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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Chris Albrecht

Three Food Tech Gadgets I Don’t Need — and Totally Want

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Normally in this newsletter, I try to tie a bunch of news threads together to present an analysis of broader trends in food tech and give you deeper insight into the forces pushing the industry forward.

But not this week.

Nope. This week I am all gimme, gimme, gimme because there are three food-related gadgets that I absolutely do not need but totally want to get. (And you might too!)

The BonBowl
Why do I want it? Because it is a neat little single-serving meal cooker and serving dish all in one. The BonBowl uses induction heating to cook ingredients in a special bowl that can be removed and used to eat said cooked ingredients. At $149, it seems perfect for college students, single folks or people living in small spaces.

I’ve got a family to feed, so the BonBowl isn’t for me, but Spoon writer, Jenn Marston loves hers (and loves the fact that it’s a lot less dangerous than a using a hot plate).

Oliver
Why do I want it? Because my favorite meals are the ones I don’t have to make, and this cooking robot promises to do most of the work for me. As Spoon founder Mike Wolf wrote, the Oliver could usher in an era of unattended cooking. You just load it up with prepped ingredients (okay, so there is some work), tell it what recipe to cook with the accompanying app and Oliver does the rest. It dispenses the ingredients at the right time, cooks and mixes everything.

While using an Oliver would let me make dinner for the family and nap at the same time, my kitchen is already chock-a-block with cooking gadgets and I don’t think I could get the go-ahead to get another one. Perhaps that will change when the Oliver ships in June of 2021.

Burrito Pop
Why do I want it? Because I am a sucker for burritos, and heaven help me, I want to back this Kickstarter project so bad. So what is this wonderous device? Think of it like the cannister you put your money in at the drive-through bank had a baby with a deodorant stick. Stick your burrito in the cannister and twist the bottom to continually raise it up as you chow it down.

The Burrito Pop will set you back $28 if you want one. That seems kinda pricey, though better than the $50 the company plans to charge at retail. But I do love a good burrito, and anything that makes eating one a little less messy might be worth it.

Well, there it is. The three gadgets that may or may not wind up in my kitchen. Have another suggestion? Drop me a line and let me know!

Food Waste vs. Food Loss

I say po-tay-to, you say po-tah-to. In either case, far too many spuds are going to waste. Or are they lost? Because there’s a difference.

The words we use to describe problems matter, which is why you should check out Jenn Marston’s piece on the difference between food loss and food waste. While it may seem like we’re being pedantic, we’re not.

Food loss happens further up the supply chain, closer to harvest and production. Food waste happens more towards the consumer end of the meal journey. Food loss is a very different problem from food waste and thereby requires a very different solution.

Hunger in the U.S. has skyrocketed during the pandemic, so being able to rescue food before rots on the field or goes into the waste bin because you forgot about it in the back of your fridge is an important topic. Thankfully, as Jenn points out, there are a number of startups working on both issues.

Read the full piece to get familiar with food loss and food waste, and then figure out what you can do to help prevent it.

More Headlines

Dotdash Acquires Simply Recipes and Serious Eats from Fexy Media – Terms were not disclosed but Fexy’s Co-CEO, Cliff Sharples, talked to us about the deal and why his company is getting out of the editorial game.

Plant-based protein companies continue to raise money – Daring raised $8 million for its plant-based chicken and OmniPork parent, Green Monday raised $70M.

Tastewise Launches Its AI-Powered Food Prediction in the UK – Tastewise has integrated data from 183,000 restaurants and delivery menus, over 2.8 billion social interactions, and 1.2 million online recipes from the UK into its AI trend predictor.

Kiwibot Partners with Sodexo to Roll Out Delivery Robots at the University of Denver – Kiwibot has partnered with Sodexo, a huge company that provides foodservice to colleges across the U.S. This partnership brings with it more legitimacy for Kiwibot, and also provides an entrée, so to speak, with college administrations and restaurants at potential campuses.

Amazon’s Echo Show 10 Swivels to Follow You. That Might be Useful in the Kitchen

Amazon introduced the latest version of its Echo Show at its hardware event today. The new Echo Show 10 features the usual Alexa-powered smart assistant, screen and speakers, but includes one new feature that might be particularly useful in the kitchen: it rotates to follow you around.

