Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Chris Albrecht

AppHarvest Raises $28M as it Builds Out a Massive Greenhouse in Appalachia

Ag tech company, AppHarvest, announced yesterday that it has raised a $28 million Series C round of funding. The round was led by J.D. Vance’s Narya Capital, with participation from Lupa Systems and Rise of the Rest among others. This brings the total amount raised by AppHarvest to $150 million.

AppHarvest is in the midst of building out the worlds largest greenhouse facility in Morehead, KY. When completed, it will be a 2.76 million-square foot indoor faming facility that will use hydroponics and vertical farming to grow 45 million pound of fresh produce a year. The greenhouse is scheduled to open this fall and will employ roughly 300 people.

AppHarvest’s facility is within a day’s drive of 70 percent of the U.S. population, so it will be able to provide fresh produce to grocery stores in Appalachia, as well as surrounding states.

In June of this year, AppHarvest partnered with the State of Kentucky as well as the Dutch government and several universities. These partnerships were designed to create a series of research programs and develop the greenhouse as a “center of excellence” for agtech innovation.

AppHarvest isn’t the only indoor farming startup partnering with a local government. AeroFarms and the World Economic Forum partnered with the City of Jersey City and as my colleague, Jenn Marston wrote last week:

This is the first partnership between a city municipality and a vertical farming company in the U.S. Through it, AeroFarms will build 10 vertical farms in senior centers, schools, public housing, and municipal buildings around Jersey City. Collectively, the farms are expected to produce 19,000 pounds of vegetables annually, according to AeroFarms. Greens will be free of charge to residents, and the initiative also includes healthy eating workshops and quarterly health screenings.

Hopefully projects like AppHarvest and AeroFarms can use their tech platforms to help create a more equitable food system for everyone.

Rise of the Pod People

This is the web version of our weekly newsletter. Subscribe to get all the best food tech news delivered directly to your inbox!

In sci-fi movies, pods are typically something to be feared (see: Alien, Invasion of the Body Snatchers). But when it comes to food delivery, pods are something we should welcome with open arms.

When I talk about pods here, I’m referring to a cabinet of internet-connected cubbies that hold delivered meals and can be unlocked by the recipient’s own mobile phone.

I expect we’ll see delivery pods like these in more apartment and residential buildings because of the convenience they offer. With pods, a customer doesn’t need to wait around until the exact moment a delivery driver drops off their order. Instead, the driver places the food inside the insulated cubby and the customer simply receives a notification on their phone that the meal has arrived. The driver saves time, since they don’t have to hunt around a complex for an apartment number, and the customer gets the added convenience of being able to pick up their meal whenever they are able to.

In a move that underscores the growing popularity of this delivery-pods-for-apartments concept, Minnow just announced $2.2 million in seed funding for its delivery pod solutions. One of the investors was the venture arm of the Lincoln Property Company, which owns residential buildings in 28 states. It’s not hard to connect the dots and see Minnow pods popping up in all those Lincoln buildings.

The idea of a dedicated delivery locker-type service certainly isn’t new. Two years ago Alibaba showed off temperature-controlled lockers that are installed outside an individual apartment to accept food deliveries. (While insulated, Minnow pods are not temperature controlled.)

But given the COVID-19 pandemic, the adoption of all things contactless when it comes to food is getting accelerated. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see Minnow scale up quickly, and other players jump into the space.

While the pandemic could fuel the biggest growth for delivery pods, it could also be the biggest hurdle to pod adoption. As restaurants shutter and companies realize work can be done remotely, people are leaving big cities. Anecdotally speaking, I’ve heard from friends in San Francisco about apartment buildings becoming ghost towns, to mix my metpahors, as people either can’t afford or want to escape high rent prices.

Having said that, people will always live in apartment buildings, even if they aren’t in the heart of the city. So there is a tremendous amount of opportunity for pods to become a table stakes benefit for apartment dwellers.

Still, it’s probably a good idea to avoid pods stacked in the back of pickup trucks and found on outer planets.

Spoon Founder Braves Ice Cream Tasting

Let’s keep with the sci-fi theme and move from pod people to a robot. A Brave Robot, to be specific. That’s the name of Perfect Day’s spinoff ice cream brand.

