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October 9, 2024

Spoonful of AI Podcast: Raj Singh Talks GPT Food Cam and Building Websites With AI

We caught up with Raj Singh, head of Solo for Mozilla (and maker of the GPT Food Cam app) for an episode of The Spoon’s newest podcast, Spoon Full of AI.

Singh, who we wrote about last month after he launched his calorie-counting app, talked with me about the importance of understanding how AI can be used to focus on more meaningful work.

Below are some of the key themes from this week’s episode:

A key theme is the role of AI as a “co-pilot,” enhancing productivity by automating low-leverage tasks. Singh emphasizes the “95% rule,” highlighting that AI’s current strength lies in augmenting human capabilities rather than achieving perfect automation.

The Evolving Landscape of AI Integration: Singh talks about the rapid evolution of AI integration, from browser-based features like Firefox’s “Orbit” to Adobe’s Firefly, which promises AI-generated video editing enhancements.

AI as a Productivity Tool: Singh illustrates how AI tools like ChatGPT are revolutionizing workflows, citing examples such as generating SQL queries for data analysis and providing UX insights, tasks traditionally requiring specialized roles.

AI’s Disruptive Potential: The discussion touches upon AI’s potential to disrupt existing business models, pointing to his skunkworks project, GPT Food Cam, which is a free, AI-powered food logging app that rivals paid services.

Spoon Full of AI is The Spoon’s new podcast about all things AI. It will include a healthy dose of food-related AI, but it also goes beyond that.

Subscribe to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

And oh yeah, you can listen below by hitting play!

October 3, 2024

When it Comes to Using AI To Shape New Culinary Creations, Ali Bouzari Thinks Food is Mostly ‘All Hands’

In the most recent episode of the Spoon Podcast, I caught up with food scientist Ali Bouzari to discuss his work and get his thoughts on new technologies that are helping to shape the future of food.

I first met Bouzari when he spoke at the Culinary Institute of America a few years ago about how robotics could impact food service and other sectors. At the time, he talked about Creator—a burger restaurant powered by robots—and suggested that food robots could sometimes do things that most food service employees could not replicate. He specifically referred to how Creator’s burger bot could create more intricate structures in the burger patty than possible to enhance mouthfeel.

When I asked him about this on the podcast, he suggested that while yes, there are things technology can do, he was worried about the recent obsession with AI and using it to craft recipes and new culinary creations. He drew a parallel between AI’s notorious difficulty in rendering realistic-looking human hands in artwork and the challenge of using AI in food production.

“You know that recurring motif where somebody will put a seemingly impressive piece of AI-generated imagery up and be like, ‘My God, look at Darth Vader doing this thing in Saturday Night Fever or something.’ And everybody always says, ‘Look at the hands, look at the fingers.’ And there’s always something wrong with the hands. There’s something that is difficult for AI to crack. What I would say it is most of food is hands. Food is basically all hands.”

Bouzari also shared how multiple clients had approached him after playing with generative AI tools to experiment with developing food products. “We have clients being like, ‘Hey, ChatGPT said we should put arrowroot flour in this cookie.’ I think that somebody is feeding all of the AI brains a lot of great information about arrowroot. Because three different people on three different projects have said that AI said, ‘Have you tried arrowroot?’ which is, in a lot of instances, kind of a useless ingredient.

But thinking about things like AI have caught his attention, Bouzari told me the biggest challenge that has his attention nowadays is the impact of climate change and how food brands are facing a reality that their products may not have a future if they continue to do things – and create food products – in the same way as they have in the past.

One example he gave is the global cacao shortage. “Chocolate is in trouble,” Bouzari said. He pointed to how disruptions in cacao production are driving up costs and threatening the availability of what is a beloved staple. This isn’t some distant, theoretical issue Bouzari told me. “It’s already happening.”

And it’s not just chocolate.

“Coffee’s next,” said Bouzari. “Coffee might do a thing where, like grapes, it just creeps higher and higher latitudes as things change.”

And because of this urgency food brands are now faced with that Bouzari gets a little annoyed with how food makers are sometimes distracted with shiny new toys while missing the big picture.

“My thinking with food is it’s a little bit extra irksome, the conversation around AI sometimes, where people say, ‘I’ve spent six months trying to get this generative AI to make me a new pasta recipe,’ when I don’t think we need that. And the water and energy cost of all of that computation is directly contributing to, I think, the actual biggest existential problem we have, which is climate change.”

We also talk about Bouzari’s experience on the Netflix Show Snack vs. Chef, his thoughts on alternative proteins and what gets him excited about the future.

You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or by clicking play below.

