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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Jennifer Marston

DoorDash Launches Initial Public Offering

DoorDash announced today it has launched the roadshow for its initial public offering (IPO). The company is offering 33,000,000 shares of its Class A common stock, with the initial public offering price expected to be between $75 and $85 per share, according to a company press release.

The San Francisco-based food delivery service confidentially filed for an IPO in February of this year and unveiled the public S-1 filing in November. The S-1 filing revealed that the company reported a profit for the first time in its history during the second quarter of 2020 — which coincided with the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a noteworthy milestone in an industry that thrives on promising a profitability it hasn’t, for the most part, achieved yet.

For DoorDash, part of that trek towards profitability appears to be expanding its service to other areas of food delivery besides restaurants. In April, the company announced partnerships with major convenience stores, including Wawa and 7-Eleven, and in August, it launched a grocery delivery service. It even went as far as to open its own “ghost convenience store,” called DashMart, which is basically a virtual convenience store owned and operated by DoorDash.  

Those new sales channels may be necessary at a time when the restaurant industry faces new restrictions to help curb the spread of the pandemic. It is difficult to say at this point how many restaurants will shutter permanently when all is said and done, and delivery services may need to branch out further to keep on the road to profitability. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, DoorDash is aiming for a valuation of $25 billion to $38 billion. The company garnered $675 million in revenue and a profit of $23 million for Q2 2020. For Q3, it posted a net loss of $43 million for Q3, but still reported revenue growth of $879 million. The company has said in the past that COVID-19-related lockdowns have played a significant role in its growth. That could be the case for a long time yet.

HungryPanda Raises $70M to Provide Food Delivery to Overseas Chinese Customers

HungryPanda, a food delivery service catering to Chinese communities overseas, announced today that it has raised $70 million. The round was led by Kinnevik with participation from 83North, Felix Capital, Piton Capital, and Burda Principle Investment. 

The London, U.K.-based company will use the new funds to continue its global expansion, delivering authentic Chinese restaurant food and groceries to Chinese people living abroad. According to today’s press release, HungryPanda’s business is already profitable in the U.K. as well as other major cities, including NYC. The service is currently available in 47 cities across six countries. 

The HungryPanda app stands out in the food delivery space because of this specific focus on the millions of Chinese people living in other countries who might encounter cultural and language barriers when trying to order restaurant food or groceries via an app. CEO Eric Liu started the company in 2017 as a direct response to this issue, which he himself experienced firsthand. The goal was — and continues to be — to provide the Chinese diaspora with a food delivery service that can meet their needs not just for food but also for the experience of browsing a menu, choosing a meal, and paying for it.

To that end, the app and website that is entirely in Mandarin and connects people with authentic Chinese restaurants, grocers, and other food outlets. Business owners, too, can use the service to connect with a potentially more relevant base of customers than they might find on, say, DoorDash.

HungryPanda raised $20 million in February of this year. At the time, Liu said that the U.S. was “strategically important” and would be the company’s focus for 2020.

Alt-Meat, Fancy Wines, and Chili’s: Black Friday/Cyber Monday Direct-to-Consumer Deals

So far, 2020 has been the year of the direct-to-consumer boom when it comes to food and beverage products, with major CPGs, restaurants, plant-based meat companies, and others setting up their own e-commerce sites to better serve homebound customers.

It follows, then, that this year’s enormous crop of Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals is chock full of offers from these companies’ sites, along with deals for meals, booze, and even groceries. And since we’re all stuck at home this year and going out to shop on Friday seems like a terrible idea as far as the pandemic is concerned, here’s a rundown of some of our favorite e-commerce food and bev deals happening over the next few days.

All Beyond Meat products on the company’s newly launched direct-to-consumer e-commerce store will be 20 percent off from 6 a.m. EST to 11:59 p.m. PST on Cyber Monday, Nov. 30. Bonus: if you’re one of the first 500 orders, you get a free Beyond Meat apron.

DoorDash just launched a gifting feature on its app that lets users send a food gift to another person. From now through Black Friday, Nov. 27, every customer that gives a gift of $20 or more gets $10 off their next order on DoorDash or Caviar.

