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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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From Aspiring Pro Surfer to Delivery Robot CEO with Coco’s Zach Rash

Zach Rash wanted to be a professional surfer. So much so, that in high school, there was more surfing than academics.

That all changed when Rash reached UCLA and met Brad Squicciarini. It wasn’t long before the two spent every waking hour together in a small room building robots.

“We spent like our entire life in this like box at UCLA with no windows, and we’re just building robots from scratch, and it was the best job ever.”

Eventually, the real world came knocking as Rash and Squicciarini graduated and had to find jobs. After applying for many of the same positions, they eventually decided they should just start their own robot company.

“We just had a lot of really strong opinions about what it would take to get these things into the world and make them useful. So… decided to do it ourselves.”

Coco launched in early 2020. “We started building them in our living room and we couldn’t get more wheels… so it was a bit of a sketchy robot.” Still, their first merchant deployment went smoothly. “The first day of the business, I mean, we gave it to a merchant and Brad and I just took turns driving it and fixing it.”

They faced steep financing challenges: “We didn’t have any money… Even if you’re only building a few, you know, it’s still going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars.” They pitched more than 200 investors before raising a modest $50,000 to start. “We thought that was a lot of money and we built a few robots with that and kind of proved out that we could run a service, not just build the robot.”

Their persistence paid off. In June 2025, Coco raised $80 million, led by angel investors Sam Altman and his brother Max, alongside Pelion Venture Partners, Offline Ventures, and others. 

This brought Coco’s total funding to over $110 million, which Rash says the company plans to use to scale its operations and technology.

“Coco Robotics will use the new funds to improve the technology and to scale up its fleet,” Rash told Techcrunch. “The company expects to go from low‑thousands to 10,000 robots by the end of next year.”

According to the company, Coco bots have delivered over 500,000 items to date, working with retailers like Subway, Wingstop, Jack in the Box, Uber Eats and DoorDash.

It’s only been a few short years since Rash was largely concerned about surfing, but now, armed with funding and lots of interest from retail partners, he’s ready to ride to the wave of growth of his robot delivery company.

“We’re building as many as we can as fast as we can.”

Zach will be speaking at SKS 2025 tomorrow, so make sure to get your tickets. You can listen to our conversatoin on the latest episode of The Spoon podcast below, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Mark Cuban to Speak at SKS 2025

Smart Kitchen Summit 2025 officially kicks off today! Over the next two weeks, we’re bringing together some of the brightest minds at the intersection of food, cooking, and technology for a virtual global summit exploring what’s next for the kitchen.

This year’s event explores how AI, robotics, new appliances, and sustainability are transforming the way we cook, eat, and connect with food. With two hours a day of sessions running daily through July 31, SKS 2025 features interviews, panels, and product showcases from innovators around the world, all accessible online, wherever you are.

We’re excited to welcome entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban as one of our featured speakers. Cuban is an astute obverver of technology, politics and the forces shaping the world we live in, so I’m super excited to sit down and talk with him about where he sees the broader innovation landscape going.

If you’re curious about the future of food, cooking and the innovation landscape, you won’t want to miss SKS 2025.

Join us! The full schedule and registration are at smartkitchensummit.com.

This Culinary Tech Inventor Thought He Could Build Some Parts For His Latest Gadget in the US. Then He Called Around.

When kitchen tech inventor Scott Heimendinger started prototyping his latest hardware product, he knew that much of it would need to be built overseas. Still, he was curious whether he could rely on local Seattle-based shops to produce some of the parts.

“I contacted local shops here in Seattle. There are a couple of machine and metalworking shops, and I thought, well, I would like to be a good customer, right? Like I’d love to spend money locally, especially on shops that are doing this kind of stuff.”

But when he called around, Scott quickly discovered that not only were the local shops going to be an order of magnitude more expensive, but they’d also take longer to deliver.

“I said, ‘look, I know this is going to be more expensive than what I’m doing in China, obviously, but maybe we can make this up on the time front.’ Before we even got into real pricing, we were already above 10X. So I said, ‘What about turnaround time?’ [They] said, well, it depends how busy we are, but like, you know, one to six weeks.’”

We’d started talking about the cost and complexity of building in the U.S. because we’d both recently listened to an episode of PJ Vogt’s Search Engine, in which Vogt interviewed YouTuber and engineer Destin Sandlin. Sandlin discussed his years-long effort to manufacture a product in America, and I wanted to get Scott’s take, especially since he’s been navigating the uncertainty caused by new tariffs. As it turned out, he had a lot to say.

One area he pointed to as a critical missing link was the shortage of tooling designers, the specialists who create the molds used to shape plastic parts.

“Tooling fabrication in principle is something that you could just do on a beefy CNC machine… In practice, no. It’s specialized techniques and tools. That knowledge has dried up in the U.S.”

We talked about why capabilities like tooling fabrication and injection molding have largely disappeared from the U.S., and one reason we both agreed on was the lack of trade education, starting as early as high school.

