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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Jennifer Marston

86 Repairs Nabs $7.3M in Funding for Restaurant Maintenance Tech

Restaurant tech company 86 Repairs has raised an additional $5.3 million, bringing its total funding for its seed round to $7.3 million, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Investors in this latest raise include TDF Ventures, Gordon Food Service, MATH Venture Partners, Revolution, and Cleveland Avenue. To date, 86 Repairs has raised $8.8 million.

Chicago-based 86 Repairs says the new funds will help the company build out more products for its maintenance and repairs management platform for restaurants.

The 86 Repairs system manages repair and maintenance processes for restaurants by digitizing information about all a restaurant’s equipment, and then handling the bulk of the work when there is an issue. For example, if a walk-in cooler breaks down, the restaurant calls or texts 86 Repairs, who handles things like troubleshooting, warranty checks, and setting up an appointment with a preferred technician. The company says it takes care of all communication, scheduling, and dispatching with a restaurant’s preferred equipment vendors.

The 86 Repairs platform also includes a “data insights” portion that displays things like incident history and overall spend on maintenance repair. The idea is to give restaurants one central location at which to view all data about all maintenance, even for large, multi-unit chains. To that end, a number of different chains already use the platform, including McDonald’s, Jimmy John’s, Sonic, and Famous Dave’s.

As predicted, both interest and investment in restaurant back-of-house technologies has increased since the start of the year. Though U.S. restaurants are for the most part reopened at full capacity, the need for cost-cutting and cost-saving measures is more important than ever.

ResQ, which just raised $7.5 million, is the other notable restaurant tech right now focused on repairs and maintenance.

Software that can digitize the maintenance management process makes sense for larger chains like McDonald’s. For smaller, independent restaurants — the benefits may be a bigger question mark. Spending money on another software subscription may or may not be justifiable, depending on how much a restaurant is able to save in overall maintenance and repair costs.

Equilibrium Capital Closes a $1.02B Fund for Indoor Ag

Equilibrium Capital has closed its second fund dedicated to indoor agriculture. The Controlled Environment Foods Fund II (CEFF II) raised a total of $1.02 billion, exceeding its original goal of $500 million. 

Speaking in a company blog post, Equilibrium CEO David Chen said that the fundraising for CEFF II reflects a broader shift where larger institutional investors are concerned. “Investors and retailers are increasingly looking for more sustainable and less volatile ways to invest in and scale agriculture. The fund is reflecting the magnitude of the opportunity and the growing importance of CEA in our food system,” he said. 

CEFF II will invest between $10 million and $125 million per deal, mostly in high-tech greenhouses and indoor farms as well as “other CEA segments of alternative proteins and aquaculture.” The fund is focused largely on North America: the United States, Mexico, and Canada. 

Equilibrium’s current assets are mostly in lettuce and tomatoes, which are two of the most popular produce types when it comes to indoor ag. However, Chang name-dropped berries in blog post, saying that Equilibrium will be “dramatically expanding” its presence in the berry family in the future. The statement reflects the larger development for indoor ag where more companies are either currently growing or planning to grow berries. Chang also mentioned peppers, cucumbers, mushrooms, and herbs.

The new fund follows the original CEFF, which closed at $336 million in April 2019 and includes well-known CEA companies like AppHarvest, Revol Greens, and Little Leaf Farms. All of those companies focus on raising crops in high-tech greenhouses, as opposed to the massive vertical farm setups a la AeroFarms or Plenty. Whether CEFF II will invest in more vertical farms remains to be seen. Chang said there were “niche applications” for the technology, though he was not specific about what those applications are. Currently, most vertical farming operations only grow leafy greens and herbs at the kinds of volumes that can supply grocery stores and restaurants. Debate persists as to whether this particular indoor ag format can produce more crops in an environmentally and economically sustainable way.

Grocery, Meet the Ghost Kitchen

One year ago, Euromonitor International predicted the ghost kitchen market could be worth $1 trillion by 2030. 

The prediction, made by Euromonitor’s Global Lead for Food & Beverage Michael Schaefer, reverberated around a restaurant industry that was still deep in the midst of dining room shutdowns and restrictions related to a global pandemic. Little wonder that from that point on, many saw ghost kitchens as a kind of savior for the restaurant industry.

