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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Food Tech Weekly: AI’s Impact on Food Accelerating, Whirlpool Lays Off Yummly Team

This is the online version of The Spoon Newsletter. You can subscribe to The Spoon and get deliver director to your inbox.

Over the past month, we’ve seen more and more signals that AI is having a once-in-a-generation transformative impact on the food business. To note:

Yum, the owner of Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, sees its franchises becoming AI-first organizations where the technology will impact every phase of operation.

Chief Digital and Technology Officer Joe Park “sees a future where AI is in every aspect of Yum’s restaurants, with generative AI—the technology behind ChatGPT—in the pockets of franchisees.

“A lot of that gets automated in the future, where you don’t have to interface directly with the technology,” he said. “You can do it through generative AI.”

Google released a new Food Mood tool that uses generative AI to create a fusion recipe between two types of cuisine. 

“This playful fusion recipe generator creates recipes inspired by multi country cuisine with the help of Google AI.

Choose whether you would like to cook a starter, a soup, a main course, or a dessert, and select the two countries you want to create your unique food fusion from. You can even select a dietary preference from the options provided, and include specific ingredients of your choice.”

Researchers released a study that found that survey participants prefer AI-generated images of food over images of the real thing.

“Study supervisor and co-author Professor Charles Spence (Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford) said: ‘While AI-generated visuals may offer cost-saving opportunities for marketers and the industry by reducing the cost of commissioning food photoshoots, these findings highlight potential risks associated with exacerbating “visual hunger” amongst consumers—the phenomenon where viewing images of food triggers appetite and cravings. This could potentially influence unhealthy eating behaviours or foster unrealistic expectations about food among consumers.’”

Food brands are exploring small language models as a way to supplement food understanding and fluency of the large language models behind generative AI platforms.

“LLMs’ shortcomings in creating credible and trusted results around those specific domains have led to growing interest in what the AI community is calling small language models (SLMs). What are SLMs? Essentially, they are smaller and simpler language models that require less computational power and fewer lines of code, and often, they are specialized in their focus.”

There’s a lot happening at this intersection of food and AI, something that clearly is going to have an impact on the old way of doing things. One of the potential impacts is on employees, including editorial and content creators. The Spoon has heard from some industry sources that some big brands are exploring replacing the bulk of their editorial teams with generative AI. While we haven’t confirmed that this is what was behind the recent decision by Whirlpool to let go of the entire Yummly team, it does make you wonder if that’s something the company is pondering. 

The impact of AI on the food business is something we’ll be exploring deeply at the Smart Kitchen Summit in June (as well as the Food AI Summit in September – more on that soon).

We’ll also be talking about this on Friday on The Spoon’s Weekly Food Tech Show, which you can watch on YouTube, Linkedin, Twitter and Streamyard at 1 PM Pacific April 5th. Join us and ask questions during the live show!

Talk soon,

Mike

Whirlpool Lays Off Entire Team for Cooking and Recipe App Yummly

Appliance giant Whirlpool has let its entire Yummly team go. According to industry sources, the company recently laid off all the employees for the recipe and cooking app and website. These sources tell the Spoon that it’s unclear what the company plans to do with the property it acquired in 2017.

The news of the layoffs marks a significant de-emphasis on creating a connected cooking experience tailored around custom-designed recipes with step-by-step cooking.

After Whirlpool acquired Yummly, it beefed up the content team and hired content creators to build a recipe catalog with cooking guidance. It also added features such as built-in food image recognition capabilities and put out a Yummly-connected thermometer (which is still available for purchase). The company announced an update with new features as recently as last fall.

To read the full exclusive story on Yummly, head to The Spoon.

Are You Building The Kitchen Of The Future?

The Smart Kitchen Summit, the pioneering executive summit focused on the digital transformation of the consumer meal journey, is excited to announce its return in 2024. In 2024, SKS will return to its birthplace, Seattle, Washington, scheduled for June 4-5th. Use discount code NEWSLETTER to get 15% off tickets today.

Is The US Power Grid Prepared For The Transition To Induction Cooking?

In case you haven’t heard, electricity demand is shooting through the roof.

After more than two decades of flattened usage due to more efficient lightbulbs, appliances, and factories, the growing adoption of EVs and the explosion in new data centers for compute-intensive applications such as AI over the last few years has resulted in skyrocketing demand for electricity, according to a new report in the New York Times. In fact, forecasters estimate that peak demand in the summer will grow by 38,000 megawatts nationwide in the next five years, which is akin to adding another California to an already overburdened grid.

The Times report does a good job highlighting how EVs and higher usage air conditioning in homes are two of the biggest culprits for reversing the trend, but largely omits any discussion of another potential big driver of electricity usage in the future: induction cooking.

And from the looks of it, induction could significantly impact the overall electricity usage of a family home. While it’s more energy efficient in general, a household switching from gas to electric induction cooking will use more electricity. How much? According to some sources, an hour of induction cooking will use between 1.4 kW and 2 kW per day. That compares with about 2.5 kW per day in charging for the typical EV.

Read the full story at The Spoon.

Podcast: The Story of Mill With Matt Rogers

If you follow the world of kitchen and consumer food tech startups, you know there hasn’t been much in the way of venture-funded startups targeting food waste in the home.

That changed last year when Mill lifted the veil on the company and its first product, the Mill Bin, a smart food recycler. The company’s unique approach included a subscription-based home food waste recycler and an accompanying service that would turn the food grounds into chicken feed. 

We decided to catch up with the company’s CEO, Matt Rogers, to hear about the journey to making Mill. During our conversation, we also talk about:

  • The early lessons in building a tech-powered food recycling appliance and service
  • Why Matt decided to target food waste after building a smart home company in Nest
  • The challenges in getting consumers to think about wasting less food
  • How better data can help us change consumer behavior 
  • The future of food waste reduction technology in the consumer kitchen

You can listen to the full episode below or find it on Apple Podcasts or on The Spoon.

Is The Keto Cereal Craze Over?

