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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Smart Kitchen Summit

For a Fast-Growing Cannabis Edibles Market, Trust is Key

When you’re curious if a food is organic or non-GMO, you look to see if there’s a label. If so, you know the item’s entire supply chain has been examined, tested, and verified by a reliable organization.

TraceTrust is working create the same sort of third-party certification for an emerging food product: cannabis-infused edibles. Started three years ago by Merril Gilbert and Rhiannon Woo, the California-based company came about right as their state was on the cusp of legalizing marijuana. Originally, they wanted to develop an entirely new type of edible: one targeted not at stoners, but a modern consumer who wanted to experiment with cannabis in a way that was subtle, reliable, and regulated.

Their target consumer group was women who wanted to use marijuana to relax or relieve pain, but didn’t want to smoke it or eat something with a heavy, overwhelming cannabis flavor. The two women got a clear, flavorless oil and gave it to pastry chefs to turn into baked goods, but quickly realized a big problem: when mixed into cookies or candies, it was really difficult to gauge potency.

“Unpredictability is the biggest issue facing the edibles market,” Gilbert told me over the phone. So TraceTrust shifted gears and began focusing on dosing. They now work with manufacturers and labs to test each edible and ensure that its advertised doses of CBD (non-psychoactive) and THC (psychoactive) are accurate and consistent. TraceTrust also examines the product’s packaging and consumption instructions to make sure they’re easy to understand. This is especially important for items which contain multiple servings, like a chocolate bar, where each square contains a prescribed cannabis dose.

If a product checks all the boxes, then TraceTrust will give the product a special seal of approval, called A True Dose. Basically, it signifies that the edible is made with reliable strains of marijuana and that each serving will contain exactly the dose it advertises.

A True Dose is currently in beta and will launch nationwide in January 2019. Starting then, manufacturers in any state where marijuana is legal can pay TraceTrust a fee to get their products certified. If they pass, they’ll earn the A True Dose seal to put on their packaging and marketing materials; if not, the TraceTrust team will work with them to correct any issues. “Overall, it’s very similar to non-GMO or any third party seal,” said Gilbert.

Gilbert predicts that as edibles become more widely legalized and, thus, normalized, labels like this will play a much larger role. “Anything that says, ‘We went further, we did more, we care’ is going to win consumers,” she said. They’re hoping that the A True Dose label will become a point of differentiation for brands, so they can charge more if their product sports the seal.

As we’ve written about previously on the Spoon, cannabis is rapidly becoming normalized and de-stigmatized; the same goes for edibles. Gone are the days of stale weed brownies — nowadays, consumers can get their high from a variety of beverages (beer, soda, coffee, even sparkling water), candies, chocolates, and more. Even Big Food and Drink companies are getting in on the game: Molson Coors, Heineken, and even Coca-Cola have all teamed up with cannabis companies to create marijuana-infused beverages.

“We’re beyond the stoner culture now,” said Gilbert. “But what makes people hesitate when it comes to edibles is the unknown.” Hopefully, TraceTrust can help cut through the haze of smoke currently covering cannabis edibles.

Gilbert will be speaking at the Smart Kitchen Summit on a panel entitled “Edible Cannabis: The New Functional Food?” She’ll be joined by Scott Riefler of Tarukino, an innovation group which develops cannabis-infused beverages, and Linda Gilbert of BDS Analytics, who tracks and analyzes the marijuana consumer market. If you’re interested in learning more about the future of edibles, don’t miss it!

Suggestic Brings Personalized Nutrition to Your Fingertips

As we all know, it’s easy to decide to eat healthier — but sticking to your diet plan can be very tricky indeed. That’s where, Suggestic, one of the 13 companies pitching at the Startup Showcase for the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) this October, comes in. The young company is leveraging technology to help users outline individualized meal plans, then connects them with recipes, grocery stores, and restaurants to help them stick to it.

Read our Q&A with co-founder Shai Rozen to learn a little more about how Suggestic hopes to make the world healthier through personalization, augmented reality, and some serious focus. Then get your tickets to see him pitch live at SKS!

The Spoon: First thing’s first: give us your 15-second elevator pitch.
Rozen: Our goal at Suggestic is to guide consumers through personalized nutrition journeys towards their individual health goals.

