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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Chris Albrecht

V2food Raises $55M for its Plant-Based Meat

Australian plant-based meat maker V2foods has raised a $55 million ($77M Australian) Series B round of funding, according to Bloomberg. The round features new equity investment from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Tamasek Holdings, and brings the total amount raised by V2foods to roughly $80 million USD ($113M Australian).

Like others in the plant-based meat space, V2foods makes a ground and patty version of its plant-based beef product. The company first came on our radar last year when it provided the “beef” for Hungry Jack’s (Australia’s version of Burger King) Rebel Whopper.

According to Bloomberg, V2foods plans to use its new funds to help the company establish a foothold in Asia. It’s certainly not the only company looking to do so. Beyond Meat has made a number of deals this year to get its plant-based products in China including building two production facilities over there. Impossible Foods has called Asia “core to [its] business.” and Green Monday, which owns the plant-based Omnipork, recently raised $70 million and got its alt-pork products on McDonald’s menus across Hong Kong and Macau.

While Asia may be crowded, Australia has been less so. As we wrote last year:

Right now the Australian alternative protein market is pretty sleepy. Beyond Meat and Moving Mountains are available Down Under, but the region doesn’t have many companies actually developing their own plant-based meat products. So v2food has a clear runway to become the biggest local alternative protein brand.

In Sept. of this year, V2foods signed a deal that put its products in 600 Woolworths stores across the country.

Albertsons Pilots Temperature-Controlled Lockers to Expand Pickup Options

Albertsons announced today that it will pilot temperature-controlled lockers as an added pickup option for its grocery customers.

The lockers, delivered by Bell and Howell, are modular, can be installed either inside or outside and feature dynamic temperature control to accommodate various items placed in them. Customers will see this new “PickUp” option from participating stores when they shop via Albertsons website or mobile app. Customers placing an order will receive a unique code they use to unlock the self-serve locker.

Grocery retailers could soon be facing a double whammy of demand, given the continued use of e-commerce, thanks to the pandemic (and flu season!) and the impeding holidays. During the early days of the pandemic, we saw the strain as retailers couldn’t keep up with demand for grocery delivery. Though those systems seem to have improved, grocers like Walmart and Target have vastly expanded curbside pickup options to provide more flexibility for customers. Adding self-serve lockers gives customers even more options for getting their food while relieving increased demand pressure placed on the grocers.

Delivery lockers like the ones Albertsons is installing are starting to become a trend. The winner of last week’s Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase was Minnow Technologies, which makes IoT-enabled food delivery lockers for places like offices, residential buildings and restaurants.

Amazon pioneered the pickup locker, many of which were at grocery stores, ironically. Though those were for general Amazon packages, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see Amazon adding similar temperature-controlled pickup lockers at its new chain of Amazon Fresh and Go Grocery stores.

The first Albertsons PickUp lockers will be installed at select Jewel-Osco locations in Chicago, with more coming to San Francisco Bay Area Safeways later this year.

Alibaba Spends $3.6 Billion for Controlling Stake in Chinese Supermarket Sun Art

Alibaba announced yesterday that it is shelling out $3.6 billion for a controlling stake in Chinese grocery store chain Sun Art. The investment will increase Alibaba’s stake in Sun Art to 72 percent.

The deal ups Alibaba’s existing stake (from 36 percent), and reinforces how the grocery sector is hot around the globe. As TechCrunch reported:

All of Sun Art’s 484 physical retail locations in China are now integrated into Alibaba’s Taoxianda and Tmall Supermarket platforms for groceries, as well as Ele.me and Cainiao, its on-demand food demand delivery app and logistics businesses, respectively. For customers, this means faster deliveries and larger selections, while giving Alibaba more sources of data it can use to improve its supply chain and business operations.

As they are both online retail giants, Alibaba and Amazon are often compared with one another, and it appears that the comparisons won’t end with grocery. Amazon, which purchased Whole Foods back in 2017, is also rolling out its own branded markets packed with technology meant to speed up the grocery shopping process — and gather more data as you shop to make it even faster.