“Some of my favorite classes in high school were sculpture class, learning to use a bandsaw and a drill press,” he said. “I wish more folks in the United States prioritized the hands-on making of stuff.”

I pointed out the strange dichotomy of the past couple of decades, in which Silicon Valley was busy valorizing the maker movement, while at the same time the U.S.’s ability to manufacture at scale was simultaneously being hollowed out. It’s as if we celebrated prototyping, while the infrastructure to mass-produce those ideas was quietly de-emphasized and disinvested in.

“A weird thing that happened, where we talked about, ‘hey, let’s start making stuff and teach our kids to make stuff,'” I said. “But at the same time, America’s ability to make stuff at scale just kind of went up in smoke.”

Scott, for his part, chose to see the upside. Despite the loss of critical manufacturing knowledge and infrastructure, he said it’s still a great time to be an inventor, thanks to how accessible prototyping tools have become.

“I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, like I love physically making stuff. I wish more folks in the United States prioritized the hands-on making of stuff, and I wish that we hadn’t eroded away these capabilities. On the other hand, it is almost point and click to have these things prototyped, if not mass-produced. And that’s an incredible boon to being a scrappy solopreneur.”.

You can listen to our latest episode by clicking play below, or you can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you’d like to ask Scott a question about his project, the challenges of manufacturing a product or the future of cooking, he’ll be at Smart Kitchen Summit next week. You can get your ticket here.

If video is your preferred podcast consumption format, you can also watch our conversation below:

Why It's So Hard to Build Hardware in America

Thermomix Has Long Been a Leader in Cooking Automation, But Now They’re Going Full Robot

For years, I’ve said that the Thermomix is quite possibly the most successful automated cooking appliance in the world. Sure, it’s not a humanoid robot or what we’ve come to expect from cooking robots in recent years, but the TM6 and TM7 are software-powered cooking appliances that automate and sequence functions in a way that feels surprisingly intelligent, especially compared to typical countertop or built-in kitchen appliances.

But now, if recent moves by Thermomix’s corporate parent, Vorwerk, are any indication, Thermomix may be going full robot. At last month’s Automatica conference in Munich, Thermomix and red-hot German robotics startup Neura Robotics announced a partnership in which Neura’s humanoid robot used Vorwerk’s Thermomix and Kobold vacuum cleaners to perform everyday household tasks.

According to Neura CEO David Reger, optimizing his robots to work with Vorwerk’s cooking and cleaning appliances is a step toward building an aging-in-place platform powered by humanoids.

“Together with Vorwerk, we are redefining household robotics – with intelligent assistants that provide concrete relief for people in their everyday lives: from cooking to independent living in old age,” said Reger.

Even more interestingly, Vorwerk also announced a partnership with AI and chip giant NVIDIA last month. According to the announcement, “Vorwerk is post-training NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1, an open robot foundation model, to support families around the home, whether seniors looking to maintain their independence, or busy families in need of an extra pair of hands. To post-train the model, Vorwerk is leveraging the Isaac GR00T-Mimic data pipeline to generate large, diverse synthetic motions data to prepare robots for common household tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and more.

“Together with NVIDIA Robotics we are now taking a significant step towards the connected and automated home,” wrote Vorwerk CEO Thomas Rodemann on Linkedin. “Our goal: creating integrated digital/physical ecosystems that support our community in their everyday lives and make the home more convenient for everyone – whether it’s providing busy families with an extra pair of hands or giving seniors more independence.”

When Jensen Huang showed up at CES in January and said that the ChatGPT moment for robotics is right around the corner, I’m not sure if he was thinking about cooking food with the Thermomix, but maybe he was. Vorwerk would be a logical candidate to build true home robot assistants, since progressing rightward on the simple tool to fully-capable robot continuum already and they’ve been the most successful at integrating software with home cooking automation

You can watch the video of the NVIDIA-powered robot making food with the Thermomix in the video below.


Is IFT’s Launch of an AI Tool For Food Scientists an Indicator of Where Trade Associations Are Going in Age of AI?

Interesting news out of IFT First this week, the food scientist expo in Chicago, where the longtime trade association announced its own AI tool called CoDeveloper.

According to the announcement, CoDeveloper is a platform built for food scientists by food scientists, offering a suite of AI-powered tools to help them formulate new products, reverse-engineer existing ones, and tap into decades of peer-reviewed food science research. Branded as a “co-scientist” named Sous, the platform is designed to live alongside R&D teams and support early-stage development work.

It’s an interesting move for the group, and as far as I can tell, the first time a trade association in the food space (or possibly any industry) has launched its own AI tool to help practitioners do their jobs. It also raises a larger question: could this be a sign of where trade associations are headed as AI becomes more integral to how we work?

It would make sense. Trade associations have historically provided value through education, convening, standards development, and general promotion. In a future where most industries are driven in large part by AI, why wouldn’t these associations, especially science-focused ones like IFT, want to get in on the action?

