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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Smart Kitchen Summit Japan

The Spoon is Back in Tokyo for SKS Japan

The Spoon is back in Japan!

That’s right, we’re back in Tokyo this week for the sixth Smart Kitchen Summit Japan, the first time we’ve been back in person since 2019 (for obvious reasons). The event started in 2017 and has grown to become the country’s biggest conference focused on food and cooking innovation.

Over the next three days, we’ll hear from some of the country’s most innovative startups, researchers, scientists, and academics about how Japan’s food tech scene has evolved over the past few years. We’ll be talking alt protein, cellular agriculture, smart kitchen, restaurant tech, and more.

If you’d like to attend virtually, you can pick up your ticket here. We’ll also be bringing you some interviews on The Spoon, so keep an eye out for that.

Japan is one of the most innovative and exciting places in the world for culinary innovation, and we couldn’t be more excited to spend the next three days talking food tech in Tokyo. Join us!

The Food Tech Show: Big in Japan

Let’s talk about Japan!

We were in Tokyo this month for the third annual Smart Kitchen Summit Japan so, naturally, this podcast is all about the magical wonderland that is the Land of the Rising Sun.

Not only did the Spoon team spend two great days talking food tech with some of the coolest thinkers and entrepreneurs in Japan and broader Asia, we also ran around Tokyo checking out food robots, eating amazing food and delighting in the wonders of the Japanese version of 7-Eleven.

You can read some of the coverage of what we found in Japan here, and if you want to meet many of those who participated in SKS Japan, make sure to come to SKS North America (use discount code PODCAST for 25% off of tickets).

As always, you can listen to the Food Tech Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download this episode directly to your phone or just click play below.

Audio Player

The Spoon is Headed for Japan!

If you grew up in 70s or 80s, you probably remember when TV shows would do something wacky to boost ratings during sweeps. Oftentimes, it would involve the characters traveling to someplace new, like The Bradys are going to Hawaii!

That’s kinda what’s happening with The Spoon this week. Mike, Catherine and myself have packed our bags and flown halfway round the world to be in Tokyo. We’re here for the third Smart Kitchen Summit: Japan where we’ll be chatting with reps from companies like SideChef, Cookpad, Middleby, Zimplistic, JUST and many more.

Given that we are literally visiting the future and are 16 hours ahead of our normal time, our content schedule is going to be a little different this week. You’ll still get regular posts from us (I’m visiting a couple of different food robots while I’m in town), and Jenn Marston is holding down the fort stateside.

So enjoy this special week of programming, and I promise, we won’t be introducing a cousin Oliver when we get back next week.

読んでくれてありがとう、来週お会いしましょう！

Japan’s CoCooking Raises Seed Round To Help Restaurants Sell Excess Food

Startups aiming to reduce food waste are suddenly hot.

After a summer which saw startups in the US and Europe pull in funding for new takes on reducing food waste, it was Japan’s turn to get into the act. Tokyo startup CoCooking recently raised a seed round that it characterized as “several dozen million yen”.  According to the company’s website, the total capital invested in the startup is now roughly $380 thousand.

Investors participating in CoCooking’s seed round include Social Entrepreneur2 Investment Limited Partnership, ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation, General Foundation SFC Fund, NOW Inc., Optima Ventures and 222 Partnership.

The idea behind CoCooking’s food sharing service TABETE is a marketplace that lets restaurants and other food retail establishments sell excess food they would otherwise throw away. Customers pay for the reduced-price food through TABETE and show up at an agreed upon time to pick it up. The store gets 65% of the proceeds, CoCooking gets 30%, and the rest is donated to charities that support feeding in-need Japanese children.

The Tabete food sharing app concept

I had a chance to meet company cofounder Taichi Isaku last month in Japan while I was there for Smart Kitchen Summit Japan, and Isaku told me that the reason he and his cofounder Kazuma Kawagoe started TABETE was that they saw food waste as an important issue that resonated with them as a result of experience.

“Food waste was always an important issue for us, ” said Isaku. “We’ve seen so much perfectly good food thrown into the trash can, especially for Kazuma who worked in the industrial kitchen for several years before starting the space.”

The space Isaku is referring to was the first project the two worked on together after college. The two had met in college while playing in a wind orchestra (“we were both trumpeters”), and after school, they spent lots of time making food together with their fellow musicians.  Because of this experience, they came up with the idea of starting a small restaurant at the base of Mt. Fuji in the small town of Fujiyosida.

“The place eventually became the center of the local community where various people, both from in and out of Fujiyoshida, met and enjoyed food together,” said Isaku.

