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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Tomorrow: Learn about the food metaverse at SimulATE 2022

Tomorrow (Feb 1st) we’re kicking off our first virtual event of the year, tackling a fast-growing area of food tech: the metaverse. We’re bringing together those helping to build the food metaverse and experts in crypto, NFTs and mixed reality to discuss the seismic shifts coming to the world of food tech.

SimulATE: the Food Metaverse + NFT Mini-Summit will kick off The Spoon’s virtual event series in 2022 and host speakers like David Rodolitz, the CEO of Flyfish Club who is working with Gary Vaynerchuk to build the world’s first NFT restaurant.

Another session with Amber Case from Unlock Protocol and Shelly Rupel from Devour Token will focus on cryptocurrencies and the role non-fungible tokens, the blockchain, DAOs and crypto overall will play in the future of dining, food retail and delivery.

We’re going to talk with Supreeet Raju, co-founder of OneRare about the work happening to build the “foodverse” and what it looks like to create a gamified and immersive food experience for users.

What does a Web3 burger chain restaurant look like? Co-founder of BurgerDAO Al Chen will discuss the work of building and funding a completely new operational model for quick service restaurants and the role NFTs will play in supporting the opening of each chain.

Register for SimulATE tickets + use SPOON for 25% off

Between sessions, you’ll have the chance to network with professionals across the channels and industries involved in Web3, crypto, blockchain, NFTs and mixed reality.

If you don’t work in those spaces but you’re trying to put your finger on the pulse of the “food metaverse” and need a crash course in the future disruption of food with metaverse tech, SimulATE is the place to be.

Check out the full agenda for SimulATE here and get your tickets; the event starts at 9:00 am Pacific on Tuesday, February 1, 2022 and runs until 1:00 pm Pacific. But, if you can’t make it live, grab a VIP pass that gives you total digital access to each session after the event.

We’re running a last-day sale — just click “TICKETS” in the upper right corner and use code SPOON to get 25% off both live and VIP tickets.

Are You Creating the Next Big Tech Tool for Restaurants?

This is the web version of our newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry.

This time last year, the restaurant biz was grappling with pandemic-related shutdowns and restrictions and innovating on the fly to survive the fallout. Digital menus. Virtual tip jars. Ad-hoc drive-thru windows. These mannequins. 

As the year wore on, much of the restaurant-related innovation turned to tech, a shift more or less forced by the pandemic. By some accounts, technological shifts expected to unfold over the course of a decade happened in a matter of months. Online ordering is the norm for many, which means so, too, are the technologies that power that process, whether in-house creations or third-party platforms. Virtual restaurants run from ghost kitchens are everywhere now, including in existing restaurant locations. Someone’s revamped the automat (see above), the robots are coming, and investors have a sudden interest in funding tech that promises to make the back of house more efficient.

There are also a lot more questions than previously around which tech tools restaurants actually need, where investment is most likely headed (spoiler: it’s the back of house), and, most important, what’s going to bring the most value to everyone’s restaurant experience moving forward. 

We could debate all of that here. Instead, I invite you to tell The Spoon about your restaurant tech innovation this summer at The Spoon’s Restaurant Tech Summit, set to take place August 17 virtually. 

Whether you think you’re the next Olo, want to entirely disrupt the drive-thru, or have a robot mannequin to track food waste, The Spoon would like to hear from you. Tell us about it by applying for the Spoon’s Restaurant Tech Innovator Showcase, which will happen as part of the aforermentioned Restaurant Tech Summit. 

The Spoon team and panel of restaurant experts will choose the 10 most interesting teams building innovative and potentially game-changing new products. Those 10 companies will then get an opportunity to do a four-minute pitch about their company that will be featured as part of the main stage at the event.

A few general guidelines apply. Companies need to be at early stage, with fewer than 10 employees and less than $1 million in funding/investment. Companies should also have an actual tech product (software, hardware, etc.)

Your pitch will be seen by attendees at the Restaurant Tech Summit and your company will be covered by The Spoon.

More Headlines

San Francisco Makes Restaurant Fee Caps for Delivery Services Permanent – San Francisco, California voted to permanently cap the fees delivery services charge restaurants at 15 percent. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a resolution.

ResQ Raises $7.5M for Back-of-House Restaurant Tech – ResQ, whose software platform manages restaurant repair and maintenance tasks, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding, bringing its total funding thus far to $9 million. 

Grubhub and Resorts World Las Vegas Partner on New Hotel Concept – Resorts World Las Vegas has announced a partnership with Grubhub for a new mobile order service. 