Perfect Day recreates dairy proteins in the lab by genetically modifying microflora and… well, let’s not fall down a casein and whey rabbit hole here. It’s ice cream! It should be fun, especially with a name like Brave Robot. So how is it? Spoon Founder, Mike Wolf, received a batch and wrote up a review for us, saying about the PB N’ Fudge flavor:

Any combo of peanut butter and chocolate usually can’t miss, so that’s where I started. It didn’t disappoint. The thick veins of fudge and peanut butter were as yummy as they sound, and maybe more importantly, the science-forward ice cream didn’t taste weird, or well, science-y, at all.

Yay science for not tasting so science-y! Check out the full review of all the flavors Mike tried. (spoiler: They were all great!)

Yo-Kai Express Sweetens Its Menu

While we’re on the subject of dessert, Yo-Kai Express, which makes (delicious) ramen dispensing vending machines, is adding a frozen sweet treat to its menu.

Company Founder and CEO, Andy Lin, wrote on LinkedIn earlier this week that Yo-Kai will soon offer a “Himalayan salt whip cream with brown sugar boba black milk tea” snow ice. The dessert will be available “soon” through both Yo-Kai’s vending machines and its mail-order meal kits.

While I’m a sucker for pretty much anything boba-related, I bring this news up because it marks another expansion for Yo-Kai. Over the past six months the company has started selling meal kits so you can make ramen at home, and is now getting into desserts.

Just like yo-kais themselves, who knows what will pop up for Lin and Co. next.

Japan Food Tech Mini-Event

Speaking of popping up, The Spoon crew — Mike, Jenn and myself — will all be hosting chats during the Virtual Food Tech Mini Summit this Friday. The event is done in conjunction with our Japanese partners who help us product the Smart Kitchen Summit Japan.

Starting at 5 p.m. Pacific Time, there will be three discussions:

  • Food and Kitchen After the Pandemic, hosted by myself and featuring Robin Liss of Suvie, Kevin Yu of Sidechef and Masa Fukata of Panasonic
  • Jenn’s discussion on the future of restaurant
  • Mike’s panel on the future of cultured meat

Sign up and save your spot today!

Uber Q2: Eats Generates More Revenue than Rides

There are two stories coming out of Uber’s Q2 earnings report today. The first is the straight ahead numbers: The company did $2.18 billion in revenue for the quarter, which was down 29 percent year-over-year, but beat analyst expectations. Uber’s net losses were $1.8 billion, narrower than the $2.94 billion in Q1.

Of course, much of this was due to the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the company’s mobility business. Uber’s mobility division had gross bookings of $3.046 billion for the quarter, which was a decline of 73 percent year-over-year. With people on lockdown, they had no need to hail a ride.

But while the coronavirus kept people from catching an Uber across town, it also pushed them to ordering more food delivery while they stayed home, which leads us to the other story.

Gross bookings for Uber’s delivery business (Uber Eats) hit $6.96 billion in Q2, which was up 113 percent year-over-year and up 54 percent over Q1 2020. That’s a lot of french fries delivered to people’s front doors.

In addition to getting a pandemic push, Uber Eats also streamlined some of its costs in Q2. The company ceased Uber Eats operations in eight different markets around the world where it wasn’t in a leading position.

In the Q2 earnings release, Uber also said that it now has more than 500,000 partnered restaurants on the platform, a 50 percent jump year-over-year.

With Q2 in the books, it’s time to look ahead to Q3 which will include the $2.65 billion all-stock purchase of rival food delivery service, Postmates, as well as the expansion into grocery delivery here in the U.S.

The Pandemic Made Self-Heating Instant Food Hot in China

Rather than inspiring bursts of creativity in the kitchen, the pandemic and continued lockdown has actually made me lazier when it comes to making food. Maybe that’s from working more hours, or feeling a constant state of stress over the state of the world, or just a general malaise. Whatever the reason, my meals are often whittled down into whatever I can stuff into a tortilla and cook in the panini press.

So when I read about how the pandemic has caused a surge in sales of self-heating packages of food in China, my first reaction was I get it. I mean, you don’t even need to stuff a tortilla or plug in the panini maker. My second reaction was where can I get self-heating packages of food?

