Choose your location
TheSpoon
Pitchbook: Food Tech Funding Dropped Almost 60% in 2023
The food tech sector navigated rough waters in 2023, as venture capital funding experienced a significant downturn for the second consecutive year. According to Pitchbook’s Q4 2023 report, food tech funding saw a steep drop of 59% in annual VC deal values, plummeting to $9.2 billion from $22.5 billion in 2022. This contraction is in step with an overall deceleration in venture investing due to a combination of macroeconomic challenges and sector-specific headwinds.
Is The US Power Grid Prepared For The Transition To Induction Cooking?
In case you haven’t heard, electricity demand is shooting through the roof. After a couple of decades of flattened usage due to more efficient lightbulbs, appliances, and factories, the growing adoption of EVs and remote work, not to mention the explosion in new data centers for compute-intensive applications such as AI, demand for electricity has skyrocketed the past couple years according to a new report in the New York Times. In fact, forecasters estimate that peak demand in the summer will grow by 38,000 megawatts nationwide in the next five years, which is akin to adding another California to an already overburdened grid.
Not Surprisingly, Starbucks Is Shutting Down Its NFT Program
Perhaps not all that surprising given the downturn in interest in Web3 and NFTs among big brands, Starbucks announced today that it’s shutting down its Web3 loyalty program Odyssey. The Odyssey program allowed members to gain benefits through playing games and participating in activities called Journeys. When they completed...
Keurig Unveils Plastic-Free Coffee Pods, Developed With A Little Help From The Maker of CoffeeB
If you can’t beat them, join them. And if you’re Delica, that’s precisely what the Swiss-based company did. That’s because today, North American single-serve giant Keurig Dr. Pepper announced that they have developed a completely new single-serve coffee form factor, one that does away with the iconic (and environmentally damaging) plastic pod, by partnering up with Delica, maker of the CoffeeB fully compostable single-serve coffee ground form factor.
Keurig Takes Another Swing at Cold Beverages With the Launch of QuickChill Cold Coffee Technology
That appears to be what Keurig is thinking, given the news of the single-serve coffee giant’s new technology and brewing system that allows it to deliver cold-brewed coffee drinks instantly. The new system, QuickChill, will use advanced cooling technology to flash-chill fresh-brewed coffee. According to Keurig, QuickChill will chill...
Why a Small Startup in the Middle of Valencia May Be Leading the Wireless Energy & Invisible Cooktop Trend
About a decade ago, IKEA famously released a concept video laying out its vision for the kitchen of the future. The central concept for their envisioned future kitchen was a kitchen table that not only made the experience of cooking and eating interactive with a touch interface, but also had built-in induction transmitters under the table’s surface that transmitted energy to power appliances and powered invisible-to-the-eye heating zones.
After Hitting Ten Thousand Users, Mill Unveils Second-Generation Hi-Tech Food Waste Bin
Last week, Mill unveiled its second-generation appliance, one year after introducing its high-tech food waste bin (don’t call it a composter!). The news comes as the company reaches ten thousand customers and claims it has helped divert one million pounds of food waste from landfills. Both the first and...
GE Appliances Debuts EcoBalance and Its Vision of the Kitchen as Integral Part of the Home’s Energy Management Network
This week at KBIS, Haier subsidiary GE Appliances focused much of its, um, energy on getting the message out about its new EcoBalance Home System, a new whole-home home systems energy management platform that it has been working on for much of the past decade. The first announcement about EcoBalance...
Can Whirlpool’s Deal to Use BORA’s Downdraft Ventilation Add Momentum to Induction in the US?
One of the more intriguing long-term technology trends in the kitchen industry has been the up-and-down market evolution of induction cooking. Though introduced almost a century ago at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, residential induction cooktops only became widely available in the early 2000s and have never really taken off here in the States due to, among other things, America’s love affair with gas cooking.
Podcast: Overcoming Obstacles To Build Kitchen Tech Hardware With Ovie’s Ty Thompson
Ty Thompson and the rest of the Ovie team recently passed a major milestone: They shipped their first hardware product. 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 right manufacturer to work with.
Chef Robotics Hits 10M Meal Milestone in Under Two Years. The Secret? AI-Powered Robots Trained With Lots of Field Data
This week, food automation startup Chef Robotics told The Spoon it had reached the ten million-meal milestone, less than two years after the company’s first robot was deployed in June 2022. If you think that type of growth is achieved by steady month-over-month increases in production over time, you’re...
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
Welcome to NewsBreak, an open platform where diverse perspectives converge. Most of our content comes from established publications and journalists, as well as from our extensive network of tens of thousands of creators who contribute to our platform. We empower individuals to share insightful viewpoints through short posts and comments. 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. We strive to foster a dynamic environment for free expression and robust discourse through safety guardrails of human and AI moderation. Join us in shaping the news narrative together.