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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Jennifer Marston

KFC Is the Latest QSR to Ditch the Dining Room in Favor if Digital Drive-Thru

KFC unveiled two new designs today for future stores that emphasize off-premises order formats and minimal dining room space, according to Nation’s Restaurant News. The Louisville, Kentucky-based chain is the latest major QSR to revamp its store format in response to the pandemic’s impact on the restaurant industry.

One design is for an “express” store format with no indoor dining space. Clocking in at about 1,300 square feet, the design is intended for use in crowded urban locations where space is both limited and expensive. This is a tactic also used by chains like Starbucks and, most recently, Chipotle. 

KFC’s other design is all about the drive-thru, which the company said grew 60 percent year-over-year in Q3 of 2020. The format includes multiple drive-thru lanes, including those dedicated to mobile orders, a small outdoor seating area, and designated parking spots and entrances for customers and delivery drivers picking up digital orders.

These new prototypes have actually been in development since last year. Chief Development Officer Brian Cahoe told NRN today that the company hit the “pause” button on these projects when the pandemic hit in order to learn and apply new requirements the pandemic would bring to the restaurant experience.

More obvious safety measures are one thing. The new KFC stores will include automatic doors and more space between tables. And of course, with the emphasis on digital ordering, a more contactless pickup or drive-thru experience is also on the menu. The company said some stores would also have a digital cubby system in future.

The QSR has in the last couple months become ground zero for testing out new restaurant tech. Besides digitizing the drive-thru, which everyone from McDonald’s to Tim Horton’s is doing, brands are introducing features like geofencing, conveyer belt meal delivery systems, and AI-powered menu boards to the restaurant experience. Many are also ditching the dining room in favor of drive-thru-only locations and ghost kitchen facilities. 

KFC will open three new restaurants based on these prototypes in 2021. 

Choco Is Challenging L.A. Chefs to Curb Food Waste With Food Creativity

As the world’s food waste problem gets literally bigger each year, so too does the amount of creative effort tech companies are putting into fighting it. The latest of these comes in the form of the Waste is Gold campaign, a pop-up event in Los Angeles in which three restaurants will serve dishes created from the food byproduct in their own kitchens. Powering the event is restaurant tech company Choco, which has big ambitions for fighting food waste both now and in the future.

The pop-up event will take place from Nov. 19–21 at Counterpart Vegan in Echo Park, Strings of Life in West Hollywood, and Beelman’s in Downtown L.A. These restaurants’ chefs will create dishes made from food byproduct (e.g., tomato soup from leftover vegetables) that will be available for takeout or outdoor dining. Customers can order online via the Waste is Gold website.

Choco is best known for its mobile platform that connects restaurant kitchens directly with suppliers to more easily order and manage their inventory. The company raised $30.2 million back in April, around the time it also launched a direct-to-consumer channel in response to the pandemic and ensuing restaurant industry meltdown. 

But speaking to me on a call this week, Chelsea van Hooven, the Global Industry Advisor at Choco, said that the company’s overarching goal was to fight food waste, and that Choco is working on a number of different projects to raise awareness about the problem, including the Waste Is Gold campaign.

She noted that the inspiration for this campaign came after working with Matt Orlando, owner and chef at Amass, a zero-waste restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark. In keeping with Orlando’s idea of building creative menus from food byproduct, Choco has given chefs participating in the Waste is Gold campaign a similar challenge.

For example, Mimi Williams, the executive chef for Counterpart Vegan, has created a ratatouille with spaghetti made from various parts of squash — parts that might normally be thrown out. Using more of the entire food, whether a squash, a pumpkin, or whatever else happens to be in the fridge, is lesson more chefs could take advantage of, and one that doesn’t necessarily require a lot of tech to execute on.

Tech, however, definitely has a role to play in the fight against food waste. For her part, van Hooven said that Choco is exploring the role of data in this area and how her company can provide a layer of it that will bring awareness and understanding of food waste to more restaurants. Tracking inventory data, and therefore food waste data, needs to become a part of daily business for restaurants. “We’re analyzing data in every field of our life, we should definitely use it for the better and optimize our food system,” she said. It’s a sentiment the food industry is voicing more these days as data’s critical role in fighting waste becomes more and more apparent.