As noted, the grocery sector overall has garnered a ton of interest since the pandemic. Online grocery shopping is projected to continue to grow to hit $250 billion in sales by 20205. Grocery delivery service, Instacart, has raised a ton of money and swelled its grocery gig worker “Shopper” ranks. Shipt has grown its delivery worker ranks as well in anticipation of the coming holidays. And third party delivery services like DoorDash and Uber Eats are expanding from restaurants into the grocery category.

With coronavirus cases back on the rise both in the U.S. and in Europe, it’s a safe bet that the spotlight on grocery won’t be going out any time soon.

Qualcomm Ventures Invests in AiFi for Autonomous Retail

AiFi, a startup that makes cashierless, autonomous retail environments, announced today that it has raised a new round of funding from new investors Qualcomm Ventures and Plum Alley as well as existing investors such as Cervin Ventures and TransLink Capital.

The amount of new funding was not disclosed, but the AiFi press announcement said the total amount raised by the company was now $30 million. As of last Friday, Crunchbase had AiFi’s funding at $15 million and listed Qualcomm Ventures as an investor for an undisclosed sum from back in August. So if we’re reading this correctly, it appears that the new round is $15 million.

But equally interesting as the funding is the investor, Qualcomm Ventures, the venture arm of mobile technology giant Qualcomm. The canned quote from Qualcomm in the press release said

“As intelligence continues to move from the cloud to the wireless edge and demand for contactless shopping grows, we are excited to be investing in AiFi,” said Carlos Kokron, VP Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and Managing Director, Americas at Qualcomm Ventures. “We were very impressed with AiFi’s innovative edge-computing solutions and look forward to their technology helping accelerate the deployment of 5G.”

That a Qualcomm entity would invest in AiFi isn’t too surprising. AiFi’s stores rely on a lot of wireless technology, and the startup’s pitch is that it creates a faster retail experience by producing shopping receipts in real time. But Qualcomm is also moving more into computer vision, which is a cornerstone of cashierless checkout. In July, Qualcomm announced a chip cluster that adds machine learning and AI to mid-tier cameras. So investing in a company that gets that tech into more locations makes sense.

In addition to retrofitting existing stores, AiFi makes self-contained, autonomous, shipping container-sized nano-stores. The company says it will be deploying them to 330 locations around the world in 2021, and that it has partnerships with a number of top grocers across the U.S., Europe and Australia.

The pandemic has spurred interest in contactless technologies such as cashierless checkout. Caper just announced a countertop cashierless system for convenience stores. Grabango publicly launched its integration with Giant Eagle’s GetGo Market. Mastercard launched a cashierless checkout partnership with Accel Robotics. And AWM is powering a new cashierless market for a California apartment building.

For its part, AiFi said it will use the new funding to continue to develop its technology.

Trax Launches its Computer Vision-Based Inventory System in the U.S.

Singapore-based Trax announced earlier this week that it has officially launched its Retail Watch computer vision-based inventory management system for grocers here in the U.S.

As we’ve covered previously, Trax retrofits stores with customized camera modules on ceilings and on shelves. These cameras snap a picture of the store’s inventory every hour and send those pics to Trax’s cloud, which uses machine learning to analyze each image to see which products are empty and if any products have been misplaced or mis-priced. A report is then sent to store management, who can then dispatch associates to re-stock and replace items.

According to this week’s U.S. announcement], the company has added autonomous robots to its tech stack, but didn’t specify their use or prominence in the overall offering.

A Trax rep told me last year that stores using its system saw a 1 percent bump in sales through improved item stocking. That 1 percent may not sound like much, but it adds up if used across multiple locations for a single retail chain. Plus, 1 percent promises to just come from better workflow of existing practices (inventory management), not adding new ones.

In addition to retailers, Trax’ also counts CPG companies among its customers. For CPG companies, Trax is more of an auditing tool to monitor shelf presence at stores to ensure they are getting what they paid for.

While keeping a close eye on store shelves may not sound sexy, it is becoming an increasingly competitive field. Walmart has developed its own computer vision-based inventory tool. And Bossa Nova, Simbe Robotics and Badger Technologies all make shelf-scanning robots.

For retailers, having more up-to-date inventory data can translate into more revenue. For consumers, it can mean fewer product outages should shocks to the system like pandemic panic buying occur again.