I have a soft spot for sugar cereals.

Having grown up in the 80s eating big boxes of Captain Crunch, Lucky Charms, and Life (my friends called me Mikey!), I still salivate when I see big, colorful boxes with leprechauns and monsters in the grocery store cereal aisle.

So when keto-friendly, processed sugar-free sugar cereal substitutes started appearing in 2018 and 2019, I was excited. Like any self-respecting adult, I’d moved on to more responsible breakfast offerings, but saw these new keto-free cereals as a guilt-free time travel machine back to the land of the magically delicious.

I wasn’t the only one. The product’s early success accelerated during the pandemic, a time when people were bored at home and ordering lots of food via delivery. This led to an impressive series B in 2022, where the company scooped up $85 million. That funding fueled the company’s expansion into retail, and now you can find Magic Spoon in places like Costco, Target, and Walmart.

With widespread availability, the company should now be beating the old-school, better-for-you cereals like Grape Nuts and granola, right?

Maybe not. According to a tweet by Andrea Hernández of Snaxshot, Magic Spoon cereal has hit the clearance bin at Sprouts, a chain specializing in premium brands. The pic, which Andrea also posted on Linkedin, led to much discussion about whether the better-for-you keto cereal trend is over.

Read the full story at The Spoon. 

PoLoPo Unveils ‘SuperAA’ to Turn Potatoes Into Protein Factories Via Molecular Farming

Last week, Israel-based startup PoLoPo announced it has deployed its molecular farming technology, a system that uses a genetically engineered potato to produce egg proteins, at greenhouse production scale. The company’s protein production system, which it has dubbed the SuperAA platform, grows proteins within a potato’s tuber, which is then harvested and extracted into protein powder.

Molecular farming, which produces animal protein using seed crops, has gained traction in recent years. The technique, which the Good Food Institute named the “fourth pillar” for alt protein, uses genetic engineering to introduce animal DNA directly into the seeds, transforming the resulting crops into protein factories. Once the genetically engineered seeds are planted, traditional farming management techniques can be employed to grow the crops until they are ready for harvest.

The technique has gained momentum in recent years, partly because of the cost savings it promises to introduce. After all, there is no more efficient way to produce calories for human consumption than by sprouting them from the ground. By transforming plants into small bioreactors, molecular farming companies can take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness of leveraging traditional row crops as protein production engines.

Read the full story at The Spoon. 

Watch as This Robot Pizza Chain Operator Breaks Down the Cost Each Part of the Pizza-Making Process

For small operators (and big ones as well) in the pizza business, Andrew Simmons’s posts on Linkedin have become must-read material.

That’s because Simmons, who I wrote about last year as he experimented with utilizing pizza automation technology in his San Diego area restaurant, has open-sourced his learnings as he continues experimenting with various forms of technology. And boy, is he experimenting!

And it’s not just automation (though that’s a big part). He’s constantly tinkering with every part of his restaurant tech stack as he expands beyond his original restaurant and looks to create a nationwide chain of tech-powered pizza restaurants. Add in the fact that he’s utilizing a crowdfunding model in which he sells subscriptions and a share of future pizza profits, and Simmons has created a live in-process testing lab for how to build a next-gen pizza chain that everyone can learn from.

One example of his highly detailed learnings that I found fascinating is his post today detailing the cost-per-pizza after allocating the costs of the different pizza-making automation he’s deployed in one of his restaurants. The video, seen below, shows how much each part of the process — dough making, doughball prep, dough-pressing, toppings allocation — costs and how he arrives at a 2024 price-per-pie of $1.91.

You can see the full story (and watch the video) about Andrew Simmons’s new cost breakdown of his food robotics stack at The Spoon. 

Watch The Figure 01 Robot Feed A Human, Sort The Dishes, And Stammer Just Like Us

While much of the startup funding for food-centric robots has been for task-specific fast-automation from the likes of Picnic Robot and Chef Robotics, some of the more intriguing – and creepy – action is happening with humanoid robots.

The latest entry into the “watch a humanoid robot handle kitchen tasks” files is from Figure, which just showed off the latest capabilities of the Figure 01 robot by showing how it can identify food and sort through kitchen tasks.

What really stands out to me is the weirdly human voice of the robot, which includes very human-like pauses and slight stammers. As an example, in one exchange, a human interviewer asks Figure 01 to explain why it handed over an apple. Figure 01 responds with a quick “On it” and then goes on to explain, complete with an “uh” pause that makes you almost think there’s an actor behind the curtain spitting out the lines.

You can see the full story (and watch the video) about Figure 01’s cooking prowess at The Spoon. 

Amazon Pulling ‘Just Walk Out’ from Amazon Fresh Grocery Stores

According to a story published in The Information, Amazon is planning to pull its Just Walk Out cashierless technology from its large-format grocery store, Amazon Fresh.

As part of the move, the company will begin to deploy its Dash smart shopping carts. Like Just Walk Out, the Dash carts have embedded computer vision, allowing customers to scan products as they put them in the cart.

“We’ve also heard from customers that while they enjoyed the benefit of skipping the checkout line with Just Walk Out, they also wanted the ability to easily find nearby products and deals, view their receipt as they shop, and know how much money they saved while shopping throughout the store,” Amazon spokesperson Jessica Martin told Chain Store Age. “To deliver even more convenience to our customers, we’re rolling out Amazon Dash Cart, our smart-shopping carts, which allows customers all these benefits including skipping the checkout line.”

That Amazon pulled it from Fresh stores (of which there are 44 locations, nearly half in California) isn’t the end of Just Walk Out. The company plans to continue using the technology in its small-format Amazon Go stores and stadiums (such as Lumen Field).

Read the full story at The Spoon. 

Check Out This Session at Smart Kitchen Summit!

We’re putting together two action-packed days at our upcoming Smart Kitchen Summit, where we’ll discuss how technologies like AI and electrification and emerging trends like the invisible kitchen will change the consumer meal journey. 