While it’s still early days for Choco’s ambitions around creating that data layer, the pop-up restaurant events will definitely be making their way to more cities in the future. 

Toast Launches a Tech Suite for Contactless Restaurant Payments

Restaurant management platform Toast today launched what the company is calling its “contactless payments suite” that includes two new social distancing-friendly ways for customers to pay for their meals: Toast Go 2 and Toast Order & Pay. The products aim to minimize staff-to-customer interactions for both off-premises orders and those that take place in the dining room, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Toast Go 2 is the latest iteration of the company’s existing handheld POS device. This time around it includes the option for contactless payment forms from Apple, Google, and Samsung. Because its handheld, it can be used in more locations than the dining room, curbside pickup and drive-thrus being two obvious places. Toast said in today’s release that this latest version of Toast Go has processing speeds that are “three times faster” than previous generations.

Meanwhile, Toast Order & Pay is the company’s take on the contactless payments technology most restaurant tech companies now offer. With it, customers can browse menus, select food, and pay for it from their own mobile device. Toast’s version follows similar offerings from Presto, Paytronix, Zuppler, and many others.

However, all of these companies are trying to push contactless tech for the dining room when there aren’t many restaurant dining rooms to speak of at the moment. New pandemic-related restrictions are sweeping across the U.S. and either limiting or shutting down indoor dining once more. While demand for more contactless tech indoors will likely exist over the long term, there may be less use for it over the next several months.

Toast, then, is wise to diversify its contactless platform with the addition of Toast Go 2. Making off-premises orders more efficient (i.e., faster) is a huge priority for restaurants large and small nowadays — as lengthening drive-thru wait times and a surge in to go orders can attest. That factor will stick around long after the pandemic leaves us, making handheld POS tech a valuable play for the longer term. 

Square Moves Into the Restaurant Back of House With Square KDS

With COVID-19 restrictions putting the future of the restaurant front of house in question, many restaurant tech companies are turning to the back of house as the next area for innovation. Case in point: Today, Square, a company best known for its payments system, unveiled a kitchen display system that organizes and displays the flow of tickets coming into the back of house from multiple different sales channels. The feature is available to new and existing Square for Restaurants subscribers, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Dubbed Square KDS, the system replaces paper tickets and can process orders coming from multiple different ordering sources — of which there are many these days. With restaurant dining rooms either closing again or operating at reduced capacity, more customers are ordering via delivery platforms (e.g., DoorDash) or restaurants’ digital storefronts, in addition to the business’ in-house POS system. The idea is to do away with humans having to manage these multiple order streams by automating the organization of each ticket and in the process speeding up the time it takes to receive, cook, and prep an order and get it out the door.

According to today’s press release the KDS system can also track how long the kitchen is taking to prepare orders at each step of the process. The feature is available to Square for Restaurants customers as of now, with the option to try the product free for 30 days. 

Square’s new system is tackling the same challenge delivery integrators like ChowNow, Chowly, and Ordermark have been doing for some time now. The big difference is that Square is also a payments processing company with an existing suite of restaurant tech including a POS system. In theory, at least, that means adding one less piece of tech to the stack for restaurants that are already using the Square for Restaurants system, of which KDS is now a part. At a time when restaurants have an overwhelming number of options to choose from when it comes to technology, a simpler setup could be enticing. 

Square’s move into the back of house is also wise considering the demand these days for ghost kitchens and the number of restaurants shifting from brick-and-mortar locations to delivery-only business models. In many cases, the days of the traditional restaurant dining room are gone as businesses evolve to stay relevant with the (highly turbulent) times. Restaurant companies must do the same, which is what Square looks to be doing with this latest product.

The Delivery Hero-Woowa Bros. Merger Faces Antitrust Hurdles

The proposed $4 billion merger between Berlin, Germany-based Delivery Hero and South Korea’s Woowa Brothers now faces regulatory hurdles around antitrust concerns, according to The Korea Herald. Some South Korean lawmakers have gone as far as to request the deal get scrapped on the grounds that it is anti-competitive.

