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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Chris Albrecht

Could the Budding Home Chef Biz Give Alternative Meats a Boost?

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Not to brag, but I make a mean Impossible burger. The trick is frying it on an electric griddle in butter to get a nice crust on it and loading it up with grilled onions (chef’s kiss).

While I am proud of my plant-based burger cooking and assembly skills, I have no aspirations of going into business selling them. But I’m sure there are others out there who do. I started thinking about the nascent home chef business sector, where everyday people can sell the meals they make at home to other people, when Foodnome got approval to operate its first Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operation (MEHKO) in the Bay Area this week. Foodnome is similar to other startups in the space like Shef and Woodspoon, creating a marketplace to connect home chefs and customers. As I was thinking about these startups and my Impossible burgers, I wondered whether home chefs could give plant-based foods a market boost.

At first, it seems premature to even ask this question. The home chef space is currently very small as rules and regulations about what food people can sell out of their kitchen are still being developed. So there aren’t a lot of home restaurants out there. Additionally, it’s not like plant-based meats need a boost from this small segment. According to the Good Food Institute, plant-based meat sales have grown 72 percent over the past two years and the category is currently worth $1.4 billion.

So right now, the idea of a tiny home cook sector moving the needle on plant-based proteins seems academic at best. But if home chef-ing becomes a viable (and legal) money-making option for people, we could see a wave of independent restaurants pop up out of people’s homes. My guess is these businesses will probably start out as side hustles for most as people dip their toes in to test the waters, and won’t involve a ton of capital expenditure (they’ve already got the kitchen and the pots and pans!). As such, these home restaurants can take more risks. Risks like serving up a delivery-only menu exclusively full of plant-based offerings.

In the case of plant-based burgers, sure, sales are growing, but the sector is still dwarfed by traditional animal-based meat. Business Insider reported in May that beef sales in America grew to $30.3 billion in 2020. So if you were to open your own burger joint, you’d have a much bigger audience selling conventional burgers than you would selling plant-based ones.

But as with movies, books and blogs, the home chef business is about the longer tail. Building out a restaurant, buying equipment, hiring staff — all of that takes a lot of money and you want a safer bet with the food you sell. If you run your own food operation out of your home, you are free to take more risks (especially if it is a side hustle and not your main source of income). So you could experiment with plant-based meat (and dairy and eggs) menus because you don’t have to please as many people.

Take my Impossible burgers for example. I believe they are delicious enough that someone paying $7 or so for one would find that was money well spent. I do not believe, however, that I could justify the cost of launching a traditional restaurant to serve them. I’m not sure there are enough plant-based burger fans in my geographic area to support that type of standalone business, and there are already a number of animal-based burger places where I live so launching my own restaurant for them seems like a fool’s errand.

But if I could make and sell them from my kitchen… well, that’s a different story. I wouldn’t need as much money to start, and I could determine the hours I want work (e.g., dinners and weekends only), making the idea of running a food business more enticing. And since I’m not spending as much time or money, I could cater to the smaller number of people in my town who want plant-based burgers.

Chances are good that I’m not alone in this type of thinking. There are probably a lot of people who make unique plant-based burgers, burritos and pizza out there. Being able to launch such a business from the comfort of their own kitchens means we could see a lot of new plant-based virtual restaurants spring up across the country.

Again, this is all more of a thought experiment right now. As noted, there is still a lot left to be determined around the regulation of home cooking, and it presents a new paradigm in meal ordering that customers would still need to figure out. But I think it’s worth considering because a large number of smaller, independent home restaurants could bring about big changes to where people eat.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Foodnome launched this week. We regret the error.

Image via Eat Just.

More Headlines

Report: Eat Just Aiming for $3B IPO in 2021 – To date, Eat Just has raised $440 million, with its most recent fundraise being a $200 million round led by Qatar Investment Authority earlier this year.

Wageningen University Launches the Third Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge – Competing teams will grow lettuce from seed using a fully automated algorithms.

Google Launches a Tool to Help Americans Struggling With Food Security – The new Find Food Support website aims to connect people struggling with food insecurity to resources like food banks, school lunch programs, and food pantries. 

Recon Food, a Social Media App Connecting Users Through Food, Launches Today – Users can post photos of food and drink ordered from restaurants and leave a review, or upload photos of dishes they have created themselves.

