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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Mike Lee

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.

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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

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.

Introducing The Tomorrow Today Show With Mike Lee

Back in 2017, I wrote a story exploring the idea of personalized food profiles. The piece explored whether, someday, we might walk into restaurants, shop at the grocery store, or have dinner at a friend’s house and be able to communicate our food preferences and dietary restrictions in advance, shaping our entire meal journey accordingly.

The inspiration for that article came from Mike Lee, who had just spoken at our Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle that October. During his talk, he introduced the idea of a “food passport” that could someday help personalize food experiences wherever we go. I had gotten to know Mike through his work at The Future Market, where he developed a concept store of the future for the Fancy Food Show. It didn’t take long for me to realize that Mike has a rare ability to imagine the many possible futures of our food system and to understand how technology and social change might intersect to bring those futures to life.

However, it wasn’t until he published his book Mise: On the Future of Food that I fully appreciated the breadth of his thinking and the ways he can masterfully get his ideas across. In Mise, Mike not only describes big potential technologies and changes we will wrestle with in the future, but he gave us stories of how these changes might unfold in our lives.

In short, Mike is not only skilled at identifying early signals and trends, but he’s also a master of using storytelling to illustrate how these futures might unfold, which is why I’m super excited to welcome his new show to The Spoon Podcast Network: The Tomorrow Today Show.

In his new podcast, Mike takes listeners on a weekly deep dive into the future of food, whether it’s restaurants, farming, consumer products, nutrition, or even food hedonism. Each episode features long-form conversations that go beyond surface-level takes, offering nuanced insights from some of the most thoughtful voices in the industry.

In this first episode, The Future of Restaurants, Mike has a roundtable conversation with Kristen Hawley (Expedite), Elizabeth Tilton (Oyster Sunday), David Rodolitz (Flyfish Club), and yours truly. We explore everything from the role of empathy in hospitality to why chefs are trading molecular gastronomy for comfort food like pot pies.

Season one is launched, and you can watch the first episode below or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to subscribe, rate and review!

Mike is my guest on this week’s episode of The Spoon Podcast, so make sure to listen to that as well to hear a little more about Mike’s background.

The Future of Restaurants

Join Us Today as We Explore Future Scenarios of an AI-Powered Food System

Ever think about all the different scenarios that AI could ultimately unleash on our food system?

Us too, so we decided to invite noted food futurist Mike Lee to talk about it on our latest edition of the Food AI Co-Lab.

Join us today at 8:30 Pacific to explore the different scenarios that AI could unleash upon us.

In this session, we’ll discuss

  • AI & Regenerative Food Systems – How can technology help restore biodiversity, improve soil health, and create more resilient agricultural ecosystems?
  • Personalized Nutrition & Food Sovereignty – Can AI make food systems more inclusive, culturally relevant, and tailored to individual health needs while ensuring accessibility for all?
  • Circular Economy – How can AI-driven solutions reduce food waste, optimize supply chains, and create more efficient, closed-loop food systems?
  • Ethics & AI in Food – As technology advances, how do we ensure that food innovation remains fair, transparent, and truly benefits people and the planet?

You can watch it below or join us on our interactive Livestream to ask Mike questions!

Exploring Future Scenarios of an AI-Powered Food System

Meet The Spoon Podcast Network

Here at The Spoon, we—like you—are big fans of podcasts.

What’s not to love? Whether we’re diving deep into a topic we’re passionate about, researching a story, or exploring new interests just beginning to take root, podcasts have become an indispensable resource for us. And we know many of our readers feel the same way.

Personally, I’ve been podcasting and using podcasts as part of my process of discovering and writing about food tech innovators for most of the past decade. As a journalist, podcasts play a crucial role in my reporting process. They’ve allowed me to open-source my discovery journey, bringing The Spoon community along as I learn from subject matter experts about how the world is changing and the industries they’ve mastered.

As both a consumer and a creator of media, I’ve found podcasts to be more essential than ever—especially in an era of AI-generated content. With so much AI-generated media flooding our feeds, it’s becoming harder to discern what’s authentic—whether in written, audio, or video form. That’s why embracing trusted, verifiable voices is more important than ever. Podcasts provide a space for genuine conversations with real people, and that’s something worth amplifying.

Podcasts were also at the forefront of the great decentralization of media. This technology, which started over two decades ago, gave independent voices a platform—no massive media infrastructure required. At The Spoon, we believe strongly in independent media, and we want to leverage our own platform to bring new voices to our community and beyond.

All of this brings us to an exciting announcement: We’re launching our own podcast network!

The idea for The Spoon Podcast Network (TSPN) came to life last year as we engaged with insightful voices across the food tech and future-of-food community. We realized there were so many stories to tell and perspectives to share. While we could certainly invite some of these great minds onto The Spoon Podcast, we started to wonder: What if we could do more? What if we could tap into these experts and leverage The Spoon (and our and their collective networks) to extend their insights, conversations, and discoveries to a broader audience?

