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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Smart Kitchen Summit

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!

Next-Gen Blender, Edible Silverware and Produce-Saving Stickers Win SKS 2019 Startup Competitions

Every year at the Smart Kitchen Summit {SKS}, one of the most exciting parts of the whole event is the Startup Showcase. The competition gives young companies on the cutting-edge of food tech a chance to pitch to our audience and show off why their product/app/CPG product will change the way we eat.

The competition is so popular that this year we decided to grow it into two separate entities. The Startup Showcase focused on food technologies in kitchens, restaurants, and grocery, while the Future Food competition highlighted edible CPG products.

We whittled down the applicants to a few top-notch finalists and this week they pitched onstage before our panel of judges. And the winners are… (drumroll please)….

Startup Showcase Winner: StixFresh (pictured above)
Judges: Menachem Katz (WeWork Food Labs), Lisa McManus (America’s Test Kitchen), Joe Ray (Wired), Nicole Papantoniou (Good Housekeeping)

Roughly half of all food waste happens in the home. (That’s the reason we’re starting our new joint initiative with the Future Food Institute, The Wise Kitchen, which we announced at SKS 2019!) StixFresh makes a small food-safe sticker that, when put on produce, can extend its shelf life by a whopping two weeks. That’s the difference between throwing away a bunch of rotten fruit and eating it.

Our judges were so impressed by StixFresh’s potential to cut down on fruit and vegetable waste that it was named winner of the Startup Showcase. We can’t wait to see where this company goes next! Keep your eyes peeled for their stickers coming to a grocery store near you…

Photo: Scott Payton

Future Food Winner: Planeteer, LLC
Judges: Victoria Sparado-Grant and Michela Petronio (Barilla), Nina Meijers (Foodbytes!), Peter Bodenheimer (Food-X), Cheryl Durkee (Mealthy), Natalie Shmulik (The Hatchery)

As the popularity of food delivery grows, one of the unintended consequences is the uptick in single-use plastic cutlery. Startup Planeteer wants to replace plastic spoons (and eventually knives and forks) with tastier options. Yep, they make edible spoons, both sweet and savory, meant to cut down on the number of plastic cutlery that ends up in landfills. In addition to a sweet trophy, Planeteer’s team will be taking a trip to Italy to visit Blu1877, Barilla’s innovation arm.

The WeWork Food Labs and Millo teams. Photo: Scott Payton

Innovation Award: Millo
Judges: WeWork Food Labs team

The blender is one kitchen appliance that hasn’t seen a ton of innovation. Millo decided to change that by developing a smart, silent, cordless blender that looks cool enough to hang out all day on your countertop. Clearly the WeWork Food Labs team thought that the world was ready for a next-gen blender, since they awarded the Millo team with their WeWork Innovation Award. Along with the award, Millo will also get a desk in WeWork’s Food Labs.

SKS 2019 Is In Two Weeks And We Couldn’t Be More Excited

With Smart Kitchen Summit just two weeks away, we’re getting really pumped to share with you what we’ve been working on for the last few months.

We had the first SKS in 2015 in an old cannery, and every year we’ve grown to include more speakers, sponsors and attendees, and this year we are really outdoing ourselves with our biggest summit year.

I wanted to share with you some of the things we’ve been working on and why we’re so excited.

Welcome to the Waterfront

When you go to Seattle, the one place you usually want to be is on the waterfront, and that’s where we’ll be for two full days at Bell Harbor Conference Center.

But great views isn’t the only reason we moved to a new venue. Moving to our new home  allows us to really expand our content, and we have more fantastic sessions than ever. This year we explore themes like the future kitchen, next-generation interfaces, the changing eater, new sources of protein, the impact of robotics and AI on the food system, the reinvented restaurants and much much more. Heck, we’ll even be talking about space food.

Networking Goes Next Level

One reason SKS has become indispensable is because it’s where those in the world of food tech and smart kitchen come to meet new partners, find innovative startups and, in general, do deals.

And in 2019 we’re taking this next level with our first-ever networking app. We are partnering with Brella to create a customized networking experience called SKS Connect that will allow attendees to find others schedule one on one meetings at the show. Once you buy your ticket, we will email you details to sign up for Brella SKS Connect!