But Schaefer and Euromonitor were looking way beyond restaurants when they made their mega-prediction. At the time, (and later on at SKS 2020), Schaefer suggested the ghost kitchen market could reach $1 trillion because it will grow to encompass all manner of foodservice businesses: grocery outlets, dark convenience stores, and ready-made meals, in addition to restaurants. In other words, restaurants alone won’t push the market to the $1 trillion mark. Instead, it will get there because the lines between ghost kitchens, groceries, and the like will become less defined over time.

That already happening, actually, and was illustrated again recently with GoPuff’s announcement that it’s hiring staff for ghost kitchens. 

GoPuff isn’t a restaurant in any shape or form. It’s a new kind of grocery delivery service that operates in dense residential areas and promises to deliver food items to customers’ doorsteps 24/7 in roughly 30 minutes or less on average. The company’s $1.5 billion fundraise from earlier this year should indicate the popularity that the speedy-grocery-delivery segment currently enjoys. 

But GoPuff’s hiring advertisement calls for chefs as well, which suggests the company wants to add some restaurant concepts to its offerings. GoPuff isn’t alone in this. DoorDash, which began life as a restaurant delivery service, opened its own ghost kitchen in 2019 and now also operates “ghost convenience stores,” which are just as they sound. A Canadian company that’s just called Ghost Kitchens carries limited offerings from QSRs along with a mix of easy-to-fulfill grocery and convenience items like ice cream pints and frozen veggie burgers. ClusterTruck has its own virtual restaurant menu but also operates out of Kroger locations. And there are companies like C3, which operate delivery-only restaurants out of a range of physical locations, including hotels, residential properties, and other non-restaurant venues.

All of these versions of the ghost kitchen prioritize speed above pretty much everything else. They also roll up neatly into a statement Schaefer made this time last year about the trajectory of ghost kitchens.

“As more and more of the foodservice environment becomes optimized for delivery, a generation of consumers growing up with smartphones becomes accustomed and habituated to being able to order literally anything from their smartphone. That is going to drive ever-more innovation,” he said.

In 2021, that innovation appears to be the speedy delivery service. As companies further blur the lines between the ghost kitchen, the grocery, and the convenience store, they’ll launch new formats that are less about having a food experience and more about getting a food item in one’s hands as fast as humanly and technologically possible.   

More Headlines

Following Tensions, McDonald’s Cuts Tech Fees for Franchisees by 62 Percent – The company has changed its stance on the $423-per-month fee for franchisees after a third-party review of of billing. 

DaVinci Kitchen Equity Crowdfunds €500,000 for Robotic Pasta Kiosk – The company’s campaign ran from March to the end of June this year on Seedmatch, with 488 investors participating.

C3 Raises $80M to Expand Its Virtual Food Hall Concept – The $80 million fundraise will go towards further expansion in the form of signing leases with real estate developers at various mixed-use, retail, and hospitality spaces.

P&P Optica Raises Fresh Funding for Hyperspectral Food Safety Inspection Tech

Canada’s P&P Optica (PPO) has raised an undisclosed amount of Series B funding for its food safety inspection technology, which uses hyperspectral imaging to gather quality metrics on the food inside of processing plants. 

The round was led by Ag Capital Canada, with new investor Synovus Family Office as well as existing investors Fulcrum Global Capital, Export Development Canada (EDC) and others.

Waterloo, Ontariro-based PPO says it will use the new funds to implement its system across more food processing plants in Canada and the U.S. The PPO Smart Imaging System uses hyperspectral imaging to “see” inside of foods like produce and meats. In doing so, the system is able to gather more precise information on overall food quality. For example, PPO’s tech can determine the fat-to-lean ratio for bacon and sausage, measure the tenderness of a steak, and even detect foreign matter like rubber, cardboard, or plastic. Wood, bone, and even certain types of metals can also be found in food items, and often not detectable by traditional x-ray machines.

While PPO’s physical imaging system itself is meant to be used inside the food processing plant, users can access data on food remotely, from a cloud-based dashboard. The company says that thanks to an AI element, the system can learn over time from what it sees and in doing so detect contaminants faster. 

ImpactVision is the other notable company with a hyperspectral imaging system for food producers. The company was recently acquired by Apeel, and its tech will be used to assess shelf life and quality of produce items. PPO’s system, on the other hand, is at this point more for meat products.

Being able to see inside food could potentially help companies catch safety issues before food leaves the plant, saving them from performing recalls and wasting food and money.

PPO says the new funding will be also go towards expanding the company’s analytics software, including the aforementioned AI tool.