Meat subscription service Crowd Cow is offering 20 percent off on a variety of meats and fish you can order via the Crowd Cow website. At the moment, there’s a healthy variety of shrimp, crap, steak, ground beef, cod, halibut and more available, and the company is adding new items to the sale every day. 

If you’re curious about testing out a meal kit, now might be the time to do so. A number of services are offering Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals this year. A couple notables are HelloFresh, which will give you $90 off your first five boxes, and Hungryroot, which will will offer 30 percent off your first delivery of $99 and throw in a free pack of almond chickpea cookie dough.

For all you winos, plenty of online retailers and subscription services are offering deals on vino. First-time buyers on Winc get 50 percent off their first order. Usual wines has a 21 percent discount going on orders of 12 bottles or more. Vinebox, meanwhile, is offering a 20 percent discount off its 12 Nights of Wine package through Nov. 30.

BonBowl, which makes an induction cooktop and accompanying bowl, is running a $50 off sale on Black Friday for orders placed via the BonBowl website. If you need further convincing this is a good purchase, check my full review of the device.

Finally, restaurants, especially chains, are always offering deals, and Black Friday/Cyber Monday is no exception. The folks at Delish have a solid rundown of these deals, which include chains like Peet’s Coffee, McAlister’s Deli, and, of course, Chili’s. Because it’s not a holiday if Chili’s isn’t somehow involved.

DoorDash to Pay $2.5M to Settle Lawsuit Over Former Tipping Policies

DoorDash will pay a $2.5 million settlement to the Washington, D.C. attorney general’s office over a lawsuit filed in 2019 about the delivery service’s controversial tipping policies. Attorney General Karl Racine announced yesterday that DoorDash has agreed to the settlement “to resolve allegations that it mislead D.C. consumers and used tips left for workers to boost the company’s bottom line.”

Racine filed the suit in November of 2019, not long after DoorDash changed its much-maligned tipping policy where it used workers’ tips to contribute to their base pay. The lawsuit alleged that “the only thing the consumer’s tip changed was DoorDash’s share of the worker’s pay.” Most of the buying public, meanwhile, had no idea their tip money was going towards, well, not tips. Racine sought to recover millions in that tip money.

Which he has. According to the press release from the attorney general’s office, DoorDash will pay $1.5 million in relief to delivery workers in D.C., $750,000 to the District, and donate $250,000 to District charities. DoorDash will also “be required to maintain a payment model that ensures all tips go to workers without lowering their base pay” and provide transparency around its payment policies.

“Today’s settlement rights a wrong that deceived D.C. consumers and deprived workers of monies that they should have been paid,” said AG Racine.

Color me cynical, but it doesn’t feel like as much of a victory as it might have even few months ago. It’s great workers are getting some of those tips back that were originally put towards their base pay. But $2.5 million ain’t a lot of dough when you consider that DoorDash (along with other gig economy companies) bankrolled Prop 22 for $200 million, the most expensive ballot measure in California’s history. It passed, meaning DoorDash drivers will remain independent contractors and the company is not on the hook to give its workers minimum wage, paid sick leave, and health care. 

In other words, the Prop 22 saga showed us that gig economy companies will pay hundreds of millions to effectively not take care of the folks on whose backs these businesses are built. DoorDash may have changed its tipping policy, but I doubt a $2.5 million settlement will motivate the company to further alter its approach to handling its workforce anytime soon. 

The settlement also comes just a couple weeks after DoorDash filed for its IPO. In that filing, DoorDash said that if it fails “to cost-effectively attract and retain Dashers,” the company’s business, operations, and financials could be “adversely affected.” Having an open lawsuit about a worker-treatment issue would have been counterproductive to that point, so the timing of the settlement isn’t likely coincidental. DoorDash said in its filing that it has over 1 million Dashers across all its markets. Attracting and retaining them is a key part of the company’s growth strategy — so long as it doesn’t chomp away at DoorDash’s profitability.