Self-heating meals are pretty much what you think they are. Special packaging allows water to mix with powdered chemicals like magnesium and iron to create an exothermic reaction with the resulting steam heating the meal.

As the Mintel blog (h/t to Spoon contributor Stephen Bronner for forwarding) writes, in China the pandemic made self-heating meals hot:

The pandemic has seen sales of self-heating foods in China surge. Between late January and early February 2020, when the virus caused peak infections and China went into lockdown, sales of self-heating foods experienced the second-highest growth of all categories, year over year, according to Taobao, China’s largest online retailer. Sales of self-heating rice alone grew by 257%. They have enabled consumers to enjoy fuss-free dishes/hotpots/meals while restaurants were closed.

Mintel goes on to explain that even though these self-heating foods have a higher price point, they continue to be embraced by Chinese consumers, with Mintel projecting that the market for such products will double.

This type of self-heating technology is also attractive to brands. Mintel reports that hot pot chain HaiDiLao has its own line of self-heating packaged meals that offer an attractive alternative for consumers who can’t afford to eat at the actual restaurants more often.

We’ve covered similar technology here in the states from HeatGen, which uses chemical reactions for self-heating cans being used by La Colombe for individual servings of hot coffee on-the-go. You can also find a variety of self-heating meals when shopping for emergency preparedness or camping foods.

Given that I’ll be basically camping out at home for the foreseeable future, who knows, maybe self-heating meals will be added to my own pandemic menu.

Cuzen Matcha Cruisin’ Through its Kickstarter Goal on its First Day

Part of the problem with this job is that I write about a lot of cool kitchen stuff. This, in turn, makes me want to buy a lot of the things I write about. Things like the Cuzen Matcha.

The Cuzen Matcha is a beautifully designed countertop machine out of Japan that grinds and mixes fresh matcha powder to create a delicious cup of matcha that you can drink straight or mix into another beverage like milk.

World Matcha, the company behind the Cuzen, launched it’s Kickstarter campaign today, and at the time of this writing had already raised more than $22,000 of its $50,000 goal. Early backers can get their own Cuzen Matcha machine, plus 40 cups’ worth of matcha leaves for $299, with a scheduled ship date of October of this year.

And therein lies the problem. I tasted the Cuzen’s matcha at our Food Tech Live event earlier this year (you can watch our video of the Cuzen in action to see for yourself how it works), and it was delicious. And the machine is more sculpture than appliance and now I want to buy one.

CES 2020: A Look at the Cuzen Matcha, a Home Matcha Making Appliance

But I don’t drink matcha with any regularity. But maybe I would if I paid $300 for a machine that makes it? I mean, colder months are coming and a hot mug of freshly ground matcha latté sounds pretty enticing. A matcha latté at Starbucks is around $3.00, and that’s for one that isn’t nearly as good. So I’d only need to drink a hundred homemade Cuzen matchas to break even? That’s not too bad…

Wait. Are we doing this? Am I buying a matcha machine?

Unlike a lot of Kickstarter hardware projects (Rite Press, we’re looking at you), having interviewed the World Matcha team and seen the product in action, I have more faith that this crowdfunded project will actually come to market.

Now the question is whether it will come to my kitchen counter.

Report: 80 Percent of Restaurant Jobs Could be Taken Over by Robots

More than 80 percent of restaurant jobs, including cooking, serving and prepping, could be potentially be taken over by automation, according to restaurant consulting firm Aaron Allen & Associates.

Pizza Magazine was first to report on this, writing:

Aaron Allen & Associates shared a graphic proposing that 82 percent of restaurant positions could be automated. The majority of them, or 51 percent, would be server positions. Fifty-seven percent of fast-food and counter workers (or 3.2 million) could be replaced, and the same goes for 38 percent of waiters and waitresses. Twenty-one percent of cooking and food prep positions also could be automated, the company asserts.

Factors that could drive this widespread adoption of automation include continued labor shortage issues for restaurants and the COVID-19 pandemic.

We write about food robots a lot here at The Spoon, and while that 82 percent number is certainly daunting, it’s not completely surprising. Prior to the pandemic, sufficient staffing was an issue for restaurants as many potential workers preferred driving for Uber or doing some other form of gig work that allowed them to set up their own hours.

