, analytical hot takes, and surveys revealing the current state of the food system. Obviously I’m biased, but I think it’s worth subscribing to if you haven’t already.

SKS, our global foodtech summit, is also going virtual this fall! That means you may not get those coveted soft t-shirts (so soft!), but taking SKS online opens up so many possibilities in terms of attendees, speakers, and networking. It’ll be awesome. 

Considering the state of the world right now, we need innovation around food — and people shedding light on the innovators — more than ever. I’m sad that I won’t be able to join the team as they move forward to catalyze and report on the future of food.

But I’m not disappearing into the ether! I hope I can continue to be a resource for The Spoon and our broader community. I really love the group of foodtech nerds we’ve built at The Spoon and will be an active member for life. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn to stay in touch.

Stay safe and stay hungry.

Miss you already,
Catherine

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!

Meet The New Spoon

You may have noticed The Spoon has a new look.

We launched the Spoon in October 2016. At the time, we didn’t know what it would become, all we knew is that we wanted to tell the stories of the people and companies shaping the future of food and cooking.

We launched the site on the same day as the second Smart Kitchen Summit, and over time it picked up steam. Back then it was just myself, Ashley Daigneault and Megan Giller posting the occasional story. Traffic was in the low thousands per month.

In short, The Spoon was an experiment.

A New Coat of Paint

Not anymore. With thousands of stories published and hundreds of thousands of readers per month, The Spoon is a big part of what we do and we figured it was time the site got a fresh coat of paint and maybe even a new beam or two.

The first version of the Spoon was a very DIY affair, with an off the shelf WordPress theme. For the new Spoon, we had the help of a web design team in Landi Industries, who I came to by way of my friend Chancey Mathews, whom I met at GigaOM where he was the seminal tech blog’s original web designer.

When we created the original Spoon logo three years ago, we wanted to convey the idea that we were all about food tech. Looking back now, our first logo did just that, but now we wanted something a little more professional and a little less on the nose.

We also wanted something both retro and modern. To help us achieve this, we worked with Seattle artist Genevieve St. Charles (also known as Goldsuit), who I had learned of after she created the logo for Eric Rivera’s addo 206 restaurant. In Genevieve’s work I saw an Andy Warhol for the new century, an artist who explored food, technology and pop culture in interesting ways. In other words, I knew I had found my logo designer.

Some Thanks

Thanks again to Jeremiah, Chancey, Sarah and the whole team at Landi. Also, thanks to Goldsuit for helping to create our new look.

And of course, thanks to the Spoon team. From a site that started with couple part time bloggers, nowadays the Spoon is headed up by our amazing managing editor Chris Albrecht who works daily alongside the fantastic talents of Catherine Lamb and Jenn Marston to break news and connect the dots for a fast-changing industry.

I also want to thank our readers for your support and insights over the past few years. Your comments, tips and emails are critical to what we do, and help us become more knowledgable and better writers.

Thanks also to our event and site sponsors. Without your support, we couldn’t do what we do. If you’d like to support us, check out our adverising page or drop us a line.

We’re excited, and a new site design and logo are really just the start. We have lots planned for coming year and we’re excited to continue the conversation with our readers.

Onward to 2020!

Introducing The Spoon

Welcome to The Spoon!

My name is Michael Wolf and I’m really excited to announce our new site focused on the future of food, cooking and the kitchen.

This is a big week for us here: First, we’re launching this site, one we hope will become a regular destination for those interested in foodtech, the reinvention cooking and how the space around us – especially our kitchens – will adapt over time. And if that wasn’t big enough, we are also holding the second annual Smart Kitchen Summit.

Some might say that’s crazy; why launch a new site the same week as your big event? Ok, so maybe it is a little crazy, but I can’t think of a better time to start what we hope will be a community and daily destination to discuss the same technologies and themes – all of which we believe will dramatically transform the worlds of food and cooking over the next decade – that we plan to talk about this week at the Smart Kitchen Summit.

Since some of you may have a few questions about what we’re up to around here, I decided to answer a few – a FAQ of sorts – as we launch The Spoon.

What is The Spoon all about?

Like I said, this site will explore the future of everything related to food, cooking and the kitchen. While some may see these topics blurring into one, we see each as distinct.

How so?

First, the change happening in the world of food is immense. Whether it’s tapping into new food sources, finding ways to solve big problems like food waste or examining the massive shift in how food will reach our homes, we plan to explore all of it.

Cooking is also undergoing a revolution, as techniques from masters become democratized through technology, old crafts left to hobbyists reach new audiences through innovation, and the devices we use every day become smarter and help us to understand our food and, in some cases, take over the process of cooking.

Lastly, the kitchen – like many spaces in our homes and our broader world – are changing, becoming aware, sentient, alive with new sensors and interfaces. We plan to examine how these massive technology shifts will change the kitchen and what happens in the kitchen.

Why a new site?

When we launched the Smart Kitchen Summit, we knew we wanted to build a community around the future of cooking and the kitchen. After the success of last year’s event and the growth we are seeing this year, we thought: why not keep the conversation going year-round?

It also allows me to dive deeper into some of the topics I’ve developed a passion for during my career. Having worked at tech blog Gigaom for four years and more recently writing for Forbes, I’ve grown to love examining cutting edge consumer technologies, none more so than those that have the potential to change our everyday lives. I really believe the shifts happening in the kitchen – to how we cook, what we eat and how we live –  is one of the most important and interesting conversations in tech today.

What’s up with the name?

Ever start a news blog or media site? It’s hard to come up with a name! But we really love The Spoon and here’s why: First, the symbol and name are unifying elements with our event. We love our spoon/radio wave symbol for the Smart Kitchen Summit, and so we thought this would be an obvious and important bridge between event and site.

Second, we wanted something approachable, that wouldn’t box us in from a topic standpoint, and the Spoon allows us to do that.

Lastly, we do want to be the source of your daily and weekly scoop on the future of food, cooking and tech, and we think you’ll agree that the Spoon is a great name for such as site.

We’ve already got some great content to take in, with lots more to come. If you’re looking for a place to start, check out Megan Giller’s conversation with the sous vide ‘king’ of Alabama, my look at how the quantified self could get a boost from the connected cooking, or this post by Ashley Daigneault looking at how more men – and tech – are entering the kitchen. If you’re a podcast fan, have a listen to my recent podcast conversation with Jane Freiman about how Campbell Soup is preparing itself for the future.

We’re excited to have you with us as we dig in and explore the transformation taking place across the worlds of food and cooking. Enjoy.