In response, South Korea’s antitrust watchdog, the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC), said it would give permission for the deal on the condition that Delivery Hero offload its Yogiyo subsidiary. Yogiyo is South Korea’s second-largest food delivery service, after Woowa’s Baedal Minjok operation. The merger would give Delivery Hero an 87 percent stake in Woowa, and the combined user bases of the two would make up 98.7 percent of the entire restaurant food delivery market in South Korea. Needless to say, concerns abound about what this marketshare would do for competition in the fast-growing South Korean food delivery space.

The situation isn’t unique to Delivery Hero. Antitrust concerns plagued Amazon’s investment in Deliveroo for well over one year. One big reason that deal finally went through was the pandemic’s impact on the restaurant biz, which had a ripple effect on Deliveroo’s business. Similarly, Takeaway.com’s merger with Just Eat faced similar regulatory concerns, though it took far less time for that deal to go through than was the case with Amazon. Regulatory issues were one reason Uber Eats likely killed its ambitions to acquire Grubhub this past summer. The newly formed Just Eat Takeaway.com eventually won the Grubhub bidding war, and there is always a chance that deal could come under regulatory scrutiny before it goes through.

Delivery Hero made clear it will fight the KFTC’s conditions, with Reuters noting the service will “challenge” the recommendation and that Delivery Hero sees it as “a starting point for negotiations.” It will, however, slow the deal down in all likelihood.

New Restaurant Restrictions Put the Value of Restaurant Tech to the Test

States and cities across the U.S. have imposed new restrictions and in some cases lockdowns that will once again shutter indoor dining. As they’ve done in the past, these restrictions once again call into question how restaurant tech can help restaurants pandemic-proof themselves and stay in business.

A stay-at-home order for Chicago residents goes into effect today. Restaurants must close by 11 p.m. each night and may only offer delivery, takeout, and outdoor seating. The city didn’t completely shutter indoor dining; it’s allowed so long as tables are within eight feet of an open window. But given Chicago’s typical wintertime temperatures, neither that nor patio seating will likely be popular options for diners right now.

New Mexico, and Oregon have imposed far tighter restrictions. Effective last week, Oregon restaurants and bars must return to takeout- and delivery-only service. New Mexico has similar restrictions as residents shelter under a two-week-long stay-at-home order.

Likewise, restaurants in Washington State and Michigan must halt indoor dining and stick to takeout and delivery models. Other states, including Minnesota and New York, have imposed curfews on restaurants, and for everyone, the threat of another lockdown looms large.

One difference this time around is that unlike in March, restaurants have more tools at their disposal when it comes to fulfilling off-premises orders. Since the early days of the pandemic, most restaurant tech companies have offered so-called “contactless” solutions that minimize human-to-human contact. Some parts of those packages, like QR-code-based ordering for the dining room, will be of little help right now, since there is no dining room in many places. But other features, such as software to power online order processing, could help restaurants fulfill takeout tickets faster and in a more organized fashion. Elsewhere, delivery integrators a la Chowly and ChowNow are now more widely used than in March and help restaurants manage delivery orders coming through multiple sales channels (DoorDash vs. Uber Eats vs. Caviar, for example). 

The option to go virtual is also more widely available. That point was underscored recently in the massive $120 million sum Ordermark raised for its NextBite platform, which pairs restaurants with kitchen space to help them develop and operate virtual restaurant brands. Along those lines, countless options for ghost kitchens have sprung up from the likes of Zuul, Virtual Kitchen, ShiftPixy, and many others. Still others, like restaurant chain Wow Bao, offer creative takes on the ghost kitchen/virtual restaurant concept that could benefit not only themselves but other local restaurants.

These and other tech solutions will undoubtedly help restaurants as they navigate new lockdowns and restrictions. The unknown factor is whether they will be enough. Big-name QSR brands have the deep pockets to turn their drive-thrus into digital innovation centers and reinvent their physical footprints, and restaurants with a certain level of demand will find ghost kitchens useful for pandemic-proofing operations. 

