Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Chris Albrecht

Announcing the ArticulATE 2021 Agenda: FedEx, Manna, Gatik and More

Our second ArticulATE food robotics and automation summit is just a little more than a week away, and at the risk of sounding immodest, we have put together a stellar show. The speakers are all lined up and the agenda has been set. And we’re excited to share both with you today!

The show is May 18 and being held virtually on the Hopin platform (so you can attend from the comfort of your own home in your pajamas, if you like). Check out the lineup and get your ticket today.

ARTICULATE 2021 AGENDA

Crops and Robots: How Automation is Changing Agriculture
Farm work is hard work. Learn how autonomous robots can take over dangerous jobs and AI can help bring more efficiency to our food supply chain.
Speaking:
Louisa Burwood-Taylor, Head of Media and Research, Editor, AgFunder
Suma Reddy, CEO, Future Acres

A Conversation with FedEx
There is perhaps no name more synonomous with reliable delivery than FedEx. We’ll hear how the storied brand is using robotics to automate the last mile.
Speaking:
Aaron Prather, Senior Technical Advisor, FedEx

A Demonstration of Moley’s Kitchen Robot
The house of the future is here, at least in the kitchen, thanks to this fully autonomous cooking robot
Speaking:
Mark Oleynik, Founder, Moley Robotics

Look! Up in the Sky! Drone Delivery is Getting Real
Drone delivery promises to be the fastest way to get your hot meal delivered. What have we learned from initial trials, and what can we expect when drones become mainstream?
Speaking:
Bobby Healy, Founder and CEO, Manna
Ryan Walsh, Co-Founder and CEO at Valqari

Order Up! The Future of Restaurant Robots
From commercial kitchens to standalone canteens, commercial kitchen robots can whip up hundreds of different meals. This will change not only restaurants but will enable any retailer to become their own restaurant.
Speaking:
Barney Wragg, Founder and CEO, Karakuri
Dibyananda Brahma, Vice President Growth at Mukunda Foods

No Register? No Problem. A Deep Dive on Cashierless Checkout
Why stand in line when you can walk into a store, grab what you want and leave? We take a look at the tech powering the new wave of cashierless checkout.
Speaking:
Stacey Higginbotham, Stacey on IoT
Trinh Le-Fiedler, Founder and CEO, Nomitri
Motilal Agrawal, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist, Zippin

A Live Demonstration of Alberts’ New Soup Robot
Yes, soup for you! Anytime you want it, thanks to Alberts new automated soup vending machine.
Speaking:
Glenn Mathijssen, Co-Founder and CEO, Alberts

Forget Last Mile, Let’s Get to Last Meter Delivery
There are plenty of robots that can get food to your front curb, but how about finding you inside an airport or mall? We get granular with the next phase of autonomous delivery.
Speaking:
Ritukar Vijay, Founder and CEO at Ottonomy.IO
Sven Mesecke, CEO, Sojourn

How Should Robots Roam City Streets? A Discussion with West Hollywood’s Mayor
There is a push and pull between innovation and implementation. West Hollywood has been a leader in autonomous delivery, and its Mayor will share what local governments consider as these robots roll out.
Speaking:
Lindsey Horvath, Mayor, West Hollywood

What Do VCs Like (and Dislike) in Food Robotics?
What stage of investment are food automation startups in right now? Where is the money headed? Have any investment bets paid off? Hear from the people who are cutting the checks.
Speaking:
Brita Rosenheim, Partner, Culterra Capital
Maggie Sprenger, Managing Director at Green Cow Venture Capital
Brian Frank, General Partner at FTW Ventures

Ruggedizing Robots for Imperfect Conditions
Right now, self-driving vehicle startups test their tech in sunny places like Arizona and Texas. But eventually autonomous vehicles will encounter stormy weather, literally. Here’s how they’ll handle it.
Speaking:
Ram Vasudevan, Co-Founder, Refraction AI
Richard Steiner, Head of Policy and Communications, Gatik

xRobotics Pizza Robot in action
Watch the xPizza One robot assemble the toppings on a pizza in real time.
Speaking:
Alena Tikovah, CMO xRobotics