Change Foods Raises $875,000 for Its Precision Fermentation Cheese

Alternative protein company Change Foods has raised $875,000 in an oversubscribed pre-seed round of funding, surpassing its initial target of $600,000. Green Queen Media was first to break the news. Participating in the round were Twitter’s Asia-Pacific VP Maya Hari, abillionveg founder Vikas Garg, game developer Tom Crago, and existing investors Newstead and Klar. 

Change Foods plans to use the funds to scale up its precision fermentation technology, which the company is using to develop an initial prototype of an animal-free cheese it says will look, taste, and cook like dairy-based cheese.

Most alt-cheese products currently available still fall well below the bar in terms of replicating the real thing in terms of taste, texture, and functionality. That’s largely because those products don’t contain the casein compound, which is found in cow’s milk and is an essential ingredient of cheese. To get that compound and others, Change Foods genetically modifies microorganisms and ferments them with sugar in a process known as precision fermentation. 

Speaking to Green Queen, Change Foods founder David Bucca said better precision fermentation technology could lead to a less vulnerable dairy supply chain, since products can be made locally, have a longer shelf life, and don’t require cold chain infrastructure to transport. 

Fermentation has been called “the next pillar” of alternative protein alongside plant-based and cell-based proteins. Precision fermentation is one method within that larger fermentation category, and is also used by companies like Perfect Day and Impossible Foods. 

To start, Change Foods is developing mozzarella and cheddar cheeses, though it plans to branch out into other dairy products in the future. The plan is to sell products via B2C channels by 2023. 

In the meantime, Change Foods will also use some of the pre-seed funding to expand its core team. It also has ambitions to raise a $4 million seed round in 2021.

Plan, Store, Redistribute: Tech Tools to Keep Your Thanksgiving Leftovers Out of the Landfill

Roughly 200 million pounds of turkey in the U.S. gets tossed out annually after Thanksgiving. And though dinners might be smaller this year, since massive family gatherings are a no-no, it’s inevitable that a lot of food is going to get wasted. That’s a tough fact to digest, given the long lines at food banks this year because of the economic consequences of the pandemic, to say nothing of food waste’s impact on the environment.

Much of food waste happens because it’s built into our food system, and fighting the problem at scale will require a massive effort from governments, businesses, and consumers alike. But you can still play your part during the 2020 holidays by taking steps to address your food waste or, better yet, prevent it from happening in the first place. Here are some useful tech tools that may come in handy.

Plan It. 

Thorough meal planning that actually reduces food waste goes beyond deciding which side dishes to serve with the bird. The first step is to “think beyond the recipe,” as NRDC puts it. If you’re buying onions to add to a stuffing dish, research recipes that also call for onions you could make in the days following the holiday. Ditto for something like parsley, which few folks tend to eat in bulk. Also scan the pantry before you ever set foot in a grocery store (or open a grocery app) to see what you already have, so you don’t buy repeats of, say, baking soda.

Fortunately, there are a lot of apps and online tools out there nowadays that can help consumers with this planning. While we at The Spoon have mixed feelings about these apps (most still require quite a bit of manual inventory entry), they can at the very least make the food planning and buying process more organized. 

For example, Meal Prep Mate, made by the Save the Food Campaign, has a bunch of planning features, including a calculator that estimates how much food you need based on your guest list, a tool to help you create your shopping list, and a recipe guide. Similarly, the Meal Hero app, from the Kraft-Heinz Evolv group, includes an interactive shopping list feature the app generates based on the recipes you give it and can even arrange to get your groceries delivered via AmazonFresh and Instacart. No Waste’s app, which also helps users create meal plans and shopping lists comes with a built-in food waste tracker and can be shared across multiple users — a bonus if there are multiple cooks in the kitchen.

As mentioned above, the big downside to most meal planning apps right now is that they can’t automatically scan your fridge or pantry to tell you what you already have; the user has to manually input that information. No, that’s not a real problem to have compared to everything else going on this year, but it is something to think about as you choose your food waste tools for the holidays.

Store It.

My crystal ball tells me that despite planning, a lot of us will still wind up with leftover food come Thursday night. If you plan to store it, place the food in clear containers marked with the contents inside and the date you first stored them. The USDA notes that doing this “can increase the chances that the leftovers in the fridge will be remembered and actually eaten.”

