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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Jennifer Marston

Food Tech News: Wild Type Is Looking for Chefs, White Castle Is Offering Rewards

Some final bits of food tech news from ’round the web this week:

Wild Type Has a Pre-Order List for Chefs

While still a good five years out from commercial production, Wild Type said this week it has opened a pre-order list for chefs wanting to include the company’s cell-based seafood into their dishes. Right now, the company is developing a cultured salmon prototype that would work in sushi dishes. Wild Type cofounder Justin Kolbeck clarified that the company is not launching its product, just “releasing news” that they “have the next iteration of the product.

White Castle Launches a Rewards Program

White Castle has launched its first-ever rewards platform, called “the Craver Nation loyalty program.” Like other digital rewards programs out there, Craver Nation will offer discounts and deals to loyal customers that sign up for the White Castle mobile app. The program was trialed earlier this summer in Louisville, Ky. and is another digital tool in the chain’s quickly-growing arsenal of them.

Asia-based abillionveg Raises Fresh Funding

Singapore-based app abillionveg announced this week that it has closed a $3 million pre-Series A round, with participation from Nan Fung Group, CloudKitchens, and York Capital. The app features community-led reviews for vegan and vegetarian products, including both retail and restaurant offerings. Simultaneous to the funding news, the company announced it has struck partnerships with plant-based heavyweight Impossible Foods and restaurant-booking platform Chope.

Cornucopia Farms Is Building a Large-Scale Hydroponic Farm in Georgia

Leafy green lovers, take note. Marietta, Ga.-based Cornucopia Farms said this week it is completing construction on a 56,000-square-foot hydroponic farm two hours east of Atlanta. The farm will grow all manner of greens, including herbs, Romaine, and Bibb lettuce, among other types, and will produce an estimated 12 million heads of leafy greens and 2 million pounds of herbs per year when it is completed. That won’t be for a minute, though: completion of the project is expected at some point in the latter half of 2021.

A Next-Gen Automat Suggests the Restaurant Biz Should Mine Its Past When Planning Its Future

“Contactless” in the restaurant biz nowadays usually refers to digital order and pay processes that lessen but don’t totally eradicate human-to-human contact. After all, someone has to bring the food out, whether in the dining room or at the curbside, and the robots haven’t totally taken over quite yet. 

But a forthcoming store in Brooklyn has figured out a way to take human beings out of the picture entirely. The Brooklyn Dumpling Shop (BDS) is slated to open in October (confusingly in Manhattan) and will feature what the business calls Z.H.I. — “zero human interaction,” according to QSR magazine.

The fully automated restaurant concept will rely on temperature-controlled food lockers from ONDO and powered by Panasonic. Think of a high-tech version of the classic Automats of mid-20th century NYC. And as it turns out, that’s exactly what Brooklyn Chop House’s Stratis Morfogen, who conceptualized BDS, was going for: 

“The Automat was single handedly the greatest fast food distribution equipment ever designed. The technology we’re bringing to Brooklyn Dumpling Shop is unlike anything seen before, which will allow us to create an Autoflow from a customers’ cell phone, to our touchless ordering kiosks, right to our lockers to bring quick serve restaurants into the 21st century,” he said in today’s press release.

With this automat 2.0, Customers will be able to place an order on their phone or at the restaurant via a touchless kiosk. Once the food is cooked, a runner places it in the food locker and a notification is sent to the customer’s phone. The customer unlocks their designated locker with a code to retrieve their food. Locker temperatures can be set to “hot,” “cold,” and “ambient,” to allow for more precise temperature control during the pickup process. BDS also said its food will be available via the major third-party delivery platforms. 

BDS is one the first “new” restaurant formats we’ve heard of that’s legitimately contactless, which makes it an inherently attractive concept in the midst of a global health crisis. 

More intriguing, though, is that Morfogen mined the past to help design the future restaurant format — one of them, anyway. The Automat, which was originally developed at the end of the 19th century, became immensely popular during its lifespan because it provided a fast, cheap, efficient way to grab a bite to eat. It served a huge variety of food, and there was zero interaction between customers and those making the food. (Side note: the format wasn’t without its controversies around labor, which should be considered in this day and age.)

