Choose your location
TheSpoon
Sepura Gets $3.7M Seed Round For Its Under-Sink Food Waste Device
While cooking tech startups have had a hard time of it lately when it comes to raising funding, it appears investors aren’t shying away from products that help consumers manage excess food waste. The latest example is a new seed funding round for Victoria BC-based Sepura, a startup that...
Starship Logs 10 million Kilometers With Sidewalk Robots
I remember reading as a kid about a guy who had driven his Volkswagen Bug a million miles, enough to drive to the moon and back twice. I remember thinking that’s a lot of miles!. And today, after learning Starship, the company which kicked off the sidewalk robot industry...
Sadly, the Shabosh Countertop Hybrid Dishwasher May Be The Closest We Get to The Tetra
A countertop dishwasher called Shabosh is attracting lots of backers on Kickstarter, having raised over $55 thousand from 535 backers. At first glance, the dishwasher looks a lot like an awful lot like another small countertop dishwasher that garnered a whole lot of buzz five years ago at CES. But while the Shabosh is visually reminiscent of the Tetra, which promised to run a cycle in ten minutes with just a half gallon of water, it’s a far cry functionally from the little wonder that had many of us lusting for something as pedestrian as a dishwasher.
Japanese Academic and Corporate Partners Launch Cultivated Meat Consortium
This week, a group of Japanese academic and corporate partners announced the creation of the Consortium for Future Innovation by Cultured Meat, a new group that aims to promote “concrete efforts for social implementation of edible cultured meat manufacturing technology using 3D bioprinting.”. The group, which includes the Graduate...
Hazel’s New CEO Focused on Diversifying Life Extention Products and Expanding Geographically
Today, produce life extension startup Hazel Technologies named Parker Booth as its new CEO. Booth, who has had a varied career in produce distribution, vertical farming, as well as a stint as general manager of Washington State Correctional Industries, takes on the new role after serving three-plus years as the company’s chief operating officer.
CULT Scoops Up Assets From Cultivated Meat Pet Food Startup Because Animals, Fresh Off Investment By Marc Lustig
This week CULT Food Sciences announced it had signed a binding letter to acquire some of Because Animals Inc.’s consumer brand assets, related patents, non-scientific intellectual property, and product formulations. The acquisition of some of the assets of Because Animals, one of the first startups dedicated to creating pet...
CULT Scoops Up Assets From Cultivated Meat Pet Food Startup Because Animals, Fresh Off Investment By Marc Lustig
This week CULT Food Sciences announced it had signed a binding letter to acquire some of Because Animals Inc.’s consumer brand assets, related patents, non-scientific intellectual property, and product formulations. The acquisition of some of the assets of Because Animals, one of the first startups dedicated to creating pet...
Podcast: Becoming a Kitchen Tech Reviewer With Wired’s Joe Ray
In this week’s episode of the Spoon Podcast, we catch up with Wired’s Joe Ray. Here at The Spoon, we’re fans of Joe’s kitchen reviews, where he cuts through all marketing blather and hyped-up features and tells the reader exactly why he or she should (or shouldn’t) buy a product.
Vow Debuts The Mammoth Meatball, Made With Protein From The Extinct Species
When Nathan Myhrvold talked about recreating meat from long-extinct species at Smart Kitchen Summit, he went back as far as the dinosaur period. While Vow hasn’t quite done that (yet), they have created a meatball using protein derived from the gene sequence of the woolly mammoth myoglobin, the protein which gives meat its color and flavor.
French Fries & Bananas Top The List of Popular Drone-Delivered Items
So what items flew off the shelves last year when it came to drone delivery?. According to Flytrex, a company specializing in backyard drone delivery, the most popular item ordered off restaurant menus last year was french fries, followed by turkey sandwiches, burrito bowls, Italian sandwiches, and pizza, according to a report published by the company summarizing its 2022 delivery activity.
A Tale of Two Startups: Why Cultivated Meat is So Close (And Yet so Far) From Disrupting Animal Ag
Last week, two contrasting stories painting very different pictures emerged from the cultivated meat industry. The first highlighted the news that GOOD Meat, the cultivated meat arm of Eat Just, had received a “no questions” letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its cultivated meat product. This makes the company the second to gain FDA approval after UPSIDE Foods, demonstrating the industry’s proximity to finally bringing meat produced outside of animals to consumers.