The Ins and Outs of Successful Crowdfunding
Equity crowdfunding is a new path for startups to raise capital, but there’s no guarantee of success. Hear firsthand what it takes to run a successful equity crowdfunding campaign from startups who’ve done it.
Speaking:
Covahne Michaels, VP of Marketing, Blendid
Massimo Noja De Marco, CEO, Piestro

Restaurants in a Box. The New Smart Vending Machines
Armed with advanced robotics and smarts, vending machines are reshaping where, when and how we get fresh food and drink.
Speaking:
Andy Lin, Founder and CEO, Yo-Kai Express
Ben Winston, Co-Founder and CEO, Rotender
Mark Chaney, President and CEO, Winecab

Pick, Pack, Deliver. Grocery Ramps Up Robots
The pandemic caused grocery e-commerce to skyrocket. Check out the new automated systems that will get you your grocery orders faster than ever before.
Speaking:
Andrew Benzinger, Business Development Manager, AutoStore
Dmitry Shevelenko, Co-Founder and President, Tortoise
Jeff Wells, Senior Editor, Industry Dive

To Co-Brand or Not to Co-Brand Your Robot
Are you a food company, or a technology company? The answer will determine your best go-to market strategy.
Speaking:
Mara Behrens, Head of Marketing and Design, Chowbotics (now DoorDash)

What to Know When Rolling Out Self-Driving Vehicles
Autonomous pods, cars and trucks are coming to our public streets. But it will take a combination of technology and policy before they can become widespread.
Speaking:
Nancy Lee, Community Manager, PIX
Manuela Papadopol, CEO, Designated Driver

In addition to the great cast of speakers, we also want to thank all of the sponsors who are helping make ArticulATE 2021 possible: Wavemaker Labs, Sojourn, Picnic, RoboEatz, Gastronomous, YPC Technologies, Karakuri and Le Bread Xpress.

All that’s missing from our awesome day is you. So get your ticket today and be a part of the future of food automation!

More Headlines

Trigo Partners with German Grocer REWE for Cashierless Checkout Stores – The new store will be located in downtown Cologne, Germany.

Hwy Haul Raises $10M Series A to Modernize Produce Trucking – The startup’s cloud-based startup helps connect shippers with carriers without all the paperwork.

Red to Green Ep 3: Breaking Through Resistance to Cultured Meat – One the ways of getting people to accept lab-grown meat is by making the pitch personal.

Impossible Foods Granted Child Nutrition Label, Opening Up Public School Market – The volunteer authorized by the USDA will make it easier for schools to buy Impossible products.

Trigo Partners with German Grocer REWE for Cashierless Checkout Stores

Israel-based Trigo announced today that it has partnered with Germany’s second largest grocery chain, REWE, to create a cashierless checkout store in downtown Cologne, Germany.

Founded in 2018, Trigo is practically an elder statesman in the world of cashierless checkout. The company uses a combination of shelf sensors, cameras, computer vision and AI to creat a “grab and go” shopping experience. Customers scan a mobile app upon entering the store, take what they want and get charged automatically upon exit.

The partnership marks Trigo’s first expansion into Germany. The company already has arrangements with grocery retailer Shufersal in Israel and Tesco (which is also an investor in Trigo) in the U.K. Initially, the cashierless checkout experience at the Cologne REWE store will be for employees only. Cashierless checkout will expand to the wider public later this summer, and REWE will still have cashiers for those who want to pay the old fashioned way.

The entire cashireless checkout sector has seen a lot of activity since the start of the year, but Europe in particular has been a hotbed of news. Nomitri (also in Germany) came out of stealth. Portugal’s Sensei raised funding. Outisde players like Imagr established new headquarters in Amsterdam while Amazon opened up a cashierless Fresh market in London. And retailers like The Netherlands’ Wundermart partnered with AiFi to launch a thousand cashierless checkout stores.