Hop Robotics’ Beer Robot is Ready for Events This Summer

The U.S., it seems, has lagged behind Europe when it comes to automated beer pouring action. There’s EBar in the UK, Revolmatic out of Poland, and Macco Robotics in Spain. But fear not, proud Americans! There’s a homebrewed, as it were, beer robot coming to market courtesy of Hop Robotics in South Carolina.

Dubbed Walter, Hop’s beer robot uses an articulating arm and bottom pouring cups to automate beer dispensing. The robotic arm is built on a kegerator with four dispensers. Walter can take an order, dispense and serve a drink in roughly 25 seconds, and do roughly 140 cups of beer an hour.

Pint 2 Pint Time Trial-Hop Robotics

As Grayson Dawson, Founder of Hop Robotics, explained to me by phone this week, his company is still pretty early on and is in the pre-revenue, commercial prototype phase. Hop Robotics has one robot available that Dawson shuttles to events at cities around the Carolinas and Georgia. Right now, Walter isn’t tied into a payment system, so Dawson manually takes cash or drink tickets and enters the order into the machine himself. Additionally, while Dawson has some age verification capabilities, he is instead relying on venues to do age and overconsumption checks.

With more people than ever vaccinated in the U.S., activities like sporting events, fairs and concerts are opening back up. Crushes of people with pent up demand for mass entertainment will probably want a frosty beverage during the summer heat, and having an automated system to churn out beer after beer could come in handy. The question is how Hop Robotics could handle any potential surge in demand.

The company has proven out the basics of its technology, but Dawson is currently seeking funding or strategic partnerships to scale the business up beyond just one machine and the one person operating it.

Heineken B.O.T. Follows You Around With Ice Cold Beer in Tow

I live in the Pacific Northwest which, as you may have heard, is experiencing a record-breaking heatwave. It is hot, especially for a region that lives under cloud cover for most of the year. What we really could have used up here over the past few days is the Heineken B.O.T. (Beer Outdoor Transporter), an autonomous little robot that will literally follow you around carrying a cooler full of ice cold beer (or whatever).

Hat tip to Hype Beast for bringing the B.O.T. to our attention. The robot is autonomous and uses motion sensors to follow you around and avoid obstacles. As the promotional video points out, lugging coolers around on a hot day is heavy and no fun. The B.O.T.’s cooler holds 12 cans of beer and ice and since it goes where you go, a frosty beverage is always within arm’s reach.

Heineken B.O.T. (Beer Outdoor Transporter)

The idea of autonomous robots bringing refreshments to people isn’t new. A couple years back, Pepsi was using Robby robots to being snacks to students at the University of the Pacific in Stockton. More recently, Cheetah Mobile in China launched FANBOT, which is like a mobile bodega — though it’s used indoors in places like hotels and malls. And Yo-Kai Express is currently developing an autonomous ramen vending machine for students to hail on college campuses.

But don’t expect to see Heineken B.O.T.s scurrying around public sidewalks anytime soon, however, as this appears to be a promotional play from Heineken. It’s holding a contest in July where you can enter to win your own B.O.T. and stay refreshed through the hot summer months.

Soft Robotics Raises $10M to Add 3D Vision and AI to its Octopus-like Grippers

Soft Robotics, which is best known for making octopus-like grippers for robots, announced today that it has raised a $10 million extension to the $23 million Series B round it raised in January 2020. The round was co-led by Material Impact, Scale Venture Partners and Calibrate Ventures, and adds Tyson Ventures (the venture arm of Tyson Foods) to the syndicate. ABB Technology Ventures and Tekfen Ventures participated as well. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Soft Robotics to $58 million.

Soft Robotics uses rubber tipped grippers with “air actuated soft elastomeric end effectors” that mimic an octopus, allowing robotic arms to pick up odd-shaped and delicate items like eggs and bread without crushing them. The company says the new capital will help Soft Robotics launch its new SoftAI technology, which adds layers of 3D vision and artificial intelligence to its gripping solution.

According to Soft Robotics’ website, “SoftAI will evaluate the pick scene and automatically choose the best grasp and ideal robot trajectory to optimize rate and reduce product damage.” It’s easy to see how this type of automated discernment would come in handy for a company like Tyson Foods (which was already using Soft Robotics before it invested), which needs to pick up and pack all different types of animal products of varying shapes and sizes.

