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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Food Tech Live

The Spoon & CES Bring Food Tech To The World’s Biggest Tech Show For First Time Ever

Each January for the past couple of decades, I’ve packed up my suitcase and headed to the Nevada desert to take part in the world’s biggest tech show, CES.

I’m not alone. CES is the singular tech show that pretty much every major industry attends along with those who watch and follow those industries.

This includes the food world. Many remember the debut of the Impossible 2.0 burger in 2019, a watershed moment for both the company and the plant-based meat industry. There’s also been food robots, ice cream makers and much more that have made a big splash at the big show.

However, up until this year, any food professionals coming to CES were attending despite the lack of a dedicated food technology and innovation area in the exhibition space or in the conference tracks. Because CES is *the* great convener in the tech world, we felt food tech needed representation. This led The Spoon to rent out the ballroom of Treasure Island for a couple of years running to produce Food Tech Live. We wanted to give the food industry a central place to connect and check out the latest and greatest in food innovation.

But now that’s all about to change as food tech hits the big time this coming January. CES announced in June that food tech is going to be a featured theme for the first time ever at the big show. We couldn’t be more excited, in part because we will get to see even more cool food tech innovation, but also because CES has chosen The Spoon as the dedicated CES partner for the food tech exhibition and conference portions of the show!

We’re busy helping to develop a half-day conference and talking to lots of companies about coming to show their products at the four day CES food tech exhibition and we can’t wait to show what we’ve helped CES build.

But we need your input too! If you are interested in showing off your latest and great food and kitchen-related product or solutions, make sure to let us know. Just head over to this form on the SKS website and drop us a line. We’ll get right back to you and let you know how you can be a part of food tech at CES.

You can read more about the program below with our official announcement, or just drop us a line to see how to get involved.

We’ll see you in Vegas!

Food tech has arrived at CES®. Leaders in kitchen, food and cooking are coming together in Las Vegas from January 5th to January 8th at CES  2022 to examine how technology is changing the global food chain. CES has teamed up with The Spoon, the leading food tech media and events partner to showcase, demo and discuss the way technology has transformed the world of food. 

While we’re sure the excitement and buzz around food tech will be everywhere, we are working with CES on two key initiatives at the show, including: 

  • The Food Tech Exhibit, an exhibit space showcasing the latest innovations and demonstrating new products from across the kitchen and food tech spectrum. This will be live on the CES show floor in the Venetian Expo. 
  • The CES Food Tech Conference, presented by The Spoon, will bring together visionary thinkers, chef entrepreneurs, appliance vendors, delivery and food retail disruptors at CES 2022. Each session will highlight the innovation and disruption happening across the food industry as a result of tech advancements like artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation, mobile accessibility and more. 

CES is fast approaching — and there are many ways to get involved before, during and after the show. The CES Food Tech presented by The Spoon area will focus solely on companies building the future of food and cooking. Booth spaces are diverse in terms of size and ability to customize – get in touch and we’ll work with the CES exhibitor team and our team to ensure you put together a space that serves you. 

If you aren’t able to secure a demo or company/showcase spot but still want your brand to be part of the inaugural year of food tech at CES, you can sponsor the CES Food Tech Conference on Day 2 of CES in the Venetian. Conference tickets for CES programming will be on sale soon. 

Here are the Kitchen Robots We Saw at CES & Food Tech Live 2021

One thing I miss most about heading to Vegas every January for CES is walking the basement of the Sands convention center. There, in the startup area known as Eureka Park, I’ll wander for hours and get lost amongst thousands of exhibitors in search of a few undiscovered food tech gems.

I usually find a few and, since we’re talking CES, they sometimes come in the form of a food robot.

From there, I usually head across the street to Treasure Island where The Spoon has its own product showcase during CES week called Food Tech Live, where I can also get my fill of food robots while also doing such things as eating a cookie with my face on it.

