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Chef Robotics Comes Out of Stealth to Show Off Robot and Reveal Early Customers
This week, Chef Robotics, the San Francisco-based food robotics startup founded by Rajat Bhageria, stepped out of stealth mode and into the spotlight by unveiling its robot and disclosing some of its high-profile partnerships. In an interview with The Spoon, Bhageria, an investor and technology founder, showcased Chef, a food...
ConverseNow Acquires Drive-Thru Voice AI Specialist Valyant AI
Today, ConverseNow announced that it has acquired drive-thru conversational AI specialist Valyant AI. According to the announcement about the deal – the terms of which were not disclosed – the entire Valyant AI team will be retained post-acquisition. Until now, ConverseNow has largely succeeded in winning restaurant chain...
Podcast: How is Kraft-Heinz Preparing for the Future of Food?
For most Americans, Kraft and Heinz products – Oscar Meyer hot dogs, Kraft cheese, Velveeta, and Jello – have been in our cupboards and fridges for as long as we can remember. But being a big company today doesn’t always ensure success in perpetuity. The world around us...
Samsung’s 2024 Family Hub Gets Enhanced Food Recognition Features With Latest Update
This past week, Samsung announced they were updating software for those with a Family Hub fridge. The update has a bunch of new features, many of which were announced at CES in January, but the most interesting one is what looks to be its much-improved food recognition capability. The new computer vision-powered features were are specific to the latest edition to the Family Hub line, the official name of which is the incredibly long Samsung Bespoke 4-Door Flex Refrigerators with AI Family Hub+ and AI Vision Inside.
Scoop: Kalanick’s Latest Idea for Disrupting Food May Be No-Fee Bulk Food Delivery & Automated Pick-Up Kiosks
When Travis Kalanick showed up at the Food on Demand conference this past May, technology and restaurant industry insiders could hardly believe it. After all, the Uber cofounder had gained an almost Howard Hughes-like reputation for secrecy over the past decade, saying nary a word publicly over the years while journalists and Internet sleuths searched for digital breadcrumbs about what exactly he was up to with CloudKitchens, a business under which he had quietly built the biggest network of dark kitchen/ghost kitchen facilities in the country.
The Food AI Weekly Bulletin: Will AI Fakery Make Restaurant Reviews a Thing of the Past?
Welcome to the Food AI Weekly Bulletin, our new weekly wrapup that highlights important happenings at the intersection of AI and food. Nowadays, there’s a lot of noise around how AI is changing food, so we decided to create a weekly brief to bring you what’s important, decipher through all the noise, and deliver actionable insights. If you’d like to sign up for our weekly Food AI Weekly, you can do so here.
‘All The Rules Are Changing’: Why AI is Accelerating Change to Every Part of the Food Business (and Beyond)
This week, I attended the Fancy Food Show in New York City. It’s long been one of my favorite food conferences, mostly because I just love walking around and sampling all the great food. I mean, who wouldn’t?. While the fantastic food samples on the show floor are...
Is Food Waste Reduction About to Have Its ‘Nest Moment’?
When the Nest came out in 2011, it quickly became popular for its innovative design and its ability to allow users to track their energy usage more accurately. While the Ecobee thermostat is largely recognized as the first true smart thermostat, most would agree it was Nest—especially after Google acquired the company in 2014—that exposed a much broader swath of the population to the concept of using smart home technology to manage energy and reduce energy bills.
‘It’s Algorithmic’: Surreal Brewing’s Founder Says Process for Non-Alchohol Beer Based on Science, Not Gimmicks
Nearly a decade ago, Tammer Zein-El-Abedein and his wife, Donna Hockey, had reason to celebrate. Donna had just successfully overcome a breast cancer diagnosis, and so the couple hoped to commemorate the good news in a healthy way. “We wanted a nonalcoholic beer,” said Zein-El-Abedei in an interview at Smart...
