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Extracellular To Offer License-Free & Low-Cost Cell Banks for Cultivated Meat Startups in the UK
Today Extracellular, a cultivated meat-focused contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), announced the availability of low-cost and license-free cell banks for research to cultivated meat developers in the UK. The banks of primary cells will be made available to early-stage cultivated meat researchers and startups via funding from StartupUK and through a collaboration with Mutus, another UK startup focused on low-cost inputs for cultivated meat growth media.
Cookware Darling Great Jones Gets Scooped Up by Meyer. Is the DTC Home Goods Wave Over?
This week, Fast Company broke the story that Great Jones, a popular DTC cookware maker for the millennial set, had been acquired by cookware giant Meyer. In Meyer, Great Jones joins a portfolio of brands that includes Farberware, Anolon, Hestan (including the tech-powered products under Hestan Cue), Circulon, and Rachael Ray. According to Fast Company, Great Jones’s six employees will join Meyer, and cofounder and CEO Sierra Tishgart will become Meyer’s executive creative director.
Sweetgreen: We’re Going Full Robot
Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman told investors this week at William Blair’s Growth Stock conference that the company plans to have its Infinite Kitchen robotic makeline installed at all new locations within a five-year timeframe. The proclamation marks the first time the fast-casual salad chain has indicated they plan to deploy automation across all of its new locations.
World’s Biggest Meat Packer JBS Building Cultivated Meat Plant Capable of 1,000 Metric Tons
Lab-grown meat is all grown up. This week Brazilian meat processing conglomerate JBS announced they had broken ground in Spain on its first commercial-scale cultivated meat production facility. According to the company, the new facility will produce more than 1,000 metric tons of cultivated meat per year, potentially expanding to 4,000 metric tons of production in the medium term, according to Reuters.
Robot Restaurant Concepts Have Struggled. Will Kernel Buck The Trend?
Last month, the NY Post revealed that Chipotle founder Steve Ells is plotting a comeback with an automation-heavy restaurant concept called Kernel. According to the Post, who viewed the startup’s pitch deck, Ells plans to build a chain of restaurants that makes the food centrally in a ghost kitchen and finishes the food in small-footprint retail storefronts. The centralized production facility and the restaurants will feature a significant amount of robotics and automation to produce the food and keep the overall employee count down. According to materials reviewed by the Post, the company states that they believe “a 3-person labor model can work.”
A Food Tech Case Study: Four Lessons From the Demise of Zume
Late last week, news broke that Zume, the company famous mostly for raising a whole bunch of money for its pizza robot & cook-on-the-road food trucks concept, had shut down. The company’s demise, first reported by The Information, comes after burning through $450 million and a well-documented pivot away from its pizza robot and delivery technology products to sustainable packaging in 2020.
The ChefDoodler Could Finally Make Sugar-Based 3D Food Crafting Approachable
One of the first products to make 3D printing approachable was the 3Doodler. Unlike conventional 3D printers that required knowledge of digital design software and the operation of what were often finicky printing systems, the 3Doodler let folks draw in 3D space freehand. This simplicity appealed to non-technical and creative...
Kittch Partners With Qualcomm for Augmented Reality-Powered Cooking
Why wear beer goggles when you can wear bing goggles?. Well, now you can, at least if you’re using Kittch’s new AR cooking mode to make chef Ming Tsai’s MingBings. Today Kittch, a culinary video community, announced they have teamed up with Qualcomm to integrate AR features into their cooking app, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The collaboration, done in partnership with technical design company Trigger, is being demoed this week at Augmented World Expo (AWE) in Santa Clara, California.
Eating Disorder Org’s AI Blunder is a Cautionary Tale About Embracing Tech for Fundamentally Human Roles
One of the ongoing debates in tech circles and beyond is how fast AI will replace humans in certain lines of work. One role where we’ve already seen organizations embrace the technology is in customer support, deploying AI-powered customer interfaces to act as the first line of contact to handle inbound queries and provide critical information to customers.
