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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Smart Kitchen Summit

SKS 2020: Watch the SKS Startup Showcase Finalist Pitches

At last week’s Smart Kitchen Summit, ten finalists made their case on the virtual stage why they should be chosen as winner of the Startup Showcase competition.

The Startup Showcase, which started back in 2015 and is one of the longest running dedicated food tech startup pitch contests in the world, had its most diverse and interesting mix of companies yet, with products ranging from cultured seafood to a food robots to a taste-enhancing cutlery.

While SKS attendees got to see the finalists from the main stage last week, we figured Spoon readers might also like to see the pitches.

Here’s how the Showcase worked: The pitch sessions were one of two portions of the showcase. After the founders pitched from the virtual stage on the first day, the next day they headed to their virtual breakout rooms where they showed off their products and answered questions from the judges.

The judges for this year’s Startup Showcase included Wired’s Joe Ray, Good Housekeeping’s Nicole Papantoniou, test kitchen expert Jane Freiman, Modernist Cuisine author/ChefSteps founder Chris Young and rlTLK/Pieshell founder Cheryl Durkee. The judges went into virtual “exhibit” areas where the founders could show off their wares and answer questions.

Since contactless pick up pod startup Minnow was declared the winner, we thought we’d also include a clip from the Minnow booth explaining how the product works.

From Food Robots to Fermentation, Innovation and Inspiration Was Everywhere at Smart Kitchen Summit 2020

The sixth annual Smart Kitchen Summit concluded last week. And while the pandemic pushed the show online, it was still as exciting and informative as ever.

There was far too much great stuff to fit into one recap post, so instead, the The Spoon team is each offering up their own highlights and trends spotted during the show.

We’ll be posting SKS video highlights over the coming week, and Spoon Plus members will have access to the full session video archive (become a member today!).

In the meantime, here are some of the takeaways from SKS 2020:

MICHAEL WOLF – SPOON FOUNDER

COVID-Catalyzed Innovation
While it wasn’t surprising to hear at SKS 2020 that every part of the food world was significantly impacted by COVID-19, it did surprise me just how much the pandemic catalyzed innovation and action in those building our food future. Whether it’s the acceleration of investment in food platforms or the reinvention of the grocery or the rapid digital transformation of the restaurant business, the ingenuity and hustle built into all parts of the food system was on display everywhere at our annual food tech conference.

Future Food Innovation Is Strong
In 2020, we’ve seen an explosion in new cell-based meat companies, new attention given to the power of fermentation as a highly-scalable future food platform, and the rapid maturation of tools like CRISPR to power future food innovation. All of this was on show at SKS 2020 as leaders from these spaces talked about the challenges of scaling their businesses as the bring them out of the labs and into the marketplace.

The Future is Exciting, But There are Different Views on How to Get There
It became clear on day two at SKS that two of the most visible CEOs in the food tech space has sharply different views on the viability of cell-based meat at an alternative to traditionally produced animal meat. Pat Brown of Impossible made it clear that he felt cultured meat would never be scalable enough, while Josh Tetrick of Eat Just felt it would be a big part of food’s future, but only after 15 years and lots of work. Differing viewpoints on how to build the future are expected in the formative early days of a market, but it’s hard not to take notice of such a big difference on what many see as the future of meat.

Consumer Kitchen Innovation Requires Putting The Consumer First
Whether it was kitchen tech reviewers like Joe Ray or Lisa McManus, authors like Eve Turow-Paul or longtime industry experts like Jane Freiman, it was clear that while consumer food behavior is changing more quickly than ever, changes in home kitchens is more evolution than overnight revolution. New approaches to cooking, shopping and food storage through technology will take if they put the consumer first and are thoughtfully designed to reduce pain-points in our busy lives.

CHRIS ALBRECHT – SPOON EDITOR IN CHIEF

Daisy chaining different robots
The days of food robots existing in silos is numbered. Right now cooking robots, serving robots, delivery robots and cleaning robots all do their own thing with no interaction, but it won’t be long before they all start working together. We talked about this during my panel with Picnic, Bear Robotics and Dishcraft, and the concept was illustrated by Piestro’s partnership with Kiwibot. There are still sticky issues like standards to be worked out, but they will be, especially if there’s money to be made. And soon enough a robotic cook will hand off a meal to a server bot that brings a meal to your table and shuttles empty plates back to the robot dishwasher.