Chicken Wing and Poultry Automation with mGripAI

In addition to its new technology, Soft Robotics said its new funding will go towards commercial expansion to keep up with pandemic-driven demand. Last year COVID-19 exposed shortcomings in our food supply chain, with meatpacking facilities, which were already a dangerous place to work, becoming hot spots for the virus. Implementing robots in a meatpacking or other food-related factory can help add additional safety and social distancing to the work environment. Robotic arms can work all day without fatigue or injury, and placing robots on a line can help space out workers, so people aren’t working right next to each other.

During our first ArituclATE food conference back in 2019, a robotics researcher told me that robotic “grippers all suck.” But that appears to be changing. In addition to Soft Robotics’ octopus approach, new technologies based on origami (paper folding) and kirigami (paper cutting) are creating entirely new types of gripping technology that can be used for odd-shaped and delicate items. The combination of the pandemic and investor interest could help fuel accelerated development and implementation of this new gripper technology and unlock new areas and uses for robots in food production.

Grab Launched AHBOI Robot to Cover Middle-Meter Meal Delivery in a Singapore Mall

We’ve covered “middle mile” deliveries before, but a new robot in Singapore is covering what we’ll dub the “middle meter.” Last week, Singapore-based delivery service Grab launched its AHBOI robot at the Payar Lebar Quarters (PLQ) mall to speed up delivery orders placed at the restaurants located inside the shopping center.

AHBOI, which stands for Autonomous Handling and Batching Operating Intelligence, is a large, green rectangular mobile locker that acts as a food expediter. According to a Grab corporate blog post, the AHBOI collects delivery orders from different restaurants inside the mall and autonomously brings them to a central collection point where delivery drivers pick them up for the last mile delivery.

By shuttling food from restaurants across these middle meters to central pickup point, Grab says it can shave as much as 15 minutes off of a delivery time because the delivery driver doesn’t need to navigate their way to and inside the mall.

We are starting to see more automation appear over the middle meters and miles for food delivery. QSRs like Burger King and McDonald’s are eyeing conveyor belts at restaurants to speed up the movement of food from the kitchen to drive-thru customers. And companies like Valqari are setting up smart lockers where drones can drop off meals at a central location for delivery drivers or customers to pick up from. Using robots to consolidate orders in a large indoor setting like a mall makes a lot of sense.

As part of its blog post, Grab encouraged users to place more orders from the mall that would use AHBOI. The idea being that the more the robot traverses PLQ, the more AHBOI will learn about its environment and the better the robot will get at driving itself around the mall. Of course, more orders also means more revenue for Grab, which they could use to make more robots.

Botrista Raises $10M Series A for Its DrinkBot Automated Drink Dispenser

Botrista, the company behind the commercial DrinkBot automated beverage dispenser, announced today that it has raised $10 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Purestone Capital and La Kaffa International with participation from Sony Innovation Fund, Middleby Corporation and PIDC. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Botrista to $16 million.

Meant for restaurants an other foodservice companies, the DrinkBot is a cloud-connected automated drink maker, dispensing mocktails, infused teas and lattes, iced coffees, lemonades and more without the need for a full bar. Drinks are ordered via an on-board touchscreen, so the experience is contactless, and they are mixed and served in less than 20 seconds.

Botrista is taking a vertically integrated approach as it comes to market. The company provides the hardware for free, charging a monthly maintenance fee and selling the drink ingredients, which as of last year were $1.40 – $1.90 per drink. DrinkBots connect to the Botrista CloudBar for drink recipes, automated inventory management, as well as sales and menu performance analytics.

In a press release sent to The Spoon, Botrista said it experienced 10x growth year-over-year, which isn’t that hard to believe. The pandemic is driving demand for more contactless food and beverage preparation, as well as the need for takeout and delivery-related tech. The Botrista can churn out drinks continuously, quickly and at the touch of a button — perfect for high volume establishments like ghost kitchens and restaurants with high off-premises volume.

Automated mocktail and juice dispensing is becoming a hot little sub-sector of the food and beverage robotic space. Over in Switzerland, Smyze’s robot baristas also make a bevy of juice beverages. And last year, SomaBar, which makes a countertop drink dispenser, pivoted away from Soju-based cocktails to have its machine create juices, teas and regular mixed drinks.

It’s worth noting that both Sony and Middleby participated in Botrista’s latest funding. Last year Sony set up an artificial intelligence unit to work on both recipe creation and robotics. It’s easy to see how DrinkBot’s combination of data and automation fits in with that endeavor. And Middleby, a giant in foodservice automation, could open up a large network of customers for Botrista.

Botrista said it will use its new funding to scale up deployment operations to roll out DrinkBot nationally.