Wells Fargo Picks 5 Indoor Ag Companies for Its Latest Innovation Incubator Program

Five early-stage indoor agriculture companies will participate in the ninth cohort of the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN2), which works with cleantech companies and entrepreneurs across food and housing sectors. Chosen participants for this cohort will focus on tools and processes that can make indoor farming more environmentally and financially sustainable. 

The Wells Fargo Foundation funds the program, which is co-administered by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Indoor ag has seen some major milestones and investments in 2021, but whether its a truly sustainable endeavor (financially and environmentally) remains a hotly debated topic. For example, growing greens inside fully controlled environments like vertical farms might cut down on inputs like land and water usage, but an enormous amount of energy is needed to run a farm off fully on artificial lighting. (Greenhouses, because they use natural sunlight, are usually a different story.) Additionally, leafy greens are still the only crop large-scale vertical farms can grow in huge quantities, and from a calorie perspective, salad can’t fully feed a growing world population.

Claire Kinlaw, director of Innovation Commercialization at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, said in a statement today that this year’s cohort is “focused on validating technologies that address key challenges in the indoor agriculture industry, including environmentally and financially sustainable ways to deliver light, control growth environments, evaluate environmental impacts and solve the need for crop varieties that are well-adapted for indoor environments.”

Companies chosen for the program address these issues and others:

  • Atlas Sensor Technologies monitors water hardness in real time to reduce waste and cost of water and improve how water softeners operate
  • GrowFlux makes intelligent horticulture lighting via an IoT platform the company says can save 20-30 percent in energy costs
  • Motorleaf specializes in AI for indoor ag in order to give growers information around yields and carbon footprint
  • New West Genetics does genomics-assisted breeding for the hemp industry
  • SunPath uses patented fiber optics tech to improve lighting for indoor farms

All participants will receive up to $250,000 in non-dilutive funding from Wells Fargo. Over a 12- to 18-month period, companies will conduct research and development at NREL and at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri. 

Aleph Farms Raises $105M in Series B Funding

Cultivated meat company Aleph Farms announced today it has completed a $105 million Series B round of funding, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $118 million. The Series B round was led by L Catterton and DisruptAD with participation from Skyviews Life Science, Thai Union, BRF, and CJ CheilJedang. Existing investors VisVires New Protein, Strauss Group, Cargill, Peregrine Ventures, and CPT Capital also participated in the round.

Israel-based Aleph Farms said the new funds will go towards increasing manufacturing, growing operations internationally, and expanding product lines. Currently, the company is developing a cultivated beef steak and will unveil a prototype for that product in November at the Agri-Food Innovation Summit. 

There is of course an enormous difference between unveiling a prototype and making these whole-muscle cuts of cultivated meat at scale. One of the challenges for cultivated meat companies is being able to produce large quantities of product at a cost that is on par with traditional meat. Aleph Farms launched a new production process at the end of 2020 that will eventually be able to reach that price parity, according to the company.

The process is the first part of a phased build-out for Aleph’s forthcoming pilot production facility, which the company says will be operational by 2022. Aleph Farms also plans to do an initial market launch at that time. The Series B funding will, in bigger-picture terms, go towards helping the company realize that goal. 

Aleph’s announcement today follows recent news from other cultivated meat companies that are also opening pilot production facilities and also aiming for commercial launches in 2022. That includes MeaTech 3D, also based in Israel and also developing whole cuts of cultivated meat. Another Israeli company, Future Meat, has already opened its facility and says it plans to sell cultivated meat in the U.S. by 2022.

Before anyone sells anything, however, these companies must get regulatory approval for each market they want to enter. So far, just one company, Eat Just, has regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat, and that’s only in Singapore. Along with price parity, getting regulatory approval is a major topic in the cultivated meat conversation these days. 

Aleph Farms says it is working with regulatory agencies, though the company did not specify for which markets. Part of the company’s international expansion will be to the United Arab Emirates and the wider Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. Aleph said it is also evaluating the possibility of a manufacturing facility located in the UAE.

C3 Raises $80M to Expand Its Virtual Food Hall Concept

Virtual restaurant company C3 (Creating Culinary Communities) has raised an $80 million Series B funding round co-led by Brookfield Asset Management and REEF Technology. Egon Durban and Greg Mondre Managing Partners and Co-CEOs of Silver Lake Partners, along with Dean Adler, Co-Founder of real estate investment firm Lubert-Adler.

