Spoiler alert! Do not read this story unless you’ve seen Wednesday’s season one finale of Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars on Fox.
Chef and restaurateur Gordon Ramsay had a tough decision to make during Wednesday’s finale of Food Stars: should he give his $250,000 angel investment to Malibu’s Pizza Girl? Was the creator of Fat Milk more deserving? Or should he reward the guy who wants to hydrate folks and save the environment at the same time?
In the end, Ramsay placed his bet on chemist Chris Kanik, who created the world’s first printed beverage. Kanik’s Smart Cups eliminate the need to bottle and ship liquids. The flavored part is actually imprinted in powder form at the bottom of the plant-based cup; all consumers have to do is add water.
Here, the entrepreneur-cum-family man talks about why he felt the need to appear on Fox’s Food Stars, even though he’s been working on Smart Cups for 11 years and currently operates his business out of a 23,000-square-foot warehouse in Orange County.
DEADLINE I saw stories on you and your technology back in 2020. Why did you have to go on a Gordon Ramsay show to get money?
CHRIS KANIK It’s taken quite a bit of time to develop this technology from scratch. Our equipment is patented, one of a kind. We have quite a bit of capital invested into the development of Smart Cups. The one element that we’re missing is commercial success. And 99.9% of the people walking this planet have no idea that Smart Cups exists. That’s why I went on the show. I needed that platform, and I wanted to expose Smart Cups to millions of eyeballs. And I knew in the back of my head, if I could get Gordon’s buy-in on this, it would lead to commercial success and a domino effect of adoption. So the $250,000 is great, but more important than that is the 50-50 partnership with Gordon and his stamp of approval.
DEADLINE How do you get the dried ingredients to stick to the bottom of the cup?
KANIK The largest food companies have tried to reverse engineer it and have failed miserably. It’s a unique plant-based polymer that’s amphiphilic, which means that it repels water and it creates a really nice shell around the ingredients. It does a nice job of adhering on surfaces.
DEADLINE And you said the cup itself is plant-based, right?
KANIK Yeah. We don’t make the physical cup, so I want to be clear on that. We source the cups from a supplier. But we’re not limited to the cups that you currently see our product in. We can print on recycled material. We can print on paper, we can print on biodegradable materials, we can print on glass and aluminum. Let’s put it this way, we haven’t found a material that we can’t print on.
DEADLINE Have you gotten to the point where you could imprint alcohol?
KANIK That’s actually how this started — with me, thinking about making powdered alcohol. I was at a Taco Tuesday. The waitress wasn’t coming fast enough with my margarita, and I had a glass of water on the table, and I said to myself, ‘it would be so great if someone could just put [powdered alcohol] in their glass of water.’ I took a napkin and started writing out a protocol. The next day I blew up my kitchen. I caused a fire and an explosion, but I was successful at making three different flavors of powdered alcohol. That’s what led me to the printing technology.
DEADLINE Did you ever consider going on Shark Tank?
KANIK They reached out but I was still in the testing phase.
DEADLINE Were your fellow contestants aware of how far along you were with Smart Cups? Did they think Ramsay may have injected a ringer into the show?
KANIK A lot of the contestants were aware of that. Yeah. I walked into the show and realized very quickly that I had far more experience. I mean, I’ve been around the block. I’ve passed Fortune 500 audits. I’ve worked with multinational companies, public companies.
DEADLINE The season had a bunch of challenges, but did every contestant already have a product before starting this show?
KANIK Yes. Everybody had a company, everybody had a product that they were trying to expand on. Some of them were very impressive.
DEADLINE So did Gordon ever yell at you?
KANIK You want a funny story? I love the Idiot sandwich stuff that he does. I traveled every day to set with two slices of bread in my pocket, waiting for him to pick me off the show. I was just gonna pull it out and ask him to call me an idiot sandwich. But he never did, he never yelled at me. He was always very professional and respectful. I think he recognized that I was a professional myself. I never engaged in any drama on the show. When they announced the winner, I pulled out the two slices of bread and walked over to him to ask, ‘okay, can you call me an idiot sandwich now?’ He said, ‘come on, we’re gonna be business partners.’ I said, ‘just do it for my kids.’ So he called me an idiot sandwich shortly after he announced the winner. So that made my day.
DEADLINE You were very emotional in the finale.
KANIK I will preface what I’m gonna say by saying that Food Stars was the most difficult experience I’ve ever had in my life. Two months away from my family. It was draining emotionally, physically, and mentally. I remained stoic throughout the entire competition. I threw in humor here and there, but I was very stoic throughout it all. When they surprised me with my family, it was like 30 years of my life flashed before my eyes. I was thinking about the late nights, the events that I’ve missed. And they cut it out, but my wife is a cancer survivor, and I remember when we first launched Smart Cups, she had just had a thyroidectomy, and I was in the hospital feeding her ice chips while answering customer emails at the same time. All those events just flooded my brain.
DEADLINE What’s next?
KANIK UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability published a paper on the impact of our technology on the environment. We also implemented our automated production line to take on enterprise business. We just signed our first big enterprise deal with a global pet product company to print pet supplements in recyclable doggy and cat bowls. They’re planning on launching March of 2024. So it’s been a pretty exciting couple of months here for us.
DEADLINE So is your reality TV career over, or are you going to try The Amazing Race after this?
KANIK Uh, I will never be a contestant again. However, if I get an offer to be a judge, that’ll be a different story.