My Food Job Rocks!

Today we’re interviewing Akiko Okada, Research and Insight Specialist at SigmaXYZ. A consulting firm in Japan. Akiko is also the main point of contact for Smart Kitchen Summit Japan, a satellite conference of Michael Wolf’s conference of the same name, Akiko gives us a short history of the innovation of Japan, in which she played a huge part of in her past life. I think this interview also gives me perspective on what exactly is food tech. Whenever I talk about food tech, I generally gravitate to alternative proteins, but that’s not the case. Food Tech is where we apply any technology to food. Though the material is the cool part, there are tons of other sectors in Food Tech I personally have no idea about! One of my favorite quotes from Akiko was out discussion on the first SKS conference in Japan. Apparently, it was just a small 200 person conference but they were all full of crazy, passionate, people! You’ll also learn how SigmaXYZ works with big companies and startups to win. The startup mentioned in this