We need a new word for “vending machines”
With companies like Fresh Bowl, Yo-Kai and Chowbotics basically building restaurants in a box, it might be time to ditch the moniker “vending machine.” Founders from both Fresh Bowl and Byte Technologies remarked that they avoid using the term in presentations because it is an immediate turnoff for potential customers. Vending machines are no longer just room temperature racks of pre-packaged snacks, and a new name is needed to reflect that.

Induction is Becoming More Mainstream (in the U.S.)
Did you read that Atlantic piece on why you should “Kill Your Gas Stove?” While cooking with gas may offer precision, evidently it can also offer up a bunch of toxic fumes. Thankfully, electricity-based induction heating is here to save the day. While Europeans have been using induction for a long time, it hasn’t really caught on in the U.S. in a meaningful way. But that seems to be about to change. GE showed off its high-tech induction cooktop at SKS, and it looked pretty amazing. But you’re also seeing induction pop up in smaller form factors like SKS Startup Showcase participant, BonBowl. We could be at a tipping point for induction (and I’m all for it).

JENN MARSTON – SPOON EDITOR

“Wellness” foods will become more accessible.
When Journey Foods’ Riana Lynn said there is an opportunity for food and healthcare to work more in unison, fellow panelist Peter Bodenheimer (Food-X) replied that one way to do that is to make the so-called “wellness” market more accessible. Right now, these foods and technology platforms are “high cost and high concept,” meaning they’re conceptually and financially out of reach for many consumers. Panelists didn’t name specific companies, but two that immediately spring to mind are the delicious-but-expensive frozen meal service Daily Harvest and Viome’s microbiome-based dietary platform. Both could help fight chronic conditions like obesity and diabetes, but we need more investment in such endeavors to help bring their costs down. Even more important, we’ll need more data on what is and isn’t working when it comes to health-centric food tech solutions. 

Visualizing cleanliness data is “table stakes” in COVID-era restaurants.
More customers want transparency into the food they order from restaurants, and nowadays, a lot of that transparency is around safety and cleanliness. On a restaurant tech panel, Pathspot founder Christine Schindler said her company has seen a huge uptick in demand for visual cues around cleanliness. Restaurants not only want the Pathspot device, which scans employees’ hands to ensure they’re properly washed, they also want to be able to show customers proof of this. Restaurants are now displaying buttons and stickers that essentially visualize the data a device like Pathspot is collecting (e.g., “2,000 verified hand washes today!”). And as more restaurants opt for the ghost kitchen model, where customers never even see the physical location, it will become even more important for businesses to document their health data, physically and digitally. Visual cues for this data will be an important part of restaurant tech going forward.

I might be able to bake with plant-based eggs in a few years.
Being a lifelong baker, I took a couple minutes at the end of my talk with Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick to ask when his company will make a plant-based egg that can be used in baking. The egg is “far and away the most versatile food ingredient,” with 22 different functionalities, he said. A plant-based egg you can bake with would mean one with binding and aeration functionalities, among others. Tetrick said the company is “about two years away” from providing the aeration functionality. To provide all 22 functionalities, he said they are “somewhere north of five years.” So find me at some point between 2022 and 2025 serving up the annual Marston Family holiday cake made from plant-based eggs.

A big thank you to everyone who participated in this year’s SKS! Hopefully next year we’ll all be able to get together in person again, but whatever form it’s in, the Smart Kitchen Summit will remain the best place to discover the future of food.

Smart Kitchen Summit 2020 Sessions, Day One

This post includes all the sessions from Smart Kitchen Summit Day one.