Of course, there has been no shortage of efforts across the food industry to develop food AI models, whether that’s startups looking to sell their AI as a SaaS platform or big food brands creating AI tools to differentiate themselves. Whether an available-to-everyone AI food product development tool is something hyper-competitive CPG companies would be interested in is yet to be seen, but I am sure that it will be something most members of the IFT community will want to take for a spin around the block.

From Red Bull to Zevia, Amy Taylor Shares Lessons Learned From a Career Built Around Buzzy Beverages

In the early 90s, Amy Taylor had dreams of Olympic gold as an elite track and field athlete.

Back then, she never could have predicted she’d spend the bulk of her career in the beverage business. But after moving to Atlanta (where the Olympics were to take place in 1996) and working for a short time for the Atlanta Hawks, it wasn’t long before she started to work for Red Bull, just as the now-famous brand was beginning to define the energy drink business in the early 2000s.

“My stepdad warned me not to take the job because he had never heard of the company,” she recalled. “And I said, I think there’s something special here. I took my Gen X assignment of creating this Red Bull brand with an American lens on it for the American audience.”

Taylor would spent over 20 years at Red Bull, eventually serving as president and chief marketing officer, where her time there shaped her philosophy on building iconic brands.

“What I learned there was about creating a hot brand and sort of becoming a part of or creating communication within and around the zeitgeist,” she said. “Instead of trying to go fast and hard and drive distribution and awareness at all costs… the brand was building relationships.”

Now, as CEO of Zevia, Taylor is applying those lessons to a different kind of beverage mission. “We are going to materially reduce sugar consumption among the population that we serve,” she said. “If a family switches from carbonated soft drinks to Zevia, they can cut their sugar consumption in half with one move.”

Known for its zero-sugar sodas made with stevia, Taylor says Zevia aims to provide an affordable, clean-label alternative for families. She’s also focused on evolving the brand’s taste and product innovation. “There are 20 molecules in the stevia leaf that can sweeten a product,” she said. “Our job is to go extract the ones that perform best within the beverage. For the part of the population that have had a negative experience with stevia, they’re going to need to come back and try Zevia. And I think they’re going to be blown away.”

Like most food brands nowadays, Zevia is embracing AI. Taylor says they are doing it with a “hacker’s approach,” which means encouraging every department to experiment with new use cases.

“Each department head challenges their entire team, not just their senior leadership, to come up with new use cases for AI,” Taylor said. From creating digital consumer prototypes to enhancing operations and finance workflows, Taylor said the company is exploring numerous applications. “We use AI to challenge our thinking and our assumptions. We want to grow faster because of our ability to leverage AI with the people that we have in the building today.”

Part of Taylor and Zevia’s push to leverage innovations like AI is because the company operates lean (fewer than 100 employees), and new technologies can help them punch above their weight.

“We are small and focused,” she said. “And we are scrappy as hell.”

You can listen to my full conversation with Taylor below and can connect with her (and ask her questions) at the Smart Kitchen Summit later this month.

Study: AI-Powered Drones Fuel Advances in Precision Ag for Early Detection of Crop Stress

Early stress detection via precision agriculture just got a serious upgrade, according to new research out of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Led by Dr. Ittai Herrmann, the team developed a drone-based platform that blends hyperspectral, thermal, and RGB imaging with powerful deep learning technology to precisely identify nitrogen and water deficiencies in sesame crops.

Sesame, known for its resilience to climate variations, is rapidly growing in global importance. However, accurately identifying early-stage crop stress has historically posed a significant challenge, limiting the ability of farmers to respond quickly to potential catastrophic challenges. To tackle this, the researchers combined three advanced imaging technologies into a single drone system, creating a robust solution capable of decoding complex plant stress signals.

Hyperspectral imaging provides detailed spectral insights into plant chemistry, including nitrogen and chlorophyll levels, which are critical markers for plant nutrition. Thermal imaging spots subtle temperature changes in leaves that indicate water stress, while high-resolution RGB images provide clear visual context of overall plant health and structure.

What made this study cutting-edge was its use of multimodal convolutional neural networks (CNNs), an advanced AI approach that can unravel intricate data patterns and add context, which significantly enhances diagnostic precision. These advanced techniques unlocked the researchers’ ability to distinguish overlapping signals of plant stress, such as differentiating between nutrient and water deficiency, something that conventional methods often struggle to achieve. According to the researchers, by accurately pinpointing the exact stressor, farmers can now apply resources such as fertilizer and irrigation more strategically, reducing waste and environmental impact while increasing crop yields.

While other researchers have studied using advanced AI techniques with drones to aid in combatting stress in walnut and specialty crops, the use of deep multimodal CNN appears to be a leap forward in precision ag. It remains to be seen how quickly this technology reaches the farmer level, but given the challenges of climate change, its easy to envision that these types of advances in precision agriculture will be invaluable tools for farmers in the future to protect against climate-related crop stress.