September 20, 2024

Podcast: Sam Rose Loves Building Consumer Products

This week’s podcast guest is Sam Rose, who has spent her entire career unraveling the complexities of bringing consumer products—often kitchen-related—to life.

I first met Sam about eight years ago, introduced through our mutual friend, Scott Heimendinger, who was collaborating with Sam on developing a next-generation coffee grinder.

But this wasn’t just any coffee grinder. It was a cutting-edge, tech-forward device that could sense the freshness of the beans, use burr grinders to achieve perfect consistency, and more. In other words, the kind of innovative kitchen gadget that intrigued a kitchen tech nerd like me, especially as someone who organized the Smart Kitchen Summit.

However, Sam’s journey didn’t begin with coffee grinders. Her first product was much simpler—at least from a technology standpoint—and was inspired by a personal frustration. Disgusted with a cheap silicone spatula, Sam thought, “Why don’t I just make my own?”

And that’s exactly what she did. Throughout her entrepreneurial journey, Sam has not only mastered the art of creating and selling her own consumer products to hundreds of thousands of customers but has also developed a comprehensive set of business processes and technologies to help others do the same. To top it off, she’s now investing in companies she believes she can help succeed—focusing on physical consumer products, a category that many investors shy away from.

Today, Sam runs Mvnifest, Endless Commerce, and hosts her own podcast, Best Day Ever. Check it out (Including her latest episode with yours truly!), but first listen to our conversation below on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.

August 24, 2024

The Food Tech News Show: Is Smell-O-Vision Finally Ready for Prime Time?

Welcome to the Food Tech News Show!

This week, Mike and Carlos discuss the following stories:

Osmo is trying to digitize the world of smells and use AI to finally help us create Smell-O-Vision

The company’s The Principal Odor Map (POM) created by Osmo’s model, outperformed human panelists in predicting the consensus scent of molecules, marking a significant advancement in olfactory science and demonstrating that AI can predict smells based on molecular structure better than individual human experts in many cases.

How’d You Like a Nice Glass of 2D Printed Oat Milk?

This week, Milkadamia, known for its range of macadamia-based milks, announced its first oat milk. However, this isn’t just any oat milk; the company is introducing Flat Pack oat milk, which are printed sheets of plant-based milk that are designed to be rehydrated in water overnight or blended for an instant beverage.

According to the company, these sheets are created by printing oat milk paste onto flat sheets using a proprietary 2D printing process. Each package contains eight of these lightweight sheets, reducing both packaging and weight.

Anova Informs Community Its App Is Going Subscription, and It’s Not Going Well

Last week, Anova CEO Steve Svajian announced that the company will begin charging a subscription fee for new users of its sous vide circulator app starting August 21st, 2024. However, existing users who have downloaded the app and created an account before this date will not be impacted by the change. These users will be grandfathered into free access to the app’s full features.

Svajian explained that the decision to introduce a subscription fee stems from the fact that “each connected cook costs us money,” a cost that has become significant as the number of connected cooks now numbers in the “hundreds of millions.” The new Anova Sous Vide Subscription will be priced at $1.99 per month or $9.99 per year.

Unsurprisingly, the news has sparked discontent among Anova users. 

We’ve got a new humanoid robot that not only performs kung fu, but will also make a meal.

The S1 robot assistant is claimed to have unparalleled agility, dexterity, and accuracy, which help it perform all kinds of tasks. Launched by Stardust Intelligence, a Chinese company, the robot has a human-like upper body structure mounted on a wheeled base. In a video, the robot can be seen feeding cats and making waffles.

Chick-fil-A Is Launching a Streaming Service. Yes, You Read That Right

Extra sauces and some unscripted content, please. Chick-fil-A — yes, that Chick-fil-A — is looking to launch a streaming platform. The fast food chain has been working with Hollywood production companies and studios to create family-friendly, mostly unscripted original shows. The chicken house is also in talks to license and acquire content, according to a source that’s pitched a project.

You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, clicking play below or wherever you get your podcasts.

August 22, 2024

Podcast: Can You Grow Meat With Light?

Cultivated meat companies have struggled over the past year as they try to figure out how to do something that’s never been done before: grow meat in large quantities in big metal vats.

Part of the challenge is figuring out how to grow the meat cells. The technology to do this has been borrowed from the pharmaceutical industry, where a single dose of a cancer drug can be sold for thousands of dollars. Needless to say, those cost dynamics don’t work when you’re making a chicken sandwich.

Deniz Kent thinks he has the answer. His company, Prolific Machines, is replacing expensive growth media with the cheapest energy input: light.