The indie restaurants will, however, struggle more than any other restaurant type. These are businesses that have neither the money to invest in sophisticated tech solutions nor the demand to justify a big ghost kitchen operation. Fee caps may help as far as delivery orders go: cities across the country have implemented mandatory caps on the commission fess third-party delivery services can charge these businesses, and if stricter lockdowns ensue, other municipalities may do the same. 

None of this guarantees a future for independent restaurants. One thing that hasn’t changed, not yet anyway, between previous spikes in the pandemic and this one is that off-premises remains a lifeline for restaurants, not the lifeline. Many restaurants still grapple with the fact that they were built — from the food they serve to the atmosphere they provide — for an on-premises experience. Developments to turn on-premises experiences into those suited for takeout and delivery are moving fast. Unfortunately, the pandemic is moving faster. Seen in that light, restaurant tech’s big priority right now should be helping smaller restaurants complete the transition from the dining room to the living room.

Lyft vs. DoorDash

We knew a DoorDash IPO was on the way, and it arrived this past week packaged with news that the company turned a profit in Q2 and has enough cash stockpiled to float along for quite some time. Throw on top of that DoorDash’s recent win on Prop 22 and its popularity among U.S. consumers, and it seems as if the company and its controversial business model for restaurant delivery are are unstoppable.

Or are they? The other big news this week came from rideshare service Lyft. Cofounder and president John Zimmer said on the company’s earnings call this week that Lyft had spoken with restaurants about many issues plaguing third-party delivery, including the sky-high commission fees companies like DoorDash charge per transaction. 

“These businesses want to partner, someone to help them move their goods from point A to point B, but one that does not step in between them and their customers,” he said. In other words, restaurants need someone to deliver the actual food but not necessarily own the order and payment process or the customer relationships (and data). Lyft more or less said it’s aiming to create that delivery model.

Even just one year ago, making this model a successful play for restaurants on a widespread basis would have been a long shot. The technical logistics of delivery are complex. A sophisticated mobile order app a la Starbucks would cost a restaurant tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to make. Apps have to allow users to browse a menu and order meals, and they have to be secure around processing payments and storing customer data. With a few exceptions, using a third-party delivery platform for this piece of the delivery stack has historically been the easiest and most cost-effective path for restaurants.

In the early days of the pandemic, restaurants had to either accept this situation and use a third-party delivery platform’s entire stack or risk going under. (A lot of them went under anyway.) But over the last few months, a number of different options have surfaced that allow restaurants to power their own digital storefronts and only rely on delivery services for the last mile. ChowNow, Toast, Lunchbox, . . . the list gets longer each month. Each of these services offers the ability to power a branded storefront through which the restaurant maintains the direct relationship with the customer but doesn’t have to go out and build a mobile order app from the ground up. Most of these services also partner with the major delivery platforms, who still handle the last mile. Restaurants would still have to pay a small commission fee for the actual delivery, but it’s drastically lower than the 30 percent it can reach to when using the full stack.

Don’t Miss Our Ghost Kitchen Event!

Join The Spoon and the leaders of Fat Burger, Wow Bao, Ordermark & more on December 9th for a free virtual event exploring the world of ghost kitchens & virtual restaurants.  Get your free ticket today!

Lyft’s comments at its earnings call this week suggest the company is ready to capitalize on this trend. Imagine a restaurant using a system like ChowNow’s to power its mobile ordering and payments. The restaurant controls the branding, menus, prices, and customer relationship. Integration with Lyft’s software would mean once an order is placed, a Lyft driver would retrieve the food and drop it with the customer. Lyft is also well-established across the U.S. and claims to have more than 1 million available drivers, so its existing user base could make it additionally attractive to restaurants and their customers.

The question is whether this approach could differentiate Lyft enough to make much of a difference. After all, restaurants nowadays can approach a similar delivery model by processing orders through a company like ChowNow then letting an established delivery player like DoorDash handle the last mile. Lyft would have to offer ultra-competitive rates on commission fees and an extremely wide delivery radius to make itself stand out.

