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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Food Tech Show

The Food Tech News Show: Behold, The Humanoid Kitchen Robot is Here

This week, the Spoon crew got together to discuss some of the big stories of the week on a new weekly video news show we’re launching called The Food Tech News Show.

The stories Carlos Rodela and I discuss include:

You can watch the full show below, on YouTube, or listen to it on the Spoon podcast.

And, if you’d like to watch next week’s Food Tech News Show, join us on March 22nd at 1 Pacific on Streamyard, Twitter, or on our YouTube channel.

Cordless Kitchens? - FTNS

The Food Tech Show: Mystery Food Boxes, A Tiny Dishwasher and Restaurant Tech

Need something to listen to on your Monday morning commute?

Good news: The Spoon gang got together after a little summer podcast break to talk about some of the top food tech stories of the week.

The stories discussed on this weekly food tech wrapup include:

Click play to listen to the podcast or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Food Tech Show Live: Restaurants Are Back

It’s been a while, but The Spoon team (sans a vacationing Chris) recently got together with food tech investor Brian Frank to discuss some of the top stories of the week.

The first story was about no matter where we look, signs show restaurant traffic is headed back to post-pandemic levels. Not only are we seeing it with our own eyes as we all head out into the world, but the data is showing it as well.

The only problem is restaurants can’t find enough workers. While there are lots of reasons for the shortages restaurant operators are experiencing, one of them is that many workers left during COVID-forced contractions and found jobs in other industries. We discuss whether they are causing operators to consider new technologies as a solution to their staffing problems.

Other stories we discuss on the pod:

As always, you can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just click play below.

Save the Date: Smart Kitchen Summit 2020, the Leading Food Tech Event In North America, Returns on October 15-16

Mark your calendars: the Smart Kitchen Summit, North America’s leading event for food tech executives, is back for a sixth year on October 15th and 16th in Seattle.

As the first event to bring together executives across the food, appliance, technology and retail industries to explore how digital technologies and innovation in science will reinvent the world of food, SKS has grown to become a must-attend global summit where leaders connect and map the future of their businesses.

And SKS 2020 will be no different as we continue to dive deep into the future of the kitchen as well as explore how advances in food science, AI, IoT and other innovation spaces will bring about a fundamental reinvention of every part of the food value chain over the next decade.

A sample of some of the topics we plan to explore at SKS 2020 include:

  • Personalization across food retail, restaurants, nutrition and the home kitchen
  • AI, robotics and automation’s impact on food in the home, restaurant and food retail
  • Future food innovation (Plant-based, lab-grown, from the air, molecular, etc)
  • Smart kitchen evolution towards a reinvention of core cooking, interfaces and kitchen business models
  • How innovation could help reduce food waste and build more sustainable food systems
  • Ghost kitchens and the changing restaurant and food delivery market

In addition to dozens of sessions exploring the areas critical to today’s food tech exec, SKS 2020 will also add new opportunities for attendees to discover innovations and connect with one another. This year’s event will feature expanded workshops and how-tos from makers to help you better understand and catalyze creation in your business. We will also include a bigger and better SKS Connect meeting platform where we will no doubt top the 1000 plus one-on-one meetings that took place last year.

Personally, I am more excited than ever for SKS. When we started the event back in 2015, I’d just spent much of the previous decade watching large-scale forces completely change the world of entertainment through digital technologies. We suspected disruptive tech was about to have a much bigger impact on the world of food and – as we can plainly see now – we were right. Everywhere along today’s food value chain — on the farm, in the factory, at food retail, in the restaurant and the consumer kitchen — we’re witnessing a radical reinvention of how business is done and how we prepare, sell and consume food.

And yet so much opportunity lies ahead of us. While we’ve seen food tech join other areas as a key focus area for many forward thinkers, the reinvention of the world of food is still in the very early stages. We have yet to find our Spotify or Netflix for food, and I really believe that it’s just a fairly short matter of time before companies emerge that will become huge platforms upon which the future of food is built.

Chances are these companies will be at SKS, so I’d love to invite you to join us in Seattle on October 15-16th as we figure out the future. Please check out our website to get access to early winter sale tickets, let us know if you want to speak or sponsor, or just sign up for more information.

See you in Seattle!

SKS 2019 Is In Two Weeks And We Couldn’t Be More Excited

With Smart Kitchen Summit just two weeks away, we’re getting really pumped to share with you what we’ve been working on for the last few months.

We had the first SKS in 2015 in an old cannery, and every year we’ve grown to include more speakers, sponsors and attendees, and this year we are really outdoing ourselves with our biggest summit year.

I wanted to share with you some of the things we’ve been working on and why we’re so excited.

Welcome to the Waterfront

When you go to Seattle, the one place you usually want to be is on the waterfront, and that’s where we’ll be for two full days at Bell Harbor Conference Center.

But great views isn’t the only reason we moved to a new venue. Moving to our new home  allows us to really expand our content, and we have more fantastic sessions than ever. This year we explore themes like the future kitchen, next-generation interfaces, the changing eater, new sources of protein, the impact of robotics and AI on the food system, the reinvented restaurants and much much more. Heck, we’ll even be talking about space food.

Networking Goes Next Level

One reason SKS has become indispensable is because it’s where those in the world of food tech and smart kitchen come to meet new partners, find innovative startups and, in general, do deals.

And in 2019 we’re taking this next level with our first-ever networking app. We are partnering with Brella to create a customized networking experience called SKS Connect that will allow attendees to find others schedule one on one meetings at the show. Once you buy your ticket, we will email you details to sign up for Brella SKS Connect!

