What would happen if you put a big battery in your induction stove? For one thing, you could cook at a much higher temperature because the power the battery brings to each cooking session is much higher than a traditional outlet. You also have the start of a fractionalized power wall, creating a foundation for what could be your electrified home. We talk about these and other implications of electrification in this conversation with Sam D'Amico, the CEO of Impulse Labs. Sam will be at Smart Kitc...
Jun 03, 2024•27 min
If you follow food Instagram or TikTok, chances are over the past couple of years you've seen a touchscreen toaster from Revolution Cooking. Revolution's toaster went viral during the pandemic, in part because it has a touchscreen, but also because of a price tag north of $250. But Revolution CEO Tom Klaff said the toaster was just the beginning, and the fuller vision for the company started to come into focus this past CES when they introduced the Macrowave, a device that combines microwave coo...
May 25, 2024•36 min
This episode's guest is Assaf Pashut, the founder of Chefee, a company that makes home cooking robots. If there's a category in kitchen technology where there have been lots of startups over the past few years, it's food robotics. Zume, Flippy, Remy Robotics, BurgetBot, and Picnic to name a few. Even Travis Kalanick is getting into the act. However, most food robots are made for commercial kitchens and that's for good reason. As consumers tend to like appliances we're familiar with, so the idea ...
May 16, 2024•19 min
Nick Holzherr is well-known in the smart kitchen space. With the rapid growth of his startup Whisk and the acquisition of the company by Samsung, it's one of the true success stories in this market. Whisk was the first recipe startup to explore early on how to use AI and apply it to recipes. As we find out in this interview, Nick and his team were building everything from the ground up, including buying computer chips to run his AI models a decade ago. Nick also tells the story of going on the B...
May 13, 2024•30 min
This week Mike and Carlos be joined by Future Market’s Mike Lee to talk over some of the most interesting stories of the week. Mike Lee also tells us about his new book Mise, which paints four different scenarios depicting the potential direction of our future food system. Here are all the stories we’ll be talking about. Bored & Hungry Closes – Food & Web3: A check in on where things are In March 2022, NFT and crypto investor Andy Nguyen purchased Bored Ape #6184 along with three Mutant ...
Apr 20, 2024•43 min
This week on the Food Tech News Show we are joined by Scott Heimendinger, one of the inventors of the home sous vide circulator and a long-time kitchen tech inventor. Here are the stories we talk about: Apple is working on robots for the home! – From Bloomberg: “The original concept for the robot was a device that could navigate entirely on its own without human intervention — like the car — and serve as a videoconferencing tool. One pie-in-the-sky idea within Apple was having it be able to hand...
Apr 09, 2024•44 min
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 had a unique approach, offering 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 co...
Mar 25, 2024•25 min
This week, the Spoon crew got together to discuss some of the big stories of the week on a new weekly video news show we’re launching called The Food Tech News Show. The stories Carlos Rodela and I discuss include: Keurig Unveils Plastic-Free Coffee Pods, Developed With A Little Help From The Maker of CoffeeB Keurig Takes Another Swing at Cold Beverages With the Launch of QuickChill Cold Coffee Technology Not Surprisingly, Starbucks Is Shutting Down Its NFT Program Watch The Figure 01 Robot Feed...
Mar 16, 2024•32 min
Over the past decade, Fresco has been building technology that helps appliance and housewares brands to create smart kitchen products. The journey for Fresco started when the company - then known as Drop - created a connected kitchen scale. After finding success selling its scale in the Apple store and other locations, the company started working with other brands to help provide enabling technology to power their smart kitchen solutions. Fast-forward to today, and Fresco is now working with som...
Mar 14, 2024•33 min
Around 2009, Ralph Newhouse's company hunted down excess inventory of small electrics and would re-sell them into the secondary market. However, it wasn't long before Newhouse realized he wanted to make his own appliances, and that's when the Chefman we know today was born. Newhouse wasn't done. As he and Chefman started to see how new connected products made their way into the market over the past decade, he realized he wanted to create a brand around more tech-forward connected products, and t...
Mar 01, 2024•38 min
Ty Thompson and the rest of the Ovie team recently passed a major milestone: They shipped their first piece of hardware. The product, a consumer food waste management system, was over half a decade in the making. Along the way to market, the founding team faced numerous challenges around funding, finalizing the product concept and design, building prototypes for manufacturing, and finding the right manufacturer to work with. Ty talks about all of these challenges and the lessons learned, includi...