C3’s business these days is as much about real estate as it is about restaurants. The company operates more than 40 virtual restaurant brands, leveraging underutilized kitchen spaces around the country to cook and fulfill those orders. For example, the company has a partnership with Graduate Hotels and uses kitchen spaces at Graduate locations to serve delivery-only orders to guests and the surrounding community.

In March of this year, C3 said it would also bring its virtual restaurant concept to residential spaces, starting in Nashville, Tennessee and Phoenix, Arizona. The company recently partnered with Kitopi to take C3 brands overseas to the UAE, has a deal to use Reef locations for kitchens, and last month said it would make its virtual brands available to Chowly’s 10,000-plus restaurant customers.

For all C3 concepts and partnerships, meals are available through the company’s CITIZENS GO mobile app, which is powered on the back end by online order company Lunchbox’s software.  

The $80 million fundraise will go towards further expansion in the form of signing leases with real estate developers at various mixed-use, retail, and hospitality spaces. According to today’s press release, these leases will serve to open CITIZENS food halls, which are brick-and-mortar versions of the C3’s virtual food halls. These spaces will also provide additional kitchen space with which to fulfill delivery-only orders for C3 brands. 

The virtual food hall concept itself isn’t new, with companies like Deliveroo, Zuul, and others employing their own versions of it. Few have pursued expansion as aggressively as C3, however. The latter says it has opened 250+ digital brand locations in the U.S., will have 1,000 by year’s end and is on track for 12,000 kitchens globally by 2023. 

MeaTech Says It Will Develop Cultured Pork Products

Israel-based alt-protein company MeaTech 3D has begun research and development activities around cultivated pork, the company announced today. 

Initial activities will focus largely on developing porcine cell lines, which the company says could expand its number of potential addressable markets since pork is the most widely consumed meat in the world. The porcine cell lines will add to MeaTech’s existing cell ag efforts, including cell lines for beef and chicken.

In May of this year, the company announced plans for a pilot production facility that will first be used to increase the production of its cultured fat product and then go on to produce entire cuts of cultivated meat using the company’s 3D bioprinting technology. 

Cell lines are a crucial step in the process of making cultivated meat, since cells are the starting inputs for any eventual product. However, creating new cell lines is an expensive and time-consuming process, and researchers are still figuring out which types of cells are best suited for the kind of large-scale manufacturing most cultured meat companies are aspiring to eventually do.

Most of those companies so far have stuck to developing cultured beef or chicken products, not pork. Despite the latter being the world’s most most popular meat, a very small handful of companies is actually focused on that particular protein right now. Future Meat Technologies, also based in Israel, says its newly opened production facility is producing cultured pork. Dutch startup Meatable, New Age Meats, and Higher Steaks have also done pork prototypes during the last few years. 

MeaTech’s specific focus on cell line development will further set it apart from the masses as more companies announce plans to explore cultured pork products in the future.

How AppHarvest Is Investing in the First Generation of High-Tech Farmers

Agriculture may have been slower to digitize than other parts of the food sector, but these days a lot of folks would agree artificial intelligence, automation, and other technologies have a role to play in the future of farming. The presence of such things means farming will soon require lots of new skills, which in turn means training a whole new generation on a whole new set of tools. It means, in the words of AppHarvest’s founder and CEO Jonathan Webb (pictured above), “getting young people to really visualize what agriculture is” in a way they haven’t before.

Standing under a tent in the middle of a downpour outside Elliott County High School in Sandy Hook, Kentucky recently, Webb explained to me how his company is training the next generation of farmers while simultaneously investing in the company’s own future as a high-tech agricultural powerhouse.

We, along with with students, parents, teachers, and Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, were at the launch for the latest unit of AppHarvest’s high-tech educational container farm program, which teaches high-tech farming to Eastern Kentucky high-school students. Launched back in 2018, the program retrofits old shipping containers to house controlled-environment vertical farms that grow leafy greens. Farms at each school serve as hands-on agricultural classrooms where students can learn not just horticulture but also how to use the technologies powering the next wave of farming innovations around automation, connectivity, and data.

“What we’re doing here is trying to plant the seeds of what it means to be in an exciting industry and get that groundswell early,” Webb told me. 

He was talking specifically about the container farm program but might as well have been referring to the entire company’s MO. AppHarvest, itself a product of Eastern Kentucky, is both a Public Benefit Corporation and a Certified B Corporation, which means the company has to strike a balance between profit and less measurable purposes like environmental impact, transparency, and social good. 