Eventually, the two decided to move onto bigger ideas, and the idea of reducing food waste seemed a natural fit.

“We knew that diversity, creativity, communities were the three core values of our company that we weren’t going to change, and we found the issue of food waste to go surprisingly well with those themes.”

They settled on the idea of reducing restaurant, and retail food waste and TABETE was born.

One reason the company cofounders thought a food sharing service focused on reducing food waste made sense for Japan is the country sees roughly 6.2 million tons of edible food thrown out every year. While that isn’t nearly as wasteful as the US, it’s still a lot of food thrown out for a country with only a 40% calorie self-sufficiency rate (meaning the country produces only 40% of the calories it consumes).

For Isaku and his cofounder, the idea of importing food just to throw it out just didn’t make sense.

“We found out about food-sharing services that were on the rise in European countries, and decided to localize the business model for our country,” said Isaku. “From there grew our team with members who were all equally concerned with food waste to do business as a startup.

After launching in April of this year, today Tabete is available in about 200 food retail establishments in Tokyo, and the company plans to expand to other cities in Japan. CoCooking employs seven other employees in addition to the two company cofounders.

As for himself, Isaku still finds time to cook with friends despite living the busy life of a startup founder. In fact, he even found time to write a book about the topic published in May called Creative CoCooking Patterns: 40 Ideas to Make the Kitchen Into a Creative and Collaborative Workshop this year.

SKS Japan: Excitement, Growth & a Rapidly Maturing Food Tech Ecosystem

Last week I was in Tokyo for Smart Kitchen Summit Japan. It was the second edition of our Japanese event, and while it’s only been twelve short months since that first gathering, the amount of progress I witnessed in the Japan food tech scene over the course of the two days in Tokyo was amazing.

Here are some of the trends, products and innovators that stood out to me last week:

In Japan, Much of the Innovation Comes From Big Companies

For those familiar with Japan, you’ll know it’s not surprising that much of the innovation comes from within established companies. These “intreprenuers” often work in R&D or as part of new business units specifically to innovate new product concepts.

One of these innovation units is Panasonic’s GameChanger Catapult. We’ve written about Catapult as they’ve been showing off innovative product concepts like a food softener for the elderly or home fermentation system.  As it turns out, the innovation unit from Panasonic is still working on those ideas as well as a few new ones.

One of Catapult’s product concepts is Tottemeal, which first showed up at SXSW in Austin in March 2017 as a product concept called Bento@YourOffice. It was comprised of an IoT-powered smart fridge and app system, which is similar in concept to Byte Fridge in that both offer fresh food for sale. Since SXSW last year the company has approached partners and refined the concept to work with any fridge.  The company is now testing out the service in Panasonic’s event/innovation hub, Kura-Think, in Tokyo.

Another large company that’s been busy working on future-forward food tech concepts since last year’s SKS Japan is CookPad. The digital cooking site, which boasts 100 million users worldwide, introduced a smart kitchen platform a couple months ago called OiCy that connects their recipes with appliances to create a guided cooking platform. At SKS Japan, the company outlined the future vision for OiCy in the form of a six-level roadmap for the smart kitchen platform. They also announced an updated partner list which includes hardware manufacturers such as Sharp and Hitachi.

Japan’s Startup Ecosystem Is Gaining Momentum

While much of Japan’s innovation comes from within large organizations, there are also signs of a rapidly maturing food tech startup ecosystem.  Part of the growth is being driven by Japan’s bigger companies like Kirin (who launched their own accelerator). However, there were also a number of young and innovative entrepreneurs that spoke at SKS Japan such as Integriculture’s Yuki Hanyu and Open Meals’ Ryosuke Sakaki.

We’ve written about both companies before in the Spoon. Chris Albrecht was the first to write about Integriculture’s impending $2.7 million funding round when he covered Shojinmeat, the open source project from Hanyu. As Northeast Asia’s only lab-grown meat startup, CEO Hanyu has big plans to jumpstart alternative meat production in the Asia market, and discussed his plans for doing just that.

Open Meals made a big splash this March at SXSW with their sushi teleportation demo. While true food teleportation may be a ways off, the Open Meals vision of creating a food digitization and printing framework is pretty fascinating. Company CEO Sasaki presented an ambitious 100-year look into the future for the idea around food digitization that spanned from digitized food restaurants in Tokyo in just two years and eventually sees space colonies where we’re sharing food experiences in real time with people on earth.