I expect we’ll be seeing more announcements from big grocery store chains experimenting with cashierless checkout as the year unfolds. The pandemic has retailers re-thinking the in-person shopping experience and cashierless checkout brings a number of benefits on that front. Cashierless checkout reduces human-to-human interaction between store staff and shoppers. It also keeps shoppers from congregating in checkout lines and can shorten the amount of time they spend in the store altogether.

Autonomous checkout is a topic we’ll be covering at our upcoming ArticulATE virtual conference on May 18. Execs from both Zippin and Nomitri will be discussing the state of cashierless checkout, implementing such technology and what’s coming next. Don’t miss out, get your ticket today!

Hwy Haul Raises $10M Series A to Modernize Produce Trucking

Hwy Haul, a cloud-based freight platform that connects produce shippers and carriers, announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series A round of funding. Eileses Capital and BluePointe Ventures co-led the round with participation from AgFunder, True Blue Partners, and other angel investors. This brings the total amount raised by Hwy Haul to $15.6 million.

As Syed Aman, cofounder and CEO of Hwy Haul explained to me last year, existing methods and workflows for getting fresh produce shipped from farms to stores around the country is still very manual and complex. It can require phone calls with truck brokers to find a carrier, multiple manual temperature checks to ensure food safety, and paying truckers can still take weeks after a haul is delivered. All of this complexity results in low transparency and food waste from loads not being kept at proper temperatures or being sent to the wrong destination.

Hwy Haul is looking to fix all that by automating the process associated with hiring truckers and shipping produce nationwide. The cloud-based system allows truckers to find instant quotes, book loads and reduce paperwork. Shippers (farms, wholesalers, etc.) can more easily hire carriers, monitor the temperature and humidity of loads, and optimize routes.

All of this, the company says, results in greater insights into shipments, reduced wait times and a more optimized supply chain. And if it’s one thing Aman knows, it’s the supply chain. Prior to co-founding Hwy Haul, Aman was Director of Supply Chain at Walmart, where he helped build Walmart’s online grocery platform.

We asked a couple weeks ago whether supply chains are sexy now as there are a raft of startups looking to transform how food is moved about the country. RipeLocker creates containers that adjust factors like oxygen levels and air pressure to extend the shelf life of produce. Varcode uses blockchain and IoT to ensure the items in the cold chain remain cold. And Gatik is creating self driving delivery trucks for the middle mile. And now with $10 million in fresh capital, Hwy Haul can keep these supply chains truckin’.

Impossible Foods Granted Child Nutrition Label, Opening Up Public School Market

After a massive expansion at retail last year, Impossible Foods is heading into a new market: the school cafeteria. The company announced today that its plant-based Impossible Burger received the Child Nutrition (CN) Label, which is a voluntary food crediting statement authorized by the USDA. Carrying the CN label means schools participating in federal Child Nutrition Programs like the National School Lunch Program can determine how Impossible’s products contribute to federal meal pattern requirements to aid in any purchasing decision.

According to the USDA, schools served 5 billion lunches and 2.4 billion breakfasts in fiscal year 2019. Now that Impossible carries the CN label, public schools can more easily purchase the company’s plant-based burger and sausage to include on their menus.

In a corporate blog post, Impossible said it is starting a number of K-12 pilot programs with school districts across the U.S. including in Palo Alto, California; Aberdeen, Washington; and Deer Creek and Union City, Oklahoma. Impossible will offer schools in these trials free cases of its plant-based meat to make things like Impossible tacos and spaghetti.

There are more than 98,000 elementary and secondary public schools in the U.S., representing a sizeable new market for Impossible. At the risk of sounding mercenary (selling to kids!), getting in on school lunches does couple things for the company. On its face, selling into school districts is another revenue stream for Impossible. But it also gets kids used to the flavor of Impossible’s plant-based instead of Beyond Meat. If that preference sets in, Impossible could have generational customers who grow up eating its product. (Though, given my memories of cafeteria food, kids could just as easily get turned off by it.)

Of course, since we are talking about plant-based meat, the federal government and schools, there is bound to be some ginned up outrage. Meat is a new front in the supposed culture war, so it probably won’t be long until we hear certain voices pipe up decrying coastal elites forcing Impossible’s plant-based burger and sausage agenda on kids.

