Building a Social Impact Food Company With Anna Hammond
In this episode, Mike is joined by Anna Hammond, founder of Matriarch Foods, a social-impact food company that turns farm surplus and manufacturing byproducts into shelf-ready ingredients and meals for food banks, disaster relief, and food service.
Anna has an interesting career journey, going from museums and art publishing to building a triple-bottom-line food startup tackling food waste at industrial scale. Mike and Anna discuss her career path, the economics of upcycling, and how food waste is quickly becoming a real business opportunity.
Enjoy the podcast.
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30:14
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30:14
The State of All Things AI in 2025 (Part 1)
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 boom
How 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!
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39:06
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39:06
Behind The Scenes at the Good Housekeeping Appliance Lab
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!
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27:54
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27:54
Are Food Companies Really Embracing AI?
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!
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31:41
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31:41
The Good (and Bad) of AI-Powered Food Tracking Systems
In this episode of The Spoon Podcast, Mike talks with Steve Statler, CEO and co-founder of AMB.AI, about the rise of ambient AI and energy-harvesting Bluetooth beacons could transform the supply chain.
Steve shares his journey from pioneering Bluetooth beacons at Qualcomm to envisioning a future where everyday items like food, medicine, and clothing are connected and continuously monitored for location, temperature, and even freshness.
The conversation explores the potential for reducing food waste, enabling dynamic expiry dates, and creating “demand chains” that respond in real time, while also tackling the privacy challenges and brand impacts of AI-driven purchasing. Steve balances excitement about the technology’s climate and efficiency benefits with caution about its role in feeding increasingly powerful AI systems.
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Ireland