There are some options for smart food storage systems available that can simplify the process of keeping leftovers and remind you when food is about to go bad. A company called Lasting Freshness uses a vacuum-seal container system and is available in the lower 48. At the moment, though, systems from the likes of Ovie and Silo are still only available for pre-order. 

For tips on how to best store certain types of food, check Save The Food’s comprehensive guide on the topic.

Redistribute It. 

You could also donate leftover ingredients to those in need. A food-sharing app such as OLIO lets neighbors and communities share excess food. Users can list pretty much anything that is edible, such as a leftover carton of eggs or an extra loaf of bread. For restaurants and grocery stores, apps like Too Good To Go and Imperfect Foods offer a way to donate excess ingredients that are then sold to customers at a discount price. 

At the moment, those apps have no options for the average U.S. household to donate excess food. They do, however, let you order a box of “imperfect” groceries, which means you could craft a Thanksgiving meal out of rescued food items and contribute to the food redistribution concept in that way. Imperfect Foods, for example, lets you pick groceries online and get them delivered to your doorstep.

Report: Restaurant Tech Company Toast Is Now Valued at $8B, Could IPO in 2021

Months after laying off half its staff, Toast has reached an $8 billion valuation, according to a new report from CNBC.

That new valuation, up from $4.9 billion in February of this year, is the result of a secondary sale Toast closed out last week. Through that deal, both current and former employees could sell up to 25 percent of their vested shares for $75 each. Toast said the deal was for up to 800,000 shares, totaling $60 million. 

It’s a big change from April, when the company cut 50 percent of its staff. In a letter to employees, CEO Chris Comparato said the layoffs were in response to “massive disruption” caused by COVID-19 that “hit the industry virtually overnight.” The move also called into question the value of restaurant tech in general, which runs the gamut in terms of providing businesses with products that deliver on ROI and those that are, as a friend of mine likes to say, solutions in search of problems. 

Toast has sat squarely in the middle of those two extremes for a long time. Once offering just a humble POS system, the company has over the years  added payroll and team management, email marketing capabilities, and a massive list of third-party integrations. There were plenty of valuable uses for the Toast ecosystem, but that seemed to be part of the problem, too. One glance at the company’s sight shows how easily overwhelmed a restaurant owner or manager could get by the number of available options. 

Toast, however, seemed to grasp the idea that too many bells and whistles can be no good thing, and more recently (since the pandemic hit), the company’s new features have been focused on the most important area of the restaurant biz right now: making off-premises orders more efficient, faster, and of better quality. The company released a platform to process delivery orders in April. It has since also launched a “contactless” suite of products for ordering and payments. Nowadays, a restaurant could easily run an entire off-premises business using Toast’s platform. With more restaurants than ever adopting digital ordering and off-premises channels like drive-thru, curbside, and ghost kitchens, Toast’s recent focus on the to-go world could wind up being very fruitful for the company. Hence the $8 billion valuation.

CNBC noted that Toast’s rebound “has been so rapid” that investors on the secondary market have recently put in bids above the $8 billion valuation. People familiar with the matter who spoke to CNBC also said the company “is viewed as a potential 2021 IPO candidate.”  

Survey: More Than Half of Restaurant Sales Will be Digital by 2025

Digital sales will make up more than half, or 54 percent, of all quick-service and limited-service restaurant sales by 2025, according to new survey numbers from market research firm Incisiv. That’s 70 percent higher than pre-COVID estimates, the firm notes.

That projected growth isn’t hard to understand. It’s been an all-out dumpster-fire of a year for restaurants, with hundreds of thousands of restaurants permanently shuttered and billions of dollars already lost. Currently, restaurants across the country are reverting to off-premises-only models, which lend themselves more to minimal interactions between restaurant staff and customers.

But as we saw early on in the pandemic, even limited/quick service restaurants struggled to manage the sudden influx of takeout, curbside pickup, drive-thru, and delivery order channels. Bigger brands with money to burn and existing digital strategies have obviously fared better over the last eight months than those without many tech investments in place. As of July, Chipotle had increased its digital sales by over 200 percent thanks to the brand’s pre-COVID focus in that area. Another example is Starbucks, which as publicly said 80 percent of its orders before the pandemic were already for to-go channels.

