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Dispatches from Israel Food Tech Ecosystem: Daphna Heffetz, CEO of Wanda Fish
Daphna Heffetz is the CEO and Co-Founder of Wanda Fish, a cellular agriculture company aimed at producing cell-based fish meat, starting with bluefin tuna. We talked about making cell-based fish entirely out of plant materials, the problems our oceans face today, and why Wanda Fish will only sell to high end restaurants to start.
Cultivated Meat is On Sale, But It’s Pricey. A New Study Shows How to Bring the Cost Down
Now that the cultivated meat industry has achieved the long-awaited milestone of going on sale to consumers in the US, the focus will increasingly turn to whether it’s possible to make meat outside the animal more affordably. After all, it’s cool to make meat using a process that sounds straight out of pages of a science fiction novel, but most of us can’t afford to dine in restaurants run by some of the world’s most famous chefs.
MIT & NVIDIA Researchers Are Building Tech That Could Enable Better Kitchen-Robot Precision
This week, a group of researchers from MIT and NVIDIA are showing off a system that one day may be pivotal in helping our robot chef make dinner without making a mistake. While robotic planning systems are good at developing high-level plans, they often fail when confronted with highly-complex environments. Because of this, the group wanted to create a task-planning system that performed well in complicated scenarios with many obstacles.
The Spoon Weekly: The Edible Barcode
This is the online version of our weekly newsletter. Head here to subscribe to The Spoon and get it delivered straight to your inbox. For the last few years, there’s been lots of excitement about blockchain’s potential to finally bring end-to-end transparency to the food system. After all, once we have an incorruptible record of where food comes from, we’ll be able to track it from the time it leaves the farm until it arrives on our plate, right?
José Andrés Serves Up Cultivated Chicken in Honor of Willem van Eelen, The ‘Godfather of Cultivated Meat’
A couple of days after the first sale of cultivated meat this weekend in San Francisco, news of José Andrés serving up GOOD Meat on the opposite coast landed in my inbox. According to the release, Andrés served charcoal-grilled cultivated chicken last night to a hand-picked group of diners. The dinner included cultivated chicken marinated with anticucho sauce, native potatoes, and ají Amarillo chimichurri, and precedes China Chilcano’s menu debut of the dish, which will be served weekly in limited quantities and by reservation only later this summer.
Big Week For Cultivated Meat: Dutch Government Approves Tastings, UPSIDE’s Chicken Debuts at Crenn
It’s been an eventful few days for cultivated meat. After getting the final regulatory green light from the USDA to serve cultivated meat to U.S. consumers, UPSIDE Food’s cultivated chicken showed up on menus for the first time this weekend at Bar Crenn. The event, hosted on Saturday, July 1st, marked the first time cultivated meat has gone on sale in the U.S.
Researchers at Cal Poly Are Studying The Social Impact of AI & Robotics on the World of Food
Last fall, a group of researchers at Cal Poly was awarded a $700 thousand grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the social and ethical impacts of AI and cooking automation. The study will last four years and explore the benefits and risks to individuals and the impact...
Ansā’s New Roaster Uses Radio Waves To Roast Coffee on The Countertop
While we know fresh-roasted coffee tastes better, by the time store-bought beans make it into our coffee machines, chances are they were roasted months ago. But what if we could roast the beans right before they enter the brewer?. If a new company called Ansā has its way, coffee roasting...
This Company is Using Baker’s Yeast to Create Invisible Barcodes That Track Food Through the Supply Chain
In a world where food-borne illnesses and food fraud are happening at ever-greater frequencies, tracking food provenance through the supply chain is becoming increasingly critical. The challenge, however, is that the further an ingredient travels from the farm to our plate, the harder it becomes to determine where it came from.
SEERGRILLS Unveils the Perfecta, an ‘AI-Powered’ Grill That Cooks the ‘Perfect Steak’ in Two Minutes
AI is seemingly everywhere nowadays, so it was only a matter of time before it would show up at the backyard BBQ to help us cook the perfect steak. , which debuted the Perfecta this week, which the company describes as the world’s first AI-powered grill. The grill combines high-temperature infrared cooking with its AI system called NeuralFire, which automates the cooking process.