We Need to Talk About Cashierless Checkout (Again!)

Since we just held a Spoon event this week focused on reducing waste, I thought it appropriate to recycle my headline from earlier this year: We Need to Talk About Cashierless Checkout. I’m not just being lazy, I think we legitimately need to talk about cashierless checkout (again) because so much has happened since the first time I said it — and a lot happened just this week!

Let’s start by reviewing the relevant Spoon headlines since the first time I ran that headline in February:

In the last four months, we’ve written nine cashierless checkout stories, which means that roughly every two weeks, we’re seeing sizeable news in the space. But it’s not just the number of stories. Scratch beneath the surface and some trends emerge.

Funding
There are four funding stories for four companies at different stages, operating in different locations around the world. Based in Portugal, Sensei’s round was a Seed round. Israel’s Trigo got a strategic investment from German grocer REWE. Here in the U.S., Grabango’s haul was a later-stage sizeable Series B. And Zippin, which is based in the U.S. but is powering stores in the U.S., Brazil, Japan and Russia, has turned to equity crowdfunding after previously raising institutional money. I wouldn’t call the cashierless checkout funding environment “frothy” yet, but the sustained level of activity shows that investors are interested in emerging an established solutions.

Different Approaches
Beyond the funding, look at the variety of cashierless checkout startups coming to market. SuperSmart, Imagr and WalkOut all do some type of smart shopping cart. Trigo, Grabango and now Amazon retrofit full-sized grocery stores with cameras and computer vision to achieve frictionless checkout. Zippin and AiFi focus on smaller convenience and pop-up stores. In other words, there is a lid for every pot. Retailers will have a number of cashierless checkout options to choose from that suits them.

Europe
While cashierless checkout spots are opening up across the globe, Europe is becoming a particular hotspot of activity. Imagr opened an office in Amsterdam. Sensei is in Portugal. In addition to its funding, Trigo is launching a store with REWE, and is also a partner/investor in UK-based Tesco. AiFi has partnered with Polish convenience chain, Żabka. AiFi is launching a thousand stores with Dutch retailer Wundermart. And not to be left out, Amazon opened up a location in London.

Sports
This is admittedly a small part of the overall picture, but both Zippin and AiFi launched small convenience stores at sporting venues. Zippin opened its third stadium location, this one at Barclays Center in New York, while AiFi partnered with Verizon to open a small pop-up store at the Indianapolis 500.

As I discussed back in February, there are a couple of main drivers of all this cashierless checkout news. First is the pandemic, which pushed retailers into looking for more contactless retail environments. In addition to removing a human cashier/vector of transmission from the equation, cashierless stores keep customers from congregating in line and reduce the amount of time they spend inside.

Another factor, however, is Amazon, which kicked off the whole cashierless checkout trend with its Go stores three years ago. Since then Amazon has only ratcheted things up with its smart Dash shopping carts and just this week, showed it can scale its cashierless checkout to a full-sized grocery store. Amazon’s constant drive to innovate is forcing other retailers to do the same and accelerate their own cashierless plans.

In other words, we’ll need to talk about cashierless checkout a few more times before the year is over.

More Headlines

InnerPlant Raises $5.65M to Turn Plants Into “Living Sensors” and Mitigate Crop Loss – Agtech company InnerPlant, which is changing plant DNA to create “living sensors” that mitigate crop loss, has raised $5.65 million in pre-seed and seed funding,

Upcycled Food Association Launches Open Enrollment as Upcycling Momentum Grows – This week, the Upcycled Food Association announced that it had opened the doors for anyone who wants to apply for certification.

There’s More to Food Waste Innovation Than Tech, According to ReFED’s Dana Gunders – Dana Gunders, the Managing Director and a founder of ReFED, kicked off The Spoon’s recent event by asking two important questions related to food waste: What is innovation, and what is the problem we’re trying to solve with it?

Switzerland: Smyze’s Robot Barista Makes Coffee and Mocktail Drinks

Switzerland-based robots startup Smyze is a lot like other robot baristas already out on the market. It’s eponymous robot is a self-contained kiosk installed in high-traffic areas, users order drinks from an on-board touchscreen or via a web app to order and an articulating arms swing and swivels around to make those drinks.

