Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution
In this week’s episode, we catch up with Rachel Konrad, a former journalist who spent the last decade-plus working for Tesla, Impossible Foods, and now the Production Board.
Rachel joins Mike and Carlos Rodela to talk about her background, the recent controversy surrounding Bloomberg’s article declaring plant-based meat a fad, and how she helped Impossible bring food tech to CES in 2019 with the launch of the Impossible 2.0 burger.
While the climate impact of our food has finally made the main stage as a topic at the world’s most high-profile summit, the average joe has no idea how good or bad that bag of chips or can of soda is for the environment.
A Dutch startup called GreenSwapp wants to change that by making information about the climate impact of practically any CPG product instantly available to anyone using its technology.
The Amsterdam-based company started as an online grocery app for climate-friendly products, but more recently has focused on building a climate impact data platform for both consumers and companies. To that end, the company debuted a new scanning tool at CES which gives instant scoring (low, medium, or high impact) of practically any packaged food product when the product’s barcode is scanned with a smartphone.
Here’s how it works: Curious about the climate impact of a tub of yogurt? Head to the GreenSwapp website (www.greenswapp.com) with a mobile browser, and at the top of the page, click on the bar code scan symbol. Your phone will ask you if scan.greenswapp.com can use your camera. Click yes and scan away.
Once a product is scanned, GreenSwapp will show a score and an estimate of how much of your daily carbon footprint a serving of the product eats up. Below that, you’ll see a breakdown in a “climate deep dive” that shows where that carbon was emitted.
So how does GreenSwapp figure all of this out? According to company CEO Ajay Varadharajan, they factor in estimates of carbon output for each food for every part of the product’s journey to our plates.
We “go through the entire journey of every food product, the impact of processing, the impact of transportation, the impact of packaging, and then we display it as a single number on a single color for the consumer to be able to understand if it’s good or bad,” he said.
While the web tool is something I’m sure some climate-conscious consumers would save as a browser favorite, I’d be more likely to make GreenSwapp a part of my daily routine if it was a discrete app or integrated as a feature on one of my online grocery apps. While GreenSwapp’s current app is only available for grocery shopping in the Netherlands, the company has an open API that any online grocery or delivery company can use to integrate Greenswapp’s data into its offering.
But will they? While most grocers don’t offer climate change impact data, my guess is it’s only a matter of time. There is already a discussion of having climate impact data on food labels (and some brands have already tried it), and my guess is at some point, progressive states like California and Washington State will force the hand of CPG companies and retailers, much as they did around nutrition and calorie labeling for food service.
If and when that happens, GreenSwapp could be well-positioned to fulfill Varadharajan’s vision of making his technology the ‘Fitbit of sustainability.’
You can watch a demo of the GreenSwapp web tool below.
Want to make margaritas on the go? Then you might want to check out the new small form factor blender unveiled last week at CES by a company called Cruz.
The Cruz BlenderCap is a new portable blender that has it all in the name: It’s a bottle cap with a blender built in. The product was developed by two former Apple employees, Dakota Adams and Matthew Moore, on the side while they set up a battery factory in China for Apple. The two eventually left their day jobs and went full-time on BlenderCap a year ago.
The BlenderCap’s strength is – perhaps not surprisingly, given the former day jobs of its creators – its battery technology. The blender uses what the company describes as a ‘next-generation electric vehicle Cell-to-Pack battery architecture’, which provides a half horsepower of power.
“You can blend an entire Costco bag of ice and fill an entire Home Depot bucket with margaritas on a single charge,” Adams told The Spoon at CES. According to Adams, the BlenderCap will work with almost any vacuum-plated bottle like a Hydroflask or Thermoflask.
The BlenderCap will start shipping next month from Shanghai, where the two founders leased manufacturing space and are making 6 thousand BlenderCaps in its first production run.
“We’re leasing factory space at a really high-end manufacturer in Shanghai, and we own all the equipment and the robots building this,” Adams told Techcrunch. “So we actually have on our assembly line — we designed the entire assembly line — and we’ve got more robots than people putting this together. It’s crazy. There are glue dispensing robots, automatic screw dispensers. It’s beautiful.”
The BlenderCap is available for preorder for $129 from the company’s website.
If you’re an adult, there’s a good chance you’ve weaned yourself off of cow milk in favor of a plant-based alternative. After all, not only is plant-based milk less disruptive to the digestive tract, but it’s also often healthier.
But it’s not all good news. Plant-based milk is often filled with weird-sounding additives like xanthan gum and lecithin, while some have more recognizable ingredients like sugar and salt that you may want to cut out of your diet.
