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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.
The Food Tech News Show: Behold, The Humanoid Kitchen Robot is Here
This week, the Spoon crew got together to discuss some of the big stories of the week on a new weekly video news show we’re launching called The Food Tech News Show. You can watch the full show below, on YouTube, or listen to it on the Spoon podcast.
Watch The Figure 01 Robot Feed A Human, Sort The Dishes, And Stammer Like Us Meatbags
While much of the startup funding for food-centric robots has been for task-specific fast-automation from the likes of Picnic Robot and Chef Robotics, some of the more intriguing – and creepy – action is happening with humanoid robots. The latest entry into the “watch a humanoid robot handle...
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...
Announcing The Food AI Co-Lab, a New Collaboration Between The Spoon & Future Food Institute
If there was one thing we learned when we held the first-ever Food AI Summit last October, it is that pretty much every food company believes their business will fundamentally change due to artificial intelligence. Whether it’s companies building farm equipment, managing food supply chains, launching new grocery shopping formats,...
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.
Bellwether Debuts Small-Format, Countertop Electric Coffee Roaster for $15 Thousand
Today Bellwether Coffee announced its latest electric, ventless coffee roasting machine, The Bellwether Shop Roaster. The new roaster, which is the company’s third-generation electric roasting machine, will retail starting at $14,900, about one-quarter of the price of its second-generation roasting appliance. According to the company, the Shop Roaster will...
Florida Bill Banning Cultivated Meat On Its Way to DeSantis’ Desk
Selling cultivated meat in Florida is about to become a second-degree misdemeanor. That’s because this week, the Florida legislature voted to pass a bill restricting the commercial sale of meat grown using cellular agriculture. The bill (SB 1084), which passed with a vote count of 86 Yays to 27 Nays, now heads to the desk of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to be signed into law. This was just days after the companion bill passed in the Florida Senate on February 29th.
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...
Ralph Newhouse Tells The Story of Chefman and Chef iQ (and Drops Some News About Upcoming Products)
Around 2009, Ralph Newhouse’s company hunted down excess inventory of small electrics and would re-sell them into the secondary market. However, it wasn’t long before Newhouse realized he wanted to make his own appliances, and that’s when the Chefman we know today was born. That was just...
Fresco Locks Up Deal To Bring Kitchen OS to Middleby Consumer Kitchen Brands
This week, smart kitchen startup Fresco announced it had struck a deal with Middleby to integrate the Fresco Kitchen OS platform across the cooking equipment giant’s residential portfolio, starting with high-end kitchen appliance brand Viking. The first Middleby product line to incorporate the Fresco Kitchen OS platform will be...
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.
The Origin Story Behind OMM, the Countertop Egg-Making Robot from Bridge Appliances
A few years ago, Lance Lentini was a year out of college when he started working at DEKA Research & Development, a technology development firm. This wasn’t just any engineering firm; it was the incubation hub for Dean Kamen, one of America’s most renowned inventors, responsible for a plethora of inventions such as the Segway, the iBOT wheelchair, and the dispensing technology used in the Coca-Cola Freestyle machine.
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...
It’s All But Official: The June Oven is Cooked
If you’ve been paying attention to the June Oven website lately (and really, who hasn’t?), you may have noticed that it’s been a bit difficult to order a new smart oven from the company for most of the past 12 months. That’s because every single model listed (standard June, June Premium, and June Oven Plus) has been marked as “sold out.”
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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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