Dinner time in space

Japan’s Smart Kitchen Community Embraces Ideas From US & Europe

The Japan smart kitchen/food tech community is also really interested in innovation happening from the West. One of the speakers at SKS Japan this year was Jon Jenkins, the head of product for the guided cooking group within Meyer, Hestan Cue. Jenkins, who goes by JJ, gave a talk about the role of technology and software in the kitchen and later gave a hands-on demo of the product to a capacity crowd:

It wasn’t just cooking demos. A highly engaged audience packed the room to hear conversations with innovators from the US and Europe such as Jason Cohen of Analytical Flavor Systems talk about the impact on AI on food personalization and flavor. They also heard from Suvie’s Robin Liss as she discuss her company’s four-chamber cooking robot and how today’s appliance companies need to start innovating around food services. The Future Food Institute’s Sara Roversi talked about taking her food innovation platform, which she started in Europe, across the globe. They also listened to Amar Krishna of Chefling and Kevin Yu of SideChef discuss the differences between the smart kitchen platform market in the US with CookPad’s Tad Yoshioka.

Collaboration, Innovation & Community

The biggest takeaway for me from this year’s SKS Japan was there a growing sense of collaboration, innovation, and community in Japan’s food tech market.  Part of it was the hard work of our partners for SKS Japan, SigmaXYZ, who have done a great job over the past year fostering the SKS community. But, just as with the US and Europe, it’s clear now that the Japanese market was ready for an event to catalyze innovation and to bring it together, and I couldn’t be more thrilled that event is SKS.

I’m excited to see how our event in Japan has just done that and has become the go-to food tech event in the Japan market and for much of Asia and I can’t wait to go back next year. I hope I’ll see you there.

If you’re interested in being a part of our global community, don’t miss SKS in Seattle in less than two months!  Robin Liss, Jon Jenkins, Jason Cohen and many more will be there, so you will not want to miss out. You can check it out here and don’t forget to use discount code SPOON for 25% off tickets!

Smart Kitchen Summit Heads to Japan This August

In 2014, I noticed that the technologies I had been writing about for over a decade in digital media, networking, big data, automation, and mobility were beginning to touch how people make, discover, buy, cook and consume food.

In short, I realized the world of food and cooking were in the early days of a large-scale shift, one that would result in significant innovation over the next few decades in product design, food science and, perhaps most importantly, business models.

And so with the biggest changes still ahead, I created the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2015 with the hope of bringing the people from the worlds of food, appliances, retail, and tech together to have a conversation about the future. In just two short years, my little event has become the leading global summit on the future of food, cooking, and the kitchen. Last year’s event grew by 60%, and this year SKS is expanding to two full days with the most impressive lineup of speakers yet.

As we have grown SKS, I also realized early on that each region’s story is different, impacted by a unique mix of culture, business dynamics, and consumer tastes. Because of this, we decided would take SKS on the road, not only because I wanted to bring our community to other parts of the world, but also because I thought it important to incorporate these stories into our community as we look to help map the future of the kitchen.

And so with that, I am thrilled to announce our first non-US event, the Smart Kitchen Summit Japan.

To put together this exciting event which will occur in Tokyo on August 25th, I worked with a wonderful partner in SigmaXYZ, one of the leading strategy consultancies in Japan. My first contact with SigmaXYZ was with Hirotaka Tanaka, who had attended SKS2016 in Seattle.  A few months later I connected with Hiro and his associate Akiko Okada at CES in Las Vegas, where we realized we had a similar excitement and interest in how innovation will impact the food, cooking and kitchen ecosystems. It didn’t take long for us to start discussing SKS Japan, and now I couldn’t be more excited to be working with Hiro, Akiko and the team at SigmaXYZ to bring together our first international SKS.

We’ve created a day packed with engaging sessions with visionaries from Japanese companies such as Cookpad and Oisix, US innovators such as PicoBrew, SideChef and Hestan Cue, as well as thought leaders from the Europe such as Johnny Grey to discuss the future of food and cooking technology, design and business models.

In addition to a jam-packed day full of sessions, but we are going to highlight startup innovation with a Startup Showcase. The Showcase, sponsored by Oisix, the largest meal kit delivery company in Japan, will feature both Japanese and US innovators pitching their technology.

In short, we have put together a summit in which we will explore how technology, culture and business model innovation will impact the Japanese and Asian kitchens, as well as explore how innovation originating in Japan could change the face of food and cooking across the globe.

If you would like to attend SKS Japan, I’d love to have you join us in Tokyo. You can buy tickets here, but I would suggest your hurry, as tickets are limited.

If you’re interested in participating as a sponsor, feel free to drop us a line and we’ll get back to you.

I look forward to seeing you in Tokyo in August.

Image credit: Flickr user Mirai Takahashi under creative commons license.