So if you want plant-based milk but want more control over what goes in it, one option is to make your own. One way to make your own is to try using your blender and a milk nut bag. But if you want to automate the process and have less mess to clean up, you might want to buy a countertop machine to create nut milk for you.
The latest nut milk machine to make its debut is from GROW UP. The machine, which was at CES last week in Vegas, “brews” up to 10 different kinds of plant-based milk. To do so, it uses what its creator calls a “cold extraction” process in which it grinds the ingredients and then vacuums the liquid through a built-in filtration system. Once the milk is dispensed – which takes about 3-4 minutes – the leftover pulp can be taken out and dried to use in baked goods.
The person behind the GROW UP Milk Brewer is Luiz Felipe Rapacci, a former F&B industry veteran who has worked for big CPG brands such as Coca-Cola and General Mills in Brazil. In 2017 Rappaci moved to the US to attend UC Irvine, where he studied innovation management and entrepreneurship. After working for a food tech startup and a basmati rice producer, Rapacci started working on what would become the Milk Brewer in 2020. GROW UP is beginning to manufacture the Milk Brewer for customers and expects to have it to market by mid-spring of this year.
The price for the countertop milk maker will be $599 and is available for pre-order. The price is a bit on the high-end, considering there are other plant-based milk makers on the market today for less than half that. That said, none of the ones I’ve seen make as many types of plant-based milk as Grown Up claims their brewer will make (10). GROW UP also has what looks like an easy-to-use touchscreen with pre-configured options that allow users to easily choose different types of plant-milk.
You can watch our interview with Rapacci from the show floor at CES below.
Most people know Cargill as a massive food conglomerate with a huge share of the total food commodity market. But considerably fewer people know the same company responsible for about 25% of total US grain exports has a digital business unit that incubates technology products more akin to something you might see from a Silicon Vally startup.
One of those products on display at CES 2023 was Chekt, a smart food locker system for restaurants, stadiums, and other food service-centric businesses. The Chekt system, which you can see demoed in the video below, automates the handoff of prepared food to customers or delivery drivers. The lockers can be configured to be hot and cold in the same unit, allowing a restaurant or other food service business to hand off a warm meal and cold drink to consumers from the same locker.
The way the lockers work is customers can order on their phone from their table or seat, and they receive a text when the food is ready. The customer then heads to the locker, responds to the text to notify Chekt they are ready for pick up, and the locker unlocks.
According to Cargill digital business lead Eric Parkin, the Chekt system is deployed at the Pittsburgh Penguins stadium and at restaurants on the US west coast. Parkin says that restaurants like Buckhorn BBQ are seeing as many as 70 orders a day going through the locker system for customer pick-up or delivery drivers.
Cargill’s Chekt system is just one of many smart locker systems for food pickup that have appeared over the last couple of years. As the pandemic accelerated the transition towards delivery and contactless pickup, companies like Cargill, GRUBBR, Minnow, and others have stepped in to fill a need for restaurants and others to automate the final handoff of food to their customers.
My guess is that over time we’ll see nearly every stadium in the US deploy similar solutions, where lines can get long, and people are in a hurry to get back to their seats. Larger restaurant chains that depend heavily on pickup orders and delivery will also likely make these a fixture, and there’s a good chance they’ll become commonplace in universities and large multifamily residences.
Nestled in the basement of the Venetian Expo center last week at CES, a startup from Italy showed off a machine that its inventor hopes will empower home cooks to do pretty much anything their heart desires: making home-made pasta noodles, roasting coffee beans, making cheese, brewing beer and lots more. In short, the machine, called the Haura, is intended to be a modular food factory in a box.
The Haura comes with three major features that unlock all of that flexibility: a motor to power different add-on modules (lasagna-maker, blender, cocktail shaker, sauce and frosting shippers, etc.), an induction heating surface for cooking, and a built-in extruder to enable home cooks to make food that usually requires pro-style equipment.
“The extruder means that you can automate a lot of processes that you only industrial food-making machines,” Haura spokesperson Matteo Pressacco told the Spoon. “For example, if you need to make pasta, candies, snack bars, are confectionery packed, baby’s food, everything can be automated.”
The company is working on a number of different modules, ranging from a lasagna maker to a beer brewer, that can be plugged into the appliance’s motor or extruder. This modularity gives the box its flexibility and sets it apart from other all-in-one cooking appliances.
The machine will have its own 10″ touch screen that shows the progress of any food-making project, including information such as temperature and humidity. The Haura will have what the company calls the F-OS, short for Food Operating System, that will enable the operation of the appliance. Different cooking instruction sets, called F-Apps, will come with pre-set processes for operating the machine and allow the user to cook a variety of foods through repeatable, step-by-step processes.