Accel Robotics to Launch Autonomous Valet Market in High-Rise Community

Cashierless checkout startup Accel Robotics announced today its autonomous Valet Market will soon open inside the Vantage Pointe high-rise residential building, located in the company’s hometown of San Diego, California.

The 1,500 square foot store is “designed as a shared pantry for the neighborhood,” and will stock locally-sourced items, such as produce, baked goods and dairy, along with typical convenience store fare. Like many cashierless checkout stores, customers need to download a mobile app to check into and shop there. Once inside, shoppers grab what they want and leave, getting charged automatically upon exit.

Accel monitors what shoppers take through a combination of cameras, computer vision and shelf sensors, which is the same approach taken by other autonomous checkout players like Zippin and Amazon Go. The inclusion of shelf sensors in addition to computer vision can help bolster accuracy when keeping track of what shoppers pick up.

The store will be open to the public during the day, but only available to residents after business hours. Additionally, Valet Market will offer “last step” delivery to Vantage Pointe residents, so they won’t even need to leave their apartments.

The launch of Valet Market continues cashierless checkout’s strong momentum on display so far this year. In the first half of 2021 AiFi has partnered with Wundermart to open one thousand autonomous stores, Standard Cognition raised $150 million for its cashierless tech, and startups around the world like Supersmart, Imagr and Nomitri come out of stealth.

But Accel’s launch of the Valet Market could be another indication that cashierless checkout stores will soon be a standard perk for high-end residential communities. We saw this start last year when AWM Smartshelf partnered with Aramark to create the QuickEats Close Convenience located inside the Nineteen01 apartment complex in Santa Ana, California. Having a dedicated cashierless convenience store inside large residential complexes actually makes a lot of sense. It’s super convenient for residents to run to the lobby for last-minute milk than heading out to the supermarket. The cashierless store can be open around the clock, and the building owner doesn’t have to pay for people to work in the store.

In addition to operating its own Valet Market, Accel said it will be announcing partnerships with other U.S. brands including universities, sports venues, military bases and fuel stations. In August of last year, credit card company Mastercard partnered with Accel Robotics to create a cashierless checkout solution for stores and announced it had lined up customers including Circle K, Delaware North and Dunkin’.

We are on the precipice of cashierless checkout becoming mainstream. If you want to see where the whole autonomous store space is headed, then you should definitely attend ArticulATE, our food robotics and automation virtual conference on May 18. We’ll have speakers from both Zippin and Nomitri talking about the technology and opportunities in the sector. Get your ticket today!

Precision AI Raises $20M Seed Round for Drone-Powered Surgical Herbicide Application

Precision AI, an automated precision agriculture startup, announced today that it has raised a $20 million in Seed round of equity and grant funding. The round was co-led by At One Ventures and the Industrial Innovation Venture Fund of BDC Capital, with participation from Fulcrum Global Capital and Golden Opportunities, as well as non-dilutive co-investment from Sustainable Development Technology Canada and Protein Industries Canada.

Based in Regina, Canada, Precision AI uses a combination of drones and computer vision to conduct precise application of herbicides and pesticides on weeds. Precision AI’s system deploys swarms of drones that fly over farm fields. The drones can carry a 25 lbs. payload and have a 55 minute flight time. Equipped with both cameras and a sprayer, the drones’ system automatically identifies weeds and sprays them with specific dose of pesticide or herbicide.

The goal is to reduce the waste and cost that comes from indiscriminate, broad application of chemicals to tackle weeds. Additionally, Precision AI’s approach only sprays the weeds, not the crops themselves, so there are fewer chemicals applied to the food we consumer. Precision AI says its drone approach to weed control on large acreage crops is much cheaper than traditional large farming machinery and could reduce the amount of pesticide use by up to 95 percent while maintaining crop yield and saving farmers $52 per acre per growing season.

Precision AI sits at the Nexus of a few trends happening in agriculture. The first, fittingly, is bringing precision control to farms. Sensors and IoT allow the monitoring of things like soil moisture, plant temperature, and fertilization on a more granular level. To get these levels of precision, we’re also seeing automation coming to farms in the form of robots that do everything from carrying gear to zapping weeds with electricity to harvesting crops. Drones are also being employed more monitor farm conditions and plant growth and even pick fruit.