With our unique service, users can forget about reading, counting and memorizing to figure out what is best to eat. They don’t need to sort through the huge amount of misinformation about what foods are “healthy” for them. We provide each person with the ease of mind that they are doing the right thing at all times, delivered conveniently at their fingertips.

Our App is backed by powerful and proprietary AI, which delivers precise recommendations of what to order at a restaurant, what to buy at a grocery store and what to cook at home, and then tracks user progress to adjust each suggestion.

Users can select a free dietary filter, or subscribe to one of our premium programs curated by renowned health and nutrition experts.

What inspired you to start Suggestic?
My co-founder and I have both seen firsthand the devastating effects improper nutrition can have, but we’ve also seen the power of food as a means of health. We both saw our fathers pass away from type 2 diabetes-related complications and we both managed to revert our own pre-diabetes through nutrition.

Our mission is to help shift healthcare from treatment of symptoms to primordial prevention through “precision eating.”

And we don’t just want people to be “healthy”. We want each individual’s health optimized rather than just reduced to an asymptomatic average.

What’s the most challenging part of getting a food tech startup off the ground?
The possibilities! There’s so much that can and needs to be done in the world of food tech that honestly the hardest part is deciding where to invest our efforts, and how to keep focused on what matters most.

Also, when you have a mission that’s also social and positive in nature, it’s pretty amazing how many people just want to help. It’s truly inspiring. But it can easily be a distraction as well, so focus is key.

How will Suggestic change the day-to-day life of its users?
We already do, everyday. By helping our users make the best possible food choices at any moment in time we have a direct impact on their health and wellbeing.

Q: What’s next for Suggestic?
The future looks great. We have scheduled over a dozen new premium program launches with our partner authors and experts for 2019, and also have new integrations coming up with lab tests that will allow our users to further optimize their individual health journeys. And we are also working on an Android version, as well as possible a stand-alone app for our Suggestic Lens (augmented reality) experience.

Thanks, Shai! Get your tickets to SKS to hear him pitch alongside 12 emerging food tech companies at our Startup Showcase this October in Seattle.

Whirlpool’s Brett Dibkey on How to Be Smart in the Smart Kitchen

Whirlpool made waves last year when it acquired Yummly, a popular recipe site, in order to boost their foothold in the smart kitchen space. With fingers in the grocery fulfillment and guided cooking pies, as well as a patent for an induction-powered sous vide cooking appliance, appliance giant Whirlpool is working hard to establish itself as a leader in the future kitchen space.

Next month, Brett Dibkey, Whirlpool’s Vice President of Brand Marketing, IoT, and Business Units, will return to the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) stage to talk about this very topic. We got to ask him a few questions in advance — on Yummly, IoT, and millennials — to get the smart kitchen juices flowing.

See the full Q&A below.

The Spoon: What role you do see Whirlpool and other connected appliance makers playing in the smart kitchen revolution?
Bretty Dibkey: Honestly, I don’t see Whirlpool’s role in the smart kitchen revolution any differently than our role in the (analog) kitchen revolution of the early 20th century. Like it was then, our focus today is on building and delivering products that create real meaningful value for consumers. While our definition of “products” may be changing, we remain obsessed with the principle of purposeful innovation. The smart kitchen will only be “smart” if the technology we deliver is purposeful and removes real friction from the lives of consumers. This is what we’re laser-focused on.

Last Whirlpool acquired smart recipe platform Yummly. How do you see this partnership furthering Whirlpool’s presence in the connected kitchen?
Whirlpool Corporation has unparalleled presence in the kitchen through our brands and product portfolio. Our brands, including Whirlpool, Maytag, KitchenAid, and JennAir, give us reach across major appliances, countertop appliances, cookware, and cutlery.

What we were missing prior to the Yummly acquisition was a digital platform to help tie the “physical” experiences of our products together. Yummly gives us a strong platform on which to build a digital presence that helps consumers address a variety of kitchen pain points — answering the “what’s for dinner” question, providing step-by-step guidance for new recipes, sending instructions to cooking appliances to ensure perfect results, and even replenishing out-of-stock ingredients.

With the rise in food delivery, some worry that kitchens will eventually become obsolete. Do you think that the kitchen will continue to be the heart of the home?
Certainly cooking habits and practices are changing, but I think the kitchen is far from becoming obsolete. Millennials, in particular, are concerned about nutrition and promoting healthy food attitudes with their children. I think because of this, the average millennial is cooking at home almost 5 times per week and nearly 90% say it’s something they’d like to get better at.