SKS 2020: Grabango Says its Computer Vision Avoids Biases Because it Doesn’t Use Facial Recognition

Grabango CEO Will Glaser said this week that because his company’s technology doesn’t use facial recognition, it can avoid some of the same types of racial biases found in other computer vision and machine learning algorithms. Glaser’s comments came during my fireside chat with him at our Smart Kitchen Summit this week.

Grabango makes cashierless (or as Grabango calls it, “lineless”) checkout technology for grocery retail. Grabango installs hundreds of cameras in the ceiling of a store, and through a combination of computer vision and AI, keeps track of what people put in their basket (or pocket). When shoppers go to check out, they choose a cashier or use an accompanying mobile app that automatically charges for the items kept.

This type of computer vision-based system is also used by other cashierless checkout companies such as Zippin, Standard Cognition and Amazon, and could become more widespread as demand for contactless retail experiences grows.

But the problem with some computer vision + AI systems is that their algorithms can contain the human biases of their creators. As TechCrunch wrote earlier this year, “MIT researchers reported in January 2019 that facial recognition software is less accurate in identifying humans with darker pigmentation.” In a busy retail environment where a lot of people are grabbing a lot of different items all throughout the day, it’s not hard to see how this type of bias could adversely impact people of color.

Glaser recognized some of the problems that can arise when algorithms are only developed or trained on white men in a lab. He made a point of saying that Grabango’s technology does not use facial recognition, and that it has a 99.6 percent revenue accuracy rate. Grabango’s system does follow a person around store, but doesn’t personally identify them (it can, however, stay with a person even after they have put on or taken off a jacket).

Grabango’s system is also being used in real world conditions, so it continues to train its algorithms in a diverse setting. Last month, Grabango announced that it’s integration with Giant Eagle’s GetGo Market in the Pittsburgh area went live. So now we’ll be able to see in a more open environment if Glaser’s claims hold true.

Minnow’s Contactless Delivery Pods Win the SKS 2020 Startup Showcase Award

Minnow, which makes IoT-enabled lockers for food delivery, is the winner of the Smart Kitchen Summit 2020 Startup Showcase. The prestigious annual award highlights independent companies doing the best and most innovative work in the food tech space.

Though this year’s showcase went virtual, it still attracted hundreds of applicants from across the food tech landscape. And while all our finalists were compelling, Minnow’s solution wound up impressing our judges the most.

Meant for residential buildings, offices (whenever those re-open) and other high-traffic locations, a Minnow pod has a number of cloud-connected cubbies. When a food order arrives, it’s placed into a cubby and held until the end customer comes to unlock the cubby and retrieve their food.

One aspect of the Minnow pod that is particularly useful during this global pandemic is that it’s contactless. There is no human-to-human interaction when delivering food. These pods can also integrate even more convenience to home meal delivery process by allowing customers to pick up their food orders when they are ready, not the exact second the food arrives. To say Minnow pods could be useful during the time of COVID-19 is a bit of an understatement.

On a more personal note. It’s fun to see Minnow win this award because we’ve been covering the company for a number of years and have watched it change and grow. We first covered them back when they started in Portland, Maine, were called Veebie and were creating a mobile locker system that would park on busy sidewalks. Then they changed their name to Kadabra and settled on the stationary locker and went cross-country to the other Portland, in Oregon. Then this year, Minnow launched its pods, raised $2.2 million and now they are crowned the SKS Startup Showcase winners.

Congratulations to Minnow and thank you to all the Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase finalists this year.

SKS 2020: Shipt CEO Says Company Not Interested in Robots

Shipt’s CEO, Kelly Caruso told audiences at the Smart Kitchen Summit today that her company is not interested in implementing robot or drone technology.

“Shipt will use technology in order drive efficiency,” Caruso said, “But that technology will be more in line with machine learning, AI and VR,” as opposed to something like drone.

Caruso continued by saying that Shipt, which is an independent unit of Target, was not going to replace their human shoppers (the gig workers who go into stores and make the deliveries). “They are critical to our success,” Caruso said.

That Shipt is focused on its human workforce is not that surprising, given that just last week the company announced it was adding an additional 100,000 shoppers to its ranks in time for the holidays. The additional headcount will bring the total number of Shipt Shoppers to 300,000.

It’s also not too surprising that Shipt will rely more on people than robots, at least for right now. While the pandemic has accelerated the desire for contactless technologies, autonomous delivery robots like those from Nuro and Starship are still in their infancy. There also remain a number of regulatory and technological hurdles that need to be overcome.