Feb 14, 2024•35 min
Chris Young is one of the most provocative and interesting thinkers in the future of food and cooking, so any time he visits The Spoon podcast we learn a lot. This time was no exception. In this episode of The Spoon Podcast, we talk about: How he has put AI compute into something as small as a thermometer Where he thinks generative AI and other AI is going in the food and cooking space How he thinks big companies should approach the AI era Why he's back creating content for Youtube and other cha...
Jan 28, 2024•44 min
Food delivery through underground tubes? Sounds crazy, but it's already happening today, and Pipedream's Garrett McCurrach thinks it just may be the future of delivery. We catch up with Garrett just a week after they announced their first pilot in the Atlanta suburbs, where they have built a system that delivers food and other items underground for nearly a mile. During this podcast we talk about how Garrett came up with the idea, what it was like to showcase the system to Jeff Bezos, how the co...
Dec 23, 2023•39 min
This week SuperGut CEO Marc Washington joins the podcast to talk about why new GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy are keeping CPG brand CEOs up at night. These new drugs, which got their start as a new class of pharmaceuticals that help contol type 2 diabetes, have become very popular in recent years as weight loss drug. They are hugely effective in suppressing appetites and reducing the overall calorie intake of those taking them, so much so that some speculate that they could have a significa...
Nov 17, 2023•31 min
In this episode of The Spoon Podcast, we welcome Ari Tulla, CEO of Elo Health. Ari got his start in tech working for mobile giant Nokia, where he helped lead the company's mobile app studio. However, after his wife experienced a health scare in the late 2000s, Ari decided to turn his attention to the broken health system and built what he describes as a "search engine for doctors." After he sold that company, he began to think about how the explosion in personal data using wearables and other in...
Oct 17, 2023•34 min
Andrew Simmons is an open book. When the long-time entrepreneur decided to buy a restaurant in 2020, little did he know that in just a few months he would be forced to close his doors due to COVID. But instead of giving up, he had to get creative and, after surviving the pandemic, he kept on tinkering, trying to figure out how new technology could make his restaurant more efficient. During this whole experience, Andrew has been documenting his journey via posts on Linkedin and on a blog. As he r...
Jun 19, 2023•41 min
In this week's podcast, we talk food and AI with Evan Rapoport. Over the past decade, Evan has led teams in Google Research and other organizations looking at how AI could impact biodiversity and change. During our conversation, we talk about a project called Tidal, in which he and Google used AI technology like computer vision and applied it to aquaculture. We also discuss the impact of AI more broadly on the food system and how Evan thinks newer technology like generative AI might have an impa...
Jun 09, 2023•33 min
When you think of the kitchen of the future, do you envision a 3D food printer instantly whipping up a dinner or a snack? While the crazy idea might not happen tomorrow, if life follows the path of science fiction (as it often does), there's a good chance a food printer will be sitting on our kitchen counter in 10 or 20 years. If we're going to get there, this week's guest Jonathan Blutinger might have something to do with it. Jonathan is a 3D food and software-defined cooking researcher who is ...
May 12, 2023•30 min
As a child, Oliver Zahn was a self-described "mathy" kid who had a fascination with how the world worked. This early interest in the mechanics of the universe would lead him to the study astrophysics and embark on a career that would land him at one of the world's top universities teaching cosmology. But as Zahn went on to become a world-recognized astrophysicist and cosmologist who would also work at places like SpaceX and Google, his interest in another childhood interest - food - continued to...
Apr 05, 2023•35 min
This week we catch up with Wired's Joe Ray. Here at The Spoon we're fans of Joe's kitchen reviews, where he cuts to the quick and tells the reader exactly why he or she should (or shouldn't) buy a product. In this episode, we take a look back at how Joe got started in food, why he picked up one day and went to France to become a writer, his tutelage under the famous restaurant reviewer François Simon, and his approach to kitchen technology journalism. We also talk about the current state of kitc...
Mar 28, 2023•36 min
In this podcast interview, Mike catches up with SideChef's Kevin Yu in the wake of the company's recent funding round to discuss the evolution of SideChef and the smart kitchen market. A lot has happened since Mike and Kevin first met on the roof deck of a restaurant at SXSW, so they reminisce about old times, talk about the cyclical nature of innovation, and how AI will impact the connected kitchen space. Kevin shares SideChef's AI strategy, his plans for the company, and where he thinks this i...