Thanks to the pandemic, the U.S. is dealing with massive amounts of unemployment, so finding people to work may not be as big an issue in the short term (though there is a debate about workers making more money via the stimulus than at their job). But the bigger problem now is the number of restaurants closing down dine in operations or shuttering altogether, reducing the number of jobs in the industry overall.

COVID accelerated the push towards off-premises dining, which requires a different kind of staffing set up. You don’t need servers if there are no customers sitting at tables to serve. And if a dining room is open, there will be fewer people eating in it to accommodate social distancing.

But even then, COVID has us re-thinking the amount of human-to-human contact as we get our food. We won’t know what the lasting impact of the pandemic on our psyche will be, but there is a good chance we will be more wary of strangers and more cognizant of the number of people who touch our food.

This is another reason why we could see more robots in restaurants. Already, a number of companies like Bear Robotics, Keenon Robotics, and Pudu Technology make server robots that can autonomously shuttle food and empty dishes back and forth from the kitchen. Then there is Flippy from Miso Robotics, which can grill burgers and work the deep fryer. White Castle recently announced that it was piloting Flippy at one of its Chicago locations. There’s also Picnic robots, which can assemble 200 pizzas in an hour.

There have always been deep societal concerns around automation, especially within the restaurant industry, which in addition to be a career many people are passionate about, also serves as an accessible first job for lots of different people. Robots taking more than 80 percent of those jobs will have massive ramifications for the country, the labor force and our collective future.

Now the coronavirus is upending those conversations. There are still issues around equity and the ability for people to find work and training if a robot takes their job, but there is the added wrinkle of what is economical for restaurants to stay in business and what people are comfortable with in their dining experiences.

With DashMart, DoorDash is Creating its own Ghost Convenience Stores

DoorDash announced the launch of its new DashMart service today in a move that essentially has the delivery company creating its own ghost convenience store.

From a DoorDash blog post announcing the DashMart (emphasis theirs):

DashMart is a new type of convenience store, offering both household essentials and local restaurant favorites to our customers’ doorsteps. On DashMart, you’ll find thousands of convenience, grocery, and restaurant items, from ice cream and chips, to cough medicine and dog food, to spice rubs and packaged desserts from the local restaurants you love on DoorDash. DashMart stores are owned, operated, and curated by DoorDash.

DashMart is currently available in eight cities: Chicago, Minneapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dallas, Salt Lake City, the greater Phoenix area, and Redwood City, CA. In the coming months, DashMarts will be coming to San Diego, Baltimore, Denver, Sacramento and Concord, CA.

I spoke with a DoorDash rep by phone today, who filled in a few more details. DashMarts are delivery-only, physical fulfillment centers that are stocked with big brand names (think: Snickers bars) as well as items from local restaurants (think: frozen slices of Cheesecake Factory cheesecake, or spices from local BBQ joints).

DoorDash has built out nine fulfillment centers, placed in locations where people don’t have easy access to a convenience store. Customers browsing the DoorDash app can select the DashMart and shop as they normally would.

That DoorDash is getting deeper into the convenience category isn’t a huge surprise. The company launched convenience store delivery in April of this year with WaWa, 7-Eleven, Circle K and more. In July, it expanded that program with a partnership with Walgreens.

Part of the reason for the expansion is pretty straightforward. The COVID pandemic shut down most of the restaurants across the country, accelerating the need for DoorDash to get into new markets. Convenience stores are a good fit for the DoorDash, which is all about fast delivery of smaller and/or last-minute items.

Today’s announcement brings more vertical integration into DoorDash’s convenience ambitions. DoorDash owns and operates these DashMarts, deciding which products gets stocked and controlling the whole endeavor from top to bottom. In addition to keeping all the revenue from sales through DashMart, DoorDash also gets more data around customers and purchases and can better optimize its own inventories.

Of course this isn’t the first ghost operation for DoorDash. In October of last year, the company opened up its first ghost kitchen facility in Redwood City, CA, which went on to house restaurant brands like Chick-Fil-A.

With the pandemic still running its course through the U.S., DoorDash’s delivery services will be in demand for the foreseeable future. So its not hard to imagine the company has plenty of time to build up a robust network of DashMarts in the coming year.