While both CES and Food Tech Live didn’t take place in person in Sin City this year, that doesn’t mean there weren’t some cool food robots to check out at their virtual versions last week. Below is our roundup of home food robots I found at virtual CES and The Spoon’s annual first-of-the-year product showcase, Food Tech Live.

Moley Robotic Kitchen

Since 2015, the Moley robotic kitchen has captured the imagination of the tech journalists and robotics industry with its robot chef concept that can that can prepare full meals from prep to cook to clean up with a pair of articulating robot arms.

And while we’ve yet to actually see the Moley cook a full meal from start to finish, the system’s inventor told The Spoon that it’s finally on sale and will find its first home in 2021. The company, which had a virtual booth at CES 2021 and debuted a bunch of new highlight videos, will sell both a home and pro version of its robotic kitchen. Prices for the fully robotic kitchen will be about $335 thousand.

The Moley Robotic Kitchen System at CES 2021

Oliver

Else Labs Oliver is a single-pot cooking robot that dispenses fresh ingredients and automates the cooking process with the help of temperature sensing and machine vision capabilities.

Else Labs, which went on sale via Indiegogo last fall, was on display at Food Tech Live last week. The product’s inventor and company CEO Khalid Aboujassoum says the major difference between Oliver and other guided cooking appliances on the market is Oliver pretty much handles the entire cooking process for you.

“The Oliver can do unattended stovetop cooking,” Aboujassoum told me last fall when the product went on sale.

Oliver, the smart cooking robot

iWonderCook

The iWonderCook is a automated cooking machine that cooks one-pot meals. The meals are provided in the form of the company’s own meal kit service, which the user orders through the device’s touchscreen. From there, as can be seen in the video below, the user inserts a bowl, embeds the food “cartridge”, and then adjusts the amount of oil and water needed.

I haven’t gotten a chance to see the iWondercook in action or taste the food, I will say is the product’s reliance on its own meal kits might be a turn-off for some users.

iWONDERCOOK robotic chef does the cooking for you.

Yo-Kai Express Takumi

Technically the new Yo-Kai Express Takumi home ramen machine is something closer to a Keurig for food than a food robot, it’s worth looking at this machine given the company’s smart vending roots.

The Takumi, which debuted at Food Tech Live last week, follows Yo-Kai’s move into the home market with its home delivery service. The Takumi takes the frozen ramen bowls, which are centrally produced in Yo-Kai’s California facilities, and steams and reconstitutes the ramen in just a few minutes.

The company has plans to not only to start selling ramen to users in the office and home, but on the go with an autonomous ramen delivery cart.

Day With Yo Kai Final

Samsung Bot Handy

Samsung announced a trio of home robots aimed at helping humans around the house. The one that was most interesting when it comes to lending a hand in the kitchen was Bot Handy, a mobile bot with large articulating hand that can help with anything from pouring a glass of wine to doing the dishes.

It’s worth noting that Samsung – like many big consumer electronics brands – has a history of showing off cool new product prototypes at CES that are more conceptual than anything close to actually coming to market, including last year’s they showed off a Moley-kitchen style robot system. Let’s hope the Bot Handy is something the company delivers on.

Julia

The Julia is another single-pot home cooking robot that allows the user to set it and forget it for pretty much an entire meal. The Julia is made by a Nymble, an Indian-based startup with plans to start selling the product in 2021. Nymble CEO Raghav Gupta showed off the product at Food Tech Live, told us that they are expanding their alpha trial program in the United States in February.

ColdSnap

Like the Takumi, the ColdSnap isn’t quite a full-fledged food robot, but something closer to a Bartesian style automated appliance that makes cold ice cream (as well as frozen margaritas and smoothies). While we weren’t able to get our hands on the ColdSnap, the company gave CNET a hands-on preview of the appliance and the editors were impressed. The appliance, which is going to a fairly spending $500-1,000, reminds me of the Wim fro-yo appliance that never made it to market after an acqui-hire of the founding by Walmart.