The inventor of the Haura is Angelo Pressacco, a mechanical and electrical engineer, who worked with chef Dario Zuliani on the conceptualization of the Haura.
The patented machine is still in the design phase, and it’s not clear at this point when it will be shipped to consumers. Let’s hope they can pull it off, because if Pressacco and his team can bring their idea to market, they may just create an entirely new category of home food-making appliance.
At CES 2023, Kara Water showed off its Kara Pure water dispenser that takes moisture from the air and turns it into drinking water.
The Kara Pure combines three functions into one machine. The machine uses the process of desiccation to gather water from the air and accumulates up to 2.5 gallons (10L) of water per day. The machine also acts as a water purifier and dispenser, making it an all-in-one water machine, only without the need to replace water jugs every few days.
Kara Water isn’t the first company to show off water-from-air technology at CES. Watergen, which sucks in air and cools it to a dew point to create water droplets, demoed their machine in 2019 and debuted the working model a year later. Zero Mass Water, which uses solar power to capture moisture and turn it into drinking water, showed off its machine at CES 2019.
Kara Water was founded in 2017 by Cody Sooden and Michael Di Giovanna. The two wanted to create a machine that could produce clean drinking water free of contaminants. Sooden’s interest in the technology started after he began experimenting with capturing water from air while studying architecture. He eventually wrote a research paper on harvesting moisture from the air, which eventually became the genesis of the company’s technology.
The company ran a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo and raised $722 thousand dollars. The company announces it had finished production of its first units and started shipping to backers last month.
The Kara Pure is available now, but at a price of $3,799, it’s most likely priced a little high for consumers and will probably show up in offices or coworking spaces. The company’s founders have already started working to sell the technology in emerging markets like India, where contaminated water is a significant issue.
Brava, a maker of smart oven technology, unveiled the Brava Glass smart oven this week at CES. The new model is the first update since the company debuted its eponymous in 2018.
The Brava Glass fixes what, for many, is the biggest shortcoming of the original Brava: not being able to see inside the cooking cavity. Ok, technically you could peek inside, but only by using the camera that resides inside the cooking chamber of the original Brava. But with the new Brava Glass, no cameras are needed (thought it does have one) as you look inside the Brava through a pane on the front door.
According to Brava spokesperson Steven Barush, the company had always intended to put a see-through glass on the door of the Brava, but didn’t want to rush it. That makes sense, especially considering that Brava’s cooking technology uses high-intensity light. To make looking inside the Brava with the naked eye without getting sun-blinded possible, the Brava Glass has a 97% tint says Barush.
As you can see below, even with a significant tint, the internal cooking light brights things up enough to get a good view of the inside of the oven.
The new Brava Glass with retail for $1,995 (compared with $1,295 for the original Brava) and comes with accessories like a cast iron dish, a muffin tin, a bread pan and more. The company expects the Brava Glass to shipping in early April.
Smarter is off to a busy 2023. At CES in Las Vegas today, the fridge cam and kitchen tech startup announced a new lineup of fridge cams. And, if that wasn’t enough, the company also announced they have acquired smart kitchen software maker Chefling.
The new lineup of fridge cams includes an update to the company’s original model. The FridgeCam2 has an extended 3-month battery life, an upgraded processor, and easier one-click set-up via the device’s Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. In addition to new FridgeCam, the company also introduced the FoodCam Mini, a small form-factor model that can be placed in the fridge or the pantry.
Smarter is also debuting the FridgeCam Pro this week, a model targeted at appliance manufacturers who want to retrofit a fridge cam into their refrigerator models without significant redesign. According to Smarter, the Pro model, which is powered by a USB-C connection, can be added to a fridge without having to make expensive modifications to an OEM’s pre-existing hardware.
In addition to new hardware, the company announced it had acquired Chefling, a startup whose software helps home cooks manage food inventory, create shopping lists and plan meals. Smarter plans to pair Chefling’s food inventory database with its food image recognition capabilities to create what it says is the most advanced food inventory management system available.
Chefling, which got early traction through a partnership and investment from Bosch, has been pretty quiet for the last year and a half. By putting its software into the hands of Smarter, it gives its technology new life through the newly combined companies’ fuller suite of software targeted at the difficult task of consumer inventory management.
“The software offered by Chefling is the missing piece of the puzzle in terms of providing a full end to end service,” Chrisian Lane, CEO of Smarter, said in a release sent to The Spoon. “Taking the hard work out of stock keeping, meal planning and deciding what you need to buy next. We have automated the entire planning and cooking experience, making it the ideal assistant for the kitchen”.