Our Amazing Speakers

Every year the Spoon team searches for those who doing the most interesting work in the future of food and cooking and tells their stories. SKS is where we invite them to have a conversation with our community tell their stories live and in person.  This year we have an amazing group of founders, makers and visionaries, ranging from IBM Watson’s lead researcher to someone creating protein from thin air to the creator of Europe’s most successful connected recipe platform in the Cookidoo to India’s equivalent to Martha Stewart. We’ve got investors, hackers, inventors and makers, all coming together to help us take stock of the future of food and set the course for the next year.

Plus, the whole Spoon team will be here and who doesn’t want to meet us?

So Many Great Startups

Each year at SKS we bring together some of the most innovative new startups in the world of food tech with our Startup Showcase. This year we’ve doubled the innovation, not only bringing together amazing food tech startups but also we’ve launched a new Future Food showcase where you can see what some of today’s most innovative food startups are working on.

Touch and Taste The Future

SKS isn’t just about great content and networking, it’s where you come to touch and taste the future. Our startups, sponsors and partners will have all sorts of innovative products, food and innovations on display, including some product launches that will make news at the show. You’ll be able to taste plant-based sea food and chicken nuggets, edible cutlery, cricket protein and so much more. You’ll see new cooking robots, new types of cooktops, countertop chocolate appliances to just name a few.

So if you just attend one event of the year to help you understand where the future of food and cooking is going, make it this year’s SKS.  Whether you’re looking for a new partner, an investor, a new employee or just want to figure out your food tech strategy, SKS 2019 is where you should do it.

There are only two weeks left (and just one week left to buy double pack tickets), so hurry up and get your tickets today! Use the discount code SPOON for 15% off your ticket.

The Food Tech Show: Impossible’s First Retail Product is Almost Here And We’re Pretty Excited About It

We’ve been head’s down preparing for the fifth Smart Kitchen Summit (in just three weeks!), but The Spoon crew took some time this week to talk about some of the latest news in Food Tech.

Here are some of the stories we discussed:

If you want to see the startups we talk about or hang out with the Spoon crew, make sure to go to the Smart Kitchen Summit and get your tickets before they’re gone! Use discount code PODCAST for 25% off of tickets at www.smartkitchensummit.com.

As always, you can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download the episode directly to your device or just simply hit play below.

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Q&A: Bill Birgen is Developing New Technology to Keep Your Delivery French Fries Fresh

At the Smart Kitchen Summit {SKS} 2018, Bill Birgen got up onstage during the Startup Showcase and started talking about a problem that many of us have struggled with: soggy delivery french fries.

“We’ve all experienced the disappointment of food delivery, when our food arrives after being ravaged — ravaged I say — by the horror of condensation,” he said. Annoyed by the severe drop in quality of certain foods during delivery, Birgen, a former rocket scientist, decided to create a technology that would keep food crisp, fresh, and decidedly not soggy while en route to your home. Thus his company, Soggy Food Sucks, was born.

Birgen won the 2018 Startup Showcase. This year he will return to the SKS stage as a speaker to talk about how he’s rethinking food packaging in the age of delivery. To whet your appetite, we sat down with Birgen to do a quick Q&A. Check it out below then be sure to snag your tickets to SKS before they sell out!

You won the SKS Startup Showcase last year with your startup Soggy Food Sucks (congrats!). Tell us more about it.
The 2018 SKS was the first time I had presented my idea in public. Prior to presenting, I was so filled with tremendous apprehension regarding how my invention would be received. Condensation in food delivery is a gap and a pain that I had never heard anyone complain about. The response from the SKS audience and judges were sources of tremendous validation. Winning SKS and subsequent food industry events is an ongoing source of encouragement and motivation. It all started at SKS 2018. I’m really looking forward to returning to SKS 2019, this time as a member of the broader food industry fraternity and less as the dark horse outsider.

Looking back I can say I am happy with how succinctly I managed to describe the thermodynamic mechanisms, and the condensation nuances surrounding my product. in my 2018 SKS Showcase presentation. I had a few coaches help with my presentation, but in the end, I largely ignored their advice. The advice I kept receiving was to tell a story and avoid being overly technical. For me to be authentic meant being technical. While I didn’t tell a story in a traditional sense, I do feel I was able to be engaging and dare I say entertaining. The Facebook Live stream that I shared online has thousands of view. SKS was fantastic exposure.