Thanks especially to the pandemic, those customer demands for speed, efficiency, and cheap eats are back in full force, so when you stop and think about it, an Automat format seems like a no-brainer. And it’s probably a concept that will make its way into all manner of public settings sooner rather than later, whether that’s a restaurant, the airport, and office buildings, among others. And BDS isn’t the first time someone’s tried to reinvent the automat: Minnow just raised a seed round for its contactless food lockers, which the company is installing residential buildings, and Brightloom (née Eatsa) has been pedaling a high-tech version of the Automat for years now.

In the meantime, it might behoove the restaurant industry to further mine past concepts that, a bit of a digital facelift might very well still make sense today. 

North American Bancard Acquires Restaurant Management Platform SALIDO

Restaurant tech platform SALIDO announced this week it has been acquired by payment tech company North American Bancard (NAB). According to a press release sent to The Spoon, NAB will “vertically integrate” SALIDO’s restaurant operating system onto its own payments platform, EPX.

SALIDO, which was founded in 2012, began its life as a POS system before evolving into a full restaurant-management platform that includes data analytics, staff management tools, menu management features, and a kitchen display system for back-of-house management. The platform works for both independent operators and large chains/franchises. The company counts EATALY, by CHLOE. and Restoration Hardware among its clients. 

SALIDO said in this week’s press release that since the acquisition, the company has been building out new products, including tableside mobile ordering, contactless payments, and online ordering — all features are fast becoming the norm in the restaurant industry. 

On that note, SALIDO is hardly alone in its efforts to build more digital, contactless tech into its platform. Actually, the majority of recent restaurant tech news has centered on these types of technologies, and SALIDO will compete with the likes of Paytronix, Toast, and many other companies, legacy and startup alike.

“Speed” and “efficiency” are two words you’ll hear frequently around the restaurant industry these days, as businesses fight to stay alive. Controlling operations in the restaurant is one way to get closer to achieving those things. SALIDO bills itself as a “unified” solution with which restaurants can do this. The integration with NAB will also give the platform better capabilities around digital payments, another new norm of the restaurant biz.

NAB acquired the EPX payment-processing platform in 2014. The acquisition of SALIDO will further embed the company in the hospitality industry. 

Farm.One Installs Its Mini-Vertical Farm at Whole Foods in Manhattan

NYC-based vertical farming company Farm.One announced today it has launched a mini-farm inside the newly opened Whole Foods Market in Manhattan West. 

Farm.One custom designed the farm for this location. From a visual standpoint, that means the design matches the Whole Foods’ look, while the physical footprint — 36 square feet — does not intrude on shopping space. The farm can hold 150 plants, which it grows using artificial lighting and the hydroponic method. 

It being a mini-farm, there isn’t a ton of variety in the crops grown. In fact, for now, the mini-farm grows only basil, which will be used for in-store pizzas and cocktails. Which sounds about right for a Whole Foods in Manhattan. Today’s press release says the farm will grow about eight pounds of basil each month. Whole Foods’ staff will harvest the plants and, thanks to the accompanying software platform, require little supervision from Farm.One engineers.

Farm.One operates other custom locations at EATALY in Manhattan’s Flatiron neighborhood and at the Project Farmhouse event space. The company will also unveil a new farm in a yet-to-be-named plant-based restaurant in October. Thus far, the company has raised nearly $500,000 in funding.

While growing cocktail garnishes won’t exactly end world hunger, Farm.One’s continued growth across Manhattan shows how varied the uses for vertical farming are getting. Not so long ago, the concept was the territory of large-scale operations in warehouse-style buildings on the outskirts of cities. Now, vertical farms have made their way into schools, restaurants, grocery stores, grocery distribution centers, and, increasingly, consumers’ homes. The more use cases we can see in action, the better we can understand where vertical farming is most valuable as a component of our future food system.

Farm.One has plans to build other mini-farms as well as flagship locations in other major U.S. cities as well as expand internationally over the next couple of years.

Iron Ox Raises $20M Series B for More Robotic Greenhouses

Ag tech company Iron Ox, best known for its greenhouses powered by robotics and AI, announced this week it has raised a $20 million Series B round. The round was led by Pathbreak Ventures with participation from Amplify Partners, At One Ventures, Crosslink Capital, , ENIAC Ventures, R7 Partners, and Tuesday Ventures. Iron Ox’s total funding to-date including this round is $45 million.   

In addition to the funding news, Iron Ox also announced a new farming facility in California, this one in Gilroy. Like the company’s first greenhouse, which is located in San Carlos and opened in 2018, the Gilroy facility will use a hydroponic grow system manned not by humans but by a large mobile machine equipped with robotic grippers. The machine plants, harvests, and moves the heavy grow trays around as needed, while machine learning and computer vision systems monitor plant growth. Humans aren’t completely out of the equation, though: the system still needs them to prune and inspect plants. 