Instacart Announces ChatGPT Plugin to Power Conversational Shoppable Recipes
The wave of ChatGPT integration announcements is just getting started, and this week Instacart debuted its first effort to tap into the generative AI zeitgeist with the debut of its ChatGPT Instacart plugin. The plugin, explained in detail in a blog post by the company’s chief architect JJ Zhuang on...
Verneek Launches Generative AI Platform to Assist Food Shoppers
Today Verneek, a New York-based generative AI startup, came out of stealth with the debut of its first product, Quin Shopping AI. The product is the first to utilize the company’s proprietary AI platform called One Quin. The company, which was co-founded by the husband and wife team of...
Fresco Introduces Complete Refresh of KitchenOS Platform, With Aim of Delivering True Multi-Brand Device Contol
Today, Fresco announced the launch of its KitchenOS platform, a ground-up refresh of its smart kitchen software suite. As part of the announcement, the company revealed that Instant Brands, the maker of the popular Instant Pot smart pressure cooker, would be the first brand to launch the new KitchenOS with the Instant Pot Pro Plus.
David Chang’s Pantry Essentials Brand Momofuku Goods Raises $17.5 Million
Today chef/entrepreneur David Chang and his team announced they had raised $17.5 million in growth funding for his packaged goods brand, Momofuku Goods. The company, which sells “a line of restaurant-grade pantry essentials,” was founded in 2019 and spun out of Momofuku a year later. According to the announcement, the funding will be used to expand Momofuku Goods’ product offerings and support its growing operations.
GoodBytz Unveils Modular Robotic Kitchen That Can Make up to Three Thousand Meals Per Day
GoodBytz, a robotic kitchen startup based in Germany, debuted its new kitchen robot last week in its hometown of Hamburg at the INTERNORGA 2023 trade fair. The GoodBytz food robot is a modular system that can be tailored around different food types and menus:. The refrigerated storage module can hold...
SideChef’s Kevin Yu Eyes Next Phase of Growth After Raising a $6 Million Series B
I first encountered SideChef’s CEO Kevin Yu at a rooftop party during CES in March 2015. At the time, SideChef was in its early stages, having been founded just a couple of months prior, and I was beginning to explore kitchen technology. The first Smart Kitchen Summit would take place only eight months after our meeting.
Kroger to Use Gatik Robotic Trucks for Middle-Mile Delivery of Fresh Products
This week Kroger announced a collaboration with Gatik, a company specializing in autonomous middle-mile logistics, to utilize autonomous box trucks in Dallas, Texas. According to the announcement, the partnership aims to enhance delivery frequency, reliability, and responsiveness for customers while streamlining costs and increasing efficiency throughout the supply chain. Starting...
TurtleTree Debuts Animal-Free Lactoferrin
TurtleTree, a biotechnology startup using precision fermentation to create bioactive ingredients such as animal-free milk proteins, has announced it will debut its precision-fermentation derived lactoferrin, which has the commercial name of LF+, tonight at a tasting event in San Francisco. The bioactive milk protein, which the company says is nicknamed...
Are Deep Sea Fish Farms the Future of Aquaculture? Forever Oceans Thinks So
The growth of aquaculture has been one of the big stories in the fishing industry over the past couple of decades, as fish raised in farms has grown from about 20% of captured fish in the 1990s to half of all fish caught in by 2020, according to a report issued by the United Nations.
TheSpoon
3K+
Posts
2M+
Views
The Spoon provides daily reporting and insight into the food tech revolution. We talk to the innovators, disruptors and creators helping to reinvent food, cooking and the kitchen and bring those conversations to you in the form of interviews, deep dive analysis, newsletters, podcasts and videos
It’s essential to note our commitment to transparency:
Our Terms of Use acknowledge that our services may not always be error-free, and our Community Standards emphasize our discretion in enforcing policies. As a platform hosting over 100,000 pieces of content published daily, we cannot pre-vet content, but we strive to foster a dynamic environment for free expression and robust discourse through safety guardrails of human and AI moderation.