One session we’re really excited about is How AI Changes the Game For The Consumer Kitchen, a visionary talk from the founder of Samsung Food, Nick Holzherr. Nick will talk about lessons learned as an early pioneer using AI for consumer recipe recommendation, how Samsung is leveraging AI for its new food app, and where he sees all this heading in the future. 

You can hear Nick’s talk and connect with him, as well as our other great speakers, at the Smart Kitchen Summit on June 4-5th in Seattle. 

Tickets for SKS can be purchased now. Use discount code NEWSLETTER to get 15% off the price of tickets at checkout. If you are interested in sponsoring SKS, you can find out more at the SKS website.

Our Next Food AI Co-Lab Event is on April 18th!

Last month, we kicked off our Food AI Co-Lab with our first ever event!

As I wrote earlier, the Food AI Co-Lab is a collaboration that aims to be a meeting space and learning center for leaders who are building the future of food through artificial intelligence. We will explore different topics, engage with our community, and provide information such as industry surveys about what people are doing at the intersection of food and AI.

We had a great time at our first event talking to Dr. Patrick Story, a professor of Philosophy at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and Kevin Brown, the CEO of Innit, about how they see AI changing food. You can watch our conversation here.

And you definitely won’t want to miss our next event, which will feature Chris Young, coauthor of Modernist Cuisine and founder of ChefSteps and Combustion, and Antonio Gagliardi, technology and design lead for Barilla’s BluRhapsody 3D printed pasta project. You can sign up for this exciting conversation on April 18th here.  I also encourage you to join our Linkedin Group where we will be featuring special content from these conversations as well as more of our projects for the Co-Lab. 

We hope to see you there!

The Spoon Weekly: Tobacco Plant Bioreactors, Roboburgers & Starbucks NFTs

Welcome to the Spoon Weekly. The Spoon Weekly features some of our favorite food tech stories from the past week. Make sure to subscribe to get it delivered directly to your inbox.

BioBetter is Turning Tobacco Plants into Bioreactors to Drive Down the Cost of Cultivated Meat Growth Media

Food tech startup BioBetter has developed a novel way to create growth factors for cell-cultivated meat utilizing tobacco plants.

Based in Kiryat Shemona, Israel, the company announced that it has developed a method to create growth factors via molecular farming techniques by essentially turning the tobacco plant into a bioreactor. BioBetter’s technology employs plant cells to produce growth factors instead of more traditional techniques which utilize yeast, bacteria, or CHO in a bioreactor to produce growth factors.

The company’s technology involves identifying the gene of the target protein, cloning it, and transferring it into the tobacco plant. They then select the highest-yielding plants, breed them to develop higher yields, and then ultimately grow and harvest the plants.

As the tobacco plants mature, their cells express the growth factors and store them until harvest. The company then uses a proprietary protein extraction and purification technology that enables it to exploit nearly the entire plant, producing a high purity product at lower overall costs.

To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.

As Meat Prices Rise, Could Plant-Based Meat Become a Value Option for Consumers?

Have you seen the price of meat lately?

It’s not pretty. The average price of a pound of ground beef in the United States has jumped over 20% in the past year and seems to just keep going up.

Meanwhile, the cost of a 12-ounce package of Impossible ground has continued to drop and is showing up at under $6 at some retail establishments, about the same price of a pound of extra lean ground beef.

Not quite price parity…yet. But as Impossible and other plant-based meat providers continue to ramp up volume, it’s worth asking: when meat alternatives reach price parity and, eventually, sell at a discount to animal meat, could customers start reaching for plant-based meat to save a buck?

You can read the full post at The Spoon.

Here Are Four Ways Starbucks Could Get Into The NFT Business

Starbucks is getting into the NFT business.

That’s according to company CEO Howard Schultz, who recently held a company town hall to discuss what the company’s plans are for the coming year. Schultz, who retook the reigns of the coffee giant this week, said the company would be in the NFT business before the end of the calendar year.

“If you look at the companies, the brands, the celebrities, the influencers that are trying to create a digital NFT platform and business, I can’t find one of them that has the treasure trove of assets that Starbucks has, from collectibles to the entire heritage of the company,” Schultz said.

While it can often be cringe-inducing when CEOs talk about new digital formats – something Schultz acknowledged by admitting he’s not a digital native – he’s right that the company has many assets that could be tokenized and create new ways to engage with its customers.

You can read the full post here. 

The Spoon is Hiring!

Do you love food tech? Are you a dynamic sales leader who can close? We want to talk! The Spoon is looking for a sales lead to help generate new sales, expand existing relationships and help build our business! Check this and other positions out at the Spoon Job Board!

Smart Kitchen

Holy Smokes: FirstBuild’s Arden Indoor Smoker Hits Crowdfunding Target in Two Minutes

FirstBuild, GE Appliances’ innovation arm, has launched its latest crowdfunding campaign, and this one looks like a potential home run.

The same group that brought you the Opal ice machine and the Paragon induction cooktop are now bringing an indoor pellet smoker called Arden to market via a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. The Arden can smoke up to two racks of ribs at a time or a small brisket, all inside your home without setting your fire alarms off.

The Arden uses a smoke-elimination technology that requires no additional filters to clean or replace. According to FirstBuild, the technology was first developed for GE’s smart hearth oven and has now been incorporated into the Arden.

The unit uses the same pellets used with other smokers. Once the smoke is pulled out of the chamber and into the smoke eliminator, it eliminates all smoke and just CO2 and water are exhausted into the kitchen. This allows users to sit the Arden on a countertop and smoke a slab of meat without any special venting.

To read the full story, head here.

Lomi, Unboxed: A First Look at The Lomi Smart Food Waste Composter

I find food tech fascinating – especially the products and solutions that have a shot at fixing a real problem in our food system. Tackling issues like food waste, food insecurity, nutrition, and accessibility, technology can give us the tools to change habits and systems.