Podcast: The CES & Food Tech Live 2021 Review

On this week’s episode of Food Tech Show, the Spoon editorial team talks about what they found walking the virtual exhibit halls of CES 2021 (answer: not much).

The good news is we also had Food Tech Live, the Spoon’s annual food tech showcase that happens during CES week. Normally we’re in Vegas for FTL, eating cookies with our faces on it and checking out the latest in food tech gadgets, but this year we took things online and had a bunch of cool product demos, interviews and breakout sessions.

Finally, we also talk about the June oven acquisition by Weber and what that means for the smart oven space.

So listen in on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, download direct to your computer or just click play below. And, if you’re a regular listener, we’d appreciate it if you throw us a review to start the year!

Next Up for Cellular Agriculture: Scalability, Accessibility

At one point in the not-too-distant past, the idea of edible protein grown in a lab was the stuff of science fiction. But in what’s felt like a relatively short period of time (a few years), a greater number of companies, individuals, and investors have embraced the concept of cellular agriculture and, more and more, consider it a vital part of our future food system. 

Now the cell-based protein sector has a new set of challenges to tackle. As HigherSteaks’ Benjamina Bollag and BIOMILQ’s Michelle Egger discussed this week during The Spoon’s Food Tech Live event, we’re past the days of trying to convince folks that cellular agriculture is a viable reality. Now, companies have to prove the idea of growing protein in a lab can work at scale outside that lab to feed a growing world population, and do so while keeping environmental degradation minimal.

It’s not exactly a simple feat (understatement), and it certainly won’t happen next week (or next year). But during this week’s Food Tech Live, Bollag and Egger pinpointed not just the areas cellular agriculture needs to focus on in order to continue its evolution towards the mainstream, but also ideas for how to get there.

Among those are safety and quality assurance, equipment design, supply chain logistics, and cell culture density, to name just a few things. Egger added that one of the challenges cellular agriculture companies face right now is they are relying on technology from industries (biotech, Pharma) that have never had to scale to the level of mass commodity, which essentially the holy grail for cell ag companies.

Perhaps the biggest — and most important — challenge for these companies will be making cell-cultured protein, whether meat, breast milk, cheese, or eggs, into the hands of many. In other words, how do we make it more accessible to everyone?

It’s a question that isn’t possible to answer in the span of a 30-minute online chat, but definitely one the industry as a whole should consider now, though we’re years away from reaching that stage of mass commodity. Right now, a select few consumers can get their hands on alternative proteins grown in a lab. Those are usually the folks invited to exclusive taste-testings or the ones that can afford the rare fine dining experience for cultured protein.

“We can’t lose sight of the fact that if you truly want to reduce the amount of environmental degradation or provide more options to people or subsidize diets in a healthier manner, you have to get into the hands of everyone throughout this world,” said Egger.

That in turn will require more strategic thinking on the part of the industry in terms of how to reach a wider audience. It will also require collaboration amongst the difference companies currently innovating across the cellular agriculture sector.

Food Tech Live 2021: Meet The Companies

Usually this time of year we’re in Vegas for CES, weaving through crowded casino floors, hailing cabs and throwing a party for a thousand of our favorite kitchen and food tech fans in the ballroom of Treasure Island.

But since CES has gone virtual this year, so has Food Tech Live!

Today we’ll be doing live interviews all day with food tech innovators creating products ranging from food robots to 3D food printing companies to a Keurig for home ramen.

We also have virtual exhibition booths you can visit and check out the latest innovations and talk to the creators.

We still have a limited amount of free tickets available so head on over and grab one before they run out.

Below is a sneak preview of the companies exhibiting at Food Tech Live. Descriptions of products were provided by the companies.

Anova – The newly introduced Anova Precision Oven is the world’s first steam-enabled combi-oven designed for the home cook.

BBot – Bbot is a web-based contactless order and pay solution that allows guests to order food and drinks from their phone to their location.

