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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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CES: Tackling Food Waste With Technology (Video)

The topic of food waste and innovation is so important — in the US alone, $408 billion worth of food is wasted each year. But the topic is too often overlooked when it comes to food tech conversations.

That’s why we invited experts to join us at the CES Food Tech Conference last month to talk about waste at different points in the food supply chain as well as the systemic issues plaguing the global food system.

We welcomed Vonnie Estes, Vice President of Innovation with the International Fresh Produce Association to moderate this panel with participants including Spencer Martin, CEO of Clew, Adian Mouat, Co-Founder & CEO of Hazel Technologies and Tim West, President of True West Ventures LLC.

The full panel — “Tackling Food Waste With Technology” is ready for viewing below.

Exclusive: Tastemade Acquiring Dining and Drinking Guides Platform ChefsFeed

Food media company Tastemade announced today that it is acquiring dining and drinking guide platform ChefsFeed. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Tastemade is the company behind a number of food, travel and home design-related video shows including Broken Bread with Roy Choi, Make This Tonight and Thirsty For.

ChefsFeed uses culinary experts to create a variety of different types of food- and drink-related content, including restaurant and bar guides for cities around the world, video recipes, mini-documentaries and live-streamed cooking classes.

In a press statement emailed to The Spoon, Tastemade said this acquisition will give the 6,000-plus culinary experts (chefs, mixologists, sommeliers, etc.) a larger platform on which to share their work.

Food-related video content took on a new purpose this past year as the pandemic limited travel abroad and shut down much of the restaurant industry. Rather than being just aspirational (Maybe I’ll try to make a soufflé some day), food and cooking content became something more necessary. Cooped up in our houses, video was our only way to experience far off places or learn how to cook new types of food.

Online video was also one of ways restaurants themselves tried to pivot. With dining rooms shut down, some restaurants turned to live online cooking classes to generate revenue.

How our relationship with food video content will change as the pandemic recedes remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure: there is a lot pent up desire to travel in people right now. When they’re able to do so more freely again, having expert bar and restaurant guides like those from ChefsFeed for destination cities could prove to be a savvy play by Tastemade.

From Edible Spoons to Adaptogen Chewing Gum, Here are 8 Startups Shaping the Future of Food

Super nutritious noodles. Cricket-based seasoning powders. Edible spoons to replace single-use plastics. Chewing gum that’s actually good for you.

These are just some of the awesome companies that pitched at the inaugural SKS 2019 Future Food Competition last month. Check out the video below to see the 8 finalists describe their company and explain why they’re the next “it” edible CPG company.

Once you’ve determined which startup you think should be the winner, click here to see if our judges agreed with you. And keep an eye on The Spoon to follow along as these companies grow, head to market and continue their efforts to shake up the way we eat.

SKS 2019: Future Food pitches

SKS 2019: Here’s What Investors are Looking For in Food Tech

Here at The Spoon we often write about funding news for new food tech companies: how much they’re raising and what they’ll do with the money. But what about the investors who are allocating these funds? How do they decide which ventures are worth investment?

We gathered four VCs to talk about just that at SKS 2019. In the panel, Tom Allison of ZX Ventures, Nate Williams of UNION Labs, and Brian Frank of FTW Ventures spoke with Brita Rosenheim of Better Food Ventures about the dynamics of investing in the food tech space.

If you’re curious about what investors are looking for in this area or are a startup hungry for funding, you should definitely watch the full video below. Here’s a quick overview to whet your appetite:

The food tech space has lots of opportunity
Rosenheim summed things up pretty well when she said, “We’re really at the infancy of the food tech sector in terms of potential.” Frank, who is a longtime SKS attendee, echoed this thought as he reflected on the growth within the conference itself. SKS was originally focused on consumer tech but now has expanded to cover tech from restaurants to supply chains to waste management in addition to the consumer sphere. Nonetheless, “it’s under-invested and under-managed,” he said. In short, there’s plenty of opportunity.

Big Food is getting involved, too
Allison, who’s the Head of Investment Strategy and M&A at ZX Ventures, part of AB InBev, spoke about how Big Food is trying to formulate its investment strategy to mimic the efficiency and agility of smaller independent companies. One takeaway? Look at untapped resources within the company (e.g., spent grain) and figure out how to capitalize on it. (Protein!)

Hardware is, well, hard
Williams, the Entrepreneur in Residence for Union, a new spinout from Kleiner Perkins, dropped some truth bombs about the difficulty of investing in hardware. “[It’s] extremely hard to execute well,” he said. “The be honest, lean startup [mentality] is bulls—t when it comes to hardtech investing.” Especially compared with the relative ease of scaling software.

Check out the full video below to hear more about what opportunities these investors are looking for — and their current favorite food tech product.

SKS 2019: Investing In Food Tech: Hardware, CPG & Future Food

SKS 2019: For the Future of Kitchen Design, Think Hydroponic Grow Cabinets and Robot Furniture

When you think about it, the basic design of a kitchen hasn’t changed much in the past 50 years. Most of them have a fridge, a sink, cabinets, a stove, an oven, and counters. Sure, there’s been innovation around smart appliances, but the layout of the kitchen itself has essentially remained the same.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. At SKS 2019, Veronica Schreibeis Smith of Vera Iconica Architecture and Suleiman Alhadidi of the MIT Media Lab spoke about how the kitchen is begging for a major design renovation to embrace evolving consumer needs.

