Fell Into Food Podcast

I had Michael Smith back on the podcast this week — round two with the guy behind Rameking, the only pre-filled portion cup dispenser out there, still running the whole operation with one other person out of Ohio. And yes, that jingle is still stuck in my head. It plays at the end of this episode too. You've been warned.

This episode is less about the product and more about what happens once you actually start posting. Michael went from 200 followers to a video sitting at three million views — no music, no editing, nothing polished about it, and the same thing that made people mad about it is the reason it worked. We get into that, and then into the real meat of the conversation: a private group he built called Global Nova, forty-some business owners trading warm introductions instead of competing for the same cold leads. No dues, no catch. Sounds like a nice idea in theory until you realize it's actually working for him.

Somewhere in the middle of all that we also cover why the standard sauce cup isn't cutting it anymore — blame the chicken tender for that one — and the one-word email trick that actually gets telemarketers to leave you alone. That's how these conversations go with Michael.
If you're trying to figure out what to actually do with the people already watching you, or you just want that Rameking song stuck in your head for the rest of the week — this one's for you.

Michael Smith / Rameking: rameking.com — available through US Foods, Sysco, and Amazon. 
LinkedIn: Rameking / Michael Smith
Instagram @ramekingdom
Facebook @therameking
TikTok @ramekingdom

Listen to the full episode and more! It would mean the world to me if you could leave a 5 star review on your listening platform to help grow and expand the Podcast.
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/55qBuFe9dQh5jLLdg0KLoL?si=08455ef88e554b91
Apple Podcast - https://apple.co/41RoTm4

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@FellIntoFood
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fell-into-food/
Instagram: http://instagram.com/fell_into_food
Facebook: https://facebook.com/fellintofood
FellintoFood.com

CHAPTERS / TIMESTAMPS
00:00 — Welcome back Michael Smith, and the jingle nobody can get out of their head
01:00 — What Rameking is, and the new 3.5–4oz cup coming because of chicken tender culture
02:59 — Rebuilding social media from 200 followers, and switching to an educational content style
05:20 — Recording 30–60 fifteen-second videos in a day, and the jingle sign-off on every one
06:33 — The Robopost CSV trick for scheduling a week of posts at once
09:45 — The raw, no-music TikTok video that hit 3 million views
13:25 — Why he built Global Nova instead of just growing a following
21:22 — What surprised him most about who joined — a Bar Rescue celebrity chef and Dart Containers
26:46 — Warm intros vs. cold outreach, and the trick to get telemarketers to actually leave you alone
29:03 — Audience vs. community vs. support group — the real difference

RESOURCES MENTIONED
Rameking (rameking.com) — portion cup dispenser, available through US Foods, Sysco, and Amazon
Robopost — social media scheduling app Michael uses to batch content, including CSV bulk uploads
Global Nova Group — private LinkedIn networking group Michael founded, ~42 members, free to join
George / Grill Advantage — mentor who helped shape Michael's educational content style
Brian Duffy — celebrity chef (Bar Rescue), Global Nova member
Dart Containers — sustainability lead is a Global Nova member
Levy Restaurants — Michael's former employer (GM, Ohio State) — kept as a warm-intro resource for the group
Episode Art

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Samantha Skyring is the founder and CEO of Oryx Desert Salt, a mineral-rich salt sourced from an ancient underground lake beneath Africa's Kalahari Desert — now stocked by Whole Foods and Woolworths, served in more than 3,500 restaurants, and supplied to JetBlue Airlines. We get into desert salt versus sea salt, the sodium and hydration science most people get backwards, and what's actually sitting in the "natural" sea salt in your pantry.

This one starts with Samantha walking 75 miles across the Skeleton Coast in Namibia in her twenties — the trip that put her face-to-face with the oryx antelope the brand is named after — and gets a lot more intense from there. Fifteen years ago, with a toddler to care for and no guarantee any of it would sell, she sold her house, bought 34 tonnes of desert salt, stored it in a garage unit, and started bottling it herself at her dining room table. That's how Oryx Desert Salt began. She'll also tell you, on tape, that table salt was invented as an industrial product around 1910 for paint and textiles, and that the chemicals added to make it "flow freely" are still in the shaker on your table today.