But, I admit I haven’t always adopted tech in my own home that has made a huge change in our own food habits outside of our beloved sous vide, and nothing that stuck when it came to food waste. With growing kids, our grocery bills keep increasing, but I throw out more food on busy weeks than I’d ever like to admit.

Composting at home has never been an easy or…neat endeavor; we’ve tried several times, using smaller receptacles to collect food scraps to bring out to a larger pile. But no matter what, we abandoned our efforts for lack of time and patience. One year, we even subscribed to a service that would drop off nutrient-dense compost soil for us to use in our vegetable garden. We paid someone for THEIR broken-down food scraps — and it turns out, nutrient-rich, locally harvested, hand-delivered compost is not cheap.

To read the full story, head here.

Smart Kitchen Platform Company Drop Changes Name to Fresco

Drop dropped Drop.

The startup that started with a connected scale eight years ago announced it has a new brand identity. The company is now called Fresco, a name which “(reflects) the company’s priority to connect dots in the kitchen between appliances, home cooks and recipes to make cooking effortless,” said the announcement.

Fresco CEO Ben Harris said that the company needed a new brand given its evolution beyond its hardware roots.

“Drop was a great name for a physical product, but we pivoted to become a smart kitchen platform, providing end-to-end solutions to make appliances connected, from firmware development to IoT expertise and an app that pulls all the appliances together,” Harris said. “As a result, we needed a brand that better represented this.”

Drop is part of a cohort of smart kitchen startups that offer software and connectivity solutions to power kitchen appliances and help consumers cook and plan meals. While some of its peers have increasingly focused on shoppable recipes and looked to help power online grocery integrations, Drop has doubled down on expanding its solutions and increasing its partner roster in the connected kitchen and guided cooking space.

To read the full story, head here.

Future Food

Plant-Based Eggs Starting to Crack Open The European Market
 

Here in the US, a version of a plant-based egg from Eat Just, Inc. has been on the market since 2013, starting with an earlier version from when the company was Hampton Creek. The company’s current product, which uses its flagship mung bean formulation, began selling in the US market in 2019.

But if you wanted to try JUST Egg in Europe, you were out of luck.

That’s about to change. That’s because the company just got approval for its mung bean protein from the European Commission. The approval, which follows an earlier greenlight last fall by the European Food Safety Authority, paves the way for the introduction of JUST Egg to the European market by the fourth quarter of 2022.

That’s not the only good news if you are looking for an egg alternative in Europe. Berlin-based Perfeggt has been working on an egg alternative that derives its protein punch from fava beans, and is starting to ship in Germany.

Read the full post here.

Israel’s Vanilla Vida Wants to Expand and Improve the World’s Favorite Flavor

Here’s a fun fact: Did you know that vanilla is the world’s most popular flavor? In addition, how about the idea that 95% of all vanilla sold is synthetic, generally made from an oil or lab-developed chemical compound. Sounds like a supply and demand issue for a real deal vanilla pod.

Vanilla Vida has done its homework and sees an opportunity to tickle the universal taste buds by using technology and data to produce large quantities of top-quality vanilla anywhere in the world. Madagascar and Indonesia are the top crop producers but face issues with uncertain weather, quality control issues, and a long drying process. With proof of concept completed, Vanilla Vida CEO Oren Zilberman is ready to expand beyond Israel and launch climate-controlled farms worldwide.

Zilberman’s experience as a VC is instrumental in the success of his new company. “When you are building a startup, you are always looking about what is the chance it can do a major impact and some change in the world and at the same time, have a really good business,” the company’s CEO said in a recent interview with The Spoon. He also explained that his experience led him not to want to develop something new or go into an unproven segment. By expanding the opportunity for a wildly popular product, such as vanilla, Vanilla Vida can hit the ground running instead of requiring a great deal of marketing to drive customer awareness.

Read the full post here

Food Robots

Chili’s is Trialing a Sidewalk Delivery Robot From Serve Robotics

Hankering for some Chili’s but don’t want to jump in your car? It might not be long before that grilled chicken and bowl of chili arrive at your front door via sidewalk robot.

That’s because Chili’s parent company Brinker has been secretly piloting a trial with sidewalk delivery startup Serve Robotics and is evaluating the possibility of a wider rollout.

The first hint of the Brinker-Serve pilot came via a small mention last week in an article in a Dallas publication about the company’s drone delivery trials with Flytrex. Both Brinker and Serve have since confirmed to The Spoon that they are running an early stage sidewalk delivery pilot but were not ready to discuss further details of a wider rollout.

“We can confirm Serve is working with Brinker International to roll out robotic delivery for Chili’s customers,” a Serve spokesperson told the Spoon. “We will have more to share once service is launched.”

To read the full story, click here!

Watch This Video of RoboBurger, a Robot Burger Vending Machine, Cooking Up Burgers

Over the past couple of years, there’s been no shortage of robotic vending machines cooking up everything from salads to bowl food to ramen to pizza. But, what we haven’t seen – until earlier this week – is a machine that makes the cornerstone meal of the American fast food marketplace, the hamburger.

The RoboBurger, a robotic burger vending machine, arrived at its first location in a New Jersey shopping mall. The machine, a fully autonomous machine that makes a complete burger in minutes, showed up at the Newport Centre mall in Jersey City, New Jersey. The box measures 12 square feet, plugs into a 220-volt wall socket, has a built-in refrigerator and an automated griddle and cleaning system. The self-contained machine holds up to 50 frozen burger patties and cooks each burger one at a time.

You can read full post here.

The Spoon Weekly: Cow NFTs, Impossible Gets New CEO, Farm Robots Rising

This is the Spoon Weekly, a collection of some of the most interesting stories from the past week. Make sure to subscribe to get the top food tech news delivered straight to your inbox.

‘It’s Like a Driver’s License for Cows’: Why One Wyoming Company is Creating NFTs for Cattle

Back when Rob Jennings helped found the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition back in 2017, he knew he needed to find a use case that resonated with residents of the Cowboy State. It didn’t take him long before he settled on beef.