If you’re at all interested in design, you should watch the whole video below. As a little teaser, here are some of the biggest takeaways from the discussion.

Kitchens can help you eat healthier
To make a kitchen more futuristic, we don’t necessarily need to transform everything into a robot. According to Schreibeis Smith, simple design solutions are all we really need to help people have more ease — and mindfulness — in the kitchen. That could take the form of climate-controlled cabinets to help preserve nutrients in food, or even hydroponic grow systems built into the kitchen itself.

For small kitchens, automation is key
We might not be headed towards a Jetson-like robotic kitchen anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean that automation won’t play a part in the kitchen of the future. Alhadidi showed off his work at the MIT Media Lab, which is trying to create design solutions for millennials living in small urban spaces and need all of their rooms to be multi-functional. Hint: the term “robotic furniture” comes up at least once.

If you want to learn more about how smart design can transform not only how we cook, but the kitchen itself, be sure to check out the whole video below.

SKS 2019: Designing for the Next 50 Years: Rethinking Kitchen Design

SKS 2019: IBM and McCormick Use AI to Make the Best Possible Barbecue Chips (and More)

Say you’re developing a new barbecue potato chip. You’re using spices from McCormick, which has not one, not two, but over 100 types of garlic flavoring. How do you decide which garlic(s) to use, and in which combinations, to make the best product for your target demographic?

That’s where artificial intelligence (AI) can help. Last year, McCormick, the largest flavor company in the world, went public with its five-plus-year partnership with IBM to build a flavor platform using machine learning. We dove deep into this partnership at SKS 2019, when The Spoon’s Chris Albrecht spoke with McCormick’s Chief Science Officer Hamed Faridi and IBM Principal Researcher Richard Goodwin about how AI can help make better, tastier products in less time and with fewer dead ends.

Check out the video below to watch the entire panel (it’s super nerdy and cool).

Hamed Faridi on the SKS 2019 stage. (Photo: The Spoon)

To whet your appetite, here’s a quick overview of what Faridi and Goodwin discussed in the session.

“The [CPG] iterating process is a very time-consuming, old system,” said Faridi during his onstage presentation. “But that’s the only thing the industry has.” All of that changed when Faridi was driving home and heard an NPR interview with a scientist from IBM’s Chef Watson, a program that develops bepsoke recipes based off of chemical flavor affinities (for example, leeks and chocolate.) Immediately, he was struck: this was the missing piece of the puzzle to develop better products in a smarter way.

Computers can’t taste or smell, so how do they know which flavors taste well together? That’s where data comes in. McCormick has kept all of its data from various flavor development processes and product experiments since the 1980s. IBM’s machine learning algorithms can take those data points and make suggestions about new ingredient combinations without having to go through all the trial, error, and staff training that a human R&D team requires.

The result is a 70 percent reduction in product development time and increased stickiness in the market. Faridi said that the IBM partnership is working so well they expect all of their labs will be using AI by late 2021.

This session was a fascinating look into how a flavor giant and a technology giant have teamed up to make better everyday products. Watch the full video below and get ready for more SKS 2019 content coming your way over the next few weeks!

SKS 2019: Case Study: McCormick & IBM Build an AI-Powered Flavor Platform

SKS Hot Seat: WPC’s David Baarman Says the Future of The Kitchen is All About Simplification

As kitchens get smarter, they also tend to get more cluttered and complicated, especially if the various connected devices involved don’t communicate with each other. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some sort of universal standard that allowed all smart appliances to be interoperable?

That’s exactly what the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) is trying to achieve with its new Ki wireless power standard. The consortium works with over 600 companies to simplify the smart kitchen, making various connected devices simpler to use in tandem — and, of course, wireless.

We sat down with David Baarman, Co-Chairman of the Kitchen Application & Promotions Group at WPC, at SKS 2019 last week to ask a few questions about how his company is working to make the kitchen not only smart, but also simple to navigate. 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: David Baarman, Wireless Power Consortium

Video: How to Make Food Commercials Look Cool with Slo-Mo and Robots

With their flying ingredients, bouncing ice and sloshing liquids, slo-mo food commercials are very good at making me hungry and thirsty. But did you ever wonder how the people behind those commercials get something as ordinary as an iced coffee to look so… cool?

The answer, in this video from B&H Photo, is good lighting, a good camera, and robots! Automation continues to creep across the entire food stack, from grilling burgers to delivering them to your door and now to carefully orchestrate ice cubes, coffee and milk all cascading beautifully into a glass. Check it out in this brief video:

How to Shoot a Commercial with Robots

If you’re a food startup or Kickstarter project looking to replicate that type of professional look, but don’t have a robo-sized budget, the video also explains how you can start out small and do some basic tricks bring your visuals to life.

And if you’re just a fan of gorgeous food imagery, you should definitely check out Modernist Cuisine’s high-end photography, which transforms ordinary acts like making coffee and slicing pizza into works of art.