Our Amazing Speakers

Every year the Spoon team searches for those who doing the most interesting work in the future of food and cooking and tells their stories. SKS is where we invite them to have a conversation with our community tell their stories live and in person.  This year we have an amazing group of founders, makers and visionaries, ranging from IBM Watson’s lead researcher to someone creating protein from thin air to the creator of Europe’s most successful connected recipe platform in the Cookidoo to India’s equivalent to Martha Stewart. We’ve got investors, hackers, inventors and makers, all coming together to help us take stock of the future of food and set the course for the next year.

Plus, the whole Spoon team will be here and who doesn’t want to meet us?

So Many Great Startups

Each year at SKS we bring together some of the most innovative new startups in the world of food tech with our Startup Showcase. This year we’ve doubled the innovation, not only bringing together amazing food tech startups but also we’ve launched a new Future Food showcase where you can see what some of today’s most innovative food startups are working on.

Touch and Taste The Future

SKS isn’t just about great content and networking, it’s where you come to touch and taste the future. Our startups, sponsors and partners will have all sorts of innovative products, food and innovations on display, including some product launches that will make news at the show. You’ll be able to taste plant-based sea food and chicken nuggets, edible cutlery, cricket protein and so much more. You’ll see new cooking robots, new types of cooktops, countertop chocolate appliances to just name a few.

So if you just attend one event of the year to help you understand where the future of food and cooking is going, make it this year’s SKS.  Whether you’re looking for a new partner, an investor, a new employee or just want to figure out your food tech strategy, SKS 2019 is where you should do it.

There are only two weeks left (and just one week left to buy double pack tickets), so hurry up and get your tickets today! Use the discount code SPOON for 15% off your ticket.

The Food Tech Show: Impossible’s First Retail Product is Almost Here And We’re Pretty Excited About It

We’ve been head’s down preparing for the fifth Smart Kitchen Summit (in just three weeks!), but The Spoon crew took some time this week to talk about some of the latest news in Food Tech.

Here are some of the stories we discussed:

If you want to see the startups we talk about or hang out with the Spoon crew, make sure to go to the Smart Kitchen Summit and get your tickets before they’re gone! Use discount code PODCAST for 25% off of tickets at www.smartkitchensummit.com.

As always, you can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download the episode directly to your device or just simply hit play below.

Audio Player

The Food Tech Show: Personalized Menus

Over the past decade, we’ve seen how big data, mobile and social media has created a wave of personalized services for consumers in everything from music and entertainment to news to financial services.

So why is it that the restaurant menu still offers a one-sized fits all offering for guests?

To discuss why the restaurant menu seems stuck in time, I am joined on this episode of The Food Tech Show by Scott Sanchez, CEO of The Fit. We talk about where the menu will go in the future, whether we’ll eventually ever see personalized food profiles and how Scott’s own personal struggles with weight led him to eventually create The Fit.

As always, you can listen to The Food Tech Show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, download direct to your device or just click play below.

The Food Tech Show: How Will CRISPR Change Food?

Like life, the food we eat is a series of tradeoffs. Whether it’s that banana we buy at the local grocer or that cup of joe we drink at the corner coffee shop, chances are we are not eating or drinking the tastiest or most nutritious variety of the food but instead that which was able to last the longest in transit or is the most disease resistant.

But what if we could have the best of both worlds?

That’s the promise of CRISPR, a new technology that is essentially a form of genetic scissors allows scientists to “edit” DNA gene sequences. Imagine taking out the bad parts of a food’s DNA gene sequence while adding in or changing parts that help make it taste better or last longer.

That’s what scientists are already doing with CRISPR and gene editing techniques.

To discuss this topic, I caught up with the Pete Rowe, the CEO of Deepbranch Biotechnology, for the latest episode of the Food Tech Show podcast.

Rowe, a molecular microbiologist by training, gave the example of avocados as a food that could benefit from CRISPR and gene editing techniques. “Let’s say the best tasting avocados also happen to be the ones that bruise the easiest,” said Rowe. “So you had extremely tasty avocados that you couldn’t ship around the world and therefore they weren’t suited for live scale agriculture. But if you were to make a specific genetic change so that the flavor benefits you get, but you also retain the conventional longevity of this avocado on the shelf.”

But it’s not just helping food last longer, but also helping food survive as a crop.

“Think about all of these problems people are having with coffee,” said Rowe. “Coffee rust is a kinda of fungus that infects coffee plants. There’ s a big genetic component with that. if you make one genetic change within the coffee plant, the likelihood is, if you know what that change has to be, that you can stop that fungus infecting the coffee.

Whether it’s improving flavor, making food more nutritious, or helping it grow faster by speeding up the breeding process, CRISPR and genetic editing hold significant potential.  Rowe does a good job not only explaining these potential applications, but also explains CRISPR in language non scientists like myself (and probably most of our listeners) can understand.

To listen to Rowe talk CRISPR, you can listen to the latest episode of the Food Tech Show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, download direct to your device, or just click play below.

Editor Roundtable Podcast: We Have Opinions on Tiny Dishwashers & Beyond Burgers

In case you didn’t already know, The Spoon team has lots of opinions. As you might guess, those opinions are especially pronounced when it comes to food and kitchen gadgets.

And so we decided to get together and get some things off our chest on this Editor Roundtable edition of the Food Tech Show.

Here’s what we talked about:

In addition to lots of opinions, we also share sound effects (or at least I do).

As always, please subscribe, play (and rate!) the podcast in Apple podcasts (or your favorite pod player), download direct or just click play below.