Innit dropped news this week of a partnership with Google Cloud, so I thought I'd do a quick catch up with him to hear about the news and see what else Innit is up to. 

You can find my story on Innit and Google Cloud over at The Spoon (www.thespoon.tech).

The Food Tech Show

Talking Grocery and Smart Kitchen With Innit's Kevin Brown

Matias Muchnick started NotCo in 2015 with a singular idea: Could AI be used to reinvent how new food products are discovered and made? Seven years later, his company is eating up market share in the plant-based milk and other alt-protein categories and he just inked a joint venture with one of the biggest food companies in the world. 

In this episode., Matias talks about those early days, what he saw as broken in the traditional food development process, and goes deep into how Giuseppe, NotCo's AI platform, helps create new food products.

The Spoon Podcast

How AI is Changing Food Innovation

Food tech industry is built on intellectual property. Whether a startup builds alternative proteins, cooking technology, automation/ AI or another food tech product, a large part of its future success relies on its intellectual property. 

A big part of a startup's success relies on managing a patent portfolio. But navigating the world of patents is confusing, so why not bring in an expert to answer some of our questions?

That's exactly what we do on this episode of The Spoon podcast with Anas Alfarra. Anas managed IP for one of the world's biggest industrial equipment makers, has secured his own patent for a food cooking system, and advises startups on how to manage their IP.

Topics discussed on this podcast include:
-What are the different types of patents?
-What is a provisional patent?
-How to understand patent strategies of large companies like Amazon and Microsoft 
-The process of applying for a patent
-And much more!

If you are at all interested in intellectual property and have questions about how to manage it for your food tech startup, this is a must-listen!

#137: Navigating The World of Patents As a Food Tech Startup

Food delivery through underground tubes?

Sounds crazy, but it's already happening today, and Pipedream's Garrett McCurrach thinks it just may be the future of delivery.

We catch up with Garrett just a week after they announced their first pilot in the Atlanta suburbs, where they have built a system that delivers food and other items underground for nearly a mile.

During this podcast we talk about how Garrett came up with the idea, what it was like to showcase the system to Jeff Bezos, how the company is working with fast food restaurants to rethink drive-thru pickup and what he sees for the future of underground delivery. 

As always, like or subscribe if you haven't already.

Talking Underground Delivery With Pipedream's Garrett McCurrach

Lab-grown or cultivated meat companies have struggled lately as they try to figure out how to do something that's never been done before: grow meat in large quantities in big metal vats known as bioreactors.

Part of the challenge is figuring out how to get the meat cells to grow. The technology to do this has been borrowed from the world of pharma, an industry where you can charge thousands of dollars for drugs.

Deniz Kent thinks he has the answer. His company, Prolific Machines, is replacing these expensive growth medium with the cheapest source of energy in the world: light.

Make sure to subscribe to our weekly Food Tech News Show podcast where we talk about some of the top stories of the week in the world of food tech.

Can You Grow Meat With Light?

In this episode of The Spoon Podcast, Michael Wolf sits down with Mark Cuban for a wide-ranging conversation recorded live at the SKS 2025. Mark and Mike discuss the transformative power of AI, exploring why Cuban believes it's more disruptive than the internet, mobile, or streaming, and how it's already reshaping education, jobs, and entrepreneurship. Cuban shares his views on the broken U.S. healthcare system, his motivations behind launching Cost Plus Drugs, and how GLP-1s might reshape food and wellness. They dive into the changing innovation landscape, the future of hardware and robotics, and why Cuban stepped away from Shark Tank and sold majority control of the Mavericks. 

A Conversation with Mark Cuban

In this episode of The Spoon Podcast, Mike welcomes Shiru CEO Jasmin Hume to the podcast to catch up on where things sit within the AI and food space in the context of Shiru's own evolution over the past couple of years.

The highlights include:
-Talking about how VCs and entrepreneurs talk differently about how AI is being embraced in food
-Who will own the foundation models for food in the future
-How Jasmin and Shiru have evolved their company and how they talk with food brands about integrating AI
-How Jasmin would advise young food scientists to move forward in an era of AI


It's a fun and interesting conversation, so take a listen!






Are Food Companies Really Embracing AI?

This week, we catch up with Nicole Papantoniou, the Director of the Good Housekeeping Kitchen Appliances and Innovation Lab. 