We cover what's actually harvested out of the ocean when a bag says "sea salt" — plastics, sewage, and in some cases radioactive waste from decades-old ocean dumping. Samantha walks through why sodium and hydration are more connected than most people realize, why she thinks "salt is bad for you" might be one of the more persistent food myths out there, and how she landed a national Whole Foods listing off three cold emails to a category buyer. We also get into the plastic-free, ceramic-mechanism grinder that kept over 894,500 plastic grinders out of landfill in 2024 alone.

Website: https://oryxdesertsalt.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/oryxdesertsalt/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oryxdesertsalt/?hl=en
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@oryxdesertsalt4081

Oryx Desert Salt can be found at
Amazon
Whole Foods
Direct on website

CHAPTERS / TIMESTAMPS
00:00 — Cold open: the five-month desert journey that started it all
01:18 — What Oryx Desert Salt is, and why an antelope is the logo
05:42 — She sold her house to buy 34 tons of desert salt
06:25 — Inside the Kalahari salt pan: 55 million tons, bigger than Texas
10:00 — What's actually in your sea salt (plastics, sewage, radioactive waste)
12:27 — Table salt's origin story: an industrial product from 1910
17:15 — "Salt is bad for you" — dismantling the biggest nutrition myth on the planet
26:26 — How she landed a national Whole Foods listing with three emails
32:15 — Getting on JetBlue and Amtrak
37:12 — The "tequila fist" taste test and what chefs are saying

Listen to the full episode and more! It would mean the world to me if you could leave a 5 star review on your listening platform to help grow and expand the Podcast.
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/55qBuFe9dQh5jLLdg0KLoL?si=08455ef88e554b91
Apple Podcast - https://apple.co/41RoTm4

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@FellIntoFood
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fell-into-food/
Instagram: http://instagram.com/fell_into_food
Facebook: https://facebook.com/fellintofood
FellintoFood.com

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Chris Valdes is a Miami-based chef and TV personality best known for Food Network Star, who's spent the last eleven years building a media career out of catering, storytelling, and refusing to let anyone else write his story for him.

This one didn't feel like a normal chef interview. We got into what it actually takes to build a brand before you have a team, how much of yourself you let a producer or a platform write for you versus protecting your own voice, and where AI actually earns a place in a professional kitchen instead of just taking over. Chris talks about grit in a way that doesn't feel like a quote on a slide — it's lived in.

We also ended up in Miami's Latin fusion food scene, the right way to cook a pot of black beans, and somehow my own Father's Day cookout. That's how these conversations go.

Connect
Website
Instagram 
Youtube

Listen to the full episode and more! It would mean the world to me if you could leave a 5 star review on your listening platform to help grow and expand the Podcast.
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/55qBuFe9dQh5jLLdg0KLoL?si=08455ef88e554b91
Apple Podcast - https://apple.co/41RoTm4

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@FellIntoFood
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fell-into-food/
Instagram: http://instagram.com/fell_into_food
Facebook: https://facebook.com/fellintofood
FellintoFood.com
4. CHAPTERS / TIMESTAMPS
Timestamps pulled from the final edited transcript (with intro narration) — these supersede the earlier raw-recording chapter list.
00:00 — Cold open: how Chris built a media brand on purpose
04:17 — Starting a catering company at 19 — the -$267 first event
08:06 — Staying authentic vs. playing a character on TV
11:31 — When cooking turned into storytelling (the Le Cordon Bleu essay & Emeril's "BAM")
15:54 — Why people actually connect with his content
23:20 — Jeff's own jump from corporate to entrepreneur
26:23 — The bride who almost didn't hire him — and 11 years of loyalty since
32:12 — Miami's Latin fusion food scene + the black beans recipe
42:13 — AI, tech, and what's actually changing in food media
53:22 — What's next: the next chapter as a storyteller

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Travis Petersen is the chef and founder behind Nomad Cook, a culinary cannabis brand that's hosted more than 1,200 cannabis-infused pop-up dinners in 117 cities across 37 states, and the person who helped the American Culinary Federation build its first cannabis chef certification course. He got his start on MasterChef at 31, years into a sales career in oil and gas — and built everything else from there. 

He bombed his tacos and got eliminated in the second episode, three minutes of total airtime. Ten days later, a recession hit his oil and gas company and he got laid off with a year's severance. That accident of timing is the entire reason Nomad Cook exists. He calls it the stars aligning; it's also just a guy who decided to spend a free year finding out if he could actually cook.

We get into how a newspaper photo of a sold-out cannabis dinner sent him into his own backyard for his first pop-up, and how that snowballed into touring 20 days a month with 500 pounds of gear and a sous chef in tow. He breaks down what terpenes actually are — sativa and indica only describe how the plant grows, not how it makes you feel. 

