The Spoon Podcast

Up until now, every morsel of food astronauts eat in outer space was created and packaged on earth. However, as we embark on the era of long-term space flight, NASA and other space agencies realize that that will need to change. 

As the Senior Project Manager for Space Crop Production and Exploration Food Systems for NASA, this is the problem Ralph Fritsche has been thinking about for the past decade. Ralph, who helped develop the Deep Space Food Challenge, works with his team to try and figure out how exactly they'll feed astronauts when they set up camp on Mars over a decade from now. 

If you've ever wondered about how we feed space travelers today and far into the future, this is the podcast for you!

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This week's guest for Food Tech Friday is long time food tech entrepreneur and investor Peter Bodenheimer.

Peter talks about his role at cultivated meat startup Steakholder Foods and what he's building at Super Kingdom.

Peter joins Carlos and Mike to talk about the food tech news of the week, including

• Are we comfortable with autonomous retail?
• Do we want drone delivery?
• Space food is happening. Should it?
• The growing number of layoffs in food tech 
• Amazon is adding a thousand robots a day. Could surpass workers by 2030
• The acceleration of food tech M&A 

And, of course, because how could we not, Chinese spy balloons   To get updates about food tech news in your inbox, subscribe to the Spoon newsletter.  

In this week's episode we catch up with Rachel Konrad, a former journalist who has spent the last decade-plus working for Tesla, Impossible Foods and now the Production Board.

Rachel joins Michael Wolf and Carlos Rodela to talk about her background, the recent controversy around Bloomberg's article declaring plant-based meat a fad, and how she helped Impossible bring food tech to CES in 2019 with the launch of the Impossible 2.0 burger.

It's a really fun conversation that you won't want to miss!

 

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It's almost the end of 2022 and so we decided to catch up with S2G Managing Director Tonya Bakritzes.

In this podcast we talk about:

-The impact of inflation and global macroenvironmental headwinds on the food tech landscape

-The plant-based meat sales slowdown and what it means for the space longterm. 

-Some areas to look forward to in 2023

You can find out more about S2G here.

 

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Ben Leventhal has nothing if not good timing. 

In 2004 the New York entrepreneur launched Eater at the dawn of the blogging era, back when food media was still mostly legacy publications and message boards. 

After selling Eater to Vox, he went on to launch Resy in 2014 just as restaurants were beginning to bristle at the data practices of legacy online reservations systems such as OpenTable. He'd eventually sell his second company to American Express. 

And now Leventhal is looking to create his third founder success story with the launch of Blackbird, a company which he describes as “a new loyalty, membership, and payments technology company.”

In this episode, we discuss Ben's journey from those early days, how evolution of food media, the changes to reservation and other restaurant tech platforms, and how he envisions Web3 and other new technologies could change the game for small and independent restaurants. 

You can find out more about Ben's new company at Blackbird.xyz. 

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Our guest this week on our weekly food tech news wrapup is Clayton Wood, the CEO of pizza robot startup Picnic.

We talk food tech news and then hear Clayton's view on where things are going in the world of food robots.

Here are some of the stories we covered:

The Food tech venture capital market really dropped hard in Q3.: Food tech venture drops 63% quarter over quarter

One sector that seems to be somewhat active in Web3 meets restaurants: Seattle's Forum3 announces funding on heels of launching Starbucks' NFT-centric loyalty program. 

Two Fast-Grocery Delivery Giants Have Merged: Turkish fast delivery company Getir has closed its acquisition of German rival Gorillas as fast grocery continues to consolidate.

Wonder Lays off 7% of Workers: Marc Lore's food delivery unicorn has its first layoff as growth goes slower than expected.

Colleges are embracing delivery robots. Grubhub announced a partnership with Kiwi, adding to their partnerships with Starship and Cartken. Is there something about college campuses that make them a logical testing ground for food robotics?

And we put Clayton on the food robot hot seat, asking him:

How would you assess the food robot marketplace in 2022?

Will we see some consolidation in certain areas of food robotics in 2023?

Predictions for the 2023 food robot market.

Enjoy!

 

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We're ramping our Friday food tech casual news wrapups back up again, and this week Mike and Carlos got together to talk about some of the stories that caught their attention this week.

The stories we talked about include:

Will reusable containers take off at colleges? Maybe. What about restaurants? One startup is trying to make it work.

A new smart mixer from GE Appliances stood out as an innovative product in a market that has lacked innovation as of late.

Has Amazon's Alexa strategy failed?

A startup debuts its new driver-optional electronic tractor.  Is this the future of farming?

One sidewalk robot company lands a nice deal with Norway's post office, but how are the others doing?

Plus: Cocaine Bear!

Join us next week on The Spoon's Crowdcast channel to see the live recording. 

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In his previous life, Max Elder worked as a futurist, where he helped food brands develop strategies for the future.

One of his primary motivations in this work was the hope that he could help steer them away from animal agriculture and towards a future centered around more humane and sustainable foods. Over time, however, Elder realized that to have a meaningful impact, he'd have to create his own product.

So in late 2020, Elder left his job as a futurist and created a plant-based meat company. With Nowadays, Elder envisions a future where he can have a bigger impact by scaling meat utilizing production techniques perfected for traditional animal agriculture.

In this episode, we talk about his transition from strategist to entrepreneur and Elder puts his futurist hat back on to look at where things are going in the world of alternative protein.

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This week we talked restaurant tech news with Kristen Hawley, friend of The Spoon and editor of Expedite.

We talked about the current state of web3 and restaurants, the evolution of the ghost kitchen, Subway's smart fridges and resilience of the delivery business. 

Enjoy!

WTF is going on with alternative protein?

To find out, we decided to catch up with one of our favorite people in future food, Indiebio's Po Bronson. Po went from being one of the early chroniclers of the dotcom boom via his novels and nonfiction titles to leading one of the most active investors and accelerators in the future of food in IndieBio, and in this podcast, we talk about his journey and how he become a VC. We also talk about the current struggles facing certain sectors of alt protein and where he sees things going. 

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