Included below are videos from the following sessions:

  • Embracing Innovation in Trying Times – Riana Lynn, Peter Bodenheimer, Ali Bouzari
  • The Changing Consumer Kitchen in the Era of COVID – Lisa McManus, Eve Turow-Paul, Susan Schwallie
  • Data Driven Personalization of Food and Cooking – Victor Penev, Nick Holzherr, Stacey Higginbotham
  • Future Fresh: Rethinking the Vending Machine – Megan Mokri, Chloe Vichot, Chris Albrecht
  • Building a Cell-Based Meat Startup – Benamina Bollag, Justin Kolbeck, Brian Frank
  • Future Kitchen Demo: The Millo Smart Table
  • The Smart Kitchen Landscape 2021 – David Rabie, Ben Harris, Kevin Yu
  • Table Talk: Food Robotics – Sean Hsu, Glenn Mathijssen, Chris Albrecht
  • Table Talk: Food Tech Investment Landscape – Brian Frank, Brita Rosenheim, Surj Patel
  • Product Demo: Meet the PizzaBot 5000
  • Workshop: Hacking Your Way to the Next Great Kitchen Product

If you purchased a ticket to SKS and have not received your Spoon Plus account activation, drop us a line.

If you didn’t attend SKS and would like to see these sessions, you can subscribe to Spoon Plus here.

SKS 2020 Day Three: Food Robots, Ghost Kitchens & a Tour of the Modernist Cuisine Kitchen

Yesterday at SKS was jam-packed with great insights and conversation.

Novameat printed meat for us, we learned Pat Brown believes cell-based meat will never be a thing, and Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick outlined a four-phase plan to bring — you guessed it — cell-based meat to market. We also heard from Wired’s Joe Ray and ATK’s Lisa McManus on the proper way to use tech in the kitchen and headed into the labs, homes and headquarters of our Startup Showcase finalists to see what they’re building.

And we’re not done! Here’s what we have lined up for our final day of SKS 2020 Virtual:

Building Resiliency in Restaurants with Tech: We catch up with the leaders of Sweetgreen, Galley Solutions and Leanpath to hear how restaurants are using tech to build more resilient businesses during the pandemic.

The Online Grocery Explosion: Wall Street Journal’s Wilson Rothman talks to Shipt CEO Kelly Caruso about the changing nature of online grocery in 2020 and where it’s going in the future.

I, Restaurant: Chris Albrecht will sit down with the CEOs of Picnic, DishCraft and Bear Robotics to see how the adoption of robotics and automation is changing restaurants in the front and back of house.

The DoorDash Playbook: Brita Rosenheim will talk with DoorDash’s Tom Pickett about lessons learned and new opportunities in the food delivery market.

Ghost Kitchens Everywhere: Jenn Marston will talk with ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant experts about strategies for navigatng this red-hot market.

The OG in Molecular Gastronomy: We just added a early-day debut of my conversation with the guy who kicked off the molecular gastronomy revolution, Harold McGee, about his new book on smells and the state of cooking innovation. (Hint: he’s more excited about some other things going on in food innovation happening outside of the kitchen.)

Let’s Head Into the Modernist Kitchen: Speaking of molecular gastronomy, we’re getting a guided tour of the Modernist Cuisine by head chef Francisco Migoya.

Plus a whole lot more. (See schedule here.)

If you’d like to attend day three, you’re in luck! We’re offering a discounted day three ticket that gets you full access. See all the sessions, network with the community and more for just $99.

Get Ready To Explore The Future of Food and Cooking Starting Today at SKS

Are you ready to explore the future of food and cooking?

After six months of preparation, it’s hard to believe that Smart Kitchen Summit is here.

This is the sixth annual (and first virtual) SKS, and we couldn’t be more excited.

Here’s a few of the things we have in store:

Talks with industry leaders: Get ready to hear from (and talk to) those forging the future of the consumer kitchen, food, restaurants and more. Leaders from companies such as GE, Impossible Foods, Sweetgreen, Shipt, DoorDash and will be telling us how they are innovating in these rapidly changing times.

Workshops: Want to get hands on? Learn about how hackers like Scott Heimendinger work on new ideas for the future.

Product Demos: It’s not everyday you see a new pizza robot unveiled, a 3D meat printing demo or go into cultured food laboratory. You will at SKS!

Table Talks: Jump into the conversation as we explore some of the most interesting area in food tech with experts and the audience.

Networking: At SKS 2020, you can network with people by jumping on a video call directly in the platform! It’s the virtual event equivalent of the sitdown meeting.

Meet The Startups Changing Food Tech. Listen in as our finalists pitch their vision in the Startup Showcase and then show off their products in a virtual show and tell.

That’s just the beginning. We’re excited to kick it all off tomorrow and I’m looking forward to having you join the conversation.

