 From the Computer History Museum, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering food IT, fork to farm, brought to you by Western Digital. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Rick here with theCUBE. We're in Mountain View, California at the Computer History Museum at Food IT. A really interesting conference about 350 people talking about the impacts of IT and technology in the agricultural space. Everything from farming through to how you shop, how you consume, and what happens to the waste that we all unfortunately throw away way too much of. We're excited to have our next guest, Mike Wolf. He's the creator and curator of the Spoon and the Smart Kitchen Summit. Mike, welcome. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm excited. Absolutely. So first off, before we jump in, what do you think of the show here? It's great. It's very focused on agriculture and the food chain, which is crucial. I focus a lot on the kitchen when food gets to our homes, what we do with it, but this is a for it all starts, so it's really important. There's so much stuff going on with the kitchen and food preparation with all these services that will either bring you your meal or they'll bring you like pre-portioned and uncooked meals. So let's talk about a little bit. What is the Smart Kitchen Summit and what is the Spoon? So I've focused on the smart home a lot. Over my career, I've written a book on how to network your home. But about four or five years ago, I noticed no one's really talking about how we're going to recreate the kitchen. We focused from a digital home perspective on the living room. We saw the Netflix revolution over the top. We've seen the huge market value creation in the living room, but the kitchen was kind of left behind. So I said, let's start a conversation. Let's focus on how we can recreate cooking in kitchen. And the Smart Kitchen Summit's entering its third year has kind of become the preeminent event about how technology will reshape how we get food, bring it to our home, how we cook and how we eat it. Which is funny though, because people would always say, I'll have an iPad on the front of my fridge and it'll tell me when it's time to go get milk. Clearly that's a pretty low, not a real significant use case out of measures, a lot more to it than that. Yeah, I think tablets and screens and connecting to things with apps is like 5% of what's interesting. I mean, I think if you look at the refrigerator, the internet refrigerator, I was just talking to an LG guy. They created the first internet refrigerator in 2000 and it was like $20,000 and no one bought it because everyone said, why would I want to connect my refrigerator refrigerator to the internet? Well, I think we're kind of at this point now where now it becomes interesting, we can maybe have the fridge understand what our food is. You know, the fridge itself is kind of a, the family Bolton board, so why not put a big screen on there if it's only a couple of extra hundred dollars? Right. And so I think there's all sorts of ways in which we're getting food, like you said, new ways like Blue Apron, cooking by number services, new ways to cook food that are coming from the professional kitchen, like sous vide, high precision cooking technology that's democratized through technology and things like automated beer brewing appliances. I've always wanted to brew beer, but my wife said, no way you're going to like have the smelly beer coming in my house, but if I can use technology to make this automated and easy, I'm one of those guys that say, let's do that. Then I can brag to my friends that I've actually made beer at home. Right, right. Well, it's funny because we saw this other thing in the kitchen not that long ago, right? Where everybody had to have a wolf and it was kind of this, you know, kind of professionalize your kitchen with all these really heavy duty, you know, appliances that really most people probably don't need a wolf so they can keep their flimbay, you know, at the perfect temperature for extended periods of time. So what are some of these things that are coming down the line that people haven't really thought of that you see as you study the space? Well, so our research shows that everyone, almost every age group is using more digital technology in the kitchen and that's iPhones, smartphones and tablets because what they're doing is looking for what they're going to have for dinner. So that starts the process of digitization of the kitchen. And so you've seen almost for 17 years now, services like All Recipes and Yumly creating kind of this digital recipe services. Now we've also seen like really one of the most popular videos on the internet, Buzzfeed Tasty was the biggest video publisher for many months this year, doing couple billion views a year per month of these simple cooking videos. So a lot of it is very much generational. So millennials are grabbing on to these how to cook, you know, how to cook videos. They're very interested in cooking but the definition of cooking is changing. And so what they're seeing is the worrying about cooking through online but also maybe applying cooking technology in a new way. Whether that's like a very simple cooking appliance like a sous vide circulator or maybe like an air fryer or if you want to go high in something like a June oven. So if you look forward, starting to add artificial intelligence, image recognition and these type of technologies to the