Zimmer said on this week’s call that it was still “early days” for this concept, though Lyft already has a partnership with Grubhub for a separate initiative. But between the pandemic, Prop 22, DoorDash’s insane growth numbers, and all sorts of other controversies, the need for a new delivery system gets more urgent for restaurants each week. This one might be a viable option. 

Driving Towards a New Kind of QSR

Meanwhile, over in QSR realm, big-name brands appear to be ditching the dining room en masse for the long term. If you had any lingering doubts about that, look to the last few month’s developments in the space:

  • Wendy’s struck a deal with Reef to kickstart its ghost kitchen strategy. The brand is also considering drive-thru-only store formats
  • Chipotle announced plans for a new store format that is essentially a ghost kitchen with a pickup area. This follows the brand’s efforts to double-down on its drive-thru strategy.
  • McDonald’s unveiled a new store design that consists of a kitchen facility surrounded by drive-thru lanes and a few parking spaces for curbside pickup.
  • Restaurant Brands International, which owns Burger King, Popeye’s, and Tim Horton’s, will modernize its drive-thrus to encourage more digital orders and off-premises meals.
  • Burger King also has a new store design that features a kitchen hanging over drive-thru lanes and a conveyor belt that delivers the food to customers.

The credo behind all of these developments is the same: make it faster, more efficient, and as free of human-to-human contact among strangers as possible. As companies look to speed up wait times and pandemic-proof themselves, we can expect the modernization of the drive-thru — and the death of the QSR dining room — to continue.

The Leading Food Tech Expo is Back on January 11th!

Food Tech Live is back for its third year! This year we’re going virtual and will have a full day of product showcases and programming. Get your free ticket here and, if you want to grab a virtual booth to show off what you’re building for 2021, let us know!

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced new restrictions for bars and restaurants that went into effect on Friday. All establishments licensed by the State Liquor Authority must close dining areas at 10 p.m. Only curbside pickup will be allowed after 10 p.m. Cuomo also said that if these measures don’t slow the spread of COVID-19, NY will consider reducing indoor dining capacity.

Third-party delivery service Caviar announced this week it has expanded to three new markets. The Grubhub-owned service is now available in Austin, Texas; San Diego, California; and Miami, Florida, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

Dunkin’s line of holiday swag is back. This time it includes bedding, which may or may not be a sign that the world really is going to hell.

 

DoorDash Files for IPO, Could Start Trading in December

DoorDash unveiled its public S-1 filing this morning after confidentially filing to go public earlier this year. The San Francisco-based third-party delivery service is expected to begin trading on the NYSE in mid-December.

Reports of the service going public as soon as 2020 first surfaced in August, along with hints that the company was trekking towards actual profitability, which is still something of an elusive concept in the world of third-party delivery. Today’s unveil of DoorDash’s S-1 filing shows that the company reported a profit for the first time in its history during the second quarter of 2020. The company garnered $675 million in revenue and a profit of $23 million for Q2 2020. The company posted a net loss of $43 million for Q3, but still reported revenue growth of $879 million and has ample cash to fund itself — $1.6 billion, to be exact, though DoorDash has said COVID-related lockdowns played a significant role in its growth and that growth rates in revenue could decline in future.

DoorDash’s forthcoming IPO arrives at a time when demand for food delivery apps is thriving. Data from September shows that sales for these services grew 125 percent year-over-year during that month. DoorDash earned almost half, or 49 percent, of those sales — a significantly higher number than the 22 percent of Uber Eats or the 20 percent of Grubhub.

Restaurant delivery remains the biggest slice of DoorDash’s business, but it’s no longer the only one. Perhaps because of the uncertainty of the current restaurant industry, the company branched out into grocery and convenience store delivery this year, too. It even went as far as opening its own “ghost convenience store” facility in August.

Though all this cash and profitability comes at a cost of its own, a human cost in this case. DoorDash helped bankroll Prop 22, which California voters just passed and which allows third-party delivery services to continue classifying their workers as independent contractors. In other words, they’re saving a lot of money by not shelling out for benefits like workers comp, health care, and paid sick leave. The company also remains steeped in controversy around the high commission fees it extracts from restaurants at a time when businesses are shuttering in record numbers because of the pandemic. 