“Back then, there was a lot of conversation around about how grass-fed, grain-finished Wyoming fat cattle beef was being mixed into commodity feed yards with lesser animals, let’s say,” Jennings said on a Zoom call with The Spoon. “And so we developed this idea about how you could use blockchain to verify the animal’s provenance.”

Back then, Jennings worked with the University of Wyoming to develop the technology for his first blockchain startup called Beefchain. And while he and other early blockchain enthusiasts found the idea of putting the information about a steer on the blockchain exciting, Jennings found the response more muted when explaining the technology to ranchers, mainly because many of them still couldn’t see the immediate value of such a tech-forward solution.

That’s when Jennings started to think about ways to utilize NFTs. With the early implementations of storing cattle data on the blockchain, Jennings said they would hash an entire excel spreadsheet and put it on the bitcoin blockchain.

“Yes, you’re putting the information there, but it wasn’t functional,” said Jennings.

You can read the full story here.

Meet the All-New Samsung Kiosk: Powered by GRUBBRR (Sponsor)

Working with less staff? Maximize your workplace efficiency with Samsung and GRUBBRR’s affordable labor solution.

Alt Protein

Impossible’s New CEO Will Need to Navigate a Fast-Changing Plant-Based Meat Marketplace

This week Impossible Foods announced that founding CEO Pat Brown is stepping down from his current role and assuming the new role of Chief Visionary Officer. The company’s new CEO will be longtime Chobani exec Peter McGuinness, who recently served as the yogurt pioneer’s president and COO.

Explaining the move in a company blog post, Brown said that as Impossible has grown in size and scale, he’s had less time to devote to strategic initiatives, communicating the company’s mission to the public and policymakers, and guiding R&D for new products. Brown said the demands on the role of CEO at Impossible Foods will only continue to grow, which means now is the time to appoint a proven executive to lead the execution of the company’s day-to-day business.

From the post:

Peter and I will work together to lead Impossible and its long-term strategy, combining our complementary strengths and experience. Peter will be our CEO and a director, and will report to the board. I will continue in my role as Founder and director, and take on the role of Chief Visionary Officer reporting to the board, leading research and technology innovation, strategic initiatives, public advocacy and, most importantly, our mission. 

McGuinness comes aboard at a time of uncertainty for the plant-based meat industry. Starting last fall, we began to see signs of a potential slowdown in sales across the segment. This year, companies like Kellogg’s are warning of continued soft sales and predicting a possible shakeout.

You can read the full post here. 

The Netherlands House of Representatives Passes Motion to Legalize Samples of Cell-Cultured Meat

Last week, the Netherlands’ House of Representatives passed a motion to make the sampling of cell-cultured meat legal. The passing of the motion, proposed by the D66 and VVD parties, is being hailed by Dutch cell-cultured meat companies as an important step towards legalizing the sale of cell-cultured meat at retail.

Maastricht, Netherlands-based Mosa Meat is famously co-founded by Mark Post, who kickstarted the lab-grown meat industry when he created the world’s first cell-cultured hamburger back in 2013. The company applauded the move by its home country’s government as a first step towards legalizing the consumption of the product.

The move “speaks volumes about the momentum that is building for innovation in sustainable meat production,” the company told Dutch TV organization RTL.

Dutch politicians are understandably proud that their country is seen as the birthplace for cell-cultured meat innovation and see this move as one that will help them continue to stay relevant as startups around the world race to bring their products to market.

To read the full story, click here.

Kitchen Tech

Canadian Sisters Launch Capra Press, a French Press That Doesn’t Oversteep and Eliminates Messy Cleanup

Mia and Zoey Knobler had a love-hate relationship with the French press. The two sisters from British Columbia loved the richer flavored coffee that resulted from the steep and plunge appliance, but hated the messy clean-up and the over-brewed coffee resulting from continued exposure to the grounds.

So they set to making a French press that had all the upside of that full-bodied first pour but not the downside of over-brewed coffee and sludgy cleanup. The result was the Capra Press, which debuted this week on Indiegogo and has raised over $32 thousand as of this writing.

The sisters teamed up with product designer Jeff Polster to create a French press with two interesting differentiators. The first is a mesh filter that seals after pressing, preventing bitter coffee from over-extraction. The filter utilizes silicon umbrella valves that seal the grounds into the bottom after plunging.

The second feature is a removable bottom that enables easier cleanup. Called the “grounds-keeper,” the twist-off bottom allows the user to dispose of the grounds into the trash or compost.

Read the full post here.

Food Robots

Chipotle Trialing a Tortilla-Making Robot Named Chippy, Eyeing Wider Rollout Later This Year

Today Chipotle announced they have launched Chippy, a tortilla-making robot.

The company is working with Miso Robotics, the company behind the Flippy fast-food robotic arm robot. As you can see below, Chippy is a slightly modified variation of Miso’s Flippy bot, only instead of flipping burgers or frying potatoes, the bot is optimized to make Chipotle’s tortilla chips.

Apparently, the customization for Chippy included producing tortilla chips with varying degrees of seasoning to mimic the imperfect work product of more carbon-based life forms. “Everyone loves finding a chip with a little more salt or an extra hint of lime,” said Nevielle Panthaky, Chipotle’s Vice President of Culinary, in the release. “To ensure we didn’t lose the humanity behind our culinary experience, we trained Chippy extensively to ensure the output mirrored our current product, delivering some subtle variations in flavor that our guests expect.”

According to the release, Chipotle is currently testing Chippy at their innovation hub in Irvine, Calif., with plans to integrate Chippy into a Chipotle restaurant in Southern California later this year.

“The company is leveraging its stage-gate process to listen, test and learn from crew and guest feedback before deciding on a national implementation strategy,” the release said.

In other words, Chipotle is trialing Chippy to evaluate (and possibly prepare for) a potentially wider rollout of the robot to essentially automate the chip-making process.

To read the full story, click here!

Growmark, One of North America’s Largest Ag Coops, Tests a Farming Robot from Solinftec

Growmark, one of North America’s largest agriculture supply cooperatives, has partnered with agtech solution provider Solinftec to trial a new scanning and field monitoring robot.