Could Lasers Made From Olive Oil Be The Next-Gen Freshness Detector or Use-By Label?

Imagine scanning a tuna steak in your fridge and suddenly a tiny laser pulse beams an expiration date or, surprise, tells you it’s not really wild-caught.

That’s no longer a sci‑fi: new research from a group of academic researchers from the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece published in Advanced Optical Materials discusses how they were able to create edible microlasers crafted entirely from food-grade ingredients, essentially turning food in a tupperware container or on your dinner plate into a data-rich interface with the potential to relay information about freshness, provenance, even safety.

So, how does it work? Researchers created tiny edible lasers by using food-grade materials like olive oil, coconut oil, and sugar-based droplets combined with natural colorants such as chlorophyll or curcumin. The droplets act as tiny optical cavities that trap and amplify light using a principle called ‘whispering gallery mode resonance‘. When excited by an external light source, they emit a laser-like signal. Because the lasing behavior is sensitive to environmental factors like temperature, pH, and chemical composition, these microlasers can be used as sensors that can be embedded directly in food to help detect spoilage, confirm authenticity, or monitor freshness. And, according to the team, this happens without adding anything inedible to the product.

The paper explores different applications, such as edible barcodes, applied onto the food itself and not on packaging. Another idea is food with built-in freshness sensors, salad kits that glow a warning when the pH level shifts, or olive oil bottles that hold internal glow-signatures to confirm authenticity.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of technology for freshness, authenticity or changing chemistry built directly into the food itself. A couple of years ago, a company called Index Biosystems developed a form of invisible barcode called a BioTag, which is created by mixing baker’s yeast in extremely small amounts with water, then spraying or misting it onto products such as wheat. BioTags can later be reach using molecular detection techniques such as PCR and DNA sequencing.

The BioTag is a cool concept, but this new breakthrough from the Mediterranean scientists seems like something that – if it ultimately is commercialized – could be much more approachable for the end-user, who doesn’t have access to tools for things like DNA sequence detection (that’s if you can lasers shooting from your food as ‘approachable’).

With the debate about use-by date labels raging after after California became the first state to create a new approach in years (causing numerous other states to consider following suit), new technology like this shows us that someday our food might actually be able to tell us, via lasers, itself whether it is still good to eat.

With the debate over use-by date labels heating up – especially after California became the first state in years to introduce a new approach, prompting several other states to consider following suit – this kind of technology is a sign that someday our food might be able to tell us directly whether it’s still good to eat.

Leanpath CEO: The Fight Against Food Waste Enters Its ‘Second Act’

At this year’s ReFED Summit in Seattle, Andrew Shakman was in a reflective mood. When asked about the state of the food waste reduction movement, the Leanpath CEO, who has spent more than two decades fighting food waste, compared the moment we’re in to the second act of a three-act play.

“If we go back to Aristotle’s Poetics, the beginning is always gripping. The middle is hard, and I think we’re in act two, where it’s no longer the beginning, but we are not at the end.”

According to Shakman, it’s a moment of transition for the food waste movement. The early momentum that defined the last decade, fueled by sustainability pledges, bold 2025 goals, and a wave of startup innovation, is giving way to a more complicated reality. Some organizations are hitting their targets while many are falling short. And now, for many fighting the fight, the question isn’t just what the next goal should be, but how to keep the movement going.

According to Shakman, that means leaning into the business case for food waste reduction, much as he did when the company first started.

“When we started, I’ve been at this 21 years. It was all about money. It was all about saving money, pulling dollars out of the garbage,” he said. “We came to understand that this was a nexus issue that incorporated issues around climate and food security and land conversion and biodiversity and water resources and everything. Today we’re reverting back to a narrower story that’s more focused on business case simplification, making life as business-focused as possible, because of the environment we’re in right now. There’s less political unanimity around climate and ESG.”

Shakman believes this re-focusing on the business case is happening because many enterprises are deemphasizing meeting sustainability goals, in part due to the political moment we are in in 2025. But just because the Leanpath CEO sees a powerful message in emphasizing efficiency and saving money as key motivators to adopt food waste reduction tech, he doesn’t think those in the industry should abandon talking about how important waste reduction is for the environment.

“You can still have the whole conversation,” Shakman said. “But the emphasis is on the business case at the moment. I don’t think we should allow ourselves to walk away from the moral imperative”

When I asked him about AI, he said the technology is most powerful when it drives action in the kitchen and elsewhere.

“Chefs did not get into food because they wanted to sit in front of their computer,” Shakman said. “They want to touch and make touch, make connect and create experience, and they want to know what’s the fastest path to taking the most impactful action, and that’s where I think AI is going to be very exciting.”

Shakman believes AI is most powerful when it adds context to decision making through triangulating different data sets, but believes the industry – and its data – is in many ways structured in a way that makes creating that contextual nuance difficult. The real breakthrough, he believes, will come from breaking down the data silos in foodservice technology.