Unfortunately, money usually talks louder than any other issue on the table. DoorDash’s filing today shows that despite these controversies, the company’s growth is unlikely to slow any time soon. 

R-Zero Raises $15M to Make UV-C Tech More Accessible to Restaurants

R-Zero, a biosafety company that makes an IoT-connected UV-C system, announced this week it had raised $15 million in fresh funding. The round was led by DBL Partners with participation from Bedrock Capital and HAX/SOSV. R-Zero says the new funds will allow the company to ramp up production and deployment of its germicidal UV device, called Arc, and get it into a wider variety of locations including restaurants.

UV-C technology has been in use for over 100 years as a way to disinfect air, water, and surfaces. Historically, the tech been the territory of hospitals, but thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is now making its way outside of clinical settings and into public spaces that at some point in the future could include everything from schools to restaurants to subway cars.

R-Zero, a company actually founded in the midst of the pandemic, is contributing to this development with its hospital-grade Arc device it says can destroy “over 99.99% of pathogens,” including human coronavirus, in a 1,000-square-foot space in under seven minutes.

The portable device is about 6.5 feet high and equipped with BLE, LTE, and GPS connectivity, allowing users to track  and monitor the device remotely via a smartphone — an important point, since UV-C is known to cause skin and eye damage and staff should ideally be out of the room before Arc kicks into its disinfecting cycle. Users can monitor the cycle via their phone and know when it is safe to re-enter the room. The company says in its FAQs that Arc should only be used in unoccupied rooms.

R-Zero’s fundraise comes at the right time. As one panelist noted during this year’s Smart Kitchen Summit, cleanliness and sanitization in restaurants is now “table stakes” for businesses, not to mention a major priority for customers. And while many restaurants remain closed or operating at reduced capacity, this emphasis on sanitization isn’t likely to dwindle, even after the pandemic subsides.

Bringing hospital-grade UV-C tech to local businesses is a relatively new concept, but R-Zero isn’t completely alone in the space. Veteran LED makes germicidal UV-C devices that are in some restaurants currently. Clean Air Systems is another such company. The latter says its technology can “kill 99.99% of Sars-COV2” and other airborne pathogens. 

R-Zero is currently in a number of U.S. restaurants, including Michelin-starred Atelier Crenn in San Francisco and restaurants under the Acme Hospitality group.

ReFed Launches a $10M Campaign to Reduce Food Waste, Announces New Insights Engine

ReFed today made two big announcements around its continued fight against food loss and waste. The U.S.-based nonprofit has launched a $10 million fundraising campaign to support projects and initiatives that reduce waste in the supply chain. Additionally, ReFed will release an online hub for food waste data and insights next year, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The campaign is meant to support initiatives across the entire food supply chain that help to reduce food loss and waste. Crown Family Philanthropies, the Fink Family Foundation, The Kroger Co. Zero Hunger | Zero Waste Foundation, the Posner Foundation of Pittsburgh, and Wiancko Charitable Foundation are already involved and have helped to raise $3 million so far. The Robert W. Wilson Charitable Trust has made a matching grant.

Additionally, the campaign is part of an ongoing effort to aid in the goal of the United Nations, the USDA, and the U.S. EPA to reduce food waste by 50 percent by 2030. As we discussed in a recent Spoon Plus report on food waste innovation, many companies and solutions exist in the space, but a great many more are needed in order to “make food waste less possible” for producers, retailers, and consumers alike.

Also supporting the 2030 goal is ReFed’s forthcoming Insights Engine, an online hub for both data and insights around the global food waste problem. Some features will include in-depth analyses on existing food waste solutions, a directory of these existing solutions and companies, a calculator that shows food waste’s impact on both the environment and food insecurity, and financial analysis that will help direct the private and philanthropic capital needed to fund new solutions.

Alongside the Insights Engine, ReFed will release its Roadmap to 2030, which the organization says will serve as its guide for the next decade around the actions it and other players in the food system take to strengthen the fight against food waste.