We hear from Nicole about what it's like running one of the preeminent testing labs for kitchen appliances in the world, her personal journey to her current position and what she's excited about in terms of kitchen innovation. 

Enjoy the podcast!


Behind The Scenes at the Good Housekeeping Appliance Lab

This episode features a wide-ranging conversation between The Spoon's Michael Wolf and his old friend, long-time veteran tech journalist Derrick Harris, about the state of AI in 2025.
Topics discussed include:

The evolution from the early cloud and big-data era to today’s generative
-AI boomHow Nvidia became dominant on the training side
-How inference is becoming the true infrastructure bottleneck
-Why ChatGPT was a consumer inflection point
-How the AI ecosystem is stratifying between foundation-model providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google) and an emerging wave of vertical and agentic applications built on top 
-Derrick's belief that infrastructure players will sell “picks and shovels” while domain experts own the higher-order use cases.

We'll have a part 2 with another AI expert in just a couple of weeks.
Enjoy!


The State of All Things AI in 2025 (Part 1)


Hey Everyone! I am pretty excited to announce a new podcast called Smart Kitchen Show. I know, I need to work on more original names, but I'm pretty proud of this new show. It's got great stories from makers in the foodtech and smart kitchen space and also will be the story of us putting together a little thing called the Smart Kitchen Summit. It's like the Startup podcast, but for smart home and food tech.

If you like the deep dives we did for NextMarket, you'll like this show. Please check it out and subscribe to it on iTunes itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/smart…how/id1037600142 or using RSS feeds.feedburner.com/SmartKitchenShow

Thanks!

Mike

Podcast Page

Special: Pie, Robot

The NextMarket Podcast is back after a long hiatus!

The guest for this episode is Mark Cuban, who joins Mike to discuss:

-The state of the 2016 Presidential campaign
-Why he decided to discuss Donald Trump's wealth
-The efforts by political insiders to recruit Cuban to make a third party run
-Whether he would consider running for president in the future
-Hillary's weaknesses as a candidate
-His work with others to create a possible new political party
-His investment history and record on Shark Tank
-Why he does Shark Tank
-Whether he regrets missing the success stories he doesn't invest in
-The success of the Amazon Echo and invisible interfaces 
-The rise of artificial intelligence and the long-term impact on labor markets
-More!

This is a great conversation so check it out and subscribe to the podcast. You can find more podcasts at http://www.technology.fm/nextmarketpodcast/

Follow Mike on Twitter at www.twitter.com/michaelwolf







#102: Mark Cuban

Ahti Heinla brought the world closer together when he helped build Skype as the founding engineer, but now he's moved onto another way to shrink space and time: sidewalk robots.

Mike walks to Ahti about how he got the idea to start a sidewalk robot company and asks how exactly the system works, how truly autonomous they are and how many robots Ahti expects to have on sidewalks a year from now. 

Check out Starship at www.starship.xyz

Find more NextMarket podcasts at www.technology.fm

NextMarket Podcast

From Skype to Sidewalk Robots: A Conversation with Starship's Ahti Heinla

This is a conversation I did in early 2012 with comedian and podcast giant Marc Maron.  We talk about his app, Louis CK, his expectations when he started podcasting, his monetization strategies for the podcast, and where he sees the medium going. 

A Conversation With Marc Maron

While alt-meat and plant-based milks have seen an explosion in great products the past few years, plant-based cheese space hasn't seen the same level of new and exciting products.

That might change soon as Ground Foods brings its cauliflower and hemp based cheese products to the masses.

We talk with Veronica Fil, the CEO of Grounded Foods, on the story behind their product that has many in the plant-based food world excited about cheese.

Making Plant-Based Cheese With Grounded Foods Veronica Fil

Long-time food tech executive Lou Cooperhouse became fascinated with the idea of creating biotechnology to create animal cells for food as he watched pioneers like Mark Post product mammal cells in a lab, but realized there wasn't nearly as much innovation happening the world of cell-based fish.

And so BlueNalu was born.

We talk about the future of cell-based fish market, how creating cell-based fish differs from other types of cultivated meat and much more.

The Food Tech Show With Michael Wolf

Talking Cell Based Fish With Lou Cooperhouse

The Spoon is the leading chronicler of the food tech revolution.

The Spoon

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