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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Chris Albrecht

Watch: Chef José Andrés Video Chats with Dr. Fauci About How to Re-Open Restaurants

What kinds of masks should staff wear? Should they use gloves or hand sanitizer? What should you do if a positive case of COVID-19 hits your business? These are just some of the questions that Chef José Andrés had for Dr. Anthony Fauci about safely re-opening restaurants during the pandemic.

Chef Andrés hosted a video chat with the epidemiologist today on Instagram and asked a bunch of straightforward, practical questions for the now-famous epidemiologist. It’s a good watch for any restaurant owner looking to open back up and even for restaurant goers to better educate themselves before heading back out to eat.

It also covers a lot of what we’ve been wondering about ourselves here at The Spoon as we begin the slow process of emerging from the pandemic.

Kroger to Build Three Robot-Powered Fulfillment Centers in the Pac. Northwest, Great Lakes and West Regions

Kroger announced today that it will be building robot-powered fulfillment centers in the Pacific Northwest, Great Lakes and West regions of the U.S. This expansion marks the first such robot warehouses to be situated on the west coast.

These smart warehouses use technology from U.K. grocer Ocado to automate the process of online grocery order fulfillment. Kroger is taking a centralized approach to such fulfillment, building out 20 robot centers in various locations across the U.S. to serve as hubs for customer delivery.

Other retailers are taking a more localized approach to automated order logistics, choosing instead to build out micro fulfillment centers in the backs of existing neighborhood supermarkets. Albertsons and Ahold Delhaize both have partnerships with Takeoff Technologies to build these types of centers, while Walmart is using Alert Innovation for a similar experiment.

The speed of online grocery order fulfillment has definitely become more of a priority during this pandemic. Quarantining has driven record online grocery sales over the past few months, but retailers were ill equipped to handle the deluge of new orders. The result has been out of stock items and massive delays in delivery windows.

The question, however, is, will those online grocery shoppers remain after the pandemic recedes. Companies like Kroger and Albertsons are making big investments in automated fulfillment, but once we get back to “normal,” which definitely won’t be the old normal, will people want to go back into the grocery store to pick out their own food?

Kroger’s march towards automation predates the pandemic by a long shot, so current fluctuations driven by the coronavirus probably aren’t driving too much of its implementation. Besides, the first of Kroger’s robot warehouses isn’t even scheduled to open until early 2021, so there is time for grocers and shoppers to figure out any new preferences to grocery shopping.

My 9-Year-Old’s Reaction to Impossible Burgers Surprised Me

To show how its new direct-to-consumer store works, Impossible Foods sent me a batch of their plant-based burgers, which arrived yesterday.

Impossible isn’t available in stores up near us, so we’ve been eating a lot of Beyond Meat during our quarantine. I was excited for the rest of my family to finally try Impossible’s take on plant-based burgers and see what they thought of it compared to Beyond. The results surprised me.

We are definitely a family of flexitarians. My son has grown up eating regular ol’ cow cheeseburgers and always liked them. And while we still eat meat regularly, as plant-based alternatives get better, we’ve incorporated more of them into our diet. Animal-based cheeseburgers, however, are a thing of the past.

So I was surprised when my son’s review of the Impossible burger was that it was “too much like regular meat.” Too much like the regular meat he had grown up eating. It was off-putting to him. He was actually “concerned” that you could play a practical joke on someone by replacing their meat hamburger with Impossible. (What the consequences of such chicanery would be, however, I’m unsure.)

But replicating the meat without the animal is the point, right? At least, it is to the tastebuds of my wife and I. The umami flavor and beefy texture of the Impossible burger are what we actually like. We both prefer Impossible to Beyond, which still has a slightly different, pea protien-y taste. But it turns out that Beyond’s slightly different flavor is what my son really likes.

My nine-year-old isn’t the only one who doesn’t dig plant-based meat that is too meaty. My former colleague, and staunch vegetarian, Catherine Lamb had a similar reaction with the Beyond Meat ground product last year, writing:

In truth, the Beyond Beef was almost too realistic for me. I haven’t eaten meat in five years, and eating a Beyond Beef burger was almost too close to the real thing for comfort. Even when I made the remainder into bolognese later in the week (you guessed it — it cooks up just like ground beef) I had trouble finishing it; the beefy flavor permeated the whole sauce in a way that was a little too strong for my liking.

Ironically, Catherine seemed to prefer Impossible.