The company’s main business is headquartered about an hour away from Elliott County High School, in Morehead, Kentucky, where AppHarvest operates a 60-acre high-tech greenhouse that grows different varieties of tomatoes. Two additional farms, one for leafy greens and another for tomatoes, are under construction, and the company just broke ground on a couple more last month. All of these farms provide or will provide produce for restaurants and grocery retailers within a day’s drive. They will also provide jobs for a local community that’s seen unemployment rise as the coal industry declines.

The high school container farms are altogether smaller and somewhat different in terms setup and technical specs, but the idea is the same: grow crops in a controlled environment and use technology to improve plant yield, quality, and nutrition profile. In doing so, people from the community get an opportunity to learn the kinds of skills that will be relevant as agriculture gets more and more digitized.

“We’ve tried to say at AppHarvest we’re not building facilities, we’re building an ecosystem,” said Webb. “Obviously our large production facility is the core critical center piece of that, but us investing in a high school education, we’re truly trying to create an ecosystem that includes facilities and the brainpower to be able to operate the facilities.”

This isn’t just feel-good talk, either. Technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, sensors, and analytics are coming to agriculture in response to multiple problems looming in the near future for the global food system. As McKinsey notes, “Demand for food is growing at the same time the supply side faces constraints in land and farming inputs.” With a population expected to grow to 9.7 billion by 2050, the planet needs to produce around 70 percent more available calories. At the same time, inputs like water supply and arable land are shrinking, raising costs for farming and negatively impacting an already burdened planet.

Part of the promise of controlled environment agriculture formats like high-tech greenhouses and container vertical farms is that they can grow more food faster, at a higher quality, and closer to the buying public. Many of these facilities operate via hydroponics systems that recirculate water, saving on that resource. (AppHarvest’s greenhouse runs off rainwater collected from the facility’s roof.) In the case of vertical farming, less land is required because plants are stacked. AppHarvest’s container farms, for example, can pack three to five acres of leafy greens into a forty-foot-long shipping container. Other large-scale vertical farms a la Kalera or Plenty are growing pounds of greens that number in the millions and also exploring additional crops such as berries.

Most individuals in this industry I’ve spoken to agree that indoor farming isn’t “the savior” that will wholly replace traditional agriculture. Nor was it never meant to be. Rather, greenhouse growers, vertical farm companies, and those operating container farms believe we need all of these formats working together and alongside traditional agriculture practices to try and resolve the above issues.

One of the many things needed to make that a reality is a new generation of young people interested in farming as a career and able to navigate the technical as well as horticultural aspects of agriculture. 

Right now, that’s a challenge. “We don’t have our brightest young people inspired to go into agriculture,” said Webb, adding that the issue is, “How do we inspire them early to get into agriculture and the technology sphere of agriculture?”

AppHarvest started investing in its education program before its main facility was ever complete, spending $200,000 of its initial $1 million investment on the program. “I’m not sure if there’s ever been a venture-backed company that’s taken 20 percent of their raised proceeds early and invested in education,” said Webb.

In 2021, AppHarvest has five different container farm programs operating at Eastern Kentucky high schools, all of them operating independently but also networked together, just as AppHarvest’s larger farms will eventually be networked. 

Students learn a huge range of skills working on these farms, from horticultural-related ones like seeding and harvesting to technology management across multiple farms to food safety, data entry, marketing, packaging, and creating a budget. Via a screen inside the farm, students can learn to track the pH levels of plants, carbon dioxide levels, temperature, humidity, and all the other variables present in a farm. And since farms from every high school are networked together, students can view one another’s activity. Elliott County High can see data from Shelby Valley High School in Pike County and vice versa, for example.

Webb says the farms are also an opportunity for schools and students to collaborate using different skillsets, whether technological, horticultural, or otherwise. “Some students might have more of a background or interest in horticulture. Some students might have more of a background or interest in craftsmanship. All we’re trying to do now is say, ‘Here, it’s your thing, bring it to life, and openly share information.’”

And while there’s no pressure, the hope is that some of these students eventually bring their skillsets to AppHarvest’s main operations and help improve them, along with indoor ag, over the coming years. “Hopefully in four years we have students that might end up at MIT. And then they’re telling us what to do,” said Webb, adding that the ROI here isn’t quick. The true impacts of the company’s investment in school programs probably won’t be seen for another five of six years, which is a few lifetimes when we’re talking about tech. 

