The Spoon Podcast

Ali Bouzari, a culinary scientist and co-founder of Pilot R&D, joins the podcast to discuss the intersection of food and technology. Bouzari shares his insights on the potential and limitations of AI and robotics in the culinary world, emphasizing the importance of approaching these tools with a critical eye. He also highlights the significant impact of climate change on the food industry, specifi...

Today's conversation is with Sam Rose, who has spent her entire career unraveling the complexities of bringing consumer products—often kitchen-related—to life. I first met Sam about eight years ago, introduced through our mutual friend, Scott Heimendinger, who was collaborating with Sam on developing a next-generation coffee grinder. But this wasn’t just any coffee grinder. It was a cutting-edge,...

Lab-grown or cultivated meat companies have struggled lately as they try to figure out how to do something that's never been done before: grow meat in large quantities in big metal vats known as bioreactors. Part of the challenge is figuring out how to get the meat cells to grow. The technology to do this has been borrowed from the world of pharma, an industry where you can charge thousands of dol...

This week's episode features a conversation with Paul Shapiro, who went from being a lobbyist who advocated for better animal treatment to building a future food company that leverages technology to reduce our reliance on animal agriculture. Links: Paul's website: https://www.paul-shapiro.com/ Paul's company: The Better Meat Co. Paul's book: Clean Meat, on Amazon. Also, make sure to subscribe to o...

The episode's guest is Robby Earl, president of Virtual Dining Concepts (the company behind Beastburger). Robby is also president of Linked Eats, a new technology company that makes software for virtual restaurant brand operators. I caught up with Robbie last week to talk about his new company and its technology and to get an update on what is going on in the virtual restaurant space, an industry...

This interview is with Rajat Bhageria, an investor and technology founder who debuted his food robot after working stealthily for five years. Bhageria, a master’s graduate of Penn’s Robotics and Machine Learning Lab, started his first company in high school, a social network for young writers. During college and grad school, he founded Third Eye, a company using computer vision to assist the visua...

The Spoon is launching a dedicated Food Tech News Show podcast. which you can find here on Overcast, on Pandora (and here on our podcast host) and Apple Podcasts. \And, of course, you can listen to this episode on The Spoon feed. In the future, we will focus on interviews and deep dives here on The Spoon Podcast, so make sure to subscribe to FTNS for your weekly shot of food tech news. On this epi...

For most Americans, the Kraft and Heinz brands have been ever-present in our cupboards and fridges for our entire lives. Products like Oscar Meyer hot dogs, Kraft cheese, Velveeta, and Jello. Household names all. The company resulted from the 2015 merger between Kraft Foods and Heinz. Now the third biggest food brand in North America, we thought it would be interesting to hear how they think about...

This episode is the audio from the very first session at SKS 2024, Lessons From the First Wave (And How to Prepare for The Next One). The session included Chris Young (Combustion, ChefSteps, Modernist Cuisine), Scott Heimendinger (Sansaire, Modernist Cuisine and Cuisonic), and Kai Schaffner (Thermomix). The session was moderated by The Spoon's Michael Wolf. It was a lively conversation about how w...

SKS 2024 is in the books, so Carlos Rodela and Mike sit down and talk about the craziness of the past week, some of the products they checked out at the show, and some of the talks by our great lineup of speakers. If you'd like to see a video version of this conversation with interspered photos from SKS, check it out on the Spoon later this week.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone...

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 elect...

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...

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 kit...

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, includin...

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...

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...

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 accompa...

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 Te...

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 technolo...

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 pas...

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 righ...

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 th...

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...

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...

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...