The U.S. 2030 Food Loss and Waste Reduction Goal was launched back in 2015 by the USDA and the EPA as a companion to the UN’s Target 12.3. Over the five years since, we have seen the number of companies working to fight food waste grow, particularly around waste at consumer-facing levels (grocery, household, etc.). Even so, 40 percent of the world’s food continues to be wasted, resulting in 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases and economic losses of about $750 billion annually.

ReFed said today the $10 million campaign will help make a significant reduction in the amount of food being wasted each year. Meanwhile, Insights Engine is expected to be released in early 2021.

PepsiCo Is Taking Applications for Its Fifth Annual Greenhouse Accelerator Program

PepsiCo is now taking applications for the fifth installment of its Greenhouse Accelerator Program, which looks for young startups reinventing in the food and beverage industry. One major focus for this year’s cohort will be on food innovations and technologies that “improve the aging process through wellness and health management,” according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

The program selects 10 companies to participate in the six-month-long program. Each startup gets a $20,000 grant and the opportunity to work with mentors, who will advise on product and brand development, supply chain management, customer acquisition, and other areas of running a food business. One company will be rewarded a $100,000 grant at the end of the program. 

Companies worldwide are eligible for the program. They must have a product or service currently available in the market, and have more than $1 million.

This year, PepsiCo’s program is looking for companies addressing issues around health, wellness, and aging. According to the Greenhouse Accelerator website, some focus areas include products that assist with tracking and managing wellness, functional ingredients, wearables that promote health awareness, and other innovations that encourage healthy diets and lifestyles.

The focus makes sense, given the ongoing global health crisis that has disrupted the way people both shop and eat for food. Snacking may be on the rise, but so too is a need for healthier food choices. Making health and wellness more accessible is in turn becoming a priority for many companies in the food industry.

PepsiCo will select the 10 companies for this cohort in January 2021. The application process is open until December 9.

Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that the Greenhouse Accelerator Program was only open to companies in the U.S. and Canada.

Chipotle Finally Launches Its Own Take on the Ghost Kitchen Concept

QSR brand Chipotle is a known leader in the restaurant industry’s current transition from dining room to off-premises formats, but the company has for the most part been quiet in the conversation around ghost kitchens. Up to now, that is. The company today revealed its Chipotle Digital Kitchen a pickup- and delivery-only restaurant that is essentially its own homegrown take on the ghost kitchen concept.

The new restaurant, located in Highland Falls, New York, will open this coming Saturday (Nov. 14). Chipotle said in today’s press release that the Digital Kitchen is meant to drive business in “non-traditional locations” such as dense urban centers that can’t hold a full-service restaurant.

While the restaurant does feature a small lobby with a few seats, there is no assembly line from which to order food and no cashier to ring orders up. Instead, customers must place orders digitally via the Chipotle app or website, or through a third-party delivery platform. Guests retrieve their orders from the aforementioned lobby that is “designed to include all of the sounds, smells and kitchen views of a traditional Chipotle restaurant.” The location can also fulfill larger catering orders.  

Chipotle’s news comes the same week McDonald’s unveiled plans for its own to-go-centric store format that will consist of a kitchen surrounded by drive-thru lanes and parking spaces for curbside pickup. Since Chipotle’s Digital Kitchen is, initially, at least, focused on urban settings with space limitations, it does not accommodate a drive-thru lane. That said, the company has been very public about its intentions to incorporate that format into its stores, and today’s release notes that the new store format “allows for flexibility with future locations.” Drive-thru may not be part of this first location, but it’s undoubtedly on the way as the company opens more of these new store concepts.

With the future of the dining room still very much unknown, there’s something of a mass exodus from that format happening among well-known quick-service brands. Burger King, Wendy’s, Dunkin’, Popeye’s, and Tim Horton’s are just a few names on the growing list of restaurants changing up their store formats.

Chipotle has been trekking towards this shift for some time. In December of 2019, the company announced a few different store format designs for to-go, drive-thru, and delivery orders. 

Make sure to join The Spoon’s Ghost Kitchen Deep Dive event on December 9th. Register here!