cooking process could make things a lot easier and make things faster and kind of give you cooking superpowers that you may otherwise not have. Right, it's so interesting. It continues to be a trend over and over that it's kind of the hollowing of the middle, right? You are either, you don't ever cook, right? And you're ever, everything is door dash or however you get your meal or you kind of get to some of these specialty items where you're way into it as a hobby. And I mean, those videos, the cooking mediums are fascinating to me, the popularity of those things. But if you're kind of stuck in the middle in the no man's land of what we think of maybe as a traditional kitchen, that's probably not a great place to be. Yeah, I think, you know, I'm a different archetype depending on the day of the week, right? I may be in the middle of the week and I'm tired, I have kids, I don't want to cook. Maybe something that automates my cooking, maybe makes it easy with food delivery that's fully cooked. That would be a great idea. But maybe on the weekend, I want to become like a maker and really, like I say, the only maker space in the home right now, besides the garage as a kitchen, it's where I'm actually using my hands to make stuff. And I think that's great nowadays when we're all spending so many times, so much time in front of screens, moving around ones and zeros with our mouses, I think, you know, our research shows that people want to cook, but the definition of cooking is changing. So they may be assembling salads or and they're buying something from Costco and they're calling that cooking. But I think if we can have technology that allows the statue to make stuff in the home where it's fresh, it tastes good, it's healthy and we feel like we're learning a craft, I think there's a lot of people that would want that. It's so interesting, there's makers in craftsmanship and you think back to kind of the traditional, beautiful cookbooks that people would buy maybe to actually use, maybe just because they want to be associated with that type of activity and those types of photographs and stuff. So it's a very different way to think about it as a maker versus I've just got to get the food out for the kids, I'm tired on a Thursday night at 6 p.m. Yeah, sometimes it's just sustenance, right? I mean, that's why packaged food is great. Like we like these protein bars, like they're expensive, but they provide everything we want and like a flat piece of food. But at the same time, like there's a whole food movement, you know, ever since John Mackie founded Whole Foods back in the early 80s until the time that Amazon acquired it, the customer base has been growing. What I think is interesting is we could potentially see the democratization of better quality food as we see the decentralization of processed food, right? So over the past 100 to 200 years, all the technology around food has been towards centralized processing in putting it into cans, making it, but what happens is you take all the nutritional value out of it. If you can start to think about bringing fresher food in the home, a lower cost to optimize value chains, like what maybe Amazon could do with Whole Foods, maybe that brings fresher food to the home at a lower cost to where it gets me on the five to 10% of the consumer, which is buying from Whole Foods. It's a high income type of retail channel, right? But I think everyone wants better food. So I think that's where I think technology could play a process. Was I just specifically, what are your thoughts on the Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods and the impact of that? Not only for those two companies specifically, but as a broader impact within the industry. I'm excited for what Amazon could do with this technology. I live in Seattle, so I've been watching their, what I would call, lab experiments with Amazon Go, which is this recreation of the grocery store, this idea of walk in, walk out, don't ever talk to cashier, that's really fascinating. And then you look at Whole Foods, which is a pretty traditional retail, or even though it's kind of created the organic food movement in a lot of ways, I think bringing Amazon technology into there is really exciting. I also think it validates the need for physical storefronts. I think Amazon's been trying to do online delivery, rolling trucks out to your home for 10 years. They've been working on Amazon Fresh for 10 years, and they haven't really reached massive scale. So I think this validates that idea of you need physical storefronts. Those physical storefronts may look very different in 10 years, but the fact that Amazon is going to need that as a distribution point, as a point of presence, in different neighborhoods, I think is fascinating. All right, well, Mike, we're almost out of time. I'll give you the last word. Where should people go to get more information about what you're up to? Yeah, go to the spoon.tech, if you want to see our writing podcast on the future of food and cooking. And if you want to come to our event, go to smirkagesummit.com. All right, you Mike Wolf, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Food IT, a lot of really interesting stuff. Again, it's all the way from the farm, the germination of the seeds, all the way through to what you eat, how you eat, and what you do with the stuff you don't. So thanks a lot, Mike. Yeah, thanks. All right, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks for watching.