The kitchen has lagged behind other rooms in the home in the move towards digital service platforms, but that is starting to change. One of the companies at the forefront in building a digital food and cooking platform is Innit.

In this conversation, Mike catches up with Kevin Brown, the CEO of Innit, on the great digital kitchen transformation and what Innit is doing to build a digital platform for food and cooking.

This is a podcast where Mike professes his love...for cereal.

After breaking himself free of the morning cereal habit years ago, Mike decides to try Magic Spoon, a new high-protein low carb cereal that sells only through a direct-to-consumer model. This cereal, which tastes like the sugar cereal of our (and maybe your) childhoods, has been on backorder and out of stock despite an eye-popping price point of $10 per 7 ounce box.

As always, check out The Spoon at www.thespoon.tech for more news and analysis (and the occasional cereal review).

Welcome to The Food Tech Show with Michael Wolf (formerly the Smart Kitchen Show).

The Spoon team is back together for another editorial roundtable (this time with sound effects!).

This week we discuss:

-Who would use a tiny little countertop dishwasher

-The problem with Beyond Meat burgers

-The growing robot backlash

-Are we ok with Walmart walking into our homes?

On the podcast are Michael Wolf, Catherine Lamb, Chris Albrecht and Jenn Marston.

As you might expect, working a robot into the busy back of house of a fast food restaurant isn't as easy as just setting it in front of the grill and plugging it in.

Nope, restaurants are a complicated mix of workflows, equipment and yes, people, so automating a part of the process with robotics requires planning.

For this podcast we talk with some of the folks working on the leading edge of restaurant robotics, including Shawn Lange of Lab2Fab (a division of Middleby) and David Zito of Miso Robotics (the company behind Flippy, the burger flipping robot).

**Important Note** - We are going to change the name of this podcast to The Food Tech Show from The Spoon. Why? Because we talk about lots of things in addition to the connected kitchen (though we still talk about that a whole bunch) and thought the name should reflect the wide set of topics. You won't have to change a thing - just stay subscribed and keep an eye out for our new podcast logo with the new name next week!

Our daily work here at The Spoon includes a lot of chats with food innovators bringing their new tech and ideas to market and in the process changing the way we eat. In fact, we get so much good intel from these conversations we decided it's time to open the dialogue and invite our readers to participate in what we are calling our FoodTech Firesides.

Our first fireside was all about foodtech accelerators, and we had a great conversation with leaders of two of the most interesting accelerators out there: Food-X and WeWork Food Labs.

This is a recording from our first live fireside. The guests for this first fireside were Tessa Price, the Manager of WeWork Food Labs, and Peter Bodenheimer, the Program Director of Food-X.

We want to thank our sponsor for this FoodTech Fireside, Cloutier Arnold Ortega. You can find out more about them at www.CAOTeam.com

Enjoy the podcast!

Like many people, I've long been fascinated with space and one of the most interesting aspects of interstellar travel is what exactly people will eat on space and once they get up there among the stars.

This is something that Angelo Vermeulen has been thinking about for a long time. After spending years focused on systems and design for interstellar travel and colonization, Vermeulen was made the commander of the first HI-SEAS mission, a NASA funded space simulation focused on researching how to keep crews happy during long missions in space.

In this episode, we talk about his experience on the HI-SEAS, some of his key takeaways, and the current state of space food research.

You can find out more about Angelo at http://www.angelovermeulen.net/

The Spoon editors get together for a weekly conference call. Since we always have a fun time talking foodtech, we thought why don't we double-dip and also record the conversation!

So here is the first Spoon editor roundtable podcast! The topics we discuss include:

-Will fake meat (aka 'motherless meat' (thanks Chris) will be a big trend in 2019

-The spontaneous combustion of the Kiwi delivery bot

-Whether food halls are the new mall food court

The editors on the call include Chris Albrecht, Catherine Lamb, Jenn Marston and Michael Wolf.

Enjoy!

A decade ago, Amy Gross was enjoying a glass of wine with her husband when she noticed how the same wine tasted different to different people. From there she began to think about how technology could be used to make personalized wine recommendations, and it wasn't long before IBM and others wanted to learn more about her tech-powered wine recommendation platform, VineSleuth.

In this podcast, Mike and Amy talk about mapping the flavors of wine using technology, how AI could start to provide really contextual and personalized recommendations for wine, and much more.

To kick off the new season of Smart Kitchen Show, we talk to with Matt Rolandson, a partner of design firm Ammunition Group.

Ammunition is one of the leading design and strategy firms in Silicon Valley, and has worked with a bunch of the future-food product companies in the space such as Cafe-X, June and Ember.

Mike talks to Matt about designing technology-forward products that don't create a barrier for consumers and the act of cooking.

You can find out more about Ammunition at https://ammunitiongroup.com

Pieter Abbeel is a professor of robotics and AI at UC Berkeley, startup advisor, co-founder of Covariant.ai and this week's guest on The Automat.

Covariant's (formerly Embodied Intelligence) technology gets pretty futuristic pretty quick, so stay with us. Covariant is developing a way for people to train robots using virtual reality. While this approach is new (Covariant just launched last November), as Abbeel explains, it means that some day in the not-all-that-distant-future, a Michelin-starred chef will be able to use VR to train a robot how to cook. All the nuances and technique of that chef will be captured and even better, software will record it all so you could "download" that chef to a cooking robot in your home.

Abbeel was a great guest, and we covered a ton of topics including the importance of good data, advances in computer vision, and the mismatch between what people think robots are good at and what they are actually good at.