Our job at Whirlpool is to make products — both physical and digital — that enable and inspire all consumers to cook at home more. While cooking will always play a role in fulfilling a basic human need, I believe it is also increasingly becoming an outlet for creativity and passion. For this reason, I think the kitchen’s place as heart of the home will endure for many years.

—
Thanks, Brett! If you want to see him speak more about rethinking business models in the era of food tech, snag your tickets to the Smart Kitchen Summit on October 8-9th in Seattle.

Kabaq Wants to Create the World’s First Virtual Reality Food Court

There’s no denying that we live in an age of curated images, where every Instagram photo is cropped, edited, and put through a filter before it’s sent into the stratosphere.

Kabaq, one of the 13 companies pitching at the Startup Showcase for the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) this October, is leveraging virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) to create a more immersive food experience for our image-obsessed society. Thus far, the company has worked with Magnolia Bakery to help engaged couples see their wedding cake before the big day, and also led an AR campaign to let Snapchat users play with 3D-visualized pizzas.

But Kabaq founder Alper Guler has much grander ambitions for his company. Read our Q&A with Guler to get a better picture (pun intended) of their vision for a future in which our food choices are guided by VR and AR.

This interview has been edited for clarity. 

The Spoon: First thing’s first: give us your 15-second elevator pitch.
Kabaq: As Kabaq, we create the most lifelike 3D models of food in the world through AR/VR. Our main goal is to help customers to decide what to eat, while at the same time helping restaurants to push premium items and tell stories about their food.

What inspired you to start Kabaq?
The era of Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat has changed what and how we eat at restaurants. Today food isn’t just about taste; it’s also about the visual experience. Now social platforms and smartphone manufacturers have created this shift in food, investing and pushing heavily in immersive technologies like augmented and virtual reality. These two emerging trends inspired us to bring Kabaq into life.

What’s the most challenging part of getting a food tech startup off the ground?
Food and technology are connected to dining experiences more than ever. Technology is improving our experience of how we grow, source, discover and order food. But adaptation of new technology has been slow, and we are experiencing a relatively slow response from the market.

How will Kabaq change the day-to-day life of its users?
In the future I believe smart glasses will replace smartphones. Everybody will use these smart glasses to engage with digital experiences around them. Imagine you are in this restaurant, using your augmented reality glasses: you can see the whole menu on your table virtually, and even order through your glasses. Don’t worry about the check — it is already paid through your glasses.

VR can also change how we order delivery. Think about how we used to connect to the internet through dial-up modems. We needed to disconnect from the internet to call and order food for pick-up. Then, companies like Seamless created platforms to order food online. With mobile phones and location-based services like UberEats, the experience became even more smooth.

In the near future I believe when you are connected to VR, you will also order your food in VR. We will create the world’s first virtual food court for people to visit through VR and order directly through the same system.

What’s next for Kabaq?
We are creating beneficial use-cases for using AR in-restaurants, delivery apps, marketing, catering and cookbooks. We’re working to bring AR to all aspects of food — and soon.

—

Thanks, Alper! Get your tickets to SKS to hear him pitch alongside 12 emerging food tech companies at our Startup Showcase and get a taste of how Kabaq applies VR to food.

New Company Soggy Food Sucks Wants to Eliminate Soggy Food (Duh)

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize soggy food sucks. But it might just take one to solve the problem.

Former aerospace engineer Bill Birgen started Soggy Food Sucks to combat the issue of food getting soft and soggy after it travels. To do so, he developed a patch you can stick to the food carton to absorb condensation, thereby keeping food crisp and fresh-tasting while it’s in transit. In other words, no more limp delivery french fries or lackluster restaurant leftovers.

Soggy Food Sucks is one of the 13 companies that will be pitching in the Startup Showcase at the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) this October (meet them all here!). We did a little Q&A session with Birgen to learn more about his impassioned goal to do one thing: eliminate soggy food from the world, forever.

This Q&A had been edited for clarity. 

The Spoon: First thing’s first: give us your 15-second elevator pitch.

Bill Birgen: Food taken home from a restaurant is often ruined by condensation. This patented product stops this, with the first of its kind, high performance, non-chemical desiccant.

What inspired you to start Soggy Food Sucks?

I’ve been packing my lunch with this product for over 10 years, and I don’t like slimy, wilted salads for lunch.