“There are POS data assets for what you’ve sold,” said Shakman. “There are inventory data assets around what you bought and maybe what’s on your menu. There are now waste data assets that are actually unique contributors to the data landscape. And with those, when you triangulate with what you sold and what you bought, you now have the ability to see things that you could never see before.”

But even as Leanpath builds toward that integrated vision, one that blends frontline kitchen tools with enterprise-level oversight, Shakman remains focused on the people behind the data. “The changemakers on this issue are the people working in kitchens,” he said. “They’re driven by emotion, by the desire to do good. If you can align action with purpose, you unlock something powerful.”

Shakman’s framing of the food waste battle as a three act play isn’t all that surprising since storytelling runs in the family; his brother, Matt Shakman, is a longtime Hollywood director, directing shows like WandaVision and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and the upcoming Marvel movie, The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

Both Shakman brothers are, in their own way, trying to navigate two very different Act Twos and shape what comes next.

You can watch my full conversation with Andrew from the ReFED conference below and find it later this week on The Spoon Podcast.

The Spoon Talks With Leanpath's Andrew Shakman at ReFED Summit 2025

The Grocery Store is the Food System

For most of us, the food system isn’t a distant farm or a produce distribution center. It’s the grocery store. We push carts through brightly lit aisles where abstract forces—supply chains, agricultural policy, consumer trends—become tangible reality. The supermarket is where the nation’s entire food apparatus converges in a single, accessible arena. The grocery store isn’t just a participant in the food system; it is the food system in miniature.

This is where supply meets demand in its most direct form. Every product on the shelf represents a long chain of decisions: a farmer’s crop choice, a manufacturer’s formulation, a regulator’s approval. And every purchase we make sends a ripple back up that chain. For consumers who are generations removed from farming, the grocery store is our most immediate encounter with agriculture itself. To understand the state of our food system, look no further than your local grocer.

What we find there reveals both the system’s greatest achievements and its deepest contradictions. The grocery store offers us unprecedented abundance while masking troubling uniformity. It promises choice while concentrating power. It connects us to global supply chains while disconnecting us from the sources of our food. Understanding these contradictions is the key to understanding how our food system really works—and how we might change it.

The Paradox of Abundance

Walk down any aisle in an American supermarket and you’ll confront what appears to be infinite variety. Hundreds of cereals crowd the breakfast section. Dozens of yogurt brands compete for refrigerator space. An entire wall of nutrition bars promises everything from weight loss to spiritual enlightenment.

Yet behind this kaleidoscope of branding lies striking uniformity. Those hundred different nutrition bars? Most are built from the same handful of commodity crops—corn, soy, and wheat. The cereal aisle’s rainbow of boxes contains variations on the same basic theme. We’ve created the illusion of choice through brand variety while consolidating actual agricultural diversity into a narrow selection of crops.

This isn’t accidental. It’s the logical outcome of an agricultural system optimized for scale and efficiency above all else. Corn, soy, and wheat dominate not because they’re the most nutritious or delicious, but because they can be grown at massive scale and processed into countless products. The grocery store, in all its apparent abundance, reveals the hidden monotony of American agriculture.

The same consolidation extends beyond ingredients to the stores themselves. While shoppers see thousands of brands, most grocery retail is controlled by a handful of chains. These companies decide which products get premium shelf space, which suppliers get contracts, and ultimately which farmers stay in business. The grocery store that feels like a marketplace is actually a carefully orchestrated system where a few powerful players control most of the outcomes.

Shelf Space Storytelling

In this landscape of managed abundance, brands face a brutal challenge: capturing a shopper’s attention in roughly two seconds with a few square inches of package real estate. The front of a package becomes prime territory where complex stories must be reduced to their simplest essence.

This is where nuance dies. A product made with heritage grains grown by a cooperative of small farmers using regenerative practices might simply become “ancient grains” on the front of the pack. The food system’s infinite complexity gets flattened into marketing slogans that prioritize emotional appeal over substantive information.

The grocery store environment itself works against deeper understanding. Hurried shoppers navigating fluorescent-lit aisles while juggling shopping lists and crying children aren’t in the mood for agricultural education. Those well-intentioned photos of smiling farmers become invisible wallpaper. The little signs explaining sustainable practices can’t compete with the thousands of other messages bombarding consumers.

This dynamic warps the entire system. Brands that master simple, powerful messaging thrive regardless of their actual practices. Those that try to communicate complicated truths often struggle to compete. Over time, the market rewards not the best food, but the best marketing. And consumers, hungry for real information but overwhelmed by choice, grab whatever package speaks most clearly to their immediate concerns.

The Geography of Access

The grocery store’s role as the food system’s public face becomes starkest when we map stores across different communities. In affluent areas, shoppers debate the merits of grass-fed versus grain-fed beef while sipping kombucha from the in-store café. Twenty miles away, families navigate Dollar Generals where the “fresh” section consists of a few bruised bananas by the register, if that.