According to the announcement sent to The Spoon, the new robot is powered by a neuro-network that features a detection algorithm to scan for crop health and nutrition, insects, and weeds, as well as monitor the entire field and provide real-time insights back to the farmer.

Growmark will trial the new robot for the bulk of the 2022 farming season and work with Solinftec to optimize the technology for planting to harvesting. This trial is the first evaluation of a farming robot under Growmark’s AgValidity­ testing program, the coop’s program to evaluate new ag technology products.

Growmark’s partnership with Solinftec is a sign of growing interest in automation on the farm. Coops serve as an important channel for new technologies to make their way into everyday use on the farm. With a network of regional FS coops that spans 40 states and into Canada, Growmark holds significant sway in technology used by farmers.

You can read full post here.

The Spoon Weekly: Cana Pricing, Humanoid Cashiers, AI-Powered Food Innovation

Welcome to the Spoon food tech weekly wrap-up, featuring some of our top stories of the past week!

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Cana Unveils Pricing for Molecular Beverage Printer, Gives a Peek Inside

Last week Cana, a company building a countertop drink printer that makes nearly any type of beverage, announced pricing for the drink machine, beverage cartridges, and the estimated ship date for the product.

Called the Cana One, the company’s first countertop beverage printer will have a limited time price of $499 for the first 10 thousand orders, after which it will be priced at $799. Customers can reserve a Cana One at the lower price for $99 on the company’s website (the $99 will be applied to the purchase price).

The company will ship everything necessary to make a drink – the sweeteners, alcohol, and the molecular drink cartridges – to the customer’s home. When the Cana One auto-detects that cartridges are getting low, the company will automatically ship them to the customer’s home.

How much the Cana One user pays for ingredients largely depends on consumption. Customers will order drinks and pay anywhere from $0.29 to $2.99 per beverage. The more a customer consumes, the more they pay, and the faster Cana is shipping out replenishment to their doorstep.

You can read the full story here.

Food Robotics

Are We Ready for Humanoid Robots Like Ameca to Take Our Food Order?

If you watched the news coming out of CES, you probably saw a robot named Ameca talking to attendees on the trade show floor.

The robot, whose human(ish) eyes and facial expressions had Elon Musk freaked out when it showed up on Twitter last December, went viral during CES in January as press and attendees tweeted out videos of the humanoid interacting with attendees.

Ever since CES, I haven’t been able to shake the image of Ameca and wonder when we might see a robot like her at my corner restaurant. And, once humanoid robots start to show up in our restaurants, I can’t help but wonder how exactly consumers will feel about it? After all, it’s one thing to show off futuristic technology at a geek-filled conference like CES. It’s another to see it in your local restaurant.

Why wonder, you ask? After all, aren’t today’s front-of-house robots more R2D2 than C3PO, and didn’t a spokesperson for the company behind Ameca say it’s probably a decade before a robot like her is walking on the streets amongst us.

You can read the full post here. 

Restaurant Tech

DoorDash Acquires In-Venue Order & Pay Specialist Bbot

Food delivery giant DoorDash announced last week they have entered into an agreement to buy Bbot, a New York-based maker of order and pay software for restaurants. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Bbot, which offers a suite of off-premise and in-venue ordering solutions, is best known for its in-venue QR code offering that allows customers to pull up the menu, order, and pay for items with their phones. The company has seen rapid growth over the past couple of years as restaurants raced to upgrade their digital ordering capabilities and install contactless payment solutions during the pandemic. The company’s fast growth led to not one but two funding rounds in 2021 and was enough to convince Doordash to scoop up the company.

For DoorDash, which launched its restaurant e-commerce platform DoorDash Storefront in 2020, the BBot deal helps expand its digital suite to include payment and in-venue offerings.

You can read the full story here.

McDonald’s Resistance to Ice Cream Machine Fix Strikes Discordant Note Amidst Chain’s Tech Stack Modernization Push

You know how they say it’s not what you know, but who you know? That’s doubly true if you’re trying to insert yourself into McDonald’s technology supplier network.

Just ask Kytch, a company that makes a device that fixes the burger giant’s perpetually broken ice cream machines. You’d think that McDonald’s would welcome such a fix since, after all, their ice cream machines are broken so often they’ve become meme-worthy.

Apparently not, as illustrated by the burger chain’s orchestrated email campaign warning franchisees to stay away from Kytch, claiming it violated the machinery’s warranty, intercepted confidential info, and suggested the device was dangerous to operators since it has a remote operation function. McDonald’s also used the email campaign to promote a new ice cream machine from Taylor (the manufacturer of the oft-broken machines), which promised to have similar remote management features as the Kytch appliance.

According to Kytch, the McDonald’s email campaign killed their business and severely hobbled plans to launch an entire line of connected kitchen products for pro kitchens.

You can read the full post here.

Alt Protein

Cultivated Meat Has a Production Capacity Problem. Yossi Quint Has a Plan to Fix It

Yossi Quint wants the cultivated meat industry to succeed. However, to reach its potential, he thinks the nascent industry has one major hurdle to overcome: a severe lack of production capacity.

Quint arrived at this conclusion while working at McKinsey, where he often worked on projects for clients in the food and beverage industry. During one deep dive into the cultivated meat market, he became convinced that this new form of food production had the potential to be a multibillion-dollar industry, but would never fulfill its potential unless it can increase production by orders of magnitude over its current capacity.

To get there, Quint believed that equipment used to make cell-cultivated meat – giant metal vats called bioreactors – needed to be built specifically for the market. That’s because bioreactors used by today’s cultivated meat producers are usually modified versions of hardware made for the pharmaceutical industry, an industry with completely different unit cost economics than that of food.

Out of this challenge, the idea for his company was born. Ark Biotech is building next-generation, high-volume bioreactors for the cultivated meat industry. I sat down with Quint to discuss the challenges of developing hardware for the cultivated meat industry and where he sees the infrastructure market going in the future. The answers have been lightly edited for brevity.