First Beer, Now Meat: How Yeast Can Help Us “Reinvent Our Food Structures”

Yeast is a hot topic of conversation these days: where to find it, what you’re baking with it, and how to create your own at home.

Sudeep Agarwala, a yeast geneticist at Ginkgo Bioworks, has you covered for that last one. He rose to Twitter fame not long ago after tweeting DIY instructions for how to make yeast out of what’s hiding in your cupboard.

But Agarwala knows a lot more about yeast than just how to hack it to make your own sourdough. For that reason, we invited him to speak at our latest virtual event, From Sourdough to The End of Meat.

Agarwala started off his presentation with a massive timeline outlining the evolution of humans. He specifically pointed to 10,000 BC — the time when we first started to use yeast to ferment food and drink. Our newfound love of yeast completely changed the trajectory of how we ate food, ushering in new foods like bread and beer. “We’re now at an age when we’re thinking about reinventing our food structures yet again,” Agarwala said.

If you’re curious about how yeast will shake up our food system, you should watch the whole conversation. You can find the recording here. Here are a few big takeaways (featuring a guest appearance by yours truly!):

Yeast could mean the end of meat
Ginkgo Biowork’s spinoff company, Motif Foodworks, uses microbes like yeast to create the flavor elements that can better mimic meat. According to Agarawala, technology can help make meat alternatives taste even more like the real thing.

Only recently, said Agarwala, has yeast technology evolved to the point where it actually has a shot at replacing the key flavors of meat. “I may get in trouble for saying this,” he said. “We’re on the verge of eliminating meat from our diets altogether.”

Yeast isn’t the only microbe out there
“I love yeast, but there are other microbes that are working for us as well,” noted Agarwala. He pointed to air protein, which can sequester carbon from carbon dioxide, as well as microbes that can fix nitrogen. These technologies leverage microbes to not only produce an output, such as protein, but also reduce the ecological cost of creating food.

Algae and bacteria are also able to make other foods (like your kombucha SCOBY). “There’s a whole microbial world sitting in your kitchen cupboard,” Agarawala pointed out.

What about my sourdough starter???
Bread makers, don’t worry — Agarwala had plenty of insight into how we’re all working with yeast during the pandemic. But he also had some thoughts on why sourdough starters could be an important tool for the future of fermentation in general.

“Yeast is a technology,” he said. “Maybe now that we’re seeing this technology growing on our counters, it is going to be more comfortable to think about, ‘What else can this technology do for us?'”

Perhaps since we’re all obsessed with yeast now, consumers will be more open to new foods grown from microbes — such as meat — down the road.

Our next Spoon Virtual Event is on May 28th at 10am PT, where Spoon founder Mike Wolf will speak with the Design for Food team at IDEO about how we design for a more resilient food system in a post-COVID world. Sign up here.

Johnny Grey on the Post-COVID Kitchen: No Cabinets, Bigger Pantries, More Pleasure

With COVID keeping many of us at home, kitchens are taking on a bigger role than ever before. They’re not just the place we cook meals; they’re also our offices, a place to teach kids homework, the background of our Zoom video calls as we cook along with family.

Considering we’ve long considered the kitchen the heart of the home, it’s no surprise that they’re shifting as we spend more and more time homebound. But how will the kitchen transform to better suit our new needs during quarantine?

To answer that question we turned to Johnny Grey, a British design leader specializing in — you guessed it — kitchens. Today Grey (and a few surprise guests) joined us for our latest Spoon Virtual Event, titled The Future of Kitchen Design in a Post-COVID19 World. He talked about some of the constants of kitchen design, how to embrace the DIY, and how the kitchen is a sort of “3D timepiece.” Here are a few of the highlights:

Fewer cabinets, more pantries
If there’s one part of conventional kitchen design that Grey absolutely hates, it’s cabinets. He thinks they take up too much space in the core of the kitchen itself, which should be a more social space.

In fact, Grey’s overarching goal with kitchen design seems to be to make it a more pleasant space for gathering. To that end, he’s a big fan of kitchen islands (or peninsulas), ideally ones with adjustable heights that can go from a bar space to a dining table.

When asked what he thought we could learn from the past, Grey answered in one word: pantries. He likes a walk-in pantry because you can see things in front of you — like all those bulk bags of dry goods you bought — and you don’t have to rely on dreaded cabinets to store everything.