Automation on the farm is actually a topic we’ll be tackling at our upcoming ArticulATE food robotics and automation virtual summit on May 18th. We’ll have speakers from Future Acres, AgShift and AgFunder discussing the opportunities that lie ahead for automated precision agriculture. Get your ticket today!

Walgreens Launches Two-Hour Delivery

Drug store giant Walgreens is getting in on the speedy delivery game, as the company announced today that it now offers nationwide two-hour delivery of more than 24,000 products.

According to a press announcement, customers can shop via Walgreens’ website or app as the normally would. There is no minimum order required and upon checkout, shoppers select Same Day Delivery and can receive their items in under two hours.

Walgreens has existing delivery relationships with third-party services like Postmates, DoorDash and Instacart. But in those cases, customers ordered via the third-party platforms, not Walgreens. Though this new service has customers using the Walgreens site and app, a Walgreens rep told us that the actual delivery of items is still being facilitated third-party delivery companies like Uber and DoorDash. This new arrangement, however, would allow Walgreens to keep more of its customer data, rather than hand it off entirely to a delivery company.

That Walgreens is launching its own fast, two-hour delivery option isn’t that much of a surprise. The lines between grocery retailer, drug store and convenience store continue to blur as shoppers can buy a variety of foods, medicines, beverages and beauty items at any of those options. As such, Walgreens is being squeezed by grocery giants like Amazon and its two-hour delivery on one end, and upstarts like the delivery-only convenience store goPuff, which offers delivery of items in as little as a half hour, 24 hours a day.

Another benefit of Walgreens ramping up its delivery efforts is that hopefully fewer sick people will go into stores. Walgreens delivery is contactless, which means people with colds and flus won’t have to wander store aisles, stand in line with other healthy customers or interact with human cashiers. A definite benefit in this pandemic age.

Miso Robotics Launches CookRight to Automate Restaurant Cooking (Without the Robot)

Miso Robotics today announced CookRight, a new software product for restaurants that delivers the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered cooking of its Flippy robot — without the robotic hardware.

The new CookRight platform uses cameras mounted above a grill along with a tablet computer. The cameras look down at the food being prepared and use a combination of computer vision, thermal detection and AI to identify a cut of meat, its thickness and cooking progress. It’s the same software system used by Flippy, only instead of a providing instructions to a robotic arm, its guides a human cook. A display on the accompanying tablet shows what CookRight is “seeing” and gives instructions for each item on the grill. Miso says that CookRight currently works with burgers, chicken, fish, steak, sausage, hot dogs, and more.

Miso Robotics Chairman and President, Buck Jordan, told me by phone last week that using CookRight can help reduce foodborne illnesses by ensuring food is cooked properly, and with the guided cooking, turn just about any cook into an expert griller with no extensive culinary training.

Additionally, CookRight integrates with a restaurant’s POS and ordering systems to automate coordination of meal prep. So if an order comes in for delivery through an app like GrubHub, CookRight will know when the driver is on their way and be able to time the grilling accordingly.

With CookRight, Miso is aiming to expand its market base with a lower cost automated cooking solution than Flippy. Though the price of Flippy has steadily come down from $60,000 upfront to $2,000 a month, that’s still a lot of money for hardware that needs to be installed in existing kitchen spaces, maintained and have workers be trained on. Additionally, smaller mom n’ pop restaurants may not have the space necessary for a Flippy installation. The biggest customer for Flippy at this point has been White Castle, which will be operating the robot at 11 of its locations.

With its minimal hardware setup and a subscription cost of $100 a month, CookRight is a much more affordable option for smaller and medium-sized restaurants looking to automate some of their processes. This, in turn, will allow Miso to scale to more restaurants more quickly.

There are other players in the restaurant tech space like Dragontail Systems, which uses AI to coordinate and optimize order workflow in the kitchen. But with CookRight, Miso is taking that automated integration and optimization a step further into the actual cooking of the food.