Why did you decide to start the company?

I was working at McKinsey had the opportunity to work with many different companies. And I had a chance to dig pretty deep into the cultivated meat space and think in-depth about what was needed in this industry to succeed over time—doing everything from consumer insights work to thinking about how to reduce unit economics and scale up. But, as I dug into scale-up, I quickly realized that biomanufacturing will be the bottleneck for this industry to grow. And that there are very few, perhaps no players, out there that are offering sensible solutions for industrial-scale cultivated meat production.

You can read the full story here.

NotCo Built a Unicorn Using AI To Accelerate Food Innovation. CEO Matias Muchnick Tells The Spoon How They Did It

When Matias Muchnick started NotCo in 2015, food innovation was a slow-moving process.

“Food R&D was three guys in lab coats, doing trial and error in a developmental kitchen,” said Muchnick in a recent interview with The Spoon. “Reading research papers from 1980 about using soy to replace animal-based ingredients. That was it. So whenever you have an industry that has a very obsolete technology, then a lot of bad things happen.”

He and his co-founders wanted to create new plant-based food products, but they wanted to do it in a new way that didn’t rely on antiquated methodologies. Eventually, they started wondering if using technology like artificial intelligence could help them make better decisions and help create new types of food faster.

They decided yes and started building an extensive database of information about all the components that create the taste and experience of food.

“Your machine learning will always be directly proportionate to the amount of data and the dimensions of data that you collect,” said Muchnick. “So from the very beginning, understanding what data was relevant for the objective that we were trying to do, which was replacing animals with plants, was important to us.”

You can read the full story here.

Food Retail & Tech

Tech-Powered Retail is Flourishing in the Food Industry. Everywhere Else, Not So Much

When B8ta launched in 2015, I loved the idea. What wasn’t there to like about a highly experiential, tech-powered retail concept where consumers could try out cool new gadgets and companies could get invaluable early feedback about their products?

The same with Amazon Books, which opened the same year. I mean, sure, it almost seemed cruel that the dominant e-tailer was going to head to head with Barnes & Noble on their turf, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t intrigued to see how the tech giant might rethink physical goods retail.

Fast forward to this year, and within the span of a couple weeks, we’ve learned both B8ta and Amazon Books are closing their doors.

Contrast this with the world of food retail. Everyone from Amazon to Walmart to upstarts like Nourish & Bloom are employing cutting-edge technology like AI, robotics, and more to power new food shopping experiences. So why is it that tech-powered food retail is flourishing while other retail concepts seem to struggle?

To read the full story, click here!

The Spoon Weekly: Food Replicators, Pizza Hut Robot, Scaling Future Food

Cana Unveils a ‘Netflix for Drinks’ That Can Make Nearly Any Type of Beverage

In late 2018, food tech entrepreneur and investor Dave Friedberg got together with a few scientists for dinner and drinks and talked about a research study that suggested most any beverage is made up almost entirely of water, with only about one percent or so making up a drink’s unique flavor.

It wasn’t long before someone wondered aloud if it would be possible to create a machine that could synthesize nearly any drink.

“Why not just make the Star Trek Replicator and let people print any drink they want, when they want, right in their own home?”

That night the concept for the Cana, a ‘molecular drink printer’, was born.

The device, which one investor describes as a “Netflix for drinks”, uses a single cartridge filled with flavor compounds that Friedberg claims can make a nearly infinite number of drinks: “We know we can print an infinite number of beverages from a few core flavor compounds. We know we can do this across many existing beverage categories — juice, soda, hard seltzer, cocktails, wine, tea, coffee, and beer. Consumer taste testing panels score our printed beverages at the same or better taste levels as commercially available alternatives. Our hardware designs will print beverages quickly and accurately. Our pricing and the footprint of our hardware can yield significant savings and advantages for most households..”

To read the full article about Cana’s molecular beverage printer, head over to The Spoon.

Virtual Event: The New Restaurant Tech Stack

For today’s restaurants, it’s no longer enough to rely on disjointed technology systems cobbled together over time. Creating a great customer experience that attracts dining dollars starts with having the right technology in place. It starts with a stack, built from the ground up, with the future in mind.

Join us on February 16th at 10:00 am Pacific for The New Restaurant Tech Stack webinar; we will explore the challenges for restaurant operators to build a modern technology infrastructure to power their consumer experience across all consumer touchpoints. 

This event is sponsored by Paytronix. 

Register for a free spot now!

Food Tech Predictions for 2022

You want food tech predictions? We got em! Last week we look at restaurant tech, food robotics, plant-based meat and consumer kitchen tech. Below are excerpts from each.

Five Predictions for Consumer Food & Kitchen Tech in 2022

Meet The Smart Food Delivery Locker

For the last few years, companies like Walmart, Amazon, and others have been trying to figure out how to deliver food when we’re not home. Ideas have run the gamut, from delivering products directly to our fridges, onto our dinner tables, depositing groceries in our garage, to even dropping deliveries into our car trunk.

All this effort would be unnecessary if homes just had temperature-controlled storage lockers, something that – at least until lately – hadn’t existed.

Until now. This month Walmart and HomeValet announced a pilot program that will deliver fresh groceries to the HomeValet smart outdoor delivery receptacle. Another company, Fresh Portal, is building a temperature-controlled home delivery box that is accessible both outside (for delivery companies) and inside the home. And then there’s Dynosafe, who appeared on Shark Tank in the spring of 2021 and got an investment from Robert Herjavec.

While companies like Yale have been making smart boxes for delivery for a little while, there hasn’t been a widely available temperature-controlled smart storage box. In 2022, I expect we’ll start seeing more deals like the Walmart/HomeValet deal, as well as some integration deals with third-party delivery providers.

To read all of our predictions for consumer kitchen tech, head to The Spoon. 