What’s the most challenging part of getting a food tech startup off the ground?

Probably the money. I bootstrapped everything myself because fundraising is such a huge distraction. Providing my own funding meant I had to go slow.

The other big challenge was optimizing the customers’ value proposition. This took the longest time. There were a lot of non-scientific friends, advisers and marketing consultants who kept telling me to make the product “sexier”, which would have been a pivot away from value.

Objective performance validation was a distant 3rd challenge.

How will Soggy Food Sucks change the day-to-day life of its users?

Imagine a world without soggy food. Imagine crunchy freedom fries, crisp fried chicken, and salads that snap with each bite you take. This is my vision for the future of food delivery, and the ultimate user experience that I will bring to the world.

What’s next for Soggy Food Sucks?

Next up will be limited production, sales and deliveries of our small batch production. I will collect letters of intent from customers at the SKS and use these to leverage financing for a full-scale production. I am also re-visiting the licensing path.

Thanks, Bill! Get your tickets to SKS to hear him and 12 other budding food tech entrepreneurs pitch at our Startup Showcase, then see his anti-soggy food patch in action. 

SKS Re-Heat: Tyler Florence has Written His Last Cookbook

With our Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle just a few weeks away (Ed. note: Ack! So much to do to get ready), we thought it would be a good idea to revisit a moment that lit up the stage last year.

During his fireside chat last year, celebrity chef Tyler Florence made news when he said he had written his last cookbook, and that he believed “recipes are dead.” In their place, Florence said, the future of home cooking would be more micro-content that you could mix and match based on what you have. You can watch his whole talk in the video below.

While we appreciate his bold, headline-making statement, we didn’t agree with Florence (neither did Milk Street’s Christopher Kimball), and if you read The Spoon regularly, you’ll know we think the recipe is more alive than ever, transforming into a robust discovery and e-commerce platform.

We’re happy to say that Tyler Florence is returning to the Smart Kitchen Summit stage this October. He’ll be talking with Mike Wolf about The Connected Chef and I’m sure Wolf will throw in a question or two about the role of recipes in the connected kitchen.

To get ready for Florence’s (as well as a ton of other great industry leaders‘) appearance at the Smart Kitchen Summit next month, watch his presentation from last year. Then get your tickets and see him for yourself in Seattle.

Tyler Florence and Amanda Gold at the Smart Kitchen Summit 2017 from The Spoon on Vimeo.

John Pleasants Thinks the Oven of the Future is Powered by Light

We at the Spoon have long been curious about Brava, the stealthy smart kitchen startup which recently debuted its first product: an oven which uses the power of light to cook food quickly and precisely, with low energy usage.

Brava’s CEO John Pleasants be speaking at the Smart Kitchen Summit this October on a panel entitled “Reimagining The Cooking Box,” alongside Lisa McManus of America’s Test Kitchen, Matt van Horn of June, and Robin Liss of Suvie. To heat up (zing!) a little excitement for Pleasants’ panel, we asked him a few questions about Brava’s quest to create an oven so good, they’re calling it “the future of cooking.”

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. 

Brava’s oven cooks with the power of light — how did you land on the concept and develop it for the consumer?
The idea for Brava started in our founder’s home thinking about how to solve the age-old problem of the family provider having to frequently go back and forth to the kitchen during a Holiday meal. The idea was to liberate them from that stressful distraction so the family could enjoy each other’s company without worry of burning their food.

At the same time, we believed that cooking technology had remained relatively static for 50 years (i.e., basic convection and conduction in ovens and stovetops) and that to truly revolutionize in home cooking, a better, faster and more dynamic heating method was needed. This spawned the birth of Pure Light cooking: our patented direct energy transfer methodology via highly controllable infrared light. We marry our custom Pure Light heating elements with a sophisticated cooking engine and an array of sensors, machine vision and AI that together delivers fantastic results with very minimal cooking effort.

Why did you decide to pair the Brava oven with a food delivery service?
Our mission is to empower anyone to make amazing food at home, any day of the week. For some people, they will want a full and turnkey solution, including ingredient delivery and preparation. So we will give them that option.

In addition, all the recipes are developed by our culinary team (including the on-oven cooking recipes/instructions) and the food is sourced from some of the finest purveyors in the world. We take great pride in our menus and the quality of our ingredients, and we think our customers will appreciate all the quality and attention to detail we bring to bear here.