You can see our full agenda here and check out our amazing speakers here. So go get your tickets and we’ll see you there!

See 3D Meat Printers, a Pizza Robot and The Modernist Cuisine Kitchen in Action at SKS

Every October, one of my favorite things about the Smart Kitchen Summit — the Spoon’s flagship conference for food tech leaders — is getting to see the latest and greatest technologies in the world of food on display.

Over the years that’s included everything from smart ovens and waiter robots to 3D-printed popsicles as entrepreneurs bring their latest creations to Seattle to show off what they’ve been building and to meet other food tech innovators.

And while nothing can replace getting to see (or taste!) the latest product that could change the world of food and cooking in person, one of the limitations of a physical world conference is what can actually be physically transported to Seattle. Sometimes, it’s just not feasible to get a product — or something like a tech-powered kitchen — on a plane.

But with Smart Kitchen Summit virtual, we can go anywhere in the world to where creators are building their innovations, from the a lab to the kitchen and into a barn. (All of these will happen this year.) And we can have a food tech innovator show us what they’re building first-hand.

Here are some of the things you can expect at SKS this year:

  • Novameat CEO Giuseppe Scionti will show us in a live demo how his company is making plant-based 3D-printed meat.
  • We’ll see a cultured seafood lab in California, food dispensing pods in Maine and food robots in India during our Startup Showcase.
  • We’ll get a guided tour of the Modernist Cuisine kitchen with the Modernist’s head chef, Francisco Migoya.
  • A new restaurant pizza robot will debut live on camera.

Not only that, with the built-in networking features of SKS Virtual, you’ll get to meet, ask questions and even have one-on-one video chats with many of the innovators at SKS 2020.

SKS starts next Tuesday, so get your ticket here. If you’re attending from overseas and can’t watch live, don’t worry: your SKS ticket will get you access to Spoon Plus, where we’ll host all the videos from SKS.

Don’t miss out on seeing the latest in food tech. Get your ticket today and we’ll see you at SKS!

A Quick Walkaround Tour of Smart Kitchen Summit Virtual

Here at the Spoon, we’ve been spending most of our days getting ready for Smart Kitchen Summit 2020, which takes place Oct. 13–15 and, this year, is completely virtual.

One thing that’s become clear over the past few weeks is that many folks haven’t attended, let alone spoke or exhibited at, a virtual summit before. Heck, for us, this is our first big one as well.

So I thought it would be worth while to give a quick guided tour of what our event will look like by giving a tour of Hopin, the virtual event platform where we are hosting SKS 2020.

One of the reasons we chose Hopin is that it includes all of the various “locations” you normally see when you attend in-person events: a Main stage, areas for breakout sessions, exhibit areas and, of course, networking space.

And we plan to take advantage of all of these different features to make for a great interactive three days of conversation, workshops, demos and networking.

Some of the things we have on tap:

  • A live demo of 3D printing plant-based meat from NovaMeat
  • A tour of Modernist Cuisine Kitchen
  • A debut of a new restaurant-scale pizza-making robot
  • Live sessions with Startup Showcase finalists demoing everything from cultured seafood labs to taste-altering cutlery to home cooking robots.

And that’s just the beginning. Add in conversations and one-on-one networking with the leaders of companies in kitchen tech, future food, restaurant tech and more, and we are super excited about helping you come away from SKS with great ideas and the right connections to help you build your next business.

You’re probably thinking that’s great, but what exactly does a virtual event look like? Don’t worry. I did a quick walkthrough of Hopin to give you a better understanding of how it all works. Just click play below to take a quick tour.

Once your done, make sure to get your ticket to SKS because you will not want to miss out!

The Food Tech Show: Amazon Intros Palm-Pay, Bear’s New Servi Robot

This week the Spoon team got together to talk about yet another potentially controverisal bit of palm reading tech from Amazon and other news from around the food tech world, including:

As always, you can get the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download the episode directly to your device or just click play below.

Meet the Startup Showcase Finalists for Smart Kitchen Summit 2020

While much of the food world has been impacted by the pandemic, there’s been no shortage of investors, inventors and innovators looking to reinvent the food system.

To me, this excitement about food tech is especially evident from the flood of interest in our sixth annual Startup Showcase, which takes place at this year’s (virtual) Smart Kitchen Summit. We were overwhelmed with applications from companies wanting to participate at our annual event that showcases the most interesting new startups building innovative new products for the future of food and cooking.