This geographic apartheid in food access follows predictable patterns that mirror broader inequalities. Wealthy communities get full-service supermarkets with extensive produce sections, in-house nutritionists, and specialty departments. Poor communities get convenience stores and small grocers with limited selection and higher prices. The cruel irony is that those who could most benefit from affordable, nutritious food have the least access to it.

These disparities reveal how our food system distributes power. When some communities get full-service grocery stores while others are left with food deserts, we’re seeing the system’s priorities made visible. Profit drives location decisions, not nutrition or community need.

Yet alternatives are emerging that point toward different possibilities. Some retailers use profits from wealthy stores to subsidize locations in underserved areas. Mobile markets bring fresh produce directly to food deserts. Community-owned cooperatives keep food dollars circulating locally while ensuring democratic control over food access. These experiments reveal what’s possible when we design food distribution around community needs rather than just market logic.

The Collective Action Paradox

Every grocery shopper faces the same psychological trap: “I’m just one person. My choices don’t matter.” This thinking, perfectly rational at the individual level, becomes problematic when multiplied across millions of shoppers. It’s the same psychology that suppresses civic engagement more broadly—one voice rarely changes everything, but when everyone thinks this way, we get the outcomes we deserve by default.

History proves this pessimism wrong. The organic movement started with a handful of “health nuts” shopping at food cooperatives and farmers markets. Today, organic agriculture has transformed farming practices across millions of acres. Fair trade certification, once a niche concern, now influences supply chains for everything from coffee to cotton. These changes didn’t happen because any single shopper mattered, but because enough people decided their choices mattered collectively.

The grocery store makes this collective power visible in ways that other civic engagement doesn’t. When demand for organic produce increases, stores expand their organic sections within months. When shoppers ask for local products, buyers seek out regional suppliers. When customers demand better working conditions, retailers eventually respond. The feedback loops are faster and more direct than in traditional politics.

This responsiveness is both the grocery store’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness as a democratic institution. It can quickly amplify consumer preferences, but it also amplifies inequality. The preferences of wealthy shoppers get heard loudly and clearly, while the needs of poor communities go unmet. Recognizing the grocery store as both mirror and maker of our food system means grappling with this tension.

Practicing Food Citizenship

Grasping the grocery store as the food system’s most visible expression changes how we might approach our shopping. Instead of seeing ourselves as individual consumers optimizing for personal benefit, we can think of ourselves as food citizens participating in a collective system.

This starts with diversifying our food sources. Join a CSA for vegetables. Buy meat directly from local farmers. Purchase grains from cooperatives. Keep shopping at your grocery store for everything else. You’re not abandoning the mainstream system—you’re creating alternatives that keep the entire system more honest and resilient.

Within grocery stores, practice strategic engagement. Ask questions and make requests. Store managers notice when customers inquire about sourcing, suggest new products, or ask why certain items aren’t available. Be the person who asks for a bulk section, requests local suppliers, or suggests worker-owned brands. Individual requests might get dismissed, but patterns of customer interest drive purchasing decisions.

Focus your attention where it matters most. Organic certification has the biggest impact on the “dirty dozen” produce items with high pesticide residues. Fair trade certification matters most for products like coffee and chocolate where farmers typically receive tiny portions of retail prices. Local sourcing matters most for products that travel long distances and spoil quickly. Know where your choices make the biggest difference.

Support policy changes that address the grocery store’s limitations. Back ordinances that incentivize grocery stores in underserved areas. Support policies that make healthy food more affordable. Champion regulations that require clearer labeling about production practices. The market alone won’t fix systemic problems—we need public policies that can address market failures.

The Mirror and the Maker

The grocery store will never be perfect. It will always reflect compromises between efficiency and equity, convenience and sustainability, profit and purpose. But that’s exactly why it matters. The grocery store is both mirror and maker of our food system—it reflects our current priorities while shaping our future possibilities.

Unlike far off farms or corporate boardrooms, grocery stores are where we actually encounter the food system in our daily lives. They’re where abstract agricultural policies become concrete realities. They’re where supply chain decisions show up as empty shelves or abundant displays. They’re where our collective choices about what we value get tallied and sent back up the chain.

Recognizing the grocery store as the food system means taking responsibility for what we see there. The abundance and the inequality. The convenience and the hidden costs. The choices and the illusions. These aren’t just market outcomes—they’re collective creations that we sustain every time we shop.

We are not just shoppers navigating retail spaces. We are participants in a food system that we help create with every purchase. The grocery store is where that participation happens, where our individual choices become collective outcomes, where the future of food takes shape. Understanding this is the first step toward building the food system we actually want.

—

This essay was inspired by Mike Lee’s recent podcast episode “The Future of Grocery” on The Tomorrow Today Show. Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Mike was joined by guest co-host Melanie Bartelme from Mintel, and we spoke with Doug Scholz from the California Grocers Association, Cameron Gould Saltman (ex-TikTok Food & Beverage), Michael Robinov from Farm to People, and Errol Schweizer from The Checkout Grocery Update.