Serve Robotics Strikes Deal With Uber to Scale Up to Two Thousand Sidewalk Delivery Robots
Uber Technologies Inc. is gearing up for a robotic future, bolstering its partnership with Serve Robotics Inc., a maker of sidewalk delivery robots. Following a successful trial in Los Angeles, the companies announced they would deploy up to 2,000 of Serve’s delivery robots in multiple markets across the United States. The deal marks one of the largest robotic delivery fleet deployments ever announced.
Smart Composters Are Heading to Retail, But Will Consumers Bite?
Earlier this month, Costco shoppers in select cities across California and Washington State may have stumbled upon a product demo for an item called Lomi. This white countertop appliance, roughly the size of a sewing machine, sat atop a table adorned with a tablecloth, with boxes stacked high just behind.
The Weekly Spoon: Sugar Alternatives Are the New Sweetness for Food Tech
Here in America, we like the sweet stuff. Whether it’s sodas, candies, or ice cream, we consume more added sugar than any other country. Not surprisingly, all this sugar consumption can lead to health issues like diabetes, which has given rise to a massive sugar replacement industry offering up a variety of synthetic replacements like aspartame or sucralose and natural ones like stevia and monk fruit.
Oobli May Have a Hit on Its Hands With Sweet Teas That Get Sweetness From Protein
This week, Oobli launched its lineup of sweet teas sweetened with sweet protein. The company, formerly Joywell Foods, showed the products off on-stage this week at the SynBioBeta conference (in a session moderated by yours truly). The company’s sweet teas, which are sweetened by a sweet protein called brazzein, can now be purchased on the Oobli website.
Incredo Sugar: Redefining Sweetness, Delighting Taste Buds, and Nurturing Health
The intake of excess sugar in our diets is an epidemic that has no season or one that lies stealthily in refrigerators or airplane tray tables. Healthy Food America notes that the United States leads the world in the consumption of added sugars and ranks third in the world in sales of sugary drinks. All this sugar has consequences – the U.S. has one of the highest overall obesity rates in the world and the highest rate of childhood obesity, not to mention heart disease and diabetes.
Prime Roots Raises $30M Series B for Deli Meat Made With Koji Mycelium
The average supermarket deli is a sad carnival of sulfites, nitrates, and preservatives that go bump in your belly. There have been a handful of upstarts in the plant-based food space attempting to create a healthy alternative to sliced cotto salami or chunks of smoked roast beef. One Berkeley-based company believes it has a healthy, tasty solution.
Wow Bao Launches the ‘Hot Buns Club’, a $99-a-Year Web3 Loyalty Program
Wow Bao, the digitally nimble Asian food startup that’s expanded nationwide in recent years through an asset-light virtual restaurant model, announced the launch of its NFT program last week. The new NFTs, called Digital CollectaBaos, will be proof of membership in a new super-fan tier called the Hot Buns Club within the company’s Bao Bucks loyalty program.
Google Wants to Put an End to Single-Use Plastic, So It Put Out a Call For New Ideas
We all know plastic is bad for the environment, but despite all the videos of plastic bottles and wrappers floating in oceans and piling up in landfills, billions of single-use containers are used and tossed every year. Google has decided to do something about it, so it’s launched a call...
Finalists for NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge Include Astronaut Oven & Air Protein Technology
Last week, NASA announced the finalists for the final phase of the Deep Space Food Challenge, a competition designed to help explore and better understand how these agencies can feed humans in space. The US Space Agency awarded $750,000 in prizes in the second phase of its Deep Space Food Challenge, and the winning teams will compete in the final phase of the challenge and $1.5 million in prize money.
Forget Getting Carded. Amazon Wants to Scan Your Palm To Make Sure You’re Of Age
Attention all baby-faced twenty-somethings who regularly get carded buying drinks: You may soon face a new high-tech twist on the age-old right of passage in the form of palm-scanning. At least, that’s if Amazon has its way. According to the company, they’ve just added age verification to their Amazon One...
Sip & Snack? Meet The Edible Coffee Cup
While most of us experience a pang of guilt when consuming water from a plastic bottle, we don’t feel nearly as bad about drinking a cup of joe out of a paper cup. After all, they’re compostable, right?. Not so fast. A significant portion of paper coffee cups...
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