Weezy Raises $1M for Speedy Grocery Delivery

London-based grocery delivery startup Weezy, came out of stealth today and announced it has raised a $1 million pre-seed round of funding. TechCrunch was first to report on Weezy and its news, writing that the round was led by Heartcore Capital with participation with from former execs from grocery-related companies like Tesco, Ocado and Sainsbury’s Chop Chop.

The hook with Weezy is that it promises to deliver your groceries in 15 minutes. It does this through a combination of “strategically located fulfillment centers” in different neighborhoods along with a fleet of electric scooter and bicycle couriers, according to TechCrunch.

Customers use the Weezy app to shop for groceries, which because the fulfillment centers are tucked in neighborhoods, also features goods from local bakers and butchers. Weezy then delivers the order in less than 15 minutes between the hours of 10 a.m. and 10 p.m., charging £2.95 per delivery. Weezy currently serves the Fulham and Chelsea districts of London.

From the sounds of it, Weezy seems to be a speedier Farmstead, which also uses a more localized fulfillment center approach to grocery delivery here in the U.S. (though doesn’t promise 15 minute delivery). This distributed network of smaller fulfillment centers is also what robotics companies like Takeoff and Fabric are looking to build.

Not living in London, we haven’t had a chance to try out the service, but one question we’re curious about is how large a Weezy grocery order can be. If they are delivered via bike and scooter, that means a week’s worth of groceries for a family is probably out of the question. But then again, this type of quick service is probably geared more towards last minute items or nice-to-haves rather than replacing full-on shopping trips.

Weezy is certainly launching at an opportune time. The COVID pandemic has spurred record amounts of online grocery shopping as people limit trips to physical stores. With the pandemic’s waves, Weezy’s speedy delivery will certainly make it an attractive option for families still stuck at home.

Farmers Business Network Raises $250M

Farmers Business Network (FBN), an ag tech platform and online farmer network, announced yesterday that it has raised a $250 million Series F round of funding. The round was led by funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, with participation from Baron Capital Group, Balyasny Asset Management, Mandi Ventures, Lupa Systems and Ron Shaich. This brings the total amount of funding raised by FBN to $517.4 million.

Existing investors DBL Partners, Temasek, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., GV, Expanding Capital, and Kleiner Perkins also participated in the round. According to Bloomberg, Farmers Business Network now has a valuation of $1.75 billion.

FBN connects farmers with one another so they can share information on things like seeds, chemical and other inputs to bring more price transparency to the market. The farming sector is not immune from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ability for a farmers to save money on things like agricultural inputs can help farms stay afloat.

According to yesterday’s press announcement, Farmers Business Network now has 12,000 members farming more than 40 million acres across North America. For comparison, when we covered FBN back in Dec. of 2017, the company had 5,000 farmers across 16 million acres.

In addition to providing industry wide price analytics, Farmers Business Network also sells seeds and inputs directly to farmers via its FBN Direct online marketplace. FBN said that it will use the new funding to expand its Direct market as well as develop new FBN Crop Marketing and Financial Services products to help farmers get the most value out of their crops.

Update to June Oven App Let’s You Check Cook Programs Remotely

June, makers of the eponymous connected countertop oven, released some new features to its mobile app last week that add remote functionality, including one to help you shop for June-ready food.

The new app features access to all of the June automated cook programs. So if you’re at the store and wondering if the June has an automated cook program for asparagus and/or frozen waffle fries, you can quickly check your phone (the answers are yes and no, respectively).

For a June owner (like myself), this is actually pretty useful. I’m not a great cook and am pretty reliant on the June for meal prep. For example, knowing what type of fish the June automatically cooks would definitely influence my buying decisions while standing in the seafood section of my store.

The other remote feature that June released that makes less sense to me is the ability to remotely start a cook program. The new functionality allows you to start a cook program from your phone, but it doesn’t work unless the food is in the June. This raises the question, why do you need to use your phone to start a cook program when you are standing in front of the oven putting your food in it? And why would I even want to start up my oven when I’m not around? I’m sure there are edge cases, but it still seems odd.

