The Spoon Podcast

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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In this episode of The Spoon Podcast, Mike catches up with Mo Abouelsoud, CEO of U The Mind Company, about the emerging intersection of brain health, wellness, and consumer technology.

Abouelsoud explains how his company’s non-invasive brain stimulation devices are designed to help treat neurological conditions while also opening the door to cognitive enhancement, better focus, and long-term brain wellness.

The conversation explores whether brain health could become the next major category in wellness, alongside sleep, metabolism, and fitness, and looks at how new technologies might one day give consumers a more complete picture of how their brains and bodies work together.

You can find out more about U the Mind Company at https://uthemind.company/

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In this episode of The Spoon Podcast, Mike catches up with Will Templeton, co-founder and CTO of Allspice, about how the traditional recipe blog model, laden with ads, pop-ups, and static content, is breaking down as users increasingly “lift” recipes into apps, screenshots, or AI tools.

The conversation explores how Allspice is building a new infrastructure layer for recipes, using structured ingredient data and vector databases to make sense of messy, inconsistent inputs from across the web. They also dig into the role of AI in the future of cooking, from conversational interfaces and guided cooking to the tension creators feel between embracing AI as a tool and fearing it as a threat.

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