Unlike many other indoor farming operations, Iron Ox does not use LED lights, but instead relies on good ol’ fashioned sunlight for plant growth. For now, the farms grow the standard mixture of leafy greens and herbs. The new Gilroy farm will sell these greens to Whole Foods and Bianchinis markets in California. 

Some of the benefits high-tech greenhouses like those of Iron Ox bring include more efficient use of space and the ability to serve customers (the ones that can afford Whole Foods, at least) locally. Iron Ox also says it uses less water than traditional farming as well as less energy. 

The company joins AppHarvest, Lufa Farms, and Gotham Greens in making recent headlines around new developments and investments in large-scale, high-tech greenhouse farming.

Ghost Kitchen Network Virtual Kitchen Raises $20M

Virtual Kitchen, a company founded by two ex-Uber executives, has raised $20 million in new funding, according to a filing with the SEC (h/t Restaurant Dive). The round was led by Founders Fund and brings Virtual Kitchen’s total funding to $37 million. 

Virtual Kitchen runs multiple “delivery-optimized kitchens” where restaurants can rent space and also take advantage of the company’s technology to scale up operations quickly. Delivery fulfillment is done through partnerships with Grubhub, Uber Eats, Postmates, DoorDash and other third-party services. 

It’s unclear at this time what Virtual Kitchen will do with the new funds, though Restaurant Dive suggests the San Francisco-based company is likely to focus on expanding its network of ghost kitchens.

Now would certainly be the time to do that. As we detailed in a recent Spoon Plus report, the market for ghost kitchens is enormous — trekking towards $1 trillion by some accounts. As a business model, the ghost kitchen was already becoming an attractive option for more and more restaurants before the COVID-19 pandemic ever hit and decimated the restaurant industry. Since then, delivery and other off-premises formats have become priorities for large chains and mom-and-pop joints alike, and there’s no setting more logical for fulfilling all these to-go orders than a ghost kitchen. 

Given all that, the recent activity in the ghost kitchen space shouldn’t surprise. Kitchen United continues to expand across the U.S. Kitopi raised $20 million this year. Zuul raised $9 million for its NYC-focused ghost kitchen operation, Dubai-based iKcon raised $5 million, and that’s but a smattering of the recent developments in this sector. 

Virtual Kitchen’s new funding follows last year’s $15 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz and Base10 Partners. 

McDonald’s Partners With Loop to Pilot Reusable Packaging

With the restaurant industry currently being reinvented with to-go-first experiences in mind, there’s cause to worry that the shift will add even more single-use cups, straws, and boxes to our already bulging landfills. So it makes for a small silver lining that McDonald’s today announced a partnership with Terracycle’s zero-waste platform Loop to pilot a reusable cup model.

The program will first be trialed at select McDonald’s in the UK in 2021. For a small deposit, customers will get a reusable Loop cup for their hot beverages. The deposit can be redeemed by returning the cup to any participating McDonald’s location, according to today’s press release. Loop will retrieve the used cups, wash them, and return them to the cycle.

As to whether this reusable cup program will make its way to the States, a McDonald’s spokesperson said, “The feedback collected through these packaging trials will help inform which options are scaled up or adopted in other countries around the world.”

Loop’s main business lets customers shop online for grocery, household, and beauty products from well-known brands, then get them delivered in packaging. Living up to the platform’s name, Loop  retrieves and cleans the empty containers once a customer is finished, and the cycle starts again. The company currently has partnerships with Häagen-Dazs, Tropicana, Nature’s Path Organic, and several well-known personal care brands. The service is available in select U.S. cities and is in the process of expanding to more places, including international locations.

The McDonald’s partnership comes at a time when the fight for a more sustainable restaurant has to co-exist alongside the fight against COVID-19. Some chains, notably Starbucks, have banned reusable cups for the time being, (understandably) citing safety concerns. But the sustainability issue can’t be put on hold for long, particularly since the increase in to-go orders could eventually equal an alarming increase in trash, too.

Whether you love big restaurant chains or fear they’ll be the only ones left after the dust from the restaurant industry upheaval settles, it’s worth acknowledging that they’re typically the ones with the deep enough pockets to invest in new forms of to-go containers. For its part, McDonald’s has already piloted other circular solutions for cups, including the Recup system in Germany and the chain’s participation in the NextGen Cup Challenge in the U.S.

