The Spoon Podcast

We're busy preparing for Smart Kitchen Summit 2017, which is only one week away.

To prime the pump, we'd thought we'd release some of our favorite sessions from last year as podcasts.

This sessions, entitled The Chefs, featured none other than Kenji Lopez Alt (Serious Eats, James Beard award winner), Chris Young (ChefSteps, coauthor Modernist Cuisine) and Philip Tessier (Hestan Smart Cooking, Head Coach, Bocuse d'Or Team USA).

If you haven't purchased your tickets for SKS 2017, you can do so now at www.smartkitchensummit.com. Use discount code PODCAST to get 25% off of tickets.

Over the past six months, there probably hasn't been a company more roundly mocked in startup land than Juicero. The funmaking started after a Bloomberg article showed how one can squeeze the company's juice packs by hand, essentially making superfluous the company's $400 juicer.

When you raise $120 million, this is a PR problem.

But the company's problems went beyond an expensive juicer. As we discuss on the podcast, the company created a nearly impossible logistical and supply chain problem from the outset.

We also discuss Miele's new RF solid state powered wall oven and Sharp's deal with SideChef, as well as Mike's trip to Tokyo for the Smart Kitchen Summit Japan.

When you drink a great wine or a tasty IPA, you're often tasting the land from which that creation came from. But what happens when the means of production becomes distributed and food is produced locally?

What are the financial implications for creators of the digitization of things such as beer and the potential of global access through worldwide markets paired with local production?

These are the questions I talk to Zahr Said, Associate Professor at University of Washington School of Law and a person who has spent a great deal of time studying the local beer creators market in the Pacific Northwest.

When I tell people I cook with Facebook, they give me a strange look.

But using Facebook's chatbot interface as a cooking interface is surprisingly natural. The first cooking company to create a Facebook Messenger chatbot interface is ChefSteps, who launched their Joule-Messenger integration earlier this year.

The chatbot is part of the company's larger vision around the idea of 'conversational cooking', which I discuss with the ChefSteps CTO Michael Natkin.

For listeners interested in the Smart Kitchen Summit, less than two weeks until early bird pricing expires. Use the discount code PODCAST to get an extra 25% off of tickets.

If you've read an article about Zume Pizza, chances are it focused on the how the company is using robotics to make pizza more efficiently.

But here's the thing: while robot-assisted pizza production IS interesting, it is NOT what's the most intriguing part about Zume Pizza's business. No, instead it's the application of data analysis combined with what the company calls an "elastic" pizza delivery network that pushes final cook and delivery to where the most demand is that's what is the most revolutionary about this fast-growing pizza startup.

In a sense, the company is applying cloud computing concepts to pizza creation, bringing the ability to scale fast to meet demand with highly efficient resources.

This makes sense for a whole bunch of reasons. Traditional retail fast food involves hundreds of thousands - even sometimes millions of dollars - in fixed cost associated with each (to use a telecom term) "point of presence", but once the store is built you're stuck in one place. Why not move to meet demand where it's at, when it's at?

That is what Zume is doing with a network of mobile pizza trucks that do final-cook in smart ovens and through a fleet of scooters that bring the pizza to the consumer's home.

In today's podcast, Mike talks with Zume Pizza cofounder Julia Collins. If you'd like to meet Julia Collins and hear her talk about the future of restaurant tech in person, make sure to be at the Smart Kitchen Summit.

Podcast listeners can get Smart Kitchen Summit tickets for 25% off using the discount code PODCAST. Just go to www.smartkitchensummit.com.

You can find out more about Zume Pizza by going to https://zumepizza.com

Every now and then there's a deal of such magnitude, it makes you almost speechless when you first hear about it. Amazon buying Whole Foods is one of those deals.

On this quick-take podcast, Mike gets together with Nomiku CEO Lisa Fetterman to discuss this mind-blowing deal, what it could mean for Amazon, what a future Amazon-ized Whole Foods could look like and the implications for the broader grocery industry.

You can also check out Mike's initial take on the deal over at the Spoon: http://thespoon.tech/analysis-why-whole-foods-makes-perfect-sense-for-amazons-expansion-into-physical-retail/

On the 50th birthday on the microwave, the core technology behind the fast-cook workhorse faces an uncertain future. One of the technologies taking aim at the old-school microwave is RF solid state cooking.

A company that figures to be a key player in the RF cooking space is Goji Solutions. With a portfolio of technology originally developed for heating tissues for medical environments, today Goji Solutions holds over 100 patents in the RF heating market. Goji is working with appliance makers to bring products to market using their RF cooking technology.

We talk to Goji Solutions President Yuval Ben-Haim to hear the backstory of his company's technology and to get a state of the market for RF cooking.

If you'd like to hear Ben-Haim talk about RF cooking in person, make sure to come to the Smart Kitchen Summit where he will be speaking. Go to www.smartkitchensummit.com and use the discount code PODCAST to get 25% off of tickets

Mike and Ashley catch up on the top smart kitchen and foodtech news of the last few weeks, including:

-Whirlpool's acquisition of Yummly

-Amazon's latest Echo device, the Echo Show

-Microsoft's new Cortana powered wireless speaker

-PicoBrew's record breaking campaign for the Pico C

-The microwave's 50th birthday and while it may not be long for this world

-The Cinder grill's Indieogogo campaign

We also catch up on all the news coming out of the Smart Kitchen Summit. If you'd like to go to SKS, head to www.smartkitchensummit.com and use the discount code PODCAST and get 20% off of tickets.

In today's podcast you get two interviews for the price of one!

The first interview is with Lisa Fetterman, the CEO of Nomiku, in which Mike and Lisa talk about Nomiku's new sous vide circulator, their new subscription meal service for users of the Nomiku and the recent investment in Nomiku by Samsung.

In the second interview, we talk with James Ehrlich of ReGen Villages. James is trying to recreate the home and neighborhood of the future in which villages will be entirely self-sufficient in terms of energy, water and food creation.

You can find out more about Nomiku at www.nomiku.com

You can learn more about Regen Villages at www.regenvillages.com

A traumatic early experience as a young medical intern set Dr. Matthew Lange on a career course to change the way the world thinks about nutrition. He realized early on that by focusing on treatment of the sick after years of poor eating habits rather than helping people to better understand nutrition and the impact of their food choices over the course of a lifetime, the medical community had it all backwards.

From these early days, Dr. Lange has spent his career at the intersection of food, nutrition and information. His latest project is helping to create a common language for the food industry to use to use as technology enables better ways to extract data from the food itself. Lange and other believe that this common language that describes the Internet of Food will help usher in new ways to create, handle, distribute, cook and consume food, with much of the focus on healthier outcomes for a large percentage of the world's population.

You can find out more about Lange's effort around the Internet of Food at http://www.ic-foods.org/