I”m not writing this because I think my son has a supernatural palate or some deep insight into flavors. It’s more an observation as Impossible ramps up their retail operations. Will the first plant-based burger people try be the one they stick with? Will regional tastes emerge with different parts of the country preferring one over the other?

Impossible and Beyond are becoming the plant-based Coke versus Pepsi. But the twist here is that these new types of vegetarian meat are like software, meaning the recipes going into them can be tweaked and altered and re-released as new versions. Perhaps we’ll even see beefier/less beefy options a la Coke Zero or Crystal Pepsi.

Actually, let’s hope they don’t create a plant-based Crystal Pepsi.

Impossible Launches Direct Consumer Sales So You Can Buy its Plant-Based Burgers in Bulk

As the company hinted at last week, Impossible Foods officially launched its first direct-to-consumer online store today. This means anyone in the lower 48 states can order packages of the plant-based burger for direct home delivery.

According to the press announcement, Impossible’s D2C site will sell the following packages:

  • Impossible Convenience Pack includes four 12-oz. packages for $49.99
  • Impossible Combo Pack includes two 12-oz. packages and ten quarter-pound patties for $59.99
  • Impossible Family Pack includes a single, 5-lb bulk package for $64.99
  • Impossible Grilling Pack includes 20 quarter-pound patties for $69.99

Shipping is free with a two-day delivery window. Impossible also says that its packaging is compostable and recyclable, though the company didn’t provide many specifics. Lots of food delivery companies make similar claims nowadays, though the extent to which their packaging is truly compostable and/or recyclable depends on the types of waste facilities available to each consumer.

The addition of a D2C channel is welcome news to flexitarians like myself, and would seem to mark an entirely new chapter for Impossible. When we first started writing about the company, its products were only available in select restaurants. Last year it started its methodical rollout at grocery retailers, and Impossible meat is now sold in more than 3,000 stores nationwide.

However, it’s still not available in stores up near my neck of woods outside Seattle, so this flexitarian is happy to be able to buy in bulk directly from Impossible. (I’ll just add it to the ways in which my life is migrating to mail order.)

Impossible’s D2C play also ups the ante in its rivalry with Beyond Meat, the other leading plant-based burger company. Beyond enjoyed a healthy lead with its retail footprint, but Impossible’s news today suggests it can now leapfrog the store altogether (and get all kinds of consumer data in the process).

As weird as it is to say, Impossible is launching this direct channel at quite possibly the perfect time. The COVID-19 pandemic drove people into buying food online (and kept them doing so for months). Plant-based meat sales have skyrocketed during the pandemic. And the pandemic has shone a bright light on the logistical and ethical issues surrounding the consumption of animal meat.

Will all this interest in online grocery shopping and plant-based meat outlast COVID-19? That remains to be seen, but at least now we can see how much of the country (at least the lower 48) shops directly from Impossible, now that it’s possible.

Creator Temporarily Closes its Robot Restaurant

Creator, the San Francisco restaurant built around a hamburger-cooking robot, announced last night on Instagram that it was temporarily closing its one physical location tomorrow.

The company wrote:

Our restaurant at 680 Folsom Street in SF is going on a temporary hiatus. The stay at home order, combined with extended work-from-home policies (which we support), have emptied out SoMa – as @Eater_SF captured so poignantly. We haven’t seen a coyote or tumbleweeds on Folsom Street yet but it’s getting there.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

View this post on Instagram

Our restaurant at 680 Folsom Street in SF is going on a temporary hiatus. The stay at home order, combined with extended work-from-home policies (which we support), have emptied out SoMa – as @Eater_SF captured so poignantly. We haven’t seen a coyote or tumbleweeds on Folsom Street yet but it’s getting there.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ .⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ This Friday, June 5th will be the last full day of restaurant operations before our SoMa restaurant goes on pause. Please stay safe at home and don't come out for us!⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ .⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Creator will continue to design at the cutting edge of dining: that now means focusing on the health and safety of our guests and employees in unprecedented ways. We’re excited to create something new for our guests that provides the same gratification and wonder that 680 Folsom has provided since our opening. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ .⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ With full hearts and tummies, Creator

A post shared by Creator (@eatatcreator) on

Creator launched in the summer of 2018 around the idea that robots could take over the repetitive restaurant task of grilling burgers, freeing up human workers for more creative tasks like customer service.

Up until the COVID-19 pandemic hit, 2020 had been a year of growth for Creator. In January the restaurant expanded to being open five days a week, and in March it added dinner service. Even when the pandemic forced its dining room to close, Creator put up a good fight and invented what was basically an air lock for hamburger pickup that aimed to keep workers, delivery drivers and food safe.