Earlier this year, the company also completed construction on its first “net zero energy-designed restaurant” in Florida. At the time of that news, I wrote that billion-plus-dollar restaurant chains like McDonald’s, Chipotle, etc. are the ones that need to take the lead in writing the playbook for sustainability in the restaurant. Smaller restaurants — the ones that have managed to survive the fallout — still struggle to remain open, so it seems unreasonable right now to ask them to also reinvent the paper cup. 

McDonald’s, on the other hand, has a $4 billion off-premises business and a recent track record that’s heavy on the innovation front. Using some of those dollars and resources to create a more sustainable restaurant experience seem the next logical step. 

Chile’s NotCo Raises $85M to Bring Its Plant-based Proteins to the U.S.

NotCo, a Chilean food tech company known for its alternative protein products, announced today it has closed an $85 million Series C round. The round was led by Future Positive, L Catterton Partners, and General Catalyst. Existing investors include Kaszek Ventures, The Craftory, Bezos Expedition, Endeavor Catalyst, Indie Bio, Humbolt Capital and Maya Capital.

The new funds come as NotCo plans to scale its operations and expand internationally, starting with a move into the U.S. The company said in today’s press release that it is evaluating both retail and restaurant partnerships in the States.

Rather than focus on a single food category, NotCo is developing meat, dairy, and egg alternatives at the same time. The company currently has its NotMilk, NotBurger, NotIceCream, and NotMay in stores around Chile, Brazil, Argentina. It also has deals with Burger King and Papa John’s in Chile. 

To make its plant-based protein products, NotCo uses artificial intelligence to match animal proteins with their ideal plant replacement, pulling from a library of thousands of plant profiles the company has stored up. The idea is to make combinations of plants that will most closely mimc not just the taste of meat or dairy but also the texture, smell, and mouthfeel, among other factors.

This approach has made NotCo one of the biggest players in plant-based protein in Latin America. However, an expansion to the U.S. means NotCo will have to compete with some serious competition in an already crowded alternative protein space that includes some of the industry’s biggest names: Beyond and Impossible in the plant-based meat sector, Eat JUST for eggs, and Perfect Day for dairy. 

International expansion, whether to the U.S. or from it, is a major development in the alternative protein space of late. Beyond, Impossible, and Eat JUST have all announced plans to move into other markets, including Canada and China. Those expansions make sense, given the amount of cash flowing into the sector. The entire alternative protein category has seen an enormous amount of investment in 2020: over $1.1 billion so far, with more than $907 million of that going to plant-based protein.

For its own expansion, NotCo co-founders, Matias Muchnick (CEO) and Karim Pichara (CTO), will be based in the U.S. The company said in a recent interview that it wants to be a $300 million company by 2024, with 70 percent of that business in the U.S.

Dunkin Donuts

Cashierless Tech Could Move Dunkin’ Ahead in the Race to Reinvent the QSR Format

QSR chain Dunkin’ will launch its cashierless checkout pilot program in October at a store in California, according to Nation’s Restaurant News. And in doing so, it may set new standards for restaurant chains when it comes to how they deploy contactless tech.

News of Dunkin’s foray into the world of Amazon Go-style checkout first surfaced at the end of August, when Mastercard announced several partnerships to deploy its newly launched Shop Anywhere platform, which is powered by Accel Robotics. Shop Anywhere uses the computer vision and AI technology of Accel robotics provide checkout-free restaurant and retail experiences. 

At the California Dunkin’ location, that means customers will opt into the Shop Anywhere platform via the Dunkin’ mobile app, then receive a QR code to enter the store. From there, customers can grab their coffee and donuts and simply walk out of the store. Accel’s system uses computer vision to keep track of items and sends a digital receipt to the customer once they leave the store.

Companies are already testing this “grab-and-go” format in several grocery and convenience store formats, but Dunkin’ is one of the first to make such an announcement in the QSR realm. 

And cashierless tech may well set the chain apart at a time when more and more QSRs are making public their high-tech visions of future store formats. At the end of last week, Burger King unveiled its plans for a physically smaller space that emphasizes to-go formats and contactless ordering and payments. Taco Bell brought news of its “Go Mobile” format in August. Shake Shack and Chipotle have also made announcements of their own around new formats driven by more technology and fewer interactions between customers and restaurant staff.