He's also walking away from the touring life at the height of it. His last public Nomad Cook pop-up dinner is September 5th in Miami, and after that he's moving Nomad Cook into education only while he starts a new venture helping small businesses with AI automation.

Social
Instagram: the_nomadcook
Website: https://www.thenomadcook.com/
ACF Cannabis Course

Listen to the full episode and more! It would mean the world to me if you could leave a 5 star review on your listening platform to help grow and expand the Podcast.
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/55qBuFe9dQh5jLLdg0KLoL?si=08455ef88e554b91
Apple Podcast - https://apple.co/41RoTm4

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@FellIntoFood
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fell-into-food/
Instagram: http://instagram.com/fell_into_food
Facebook: https://facebook.com/fellintofood
FellintoFood.com

CHAPTERS / TIMESTAMPS

00:00 — Intro: Travis Petersen, the Nomad Cook
02:24 — The first backyard pop-up
04:48 — From oil and gas to MasterChef
09:54 — Writing the cookbook, building the ACF certification
15:02 — What a cannabis dinner actually is
19:05 — Terpenes, the entourage effect, and the mango trick
23:20 — Inside the dosing system
27:49 — Why the touring life is ending
33:25 — The Paris takeover surprise
51:23 — What's next: education and AI

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Rob Whitten and Jane Lo are the co-founders and co-CEOs of p!ng — a robotics-powered coffee company building 120-square-foot autonomous pods that take your order before you arrive and hand you a finished drink in under 30 seconds, with no one behind the window. Rob is a West Point graduate and former robotics leader at Amazon and iRobot. Jane is a brand strategist and Booth MBA who spent her career inside customer experience at Forrester and SharkNinja. Together, they're going after the $50 billion coffee industry with an idea that sounds like science fiction until you realize how much of the modern drive-thru is broken.

They didn't start with the robot. Rob ran a food truck first — flipping eggs on two four-foot griddles — just to learn the food business from the inside before he ever touched automation. And in the early pilot, when customers pulled up to what looked like a fully automated pod, Rob and Jane were behind a curtain inside, making the drinks by hand, Wizard-of-Oz style, just to prove people would actually want this. The twist? When customers found out there was a person inside, they were disappointed. They wanted the magic to be real.

That tension — building real automation without losing the human side of hospitality — runs through the whole conversation. We get into how p!ng's "sensor-augmented geofencing" actually identifies which car you're sitting in before you reach the window (your phone is doing more work than you think), why they chose Cometeer flash-frozen coffee extract over brewing on-site, how a fifty-plus-ingredient menu gets built around what robots can actually do well, and what their Robotics-as-a-Service franchise model looks like for someone who wants to own a pod without ever having to learn robotics.

P!ing - Where to find 
Website — pingthru.com
TikTok — @pingthru
Facebook — facebook.com/pingthrucoffee
LinkedIn (company) — linkedin.com/company/pingthru
YouTube — youtube.com/@pingthru
Instagram — @pingthrucoffee
Jane Lo — linkedin.com/in/jane-lo-ping
Rob Whitten — linkedin.com/in/rob-whitten-pingthru
Wefunder — wefunder.com/ping

Listen to the full episode and more! It would mean the world to me if you could leave a 5 star review on your listening platform to help grow and expand the Podcast.
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/55qBuFe9dQh5jLLdg0KLoL?si=08455ef88e554b91
Apple Podcast - https://apple.co/41RoTm4

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@FellIntoFood
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fell-into-food/
Instagram: http://instagram.com/fell_into_food
Facebook: https://facebook.com/fellintofood
FellintoFood.com

CHAPTERS / TIMESTAMPS
00:10 — Intro: Rob Whitten & Jane Lo, p!ng
01:28 — Origin story: food trucks, robot armies, and how p!ng came together
09:50 — Hand-building the first pod in a driveway
13:02 — "The guy in the box" — why customers wanted the magic to be real
14:49 — Restocking and the hub-and-spoke model
18:02 — Sensor-augmented geofencing explained
22:19 — Why p!ng uses Cometeer flash-frozen coffee
26:14 — Building a 50-ingredient menu a robot can run
30:23 — Robotics-as-a-Service: the franchise model
38:21 — What's next: 24/7 pods, WeFunder, no-tip pricing

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