We don’t know what this means for Creator, which has raised $18 million in funding. Even though the one location is closed, they have a year and a half’s worth of data and experience that could be useful if they wanted to license out the robot technology to other foodservice operators. As the long-term effects of the pandemic remain unclear, restaurants may be more keen on reducing the number of humans involved in preparing and serving food. Having a robot cook could be one less vector of transmission for a restaurant.

We have reached out to Creator to find out more about any future plans.

On a more personal note, Creator was a highlight for me during my robot food tour of San Francisco last year , and whenever I was in town I made a point of going. Not because of the robot, but because the food was delicious and the experience was always great.

Robot Learns to Cook Omelets to Your Liking

Whether it’s burgers, tater tots or fried octopus balls, there are plenty of things robots can cook, and plenty of robots out there trying. But those robots are pretty rigid, following a specific set of criteria. The whole point is that they take over the repetitive task of cooking the same thing over and over and prepare it consistently.

But researchers at the University of Cambridge released a paper this week showing how they are teaching a robot to not just make an egg omelet for you, but also learn from how you like your eggs and adjust the cooking accordingly.

Improving robotic cooking using Batch Bayesian Optimization

IEE Spectrum has the full story (and an interview with the paper’s authors), and explains how the robot is able to do this customized cooking:

The researchers employed a solution to this problem called batch Bayesian optimization. The more traditional sequential Bayesian optimization would take a human’s score of each omelet and use it to modify the cooking process for the next omelet, but this approach doesn’t work well because the human feedback is, as the researchers tell us, “often ambiguous and relative.” By running the optimization process only after all scores have been collected, the robot is able to explore many more combinations of variables, yielding a substantially better end result. Instead of the omelets gradually getting better as you go, you’ll instead be tasting them randomly, but you’ll end up with a much tastier omelet.

In this case, the robot is able to adjust a number of different variables such as the amount of salt/pepper, whisking time and cook time.

Adding this type of customization to a robot’s repertoire and being able to apply it to more kinds of food could help automated cooking move from the more mass, industrial-sized food prep of fast food and more into personal cooking. Having your own robo-chef that can cook eggs just as you like them while you get ready in the morning (or have dinner waiting for you when you get home), is an idea that would be welcome in a lot of homes.

SynchroLife Raises $2.6M for Restaurant App That Rewards Reviews with Cryptocurrency

Ginkan, the Tokyo-based company behind restaurant discovery and review app SynchroLife, announced yesterday that it had raised a $2.6 million Series A round of funding (hat tip to beincrypto). This round was led by MTG Ventures, and brings Ginkan’s total amount of funding to $3.7 million.

SynchroLife bills itself as a restaurant review platform that combines AI with cryptocurrency. Users that post “high-quality” restaurant reviews and information are rewarded with SynchroCoin (SYC), the platform’s own cryptocurrency. Restaurants can also be on the platform to offer SynchroCoin-based coupons. On its website, Ginkan says its token system will eventually be used as payment at restaurants.

Beincrypto writes that SynchroLife already has more than 210,000 reviews of 100,000 different restaurants. The company uses this growing database of reviews as the basis of its AI to make restaurant recommendations. The SynchroLife app is available in 155 countries and in English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

Restaurant reviewing has definitely gotten more difficult over the past few months, as the COVID-19 pandemic forced dining rooms to close. To adapt, last week SynchroLife expanded its restaurant recommendation and review platform to takeout meals.

There is definitely an opportunity for a new restaurant review platform to capture eaters’ attention. Longtime social reviews site, Yelp, had to lay off 1,000 employees and furlough another 1,100 in April as restaurants across the country shuttered. Google, on the other hand, has been building up its own restaurant discovery tools. Last year Google Maps started surfacing popular dishes in restaurant search results.

Regardless, with fresh capital in the bank, SynchroLife can expand and see if cryptocurrency rewards are enough to carve out its own niche to attract and keep restaurant reviewers on its platform.

Swedish Industrial Heating Company Creates Oven That Bakes a Pizza in 37.5 Seconds

The Swedes have given us Bjorn Borg, IKEA and now the ability to cook a Neopolitan pizza in under a minute.

Normally, a Neopolitan pizza takes 90 seconds to cook at around 840 degrees Fahrenheit. But Swedish industrial heating company Kanthal developed an experimental pizza oven that heats up to 1650 degrees F using eight electric heating elements in conjunction with a special metal alloy to cook pizza in less than half that time.