All of those examples still rely on customers placing orders, manually paying, then waiting for their food. Being able to simply grab an item and leave the store without having to do any of those things would definitely provide a faster, more efficient, and truly contactless restaurant experience.

Dunkin’s menu, which is primarily coffee and donuts, rather than customized orders, lends itself to such a model. But there are plenty of QSRs out there at which the cashierless format would make sense, Starbucks being the prime example. Cashierless checkout could even make sense at other chains for certain items that can be pre-prepped — for example, if someone just wanted to grab some chips and queso from Chipotle. White Castle, too, plans to experiment with cashierless checkout, and is another Mastercard partner planning too deploy Shop Anywhere later this fall.

None of this is quite a reality yet, but Dunkin’ for the last couple years has proven itself an early adopter of restaurant tech. It was one of the first to offer drive-thru lanes dedicated to mobile orders, and has since opened several of its next-generation stores that feature self-service kiosks, geofence-enabled delivery, and other to-go-friendly tools and technologies. Seen in that light, cashierless checkout seems the next logical step, and one others will inevitably take as well in the near future. 

11 Food Tech Startups Will Join TechStars 2020 Farm-to-Fork Virtual Accelerator

TechStars today announced the 2020 class of its Farm-to-Fork program, which selects and supports companies and entrepreneurs working in the food and agricultural industries. The program is in its third year, with 2020 being the first time it goes 100 percent virtual, thanks to the ongoing pandemic.

But if there’s anything akin to a silver lining in the midst of a global health crisis, it may just be the many tech innovations now coming out of the food industry at a faster pace than ever before. “The food system has changed more in the last six months than it has over the entire five years I have been investing in the space,” Brett Brohl, Farm-to-Fork’s Managing Director, said in a press release. 

The Farm-to-Fork Accelerator looks for early-stage entrepreneurs and companies addressing major issues in the food chain around food safety and security, supply chain management, and ag tech.

The 2020 class includes 11 startups:

  • AgTools, Irvine, Calif.: A real-time data intelligence platform for the food and ag industries
  • Applied Particle Technology, St. Louis, Mo.: A data platform for automating health and safety in mining 
  • Boson Motors, Freemont, Calif.: Electric vehicles for farmers
  • Canomiks, Rochester, Minn.: A genomics, bioinformatics and AI-based platform for functional food and bev as well as skincare
  • FeedX, Madison, Wisc.: An online marketplace for the animal feed industry
  • H20kInnovations, Boston, Mass.: A contaminant management system for industrial water
  • Iamus, Dublin, Ireland: Uses AI and robotics to help poultry farmers with production safety
  • IXON, Hong Kong: Makes advanced sous-vide aseptic packaging that keeps protein stable at room temperature for up to two years
  • Milk Moovement, Halifax, Nova Scotia: A cloud-based platform for the dairy industry
  • Satis.AI, London, England: Develops AI operating systems for autonomous kitchens in foodservice
  • Toolsvilla, West Bengal, India: A digital marketplace for machinery, tools, and equipment in India

All participants to the Farm to Fork accelerator get $20,000 in return for 6 percent equity (on a fully diluted basis, issued as common stock). In addition, they get access to Techstars resources for life, access to mentors and potential investors, and the chance to participate in a demo day at the end of the program.

The 2020 virtual cohort kicks off on September 8.

Floating Kitchens of Burger King

Now that its apparent even contactless tech won’t bring back the glory days of the dining room, restaurant chains are on a tear to refit their existing stores to better serve to-go formats. Efforts run the gamut, from dumping the front of house altogether to geofencing the premises for faster pickup orders to building more drive-thru lanes.

Burger King just one-upped all those efforts. The decades-old burger chain has has compiled all of the above and then some into a whopper of a design prototype for future restaurants. Per a BK press release from this week, the new design — which hasn’t actually been implemented yet — is meant to serve multiple order and delivery formats and will be 60 percent smaller than a traditional BK location.

BK plans to accomplish that with the following:

  • A drive-in area where customers scan a QR code then order and pay through the app. Food is delivered to the car. 
  • Curbside delivery and pickup lockers for customers who order ahead via the BK mobile app. The only element missing from this is geofencing tech for the curbside service, which other QSRs are now using to speed up operations.
  • On-premises service. No surprise that this will be a much smaller part of the overall plan moving forward. In one design, BK swapped out the traditional dining room for a covered patio. See below for the other option.
  • Double- and triple-lane drive-thrus. There will also be a walkup window and a view of the kitchen inside.
  • Suspended kitchens and dining rooms are by far the most intriguing addition, and one we haven’t yet see from another QSR. The kitchen and dining room will hang above the drive-thru lane, cutting down on the restaurant’s overall physical footprint. For drive-thru guests, at least, orders are delivered via a conveyor belt system. This particular design also includes a dedicated drive-thru lane for delivery drivers and is, according to the press release, “a 100% touchless experience.”