So far, this sounds a lot like other robo-ristas on the market from the likes of Cafe X, Crown Digital and Blue Hill coffee. What makes Smyze a little different is that it also offers a variety of mocktail-type drinks, making it more of a full beverage station rather than just a high-tech, sci-fi latte machine. Measuring 2 meters by 2 meters, the Smyze station has a menu of 60 drinks, split 50/50 between coffee drinks and mocktails, and can churn out 120 drinks per hour.

“We didn’t want to just be a robot barista,” Daniel Adamec, Co-Founder of Smyze told me by video chat this week. “We have a broad range of drink possibilities, you don’t want to restrict yourself to just coffee.”

I asked Adamec why his company went with an articulating arm for its design, as it might not be as fast as more of an industrial machine type of approach. “We want the robot experience,” he said, highlighting the arm’s theatricality. “We don’t want to have a vending machine. It doesn’t add a huge cost, and it’s just an experience. People love it.”

There are currently three Smyze robots up and running in Switzerland with two more set to go online in that country in the next couple of months. The robots are owned and operated by Smyze, so it is responsible for stocking, cleaning and maintenance (which Adamec said happens once a day). When they install in a new location, Smyze negotiates a revenue sharing deal with that location rather than renting space or leasing the machine outright. Adamec said that Smyze will continue that owner/operator model as the company grows across Europe, but will also use more of a franchise model for its forthcoming customers in the middle east and Asia, where Smyze is not physically located.

As noted, there are currently plenty of robot baristas coming to market in different places around the world. But Smyze is part of a larger movement of startups looking to automated all kinds of commercial beverage experiences. Blendid and Alberts make smoothies. Rotender and Celia make actual cocktails. And Drinkbot makes a variety of juice-based mocktailers. Right now, Smyze sits somewhere in the middle of all these, offering a broad array of drinks, which just might help its robot stand out in an increasingly crowded field.

South Korea: Lounge Lab Opens Brown Bana Robot Ice Cream Shop

South Korean robotics company Lounge Lab announced today that it has opened Brown Bana, a robot-powered ice cream store in Seoul.

Technically, Brown Bana is more of a co-botic setup, as the articulating robot arms just move cups and capsule-based ice cream around while a human adds the toppings (see the video below) and serves the finished product. But based on the information Lounge Labs sent to The Spoon, the robots are equal parts labor and entertainment.

From Lounge Labs’ press announcement:

Brown Bana’s ice cream robot Aris provides an interactive experience in which customers and robots communicate through emotional motion functions and animated characters that express various emotions with faces. A total of seven motion contents, including ‘greeting,’ ‘calling,’ ‘rest,’ ‘drowsy,’ and various dance movements, are applied, as well as facial expressions suitable for each motion through a mounted display with character animation.

로봇이 아이스크림을?! 한국 최초의 로봇 아이스크림 스토어 '브라운바나' 오픈!

Theatricality is certainly part of a food robot’s appeal, especially since the technology is still novel for most audiences. Watching a robot make you food is still enticing enough to make passers-by stop and watch. Cafe X added waving and other gestures to its articulating robotic barista arms, and even set up its see-through kiosk on a busy downtown San Francisco street corner (though, those locations later shut down).

Lounge Labs believes Brown Bana’s robot hook will be appealing to both millennials and gen z customers, and is targeting cafes, amusement parks and pop-up spaces as target installation locations.

Brown Bana is just one of the automated experiences that Lounge Labs has developed. The company also makes the LOUNGE’X robot barista that makes pourover coffee, as well as the MooinSangHoei AI-powered vending machine.

Cashierless Checkout Startup Trigo Gets $10M Strategic Investment from REWE

Israel-based cashierless checkout startup Trigo has received a $10 million strategic investment from German supermarket chain Rewe. TechCrunch was first to report the news and also confirmed that Trigo has raised $104 million to date.

Trigo is one of the many startups looking to bring cashierless checkout to grocery retail. The company’s technology relies on cameras, computer vision and artificial intelligence installed in stores to keep track of what shoppers pick up and keep, charging them automatically upon exit.

That REWE is now an investor in Trigo is not a surprise, as last month the two companies announced a partnership to create a cashierless checkout store in Cologne, Germany. This is actually the second large European grocery chain to partner and invest in Trigo. In October of 2019, UK-based grocer Tesco made an undisclosed strategic investment in Trigo as part of their partnership. Trigo also has a partnership with Israeli grocery chain Shufersal, though there is no investment as part of that relationship.