Think about how you move around when cooking from a recipe. You shift between your prep area to the fridge to the oven to pantry. Being able to always have the recipe in view means no problem if you forget what temperature to set the oven or how many eggs you need to grab.

Even if you aren’t following an on-screen recipe, the ability for the screen to swing around so you can watch a show as you cook or hold a video call is pretty neat.

We haven’t had a chance to play around with the Echo Show 10 yet, so it may not work all that well in reality. And not everyone will be comfortable with an Amazon device watching you and silently following you around with its camera eye.

But, if you’ve already given in and have an Alexa powered assistant, this seems like it could give you a little more mobility and utility. I mean, it doesn’t seem as strange as the indoor drone Amazon also announced today that pops up and flies around your house acting as a security camera.

The new Echo Show 10 will cost $249.99, will be available in Charcoal and Glacier White. Amazon says it will ship in time for the holidays.

Nutrimeals Launched an App for Contactless Ordering at its Vending Machine

Nutrimeals launched its first vending machine roughly eight months ago in Calgary, Canada. Eight months ago is also around the same time the coronavirus began hitting North America.

That the two happened at the same time wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Nutrimeals sells fresh, healthy, pre-cooked meals that just need to be reheated in a microwave. As I wrote earlier this year in The Great Vending Reinvention, the pandemic could provide a boost to automated vending machines like those of Nurtimeals (and Chowbotics and Yo-Kai Express) because they offer convenient full meals on-the-go in a more contactless environment, and there are no human hands serving up your food.

But at the time I also noted that vending machines need to take their current contactless options even further. Many vending machines right now still require you to touch a screen to place your order. Having lots of people paw at the same touchscreen of an unattended vending machine all day seems to negate all the other contactless benefits automated vending machines offer.

Which is why Nurtimeals launched its own app two weeks ago (hat tip to Vending Times). The Nutrimeals app lets customers check inventory of machines, reserve meals and pay for them all through their mobile phones so they don’t have to touch a screen. The meals are even dispensed in such a way that people don’t have to even have to touch the machine to get their food.

Originally the company, like so many other vending services, targeted airports, office buildings and other high-traffic areas as prime locations for its machines. But COVID pretty much shut down air traffic and offices, so now Nutrimeals is targeting residential buildings, and even hotels that don’t have their own food facilities.

Nutrimeals is bootstrapped and its main business remains a D2C meal prep subscription service. It has two vending machines up and running in Calgary and is looking to expand the food options in those machines to include snacks and salads.

Zero Grocery Raises $3M Seed Round for Plastic-Free Grocery

Zero Grocery Founder and CEO Zuleyka Strasner announced today via Medium that Zero has raised $3 million in Seed funding for its plastic-free grocery delivery service. According to Strasner, “the largest check” came from 1984, with other investors such as Arlan Hamilton, AVG Basecamp Fun, Bluestein Ventures and more participating. This brings the total amount raised by Zero Grocery to $4.7 million.

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Zero Grocery doesn’t use any plastic in its grocery delivery service. According to the company FAQ, food is bought wholesale and packed into glass jars, tiffins, boxes and other containers.

Zero has a membership option for $25 a month, which gives offers free deliveries and also collects empty containers from previous deliveries (which then get sanitized and re-used). You don’t have to have a membership to shop at Zero, though non-members pay a $7.99 delivery fee.

The timing is certainly ripe for Zero’s fundraise. First, the pandemic has spurred record amounts of online grocery shopping over the past six months. And while the numbers have fallen, the online grocery sector is projected to keep growing and hit $250 billion by 2025.

In the Medium post, Strasner even mentioned that the pandemic drove 20x new business for Zero, but it was it was able to adjust on the fly and survive:

As other grocery stores faced out-of-stocks due to a mutual reliance on the same distributors and sources for their products, we were able to avoid out-of-stocks and maintain a consistent customer experience. We had put our model to the test and succeeded, and it allowed us to serve customers in the best way we possibly could.