Where does smart tech fit in?
For Grey, smart tech does have a role to play in kitchens of the future. Specifically when it comes to two things: precision and safety. Grey also emphasized that kitchen technology can help generations age in place. If individuals can cook for themselves, he theorizes that they won’t have to move to assisted living facilities as quickly — thus keeping them home for longer.

Photo: Innit and Sharp

The kitchen as a timepiece
During the virtual event Grey unveiled a new concept he’s been working on. Called the Evening Kitchen, he explained that the kitchen has multiple different lives during each 24-hour cycle. During the day it may be an area for quick meal prep, but in the evening it morphs into a bistro, a nightclub, or even a quiet living room, depending on the circumstances. Grey calls the kitchen a sort of “3D timepiece.”

For that reason, the evening kitchen must look different than the kitchen of daytime. Grey talks about the power of lighting, which gives intimacy, as well as smell and music to transform the space. If you’re curious you can watch his video explaining the concept here.

Especially now, embrace joy
Especially now, kitchens should be a place of joy. “It should be a pleasure to use your kitchen,” Grey said. To make it pleasurable, designers should think about touch, ease of movement, and even color. They could set up places to set a chair in the sun. Consumers themselves can do a lot to improve their kitchen. “Embrace the DIY,” Grey told the audience.

Grey also urged listeners not to put too much pressure on themselves to de-clutter, especially now that the kitchen table is also a coworking space and/or classroom. “It’s not really how people can live,” he said.

Overall, it was a fascinating conversation and — bonus — you get to enjoy Grey’s soothing British accent. You can watch the full video below.

Kitchen Design in a Post-COVID World: A Conversation with Kitchen Designer Johnny Grey

Finally, don’t forget to mark your calendar for our next event on May 21st 10am PT, when Gingko Bioworks program director Sudeep Agarwala will talk about fermentation as a food tech platform.

Join Us for the COVID-19 Virtual Strategy Summit for Food and Restaurants

During this pandemic that has radically reshaped pretty much everything in our lives in the blink of an eye, we keep coming back to one question here at The Spoon: How can we help?

And so it’s with that in mind that we decided to have a virtual summit to discuss ideas and come up with strategies for navigating the COVID-19 pandemic for the food and restaurant industry.

This virtual summit, called the COVID-19 Strategy Summit for Food & Restaurants, will take place on April 6th and feature experts who can talk to and share perspectives about the operational, business, legal and historical impact that coronavirus is having on the food business. While no one has navigated a worldwide pandemic like COVID-19, we think bringing together some of the industry’s biggest thinkers to share their perspective and some advice, we can maybe help some of those scrambling to figure out this new normal.

The event, which we’re working on with the great people from the Future Food Institute is in just two weeks, and we’ve already assembled some amazing speakers, including:

Chef Mark Brand – Founder of Save-On Meats and creator of the Token Program to feed those in food insecure situations

Sara Roversi – Founder of the Future Food Institute

Paul Freedman, history professor at Yale University and author of American Cuisine: And How It Got That Way

Ryan Palmer – Partner at Lathrop GPM and chair of firm’s Restaurant, Food, and Hospitality group

Dana Gunders – Executive Director of ReFED and recognized expert on the problem of food waste

The event is free to attend and you can register here. We’re using Crowdcast as the platform, which is highly interactive and allows audience members to ask questions share ideas with speakers and other attendees, so make sure to come with questions..

Also, if you are or know a world-class expert on some aspect of the food or restaurant business that could provide hugely valuable to business owners or employees in this new world, we’re still looking for a couple more speakers so drop us a line (no product pitches, please). If you have an idea about how you’d like to support us by getting the world or tapping into your network, we’d like to hear from you too.

Finally, as you know The Spoon team has been working every day trying to uncover stories of people innovating on the front lines of the food world during COVID-19. If you have a story or news you think we should know about, please let us know.

Stay safe and healthy and we’ll see you (virtually) on April 6th!

A Sneak Peek at Customize, The Spoon’s Personalized Food Summit

This week UBS published a report that personalized nutrition could generate annual revenues of $64 billion, and that companies large and small should take note. But how are companies capitalizing on the personalization trend across the food system, from CPG to restaurants to the home kitchen?

That’s exactly the question we’ll explore at Customize, The Spoon’s NYC summit on food personalization coming up on February 27. We’ve recruited an amazing list of speakers to discuss some of the most cutting-edge topics in the future of personalization.