The first real-life buildout of these designs will be in Miami and the Caribbean in 2021. 

And while we wouldn’t expect other QSRs to produce a carbon copy of the design, it does feel that BK has raised the bar in terms of both standards and innovation when it comes to reformatting the restaurant experience. Some of the elements, like curbside pickup, are already fully established formats across most QSRs. Others, like triple drive-thru lanes, are more an anomaly. The hanging kitchen is, to the best of my knowledge, unheard of at any other QSR. 

The design does raise some questions around what the company will expect of its franchisees. As we saw last year with McDonald’s, retrofitting stores is an expensive, sometimes frustrating endeavor for franchisees. If Burger King wants this wonder of the QSR world to set the new standard for restaurant chains, it will need to ensure new build outs and existing store updates are as pleasant an experience for franchisees as they seem poised to be for customers. 

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NPD: Drive-Thru Visits Increased 26%

If there’s one true off-premises lifeline for QSRs during the pandemic, it’s the drive-thru. (Sorry not sorry, delivery.) The NPD Group underscored that point this week when it announced that drive-thru visits increased 26 percent in April, May, and June, and that this format “will be key to the industry’s future.”

It’s common knowledge at this point that those restaurants equipped with drive-thrus are faring much better than those that have traditionally focused on dine-in service. And some QSRs and fast casuals that historically never really offered drive-thru service are now doubling down on that format, including Chipotle and Shake Shack. 

Even in July, when more restaurant dining rooms were opened, the number of drive-thru visits increased by 13 percent, according to NPD. That number represents the highest increase among all service modes in the restaurant (e.g., dine-in, takeout, delivery).

David Portalatin, a food industry advisor to NPD, said we should expect to see more chains switching to drive-thru in the future. Whether all of them come with a hanging kitchen and conveyor belt setup remains to be seen. 

Fee Caps ‘Round the Web

This week, Santa Clara, CA moved to finally cap the commission fees third-party delivery services charge restaurants at 15 percent. The ordinance is effective immediately and will last “until the end of the pandemic.”

NYC extended its own emergency fee cap of 20 percent to be in effect 90 days after restaurants are allowed to operate dining rooms at full capacity. Your guess is as good as mine when it comes to that distant day.

Back on the Left Coast, Los Angeles also extended its fee cap with the same criteria as NYC. Fees must remain at 15 percent or lower until LA restaurants can operate dining rooms at 100 percent capacity.

Food Tech News: Lettuce Glow, Plus More Expansions for Food Tech Companies

Since most of us are still relatively homebound, it’s no surprise much of the food tech news of late has been about grocery, grocery delivery, farming at home, and big food brands going the direct-to-consumer route.

Herewith, the latest developments in those areas from around the web this week:

Lettuce Grow’s Farmstand Gets a Glow

Lettuce Grow, a smart-garden company founded by Jacob Pechenik and Zooey Deschanel, announced this week a new accoutrement for all your at-home farming needs. The company is launching its Glow Rings LED indoor grow lights as an add-on to its Farmstand hydroponic vertical garden. The garden, which we covered back when it was first released, previously lacked any lighting technology and had to be kept outside. The addition of the Glow Ring means those would-be agtech enthusiasts with no outdoor space can try their hand at the indoor smart-farming concept. 

Giant Food Stores grows Mid-Atlantic footprint | Supermarket News

A Giant Partnership for Union Kitchen

Grocery chain Giant Food is expanding its partnership with Washington, D.C.-based food accelerator Union Kitchen. The chain will offer more products from Union Kitchen participants — all of whom are food and bev producers — through its grocery delivery program. For shoppers, it means access to more locally made and/or grown goods.

JUST Is Expanding to More U.S. Stores . . . Again

Eat JUST, the company behind plant-based egg product JUST, said this week via an email to The Spoon that it is in the midst of what it calls its largest expansion yet. By the end of September, the company will have its products at “more than 17,000 points of retail distribution” across the U.S., a 40 percent increase that includes stores like Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons, and Safeway. Food Lion, Giant Food, and many other local stores are also on the list.