But the plastic-free nature of Zero’s service is also compelling. People are more acutely aware than ever, especially in light of a recent NPR and Frontline’s recent headline “How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled.”

Thankfully, there is a new wave of waste-free grocery stores coming up to help tackle the problem. In addition to Zero Grocery, there’s Zero Market in Denver, CO, and Nada Grocery in Vancouver, Canada. Even big brands like Unilever and Pepsi are getting in on the reusable container train through the Loop store.

All of this combined, along with $3 million means that there are a lot more zeros in Zero’s warchest to help it scale its plastic-free mission.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post misstated that there was a jar deposit for non-members.

Aveine Launches New Lower-Cost Connected, Essential Wine Aerator

Aveine, which promises to help you enjoy your wine more thanks to tiny air bubbles, announced its new, lower cost Essential wine aerator today.

Aveine’s aeration system has two components. The hardware is the aerator that plugs into the top of an open wine bottle and injects tiny bubbles into the wine as you pour. Then there is the connected mobile app that you use to scan a wine label. The app identifies the type of wine and, based on that information, tells the aerator exactly how much air to add as you pour the wine.

This precise aeration, according to the company, means you don’t have to wait for the wine to “breathe” after opening a bottle. You’ll also get a more rounded wine taste with more flavor.

The first generation of the Aveine, released back in 2018, isn’t cheap, costing $449. That’s a lot of money for a bunch of tiny bubbles. Though, if you are a collector or someone who is really into their wine, that might seem like a fair deal.

The rest of us, however, probably wouldn’t spend that kind of scratch for our $12 bottle of pinot. With its lower cost, the new Essential aerator is a play to reach a wider audience.

Like its more expensive predecessor, the Essential also offers precise aeration as well as connection with the app for automatic adjustments, according to press materials sent to The Spoon.

However, the Essential is more limited in its aeration scale (the number of aerated hours the device replicates), and has a shorter free trial (30 days versus 60) and warranty (one year versus five years).

But the biggest factor for most people in the wider audience Aveine is trying to reach is the cost. The Essential will be available at a pre-sale price of 199€ (~$232 USD) from Sept. 24 – Oct. 31. After that, the Essential will cost 249€ (~$290 USD).

That’s still not cheap for most people. But given how wine sales surged during the pandemic over the summer, and the colder months ahead (coupled with continued COVID), perhaps people will pony up to get a little more flavor in their lives while they are housebound.

Firstchop Shuts Down as COVID Crushed its B2B Pivot

Firstchop has a special place in my food tech journalist heart. I was there when the company first launched back in the Fall of 2017, and today, nearly three years later, I’m writing about its collapse.

Firstchop started its startup life amid the consumer sous vide mini-boomlet from a few years back. Unlike Anova and Chefsteps however, Firstchop gave away its sous vide wand to get you to subscribe to its protein delivery service. The company would send you a box of chef-prepared meats that you just had to heat up in the sous vide bath.

“Sous vide really caught fire and then collapsed,” Firstchop founder Ajay Narain told me earlier this year. “Unrealistic expecations were built around what sous vide could do. People thought it would be great for all of these different use cases, but it has a lot of limitations.”

So Firstchop abandoned that business to pivot to B2B, re-launching to sell prepared microwaveable meals to offices. At first, the switch to B2B was more fruitful for Firstchop. At the time of its official launch, Narain said that Firstchop sold three times as much product in the first month than it had the entire previous year of selling D2C.

In an email exchange this week, Narain said that Firstchop had also set up distribution through KeHE and Vistar (for offices), had brokers and had meeting scheduled with retail buyers at ExpoWest.

However, those good times quickly soured. Firstchop’s new debut was at the end of February, which is right as the pandemic was starting to hit the U.S. ExpoWest was cancelled. “Getting meetings became impossible,” Narain wrote to me in our exchange. “The office vending market absolutely collapsed. Not sure when it will ever recover as people get comfortable permanently or semi-permanently working from home.”

As a result, Firstchop has shut down.

In his email, Narain wrote that he kind of wished he had stayed in the D2C market as other players in that space like Blue Apron have rebounded. Indeed, direct to consumer channels have boomed across the food tech landscape during this pandemic. Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

Like any good entrepreneur, Narain isn’t done with the startup game. He said he’s already working on something new and still in the food tech space. Though he wouldn’t say more, I’m sure I’ll be writing about that when it launches.