BIOMILQ – is a women-owned, science-led, and mother centered start-up that is on a mission to provide the next generation every opportunity to thrive by producing cultured breastmilk that offers supplemental nutrition to mother’s milk with the convenience of formula.

BonBowl – Bonbowl is an induction cooktop paired with patent-pending cookware, designed to allow you to cook for one. The bowl is designed so that you can cook and eat from the same dish. Bonbowl also offers single serving recipes that are specifically designed to be cooked in 15 minutes or less.

Botrista – The Botrista DrinkBot is the next generation drink dispenser for restaurants. The patented technology can dispense more natural ingredients which tend to have higher fiber or pulp levels, like juice concentrates or even as thick as honey.

Breville/Polyscience – Breville|PolyScience is a manufacturer of cutting-edge equipment for chefs and mixologists, including sous vide immersion circulators, the Control ºFreak, the Smoking Gun Pro, Anti-Griddle, Sonicprep, Rotary Vacuum Evaporator, and other culinary technologies. The company has just released the HydroPro and HydroPro Plus sous vide immersion circulators.

CHEF iQ – The CHEF iQ Smart Cooker is an electric pressure cooker with unique features like a built-in scale, OTA firmware updates, and a connected app with over 200 included guided recipes.

CocoTerra – CocoTerra has developed the world’s first tabletop chocolate maker. CocoTerra lets you create custom chocolate from scratch in just two hours. You get to choose your chocolate flavorings, ingredients, designs, and decorations. Make chocolate your way, anytime you want.

Cuzen Matcha – An innovative at-home matcha system consisting of Matcha Maker and Matcha Leaf.

Drop – Drop is a smart kitchen platform with its KitchenOS serving over 100 different appliance models from brands like Bosch, Instant Brands, Panasonic, LG Electronics and Thermomix. The company specializes in recipe and kitchen appliance technology, connecting the whole cooking journey, effortlessly.

Edamam – Edamam licenses and provides via API nutrition data to food, health and wellness businesses. We have built the largest, broadest and deepest dataset of nutrition data with over 5 million recipes and 800K+ foods all analyzed and tagged for every nutrient, allergen, lifestyle diet and chronic condition.

Else Labs – Else Labs is the maker of Oliver, an expert chef, recipe library, meal planner and shopping assistant all in one. This robot chef replicates the timing, patience and skill of a chef at the stovetop leading to the creation of dynamic and delicious meals cooked to perfection, every time.

Ember – Ember Travel Mug² and Ember Mug² are the most advanced coffee mugs on the market, allowing individuals to set and maintain their preferred drinking temperature for hot beverages.

Grubtech – Grubtech’s product suite encompasses the entire end to end operations from demand generation, food aggregator integration, in-kitchen operations and last mile delivery integration.

HakkoBako – Fermentation Chambers for professional flavor developers

Hestan Cue – Hestan Smart Cooking provides the latest in temperature sensing cookware and leading connectivity solutions. Hestan Smart Cooking has pioneered precise temperature control for the stovetop and offers a variety of services ranging from hardware manufacturing, app development, to content creation, and more.

Minnow – Contact-free Pickup Pods take the worry out of food pickup and delivery by keeping food secure and people safe. Amazon Locker for food.

MyAir – MyAir develops plant-based nutrition bars with a personalized edge. The company’s plant-based formulations (infused in nutrition bars) are tailored to the consumer’s unique stress profile and cognitive needs.

Nymble – Home food robot. Julia, a home robot that helps you treat yourself to world food everyday, without having to spend time in the kitchen cooking it yourself. The food is cooked using ingredients you trust, all from the comfort of your home at the press of a button.

Pantri – An online platform that enables your smart appliances to shop automatically for the items they consume.

PantryChic – Simplify recipe preparation and ingredient organization with the PantryChic Smart Storage System. This multifunctional appliance stores, measures, auto-converts, dispenses and weighs ingredients.