EU Moves Towards Relaxing Rules Over Gene-Edited Food
According to a new document leaked by the Genetic Literacy Project, the European Union is moving towards relaxing its current regulations overseeing gene-edited food. The draft regulation of the European Commission, the body responsible for drafting new regulations for the EU, recommends that food developed using tools such as CRISPR be approved as conventional rather than adhere to the laborious approval process dictated by the EU’s GMO regulations. According to the proposal, the EU would create a new category for plants developed using gene-editing techniques that could side-step the GMO categorization, provided that the new varieties could have been achieved using traditional breeding techniques.
Molecular Farming Startup Moolec Shows Off ‘Piggy Sooy,’ Its Animal Protein Producing Soybean
Today molecular farming startup Moolec showed off its new soybean platform for producing animal proteins, the “Piggy Sooy.”. According to the company, the new soybean reached an expression level of up to 26.6% of total soluble protein in soy seeds, which they say is four times higher than initially projected. Moolec says that the results can be observed visually in the pink color of the bean, which is essentially the same color as a pig. The company says the success of its soybean platform has led them to “file a new patent utilizing a novel approach aiming to provide the company with a frictionless regulatory pathway going forward.”
Yes, I’ve Entered the Meataverse
Last year, when news got out that Slim Jim had gone and registered the term meataverse, we all had a good laugh. Over a year later and a few notches down the Gartner Hype Cycle, the salty meat stick company has finally launched its web3 world effort to get people to go online and collect digital art of cartoon meat sticks. The company, which, in a sarcastic nod to Facebook’s new corporate name, has periodically rebranded itself as MEATA on Twitter and described the effort in its trademark finding as something providing “services featuring virtual goods, virtual food products, and non-fungible tokens,” along with “providing a metaverse for people to browse, accumulate, buy, sell and trade virtual food products.”
Announcing the Food AI Summit: A Global Conference on AI’s Role in the Food System
Today the Spoon is thrilled to announce the Food AI Summit, the world’s first event focused exclusively on AI’s impact across the food ecosystem. The conference, which will take place on October 25th in Alameda, California, will convene scientists, investors, entrepreneurs, and others who are building the future of food using AI together for a day of keynote talks, interactive sessions, product demonstrations, and networking. The event will feature experts from the worlds of agriculture, food science, retail, synthetic biology, restaurants, and consumer products discussing the implications of AI. Sessions will cover the entire spectrum of AI technologies, from machine learning and computer vision to the quickly evolving world of generative AI.
Instacart’s AI-Powered Shopping Cart Arrives at ShopRite and Fairway Market
Today Instacart announced that ShopRite in Spotswood, New Jersey, and Fairway Market in Kips Bay, Manhattan are the first two locations to deploy the company’s latest generation smart shopping cart. The new Caper Cart, which the company announced last September, is the third generation of the AI-powered smart shopping...
Alt Protein Enters New Era as USDA Approves Sale of Cultivated Chicken By UPSIDE & GOOD Meat
Today marks a big day for cultivated meat as two companies, UPSIDE Foods and Good Meat, announced today that they had received approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to sell their cultivated meat products to consumers. According to UPSIDE, the news came in the form of notification from...
Karakuri Joins The Growing List of Food Robot Startups That Have Shut Down
More bad news on the food robot front. Karakuri, a startup that made a robotic food kiosk that assembles various cold and hot ingredients into prepared meals, is shutting down, according to founder Barney Wragg. In a post on Linkedin, Wragg cited the pandemic and the challenging fundraising environment as...
Shiru Used AI To Discover Its First Novel Ingredient in 3 Months. The Next One Will Go Even Faster
This week, novel ingredient discovery startup Shiru announced they have commercially launched their first ingredient, OleoPro, a plant-based fat ingredient the company says doesn’t have the environmental costs or health consequences of animal fat. As part of the announcement, the company disclosed that the company’s first commercial partner is Griffith Foods, a commercial food ingredient manufacturer.
Wonder Launches Membership Program, Eyes Ten Store Rollout As It Leaves Delivery Vans Behind
Wonder, the food delivery startup made famous by its original model that used customized delivery vans, has launched a membership program called Wonder+ the Spoon has learned. The new program, which costs $7.99 monthly, entitles members to free delivery with no minimum order value. Wonder+ also entitles members to prioritized delivery or pickup via a Wonder “Fast Pass” with each member’s order.
MrBeast: I Want To Move On From Beast Burger, Enjoy Feastables ‘100x More’
As the virtual restaurant and ghost kitchen business has struggled for much of the past year, proponents pointed to the success of MrBeast Burger, a virtual restaurant chain started by the YouTube star that expanded to over 300 contracted restaurants and included some physical restaurants. But now it looks like...
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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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