Has anything changed for your company since you won the Showcase?
Immediately following SKS2018 TechStars offered me a position in their upcoming accelerator. I did not realize what a huge opportunity TechStars was. Naively, I turned down TechStars, with the expectation that I would be selected as one of the eight startups for Chipotle’s first ever accelerator. When I was not accepted into Chipotle’s accelerator I continued forward, bootstrapping as I had before.

The product itself has recently been redesigned for aesthetics and re-branded as SAVR-pak. The first automated, real production inventory has been received at our distribution facility. Deliveroo has placed a purchase order. GrubHub, and Door Dash cannot be far behind. Marina Bay Sands, Wynn Casinos, Disney and Virgin hotels have all reached out for product and demonstrations. Cambro wants a larger size product that will integrate seamlessly with their larger food delivery platforms.

Subsequent patents have been filed in an adjacent food packaging space. The focus of this new product being the elimination of frost inside frozen food packaging. One of the largest fresh fish processor in Hong Kong has adopted this new anti-frost packaging product.

Think big: How do you envision your technology changing the food delivery experience?
B2C is a massive market that I plan on addressing a year or two down the road, due to the scale of the education and marking required. I will let the public become familiar with seeing my SAVR-pak in food delivery and catering applications before putting it on the shelf at supermarkets, next to cellophane sandwich bags and brown paper lunch bags.

The goal all along of my humble invention was to create a higher expectation for food quality, when it comes to food delivery and storage. Delivering food that is fresher, means less food will be discarded. Aesthetically, it is so much more appealing to open a container sans hundreds of water droplets clinging to every surface. So much of our food experience is aesthetics and perception. Soggy Food Sucks has introduced the SAVR-pak to help with food quality and to reduce waste.

What’s the absolute worst food to eat soggy?
By far the resounding answer from the food delivery industry is French fries. This perspective is biased in my opinion, by the pervasiveness of French fries on our menus. I would challenge this obvious answer, and say spinach salad is the worst soggy food. The spinach leaf has a delicate structure that is quickly compromised by condensation. The result is not just soggy but limp and even slimy spinach, which is wholly inedible. A salad that has been touched by condensation cannot be eaten.

Keep an eye out for more speaker Q&A’s as we ramp up to our fifth year of SKS on October 7-8 in Seattle! We hope to see you there.

SKS Q&A: Andreas Wuerfel on How Big Grocery Can Stay Innovative, Agile and Competitive

If you’ve eaten out in Europe, Russia, or Asia, chances are at some point you’ve patronized a café, hotel, or kiosk that purchase food from mega-retailer METRO AG. As the largest non-U.S. wholesale and foodservice company, the Germany-based METRO functions in 35 countries and serves over 24 million businesses.

One place it doesn’t serve is the U.S. However, Andreas Wuerfel works for METRO as Group Director for U.S. Strategic Partnering; keeping a finger on the pulse on retail trends in the U.S. through local partners and applying them to the METRO network. Which means that he is uniquely positioned to track innovation across foodservice and grocery across the globe.

If you want to hear Wuerfel speak about the ways that METRO is forging the future of retail — digitally and otherwise — get your ticket to SKS. Then get a sneak preview with the Q&A below.

You’re the Group Director for U.S. Strategic Partnering at METRO. Tell us about what your role entails.
While METRO Group has no local operations, the US is a key “lighthouse” market for us. US restaurant, hotel, and retail innovation trends often foreshadows development in our Europe and Asia markets. Gaining an understanding early, and working with key US players is important to the degree [with which we] can cooperate across our Europe customer footprint. With that in mind, my role is to help initiate our “bridge-to-Europe” strategic/commercial deal opportunities, to help create win-win-win value for our Europe customers, our US partners, and METRO at large.

You were involved with founding the METRO Accelerator program, powered by Techstars. Why did Metro AG decide to help create an accelerator?
Globally, the retail sector is undergoing rapid change. Much of that dynamics comes from outside our traditional channels. Outside established large IT firms, it is often young startup teams that best ideate, invent and disrupt “the future of retail”. In working with retail tech and hospitality tech founder teams from around the world, our METRO Accelerator is specifically designed as an outside-in innovation program — to help capture, fund, and shape the relevant early-stage digital applications most meaningful for our small business customers and our own stores long term.

How do you stay competitive in the competitive wholesale retail space, especially against giants such as Walmart or Tesco?
Despite the aforementioned retail industry transformation — simply put — it’s still all about ensuring we offer “the right product for the right customer at the right price exactly when and where needed.” To ensure this “contract with our customers” is fulfilled, METRO leverages its unique footprint and supply-chain advantages. (Globally, METRO Cash & Carry is the only wholesaler doing business in 35 countries, with deep access to local assortment and competitive pricing).