If you want to see the future of automated cooking, then you should definitely check out Articulate, our food robotics and automation virtual summit happening on May 18. Buck Jordan will be speaking as will execs from restaurant robot companies like Karakuri, Blendid, Piestro and Mukunda Foods. Get your ticket today!

Kroger Taking Flight with Drone Delivery Pilot This Spring

Kroger announced today that it is working with Drone Express, a division of TELEGRID Technologies, to launch a drone delivery pilot starting this spring.

The first test of the new drone delivery will begin this week near the Kroger Marketplace in Centerville, Ohio (just outside of Dayton). Actual customer deliveries are scheduled to begin later this spring with a second pilot launching this summer at a Ralphs in California.

But Kroger isn’t just planning on sending drones to your front yard. In the press announcement, the company indicated that it’s looking to get customers the last minute items they need, wherever that may be. So that could be picnic supplies to a park, or cold drinks at a hot beach. Kroger said that drone deliveries will be limited to a payload of around five pounds and deliveries of eligible orders should arrive within 15 minutes.

When we talk about drone food delivery, it’s usually centered around restaurants. Because drones can reach their destinations so quickly, they are shaping up to be a viable option for hot restaurant meal delivery. But we are starting to see drone delivery gain traction with grocery retailers. In Ireland, Manna has a partnership with Tesco, and here in the U.S., Walmart is working with Flytrex to test out drone deliveries in North Carolina and Rouses Market is using Deuce Drone to trial deliveries in Alabama.

It should also be noted that with this drone trial, Kroger continues to show its tech-forward thinking. So far this year, Kroger has opened the first of its robot-powered customer fulfillment centers, and started piloting more automated checkout via Caper’s smart shopping carts. Plus the fact that Kroger is launching two drone delivery pilots this year shows the company is being more aggressive about aerial delivery than its competitors (at least publicly).

If you are interested in the future of drones delivery, then you must come to ArticulATE, our food automation virtual summit happening on May 18. We’ll have a full panel devoted to drones featuring the CEO of Manna. Get your ticket today!

Sweden: Stockeld Dreamery Launching First Plant-Based Cheese This Week

Plant-based cheese startup Stockeld Dreamery (formerly Noquo Foods) will launch its first product, Stockeld Chunk, at select stores in Stockholm, Sweden on May 6. Daniel Skaven Ruben, an early investor and advisor to Stockeld and now the company’s Head of Strategy and Special Projects, published a Medium post today announcing the news.

Stockeld Chunk is made from fermented peas and fava beans and can be crumbled onto either hot dishes or on salad like a feta cheese. It has a similar nutritional composition to feta, with 13 percent protein, 1.5 percent carbs and 20 percent fat. Skaven Ruben is quick to point out in his post that Stockeld isn’t trying to create a “fake” version of feta, only that the product be used like feta.

Stockeld is certainly launching its first plant-based cheese product at the right time. Recent data from the Good Food Institute shows that U.S. retail sales of plant-based cheese rose 42 percent from 2019 to 2020, with 54 million units selling last year making the category worth $270 million.

Plant-based cheese is a tough product to create, as you have to get the taste, texture and melting properties just right. There have been a number of companies making vegan cheese over the years, but a new wave of startups is looking to elevate the product to new heights, and hopefully more widespread acceptance. Grounded Foods and GOOD PLANeT‘s plant-based cheeses are already available, and the more early stage Climax Foods is using machine learning to combine various plant ingredients into different types of cheese.

If you are in Stockholm and want to try out Stockeld’s take on plant-based cheese, it will be available both as part of a dish and a standalone CPG starting May 6 at Pom & Flora, BAK Bakery and cheesemonger Wijnjas Grosshandel.

Should Food Tech Cos Fuel Bitcoin Adoption?

For those following the cryptocurrency markets, this weekend saw a big milestone as Ethereum passed the $3,000 mark. That still pales in comparison to Bitcoin’s price tag of nearly $58,000 per coin (at the time of this writing), but it reinforces that there is growing interest in digital currencies among the general public.