In a somewhat counter intuitive manner, the June has actually become more useful during this pandemic. You’d think being stuck at home would mean I have more time for cooking, but between working from home (i.e., office hours are kind of all hours) and nice weather, I don’t really want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. This will probably be doubly so once school and remote-learning for my son start up again next month and there are even fewer hours in the day.

Given all that, one feature request I would like June to fulfill is for the oven to automatically and frequently clean itself thoroughly.

Minnow Raises $2.2M Seed Round for Contact-Free Delivery Pods

Minnow Technologies, which make IoT-enabled, contactless delivery lockers, announced today that it has raised a $2.2 million seed round led by Elevate Capital with participation from Portland See Fund and the venture capital arm of Lincoln Property Company. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Minnow to $3.4 million.

With the pandemic still raging across the country, contactless delivery is basically table stakes for food operators and consumers alike. Minnow’s pods are installed in high-traffic locations and allow food deliveries to be stored in specified cubbies and unlocked by customers using their mobile phones.

Minnow’s go-to market strategy (and company name) has evolved since its inception back in 2017. The company was first called Veebie and the food locker was meant to be mobile. When the company changed its name to Kadabra, it took the wheels off the locker, installing them in locations and added IoT capablities. When it re-branded as Minnow (and moved headquarters from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon), and officially launched in March of this year, it installed seven Minnow pods in office buildings in the Portland, Oregon area.

The COVID-19 pandemic, however, meant that office buildings weren’t exactly bustling any longer, so the company started looking at apartment and other multi-family residential buildings as installation locations. In today’s funding announcement, Minnow added that its pods were also available for ghost kitchens and other cafeterias (a la Brightloom) to act as a contactless intermediary between kitchen and delivery people or customers. Minnow even added UV lights to the interior of its cubbies to further help with sterilization.

Minnow is certainly raising money at the right time. With restaurants going back and forth between opening and closing, off-premises eating is the really the main way for them to stay afloat. Delivery cubbies like Minnow’s also have the added benefit of flexibility for the customer. Instead of having to be at the door when the delivery person comes, food can be dropped off in the insulated cubby and picked up when its most convenient (the Minnow FAQ says that the cubbies are designed to hold food for 90 minutes).

With its move into residential buildings, having Lincoln Property Company, which has buildings in 28 states, is a good investor to have. Even after the pandemic recedes (whenever that will be), people will still be getting food delivered, and having a special locker in your lobby will be a nice perk for residents.

Yo-Kai Express Adding Boba Dessert to its Machine and Meal Kit

Pretty soon, you’ll be able to get more than just ramen from Yo-Kai Express vending machines and meal kits. Yo-Kai Founder and CEO, Andy Lin, shared on Linkedin today that his company will be adding a frosty dessert to its menus.

The Yo-Kai “signature snow ice,” Lin wrote, consists of “Himalayan salt whip cream with brown sugar boba black milk tea.” No specific timeframe was mentioned but Lin said the dessert would be available in Yo-Kai machines and home meal kits “soon.”

We reached out to Lin to fill in some details and will update the post when those arrive. Overall, this marks another bit of expansion for the vending machine startup.

When we first started covering Yo-Kai, its automated vending machines served hot ramen to customers in high-traffic areas like malls, airports and corporate campuses. But as the pandemic hit the U.S., those locations saw fewer and fewer people.

So, if people can’t come to you, you may as well go directly to them. In April of this year, Yo-Kai started selling ramen meal kits that ship directly to consumers’ doors (if you live on the West Coast).

Like the meal kits, the addition of a cool dessert isn’t too much of a surprise either. Once made, Yo-Kai’s bowls of ramen are frozen and stored that way inside the vending machine before being reheated. A similar, pre-made frosty snow ice dessert in a bowl seems like a pretty easy thing for the Yo-Kai machine to dispense as well.

It should also be noted that according to the Yo-Kai website, two of its machines are installed at Milk Tea labs in San Francisco and San Jose. So offering a boba/black milk tea doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch.

As I’ve written before, I’m all-in on vending machines (and wrote an extensive report on them for Spoon Plus Subscribers), in part because of their ability to offer really good food, from a very compact space around the clock. While I haven’t had the chance to test out Yo-Kai’s snow ice dessert, given how much I liked their ramen meal kit, it’s hard to imagine them making their first foray into desserts a bad one.