It’s only Wednesday, and it’s already been a monster news week in the cashierless checkout space. Amazon announced it was adding its Just Walk Out technology to its new full-sized grocery store opening in Bellevue, Washington this week. This 25,000 sq. ft. space will be the largest implementation yet of Amazon’s cashierless checkout system. Elsewhere, Zippin partnered with American Express to open up a small convenience store inside the Barclays Center in New York, and AiFi partnered with Polish c-store chain Żabka to launch an autonomous NanoStore.

The cashierless checkout sector was already enjoying a strong start to the year with numerous funding announcements and retail partnerships. As grocers and convenience stores continue to explore more contactless forms of retail, we’ll see even more news as adoption of cashierless retail accelerates.

Zippin and AiFi Announce New Cashierless Checkout Store Locations

It’s not even noon pacific time as I write this and it’s already been a day packed full of cashierless checkout news. Things kicked off when Amazon announced a new full-sized grocery store using its Just Walk Out technology, and that was quickly followed up by Zippin and AiFi talking about newly launched cashierless checkout stores. All of these moves show that momentum for the cashierless checkout space that began earlier this year seems to be continuing unabated.

First let’s start off with Zippin, which said today it has opened up a new autonomous store in the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, home of the Brooklyn Nets (the news was first reported by the Sports Business Journal earlier this month). What makes this store a little different from the ones Zippin previously opened in venues like Mile High Stadium and Golden 1 Center is the exclusive partnership with American Express. According to the Zippin blog post, the new store, which will sell an assortment of beverages, snacks and merchandise, is only open to American Express cardholders.

Cashierless checkout stores at sporting events is an alluring concept. The ability to walk into a store, grab what you want and leave without standing in line means you spend less time out of your seat and more time watching the action. With sporting events are just starting to come back, cashierless checkout also provides contactless retail experience. Given all that, it’s cool that AMEX is helping push the technology forward, but it’s a bummer that it’s only available to its cardholders. Such exclusivity reinforces digital divides and only provides the convenience of autonomous retail to the haves, while the have nots can go wait in line with everyone else.

Elsewhere, fellow cashierless checkout startup AiFi announced today that it has partnered with Polish convenience store chain Żabka to launch a cashierless checkout store in Poznan, Poland. AiFi’s announcement is on the opposite end of the spectrum from Amazon in that the autonomous Żabka location will be one of AiFi’s 210 sq. ft. NanoStores. These NanoStores are essentially pre-fab shipping containers that can be shipped and set up just about anywhere. Future AiFi-powered Żabka autonomous stores will be a combination of NanoStores and retrofitted Żabka micro markets.

AiFi has partnerships with 15 store brands internationally, including Choice Market, Carrefour, Loop Neighborhood and Wundermart. Earlier this year, Wundermart said it plans to launch more than a thousand cashierless stores using AiFi’s technology.

While cashierless checkout hasn’t crossed over into the mainstream yet, today’s flurry of activity in the space further illustrates that such a time is not that far away.

Underground Cellar Raises $12.5M for its Gamified “Upgrade” Wine Service

Underground Cellar, which aims to entice wine buyers with the promise of random upgraded bottles of wine, announced today that it has raised a $12.5 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Accomplice, with participation from Golden Ventures and Bling Capital.

There are plenty of players in the online wine space such as Vivino and Winc that recommend and sell wine, but Underground Cellar’s hook is its gamification of the wine-buying process. Rather than discounting wines, it offers customers the chance for free upgrades. For example, someone might purchase three $20 bottles of wine through Underground Cellars. However, after purchase, Underground Cellar upgrades one of those bottles to a randomly selected, more expensive wine. So the customer could receive a bottle worth $50, $200 or much more.

In addition to its upgrade program, Underground Cellar also offers customers the ability to store up to 500 bottles of wine in the company’s temperature- and humidity-controlled facility in Napa Valley. This “Cloud Cellar” holds the purchased wine, and when customers are ready, they select bottles from their collection and Underground Cellar ships them off for delivery.

Underground Cellar’s funding could be coming at just the right time. Wine Spectator wrote back in December of 2020 that the U.S. wine market grew just 0.1 percent last year, with 328.9 million cases sold. However, Rob McMillan, executive vice president of Silicon Valley Bank’s wine division, told Wine-Searcher in April of this year to expect a wine boom over the next year as the pandemic recedes. Wine-heavy events like weddings, which were put on hold last year, will be back and there will be pent-up demand to celebrate.

With its new funding, Underground Cellar says that it will enhance its gamified platform, deepen relationships with wineries and triple the size of its team by the end of the year.