As such, I thought it was worth re-surfacing a small bit my colleague, Jenn Marston wrote about Bitcoin in her most recent restaurant tech newsletter over the weekend:

Landry’s a restaurant group that owns Morton’s The Steakhouse and Bubba Gump’s Shrimp, said in a recent interview that most of the company’s restaurant brands will start accepting bitcoin as payment in the coming months. CEO Tilman Fertitta cited “the next 90 days” as a timeframe.

Cryptocurrencies actually have a long history with food. Pizza, of all things, was one of the first things “purchased” with Bitcoin. In 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz traded 10,000 Bitcoins with someone in exchange for them ordering him Papa Johns.

We’ve seen crypto gain acceptance in fits and starts since then. Other restaurant chains have dabbled in accepting Bitcoin, though these are more one-offs in various regions: Burger Kings and Pizza Huts in Venezuela, KFC Canada (for a limited time), some Subway stores, for example. Ramen vending machine, Yo-Kai Express accepted Bitcoin at one point.

But we’re starting to see more acceptance of crypto from big, established companies. Whole Foods started accepting cryptocurrency back in 2019. In April of this year, you could start buying Starbucks with Bitcoin through the Bakkt digital wallet. Chipotle used Bitcoin as the backbone of a promotional stunt. Landry’s jumping into crypto is another big company pushing acceptance of Bitcoin forward.

This is not a financial blog, so this post should not be construed as advice. But as more retail investors start buying crypto, and well established companies like PayPal and Tesla begin to adopt Bitcoin, is there a bigger opportunity for food tech?

At first, adopting cryptocurrencies might seem like a natural fit for many of the companies we cover. Restaurants, grocery retailers, vending machine companies are all looking to streamline and automate much of their operations. Adding a universal digital currency available anywhere in the world could, in theory, could remove some friction from the transaction process, and generate more sales.

But there are definite pitfalls to adopting a cryptocurrency. The whole process is still very complex. Not only are there are ton of cryptocurrencies with various utilities and values (and there are some shady players out there), just the act of buying and spending cryptocurrency is still complicated for the average consumer. Cryptocurrencies are also still volatile. Yes, the overall trend for Bitcoin over the past year has been a hockey stick, but it still has wild valuation swings, so the money you take in today could be worth a lot less an hour later. And then there are tax and regulatory issues around crypto currencies that haven’t been fully figured out yet.

We appear to be at some kind of public perception inflection point for cryptocurrencies. While this bull run could be interrupted with a severe downturn, there are more people than ever learning about, buying and spending Bitcoin. That’s an opportunity for sure, but one with no small amount of risk.

Tyson’s Raised & Rooted Expands into Plant-Based Burgers, Brats and Italian Sausage

Raised & Rooted, Tyson Foods’ plant-based protein brand, announced today that it is expanding its lineup with three new offerings: burgers, Bratwurst and Italian sausages.

Raised & Rooted launched in June of 2019 with plant-based “chicken” nuggets and a line of blended burgers that combined both plant ingredients with conventional animal beef. The new Raised & Rooted products are made from pea protein, are soy free and have 17 – 21g of proteing per serving. The company says the Raised & Rooted brand is available at more than 10,000 retail locations and will be expanding beyond the U.S. into Europe.

Plant-based meats are enjoying continued growth in popularity. According to recent data from the Good Food Institute, sales of plant-based meat grew by more than $430 million in sales between 2019 and 2020 and the category is now worth $1.4 billion in the U.S.

There has been a flurry of activity in the plant-based meat space recently. Plant-based food startups Hungry Planet, Atlast Food Co., and Gathered Foods each raised eight-digit rounds of funding last month. Established giants aren’t resting on their laurels either. Beyond Meat launched version 3.0 of its burger, and Impossible kicked off its first major TV ad campaign, looking to entice meat eaters.

Raised & Rooted is also launching its new plant-based meat at as the summer grilling season is about to start. The added bonus this year is that with vaccinations rolling out, more people will be able to partake in backyard barbecues than last summer.

All of Raised & Rooted’s new products are available now nationwide, and cost between $4.99 and $7.99 per package.