Separately, Incisiv notes that while restaurant chains are making investments in tech, they are “not necessarily addressing the highest priorities nor the solutions that will deliver the best maximum ROI across diverse customer expectations.”

It’s a point we make all the time here at The Spoon. There are seemingly endless options for businesses when it comes to tech, but they’re not all equal in terms of the value they provide to a businesses trying to serve customers quickly, safely, and with the same quality they would get in the dining room. For example, the so-called “contactless” kits that address the in-dining room experience may become a staple of the future, but they can’t exactly add value when dining rooms are shut down. On the other hand, focusing tech investments on tools that will make digital ordering and fulfillment easier and cheaper should be a priority. To that end, Incisiv’s report urges restaurants to “make enhancements in digital tech.” Those that do, according to the report, “will be better positioned should another shutdown occur.” Which, if you hadn’t noticed, is happening as we speak.

As noted above some of the bigger QSR brands are clearly leading the charge when it comes to digital sales trends, but Incisiv says there is plenty of area for both growth and improvement. Customer satisfaction actually remains low in a few key areas. Only 40 percent of survey respondents were satisified with their pickup experience; that number drops to 25 percent for delivery. Half of guests prefer paying with a mobile wallet, but fewer than 20 percent of QSRs provide expanded payment options.

The survey found that “close to 70 percent” of restaurant chains have “stated their intent” to increase investments in mobile ordering. Over the long term, digital sales are expected to dip slightly once in-dining room service is resumed with some semblance of its former days. However, the return of the dining room won’t mean the end of off-premises, not if recent developments around condensed store formats and expanded drive-thru lanes are any indication. Incisiv also notes that share of delivery sales is expected to grow 23 percent by 2025 versus a pre-COVID forecast of 15 percent.

As the report notes, if all of this holds true, it will be QSR chains making the most progress in terms of digital ordering and setting the example for the rest of the industry. 

Shiok Meats Unveils Prototype for Cell-Based Lobster

At a recent exclusive tasting event, Singapore-based Shiok Meats unveiled a prototype for cell-based lobster, according to FoodNavigator-Asia, who attended the event. The prototype was unveiled at the event as part of two dishes, a lobster gazpacho and lobster terrine.

Shiok said the lobster is cultivated with the same technology the company uses it make its cell-based shrimp. Shiok takes a sample of lobster cells, which are then grown in a bioreactor and harvested several weeks later. Right now, it takes between four and six weeks for Shiok to produce its cell-based shrimp; the company says the lobster takes a couple weeks longer than that. It is also more expensive to produce, though the company is looking to bring the cost down to $50/kg at some point in the future.

Neither the shrimp nor the lobster are available for sale to consumers right now. The company plans to have its Shiok Shrimp product commercially available by 2022. A manufacturing plant in Singapore is slated to be operational at that time, too. Shiok raised a $12.6 million Series A round in September of this year, part of which will go towards building out the production facility. FoodNavigator reported that once that plant is up and running, Shiok will be able to get regulatory approval to sell its products, which it will initially do in restaurants and other B2B settings.

No cell-based meat or seafood is currently available for commercial sale, though plenty of companies are moving towards that future. The list includes BlueNalu, a company that also makes cell-based seafoods and is currently expanding its production facility, which the company plans to open in the next five years. And plenty of investment is currently happening in the cell-based meat sector, with Mosa Meat, Integriculture, Meat-Tech 3D, and others all raising funding in the last six months.

However, being able to sell these products to mainstream consumers and at scale will be a much longer process, one that could take up to 15 years, by some accounts. Costs must first come down, and companies must get regulatory approval before they can even sell their products to restaurants.

For its part, Shiok will keep innovating on various cell-based seafoods in the meantime. In addition to shrimp and lobster, the company plans to introduce a cell-based crap prototype in a few months. 