What are a few ways you’ve seen tech transform retail?
Inside METRO, we’ve found tremendous value in helping educate and consult the “long tail” of the hospitality and retail industry. We are unique in that our primary customers are 24+ million small business owners. Not consumers but rather the many independent restaurants, hotels, retail operators, catering companies, and small professional offices — all looking to understand and benefit from the use of digital innovation as well as new “next-gen” food & beverage choices. Our down-market innovation programs and corporate investment initiatives therefore all center around enabling our small business customers and their guests, in the process helping to transform the independent retail customer side of our business.

Keep an eye out for more speaker Q&A’s as we ramp up to our fifth year of SKS on October 7-8 in Seattle! We hope to see you there.

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.

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SKS Japan 2019: Moving Into a Food Tech Future

The Spoon team has been in Tokyo this past week for our third SKS Japan conference! This year the theme is Move — that is, how we can leverage technology to move towards a more sustainable, healthy, and collaborative food system, together.

We’ve seen some real growth in our Japan conference. This year there were almost 400 attendees, 180 participating companies, and 60 speakers, over double the numbers from the event’s first year in 2017. These metrics illustrate the exciting potential of the food tech ecosystem in the Japanese market — moving up, indeed.

Here are a few highlights from the conference, including (multiple) cooking robots, augmented dining tech, and lots and lots of delicious food.

The night before SKS Japan was the speaker dinner, where the Suvie kitchen robot made its public debut! Yes, it makes dessert, too.

SKS founder Michael Wolf kicked off the conference with some words on why Japan — and Asia in general — has such an important role to play in forging the future of cooking.

We told you — lots of robots. This year’s SKS Japan featured a (rainbow!) crepe-making robot, an onigiri (Japanese rice ball) robot, the Rotimatic, a roti-making kitchen robot, and more. These food-making ‘bots made for some very exciting breaks!

Other cool tech from the conference were Panasonic’s DishCanvas, a plate that can display moving images, Shojinmeat founder Yuki Hanyu’s VR rendering of a Martian lab-grown meat lab, and Cookpad’s unveiling of Oicy, its device that can dispense hard and soft water to suit specific recipes.

The conversations took a broader focus as well, tackling pressing issues like sustainability, national identity, and more. Here’s a photo from one of the forward-facing discussions from the day, in which Future Food Institute’s Sara Roversi spoke with Ferda Gelegen, the Deputy Head of UNIDO ITPO Japan about how to better grow and consume food in the face of climate change.

The gadgets are certainly cool and the food samples tasty, but the most inspiring part of SKS Japan comes not from the technologies, but the people. It may sound cheesy, but it’s true. We’re headed back to Seattle inspired by the passion, energy, and creativity we saw from the SKS Japan attendees and speakers.

来年まで!

Video: Bellwether Cuts Out the Coffee Roasting Middleman

“A lot of people don’t realize just how big coffee is,” said Nathan Gilliland, CEO of Bellwether Coffee at the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit. Seriously, though: according to him, coffee is the most consumed beverage in the U.S., with people drinking more cups of joe than bottles of water, wine, and beer combined.

Not only are people drinking a lot of coffee, they’re also drinking better coffee. Consumers — especially millennials — are looking for fresher, higher-quality beans that are roasted locally. And they’re willing to pay for it.

But getting that freshly-roasted product into the hands of consumers isn’t easily done. The majority of coffee today is roasted at a highly centralized place and then shipped all over the world. This “hub and spoke roasting model,” as Gilliland calls it, is expensive and not condusive to freshness.

Enter Bellwether. The company makes internet-connected coffee roasters that can be installed in cafes, grocery stores, or small local coffee shops, and also has a marketplace for green (unroasted) coffee beans. By roasting in-store, Gilliland explains that the shop can provide more sustainable, fresher coffee and save money by cutting out the roasting middleman. “It’s like a roaster meets an iPhone,” he said.

Watch the video below to get the lowdown on the future of sustainable coffee consumption — and how data and IoT can help us get there.

From Soil To Sip: Disruptions In The Coffee Value Chain

For more videos of panels, fireside chats, and startup pitches from the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit head to our YouTube channel!