What we should keep an eye on is whether Shipt’s parent company, Target, adopts some sort of robot-powered automation to fulfill e-commerce orders. Target is a bit different from other grocery retailers because it sells so much more than foods. In other words, a micro-fulifllment center using totes and rails in the backroom of a Target can’t exactly grab a bunch of bananas and a patio furniture set.

Having said that, Shipt works with a number of different retailers, grocery and otherwise. As grocery e-commerce continues to grow into a projected $250 billion sector, both retailers and Shipt will adapt to serve customers’ evolving needs.

LIVEKINDLY Raises $135M to Expand Its Alt-Protein Operations in the U.S.

Alt-protein collective, LIVEKINDLY, told The Wall Street Journal this week that it recently raised an addition $135 million in funding (hat tip to Food Dive). The round was led by Blue Horizon Corporation, with Trustbridge Partners, EQT and Griffith Foods participating. This brings the total amount raised by the LIVEKINDLY collective to $335 million.

LIVEKINDLY was formed in March of this year when Foods United bought vegan media company LIVEKINDLY. The new entity re-branded as LIVEKINDLY CO. Brands in the LIVEKINDLY portfolio include alt-protein companies such as Like Meat, Fry Family and Oumph!, which LIVEKINDLY acquired in June of this year.

LIVEKINDLY is certainly striking while the plant-based iron is hot. In many ways, alternative proteins have had a banner year. Sales of plant-based meats have surged in the U.S. this year as the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted inefficiencies and inequalities in our animal-based meat production system.

Plant-based companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have responded with rapid expansion at grocery retail as well as their own direct to consumer channels. Additionally, plant-based food companies like NotCo, Climax Foods, and Better Meat Co. have all raised funding.

The alternative chicken and egg space is getting crowded. Eat Just continues to innovate its plant-based eggs, while both Simulate and Rebellyous offer plant-based chicken nuggets. Though there is still plenty of room left for more competition, especially one with the deep(er) pockets of LIVEKINDLY.

According to The WSJ, LIVEKINDLY plans to use the new funding to expand its products into the U.S. and China. Food Dive reports LIVEKINDLY will also focus on developing new plant-based chicken and eggs.

SKS 2020: Novameat Expanding into Cultured Meat for its 3D Printer

Spanish startup Novameat is adding cultured meat to the list of ingredients it is using to 3D print cuts of non-animal meat.

Historically, the company has used only plant-based ingredients to 3D prints steaks and pork. But during his demonstration at the Smart Kitchen Summit today, Novameat CEO, Giuseppe Scionti, shared that his company has protoyped 3D printing hybrid meats that use plant-based ingredients for scaffolding together with cells from cultivated meat.

Scionti showed off how Novameat’s technology works at SKS by printing a plant-based steak in real time. The 3D printer holds a plant protein mixture that is extruded in a way that mimics the texture and appearance of animal protein. Right now the process takes long time, Scionti’s SKS steak was started before his half hour talk and was not finished by the time he was done.

Novameat is working towards speeding that process up, initially to a point where it could work in restaurants. Scionti laid out a vision where people could customize the ingredients that go into their protein mixture to have the restaurant create a customized steak on the spot.

Novameat had some pre-3D printed plant-based steaks on hand for its demo (see the video below). And while they were a little hard to completely see because of lighting and the nature of streaming video, the bits of steak did indeed cook and cut apart like steak.

3D printing could wind up being an important part of the meal creation process in the not-too-distant future. 3D printing and micro-extrusion allows for the creation of foods with specific layers of fat and protein. Plus, as noted earlier, they can be the vehicle for constructing truly customized foods.

While we write about the future of food all the time here at The Spoon, seeing a 3D printer in action like we did today really did give attendees a sci-fi like peek into what’s ahead for our meals.

NovaMeat 3D Prints Plant-Based Meat at Smart Kitchen Summit 2020

SKS 2020: Impossible Foods CEO on Cell-Based Meat: “It’s Never Going to Be a Thing”

Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown didn’t mince words when asked about the future of cell-based meat today at the Smart Kitchen Summit. “That will never be a commercial endeavor,” Brown said. “The reason has to do with the fact that it’s irreversibly expensive.”