Why did you decide to build your own brand with Brava, instead of licensing out your light-cooking tech to larger manufacturers?
We are a technology food and cooking company, focused on a direct to consumer model. We believe all elements ‚ from recipe development to hardware to constantly updating software — all have to come together under a single entity to deliver the type of service we think can truly change people’s routines and lives for the better. We seek to build that company.

Do you think that connected appliances will eventually become the norm in the kitchen, showing up in the homes of everyone, even non-tech-forward consumers? Or will they continue to be a niche product?
Connected appliances are definitely going to become a staple in the home, specifically in the kitchen. But the connection or “smarts” has to be valuable and actually improve people’s everyday lives…and today that’s not always the case.

How do you envision the kitchen of the future? Is it full of connected appliances? Voice assistants? Paint us a picture!
Pure Light Technology in every kitchen 🙂

You can try Brava’s Pure Light Cooking tech (AKA bake things with light!) for yourself at the Smart Kitchen Summit on October 8-9th! Tickets are going fast, so don’t delay — we’ll see you in Seattle. 

Ripe.io Racks up $2.4 Million for its “Blockchain for Food”

Today Ripe Technology INC (better known as Ripe.io) announced the completion of a $2.4 million funding seed round, led by Maersk Growth.

Founded in 2017, Ripe.io is working to create what they call “The Blockchain of Food.” When Michael Wolf had Ripe.io’s co-founder and CEO Raja Ramachandran on the Smart Kitchen Show last year, he said:

If a farmer wants to say I harvest strawberries these two days, well, they can say that, but do they say that to everyone? … That’s the beauty of blockchain. It manages the decentralized nature of the food business, so people can post data, they can protect it, they can share it, they can create records with it… In the end for the consumer, they basically get a longer record.

That means that when people go to a restaurant or a grocery store, they can know exactly where their food comes from, whether or not it’s organic or GMO, and how fresh it is. Ripe.io hopes that blockchain technology can help digitize supply chains end-to-end and ensure maximum food transparency for the end consumer. Which, as Ramachandran explained on the podcast, is a $30-40 billion dollar market.

Other companies are also turning to blockchain to bolster their food businesses. Goodr is a startup which harnesses blockchain to reduce large-scale corporate food waste, and FoodLogiQ recently piloted a blockchain pilot to see how this emerging tech could increase supply chain transparency. But Ramachandran doesn’t see the blockchain of food as a zero sum game. “It’s not going to be one blockchain, it’s going to be many,” he said. “And we all have to connect.”

We’ve reached out to Ramachandran for comment on how his company plans to use their new funds, and will update this article if we hear back. 

Ramachandran will be at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle on October 8-9th, discussing blockchain and food with executives from Goodr and Walmart. Join us — use discount code THESPOON to get 25% off your tickets. 

Meet the Finalists for the Smart Kitchen Summit 2018 Startup Showcase

Year after year, one of the most popular — and exciting — parts of the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) is the Startup Showcase. Not only do you get to watch as startup founders with an idea for the next great kitchen appliance, AI-driven personalization app or food robot get on stage at Benaroya Hall and tell us how they will change the way we cook and eat forever, but you get to follow that up by seeing, touching and tasting all the products at our Showcase happy hour.

This year we had an amazing pool of applicants, but have finally whittled the list down to 13 startups which we think show some serious potential. Learn about the diverse set of finalists, then snag your tickets to SKS to see live demos of their technology on the show floor.

Startup Showcase Finalists

Kabaq 3D Food Technologies

Kabaq partners with restaurants and food brands to create immersive experiences for their customers. Using AR, VR, and mixed reality, the startup creates 3D visualizations of food so people can visualize exactly what their next meal (or wedding cake) will look like.

Suggestic

Suggestic combines AI, AR and personalized nutrition to help people eat better. Users can input health goals and Suggestic’s app will create weekly meal plans, suggest restaurants, and give fitness tips. They’re currently working on an AR feature which will let users “read” restaurant menus to determine which items are on their diet plan — and which aren’t.

Dizzconcept

Croatian startup Dizzconcept designs pop-up kitchens designed to fit into our urbanized world. Their portable kitchens take up 1.6 square meters of space and function as a TV cabinet when closed. However, they open up to reveal a fully operational mini-kitchen, including a sink, fridge, and stove.

