Tuesday Top 5: Must-Follow Names in NYC Food Tech
Meet the people who are driving NYC’s thriving food tech scene.
By the Dave Partners Team.
New York has always been a great town for food. This city has the ideal conditions for creating amazing culinary culture: People from every conceivable nation and culture call New York their home, and they’ve been exchanging ideas and tastes since the city was founded, resulting in amazingly creative and diverse ideas of what a good meal should taste like. We have eager investors and ambitious chefs, living very close to each other, making it possible for the next great restaurant to arise overnight. And, of course, we have New Yorkers: Sophisticated city-dwellers with adventurous palates, always eager to try the next great thing.
So it’s only natural that some of New York’s greatest tech exports would be centered on the culinary world: Start-ups that focus on getting your next meal to you in exciting and adventurous ways. We love Twitter as a way to stay in touch with the city’s great minds. So, without further ado, we present the top five must-follow figures in NYC food tech.
1) Chris Muscarella, @cm
Muscarella has founded one of NYC’s most creative start-ups: Kitchensurfing, a service that allows you to book a professional chef to design a menu and prepare a restaurant-quality meal in your own home. There are more great chefs in NYC than there are head chef positions at restaurants; this allows the chefs the creative freedom they need, and gives you the great party or anniversary dinner you’ll love. Muscarella is also tremendously well-informed, curating must-know information from every corner of the food and tech world. He’ll give you a crash course in what food tech looks like and where it’s headed.
2) Nick Taranto, @NickTaranto
Nick Taranto is the co-founder of Plated, which is pioneering the growing personal-shopping trend in food tech: It aims to “demystify cooking” and turn busy professionals into foodies by delivering chef-designed recipes and fresh ingredients every week. On Twitter, Taranto is friendly, funny, and sharp, always offering both insights and laughs about the start-up world.
3) Paul Lightfoot, @plightfoot
We all know that we ought to be eating locally grown produce: It tastes better, it’s fresher and more nutritious, and it’s good for the environment, to boot. The problem is actually finding local produce — especially when you live in the city. Paul Lightfoot’s BrightFarms aims to solve that problem, by building mini-farms and gardens near supermarkets, so that you’re never too far away from fresh food. Lightfoot’s feed is socially conscious and deep, with all the info you need about responsible eating and how farming is changing in the 21st century.
4) Matt Salzberg, @MattSalz
Salzberg’s Blue Apron has become the go-to name in meal delivery: Fresh, local ingredients, simple but great recipes, and availability everywhere. It’s how people in the 21st century teach themselves to cook. As for us, we love Salzberg’s Twitter presence: For gorgeous meal photos and tantalizing looks at the latest food trends, there’s nothing like it.
5) David Chang, @DavidChang
Of course, no article about NYC food would be complete without the wildly charismatic — and wildly talented — David Chang, the celebrity chef behind Momofuku and food magazine Lucky Peach. We love Chang’s delicious (and shamelessly high-calorie) meals — but what we’re really looking forward to is his new start-up Maple, the food delivery start-up that will be sending Chang-designed meals to New Yorkers wherever they are. His Twitter feed is worth following for the updates, if for nothing else, but we also like getting a look into the mind of New York’s most popular chef every day.
Dave Partners is New York’s leading boutique headhunting firm exclusively for high-growth tech companies. We find the top 1% of A+ talent for our clients. To learn more, contact us or visit us online.
This post originally appeared on the Dave Partners blog.