According to the Kanthal press announcement, the oven uses eight electromagnetic radiation heating elements and reflectors to evenly heat the pizza that the company says is neither soggy nor burnt.

The company made a video to show the oven in action. We normally wouldn’t post such promotional footage, but it’s pizza. And everyone loves pizza.

The World's Fastest Pizza

Between vending machine companies like Basil Street and API Tech, we’ve seen advancements in where pizza will soon be available (read: everywhere). But we haven’t seen as much innovation around how pizza gets cooked (though the Brava oven can cook pizza with light).

Kanthal’s press announcement doesn’t say whether the company plans to productize or commercialize the oven. It seems as more of an attention grabber (achievement unlocked!) to show off technological capabilities. Though who knows? If there’s enough attention around it (and money to be made), half-minute pizzas could become another cultural institution to come out of Sweden.

Beyond Meat Deal Expands its China Footprint with KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell

Yum China Holdings announced a deal yesterday to bring Beyond Meat’s plant-based burgers to select KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell stores in mainland China for a limited time this month. The move expands Beyond’s presence in China, which has been a priority for the company.

As part of the deal, KFC and Pizza Hut will both offer the Beyond Burger, while the Taco Bell locations will offer a taco made with Beyond meat. All three restaurants are offering the plant-based alternatives for just a limited time.

The Yum deal follows a similar partnership Beyond announced in April, when Starbucks in China added three dishes made with Beyond’s meat product. Beyond has a particular focus on Asia and has a goal of producing its plant-based burgers in the region before the end of this year.

All of these QSR deals help Beyond establish a foothold in China before its rival, Impossible Foods has a chance to do the same. China is something of a holy grail for plant-based meat companies. As we explained last year:

  • China has the largest population in the world
  • China produces the most meat in the world
  • China consumes the most meat in the world, and its hunger for protein is growing

Additionally, pork is the most consumed meat in Asia, and earlier this year Impossible debuted its plant-based pork product at CES.

We can expect to see Beyond make more deals like the Yum one in the coming months. And for it’s part, Impossible has been ramping up production and its retail presence here in the U.S. over the past year, and seems to be prepping a direct to consumer sales channel.

Plant-based meal sales were already skyrocketing, and that trend isn’t likely to ease up as the COVID-19 pandemic has raised new questions about the health and safety of eating animal-based meat. The business of faux burgers is very much real.

NPD: Restaurant Chain Transactions Down From Last Year, Digital Orders Up

New data from NPD Group is a real good news/bad news situation for restaurants. The bad news: for the week ending May 24, total major restaurant chain transactions declined 18 percent compared to the same time period last year. The good news? That’s up 25 percentage points from the biggest decline in transactions during this pandemic (-43 percent for the week ending April 12).

Of course, a big reason for that growth is that more cities and states began re-opening towards the end of May, so more people could once again actually go into a restaurant.

An NPD press release breaks the numbers down further, writing:

  • Major full service chain restaurant transactions declined by -42% versus same time year ago, a +7 point improvement from the prior week’s decline of -49% from year ago.
  • Transactions at quick service restaurant chains were down -17% in week ending May 24 compared to same week year ago, improving from the -20% decline in the prior week.

Another couple of interesting tid-bits from NPD’s recent data is that drive-thru, mostly at QSRs, made up almost half of all restaurant occasions, and that digital orders grew by 106 percent in April compared with last year. NPD says that digital orders now account for 20 percent of all restaurant occasions.

If you’ve been following my colleague Jenn Marston’s writing, this growth in digital orders and off-premises dining shouldn’t come as a surprise. In her excellent weekly restaurant tech newsletter this past Friday, she covered recent Black Box data that showed takeout orders are going back up. As Jenn wrote:

Presumably, people got excited about going back to restaurants instead of ordering takeout, then realized what a pain in the a$$ dine-in service is going to be for a long time to come. Guidelines vary from state to state in the U.S., but almost all of them include reduced capacity, reduced party sizes, no buffets, and in some cases a mask requirement. Add to that the trepidation most of us wear with our masks these days anytime we set foot in public, and it’s not exactly a recipe for a packed house.

As more cities and states ease shelter in place order, and summer gets into full swing, we’ll move from guessing about how consumers will react to restaurants’ re-opening and into hard numbers around what they are actually doing. Data like this from NPD helps chart those movements.