Mar 17, 2023•26 min
Are VCs still hungry for food robotics investments? We ask S2G's Arthur Chow and Vebu Labs' Buck Jordan what their thoughts are on the food automation landscape. In this podcast we ask: The current investment climate for food automation Why founders should consider monetizing on their vision soon through incremental releases of products The roll-up opportunity for investors Alternative forms of financing for food robotics founders Whether we will see a food robotics unicorn You can watch the vid...
Mar 03, 2023•34 min
Do you know what DeSci is? If you don't, don't feel bad, especially if, like me, food is your primary focus. A16Z's publication Future describes DeSci as a movement in which "a growing number of scientists and entrepreneurs are leveraging blockchain tools, including smart contracts and tokens, in an attempt to improve modern science. Collectively, their work has become known as the decentralized science movement, or DeSci." If you're like me and are just learning about DeSci, the reason for that...
Feb 24, 2023•27 min
Our special guest is Scott Heimendinger for our weekly food tech news wrapup. Scott is a long-time kitchen tech inventor and entrepreneur who is currently building his next big thing. In this episode, we discuss the following stories: Tovala intro's new oven Why all the sourdough tech now? Do we need tech to make us better bakers? Good and bad way to use generative AI with food CloudChef Wants to Capture a Chef’s Knowledge in Software to Recreate High-Quality Cuisine Anywhere Facebook wants us t...
Feb 19, 2023•41 min
Up until now, every morsel of food astronauts eat in outer space was created and packaged on earth. However, as we embark on the era of long-term space flight, NASA and other space agencies realize that that will need to change. As the Senior Project Manager for Space Crop Production and Exploration Food Systems for NASA, this is the problem Ralph Fritsche has been thinking about for the past decade. Ralph, who helped develop the Deep Space Food Challenge, works with his team to try and figure o...
Feb 10, 2023•32 min
In this week's episode we catch up with Rachel Konrad, a former journalist who has spent the last decade-plus working for Tesla, Impossible Foods and now the Production Board. Rachel joins Michael Wolf and Carlos Rodela to talk about her background, the recent controversy around Bloomberg's article declaring plant-based meat a fad, and how she helped Impossible bring food tech to CES in 2019 with the launch of the Impossible 2.0 burger. It's a really fun conversation that you won't want to miss!...
Jan 27, 2023•58 min
It's almost the end of 2022 and so we decided to catch up with S2G Managing Director Tonya Bakritzes. In this podcast we talk about: -The impact of inflation and global macroenvironmental headwinds on the food tech landscape -The plant-based meat sales slowdown and what it means for the space longterm. -Some areas to look forward to in 2023 You can find out more about S2G here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dec 23, 2022•29 min
Ben Leventhal has nothing if not good timing. In 2004 the New York entrepreneur launched Eater at the dawn of the blogging era, back when food media was still mostly legacy publications and message boards. After selling Eater to Vox, he went on to launch Resy in 2014 just as restaurants were beginning to bristle at the data practices of legacy online reservations systems such as OpenTable. He'd eventually sell his second company to American Express. And now Leventhal is looking to create his thi...
Dec 15, 2022•34 min
Our guest this week on our weekly food tech news wrapup is Clayton Wood, the CEO of pizza robot startup Picnic. We talk food tech news and then hear Clayton's view on where things are going in the world of food robots. Here are some of the stories we covered: The Food tech venture capital market really dropped hard in Q3.: Food tech venture drops 63% quarter over quarter One sector that seems to be somewhat active in Web3 meets restaurants: Seattle's Forum3 announces funding on heels of launchin...
Dec 10, 2022•38 min•Ep. 142
We're ramping our Friday food tech casual news wrapups back up again, and this week Mike and Carlos got together to talk about some of the stories that caught their attention this week. The stories we talked about include: Will reusable containers take off at colleges? Maybe. What about restaurants? One startup is trying to make it work. A new smart mixer from GE Appliances stood out as an innovative product in a market that has lacked innovation as of late. Has Amazon's Alexa strategy failed? A...
Dec 03, 2022•32 min•Ep. 141