Video: Do Food Robot Startup Founders Need Restaurant Experience to Be Successful?

Say you’re a VC looking to invest in a company that makes strawberry-picking robots. There are three or four companies in the space, all vying for your capital to get off the ground.

How do you choose where to put your dollars?

That’s one of the questions that we tackled last week at ArticulATE, our inaugural food and automation summit. We closed out the day with a lively panel on the opportunities — and challenges — in the food robotics investment landscape. Our speakers were VCs from the foodtech, hard tech and IoT spaces: Brian Frank of FTW Ventures, Brita Rosenheim of Better Food Ventures, Rajat Bhageria of Prototype Capital, and Avian Ross of Root VC.

The Spoon’s Michael Wolf moderated the conversation on what these investors are looking for in a food automation startup pitch specifically — and where they see significant opportunities in the fast-growing market. (Yes, both Frank and Ross have invested in strawberry-picking robots — and Ross claims he made the right choice.)

It’s certainly an exciting time in the food robotics space: there are tons of entrepreneurs out there with lofty plans to build the next robotic sushi restaurant, the next automated food delivery bot, or the next burrito-rolling robot arm (which, apparently, really hard to do).

However, the panelists seemed to agree that food robotics is a trickier investment space than a lot of other tech areas. Sure, the basic building blocks of food robotics — AI, articulating arms, etc. — are pretty democratized. But Ross (who — fun fact — spent a former life building robots for the Food Network) said that “robotics feels special and different.” He pointed out that the food system is incredibly complex and that a whole host of players have to be involved to deliver even the most basic meal to the consumer. And that’s just logistics: getting a robotic system to reach parity with a basic human fast food experience in terms of taste or customer experience is really tricky.

Because there are so many complexities at play it can require more capital than some other tech investments. It can also take longer to bring food automation technology to market. Which isn’t a problem — unless, as Rosenheim pointed out, you’re working with investors who are looking for “the next shiny thing” and aren’t patient enough to be in it for the long haul.

Investors in food robotics have to be especially willing to take risks and play the long game. However, not all the VCs saw eye-to-eye on what it takes for a food automation startup to be successful. The panelists disagreed on whether or not startups need deep restaurant market knowledge to be successful, how high the capital investment has to be in food automation, and what sets one seemingly identical food robotics startup apart from another.

Check out the video below to see the whole conversation — it was a really fun one.

Articulate 2019: Investment Opportunities in Food Robotics

Look out for more ArticulATE 2019 videos rolling out on our YouTube channel over the next week! 

Meet Fromaggio, a Countertop Cheese-Making Robot

For most of us, making cheese at home seems almost laughably unattainable, something for the Martha Stewart’s of the world, not the average (or even above average) home cook. A simple ricotta, maybe, but a blue cheese or a cheddar? No way.

A new device claims it can make even the most hapless cook into a cheesemaker. Fromaggio, which debuted at CES 2019, is a smart countertop appliance that takes the guesswork out of making any kind of cheese. Just add the right type of milk (sheep, cow, or goat), pop in a pod of cultures, and press a button. In 48 hours or less you’ll have a round of cheese. (Admittedly, for hard cheeses like cheddar you still have to age it.)

We caught up with Fromaggio founder Dr. Glen Feder on the floor of our Food Tech Live event to get a hands-on look at the machine that will make everyone (yes, even you) a cheesemaker. And to eat our weight in cheese samples, of course.

The Spoon looks at Fromaggio, a smart home cheese maker

Video: Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown says They’ll Tackle Steak Next

Last night, Impossible Foods unveiled their new Burger 2.0 at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The newest iteration of the alt-meat is made of soy and potato protein (not pea protein, as I guessed!), is gluten-free, and has fewer calories and fat than the first version.

After tasting our way through sliders, tacos, empanadas, and even tartare made of the new ground “beef,” we got to sit down with Impossible Foods founder and CEO, Dr. Pat Brown, to ask him a few questions about the topic that’s on everyone’s mind during CES: the future. Specifically, the future of plant-based meat.

“R&D has been going at a blazing pace since Day One,” said Brown. Which means as soon as they locked down the formula for Version 1.0 of Impossible’s patties and started selling them in 2016, they were already working on version 2.0 (and yes, now they’re working on 3.0).

While they plan to keep iterating on their flagship ground beef product, Brown explained that they’re also starting to work on what he called “whole cuts of beef,” including steak. “[Steak] has huge symbolic value,” said Brown. “If we can make an awesomely delicious world-class steak . . . that will be very disruptive not just to the beef industry, but to other sectors of the meat industry.”

Watch the video below to hear more about Impossible’s plans to tackle the $3 trillion industrial meat industry, and why they’re not worried about plant-based competition.

Impossible CEO Pat Brown talks Impossible 2.0 and the future of meat

If you’re in Vegas for CES, be sure to hit up their food truck outside the Convention Center and taste the burger 2.0!

Video: Bellwether Cuts Out the Coffee Roasting Middleman

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

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

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

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

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

From Soil To Sip: Disruptions In The Coffee Value Chain

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