And so we’re excited today to announce the 10 finalists that will be showcasing at the Smart Kitchen Summit Oct. 13th-15th. These startups are innovating in everything from cultured meat to food waste to restaurant robotics to taste-altering utensils.

If you’d like to watch the founders of these companies pitch and go into a virtual session where they will show off their products and answer questions, get your ticket for the Smart Kitchen Summit today!

Minnow Technologies

Minnow Technologies is making an Amazon Locker for fresh takeout food. The connected food pickup pod can house takeout meals in an antimicrobial environment. Pods can be placed virtually anywhere and restaurants, food halls and other food businesses can leverage them to provide their customers and delivery providers with a safe and way to grab and go.

Cultured Decadence

Cultured Decadence is a cell-based tech startup creating a system that can produce seafood like crabs and lobsters sustainably. It does this using cell culture and tissue engineering techniques for the high-value portions of crabs and lobsters, producing no shells or wasteful organ pieces. It can also potentially eliminate the need for wild harvesting altogether and help create a more sustainable ocean ecosystem.

Satis.ai

Satis.ai is a full-stack operating system for restaurant kitchens. The system uses live camera feeds in kitchens to analyze cooking processes and provide actionable feedback to back-of-house staff in real time as well as give owners/managers business intelligence to help increase efficiency, inventory ordering and customer order accuracy.

Zymmo LLC

Zymmo’s platform is a meal marketplace and foodie social network that gives chefs a place to connect with local food lovers and potential customers. Zymmo allows chefs to publish their menus, promote their events and facilitate ordering and payments all in one app.

Bonbowl

Bonbowl is a small appliance startup making an induction-based heating cooktop along with patent-pending cookware that can be used to cook with and eat from safely. Their induction technology enables power efficient cooking that uses half the power of electric stoves of similar size. The Bonbowl pot doubles as a bowl that consumers can eat right out of, eliminating a longer cleanup process and additional hardware.

Nymble Labs

Nymble Labs makes Julia, a domestic cooking robot that helps consumers cook healthy meals for their families. The cooking robot only requires users to select a recipe, chop up or gather the ingredients for said recipe and insert them into the device. Users press a button and Julia does the rest: heating at the right temps, adding ingredients at the right time, stirring and simmering until the meal is done and ready to be served.

Taste Boosters

Taste Boosters is the startup behind SpoonTEK, the world’s first taste-altering utensil. Using taste buds, the human body’s sensors and their patent-pending ionic technology, SpoonTEK can alter and enhance taste and flavor of any food dish.

Vobil

Vobil is a startup that’s developed a voice-based e-commerce technology platform that links food ordering to connected car interfaces, allowing for entirely voice-based ordering, checkout and navigation to the store in real-time.

Kitche

Kitche is a free app for iOS and Android phones that helps users reduce food waste at home by helping change personal habits with what they buy and consume. The app uses a connection with an OCR (optical character recognition) engine and a food ontology database to help users know what they already have at home, even when they’re on the go. The app helps users understand how much money they waste every time they throw food out at home.

Piestro

Piestro is an automated pizzeria startup that has created a standalone, fully-integrated cooking system for artisanal pizzas. From start to finish, it takes three minutes to make a pizza. Piestro will be able to press pizza dough, spread sauce and shredded cheese, add up to six desired toppings, and calculate the perfect cooking time based on the ingredients and humidity. Orders can be placed either in person at a public location (e.g., shopping malls, college campuses, movie theaters, hospitals or airports) and cooked in front of the customer. Customers can also opt to get the pizza even closer to their door by ordering through an app for delivery.

Building The Next Great Food Tech Company? Apply for the Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase!

Are you working on a new alternative protein product that you think will change the world? Building the cooking appliance or food robot of the future? Have an idea for AI could reduce the amount of food we waste?

If so, you’ll want to apply for the sixth annual Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase!

Alumni of the SKS Startup Showcase have gone on to raise raise tens of millions of dollars in funding, appear on Shark Tank, and make some of the most exciting and well-known products in their categories.

And because North America’s leading food tech summit is going virtual this year, the 2020 Startup Showcase will be a truly global launchpad for your food tech company.