SamsungNext/Whisk – Whisk powers the creation, discovery, personalization and monetization of food content online, in-store and at home. Whisk was acquired by Samsung in 2019.

Satis.AI – Satis.AI is an AI powered operational platform for restaurant kitchens aimed at improving decision making and reducing mistakes. The core of the platform uses computer vision to do object detection, object tracking and action recognition, enabling real time feedback to staff and connected devices

SIGMADESIGN – SIGMADESIGN supports food tech industries what it calls ‘Protoduction’. The company bridges the middle ground between prototyping and full-scale manufacturing.

Sojourn – Technology for last meter meal and grocery delivery. Computer vision platform and supply chain technology that can integrate with existing navigation techniques of delivery services and applications.

SpoonShot – Spoonshot delivers food & beverage innovation intelligence by leveraging AI and food science.

Tasteboosters – Tasteboosters makes SpoonTEK, a new tongue sensory utensil that adds a mild electric current to food (which excites the taste buds) to enhance flavor, heighten taste and improve after-taste.

The Weapon – Your beverage cans dedicated home entertainment – dispensed ice cold or hot from you mobile app.

Yo-Kai Express – Autonomous Restaurant Solutions using highly advanced technology to freshly serve a gourmet bowl in under 60 seconds 24 hours a day.

Zymmo – Zymmo gives independent chefs the power to market and manage every aspect of their careers, while providing foodies with amazing food experiences through their chef-meal marketplace.

Video: World Matcha’s Elegant Machine Grinds Fresh Matcha at Home

On our Food Tech Show podcast this week, The Spoon’s editorial gang talked about all the drink robots we saw this year at CES. One that definitely stood out for all of us was World Matcha’s Cuzen Matcha maker.

Yes, the Cuzen will grind matcha leaves and stir it for you. That in and of itself is cool. But the design of the machine is . . . stunning. Rather than a bulky black or silver box, the Cuzen is more like sculpture, with a slim footprint, bold shapes and use of negative space. It even has a whisk that mimics the traditional bamboo ones used to mix your matcha. It’s a device you’d want to make space for on your kitchen counter.

Oh. And the resulting matcha is tasty too.

The Cuzen Matcha isn’t cheap. Pre-orders are going for $290, which includes two sleeves of raw matcha leaves. But if you are a matcha fanatic. This might be worth the investment. World Matcha brought its matcha machine to our recent Food Tech Live show in Las Vegas, and I got the chance to speak with the company’s Founder and CEO, Eijiro Tsukada about the Cuzen and and to see it in action. Matcheck it out!

CES 2020: A Look at the Cuzen Matcha, a Home Matcha Making Appliance

Video: The Spinn Coffee Maker is For Real, a Chat With its CEO

The Spoon has been covering The Spinn saga basically since we founded the publication back in 2016. The high-tech crowdfunded coffee machine that uses centrigual force to extract coffee is, after all, three years overdue. Early backers of the product (including Spoon Founder Mike Wolf) are understandably… concerned that they would ever get theirs. But we have good news!

Spinn was at our Food Tech Live event in Las Vegas last week, bearing good news! Spinn Founder and CEO Roderick de Rode said the first Spinn units are shipping now in California. He also said there’s a “huge backlog” of orders, so those in other states will need to stay patient.

In this video interview de Rode explains a bit more about how the hardware works, but also outlines how Spinn is a coffee marketplace. The company has 462 partner coffee roasters selling their coffee on Spinn’s platform. Once you get a bag of beans, scan it with the Spinn app to bring up recipes for that roast and send them to the machine, which adjusts its extraction accordingly.

Whether or not you backed the Spinn, you should watch the full video to see one of the more unique coffee makers that are (finally) hitting the market.

CES 2020: A Look at the Spinn Grind and Brew Coffee Maker

Newsletter: Everything We Saw in Kitchen and Food Tech at CES 2020

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The Spoon team descended on Vegas last week to try and find all the food and kitchen tech we could lay our hands on. We also held our second annual FoodTech Live event because, well, we’re lazy and we wanted the food tech to come to us.