Now is the Time to Add Gesture Control to Self-Serve Kiosks

Self-serve kiosks could be one bit of technology used to help restaurants re-open. Switching to kiosks can help eliminate ordering from a worker behind a counter and thereby reducing human-to-human contact.

But the problem with a lot of kiosks is that they still require people to use a touchscreen when it comes to browsing a menu and ordering food. Those touchscreens are, well, touched by a lot of hands throughout the day. This will mean that restaurants will need to not only clean the screens on a regular basis, but make sure those sanitation efforts are on display so customers know the kiosks are clean.

One feature that could help mitigate any concerns over using public kiosks is gesture tech — that is, the ability to wave and swipe your hands in front of a device without actually touching it to activate it.

More than just waving your hand under a faucet to get it to run, gesture controls have been around for a long time. Check out this demo of gesture control via Kinect on the Microsoft Xbox from 2014. It shows how you can scroll and select on-screen objects with your hand while never actually touching the screen. My recollection of using the system back then was that it was pretty clunky, but advancements in computing power, computer vision and even AI have assuredly resolved those issues.

You can start to see some of this contactless tech with PopID, which makes kiosks that let you pay with your face. Obviously, as with any facial recognition, there are privacy concerns. But, rightly or wrongly, those more abstract concerns could get set aside because people who don’t want to physically interact with a public machine and insert their credit card.

Obviously, an easier solution would be to skip the kiosk altogether and just have people use their phone to order. In that way, the only object they touch is their own. That is true, but not everybody has a smartphone. Also, while people may download apps for big companies they frequent like Starbucks or McDonald’s, they won’t download an app for every single restaurant they visit. Plus, mobile apps are expensive to build and not every mom and pop restaurant can afford to make them.

We are just starting to figure out what people want from restaurant interactions. Perhaps they will be fine with ordering from an actual person wearing a mask and all of this is for naught. But if the virus doesn’t go away or rebounds in a meaningful way, we could all be waving hello to gesture controlled kiosks.

With Ella, Crown Coffee is Transparent About its Robot Barista Ambitions

I know I should probably be more focused on the robot part of Crown Coffee’s “Ella.” Ella is, after all, a robot barista. But watching a video of Ella in action that the company posted to Linkedin, I can’t stop staring at the machine’s screen. It’s transparent but still displays messages about orders. The words just float in front of the articulating arm that swirls around making coffee.

That transparent OLED screen is made by LG, but as Crown Digital IO Founder and CEO Keith Tan told me by phone this week “It was just a prototype. LG wasn’t even selling them.” Somehow, Tan convinced LG to give him a pre-production version of the display, to which Crown added touch capabilities.

Based in Singapore, Crown Coffee started off in 2016 as a regular chain of human-powered cafes before Tan got the idea to add robotics into the service mix last year. Ella comes in three different sizes and can serve a variety of coffee, tea and iced drinks. It also makes up to 200 coffees per hour. Drinks can be ordered and paid for via touchscreen on the machine or with a mobile app.

So far, Ella has just one installation in Singapore and has made a number of appearances serving coffee at large events.

Ella joins the ranks of other robot baristas around the world including Briggo, Cafe X, TrueBird, MontyCafe, Rozum Cafe and Fibbee. They all offer the same basic value proposition: good coffee served quickly in high-traffic areas. But in the age of COVID-19, Ella, and all of the robot baristas also offer something more appealing than a faster latte. They offer a contactless way to get your morning joe.

Robots, as I’ve been repeating for the past couple of months, don’t get sick. In an age of social distancing and facemasks, that lack of human touch could be appealing to a global population that has watched a viral outbreak sicken and take so many lives.

Crown Coffee is currently bootstrapped, and the company plans to both own and operate its machines as well as lease them out with a rev-share to outside locations. Like other robot barista companies, Crown Coffee is targeting high-volume areas like airports and train stations.

Unlike a lot of its competitors, Tan says that coffee is just the beginning. “All this groundwork will evolve Ella into other use cases like food,” Tan said. “The lowest hanging fruit is coffee, tea and soft serve.”

While there is a lot of competition in the robo-barista world, it’s still pretty spread out around the world. Given the small footprint of each of these machines, and how many people love their java, the automated coffee space doesn’t have to be a zero sum game.

In the meantime, I’ll be watching out for Ella, and then watching that screen.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post inaccurately stated that LG added the touch capabilities to the screen. This technology was added by Crown. We regret the error.