This post was originally published on Mike Lee’s wonderfully written and informational substack. You can find the post here. You should subscribe!

You can listen to the full conversation below.

The Future of Grocery

Nearly Seven Years After Launching Kickstarter, Silo Finally Delivers Next-Gen Home Food Storage System

In 2018, when I saw a company called Silo launch a crowdfunding campaign for a modern food storage system – essentially Tupperware for the digital age – I couldn’t resist. I pulled out my credit card and backed it.

Little did I know it would take nearly a decade for the product to show up at my doorstep. However, last month, I noticed that Silo had finally begun shipping to backers, and just last week, mine arrived.

So what took so long?

Like many hardware startups over the past five years, Silo ran into major headwinds. The first big hurdle was the pandemic, which prevented the team from traveling to China to oversee manufacturing. They also struggled to raise additional funding after one investor got cold feet and pulled out during COVID.

“When COVID erupted globally, I got a phone call saying, ‘Hey, listen, we’re not going to transfer the funds,’” Silo CEO Tal Lapidot told me in 2022.

Eventually, the company secured a new investor, and Lapidot reassembled a team to bring the product to market. Now, three years later, the product is finally shipping.

According to the company, units have been sent to all backers who completed their surveys, and Silo is now also selling the system on its website. When I backed the campaign in 2018, the entry price was a relatively low $199. Today, nearly seven years later, the base system, which features the vacuum seal unit, scale, and four storage containers, sells for $499. A 12-piece version goes for $649.

Early feedback from Kickstarter backers (those who didn’t request a refund) has been mixed to positive. One backer has even started a Facebook group for users. I’ll be testing mine soon and will share a full review in the coming weeks..

What Flavor Unlocks

Sustainable, healthy foods won’t win through guilt trips alone—they need to be irresistible.

Flavor is the most powerful force in our food system. Not nutrition labels, not health claims, not environmental impact. It’s flavor. It’s the gravitational force that decides what we eat, what gets produced, and what companies make billions from.

You know how I know this? Because entire industries exist purely because they figured out how to make food taste incredible, with no other redeemable attributes other than their taste. Chips, energy drinks, candy—these products don’t keep you healthy or feed you efficiently. They have little to contribute to a healthier agricultural system. Yet they exist because food scientists cracked the code on making your brain crave them. And it works. These companies rake in billions by hitting our pleasure buttons just right.

If junk food can build empires on taste alone, imagine what we could do with food that actually serves us.

The Business of Bliss

Every ingredient in a bag of chips is there for one reason: to trigger your reward system as hard as possible. Food scientists call these “bliss points“—the perfect mix of salt, fat, sugar, and crunch that makes your brain say “more.”

Companies making healthier or more sustainable foods face a different challenge. They’re working so hard on the nutrition, the sourcing, the environmental impact, that they can run out of bandwidth to make their products truly irresistible.

Many of these companies get so caught up in their metrics and mission that they lose objectivity about how their product tastes. They delude themselves into thinking their product is more delicious than it actually is. There’s almost an implicit assumption that the nutrition label or sustainable certifications it bears will get eaters to overlook that the thing might actually taste like shit. The result? Products that check all the right boxes on paper but fail the most basic test—do people actually want to eat them?

It’s noble to make food that’s healthy and sustainable, but the average eater can’t taste nobility. They need flavor. We need more brutal honesty about how our food tastes. Especially for the foods that are trying to create positive impact on the health of people and planet. Because if those aren’t also the foods that people crave, then that brand’s impact will never be realized. Flavor is the key to unlocking that impact.

The success of junk food actually shows us the path forward. Flavor isn’t the enemy of healthy eating—it’s the secret weapon we’re not using enough. Instead of fighting our love of delicious food, we should be making healthy food irresistible.

Breeding for Flavor

Dan Barber’s Row 7 Seed Company exemplifies this approach. By breeding vegetables primiarly for flavor first, Row 7 is doing what I think is one of the most important efforts in food today—closing the gap between artificially flavored junk food and real food.

The produce industry has spent decades inadvertently breeding the flavor out of basic vegetables to make them more compatible with the demands of industrial food supply chains. Carrots, potatoes, salad greens—most of what you find in supermarkets has been selected for everything except taste. Is it any wonder kids still have trouble eating their vegetables? We’ve created a food system where a bag of chips delivers more flavor excitement than a carrot and it doesn’t need to be that way.

Remember the first time you tried an in-season, heirloom tomato? I do. It completely scrambled my brain about the theoretical flavor potential of common produce. I felt like I was lied to by the mass tomato industry about how good these things could taste.That first bite was a revelation—sweet, acidic, and startlingly complex, as if I’d been eating tomato-flavored water my whole life. It made me think: what other foods had I been gaslit into accepting?