Outsource the Turkey, Help a Restaurant

The whole “Thanksgiving-to-go” concept used to be the territory of just a handful of restaurant chains — the Bob Evans and Cracker Barrels of the world, for example. That, of course, was pre-pandemic, and now that the CDC has told Americans not to travel on Thanksgiving and the whole “home for the holidays” phrase has new meaning (like, you’re literally stuck at home), restaurants of all types and sizes are offering up their own take on the Turkey dinner.

At one point in the not-so-distant past, I might have thought Thanksgiving in a box was a bit bleak. But let’s be real: it’s been a stressful, scary year. People are alone and lonely, many are struggling financially, and the ever-present threat of the pandemic hangs over everything. Rather than spend hours in the kitchen cooking too much food for too few people, check out some of these restaurants, which are ready to do the hard work for you.

The Classic Thanksgiving Meal. You’ll find the old standards in this category: Cracker Barrel’s famous Heat&Serve Thanksgiving, Denny’s Turkey & Dressing Dinner Pack, and Boston Market’s takeout Thanksgiving (which, for the record, I’ve actually had and it was delicious). Thrillist has a big ol’ list of other restaurants here. There’s nothing fancy or unique about most of these options, but if you’re dead set on a turkey dinner but don’t want to deal with cooking it, these options are your best bet.

The Plant-Based Thanksgiving. Demand for plant-based foods has skyrocketed this year. It follows, then, that many restaurants around the country are offering 100 percent vegan takes on the Turkey Day dinner. VegNews has rounded up some notable ones here that include California’s Cafe Gratitude, the Veggie Grill chain, and many other restaurants, both local and national. 

Higher-End Thanksgiving to Go. If the industry-wide shift to off-premises has taught us one thing this year, it’s that even high-end food can be put in a box and delivered to your door. In keeping with that, a number of higher-end restaurants are offering Thanksgiving feasts to go. Some notable ones include Chart House, Fleming’s, and McCormick & Schmick’s.

Not-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving. Or you could just be totally over it all and have no inclination whatsoever to celebrate this year. Can’t say I blame you. For the usual QSRs and fast-casual joins, from IHOP to Sonic and every McDonald’s in between, Thursday will be business as usual.

Go Local. One quick glance on Twitter shows the sheer number of small, independent restaurants offering some kind of service on Thanksgiving. Encouragingly, there’s also an unbelievable high volume of tweets from folks that are ordering from these establishments in order to show their support.

An added bonus of ordering in for Thanksgiving instead of doing it yourself: most of these restaurants need the revenue. With no end in sight to either the pandemic or the struggles eating establishments face as they struggle to keep the lights on, the more support they can get on Thanksgiving, the better.

Upcoming Event: Food Waste Strategies for the Supply Chain

Restaurants are one stop along the food supply chain where a whole lot of food gets wasted. For restaurants, there are financial consequences to so much waste; for the entire world, there are environmental and human ones.

On Monday, November 30, The Spoon will be holding a virtual fireside chat with Apeel founder and CEO James Rogers to discuss how this waste happens and what we can do to stop it. That goes for restaurants as well as grocery stores, farms, distribution centers, and your own fridge.

Join James and myself on the Hopin platform at 2 p.m. PST that day to be a part of the discussion. You can register here.

And oh yeah, it’s free!

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

Chick-fil-A officially made ordering via its website available after tests in the Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. this past summer. Those that can’t or don’t feel inclined to download the chain’s app can now order digitally through the brand’s website.

Papa John’s is the latest restaurant brand to employ an AI-powered voice assistant to answer the phone. The chain will use AI company Kea’s platform, which can learn a restaurant’s menu as well as take orders, answer questions, and even upsell items. 

Washington, D.C. is allocating $35 million in COVID-19 recovery grants to restaurants as part of the city’s $100 million “Bridge Fund” for the hospitality industry. D.C. restaurants are still open, though Mayor Muriel Bowser suggested new restrictions could go into effect soon in response to the pandemic. 

Everytable Raises $16M to Fight Food Insecurity With Delivery

Social-enterprise-meets-restaurant-business Everytable announced this week it had closed a $16 million Series B funding round to continue its fight against food insecurity. The round was led by Creadev with participation from Kaiser Permanente Ventures, Candide Group, Gratitude Railroad Ventures, Desert Bloom Food Ventures, and Kimball Musk. This round brings Everytable’s total funding to $18.5 million. 