“We get judged on quarterly earning calls, [but] that’s not the way I think,” he said. “I want us to think, first decade, second decade, third decade, and these are very long-term investments.”

He hopes to see more tech companies investing in high schools, and AppHarvest isn’t quite the lone wolf when it comes to this. Freight Farms, which deals exclusively in container farms, has a partnership with Sodexo to bring its units to K-12 schools and universities in the U.S. AeroFarms, also a Certified B Corp., has partnerships with various schools and community centers, too.

For AppHarvest, the educational program is is an integral part of the operation, and one tied to the company’s long-term success. “It’s not a ‘nice to have,'” Webb told me. “It’s something we truly believe is going to give our company a competitive advantage medium to long term.” 

AeroFarms Talks R&D in the UAE for Vertical Farming

One place that gets a lot of attention these days when it comes to food tech initiatives is the United Arab Emirates. Like Singapore, the country is aggressively pursuing food and ag tech initiatives as a way to improve food security and quality within its own borders and in doing so become a more self-sufficient food producer.

The UAE got another big agrifood boost recently when New Jersey-based vertical farming company AeroFarms announced that its UAE-based subsidiary AeroFarms AgX LTD had started construction on an R&D facility in Abu Dhabi. The center will focus on new developments for indoor ag and controlled environment farming, and is expected to be operational in the first quarter of 2022.

“The region aligns very well with our value proposition,” Aerofarms cofounder and CEO David Rosenberg explained to The Spoon recently. “The UAE imports 90 percent of their crops, so there’s a food security issue. They also have relatively cheap energy.” He added that a facility for R&D in the country gives Aerofarms a “strong regional presence” from which it can expand to other areas in the Middle East and beyond. 

There’s certainly enough opportunity for indoor agriculture in this part of the world. Because of the desert climate, the UAE and other countries in the Middle East deal with a lack of arable land as well as water scarcity. Vertical farming operations like those of AeroFarms or another player, Vertical Field, claim to use significantly less water than traditional outdoor agriculture. And because of the vertical nature of the grow systems (plant trays are literally stacked inside a giant warehouse-like setting), companies can pack more plants into less space than would be possible on a horizontal field.

According to Rosenberg, the R&D center isn’t really to figure out how to grow food in the desert (“We could grow anywhere in the world”) so much as it is about growing plants specific to Middle Eastern eating habits in general. He cites mint and parsley, two popular foods in the region, as examples. Having an R&D center that focused on optimizing the grow cycle for these plants could increase quality, yield, and nutritional profile. 

The other goal of the forthcoming new center will be to apply the learnings discovered there to other parts of the region in the future. That includes research in areas like plant science, vertical farming and automation, accelerating innovation cycles and commercializing products.

Rosenberg says that versus a greenhouse, his company’s vertical farms can grow plants faster, producing around 26 harvests per year instead of 12 to 16. Right now, Aerofarms is best known for leafy greens, but the company has its sights set on other crops, too. In April of this year it announced a deal with Chile-based berry producer and distributor Hortifrut to research and develop blueberry and caneberry production. 

“Today we’re most known for leafy greens, but behind the scenes, we’re working with some of the biggest ag tech companies in the world to improve their genetics,” says Rosenberg. He adds that AeroFarms has grown 70 different varieties of berries, and that of the 550 different plants the company has grown, “probably 350 of them are in the leafy greens category.” He declined to elaborate on other crops, but suggested that information might surface soon to the public.

Last year, the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) invested $150 million in a few ag tech companies, AeroFarms being one of them. The forthcoming R&D facility will be one tangible result of that investment. 

AeroFarms announced in March its intention to go public via SPAC with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. 

Voice bots and Back Office Tasks: A Mid-year Look at Restaurant Tech

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As we’re fond of saying lately, last year’s pandemic-induced chaos accelerated the restaurant industry’s adoption of technology so much that about a decade’s worth of changes happened in the span of a couple months. Investor, restaurant tech guru, and friend of The Spoon Brita Rosenheim highlighted that point recently when she released her 2021 Restaurant Tech Ecosystem Map. 

The map, while not exhaustive, includes a staggering number of companies across many areas of the restaurant business, from ordering and delivery tech to back-office tools, business intelligence, corporate catering and ghost kitchens. Even a casual glance shows just how enormous (or bloated, depending on your point of view) the restaurant tech sector has gotten over the last 18 months. 

