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The Food Tech News Show: A Look at Our Food Lives in The Year 2055
Welcome to the Food Tech News Show! You can watch the show live here at 1 Pacific/4 Eastern or on Streamyard, YouTube, or LinkedIn. 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 will also talk about his new book Mise, which paints four different scenarios depicting the potential direction of our future food system.
As Bored & Hungry Shuts Its Doors, It’s Worth Looking at State of Web3 and Food
In March 2022, NFT and crypto investor Andy Nguyen purchased Bored Ape #6184 along with three Mutant Apes and soon decided to establish a Bored Ape-themed restaurant named Bored & Hungry. The restaurant opened its doors on April 9, and by the end of its first day, it had served 1,500 burgers and had lines stretching around the block.
Gaeastar is Now Cranking Out 3D Printed Clay Coffee Cups as It Launches a Pilot With Verve Coffee
Gaeastar, a startup that makes compostable drinking cups out of clay, is officially launching its U.S. pilot with Verve Coffee on April 22nd. Verve, a Santa Cruz-based coffee chain with locations across California, will begin using Gaeastar’s coffee cups in three locations and will expand to other locations over time. The pilot launch comes after the two companies have worked over the past year to refine the prototype and integrate the cups into Verve’s business.
Wow Bao Launches Hot Bun Vending Machine In The Metaverse
You can now visit a hot bun vending machine in the metaverse. No, this isn’t a plotline from the sequel to Hot Tub Time Machine, but the next chapter in the continuing push by digital-forward restaurant chain Wow Bao to expand into the Metaverse and web3. The company, which launched its NFT program a year ago, announced last week that Wow Bao has launched on Roblox, a hugely popular virtual gaming platform with over 200 million monthly global users. According to Wow Bao, their launch on Roblox marks the first time that a fast-casual restaurant has launched in the Metaverse with a loyalty program that gives away in-real-life perks.
Report: Diners Opting for Restaurant-Specific Apps & Kiosks While Deemphasizing 3rd-Party Delivery
A new report published by Tillster shows that quick-service restaurant customers are increasingly opting to use restaurant-specific apps over 3rd party delivery apps. The report, which analyzed the results of a survey of over 1,000 quick-service and fast-casual diners, showed that the number of customers who used restaurant-owned ordering channels over the past three months has increased 25% compared to last year, and 17% of those surveyed say they plan to use third-party apps and websites less in the coming year.
With a Summer Opening In Sight, Flyfish Club Now Letting New Members Join in the Old-School Non-NFT Way
Remember Flyfish Club, the Gary Vaynerchuck-affiliated dining club that made news when it announced it was planning to build the world’s first NFT restaurant?. While you may not, the restaurant industry sure does. After the group raised an impressive $14 million in just weeks by selling tiered memberships via NFT, it seemed everyone started wondering, ‘Could it really be this easy?’ (Editor spoiler: For others, it was not that easy. Copycats proliferated, but none matched the success of Flyfish).
Restaurant Cashier Zooms In to Work, Press Freaks Out. Better Get Ready for Lots More Change at Checkout
This week, a raft of news stories about an encounter with a cashier manning the checkout remotely from a distant location went viral. Dozens of shock-take articles proliferated after a Google employee named Brett Goldstein stumbled upon the remote cashier in a New York City restaurant called Sansan Chicken and proceeded to breathlessly tweet about it. From there, everyone from Eater to the New York Post covered the story. According to a publication called 404 Media, the company providing the virtual labor is called Happy Cashier.
Mycelium Protein & Fresh Produce Production System Wins Canadian Edition of Deep Space Food Challenge
Today, the Canadian edition of the Deep Space Food Challenge announced the grand prize winner for its years-long competition to discover new solutions to feed astronauts on long-term space missions. The winner is a food production system co-developed by Canadian companies Ecoation and Maia Farms. The system, called CANGrow, grows...
