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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Podcast

Food Tech Show Live: Meal Worms – It’s What for Dinner

This week’s podcast is another live Clubhouse edition of the Food Tech News wrap-up.

In this week’s show, we discuss:

To listen in live on Clubhouse, join the Food Tech Live club on Clubhouse and listen in on Fridays at 1 Pacific.

And as always, you can listen to the podcast version by clicking play below or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Food Tech Show Live: Online Grocery & Massive Alt-Protein Funding

This week the Spoon editor team (joined by special guest Tom Mastrobuoni of Big Idea Ventures) jumped on Clubhouse to talk about some of the biggest stories of the week.

Here are the stories discussed on this week’s show:

If you’d like to join us for the live recording of our food tech news weekly review, make sure to follow us our club, Food Tech Live, on Clubhouse.

And, as always, you can listen to the recording of the wrapup via our podcast feed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts or just click play below. If you are a regular listener of the show, make sure to give us a review on Apple Podcasts!

To Make Truly Personalized Nutrition Products, Naveen Jain Realized He Needed to Build a Robotic Factory

Back when we wrote about Viome for our DNA-based personalized nutrition report last year, the company primary product was a personalized nutrition plan based on what they had learned from the DNA and RNA of a customer’s microbiome. Viome would then use this information provide nutritional guidance and meal plans for the customer.

While this is valuable and markedly different from traditional nutrition planning, it’s still the largely the same in one significant way: Viome’s nutrition plans still required the user to then go out and assemble a hodge-podge of supplements at the store or through Amazon that would help them take action on the information in the reports.

Naveen Jain, the CEO of Viome, realized that was a problem.

“We will tell you that here are the nutrients that your body needs, and what we found was that there was no way to give people the precision nutrition,” said Jain in a recent interview on Clubhouse. “The problem was they contain 10 other things that went with that. And other nine things were actually harmful to you and only one was beneficial.”

“We couldn’t figure out how to actually tell you what you need, and nothing that you don’t.”

Jain decided that what his company needed to do was provide highly personalized vitamins tailored for each person individually. In order to do that, however, the company would need to solve a massive engineering question: How do you create personalized supplements tailored for a particular person’s biomarkers at scale?

The answer was to build a robotic factory.

“We decided what if we could create completely automated robotics, where every single capsule is made for each individual based on every ingredient that the person needs in the precise dosage.”

Jain emphasized how the precision created by automation was key to assemble tailored supplements with up to 75 different nutrients.

“We literally see ‘take from the bins 17 milligrams’ and ‘take from the bins 13 milligrams’ and we literally make those powder, encapsulate them and ship them on that date. This has never been done.”

Jain believes other companies that claim to offer personalized nutrition supplements today aren’t really personalized nutrition, but more just matching categories of supplements to consumers on a closest-fit basis. To build a truly personalized nutrition consumable product is a massive engineering challenge.

“No one has figured out how to do these things at scale,” said Jain. “And that was our biggest challenge to build this massive robotic form to do it at scale.”

I talked with Jain in The Spoon’s Clubhouse room, FoodTech Live, last week. If you’d like to listen in on these conversations live, make sure to follow us on Clubhouse. And of course, you can listen to this conversation and others on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app.

And, as always, you can just click play below.

Podcast: The Future Grocery Store

While I may have missed my annual sojourn to sin city for CES this year, I may soon be able to get something akin to walking the Vegas strip just by heading on down to my local grocery store.

That’s because, at least according to The Spoon’s Chris Albrecht, grocery stores will soon resemble the floor of a casino with all the screens that will show up there in the future. Whether it’s smart carts with a touch screen or digital displays up and down the aisles, we can expect lots more digital signage and screens in our lives as shopping becomes more connected and digitized in the future.

And, as I say on this week’s editor podcast, I’m totally on board with more tech in the corner store as long as it includes bread-making robots filling up the aisles with the smell of fresh-baked loaves.

In addition to talking about smart grocery carts this week, we also discuss:

As always, you can check out the Food Tech Show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Soundcloud, or just click play below.

Podcast: Talking Plant-Based Cheese With Grounded Foods’ Veronica Fil

While the plant-based meat and milk space has seen incredible momentum the last couple of years, cheese has been another story.

It’s not that anyone hasn’t tried. Companies like Treeline have been making vegan cheese for a while, and they’ve certainly found their niche among vegans. Still, for those of us non-vegans who want to try some plant-based alternatives for health or sustainability reasons, there hasn’t really been anything out there that’s really close to the real thing.

Until now. Grounded Foods new line up of plant-based cheese, which will start shipping early in 2021, tastes just like the real thing. I had a chance to try some of their early prototypes in February and was blown away. It had the taste, mouth feel and true cheese funkiness that you expect from the real thing.

In short, if what I tried early last year is anything close to the final product, Grounded Foods might do for cheese what Impossible Foods did for beef.

In this episode, I talk with Grounded Foods CEO and cofounder Veronica Fil. who shares the story of how she came up with the idea for a plant-based cheese that appealed to non-vegans. She also shares how she convinced her co-founder and husband, who was running one of the top restaurants in Australia, that making cheese – not running a restaurant – was the big idea they should pursue.