Company founder Sam Polk started Everytable in 2015, after leaving Wall Street, with the idea of selling grab-and-go meals priced according to the neighborhoods in which they were sold. Everytable’s main mission was — and still is — to make nutritious meals accessible to everyone, regardless of their socio-economic bracket.

The Los Angeles-based company has since added a meal subscription service where users choose meals from a rotating menu. Everytable chefs prep the food in a central commissary kitchen, while the company’s delivery team delivers the food. Like grab-and-go items, meals are priced according to the area in which they are headed, so that affluent customers will pay a little more than those facing food insecurity.

Customers an also get meals from a number of Everytable’s own brick-and-mortar stores around Los Angeles.

That food insecurity affects one in eight Americans, according to data from Feeding America. Unsurprisingly, this lack of access to nutritious food has become an even more urgent issue since the pandemic hit. In response, and in addition to its retail efforts, Everytable has also been delivering meals to those most in need, including homebound elderly people, the homeless, and community college students who would ordinarily rely on their schools’ meal plans. The company said in today’s press release it has donated more than 4 million meals to Los Angeles residents, which has also led to the company’s scaling production from about 30,000 meals per week to 180,000.

Everytable says the new funding will help it expand throughout Southern California via new grab-and-go stores, partnerships with institutional foodservice outlets, and new postal codes eligible for the company’s subscription service.

For the holidays, the company is also currently running its Pay It Forward program, done in partnership with YWCA Greater Los Angeles and Genesis Motors, both of whom will match donations. Individuals can donate a meal for $6.50 or a care package with five meals for $29.00. The cost of delivering the food is included in the donation. 

Olo Unveils New Restaurant Tech Features for Curbside, Dining Room

Curbside pickup is here to stay, and so too is the dining room, judging from restaurant tech startup Olo’s latest announcement. The company announced two new features this week aimed at smoother, more efficient service for off-premises orders. The new features include arrival notifications for curbside orders and order-ahead capabilities for dine-in guests, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Olo’s main businesses is to make the management of off-premises orders simpler and easier for restaurants. Its software funnels the orders coming from different sales channels (DoorDash versus social media versus an in-house kiosk) into a single ticket stream and directly into a restaurant’s main POS system. That means less juggling of tablets for the staff and a lower risk for mistakes, since humans aren’t manually keying in orders from a delivery service’s tablet to the POS. 

Eight months ago, that kind of streamlined management was a nice-to-have. Thanks to the pandemic, which has shuttered dining rooms across the country and forced the restaurant biz to lean on delivery and takeout, a platform like Olo’s is a must-have. But given the evolving needs of restaurants, no restaurant tech company should rest on its laurels right now. To stay valuable and relevant to restaurants, they too, need to evolve.

Olo appears to be doing just that with its new bundle of features. The need for speed when it comes to curbside pickup is well documented. Olo’s new feature is available as of now for restaurants using the company’s Expo tablet. When a customer arrives and hits an “I’m here” button, the system automatically notifies the restaurant. It’s not as automatic as, say, geofence-enabled curbside pickup, but it saves customers from having to dial an actual phone number and wait for a human to pick up.

The other big feature Olo released this week, it’s Dine-In Support, may get less use in the near term, though it’s a wise long-term strategy. The function allows customers to order and pay for meals they intend to eat in the dining room.

At one point, this particular technology felt superfluous, and at the moment, cities across the U.S. have closed down indoor dining so there isn’t a great need for it. But someday, we’ll be able to eat in an actual restaurant again, and by then, consumer preferences around speed, efficiency, and social distance will have been firmly embedded into their routines, even when it comes to restaurants. While there’s something a little depressing about a restaurant experience based solely on those factors, it’s inescapably the future for many. Seen in that light, Olo is an early mover in what will be a long-term behavior change. (Fellow restaurant tech company Allset is also a known leader in this area.)

The above features are both available right now, at no extra cost to existing Olo customers.