Fexy Media’s Cliff Sharples Talks Serious Eats Sale and Getting Out of the Editorial Business

There are two sides to every story. For example, earlier today, digital publisher Dotdash announced that it had expanded further into food editorial content with the acquisition of Simply Recipes and Serious Eats from Fexy Media. The flip side of that news is that Fexy Media is getting out of the editorial business to focus on its core technology platform.

“We are divesting ourselves from [the] digital media ad supported model,” Fexy Media Co-Founder and Co-CEO Cliff Sharples told me by phone this morning. “We are really focused on being a technology company and ultimately building a marketplace.”

Fexy Media’s main business is its Relish shoppable recipe platform that Sharples says now reaches more than 120 million users a month across its 30 blog partner sites. Simply Recipes and Serious Eats will both remain Fexy content partners and use the Relish platform, so Fexy isn’t losing any audience or reach.

Fexy’s move away from editorial is understandable. One, as noted, creating editorial content is not the company’s core focus. Second, creating good editorial content on an ongoing basis is hard, and harder to justify when it isn’t your core business. There is also already a ton of competition from big and smaller food media players alike. Finally, we are in the midst of pandemic-related behavioral changes that could translate into bigger upside for Fexy. COVID-19 has forced the closure of dine-in options at restaurants, not to mention forced the closure of restaurants altogether. This means that people are eating at home more, which in turn spurs people to seek out and discover new foods to cook (hello, sourdough!). That’s where Fexy comes in.

Fexy’s Relish generates revenue through its shoppable recipe relationships. Find a recipe you like at a participating Relish site, click a button and all the items are sent to a grocery retailer where you can make your purchase and, increasingly, have those items delivered on the same day. Fexy monetizes the idea of consumers turning discovery into action through product placements, revenue shares and affiliate programs.

Buying groceries online is something else that has gotten a push from the pandemic. Fears over COVID translated into record amounts of online grocery shopping over the past six months and grocery e-commerce in the U.S.

“Over the full scope of the pandemic, we’ve seen more than a tripling of take rate in terms of people using relish, building out recipes and sending those to [retail] partnerships,” Sharples said.

And while online grocery shopping has fallen from its record highs in recent months, it’s projected to hit $250 billion in total sales in the U.S. by 2025. So there is a huge opportunity for Fexy to focus on expanding its with retailers and other content sites, rather than trying to build out their own.

Meallogix Raises $1.25 Million for its Meal Prep Software Platform

Meallogix, an enterprise resource planning software company focused on the meal prep market, announced today that it has closed a $1.25 million Seed round of funding.

Meallogix promises to take care of the more administrative tasks associated with running a meal prep or meal kit company. According to press materials emailed to The Spoon, Meallogix digitizes a company’s supply chain, handles nutrition label creation, shopping list creation, recipe costing, delivery options and more. The Meallogix dashboard also gives meal prep companies analytics around financials and menu performance.

Meal prep and meal kits have seen a bit of a resurgence during the pandemic. With restaurants shut down and more people eating at home, services that provide such pre-fab meals help consumers break out of their habitual eating ruts and discover something new. Even the beleaguered godfather of meal kit companies, Blue Apron, got a profitable boost thanks to shifting eating patterns during the pandemic. One also has to wonder if there is a burgeoning market in the home chef space, where home cooks could assemble prepped meals.

Meallogix is providing the picks-and-shovels to those types of meal prep companies, and allows them to focus more on the food by digitizing the day-to-day operations that go into prepping the kits. The company’s Seed raise shows that at least some investors think the meal prep and meal kit categories are robust enough to continue as the pandemic recedes.

The Meallogix platform costs $149 a month. The company says it will use the new funds to build out its platform, scale its operations, hire additional people and expand partnerships.