If you haven’t heard Veronica Fil and Grounded Foods’ story, you’ll definitely want to give it a listen. Just click play below, download direct to your device, or find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Food Tech Show: Ghost Kitchens are Complicated

In this week’s podcast, the Spoon team talks about some of the lessons learned from last week’s ghost kitchen deep dive.

One of the key takeaways from the day is there are lots of different approaches to rolling out a ghost kitchen strategy. Some operators simply leverage unused kitchen space in their own facility to roll out a single virtual brand, while others partner with a full stack ghost kitchen operator that has everything from the kitchen space to optimized tech to fully realized and operational virtual restaurant concepts ready to go.

The bottom line? The ghost kitchen market is changing quickly and strategies are becoming more nuanced as restaurants explore ways to tap into the benefits of this new model.

Jenn summarizes the day in a couple posts. You can also watch the full sessions here if you are Spoon Plus subscriber. Or, you can just listen to this podcast!

Other stories we talk about on this episode include:

As always, you can find The Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If you like the show, please give us a positive review!

You can also listen to the show below by clicking play.

The Food Tech Show: Cultured Meat’s Big Month

This week the Spoon editorial team got together to talk about the latest food tech news, including whether or not cultured meat would venture into, well, humans.

We all got grossed out (well, most of us) and decided a Mike Burger is a bad idea. But we did agree the food industry will have to address some of the more ethical questions around cultured meat as the ease and cost to replicate cells comes down over time.

Other (not so gross) stories we discuss on the pod also include:

As always, you can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts) or just click play below.

The Food Tech Show: What Would a Biden Presidency Look Like for Food Tech?

It’s another Food Tech Show podcast!

The Spoon editorial team got together this week to discuss our favorite stories of the week, including:

  • McDonald’s announced their new plant-based burger, the McPlant, and everyone was confused
  • The Golden Arches also talked about how technology will change the McDonald’s experience in coming years, especially when it comes to drive-thru
  • Boston robot restaurant startup Spyce Kitchen debuted their 2.0 concept and it’s pretty darn different than the first generation. Also different: no dine-in eating.
  • What a Biden presidency could look like when it comes to food tech?

As always, you can find the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other places you get can podcasts.

You can also hit play below or download the episode direct to your device.

The Food Tech Show: Did The Automat Ever Really Go Away?

In this week’s episode of The Food Tech Show, we talk about those new contactless systems and compare them to a technology from long ago: the automat.

Yep, that old-school idea born in New York City a century ago is back (or maybe it never left?), showing up everywhere from restaurants to condos.

Jenn Marston waxes nostalgic about the automat and other concepts that seem to be getting a second look as the food system looks to reinvent itself in the wake of COVID-19.

We also talk about these stories in today’s podcast:

As always, you can listen to this week’s podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts. You can also download the episode direct to your device or just click play below.

The Food Tech Show: Talking Food Tech & Racial Injustice With Journey Foods’ Riana Lynn

I sat down this week with Riana Lynn, the CEO of Journey Foods, to talk about her journey as a black female food tech entrepreneur.

From her time in the Obama White House, to working for former McDonalds CEO Don Thompson at venture firm Cleveland Avenue, to her latest startup that uses AI to help CPG companies make healthier and more sustainable food products, Riana’s had a fascinating ride over the past decade. But, as she told me in our conversation, the two consistent and recurring themes throughout her career have been food and technology.

We talk about her journey through these worlds as well as:

  • How food tech and food innovation could address some of the systemic problems in the food system that disproportionately impact people of color.
  • How many of today’s current food trends like plant-based food have long histories in black culture.
  • How technologies like blockchain could be well-suited to modernize antiquated systems designed to help those in food insecure situations get better access to food assistance.
  • What she thinks the long term impact could be from the conversation we are having about systemic racism.
  • Some ways in which she thinks the world of food tech and venture capital could be more welcoming to people of color.

Some of you may have read Riana’s guest post last weekend at The Spoon. She and her team are churning out some really compelling and thoughtful content over at the Journey Foods’ blog, so I suggest you check it out.

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

The Food Tech Show Podcast: Will You Be Dining With a Mannequin?

Most of us are eager to start dining in again at restaurants, but are we ready?

We discuss the huge spectrum of responses we got when we asked our readers if they’re ready to start dining in restaurants again on this week’s Food Tech Show, as well as some of the innovative ways restaurants are dealing with dining in the era of COVID.

One restaurant is putting mannequins at tables as a way to fill in the gaps between socially distanced diners. Another restaurant in Amsterdam is seating diners in glass houses.

Other topics discussed on this week’s show include a small bowl-food-for-one cooking system looking to make its way into college dorms and small apartments, and a leap forward in cross-industry collaboration for food traceability.

Just click play below or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Food Tech Show: A Moment of Silence for PicoBrew Episode

This week, the Spoon editorial team got together around the virtual table and talked about some of the top stories of the past week, including:

As always, you can find The Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever you find podcasts. You can also download it direct or just click play below.