Listen to this conversation to hear how Deniz learned about how light could be a way to grow cells, why he thinks lights could help save the cultivated meat industry, and where he sees the cultivated meat industry going over the next decade.

You can listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or by clicking play below.

August 3, 2024

Food Tech News Show: Blackbird Launches Pay, DoorDash Delivers Big Numbers

This week on the Food Tech News Show, we are joined by Kristen Hawley, long-time restaurant tech journalist who writes for Fast Company, Eater and her own site, Expedite.

The Food Tech News Show

Blackbird Launches Blackbird Pay

This week, Blackbird, founded by Resy and Eater’s Ben Leventhal, launched Blackbird Pay. Blackbird is a blockchain-based guest loyalty and payments platform designed to better connect restaurants and diners. Diners can use the app to pay at participating restaurants with stored credit card information or loyalty points, and Blackbird charges a 2% processing fee per transaction, lower than standard restaurant POS systems.

Andrew Simmons Ends Pizza Automation Experiment

Andrew Simmons announced the end of his Pizza Roboto project after investing over $300K. His post on Linkedin details the challenges he faced around spinning up new locations and the mixed success of his pizza subscription plan. This news coincides with RestoGPT launching a pizza subscription program based on Simmons’ plan.

DoorDash Sees Digital Orders Surge Despite Industry Headwinds

Amid financial pressures, DoorDash reported a 19% year-over-year increase in total orders and a 23% rise in revenue in its Q2 2024 earnings report. The company noted that digital ordering remains resilient compared to declines in other restaurant industry channels.

Yum Brands to Expand Voice AI Across Taco Bell Locations

Yum! Brands announced plans to expand Voice AI technology to hundreds of Taco Bell drive-thrus in the U.S. by the end of 2024, with future global implementation across KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. Currently in over 100 Taco Bell locations, the company believes the technology will enhance operations, improve order accuracy, and reduce wait times.

Amazon Unveils New Just Walk Out AI Model

Amazon revealed details of its new AI model powering the Just Walk Out platform, despite removing the feature from Fresh stores earlier this year, indicating the platform’s continued development and potential.

You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,, or by clicking play below. Don’t forget to like, rate, and review!

July 20, 2024

The Food Tech News Show: Gene-Edited Tomatoes & Rethinking Robots Restaurants

On this week’s episode of the Food Tech News Show, longtime podcaster, former host of NPR Marketplace, and all-around nice person Molly Wood joins Carlos and Mike to discuss the food tech stories of the week.

Here are the stories covered in this week’s show:

  • Tomatoes are thirsty crops. Here’s how CRISPR gene-editing could help them thrive with less water
  • Food recycler Mill unveils pilot study results
  • Meatly gets the nod to sell cultivated meat in UK
  • Chipotle’s founder realizes he needs a few humans in the front of house
  • Google-backed company launches AI platform to map the entirety of the world’s farmland
  • And more!

Tune in to The Spoon’s new dedicated weekly Food Tech News Show! You can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can just click play below!

July 13, 2024

The Food Tech News Show: Food Tech Funding Down in 1H 2024

The Spoon has launched a new podcast!

As listeners of the Spoon Podcast know, it’s been both a long-form interview show and a news show. Since those who listen to interviews aren’t always the same as those who want their weekly dose of food tech news, we thought a dedicated news show made sense.

Meet the Food Tech News Show podcast! You can subscribe to the new The Food Tech News Show on Apple Podcasts, Pandora, iHeart Radio, and via RSS.

On this episode, Michael Wolf and Carlos Rodela welcome Peter Bodenheimer, a longtime food tech investor and operator, to discuss the current state of food and ag tech funding. In this episode, they delve into:

  • The decline in agrifoodtech investments in the first half of 2024, with startups raising $7 billion across 427 deals, a significant drop from H1 2023.
  • Upside Foods recently let a couple of dozen people go amid a tough funding environment and industry challenges due to state-level political challenges to cultivated meat
  • SharkNinja’s latest innovation, the Ninja SLUSHi Professional Frozen Drink Maker, makes commercial-grade slushies for home kitchens.
  • Chef Robotics is emerging from stealth mode to showcase its new robot and announce early customer partnerships.
  • The Thimus’ T-Box reads brainwaves to assess consumer reactions to food products. Is this the future of consumer CPG product testing?

Tune in to The Spoon’s new dedicated weekly food tech news show!

Those who would like to watch the video version of the show can check it out below.

The Food Tech News Show

July 8, 2024

Podcast: How is Kraft Heinz Preparing for the Future of Food?