We’d love to see you there! Here’s a sneak peek at what to expect at the event:

  • Personalized Nutrition & Wellness. How will biomarkers — like the microbes in your gut or your DNA — shape your diet? What’s the deal with food as medicine and how do grocery stores tap into it? We’ll have experts from Kroger, Viome, Genopalate and more weigh in.
  • Making Mass Food Markets Personal. CPGs and retail giants want to personalize their products, but how do they reshape the value chain to make hyper-personalization on a large scale? That’s what we’ll talk about with Walmart, Spoonshot, and Halla.
  • AI & Big Data in the Kitchen. A big piece of the personalization puzzle is data. How are companies collecting that data, keeping it safe, and applying AI to better understand us and shape our food? Folks from Whirlpool, evolv, and more will weigh in.
  • How Personalization Shapes Foodservice. Restaurants and catering operations alike are trying to figure out how to better customize consumer dining options. That’s what we’ll discuss with Compass Digital Labs (part of the massive Compass group) and Sevenrooms.
  • What’s Next for Food Personalization? Finally, we’ll have experts from Mintel, Food-X, and Alpha Labs weigh in on the future of food personalization.
  • … and lots more.

If you’re curious about how customized dining will affect your business — or want to tap into this cutting-edge trend — you’ll want to be at the show. We’ll have plenty of time to network, make connections in the space, and even try cool personalized food samples like 3D printed vitamins.

Spoon readers can get a 15 percent discount if they use code SPOON15. If you’re media and would like to attend drop us a line.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing a series of Q&A’s to introduce you to the Customize speakers. Keep an eye out for those.

Grab your tickets here. We’ll see you in New York!

Introducing Customize, the Food Personalization Summit

If you live in the U.S., odds are you have Thanksgiving on the mind this week. Though many T-Day menus feature the same classic rolodex of dishes — turkey, cranberries, stuffing, etc. — each spread is slightly personalized to reflect the preferences of the chef and guests.

But personalization goes well beyond what’s on the holiday dinner table. In fact, we here at The Spoon believe breakthrough discoveries in food science, artificial intelligence, micro-manufacturing and other critical areas will lay the foundation for a food system that will be radically reshaped by personalization over the next decade.

However, even as the era of one-sized-fits-all food comes to an end, the conversation in the space is pretty fragmented. While everyone knows that personalization is the goal, they’re not exactly sure how to make it happen.

Which is why we created Customize, a one-day executive summit that will explore the impact of personalization across the food system. Customize will take place in New York City on February 27th at WeWork’s awesome 85 Broad St. space in NYC’s Financial District. (WeWork Food Labs is our awesome event partner for Customize.) 

Throughout the day we will examine topics from the food personalization space, including microbiome-based nutrition, AI-powered grocery recommendations, CPG development and more. 

To help create an amazing day of conversation, we’ve already recruited a star-studded lineup of speakers, including:

And that’s just the beginning. We’re adding more speakers every week, so be sure to check back regularly for updates. If you are building something world-changing in the area of food personalization, drop us a line or fill out our information form on the Customize website and let us know!

Tickets absolutely will sell out — get your Early Bird pass now before prices go up on December 31.

Finally, if your company has something interesting cooking in the world of personalization and you would like to be a sponsor for Customize, let us know!

We’re super excited to bring you this new event and look forward to exploring the world of food personalization with you in February.

See you in New York!

SKS Japan: Excitement, Growth & a Rapidly Maturing Food Tech Ecosystem

Last week I was in Tokyo for Smart Kitchen Summit Japan. It was the second edition of our Japanese event, and while it’s only been twelve short months since that first gathering, the amount of progress I witnessed in the Japan food tech scene over the course of the two days in Tokyo was amazing.

Here are some of the trends, products and innovators that stood out to me last week:

In Japan, Much of the Innovation Comes From Big Companies

For those familiar with Japan, you’ll know it’s not surprising that much of the innovation comes from within established companies. These “intreprenuers” often work in R&D or as part of new business units specifically to innovate new product concepts.

One of these innovation units is Panasonic’s GameChanger Catapult. We’ve written about Catapult as they’ve been showing off innovative product concepts like a food softener for the elderly or home fermentation system.  As it turns out, the innovation unit from Panasonic is still working on those ideas as well as a few new ones.

One of Catapult’s product concepts is Tottemeal, which first showed up at SXSW in Austin in March 2017 as a product concept called Bento@YourOffice. It was comprised of an IoT-powered smart fridge and app system, which is similar in concept to Byte Fridge in that both offer fresh food for sale. Since SXSW last year the company has approached partners and refined the concept to work with any fridge.  The company is now testing out the service in Panasonic’s event/innovation hub, Kura-Think, in Tokyo.

