Here in the Bay Area, we love startups, and we love food. So it stands to reason that we’d love startups working to transform the way the food industry works.
And indeed, just as you’d expect, the region is home to one of the largest clusters of food-related startups anywhere, as I documented in my June 2011 story Silicon Chef: A Half-Baked Guide to Food Startups. A few weeks ago, founders from several of the companies on that list gathered for a panel discussion at a meetup of food-and-entrepreneurship enthusiasts at SOMA Central, the startup hub on Townsend Street in San Francisco.
The organizer of the event, Matthew Wise of FounderLY, asked me to moderate the discussion, reprising my role at an earlier meetup back in November 2011. I happily agreed, given that I’ve been covering many of these companies for a while now and that I consider food one of the most interesting areas for technology-driven innovation.
Now Matthew’s group has put the video from the event online. You can watch it below, or over on YouTube. It’s 1 hour and 3 minutes long.
The speakers you’ll see in the video include:
—Andrea Cutright, co-founder of social meal planning startup Foodily
—Naithan Jones, founder of AgLocal, Kansas City, MO-based building a service intended to make it easier for foodsellers to buy locally-raised meats
—Aihui Ong, founder of Love With Food, a subscription-based service that distributes boxes of tasty food samples monthly
—Arram Sabeti, founder of Zerocater, which provides lunch services to numerous technology startups and other companies in the San Francisco Bay Area
—Rob Spiro, founder of Good Eggs, a startup working to grow and sustain local food systems
—Brian Witlin, CEO of IDEO spinoff Shopwell, which is working to improve consumer access to nutritional information about food.
Bon appétit!
