The answer is, it isn’t. But ssshhhhhh … don’t tell Silicon Valley. “Foodtech” is the sparkle in investors’ eyes, even as unicorn darlings like WeWork and Uber do a stock market swan dive. Hey, at least Beyond Meat turned a profit in its third quarter, however slim the margins may have been.

Food-as-technological-frontier was a common theme from the stage at the Good Food Conference in San Francisco in September.

“We tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short run, but underestimate the impacts in the long run. What I'm here to talk about today is what those underestimated long-term impacts [of new food technologies] could be … if we designed for them intentionally today,” said Max Elder, research director at the Institute for the Future.

Seth Goldman, executive chairman of Beyond Meat, was more direct: “The neat thing about our technologies is we continue to iterate, really, on a yearly basis. What's nice about it is our competition — which in this case is cattle — cattle's not evolving. And so we can keep improving against that.”

(Not so, Mr. Goldman, but we’ll get back to that in another blog.)

Two major considerations distinguish the meat business from the tech business: First, as Goldman points out, tech companies never stop improving products already on the market; put another way, they almost always release products to the market that they know are flawed, and fix them on the fly. No food company can do that, period. Taste, appearance, ease of preparation and, of course, food safety must be ready for prime time before a single package shows up on the shelf. Consumers will work around a glitchy software program, but then, they’re not eating the software.

Second, “tech company” and “manufacturing company” are not the same things. Most tech companies, like clothing designers, nurture their ideas in stateside offices and make the stuff elsewhere, usually Asia, often using subcontractors. Most food companies, on the other hand, actually make the products they market and do so here in the States, close to the ultimate consumer. That introduces a whole slate of accounting realities: sunken costs and depreciation, raw material acquisition and manufacturing margins, labor cost, food safety testing and cold chain management. Not to mention regulatory compliance.

So what to make of Dean Banks, Tyson’s new president? Tyson isn't confused about what it is: It’s a food manufacturer, one of the biggest, oldest and most storied. Banks has been an independent director of Tyson’s, serving on the governance and nominating committee and the strategy and acquisitions committee. But his resume includes, most recently, X, an Alphabet Inc. company, where he has been a member of the leadership team since 2016. Banks also is on the board of biotechnology company Vergent Bioscience, where he previously held the post of CEO. He also was managing partner of SEED Ventures, a group investing in early stage healthcare technologies. His bona fides in health care innovation and investments go on.

What exactly does the Tyson board think Banks, 46, will do for the company? Shake things up? Clearly. Will Banks eventually blend with the poultry industry’s traditional Southern gentility? Or will this grafted scion be rejected by its rootstock?

As much as companies seek to insulate themselves from threats, insularity is itself a threat. Cross-breeding ideas from different industries and perspectives for better, stronger outcomes often works, and sometimes doesn’t.

The ideas that Banks will bring to Tyson promise to be different and exciting, and the company does offer a forward-thinking pool for him to swim in. I look forward to seeing if this mash-up of technology and food yields something better than “foodtech.”

How is software like a spinalis dorsi?

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