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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Startup Showcase

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SKS Hot Seat: Millo’s Aivaras Bakanas on The Ripple Effect of Smart, Silent Kitchen Appliances

I always feel a little guilty because I wake up a good hour before my roommates and one of the first things I do is make my morning smoothie. And our blender is loud.

Maybe I should think about investing in a Millo. The startup makes a platform with a powerful motor run by magnets, which is much quieter than a traditional motor. Their first product is a cordless, stylish blender, which impressed folks at SKS 2019 so much that Millo ended up winning the Innovation Award for the SKS Startup Showcase.

After collecting their award, we invited Aivaras Bakanas, co-founder and COO of Millo, to our SKS hot seat to answer a few questions about the company’s technology and what kitchen appliances they’ll be tackling next (hint: coffee grinders). Check out the video below and be on the lookout for more videos from SKS 2019 to hit The Spoon soon!

SKS Hot Seat Interview: Aivaras Bakanas of Millo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Scott Payton

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

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

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

Innovation Award: Millo
Judges: WeWork Food Labs team

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

Eat Safe Verified Wants to Fight Food Recalls and Waste with Radical Transparency

Remember last year’s notorious romaine lettuce recall? That was only one of hundreds of food recalls in 2018 alone. These outbreaks are the sort of food safety issues that a new startup called Eat Safe Verified (ESV) is trying to mitigate. Their solution? Putting more information into the hands of consumers in the form of an app that lists details about the contaminant testing, ingredient sourcing, manufacturing and more behind each product.

We were pretty intrigued by this concept, so we chose ESV as one of the 12 finalists for the SKS 2019 Startup Showcase. To give you a little taste of the action, we spoke with founder and CEO Kiran Kastury about how radical transparency can help solve widespread issues like food waste, allergic reactions and contamination.

Check out the Q&A then get your tickets to SKS to see Kastury pitch live in Seattle this October!

This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity.

First thing’s first: give us your 15-second elevator pitch.
Eat Safe Verified makes software that brings people and food closer together. Consumers can gain valuable insights into their food, while food businesses are able to easily share information across their supply chain to expedite their business processes, thereby ensuring effective transparency, communication, and collaboration.

What inspired you to start your company?
My co-founder and I collectively have spent years working in bio-tech, specifically in the food testing and analytical services sector, where we saw a huge number of food companies unable to effectively show their customers how they strove to make the best product possible. Furthermore, we were tired of hearing about situations like food recalls, consumers getting sick because of allergens or food contaminations, and food getting lost and wasted by the ton. We believed that in today’s tech-driven world, there had to be a better way for people to learn more about their food, and a better way for companies to easily share information throughout their network.

What’s the most challenging part of getting a food tech startup off the ground?
I think that education and awareness are probably the biggest hurdles for food tech startups right now. In the case of ESV, we are embarking on a mission of introducing the concepts of information sharing and transparency to an industry that hasn’t been faced with this sort of disruption just yet. We’re confident that with the right product however, we can transform how food is perceived by people on a daily basis.

How will your company change the day-to-day life of consumers and the food space as a whole?
With launching ESV, we are well on track for achieving the free flow of information all the way from the farm to the consumers’ fingertips. Consumers wouldn’t have to spend the significant amount of time they do now worrying about whether or not they are eating a potentially harmful allergen, putting irresponsibly created food in their bodies, adhering to dietary restrictions for heath or personal reasons. I think that ESV is the answer to ensuring that things like consumer miseducation, consumer harm, or food loss cease to happen as regularly.

Come watch Kastury pitch live onstage at the SKS Startup Showcase next month! Get 25% off your tickets here.

Rotten Avocados? StixFresh’s Sticker Will Keep Them From Going Bad

Have you ever bought a bunch of avocados that ripened so quickly you had to throw them away before you could use them?

Well I have, and I’m not the only one. In fact, almost half of food waste happens at home, often because of scenarios like the one above. StixFresh is a new startup that’s combatting downstream food waste in grocery stores and consumer kitchens — with a sticker. They’re also one of the finalist companies who will pitch live at the SKS 2019 Startup Showcase in October.

We spoke with StixFresh cofounder and CEO Moody Soliman to learn a little more about these seemingly magical food waste fighting stickers. Check out the Q&A below then grab your tickets to SKS before they sell out.

Give us your 15-second elevator pitch
At StixFresh, we’ve developed a food-safe sticker that can extend the shelf life of fresh fruit by up to two weeks. This simple sticker can be applied at any point along the produce supply chain.