Just submit your application no later than September 15 to enter your company for consideration. We’ll be selecting 10 startups to tell the world about their ideas at the Smart Kitchen Summit from October 13 – 15, 2020.

We look forward to hearing about your company and helping you tell your story to the world!

Meet Spoon Plus, Our New Deep Dive Insights & Virtual Events Membership Program

When we launched the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2015, an event all about the rethinking of cooking and our kitchens, we soon realized innovation was happening everywhere across the food system: at the farm, in our favorite restaurants, at the corner grocery store and, yes, in our kitchens.

It felt necessary, almost urgent, to tell these stories. After all, I’d spent a good chunk of the decade prior working for one of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech blogs, where I discovered how crucial it is to nascent markets to find those betting big on turning their world-changing ideas into a changed world. Back then it was technologies like cloud computing and IoT upending established industries like digital media and communication, but it didn’t take me long to realize the reinvention of the food system would be an even bigger deal.

After all, everyone eats, right?

So we started The Spoon in 2016 because we had this idea that we would tell the stories of a new generation of innovators working to reinvent the food system. Now, almost four thousand stories later, we are more convinced than ever about the impact of innovation on food.

Which is why we created Spoon Plus.

What’s Spoon Plus? In short, it’s our paid membership community where we’ll be bringing you deep dive insights in the form of research reports, long-form conversations with innovators, and exclusive online events to help you better understand the world of food tech and food innovation.

We’ll have new content every week, and to start we’ve got a great report from our own Catherine Lamb analyzing the emerging market for air protein. We also have a new report by me analyzing the survey results of food-industry executives about the impact of COVID-19 and their go-forward plans for the rest of 2020.

That’s not all. Early next week, I’ll publish my first weekly intelligence brief looking at COVID-19 disruption on new product launches in the kitchen and housewares space. After that, our editor-in-chief Chris Albrecht will soon have a report on the emerging market for next-generation food vending machines, and our restaurant tech expert, Jenn Marston, will have a strategy guide for cloud kitchens in the post-COVID world.

As part of Spoon Plus, we’ll also have deep dive conversations and interviews with industry executives like this one with Chris Young, the coauthor of Modernist Cuisine and founder of ChefSteps, who opened up to me recently about what happened with the company he founded and where he thinks the next big opportunities are in the world of food.

As part of our launch of Spoon Plus, we’re also announcing that Smart Kitchen Summit 2020 is going virtual, and that every Spoon Plus annual membership will include a ticket to SKS 2020. Our belief is that our events and online content have a symbiotic relationship, where our community engages with the same innovators we are writing about and where we often find the next big story at The Spoon. As we go deeper with Spoon Plus, we want our SKS community to be a part of that.

Of course, part of the reason for going virtual with our flagship event is we now live in a world where in-person events that thrive on a global mix of interesting people are going to be difficult, if not impossible, for the next 1-2 years. That said, we’re really excited about the SKS reaching even more people. We’ve been working hard at building our virtual event capabilities (we had a virtual COVID-19 food summit last month with over 1500 attendees), and are becoming more excited by the day about the possibilities of SKS 2020 and other exclusive virtual events through Spoon Plus.

So if you want to go deeper with us through research and reports, if you want to attend SKS 2020, if you want to support The Spoon as we grow, subscribe to Spoon Plus. As a way to help you get started, we’re offering Spoon Plus annual memberships for 40% off for the next ten days only. This one-time discount includes our company plans (that’s right – you can get Spoon Plus for your entire team). Just use the discount code LAUNCH when you are checking out and Memberful (the technology powering our membership offering) will deduct the amount from the total.

And of course, if you want to try out Spoon Plus for a month, you can subscribe to our monthly plan (monthly plans do not include a ticket to SKS). We also offer substantial discounts for students and for anyone who is in the midst of job transition.

If you’d like to learn more about those, just drop us an line.

For those of you wondering about The Spoon’s free coverage, don’t worry. We’re more committed than ever to bringing you the same daily news and analysis of those changing the food system for free on our main site. Spoon Plus is for those who, like us, also want to go deeper and access content that connects the dots from our daily reporting.

Thanks for your support. We look forward to building Spoon Plus together as we look to better understand and engage in the future of food.

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!