The Spoon Podcast

Fresh back from CES, we talk about guided cooking apps, cooking robots and a "sexy" dishwashing appliance.

As food becomes more digitized, the opportunity better understand and quantify flavor, taste and perception becomes a reality. In today's podcast, I talk to Daniel Protz of FlavorWiki about his company's system that measures consumer tastes and preferences around food.

You can learn more about FlavorWiki at www.flavorwiki.com

Find more podcasts at www.thespoon.tech

Billions of dollars are wasted every year on bringing food products to market that don't succeed.

So what if we could use machine learning and predictive algorithms to create products that have a higher rate of success in the marketplace?

That's what we talk about on the podcast with Analytical Flavor Systems CEO Jason Cohen. Cohen's company uses AI to understand flavor perception biases of individual consumers and predict how consumers will like flavor signatures across a broader population of users.

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If you think blockchain is just about cryptocurrencies, think again.

A number of trends are driving innovators and data scientists to look at ways to apply blockchain to the food system, so on this week's podcast we talk to Raja Ramachandran, the CEO of Ripe.io, a company building a blockchain for food.

You can find out more about Raja and his company at www.ripe.io

Robots are playing increasingly important roles from the farm all the way into the kitchen. We chat with science and tech writer (and robot expert) Signe Brewster and The Spoon Founder, Mike Wolf about restaurant robots, automation vs. robotics and why everyone should have to work in a restaurant.

The Spoon sits down with the always lively and innovative Dan Pashman, host of The Sporkful podcast, where he gives advice on how to build your own food media empire.

The recipe is having a moment.

Yes, the recipe, which some have called dead, is fast becoming the center of action in the digital kitchen as publishers, food brands and startups like Chicory want to help consumers make purchase decisions within the recipe itself.

My guest for this podcast is Chicory's Yuni Sameshima, a company which works with publishers such as Betty Crocker and Time Inc to help transition the recipe from a static list of ingredients to an interactive platform which helps food brands become part of customized food bundles that make their way into consumer homes through both physical retail and brick and mortar.

You can find out more about Chicory at https://chicory.co/.

As always, check out www.thespoon.tech for more stories and context on this topic.

During our recent Smart Kitchen Summit, celebrity chef Tyler Florence proclaimed that "the recipe is dead." Not to get all Monty Python, but Milk Street founder Christopher Kimball disagrees and thinks Florence's take is dead wrong.

In this episode we talk with Kimball about recipes, why cookbooks are still king in the kitchen, and what connected gadgets he actually likes.

On one misty morning in Lyon, France back in spring of 2015, hardly anyone noticed when the US team showed up for competition at the Bocuse D'or, the semiannual world culinary championships. By that afternoon, people realized that this team of Americans were not the same as teams of years past who had come away empty handed.

This team had come to cook and win.

The team, led by Phil Tessier, walked away with the silver medal for the first time in the history of the competition. Two years later, with Tessier as head coach, they walked away with gold.

In this podcast, I talk to Phil Tessier about this journey to Bocuse, what changed, and what it was like competing that day. We also talk about his day job at Hestan Smart Cooking, where he is the culinary director and works with a team of technologists, culinary experts and more as they try to forge the future of cooking.

It's time for Mike and Ashley's annual post-Smart Kitchen Summit wrapup where they talk about the talks, the startups, cooking tech and all the behind the scenes happenings.

It's required listening, an indispensable "director's cut" accompaniment to the Smart Kitchen Summit.

We'll also already posting videos from the Smart Kitchen Summit over at the Spoon. Check out www.thespoon.tech where you'll see the video sessions first. You'll also want to check in with the www.smartkitchensummit.com from time to time for more details about upcoming events as well as photos and videos of SKS17.