While Brown agreed with the sentiment behind cell-based meat — removing animals from our diets — he doesn’t think the concept is a viable solution. Brown said that if companies were able to recreate muscle cells, that technology would be used first for therapeutic purposes, which would be much more lucrative than selling a facsimile of animal products.

Brown went on to create a hypothetical example. If 200 years ago, he theorized, you tried to develop new transportation by recreating the muscle cells of a horse, “you miss the real opportunities” because you’d be “stuck with limitations of animal cells.”

Brown’s fiery assertion is bound to ruffle some feathers in the cell-based meat world, which is full of companies hard at work re-creating meats in the lab. Startups in the cultured meat sector have raised a lot of money just over this past year: Memphis Meat raised $161 million in January, Integriculture raised $7.4 million in May, New Age Meats raised $4.7 million for its cell-based pork in July, and Mosa Meat raised $55 million for its cell-based burgers just last month.

In addition to raising money, cell-based meat companies are busy developing a variety of products including briskets, shrimp, yellowtail, bacon and even kangaroo.

Though Brown definitely has a plant-based horse in this race, his point is something we at The Spoon have pondered before. If plant-based meat tastes this good, do we even need to make meat in a lab? The plant-based ground beefs and pork from both Impossible and Beyond Meat are delicious. Should more resources be funneled into the cultured meat space, which, according to the companies making cell-based meat, is still years away from commercial availability at scale?

As if to erase any doubt about his position on cell-based meat, Brown said “It’s never going to be a thing. I’d put any amount of money on that.”

Exclusive: Blendid Opens Robot Smoothie Kiosk at a Walmart in Fremont, CA

Blendid announced today that it’s opening its latest smoothie-making robot kiosk inside a Walmart in Fremont, California. This is the fourth location for a Blendid robot and the first inside a traditional retail environment.

The Blendid kiosk features a bevy of refrigerated ingredients as well as an articulating arm that gathers ingredients and blends, and serves fresh, cold smoothies. A Blendid machine can make up to 45 smoothies in an hour.

What makes this story interesting isn’t just that Blendid has added another robot to its roster. Rather it’s where that robot is now located and how that location is indicative of where the company is headed.

Up until now, the company was mostly placing machines on college campuses. It has one in the food hall at the University of San Francisco and one at Sonoma State University. (The company’s first machine is located at the Plug and Play accelerator in Silicon Valley.)

But, as you can probably guess, those college locations have been put on hold thanks to the pandemic and schools moving to online classes. As a result, Blendid, like other players in the robotic vending space, is eyeing more retail locations.

“COVID has opened up interest from supermarkets and hospitals,” Blendid Founder and CEO, Vipin Jain, told me by phone last week.

For retailers like Walmart and other supermarkets, the attraction to robot-powered vending machines makes sense. Robot kiosks can offer fresh food and food and drinks in a more contactless environment. All of the ingredients are sealed away behind glass, and there is no human making the drinks, which means fewer vectors of viral transmission. Fellow food robot company Chowbotics has seen a similar uptick in interest from food retailers for the same reasons.

But Blendid is also actually ahead of its robo-bretheren when it comes to contactless ordering and payments. Users order and pay for Blendid drinks through the company’s mobile app, so there is no touchscreen on the machine that needs to be wiped down. This type of contactless ordering is a feature other robot vendors are hurrying to implement as the pandemic continues to upend traditional retail.

The move into retail also foretells a business model shift for Blendid. The company originally planned to own and operate its own machines, but as Jain explained to me “Blendid wants to be in the licensing business. That’s a model we are transitioning to.” This makes sense when you think of being in a supermarket, which by definition, has access to lots of frozen fruits, vegetables, juices and more that are required to make smoothies.

The robot debuting at Walmart today is also the latest version of Blendid, featuring a smaller footprint and the recently launched holding feature, which allows customers to order a drink ahead of time and have the machine hold it until you come and pick it up.

The Blendid kiosk is open at the Fremont Walmart at 44009 Osgood Rd. It will be open from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., seven days a week, with drinks costing ~$5 – $6 per 12-ounce drink.

UPDATE: This post includes a direct new quote that provided more grammatical clarity. The tenor, sentiment and meaning of the quote did not change.