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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.
We Used CloudChef’s Cooking Guidance System to Cook Like a Chef
Earlier this month, we visited Google in Chicago, where we got a chance to put the Cloudchef cooking guidance system through its paces. For those not familiar with Cloudchef, the company uses computer vision to monitor a chef working through a recipe. Sensors and cameras monitor everything from the temperature of a protein to the moisture lost while reducing a sauce to the brownness of an onion and put it all into a machine-readable playback file that can be executed in a kitchen powered with Cloudchef’s software.
Is Kirin’s Electric Spoon an Early Signal of a Tech-Powered Eating Trend?
Japanese food giant Kirin announced this week that it is selling an ‘electric salt spoon’ that amplifies food’s saltiness by applying an electric current to the tongue. According to the product’s co-developer, the product works by using the current to draw more sodium into contact with the tongue, which in turn enhances the perceived saltiness of the food.
Speedy Eats Readies First Unattended Drive-Thru Convenience Store Location for Summer Launch
Speedy Eats, a maker of unattended vending and retail technology, will debut its first location with a customer this summer. The company, which has been showcasing its unattended retail concept at its lab in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for the past year, will launch with an unnamed food operator in August, according to CEO Speed Bancroft.
Meet the SKS 2024 Startup Showcase Finalists
Ever since we launched the Smart Kitchen Summit {SKS} in 2015, one of the most popular parts of the conference is the Startup Showcase, where attendees get a glimpse at early-stage companies making innovative inroads into food and kitchen tech. The Showcase is back this year, and we’re excited to...
The Story of Chefee with Assaf Pashut
There’s been no shortage of cooking robot startups in the past few years, but most are focused on commercial kitchens. It’s for good reason: consumers tend to like appliances we’re familiar with, and the idea of having a robot make our food seems, well, like something out of a science fiction future.
The Story of Samsung Food with Nick Holzherr
Nick Holzherr, founder of Whisk and head of Samsung Food, is this week’s guest on the Spoon Podcast. Those in the smart kitchen industry know Nick, in part because his company helped pioneer the early tech behind shoppable recipes, but also because his acquisition by Samsung is the culmination of one of the true success stories in this market.
Waring and Planet Protein Debut Fermentation Appliance for Chefs to Create Plant-Based Proteins
This week at the National Restaurant Show, commercial equipment provider Waring and Planet Protein debuted a new commercial fermentation system to create plant-based proteins in commercial kitchens. The new system, called the Planit POD Fermentation Chamber, uses single-ingredient bases provided by Planet Protein combined with a proprietary starter culture to create eight pounds of customizable protein base in 24 hours.
Spoon Tank: The Spoon Team Watches and Gives Play-by-Play on RoboBurger’s Shark Tank Pitch
Like many, we’ve been long-time fans of Shark Tank, especially when the crew brings food-related products into the tank. This year the sharks have seen quite a few food pitches, and it seems like there’s been a particular emphasis on food robots. Because we have lots of thoughts on these pitches, we thought we’d watch it Mystery Science Theater 3000 style and throw our commentary in from the peanut gallery.
Halla’s Spencer Price: Grocers Will Create ‘Unique Grocery Store for Every Shopper’ in The Future
Next up in our Smart Kitchen Summit speaker preview series is Spencer Price, the founder of Halla. Halla has built an AI personalization and recommendation platform for grocery store providers. According to Price, the turning point for his company and the broader grocery store industry was when Amazon acquired Whole Foods.
SKS 2024 Preview: Clayton Wood Talks The Current State of Food Robotics
We’re just one month away from the Smart Kitchen Summit, so we’re going to be checking and hearing from some of our speakers. First up is Clayton Wood, a long-time entrepreneur who has been navigating the food robotics market for the last five years, first as the CEO of Picnic (which debuted its robot at SKS 2019), talking about the challenges and opportunities he sees in this market. You can watch the full interview by clicking play below or read some of the highlights in the transcript below.
Why GFA’s Unceremonious Drop of Climax is a Big Win For the Company & the Plant-Based Cheese Category
For the past week, the alt-protein world has been abuzz about the news that the Good Food Awards had quietly dropped Climax Food from the list of finalists and, according to Climax, snatched the winner’s trophy from them due to a convoluted and confusing set of rationalizations by the organization.
‘Amazon for Proteins’: Shiru Launches AI-Powered Marketplace for Proteins
Shiru, a company that utilizes AI to discover plant-based novel proteins, has announced a new marketplace in ProteinDiscovery.ai that lets anyone search, discover, pilot, and buy molecules for food, agriculture, personal care, and advanced material applications. Shiru claims that its protein marketplace is an industry first. It allows researchers and...
Pipedream Raises $13M as It Looks to Build Underground Middle Mile Delivery Network
Underground delivery startup Pipedream Labs announced it has raised $13 million in funding. Company CEO Garrett McCurrach disclosed the funding, led by Starship Ventures, with participation from Cortado Ventures, Myelin Ventures, and others, in a post on LinkedIn. The new capital infusion will primarily be utilized to enhance Pipedream’s “Instant...
U.S. Online Grocery Expected to Hit $120B by 2028 as Grocers Focus on Building Out First-Party Delivery
According to a new report just published by researcher Bricks Meets Click, U.S. online grocery sales are expected to hit $120 billion by 2028. The report forecasts that the e-grocery segment will grow at a 4.5% clip over the forecast period, three times the growth rate of the in-store grocery segment, which is forecasted to grow 1.3% during the same period.
Micromart Wants to Create Just-Walk-Out Convenience Anywhere With Its Just-Plug-In Cabinets
Earlier this month, we learned that Amazon is phasing out its Just Walk Out technology at its Amazon Fresh grocery stores. The company didn’t say much about the reasoning behind it, but one likely reason is customers never valued skipping the checkout line in a traditional grocery store shopping experience as much as Amazon anticipated.
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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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