The Spoon Podcast

In this episode, Mike sits down with Kai Schaeffner and Andreas Nicklas, who have been spending the last couple of years building an AI to better understand and predict individual taste and smell preferences.

Kai and Andreas talk about how they've built their platform using scientific cohort and patient data, why taste is often the missing link between healthy eating recommendations and real behavior change, and how personalized taste profiles could eventually power everything from recipe recommendations and connected appliances to restaurant menus and digital food passports. They also talk about why are building their own specialized AI models rather than relying on large language models, and where the company sees opportunities to bring its technology to food brands, healthcare providers, hospitality companies, and consumers.
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In this episode of The Spoon Podcast, Mike talks with Neal Carter, founder and CEO of Okanagan Specialty Fruits, about buying back the company he and his wife Louisa founded nearly 30 years ago.

Carter reflects on the long journey behind the Arctic apple, the company’s nonbrowning apple created to reduce waste and get “more apples in more places,” and explains how OSF’s early work with RNA interference is giving way to a new generation of genome-edited fruit. He also lays out his bigger vision for the farm of the future, where genetics, automation, AI, and redesigned tree architecture come together to make orchards less labor-intensive, more resilient, and more economically viable for growers.
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This week's guest is former Brava executive Travis Rea, who reflects on building one of the more interesting kitchen startups over the past decade.

Rea shares the story behind Brava's light-based cooking technology, the challenges of creating an entirely new appliance category, and the lessons learned about consumer adoption, hardware startups, and innovation in the kitchen.

The conversation also explores Brava's unexpected impact on accessibility and independent living, why the company developed such a loyal user community, and what the future holds for smart cooking technology.
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In this episode of The Spoon Podcast, Michael Wolf talks with Jake Berber, the cofounder and CEO of Prefer, a Singapore-based startup that uses fermentation to create coffee and cocoa extenders from ingredients like rice and chickpeas.

Berber explains why rising coffee and cocoa prices, climate pressure, and growing global demand convinced him there was a massive opportunity to help future-proof some of the world’s favorite foods, and his journey from Texas to Israel to Singapore led him into the world of food tech and climate-resilient ingredients.
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In this episode of The Spoon Podcast, Mike sits down with Chef Robotics CEO Rajat Bhageria to unpack how the company quietly went from years in stealth to assembling more than 100 million meals. Bhageria explains why assembly, not cooking, is the real bottleneck in food production, how Chef is using its ChefOS platform to build a data-driven approach to food manipulation, and why the messy, variable nature of food has historically made automation so difficult. The conversation also explores Chef’s expansion into new categories like airline catering and school meals, as well as Bhageria’s bigger ambition to build the defining success story in food robotics.
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