And how lucky was I to even discover this, when so many people go through life never knowing that vegetables don’t have to taste as bland as the specimens lining supermarket shelves? Of course, it’s not practical for everyone to spend $8 on an heirloom tomato—I get that this sounds like privileged foodie nonsense.

But what if we put the same energy into making vegetables irresistible that we put into perfecting snack foods? What impact would we have on the world getting people to eat more vegetables and fruits by showing them more delicious versions of things they didn’t think could be delicious? Imagine how much we could do to convince people to eat more real food if they understood there was a better, more delicious option waiting for them.

The Twilight of Universal Taste

It’s really hard to try and imagine what a critical mass of people can agree on is delicious anymore. In our increasingly fragmented society—split by culture, class, geography, and digital echo chambers—can we even create flavors that almost everyone agrees taste good? Flavor is so subjective and can often be altered by circumstance, mood, atmosphere, story, context, and a thousand other variables. This requires stepping outside your own taste preferences and imagining what deliciousness means to people from different backgrounds, with different genetics, different food histories.

A spice that seems mild to someone used to fresh, high-quality ingredients might taste intense to someone raised on processed food. Products designed for mass appeal often disappoint people looking for more complex flavors. The challenge is creating food that bridges these different flavor worlds without dumbing everything down to the lowest common denominator—but maybe that challenge is becoming impossible.

If this is true, then the basic assumption of Big Food—create standardized food for the masses—might be fundamentally eroding. Is it becoming a fool’s errand to try to make everyone happy? Perhaps the smarter play is to superserve the people we know who will really like something and forget about being everything to everyone. This shift is already slowly happening in our grocery store aisles, with endless micro-targeted products for specific dietary needs, cultural preferences, and lifestyle tribes.

But I wonder: could anyone create a company today from scratch with as much mass flavor appeal as Coca-Cola once had? Or are we living in the twilight of universal taste, where the future belongs not to products that unite us, but to those that divide us into ever-smaller, more satisfied tribes?

Making Virtue Irresistible

We’re facing huge challenges in the food system: climate change, public health crises, food security. Flavor is the key that unlocks the innate potential of any food to address these problems. The most promising food innovations aren’t asking people to sacrifice pleasure for virtue—they’re making virtuous choices more pleasurable.

Consider the groundbreaking work that Mette Johnsen, CEO of Spora, described in our interview. Spora is a global food research center that emerged from Copenhagen’s revolutionary restaurant Alchemist, bridging avant-garde gastronomy with food science. Her team tackled the 80 million tons of rapeseed cake left over annually after oil extraction—a protein-rich waste stream that looks “more like something you feed a rabbit” and tastes intensely bitter due to compounds that suppress nutrient absorption.

Through fermentation, they transformed this industrial byproduct into what Johnsen calls a “gold standard protein” that’s as nutritionally valuable as soy. The result is a versatile meat alternative that can be formed into burger patties, used in bolognese, or incorporated into spring salads now served at Alchemist.

While Alchemist itself remains a rarified dining experience—accessible to only a privileged few due to cost and location—operations like Spora represent something far more significant: innovation sandboxes where extensive resources and world-class talent can identify patterns of deliciousness that could eventually reach mainstream food channels. The same fermentation techniques perfecting rapeseed protein for Copenhagen’s culinary elite could one day inform products sold at McDonald’s or Walmart. These high-end laboratories serve as proving grounds for flavor breakthroughs that, once refined, can be scaled and democratized.

This illustrates a crucial principle: without solving the fundamental flavor problem first—making something genuinely delicious that people would choose repeatedly—the enormous potential for converting massive waste streams into human food could never have been realized. As Johnsen puts it, they put “deliciousness first” as the essential vehicle for sustainable food choices.

Everyone in the food industry says “it’s gotta taste good,” but how many are actually successful at doing that? The gap between intention and execution is enormous. Too many companies are in denial about how their products really taste compared to what’s already winning in the marketplace.

Sustainable foods won’t win through guilt trips alone—they have to win in the arena of immediate satisfaction. The most exciting food tech focuses on unlocking new flavors that were previously impossible: fermentation that creates entirely new tastes from food waste, growing techniques that concentrate flavor compounds, processing that preserves the sensory qualities usually lost in mass production.

These approaches recognize that flavor isn’t frivolous—it’s the fundamental force that determines which foods survive. Products that taste better don’t just sell better, they reshape eating patterns and ultimately determine the direction of our entire food system.

This essay was inspired by a conversation about The Future of Flavor on The Tomorrow Today Show, featuring host Mike Lee with guest co-host Ali Bouzari (food scientist and co-founder of Pilot R&D), Mario Ubiali (Founder of Thimus), Ori Zohar (Co-founder of Burlap & Barrel), and Mette Johnsen (CEO of Spora).

This post was originally published on Mike Lee’s wonderfully written and informational substack. You can find the post here. You should subscribe!

And you know what? You should also definitely subscribe to Mike’s new podcast, The Tomorrow Today Show, from the Spoon Podcast Network. You can listen to this episode about flavor below.