How would you like to have your bone broth and drink it too? Ancient Nutrition, a company best known for its bone broth-based protein supplement powder, just snagged a $103 million investment. The funding round was led by private equity firm VMG partners along with Hillhouse Capital and Iconiq Capital. It also included participation from over 100 current and former players in craft food companies such as Noosa Yogurt, The Honest Company, and Stone Brewing.

It's hard to get amped about the food options inside an office building. Unless you work for a Google-like company and get subsidized or free meals, you're probably stuck with vending machines. And we all know Fig Newtons do not a healthy lunch make.

Weight Watchers is trying to carve out a space in the meal kit market-they're just skipping the whole delivery bit.

Last week, Aspire Food Group announced that it had acquired Exo, a company that makes protein bars from crickets. Exo will, under the terms of the acquisition, become Aspire's consumer-facing brand. Aspire's Aketta line, which launched in 2016, will be rebranded as Exo products. Exo, meanwhile, will exclusively use cricket protein from Aspire. "Aspire is the Procter & Gamble and Exo is the Gillette - on a much more humble scale right now," Aspire cofounder and CEO Mohammed Ashour said...

While the big 3D printing companies have yet to deliver on food printing, a small Spanish startup called Natural Machines has been quietly working on a 3D food printer for five years and started shipping it in small batches in the last couple of years.

We normally think of caffeine and vitamins as coming from two different sources in the morning. The folks at VitaCup think otherwise, and they have a product that could change the rest of our minds, too. The company makes Keurig-compatible coffee and tea pods infused with vitamins and available in a range of flavors you'd find with any other line of Keurig cups. And we'll likely see the company's offerings expand in the near future, as VitaCup announced last week that it has raised an...

Ever want to distill your own spirits? That job may have gotten a little easier, at least if you own a PicoBrew brewing appliance. That's because the company announced they've started shipping the PicoStill, an add-on to the Pico brewing appliance that will convert beer into the hard stuff, to their Kickstarter backers.

Yesterday, U.S. Patent No. 9,908,760 B2 was awarded to Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. for "Shopping facility assistance systems, devices and methods to drive movable item containers." Translation, robot shopping carts could be making their way to Walmart.

When dealing with any type of customer service online these days, I just assume that I'm talking with a chatbot. Companies like chatbots because they take the place of actual people who need things like paychecks, healthcare, etc. But if you reorder product from energy bar startup Verb, you will be texting back and forth with an actual human, and according to the company, it will always be this way.

It's a good day for wine lovers (and wannabe lovers) everywhere. Vivino, the world's most downloaded wine app and largest online wine marketplace, just raised $20 million in series C funding.

You know the time between when you order a meal for delivery or takeout and when it arrives? The 'hanger gap'? Well, Amazon wants to eliminate that waiting time between when you get hungry and when the food arrives by predicting exactly when you want to eat and preemptively ordering a meal for you.

We already know that robots can harvest our crops, cook us a medium-rare cheeseburger, bring us our takeout, and even make us a cappuccino (extra foam). In fact, it seems that every time we turn around there's another story about some company making robots to perform some task within the food system (or a podcast!). And now they're coming for your groceries-and then they're going to deliver them to you.

What do you get when you take a meal kit marketplace, cover it with the contents of a can of Cream of Mushroom, and let the two simmer over low? Probably something like this new partnership between Chef'd and Campbell's.

For just about a year now, Central Market in Dallas has tested out offering produce that was grown on-site in a Growtainer. Evidently, that partnership has gone so well that Central Market is making the relationship more permanent and expanding it with the addition of another Growtainer.

Though it sounds like a hardcore street narcotic in some rain-soaked cyberpunk noir story (apologies, I've been binging Altered Carbon), Nucane, a new sugar product, is actually quite sweet. And if it works as promised, the sweetest part could be a new industrial approach to making sugar... I don't want to say "healthier," but at least less bad for you.

Miso Robotics, the company behind Flippy, the hamburger flipping robot, announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series B round, led by Acacia Research. In a press release, Miso said it will use the new funding to expand its suite of kitchen robots and broaden the applications for its Miso AI machine learning platform.

One of the more frustrating elements that crops up in bad restaurant experiences is noise.

It was estimated at one point that Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson ate upwards of 821 pounds of cod per year. He's certainly an outlier, but as global demands for seafood increase, fish farms are rising to meet that challenge, with the aquaculture market projected to reach $219.42 billion by 2022. Already, half the seafood eaten in the U.S. is farmed, and a startup called Aquabyte is using machine learning and computer vision to make those farms more efficient and productive.

There is a milk glut in the U.S.. Technology has allowed dairy farmers to produce more milk than ever, but all this abundance has caused milk prices to plummet. It's getting so bad that some farmers face selling off their cows. While technology helped create this crisis, perhaps SomaDetect's technology can help struggling dairy farmers get out of it.

Amazon and Whole Foods today announced that they are rolling out two-hour delivery, in a move that ratchets up the ongoing retailer battle royale over who can get you your groceries fastest.

Today PicoBrew teased the release of a new beer brewing appliance called the PicoBrew Z.

When you talk with startups trying to combat food waste, you hear a common refrain: you can't get to absolute zero-there will always be some waste in the system. While we may never hit zero food waste, Copia is a software company fighting to get as close to that as possible through a combination of prevention and recovery.

We have banned the headline "X company hopes to become the Keurig for Y" here at The Spoon. But perhaps we should make an exception since it could literally be applied to today's news that Keurig Green Mountain plans to buy Dr Pepper Snapple Group in a deal valued at $18.7 billion. Will the addition of Dr Pepper make Keurig the, uhhh, Keurig of sodas?

Spoiler alert! The enterprise software startup, Spoiler Alert, works to help large food manufacturers, distributors and grocery distribution centers better manage their inventory to help reduce food waste and recoup potentially lost revenue.

Companies that make electronic programming guides have figured out six ways from Sunday to optimize recommendations for what your next binge-watched TV show should be. But what if your TV could recommend shows based on the smell of pizza or curry wafting through the living room?