And now that we’re back in the snowy foothills of the Pacific Northwest, the Spoon team had some time put our thoughts about the tech expo together, record a podcast, and decipher what it all means. 

So here it is, our CES Food Tech wrapup. I’ve got kitchen tech covered below, then Catherine looks at Impossible Pork and what else she saw on the fake meat front, and finally Chris gives his thoughts on robots and kitchens coming out of what has been an eventful couple weeks in that space. 

Kitchen Tech at CES

Because I’ve gone to CES more times than I could count, I’ve gotten pretty good at searching out what matters to me the most so as to make productive use of my time. That’s always been a challenge in food tech since CES and its exhibitors have largely ignored the category. But that all changed this year because of what happened last year: The launch of the Impossible Burger 2.0. 

And while fake meat is a long ways from a smart oven or a food robot, I think having the food tech unicorn choose CES as its venue to launch its new products has just given momentum to everything food-related, included the future kitchen.

What did I see? Well, I wrote a deep dive full kitchen tech wrap-up report detailing everything kitchen tech at CES this year, but if you’re looking for the short-short of it here are the top takeaways:

Personalization is Impacting Everything, Even Physical Space

There’s no doubt, personalization is impacting everything in food (heck, it’s why we decided to have a dedicated event on it). But when it comes to personalization, we usually are talking recipes or diet plans, not physical space. GE wants to change that, and so they showed off an adaptable kitchen concept that personalizes the space depending on the needs of the individual. 

Of course, there was also lots of meal planning and recipe personalization, as well as a couple startups like DNANudge and Sun Genomics looking to help you build meal journeys based on your personal biomarkers and DNA. 

Food Waste Only Gets A Half-Nod

There were better and more capable smart fridges to help us take better inventory and there were smart pantries to help us keep track of our dry goods, but I didn’t see a whole lot of effort focused on helping us reduce consumer food waste. One company, however, that wanted to help us all get better at composting our food waste was Sepura Home, which had a good solution that integrated with your home disposal to route food waste to a composter and liquids down the drain. 

Focus on Full Meal Journey Rather Than Point Solutions

When it comes to the smart home and connected kitchen, we’re used to seeing standalone technologies that show off a cutting edge new technology rather than a bigger solution tailored towards solving consumer problems. I think that’s starting to change, as companies like GE and Samsung showed off bigger ideas tailored towards helping people solve problems and connect the different parts of the meal journey. 

Drink Tech!

There were so many drink tech offerings at CES it was hard to keep track. We wrote about the Matcha making machine, tried out the Spinn and saw new beer-making robots.  We even checked out a new seltzer machine that is targeting reducing plastic waste in hotels and homes.

Countertop Cooking

Being a kitchen tech nerd, I have to admit it was cool have the guy who basically invented the home sous vide circulator give me a walkthrough of the Anova Precision Oven (you can listen along to Scott Heimendinger’s guided tour here.) We also took a look at the Julia multicooker here. 

Once again, check out my full kitchen tech wrapup for CES 2020 here. But first, see what Catherine has to say about fake meat this year at CES…

Impossible Pork at CES 2020 [Photo: Catherine Lamb]

I came into CES especially excited about one thing: Impossible Foods’ press event. The company had teased something major on Twitter, so I guessed we would see a new product — probably pork or chicken. And pork it was!

We got to taste the faux pork in a number of applications and it was juicy and fatty, though slightly more neutral-tasting than traditional pork — a great blank canvas for a number of porky recipes. If you’re feeling FOMO right now, don’t sweat it — you can soon you can sample the faux pork for yourself in the Impossible Croissan’wich, featuring Impossible’s plant-based pork sausage, which is rolling out in select Burger King locations this month.