Dotdash Acquires Simply Recipes and Serious Eats from Fexy Media

Digital publisher Dotdash announced today that it has acquired the websites Simply Recipes and Serious Eats from Fexy Media. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Dotdash was already a sizeable player in the consumer content publishing space, owning such brands as The Spruce, Lifewire, TreeHugger and Liquor.com. This is the fifth acquisition for Dotdash since 2019. According to the press announcement, Simply Recipes and Serious Eats will keep using Fexy’s Relish shoppable recipe and menu-planning technology, and Relish will be added across The Spruce Eats.

Combined, Simply Recipes and Serious Eats reach more than 16 million people per month (comScore August 2020) the two companies reported in its press release. Dotdash is acquiring the 27 employees of Simply Recipe and Serious Eats, and plans to invest in both properties. Dotdash CEO Neil Vogel told Axios:

“To make a food site work now, you have to make GIFs. You have to have incredible video capabilities,” says Vogel. “You have to explore the cultural history of recipes and talk about nutrition. All these things you never had to do 5 years ago, but now you have to do them.”

Dotdash will continue to monetize the sites through advertising, though Vogel told Axios that the number and types of ads on both sites will be more optimized.

Fexy’s network of partner recipe sites also includes brands such as FoodieCrush, Recipe Girl and Macheesmo, which offers shoppable recipes via the Relish platform. Additionally, earlier this year at the height of pandemic panic-shopping, the company released an online tool that let you see if certain goods are in-stock at your local Target and Walmart. We reached out to Fexy Media to find out more about this deal from its end and will update this post as we hear back.

The pandemic has also provided an opportune time for Dotdash to bolster its recipe-related content. With COVID shutting down dine-in options at restaurants (and closing restaurants altogether), more people have been pushed into preparing more of their meals at home. Simply Recipes and Serious Eats are both big brand names in the world of food that should help Dotdash expand its reach.

UPDATE: an earlier version of this story listed recipe partner sites as being owned by Fexy.

Walmart Sets Goal of Zero Emissions by 2040

There are multiple layers of good news in Walmart’s announcement today that it’s targeting zero emissions across all of its operations by the year 2040.

First, on its face, it’s good news when the world’s largest retailer decides to do something beneficial for the planet (though one could argue the actual the “good” here doesn’t balance out the company’s main business of selling us more stuff). According to today’s press announcement, Walmart says it will:

  • Convert to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035 through a mix of wind, solar and other energy sources
  • Electrify and zero out emissions from all of its vehicles including long-haul trucks by 2040
  • Shift to “low-impact” refrigerants for cooling and electrify the climate control of its stores, clubs, warehouses and data centers by 2040

As part of today’s announcement, Walmart also said that it will “manage or restore at least 50 million acres of land and one million square miles of ocean by 2030.” The company also pledged to drive the adoption of regenerative agriculture practices and management of sustainable fisheries.

This is not the first eco-initiative from Walmart, a company that has a complex history of “greening,” as this paper published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review back in 2008 points out. But Walmart’s current renewable efforts are coming at a time when the company is possibly changing its relationship with consumers. The pandemic has spurred people towards new heights of online shopping, and Walmart recently launched its Walmart+ subscription service, which offers free same-day delivery of groceries as a perk.

Online commerce and increased need for delivery changes how Walmart will move goods around. Instead of just going from distribution centers to stores, it will be driving more goods around directly to people’s doors across the country. More deliveries means more trucks on the roads (or drones in the sky), more often, which means that actually, that electrified vehicle fleet should probably come sooner than 2040.

But the year 2040 is actually the other layer of good news from Walmart’s announcement. At least the company thinks there will still be a planet to sell goods on by then.

Kiwibot Partners with Sodexo to Roll Out Delivery Robots at the University of Denver

Kiwibot announced today that it has partnered with foodservice company Sodexo to bring robot food delivery to students, faculty and staff at the University of Denver.

Starting today, a fleet of 15 Kiwibots will be available to deliver food from Monday to Friday between the hours of 8 a.m and 6 p.m., with deliveries costing a flat $2.50 per order. Delivery will start with one campus restaurant before expanding to four more food options by mid-October. Kiwibot is also working with the city of Denver to enable off-campus deliveries at some point in October, as well.