Dexai Robotics

Dexai Robotics makes a robotic arm for foodservice. Named ‘Alfred,’ the robot can learn restaurant layouts and recipes and rotate hand attachments for different ingredients. It also integrates with restaurants’ POS systems so that it can start preparing food as soon as an order comes in.

Soggy Food Sucks

Have you ever experienced the crushing disappointment of finding that your delivery fries have gotten soggy in transit? As its name implies, Soggy Food Sucks is out to fix that nagging problem plaguing food delivery. They make a patented peel-and-stick patch which absorbs condensation and can keep your food from getting soggy during transit.

Mimesis

Mimesis is the maker of smartcook, a connected all-in-one kitchen appliance that aims to streamline home cooking. Their smart surface acts as a visual interface with interactive recipes, video cooking lessons, and online grocery ordering, and also functions as a stove, cutting board, and kitchen scale.

Pizzametry

Pizzametry’s concept is pretty darn simple: pizza vending machines. They can make and cook 8-inch pizzas (in cheese or pepperoni) in three and a half minutes.

MyFavorEats

MyFavorEats uses AI to create modular, easily customizable online recipes. The startup translates online recipes into a machine-readable format, so users can easily swap ingredients and personalize meals to their particular diets, preferences, and kitchen appliances.

HotBot Beverages

Hot Bot is a two-part system which combines an in-store induction heating unit with special drink bottles. The result? Grab-and-go hot beverages and soups available in restaurants, grocery stores, office canteens, and more — all in roughly a minute.

MoJoe Brewing Co.

Mojoe is a portable coffee brewer/travel mug that lets users brew coffee on the go. Pop in some ground coffee or tea (you can buy a Mojoe pod or custom-fill your own) into the brewer, add any temperature water, and brew. The device can be powered by wall socket, car charger, or a rechargeable battery, and fits in a standard cupholder.

Klove Chef

Klove Chef is a white label voice technology service for the kitchen. Their technology can guide users through recipe preparation, sync up with smart home devices to monitor cook temperature and time, and can also order groceries.

MockMill

The Mockmill 100 is a tabletop stone mill for home/restaurant/bakery production of bakery-quality flours, also for milling of spices, pulses,and other dry foods.

Garbi

Garbi is a smart trash can that recognizes items you throw away and reorders them for you from local e-commerce retailers. They’re also working on a recycling functionality that would let Garbi’s garbage cans indicate to users whether items should go in the trash, recycling, or compost.

Curious about this diverse group of food tech startups? Join us at the Smart Kitchen Summit on October 8-9th to see them pitch live, ask them about their companies, and learn which will win the $10,000 prize! Make sure to get your tickets today and save 25% today with discount code SPOON. 

Podcast: Building Food Robots With Zimplistic’s Rishi Israni

While most of us only started to think about food robots in the last couple of years, Rishi Israni and his cofounder (and wife) Pranoti Nagarkar Israni have been thinking about them every day for a decade. That’s because ten years ago Pranoti decided to build a robot to create the Indian flat bread called roti so she wouldn’t have to make it every day by hand. Fast forward to 2018 and the Rotimatic flatbread robot is arguably the most successful home kitchen robot in the embryonic food robot market.

In this podcast I talk to Rishi about the journey behind the Rotimatic, what the difference is between and appliance and a robot and where exactly these things called food robots are going in the future.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking play below, download it directly or subscribe in Apple podcasts.

If you’d like to see the Rotimatic and meet Rishi and Pranoti in person, they’ll be at the Smart Kitchen Summit in four weeks. You can use the discount code PODCAST for 25% off tickets. Just use this link with the discount applied and we hope to see you there!

For Goodr’s Jasmine Crowe, Blockchain Is a Key Piece to the Food Waste Puzzle

Food waste is generating quite a lot of interest as of late; but one buzzword that might give “food waste” a run for its money is blockchain. (Alright, food waste is two words, but stick with me.) Companies around the world are starting to play with this nascent technology to explore how it can help make the food supply chain more transparent, safe, and efficient.

Atlanta-based startup Goodr is one company combining these two trending areas, using blockchain as a tool to redistribute food waste from businesses (such as office cafeterias) to those struggling with hunger. Goodr founder and CEO Jasmine Crowe will be speaking about how her company is leveraging emerging tech to power their mission at the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) this October. Since it’s only a few weeks away (!), we’re giving you a sneak peek into Crowe’s mission to use analytics, blockchain, and IRS-friendly donation records to eliminate food waste — one city at a time.