Five Plant-Based Meat Predictions for 2022

The Year of the Whole Cut

After years of countless plant-based burgers and other minced alt-meat product introductions, the plant-based meat industry will see lots more whole cut analogs make it to market in 2022 and beyond.

We first got a hint at CES 2019 that Impossible was interested in whole cuts when The Spoon broke the story the company was working on a steak, but since that time we’ve seen a bunch of companies announce they are working on building whole cut alternatives.

Juicy Marbles, Novameat and Redefine Mean are also working on whole cut steak analogs. Others like Atlast are offering mycelium-based whole cut bacon. Then there are those making whole-cut seafood analogs like that from Plantish.

Many of these companies are looking to deliver their products in 2022, and you can expect a wave of new plant-based whole cut concepts introduced throughout the year.

You can read all of my plant-based meat predictions on The Spoon. 

Five Food Robotics Predictions for 2022

Restaurants-in-a-Box Start Rolling Out

Get ready for the restaurant in-a-box. There are a number of startups with robo-restaurant concepts already in fully operational pilot tests who are looking to expand with multiple self-contained robot restaurants in 2022.

Hyper-Robotics, which makes fully automated containerized robot pizza restaurants that can pump out up to 50 pies per hour, is beginning to roll out its pizza robot restaurants in Israel. Cala, a French startup that makes fully autonomous pasta-making robots, is already operating a robot in Paris’ fifth arrondissement district. Another startup called Mezli, which is currently running its containerized bowl-food restaurant in Kitchentown, has plans to eventually launch more locations.

These are just a few self-contained robo-restaurants and we expect to see many more rollout in 2022.

Check out all of my food robotics predictions for 2022 on The Spoon. 

Five Restaurant Tech Predictions for 2022

Restaurants Will Deploy More AI, Automation & Cloud-Powered Labor to Offset Labor Challenges

Like many other restaurant chains, Checkers has struggled in recent years to find enough workers to cover the various shifts. Going forward, they won’t have to worry about that when it comes to manning the drive-thru as the company rolls out AI-powered voice bots to 267 of their restaurants.

This is only one example of how we’ll see restaurants embrace more technology to deal with what has become a permanent labor shortage in the restaurant space. Of course, automation and robotics will also be a part of the equation, but I think we’ll also see more restaurants find help through remote labor through platforms like Bite Ninja.

See all my restaurant tech predictions for 2022 on The Spoon.

Planning food tech world domination in 2022? Run a campaign with The Spoon!

We are experts in virtual events and webinars, have massive reach with our hugely popular newsletter, and reach hundreds of thousands of readers every month at The Spoon. 

Reach out for a media kit and we’ll be in touch!

Here Are The Details About Flyfish Club, Gary Vaynerchuk’s NFT Restaurant Opening in 2023

While we already knew some of the basic details about Gary Vaynerchuk and VCR Group’s NFT restaurant concept, we’ve learned more in the last week about how the whole thing will work.

Here’s some of what we’ve learned and my quick thoughts:

Token as Membership. At a high level, the Flyfish Club and its NFT membership is essentially a new, crypto-ized spin on an old idea: a member’s only dining club. To start, VCR initially made a total of 1,501 membership tokens for the Flyfish Club available to the public and reserved 1,534 for the company. Membership remains valid as long as a person owns the token. As just like most NFTs, the owner can resell the token (and many are already trying to do just that) on marketplaces like Opensea.

Flyfish Has Two-Tiered Membership. Flyfish has two types of tokens available: a Flyfish token and a Flyfish Omakase token. The Flyfish token, initially offered at 2.5 Ethereum (~$8,400), gets you into the restaurant and cocktail lounge while the Omakase token, offered at 4.25 Ethereum (~$14,300), gets you all that plus entry into the exclusive Omakase room.

To read all the details about Gary Vee’s NFT restaurant, head over to The Spoon.

ALSO!: David Rodolitz, the CEO of the Flyfish Club, will be speaking at our Food NFT and Metaverse mini-summit. Use discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets!

As Future Food Companies Look to Grow, A New Crop of Startups Lend a Hand on Biomanufacturing Scale-up

While companies creating precision fermented and cell-cultured food products continue to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, the reality is their products are still years away from making a significant dent in the overall consumption of a growing global population.

The primary reason for this is that these products still aren’t being produced at nearly the scale they need to feed billions of people. Some estimates have put the biomanufacturing capacity needed by 2030 at 10 billion liters in order to meet the projected demand for fermentation-based animal proteins.

The good news is that a growing number of companies are building out technology and services platforms to help these companies move towards scaled production. One such company is Solar Biotech, which makes customized plant architectures to help future food and other companies scale up their biomanufacturing capacity. The company has been working with startups such as Motif Foodworks and TurtleTree Labs to help them develop their product and move towards higher capacity production.

You can read the full story about the new crop of startups helping to scale future food at The Spoon

Pizza Hut Launches a Fully Robotic Restaurant-in-a-Box (Video)

This month, Pizza Hut debuted a fully automated robot-powered restaurant.

The ‘restaurant-in-a-box’ is based on technology from Hyper-Robotics, an Israel-based food robotics startup that makes containerized restaurants.

The restaurant is operating out of the parking lot of Drorim Mall, a shopping mall located in the central Israel city of Bnei Dror. The restaurant is fully self-contained, doing everything from dropping toppings to baking and boxing. About the only thing it doesn’t do is make the dough, but according to Hyper its pizza restaurant can hold up to 240 types of dough in different sizes.

When Hyper launched its robot pizza restaurant in November, it had a capacity of 50 pies per hour. It also had 30 warming cabinets, two robotic dispensing arms and dispensers for up to 12 toppings.

The customer initiates an order for a pizza directly from a touchscreen kiosk on the restaurant exterior or through the Pizza Hut app. After the pizza is made and boxed, a Pizza Hut employee takes the pizza from a dispensing tray and hands it to the customer. In future versions, the restaurant will be able to dispense the pizza directly to the customer.

To read the full story and see a video of the Pizza Hut containerized robot, click here.