There are a few things worth noting about this deal. First, this is Kiwi’s second bite at the apple when it comes to college delivery. Last year, the company delivered to UC Berkeley and had big plans to expand to a number of different schools across the U.S. Those plans never came to fruition, however and were abandoned. One reason that growth might not have happened last year was that Kiwibot was going through student groups, and not partnering with a school’s administration.

This time around, Kiwibot has partnered with Sodexo, a huge company that provides foodservice to colleges across the U.S. This partnership brings with it more legitimacy for Kiwibot, and also provides an entrée, so to speak, with college administrations and restaurants at potential campuses.

That Kiwibot has partnered with Sodexo is in itself interesting because Sodexo has an existing partnership with Kiwi rival, Starship, for robot deliveries on various colleges like George Mason University. The difference, however, is that Starship’s program requires users to download the Starship app. Kiwibot’s solution is more of a B2B play, and will integrate with a food ordering app from Sodexo. So it could provide Kiwibot with direct access to a greater number of Sodexo-run properties, should the partnership grow.

Kiwibot have been on a bit of a, err, roll lately. In July the company launched a restaurant delivery program in the city of San Jose, CA. Kiwibot is also in the middle of an equity crowdfunding campaign, which aims to raise $1 million.

Somabar Adapts to Pandemic, Adds Booze, Coffee and Juice to its Drink Menu

When I last checked in with Somabar at our Food Tech Live event in 2019, the company was making an eponymous automated drink dispenser that served up low-proof cocktails. The idea was that it could be used by bars and restaurants to create alcoholic cocktails without the need to get a full liquor license (think: Soju-based mixed drinks).

A lot Everything has changed since January 2019, including Somabar. Since the start of 2020 the company has been expanding the capabilities of the machine and positioning it as a more contactless way for restaurants, cafes, hotels and other hospitality locations to serve a wider variety of drinks around the clock.

“What SomaBar does, is it’s a professional mixologist of all things,” Somabar Co-Founder and CEO Christopher Hameetman told me by phone this week. “We’re now living in a world where we want to broaden our use.”

To that end, Somabar will now mix up just about any kind of cold drink you want. Low-proof cocktails, high-proof cocktails, cold brew coffee drinks, iced tea drinks, juices and, well, the list could go on.

The Somabar has six 750 ml and one 150 ml cannisters. Fill each cannister with whatever liquid you want: coffee concentrate, tequila, oat milk, orange juice — whatever. You then let the accompanying app know what you’ve loaded in each cannister. The app then tells you all the kinds of drinks you can make. Tap the button and voila! The Somabar dispenses your desire drink.

Or, don’t tap anything at all. The company has also added Siri and Alexa integrations to provide voice controls. Hameetman provided me a Zoom-based demo where he asked Alexa to mix him a drink, and while there was the occasional slight hiccup (which seems to come with any Alexa demo I’ve ever seen), it did work.

The idea with all this new functionality is to make Somabar more attractive in our modern, pandemic-stricken world. The expansions of Somabar’s drinks menu means that a restaurant could serve non-alcoholic drinks during the day (and to kids), and then swap out the canisters and serve boozey concoctions at night.

The voice-control features make Somabar part of the contactless 2.0 wave of restaurant tech, though I’m trying to figure out exactly how well voice control would work in a drinks scenario. You wouldn’t just have it out for anyone to use, because nowadays you can’t have lots of people putting their paws all over the same device. Having it behind a bar or counter seems too noisy for voice control and you would theoretically have only one person handling the cup, so they could presumably be the only person operating the app on a tablet.

Regardless, I could actually see the Somabar finding a place in restaurants, cafes and even small grocery stores/bodegas. The ability to make a wide variety of customized drinks throughout the day without needing to bring on a mixologist of some sort could prove very useful.

However, that versatility doesn’t come cheap. The Somabar is ~$4,800 (you can get a refurbished one for $2,800). The nice thing is — that’s it. There is no subscription for the software, so you get the drink library as part of that hefty price tag. And the open nature of the device means you can use your own ingredients instead of the pods that come with other automated drink machines like Drinkworks and Bartesian (though both of those are geared more towards consumers).

Somabar’s open nature could also help it further adapt, because 2020 isn’t done yet and a lot more everything could change.