While eating a bao stuffed with plant-based pork, I couldn’t help but wonder — what will be the next food to make a splash at CES? Last year Impossible stirred up a lot of attention when it won the Best of the Best award from Endgadget, even though it was the first edible food company to show at the tech expo. Now that the company has proven that food is, in fact, technology, it has opened up the door for more food companies to make a splash at CES.

One company to keep an eye on is Dutch startup Meatable. The cultured meat startup, which is growing pork muscle and fat cells outside of the animal, actually had its own small booth at CES this year. They didn’t have any of their actual meat on display, but Meatable’s CEO Krijn De Nood told me that they were hoping to bring cell-based pork samples to Vegas in 2021 for a limited taste test. They plan to start selling the pork on a large scale — pending regulatory approval — by 2025.

I guess that means we’ll have to start building up an appetite for CES 2021.

FlowWaste’s image recognition device. [Photo: Catherine Lamb]

Other cool stuff I saw (and tasted) on the CES show floor:

Food Robots: Do We Need Them?

While Chris wasn’t able to get around CES this year (save for our event FoodTech Live), he was watching for food robots and saw buzz around quite a few:  

I was unable to attend CES this year, and as such, I missed a bunch of robot stuff. LG showed off a mock restaurant with a robot cooking food and making pourover coffee. Samsung demoed a concept robot that was billed as an “extra set of hands” in the kitchen that could grab items, pour oil and even wield a knife. IRobot, maker of the Roomba vacuum announced it too was developing robotic arms to load dishes or carry food to the table. And of course, who could forget the robot that makes raclette melted cheese.

But in the end, he started to wonder: Do we need these more advanced robots in the consumer kitchen? …my initial response to robot arms swerving around a kitchen is why? Are these robotic ambitions the best way to gain greater convenience in the kitchen, or do they just make things more complicated? Let’s acknowledge that there are definite use cases for robotic arms to help those with disabilities or who are otherwise movement impaired. The University of Washington is working on a voice-controlled robot that can feed people who need such assistance. And researching how robots interact with odd-shaped and often fragile objects like food can help the robotics industry overall. That’s one of the reasons Sony teamed up with Carnegie Mellon to develop food robots, and why Nvidia built a full kitchen to train its robots. But in our homes, and especially smaller apartments with even smaller kitchens, robot arms seem like more of a menace than a help, taking up space and potentially getting in the way. A case of futuristic form over function.

You can read Chris’s full piece about the robotic consumer kitchen and where he thinks it’s all going here. 

Video: PathSpot Helps Prevent Poop Hands in Restaurants

Poop hands. Fun to say, super gross to have, especially if you work in a restaurant.

We’ve all seen the signs in restaurants broadcasting that employees must wash their hand thoroughly before returning to work. But one person’s deep, lathery scrub is another’s gentle rinse, so how can restaurants (and consumers) be sure that the person handling their food actually has clean hands?

Minimizing foodborne illnesses is no joke. In 2018, The National Institute of Health estimated that “the cost of a single foodborne illness outbreak ranged from $3968 to $1.9 million for a fast-food restaurant, $6330 to $2.1 million for a fast-casual restaurant, $8030 to $2.2 million for a casual-dining restaurant, and $8273 to $2.6 million for a fine-dining restaurant.”

PathSpot has developed one tool to help. Its eponymous device is installed in restaurant kitchens as a means to assess whether or not an employee has indeed scub-a-dubbed enough. After washing their hands, employees stick them under the PathSpot, which uses fluorescent spectroscopy and special software to analyze and detect any pathogens like E. Coli, Salmonella and Norovirus.

PathSpot showed off its device at our recent Food Tech Live event in Las Vegas. Though I had spent the day traveling on a plane, through two airports and in a Las Vegas hotel, I stuck my hands under the PathSpot to see how well I cleaned up. What were my results? Watch the full video to see how it works and find out.

CES 2020: No More Poop Hands! A Conversation with PathSpot