Brita has her own takeaways and predictions bundled with her map, and you should definitely read through them if you are interested in learning more about restaurant tech’s near-term trajectory. Here, I’ll add a few of my own thoughts to the mix, including:

Rise of the voice bot. This is one category that’s slowly but steadily grown a presence in the restaurant industry over the last few years. But excepting maybe Domino’s chatbot, widespread voice-tech implementations at restaurants are still rare, though that will likely change in the next couple of years. McDonald’s threw heat on this topic last month by announcing it is currently testing automated ordering via voice tech at 10 locations, and that it expects this technology to be in all of its locations within the next five years. Meanwhile, the current labor shortage has left restaurants scrambling to make their operations more efficient. If correctly executed, going fully autonomous with the order process could shave seconds off every individual customers’ order. And those seconds (and costs) add up fast. 

The analytics opportunity. Marketing analytics for restaurants are another “it” category at the moment, if its slice of the restaurant tech pie above is any indication. In the words of Adam Brotman, CEO of Brightloom, online ordering tech has become “a commodity,” and that the next big frontier for restaurant tech is around analytics. When Brotman and I spoke a few months back, he explained that data — about customer preferences, transactions, order histories, etc. — is a huge opportunity for restaurants if they can figure out how to harness it. Seeing as that’s no small feat technically, a huge number of analytics and CRM companies have cropped up offering solutions to smaller businesses that can’t build these programs in-house. Expect more companies and much consolidation in this category.

Back-office bonanza. The sizable slice back-office tech gets in Brita’s market map reflects a trend we’ve written about before: that investment and interest in back-office tasks will continue to attract attention in the coming months. The back office was probably once the most “un-sexy” area of restaurant tech, since most of it has to do with digitizing invoices and schedules and helping businesses run payroll. One pandemic later, restaurants are trying to save on costs in as many areas as possible, and a surprisingly effective way to do that is through digitizing, centralizing, and streamlining some of these previously boring tasks. Like analytics, this category will see a wave of consolidation in the future, and in fact that is already happening.

As always, I welcome your thoughts on my thoughts, now and in the coming months as restaurant tech continues to evolve.

More Headlines

Local Kitchens Raises $25M for Its Virtual Food Hall Network – The ghost kitchen/virtual food hall, started by three ex-Doordash employees, has raised Series A funding roughly one year after launching.

Mobility Service Helbiz Opens Its First Ghost Kitchen – Italian-American mobility company Helbiz announced today it is launching its own ghost kitchen/food delivery/virtual restaurant business called Helbiz Kitchens.

Miso and Lancer Worldwide Aim to Automate Beverage Dispensing for QSRs – Miso announced a partnership with Lancer Worldwide, a global manufacturer of beverage dispensers, to develop an automated, intelligent system designed to speed up and organize drink orders.

Following Tensions, McDonald’s Cuts Tech Fees for Franchisees by 62 Percent

McDonald’s will cut technology fees for its U.S. franchisees by 62 percent following a third-party review of of billing, according to a report from Bloomberg. 

The original $68 million was announced in December of 2020, when corporate said it would charge franchisees a $423-per-month fee to cover a lag in outstanding technology fees. Outrage ensued from franchisees, who have pushed back against some of McDonald’s tech-related decisions in the past.

Those clashes have included everything from store design overhauls to disputes over delivery. At the same time, McDonald’s has been aggressively pursuing new technology implementations in an effort to digitize its fast-food business. It acquired AI company Dynamic Yield and voice-tech company Apprente in 2019. And though the chain has downgraded its Dynamic Yield implementations of late, it appears to be increasing its efforts around voice tech. McDonald’s latest move has been to implement voice-order technology at 10 stores in Chicago in an effort to automate more of the drive-thru experience for customers. At the time of that announcement, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski suggested we’ll see voice-ordering at all McDonald’s in the next five years.

Additionally, McDonald’s is one of the many QSRs to release new store designs following 2020’s upheaval. Future locations could prioritize formats like drive-thru and curbside pickup, and emphasize mobile ordering and more tech in the drive-thru lane(s).

Franchisees have argued against some new technologies in the past. It remains to be seen how onboard they will be with further digitization of the business in light of this new agreement with corporate. 

Franchisees own about 95 percent of all McDonald’s locations in the U.S.