In other words, could we open-source the explorations of smart people across food, nutrition, and modern life—so that more of us can learn, engage, and join the conversation?

So that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re launching a great slate of new podcast hosts, and we’re already in talks with more creators to grow the network. Here’s our debut lineup of new podcasts launching with our partners:

Food Truths

On Food Truths, Food scientist Eric Schulze—former head of Global Regulatory at UPSIDE Foods and a former FDA regulator—will bring on smart minds from the food world and beyond to bust myths, uncover surprising truths, and dive deep into the science of food. (Apple Podcasts, Spotify).

Watch What You Eat With Carolyn O’Neil

As CNN’s original health and nutrition contributor, Carolyn O’Neil has spent decades covering how technology and innovative changemakers are reshaping nutrition. On Watch What You Eat, she’ll explore the worlds of food, nutrition, and cuisine, tracking new trends and helping listeners embark on new culinary adventures.

My Food Job Rocks

We’re not just creating new shows—we’re also bringing on seasoned hosts with podcasts we’ve long admired. Adam Yee, one of the original food-industry and food-innovation podcasters, launched My Food Job Rocks nearly a decade ago. We’ve been fans of Adam’s insightful and fun conversations with industry leaders, and we’re thrilled to welcome him to the network as he re-launches his iconic show.

Maybe Food, Maybe Tech

In addition to relaunching My Food Job Rocks, Adam Yee is launching a brand-new show with co-host Kai-Hsin Wang. On Maybe Food, Maybe Tech, they’ll break down current events, explore innovative companies at the intersection of food and technology, and share personal insights on life and industry trends.

The Tomorrow Today Show

Mike Lee, author of MISE and a longtime food futurist, has a talent for deciphering early signals and identifying what’s around the corner. On The Tomorrow Today Show, he’ll tackle big questions about sustainability, technology, pleasure, and connection—viewed through the lens of food.

Women Innovators in Food and Farming

Award-winning journalist Amy Wu hosts Women Innovators in Food and Farming, where she interviews women entrepreneurs driving change in agri-food tech. From advancements in seed breeding and soil innovation to cutting-edge robotics and automation, Amy explores the stories and insights shaping the future of food and farming.

Everything But The Carbon Sink

Hosted by Eva Goulbourne—an experienced strategist in food systems transformation and climate philanthropy—Everything But the Carbon Sink examines how agriculture, food waste, and land use impact the climate crisis. Each episode highlights forward-thinking solutions, financing strategies, and the key players driving change at the intersection of food and climate.

Soul to Table

Join Chef Ryan Lacy on the Soul to Table podcast. he goes on a journey to explore our food systems from seed to table through the eyes of our guests, chefs, ranchers, food scientists, farmers & many more.

Spoon Full of AI

In this show, The Spoon’s own Carlos Rodela dives into the cutting-edge world of artificial intelligence. We go face-to-face with industry innovators who share firsthand how AI is transforming their industry and how they are meeting the challenge by utilizing AI in their business. In each episode, we’ll also explore the latest AI tools powering big change, complete with suggestions for leveraging them in your business.

The Reimagining Restaurants Podcast

In this podcast, I talk to entrepreneurs, chefs, and industry leaders who are redefining what it means to run a modern restaurant—leveraging robotics, AI, automation, and sustainable practices to enhance customer service, optimize operations, and drive profitability.

And, of course, we’ll continue to feature The Spoon Podcast, our flagship show covering innovators across the food system. Over the next couple of months, we’ll spotlight conversations on The Spoon Podcast with all of our new hosts so you can get to know them better and hear from them about why their podcasts are must-listens.

You can check out all of our shows on The Spoon Podcast Network page, where you’ll also find links to the podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and their RSS feeds. Please subscribe!

And if you’d like to support our podcasts and independent media through sponsorship, drop us a line—we’d love to have that conversation.

Finally, a big shoutout to our hosts who believed in this vision, and to The Spoon team, including Carlos Rodela (our producer) and Tiffany McClurg, our head of operations (and new warm-read specialist!).

We can’t wait to bring these conversations to you. Stay tuned!

Podcast: Reimagining The Grocery Store with The Future Market’s Mike Lee

Growing up in Detroit, Mike Lee loved going to auto shows. His favorite part was seeing the concept cars auto makers rolled out to help consumers envision the future.

As he got older, Lee wondered why food companies never created similar concept products. Why not, after all, create the products of the future and show them to people?

Eventually, he decided to do it himself as part of his company The Future Market, and Lee brought his “concept cars” for food to the Fancy Food Show this past January. I had a chance to tour Lee’s vision for the reimagined grocery and knew at that point I needed to have him on the podcast to talk about what the grocery store of the future would look like.

Enjoy the podcast.