Read the full Q&A below:

For those who don’t know, give us a brief overview of what you’re working on at Goodr. 
Goodr is a sustainable waste management platform that leverages technology to reduce food waste and combat hunger. We provide an end-to-end solution for businesses seeking to reduce their overall waste, save money and empower their local community. Our platform provides the logistics, analytics, and security for businesses to earn deductions under the PATH act in compliance with the Internal Revenue Services (IRS).

You’ve stated before that hunger isn’t a scarcity issue, it’s a logistics issue. Explain what you mean, and how Goodr is helping to solve the issue.
Absolutely, there is more than enough food — we just have to get it to people. Goodr views hunger as a solvable logistical problem and not an issue of resource scarcity. American consumers waste 161 billion pounds of food every year, and food waste takes up an estimated 28% of landfills. In America, Food Waste has tripled since 1970. Goodr redirects edible food waste away from landfills to fill the stomachs of the many Americans who are food insecure.

As technology improves, where is there room for growth and improvement in terms of reduction in hunger and food waste?
I believe we are WAY past time to be using technology to solve real problems. I believe that there is substantial room for growth in this space from the farm to the table.

Blockchain is a huge buzzword right now. How are you leveraging this emerging technology in your company?
Yes, it is a huge buzzword but we have made a very good use case for it in the day-to-day work of Goodr. Our technology coordinates the collection and distribution of food donations. Unlike our competitors, Goodr’s platform also provides an IRS audit-friendly donation record, real-time food waste analytics, and community impact reports thanks to blockchain.

What’s next for Goodr? 
Our goal is to be in 20 cities by the end of 2020, so we are looking at massive expansion and helping more companies and cities be food waste and hunger-free.

Want to hear Jasmine Crowe speak more about how blockchain can be used to reduce both food waste and hunger? Join us at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle on October 8-9th — tickets here. 

Announcing the Smart Kitchen Summit 2018 Program

Hard to believe, but we’re just six weeks away from the Smart Kitchen Summit, our flagship industry event that brings hundreds of executives, innovators, startups and media together in Seattle’s Benaroya Hall for two days to forge the future of food, cooking, and the kitchen.

It’s been three years since we held our first in an old cannery in 2015, and since that time we’ve become the hub across three continents for the world’s biggest brands in appliances, food, and tech to connect and discuss food tech.

And now, after lots of emails, planning meetings and Google sheet rejiggering, we’ve released our agenda for the Smart Kitchen Summit! We’ve got an incredible lineup with panels, TED-style talks and fireside chats featuring some of the most exciting people in the space. Check it out!

A few highlights:

  • The Wall Street Journal’s Wilson Rothman will sit down with the person who ran product on both the Amazon Echo and the Juicero –  Malachy Moynihan – to ask why kitchen products succeed or fail.
  • Dr. Karsten Ottenberg, the CEO of one of the world’s biggest appliance manufacturers, BSH Appliances, will talk about how his company is building its future around services.
  • Executives from Cafe X, Chowbotics and Zimplistic will talk about the future of food robotics
  • Walmart’s VP of Food Safety Frank Yiannas will speak on a panel with Raja Ramachandran of Ripe.io and Jasmine Crowe of Goodr about the potential for blockchain to increase transparency and reduce waste throughout the food system.
  • The CEOs of June, Brava, Tovala, and Suvie will talk about how cooking appliances will change over the next decade.
  • We’ll find out why Eli Holzman, the creator of Project Runway & Project Greenlight, has made the intersection of technology and cooking his next big project.
  • Tom Mastrobuoni of Tyson Ventures, Carmen Palafox of Make in L.A., and Brian Frank of FTW ventures will explore strategies for food tech investment, from hardware to CPG and beyond.

That’s just the start. We have sessions on personalized food, the future of restaurants, AI & food, cooking robots, food & cooking data, blockchain & food, IoT security in the smart kitchen, reinvention of the grocery store and much more.

Peppered throughout the day we’ll also have 12 new startups (companies to be announced soon!) pitching their companies before a panel of investors and executives. Our panel of judges will vote on the winner, who will get a $10,000 cash prize! You can view the new full conference schedule here.

Our last shows have all sold out, so make sure you grab your tickets now, and we’ll see you in October!