MOTO Pizza’s Lee Kindell Talks Drone Delivery and Humanoid Robots
Last week at SKS, we had a chance to sit down for an interview with MOTO founder Lee Kindell. Anyone who’s spent time with Lee knows he’s an enthusiastic proponent of technology, both in his restaurants and in our lives. That’s why it no surprise that he’s embracing drone delivery and hopes to see Zipline drones dropping his craft pizzas on front doors in the Seattle market by the end of this year.
Podcast: The Smart Kitchen Summit Recap
Last week, The Spoon and almost three hundred of our closest friends spent an eventful couple of days in Seattle, talking about how technology is transforming the consumer meal journey. After the dust had settled, Carlos Rodela and I got together to talk about some of the highlights of SKS...
Don’t Call It a Comeback: Take-Aways and Thank Yous For Smart Kitchen Summit 2024
Last week, we produced the first in-person Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) since 2019. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. In some ways, we’ve lost all sense of time given what has happened over the past five years, including a pandemic, but still, five years is a long time.
Scenes from Smart Kitchen Summit 2024
The Smart Kitchen Summit wrapped up this week, and boy, did we have a great time discussing how new technologies will drive the next wave of cooking and kitchen innovation!. I’ll be sharing some of my thoughts next week, but I thought I’d share some of my favorite shots from the show. Thanks, as always, to Heather Moore for great work.
Your Future Induction Oven May Be the Foundation for That Home Power Wall
If you’re like me, you’ve considered installing a giant home battery to help transition away from traditional grid-connected power. And if you’re also like me, you haven’t done it because it’s expensive, and there’s a lot of housework you need to do to make it happen.
MOTO Pizza Teams Up With Cibotica for Salad Bowls, Eyes Expansion into Frozen Pizza for Retail
This week, fast-growing restaurant chain MOTO Pizza announced it will soon add salads to the menu at select locations with the help of Cibotica, a startup specializing in salad and bowl food robots. According to MOTO founder Lee Kindell, the Seattle-based pizza chain will deploy its first Cibotica unit at the chain’s flagship location in the Belltown area of downtown Seattle sometime this summer.
A Decade Before The ChatGPT Recipe Craze, a Cooking Show Champ Helped IBM Train Chef Watson
By now, most everyone has tried their hand at prompt engineering ChatGPT or another LLM to create a decent recipe. But a decade and a half ago, well before the current craze of making recipes with generative AI, IBM was trying to figure out how to make Watson start cooking. The supercomputer-powered AI, which was probably the first real-world AI most of us knew by name, had just broken into the broader American consciousness after it had beaten human players Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a Jeopardy tournament. Now, IBM was looking for ways to showcase how the technology could help people be more creative, and they identified cooking and recipes as the next world to conquer.
Tovala’s Keeley Kabala: Success in Smart Kitchen Requires Listening to Your Customers
Back in 2016, an early-stage startup called Tovala appeared in just the second Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase. Company CEO David Rabie showed off the first-gen oven and discussed the vision for a combination of a hardware appliance and a food subscription service. Fast forward eight years later, and Tovala...
Meet PZZA, the Latest Pizza Robot Built by a Rocket Scientist
So what’s the deal with rocket scientists and pizza?. No, that’s not a Jerry Seinfeld punch-line setup, but an actual question I have after seeing Andrew Simmon’s recent post on Linkedin about the latest pizza robot he’s stumbled across. Simmons, who’s made a name for himself documenting his learnings as he tinkers with his restaurant chain tech stack, wrote about a new pizza robot named, well, PZZA.
From Smart Toasters to Cookbox Mash-ups: The Story of Revolution Cooking
If you follow food Instagram or TikTok, chances are you’ve seen the touchscreen toaster from Revolution Cooking over the past couple of years. The company made a name for itself by creating the world’s most high-end, tech-enabled toaster, and just this past CES, it announced its second-generation toaster with Wi-Fi.
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