Big Tech Set Its Sights on Reinventing Checkout. Consumers Said ‘Not So Fast’
When it comes to technology and grocery shopping, one primary focus for grocery chains and technology providers in recent years has been the checkout experience. Amazon and various other technology companies have been developing platforms to enable consumers to skip the checkout counter. These platforms aim to transform the shopping experience into something akin to walking into a giant pantry, loading up your cart, and then walking out without going through a checkout line.
Robomart Unveils Autonomous Retail Collective to Propel Self-Driving Shops
Robomart, a company building a platform for self-driving retail storefronts, has announced a new organization called the Autonomous Retail Collective, a group aimed at accelerating the development of self-driving shops. The group is a mix of Robomart’s partners, including Whale Dynamic, specializing in autonomous driving systems; Avery Dennison, a supplier...
The Food Tech News Show: Apple’s Building Home Robots!
Join us at 1 PM Pacific where we’ll be talking about the food tech stories of the week!. This week, we’ll be joined by Scott Heimendinger, former founder of Sansaire and current builder of the next big idea in home knives at Seattle Ultrasonics. The live stream can...
Food Tech Weekly: AI’s Impact on Food Accelerating, Whirlpool Lays Off Yummly Team
This is the online version of The Spoon Newsletter. You can subscribe to The Spoon and get deliver director to your inbox. Over the past month, we’ve seen more and more signals that AI is having a once-in-a-generation transformative impact on the food business. To note:. Yum, the owner...
Whirlpool Lays Off Entire Team for Cooking and Recipe App Yummly
Appliance giant Whirlpool has let its entire Yummly team go. According to industry sources, the company recently laid off all the employees for the recipe and cooking app and website. These sources tell the Spoon that it’s unclear what the company plans to do with the property it acquired in 2017.
Amazon Pulling ‘Just Walk Out’ from Amazon Fresh Grocery Stores
According to a story published in The Information, Amazon is planning to pull its Just Walk Out cashierless technology from its large-format grocery store, Amazon Fresh. As part of the move, the company will begin to deploy its Dash smart shopping carts. Like Just Walk Out, the Dash carts have embedded computer vision, allowing customers to scan products as they put them in the cart.
Watch as This Robot Pizza Chain Operator Breaks Down the Cost Each Part of the Pizza-Making Process
For small operators (and big ones as well) in the pizza business, Andrew Simmons’s posts on Linkedin have become must-read material. That’s because Simmons, who I wrote about last year as he experimented with utilizing pizza automation technology in his San Diego area restaurant, has open-sourced his learnings as he continues experimenting with various forms of technology. And boy, is he experimenting!
When It Comes to Making Generative AI Food Smart, Small Language Models Are Doing the Heavy Lifting
Since ChatGPT debuted in the fall of 2022, much of the interest in generative AI has centered around large language models. Large language models, or LLMs, are the giant compute-intensive computer models that are powering the chatbots and image generators that seemingly everyone is using and talking about nowadays. While...
Weekly Food Tech News Show: Wither Magic Spoon?
On this week’s Food Tech News Show, Mike and Carlos welcome Rachel Konrad, former head of communications for The Production Board, Impossible Foods and Tesla. You can find the video version of this Weekly Food Tech News Show below, and you can find the audio-only podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Is The Keto Cereal Craze Over?
I have a soft spot for sugar cereals. Having grown up in the 80s eating big boxes of Captain Crunch, Lucky Charms, and Life (my friends called me Mikey!), I still salivate when I see big, colorful boxes with leprechauns and monsters in the grocery store cereal aisle. So when...
PoLoPo Unveils ‘SuperAA’ to Turn Potatoes Into Protein Factories Via Molecular Farming
Today, Israel-based startup PoLoPo announced it has deployed its molecular farming technology, a system that uses a genetically engineered potato to produce egg proteins, at greenhouse production scale. The company’s protein production system, which it has dubbed the SuperAA platform, grows proteins within a potato’s tuber, which is then harvested and extracted into protein powder.
Podcast: The Story of Mill With Matt Rogers
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’s unique approach included a subscription-based home food waste recycler and an accompanying service that would turn the food grounds into chicken feed.
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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
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