Smarter also announced a new inventory management software tool it calls KitchenSync. The tool, paired with Smarter’s computer vision, can determine whether food is in stock or not. The software can factor in other sensor data (such as a weight sensor) and determine whether an item needs to be replenished. The software can also integrate with a customer’s online grocery service and can match food inventory to purchases.
If you want to check out Smarter’s new FridgeCam lineup, they’ll be at Showstoppers at CES.
Smarter Managing Director Isabella Lane will be on stage tomorrow at the CES Food Tech Conference on the future of cooking session.
If you’re heading to CES to check out food tech, we’ve got you covered. The Spoon team has scoured the exhibitor pages and the news releases and is keeping running track of all the companies exhibiting in the food tech category in Las Vegas this week.
You can use the handy table below to read a description of what each is showing off at CES as well as find a link that shows a map of the location of their booth.
The exhibit floor open tomorrow and we’ll be updating this throughout the show, so feel free to check back!
Yo-Kai Express, a startup that makes autonomous ramen robots, will debut its latest model at CES, a desktop ramen-making machine targeted at small-format retailers such as gas stations and co-working spaces.
The new machine, called the YKE Desktop, is a semi-automatic cooking machine that makes a bowl of ramen in 90 seconds. The machine is paired with an RFID-enabled freezer that holds up to 24 bowls of ramen.
“We are pleased to debut our new product : Yo-Kai Desktop, the new terminal with a smaller form factor, which can be installed anywhere – remote office, gas station, convenience stores, co-working space,” said Andy Lin, founder and CEO of Yo-Kai Express. “It’s a semi-automated machine that provides our customers more flexibility.”
In addition to showing off its newest model at CES, the company will demo a new app that enables customers to order ramen remotely. The app, which will be released to the public in the spring, allows customers to earn loyalty points, discounts, and rewards.
The news follows a busy fall for Yo-Kai, in which they expanded throughout Japan, raised additional funding, and partnered with the Japanese robotics giant Softbank to enable an integration with server robot Pepper.
For those interested in checking out the new Yo-Kai machine, they will be in the Food Tech Pavilion at CES at booth 53114.
Ever since Impossible stole the show at CES with the debut of the Impossible Burger 2.0 in 2019, a growing number of future food startups head to Vegas each January to try to repeat the feat or, at the very least, build momentum for the coming year.
This year will be no different, and companies making everything from new types of fat to bug protein infrastructure will be on the show floor starting this Thursday.
Below are some of the alternative protein and future food startups on our radar for CES 2023:
Armored Fresh – If you’ve ever wanted to try plant-based cheese, this is your chance. Armored Fresh which launched their plant-based cheeses in the US in October, creates its cheese with almond milk and plant-based lactic acid. The company, which has a number of patents for its process, will be showcasing its cheese starting January 5th at booth 53314.
Koreasoft – If cheese isn’t your thing, how about bugs? Koreasoft showing off its 3rd generation edible insect smart farm machine and system on the bottom floor of the Venetian Expo in Eureka Park in the Korea Pavilion.
SavorEat – Israel-based SavorEat is has built a 3D-printing robot that makes plant-based meat. The company’s focus for now is food service, but they intend to create a home machine in the future. SavorEat will be in the Food Tech Pavilion in the Venetian Expo at Booth #53117.
Kwang Jin Corp – This Korean startup will be showing off its plant-based food product, ‘DNS Da Neung Sik’, which originated from Chungguk jang, a traditional Korean fermented food. DNS’s main ingredient is soybeans and the company says it is a futuristic fermented alternative milk rich in protein and probiotics. You can find DNS Da Neung in the Korea Pavilion in Eureka Park.
Lypid – Lypid makes PhytoFat, a proprietary plant-based fat line that it claims mimics the texture, mouthfeel, transfer of flavor, and cooking behavior of animal fats. The company plans to sell its product to manufacturers to add animal meat-like juiciness and mouthfeel to plant-based meats. The company will in the Taiwan Tech Arena, booth 62500, starting Thursday.
Nuldam – Nuldam makes a variety of plant-based food, including vegan macarons and vegan aquafaba. They will be in the Food Tech Pavilion at booth #52914.
Nature’s Fynd – Nature’s Fynd makes alternative meat products utilizing a hearty new microbe called Fusarium strain flavolapis, which they discovered in the remnants of acidic volcano springs of Yellowstone National Park. Nature’s Fynd will be sampling their product outside of CES in a food truck.
The Spoon will be covering all the food tech news they find at CES. Check back regularly!