What inspired you to start StixFresh?
My co-founder and I both have an unyielding passion for bringing innovative technologies to market that ultimately improve people’s health, safety and quality of life. This is exactly what we saw in StixFresh — a technology that truly has the potential to change the world. It will not only have an economical benefit, but it will also have enormous social and environmental benefits across governments, companies and communities around the world.

What have you found to be the most challenging part of getting a food startup off the ground?
In a food tech startup, efficacy and safety go hand-in-hand. You are not only faced with the challenge of developing an innovative and potentially disruptive technology that has to work, but it must also be 100% safe. Because of our backgrounds, this has been our focus from the get-go. Nevertheless, this requires extensive R&D and product development work. This takes significant resources in the form of time and money in order to do it right, neither of which are a luxury for most startups.

How will StixFresh change the day-to-day life of consumers and the food space as a whole?
StixFresh will (1) significantly reduce fresh food waste by extending shelf-life via an all-natural process, and (2) maintain the food’s freshness longer, thus allowing many communities (especially developing ones) to consume fresh, natural, organic foods they were not able to access previously.

Furthermore, fruits and vegetables account for the largest portion of wasted food in terms of mass. So, by reducing the food waste that makes up a significant portion of today’s landfills, StixFresh will help reduce our carbon footprint and foster more responsible stewardship of the huge amounts of natural resources required to grow our food. StixFresh will not only help consumers save money, it will also help farmers, governments, companies, and communities provide food sustainably, as well as help address the issue of climate change.

Come watch Moody pitch live and at the SKS Startup Showcase next month! Get 25% off your tickets here.

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

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

Here are some of the stories we discussed:

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

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

Meet the 12 Finalists for the SKS 2019 Startup Showcase!

Every year, attendees of the Smart Kitchen Summit {SKS} tell us that one of their favorite parts of the two-day conference is the Startup Showcase. It’s a time for our audience to get a glimpse at early-stage companies making innovative inroads in food and watch them demo cutting edge technologies.

This year we got so many applications for this competition we decided to split it up into two groups. The Startup Showcase will focus on food tech, such as connected kitchen appliances, recipe apps and cooking robots, while the Future Food Competition will highlight companies making innovative CPG products.

After much deliberation we’ve selected our 12 Startup Showcase finalists! Meet them below and look out for a post later this week introducing the Future Food finalists. Then be sure to snag your tickets to SKS to see both cohorts pitch live this October!

Startup Showcase Finalists

Anrich3d is developing a 3D food printer which can extrude food to match individuals’ precise nutritional requirements and taste preferences.

Anycart is a recipe discovery and meal planning app with transparent per-serving pricing for each dish. Users can search for recipes, order ingredients for delivery, and get guided step-by-step cooking assistance.

Botrista is a barista robot aimed at making craft beverages more accessible and affordable through automation.

bowl is an automated micro salad restaurant. Customers order their salad via the bowl app and are notified when their personalized salad is ready for pickup at the machine.

CocoTerra has developed the world’s first tabletop, bean-to-bar chocolate maker which can make dark, milk, and white chocolate in about two hours. Users can also create their own custom chocolate blends.

Eat Safe Verified is increasing food transparency by establishing a dedicated communication channel between food companies and consumers. Individuals can look up information about their food such as how it’s tested for contaminants.

Ends+Stems is a meal planning web app aimed at reducing household food waste. It’s a subscription-based service which provides curated meal plans and grocery lists based off of individuals’ dining preferences to reduce ingredient waste.

FET Kitchen brings a world of experts into your kitchen, via a digital screen in your kitchen backsplash, so you can take cooking classes when you want at home.

The HotSpot CookTop has the functionality of a flat top grill with the size and ease of a traditional cooktop so that home cooks can create restaurant-quality food at home.

LEVO is a countertop device that pairs with a mobile app to automate the infusing process, allowing individuals to make their own infused oils, soaps, butters, and more. It can also make CBD infusions.

Millo makes an updated kitchen blender that’s cordless, silent, efficient and beautiful enough to keep on your kitchen countertop. It connects to your phone for remote control and personalization.

StixFresh makes a food-safe sticker which can extend the shelf life of fresh fruit by up to two weeks. The sticker can be applied to produce at any point along the supply chain.

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Curious about this diverse group of food tech startups? Join us at the Smart Kitchen Summit on October 7-8! Make sure to get your tickets today and save 25% with code THESPOON25.

Video: Soggy Food Sucks Uses Thermodynamics to Keep your Fries Crisp During Delivery

“When we talk about the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS), it’s not just about being smart or connected,” said Michael Wolf before he announced the winner of the SKS 2018 Startup Showcase. “It’s about finding an interesting product that hasn’t been there before that solves for a real consumer need. And this winner really showed me that.”