For most Americans, Kraft and Heinz products – Oscar Mayer hot dogs, Kraft cheese, Velveeta, and Jell-O – have been in our cupboards and fridges for as long as we can remember.

But being a big company today doesn’t always ensure success in perpetuity. The world around us – due to climate change, new retail consumer touch points and emerging technology – is changing more quickly than ever. Add in rapidly shifting consumer tastes in our social media-saturated lives, and a company like Kraft Heinz has to transform itself to meet this constantly evolving market.

To hear how Kraft Heinz is meeting the challenge of adapting new technologies and reimagining its product lineup, I caught up recently on an episode of The Spoon podcast with the company’s President of R&D for North America, Robert Scott. Scott, a long-time exec with stints at Coca-Cola and Abbott before he took over R&D for Kraft Heinz, had lots of opinions about how to ensure Kraft Heinz adapts to a changing world.

As a part of this conversation, Robert talks about:

  • The company’s partnership with NotCo and how they are using the Giuseppe AI to develop new plant-based products.
  • How he sees AI becoming interwoven into the company’s product development cycles
  • Why they created a Freestyle-like machine for custom condiments called the Heinz Remix
  • The idea behind the 360Crisp and innovating our food products and how they cook in our kitchens
  • How Robert would advise aspiring food scientist to pursue a career path in food research and development
  • And much more!

You can listen in to our conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or just clicking play below.

If you’d like to dive deep into how AI is changing food at places like Kraft Heinz, you’ll want to make sure to be at the Food AI Summit on September 25th in Berkeley, CA.

May 27, 2024

From Smart Toasters to Cookbox Mash-ups: The Story of Revolution Cooking

If you follow food Instagram or TikTok, chances are you’ve seen the touchscreen toaster from Revolution Cooking over the past couple of years. The company made a name for itself by creating the world’s most high-end, tech-enabled toaster, and just this past CES, it announced its second-generation toaster with Wi-Fi.

The CEO of Revolution, Tom Klaff, never thought he’d make toasters for a living. As a long-time tech entrepreneur, Klaff has spent his career building education software and telecom companies, but one day, his business partner Bruce Levenson told him about an idea for a new type of toaster, one with a new approach to heating the bread. Wanting to learn more about the toaster business, Klaff went to the housewares show in Chicago and saw that every bread crisper used the same type of heating element that’s been used for most of the past century.

When he returned from Chicago, he told Bruce he was in, but that he wanted to think bigger than just toasters. Tom thought that the heating technology, which combines infrared heating with algorithmic cooking optimization for specific types of food, could not only help create a new type of toaster but could also be applied to ovens. In other words, the heating technology could be a platform.

In this conversation with Tom, you can hear the entire story of Revolution, from those early days when they decided to add a touchscreen to his meeting with Oprah to this January’s launch of the company’s first non-toaster product, a countertop cookbox mashup of an appliance called the Macrowave.

Click play below to listen or hear our conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

February 14, 2024

Podcast: Overcoming Obstacles To Build Kitchen Tech Hardware With Ovie’s Ty Thompson

Ty Thompson and the rest of the Ovie team recently passed a major milestone: They shipped their first hardware product.

The product, a consumer food waste management system, was over half a decade in the making. Along the way to market, the founding team faced numerous challenges around funding, finalizing the product concept and design, building prototypes for manufacturing, and finding the right manufacturer to work with.

Ty talks about all of these challenges and the lessons learned, including:

  • Battling mission creep around the product’s vision
  • How to find the right minimum viable product to get it into production
  • What you need to do (and what you shouldn’t do) when looking to find the right manufacturing partner
  • How to balance your life and your day job while hustling to build a startup

And much more!

You can listen to the full episode by clicking play below or you can find it in the usual podcast spaces such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

November 17, 2023

Podcast: Why Are CPG Brands Freaking Out About Ozempic?

On this week’s Spoon Podcast, SuperGut CEO Marc Washington joins me to talk about why new GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy keep CPG brand CEOs up at night.

These new drugs, which got their start as a new class of pharmaceuticals that help control type 2 diabetes, have become very popular in recent years as weight loss miracle drug. They are hugely effective in suppressing appetites and reducing the overall calorie intake of those taking them, so much so that some speculate that they could have a significant impact on the overall demand for food if, as predicted, tens of millions begin to take them in coming years as prices come down and they become available in more accessible formats. 

Marc’s company, SuperGut, creates a natural alternative to GLP-1 drugs in the form of supplements, snacks and bars. His journey to become CEO of SuperGut was born out of a personal loss and a chance meeting with Dave Friedberg, the CEO of The Production Board. 

You can listen to our conversation by clicking below, downloading to your device, or heading over to Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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