Another large company that’s been busy working on future-forward food tech concepts since last year’s SKS Japan is CookPad. The digital cooking site, which boasts 100 million users worldwide, introduced a smart kitchen platform a couple months ago called OiCy that connects their recipes with appliances to create a guided cooking platform. At SKS Japan, the company outlined the future vision for OiCy in the form of a six-level roadmap for the smart kitchen platform. They also announced an updated partner list which includes hardware manufacturers such as Sharp and Hitachi.

Japan’s Startup Ecosystem Is Gaining Momentum

While much of Japan’s innovation comes from within large organizations, there are also signs of a rapidly maturing food tech startup ecosystem.  Part of the growth is being driven by Japan’s bigger companies like Kirin (who launched their own accelerator). However, there were also a number of young and innovative entrepreneurs that spoke at SKS Japan such as Integriculture’s Yuki Hanyu and Open Meals’ Ryosuke Sakaki.

We’ve written about both companies before in the Spoon. Chris Albrecht was the first to write about Integriculture’s impending $2.7 million funding round when he covered Shojinmeat, the open source project from Hanyu. As Northeast Asia’s only lab-grown meat startup, CEO Hanyu has big plans to jumpstart alternative meat production in the Asia market, and discussed his plans for doing just that.

Open Meals made a big splash this March at SXSW with their sushi teleportation demo. While true food teleportation may be a ways off, the Open Meals vision of creating a food digitization and printing framework is pretty fascinating. Company CEO Sasaki presented an ambitious 100-year look into the future for the idea around food digitization that spanned from digitized food restaurants in Tokyo in just two years and eventually sees space colonies where we’re sharing food experiences in real time with people on earth.

Dinner time in space

Japan’s Smart Kitchen Community Embraces Ideas From US & Europe

The Japan smart kitchen/food tech community is also really interested in innovation happening from the West. One of the speakers at SKS Japan this year was Jon Jenkins, the head of product for the guided cooking group within Meyer, Hestan Cue. Jenkins, who goes by JJ, gave a talk about the role of technology and software in the kitchen and later gave a hands-on demo of the product to a capacity crowd:

It wasn’t just cooking demos. A highly engaged audience packed the room to hear conversations with innovators from the US and Europe such as Jason Cohen of Analytical Flavor Systems talk about the impact on AI on food personalization and flavor. They also heard from Suvie’s Robin Liss as she discuss her company’s four-chamber cooking robot and how today’s appliance companies need to start innovating around food services. The Future Food Institute’s Sara Roversi talked about taking her food innovation platform, which she started in Europe, across the globe. They also listened to Amar Krishna of Chefling and Kevin Yu of SideChef discuss the differences between the smart kitchen platform market in the US with CookPad’s Tad Yoshioka.

Collaboration, Innovation & Community

The biggest takeaway for me from this year’s SKS Japan was there a growing sense of collaboration, innovation, and community in Japan’s food tech market.  Part of it was the hard work of our partners for SKS Japan, SigmaXYZ, who have done a great job over the past year fostering the SKS community. But, just as with the US and Europe, it’s clear now that the Japanese market was ready for an event to catalyze innovation and to bring it together, and I couldn’t be more thrilled that event is SKS.

I’m excited to see how our event in Japan has just done that and has become the go-to food tech event in the Japan market and for much of Asia and I can’t wait to go back next year. I hope I’ll see you there.

If you’re interested in being a part of our global community, don’t miss SKS in Seattle in less than two months!  Robin Liss, Jon Jenkins, Jason Cohen and many more will be there, so you will not want to miss out. You can check it out here and don’t forget to use discount code SPOON for 25% off tickets!

Agenda for SKS Europe Announced

We just released the agenda for the first-ever SKS Europe! All the action will be happening at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin on June 11-12th.

We’ve got an amazing lineup full of experts in some of the biggest topics in food innovation this year, like food delivery, the future of grocery, IoT and the connected kitchen, and taste and AI.

A few highlights:

  • Conversations with innovation leads from Europe’s biggest appliance makers such as Electrolux, BSH and Groupe SEB
  • TED-style talks from the founders of some of Europe’s leading smart kitchen startups, like Smarter and Whisk
  • A look at the personalized, guided recipe led by food journalist Katie Quinn along with Hestan, Recipe Guru and FlavorWiki
  • Analysis of the foodtech & smart kitchen investment landscape from leading European and US venture capitalists.

If you’re interested, you can view the full conference schedule here.

Tickets are on sale now, so grab yours before the event sells out. We’ll see you there!