Indeed, Soggy Food Sucks, who took home the title of Overall Winner at the Startup Showcase, makes a product that seems almost deceptively simple. Their frozen patch sticks to the inside of a food containers and wicks condensation to keep takeaway eats crispy, crunchy, and decidedly non-soggy. No artificial intelligence, virtual reality, or robots in sight.

Despite its lack of bells and whistles, Soggy Food Sucks captured the judges’ attention because it solves a real, relatable problem in the food delivery space: how to keep food crisp during its journey from the restaurant to your home.

“We’ve all experienced the disappointment of food delivery, when our food arrives after being ravaged — ravaged I say — by the horror of condensation,” preached Birgen onstage. So he decided to use his engineering know-how (he used to be an actual rocket scientist) and solve the problem with some basic chemistry.

Watch the full video to see Birgen’s charismatic pitch for a product that we think has the power to massively improve the food delivery business. See ya never, soggy fries.

SKS 2018 Startup Showcase: Soggy Food Sucks

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

SKS 2018: Meet the Winners of the SKS Startup Showcase

With so much of the innovation and breakthroughs in food and technology coming from the startups, we’d be remiss if we didn’t highlight the amazing work these companies are doing in the space. Throughout the last day and a half, various startups took the Smart Kitchen Summit stage to present their products. And while it’s never an easy task, our panel of judges managed to whittle the contenders down to a few winners, which we’ve summarized for you here:

Excellence in Design: MoJoe Brewing
ChefSteps co-founder Chris Young awarded the Excellence in Design award to MoJoe Brewing. MoJoe makes a portable coffee brewer and travel mug combo that lets users brew hot coffee or tea on the go, using any temperature water (even cold!). The device can be powered by a wall socket, car charger, or a rechargeable battery, and is slim enough to fit in a standard cupholder.

Best in Innovation: Garbi
Presented by Zorlu Ventures, the Best in Innovation award went to a company called Garbi. The startup makes a smart trash can that recognizes items you throw away and reorders them for you from local e-commerce retailers. The founder, Brandon Bourn, told the audience Garbi is also working on a recycling feature that would let Garbi’s garbage cans “sort” items into trash, recycling, or compost.

Overall Winner: Soggy Food Sucks
Michael Wolf stated that the overall winner solved a big consumer problem with a simple solution. The award went to the wonderfully named Soggy Food Sucks, which makes a patented peel-and-stick patch that absorbs condensation and to keep your food fresh — and never soggy — during transit.

We chatted with founder Bill Birgen (a former aerospace engineer!) a few weeks ago about his company and their mission to do one thing: keep restaurant leftovers and food delivery at its best.

Check back for more posts throughout the day, and follow along for a steady stream of updates on our Twitter and Instagram feeds.

Dizzconcept Makes Folding Kitchens for Cramped Spaces

In our urbanized world of tiny spaces, finding room for a kitchen can be tricky. That’s the problem that Dizzconcept, one of the 13 companies pitching at the Startup Showcase for the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) this October, is trying to solve. They create super compact pop-up kitchens that fold, so they can fit into small apartments, cramped offices, and more.

Read our Q&A with CEO Darko Špiljarić to learn a little more about how Dizzconcept hopes to bring kitchens to all sorts of spaces, no matter how tiny. Then get your tickets to see him pitch live at SKS!

This interview has been translated by Karlo Krnić and edited for clarity. 

The Spoon: First thing’s first: give us your 15-second elevator pitch.
Dizzconcept: PIA kitchens are dedicated to solving a number of issues that mainly impact young people in urban areas. PIA kitchens save valuable space and have low rental cost, energy requirements and impact on the environment. We have a fully functional kitchen that only takes up 1 to 1.6 square meters (depending on the model) and each comes with a support for a 40″ TV.

What inspired you to start Dizzconcept?
I was inspired by a personal need to find work that was creative. I was especially drawn to create innovative products which improve people’s lives.

What’s the most challenging part of getting a food tech startup off the ground?
The most challenging part of our kitchen startup is introducing our idea to the architects, interior designers and developers. It can be tricky to make them open to a new way of designing small spaces.

How will Dizzconcept change the day-to-day life of its users?
The buyers of our products enjoy using them. When designing a product such as PIA, users get numerous other benefits in addition to good design: better organization space, lower rental cost, lower heating and cooling costs, lower energy and material cost. Besides, they feel good because they’re contributing to protecting the environment.

What’s next for Dizzconcept?
Currently we are perfecting our outdoor kitchen set (Nota) that will introduce significant innovations and improvements over the typical outdoor kitchen. We are also developing a new space-saving program called MOVI.

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

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.

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.