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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Jennifer Marston

Motif FoodWorks Raises $226M to Improve the Taste of Plant-Based Proteins

Plant-based food tech company Motif FoodWorks has raised a whopping $226 million in Series B funding, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The round was co-led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, through its Teachers’ Innovation Platform, and BlackRock. Rethink Food and existing investors also participated in the round. To date, Motif has raised $345 million.

The company says its new funds will go towards three areas: research and development; scaling and commercializing its food tech; and expanding its number of people and facilities.

Through all of these areas, Motif’s underlying goal is to improve plant-based foods by developing novel food ingredients that lead to better texture, mouthfeel, and taste in products. The company does this via a mix of microbial engineering and precision fermentation.

Motif, which was spun out of bioengineering platform Ginkgo Bioworks, moved into its own facility in the Boston Seaport area last year, where it is focusing on R&D efforts. Meanwhile, just last month, the company announced it had acquired extrudable fat technology from private research firm Coasun to use in mimicking fat textures in plant-based meats. Additionally, Gingko is licensing prolamin technology from the University of Guelph. The prolamin tech will improve the texture of plant-based cheese so that it can melt, bubble, and stretch as easily as its traditional counterpart. 

This massive Series B fundraise comes at a time when retail sales of plant-based foods surpassed $7 billion. Even so, there’s room for improvement. Research from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and Earth Day Network found that 44 percent of consumers surveyed “don’t like the taste of plant-based foods.” However, two out of three said in the same research that they would be “willing to eat more plant-based foods instead of meat if plant-based foods tasted better than they do today.”

Fermentation technology, sometimes called “the third pillar” of alt protein, is a way to bridge the taste gap between traditional and plant-based meats. Ingredients made with biomass and/or precision fermentation can be combined with plant-based ingredients to achieve the kind of meat and dairy analogues that taste and feel as close to the real thing as possible.

Other companies, including Perfect Day, Change Foods, and Clara Foods are all working towards this goal, too.

Animal-Free Dairy Startup Change Foods Closes $2.1M Seed Round

Change Foods, a startup best known at this point for making animal-free cheese via a fermentation process, has closed an oversubscribed Seed round of $2.1 million. Investors include Plug and Play Ventures, Clear Current Capital, Canaccord Genuity, Better Bite Ventures, Jeff Dean, and GERBER-RAUTH, among others. To date, Change Foods has raised $3.1 million in funding, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The company, founded in 2019, has up to now been split between Palo Alto, California and Melbourne, Australia. In the wake of this new funding, Change Foods is setting up a new R&D facility in the San Francisco Bay Area and company founder David Bucca has already relocated there.   

The company plans to bring its first product — animal-free cheese — to market in 2023.

Precision fermentation is one method within the larger fermentation category. For Change Foods, involves fermenting microorganisms such as yeast or filamentous fungi with sugar to produce the cells for specific functional ingredients — fats, vitamins, flavoring agents, and enzymes, to name a few. (Precision fermentation is also used to create insulin.) Perfect Day and Impossible Foods are examples of major alt-protein companies that use this process to get their products.

An animal-free cheese made via this method has the potential to be one of the first animal-free cheeses to appeal to the non-vegan crowd. Up to now, numerous companies have tried their hand at plant-based cheeses. Few have gotten the flavor and texture close enough to the real thing to win over masses of consumers. Motif Foodworks, the food tech spinout of synthetic biology company Gingko Bioworks, is the other notable company developing cheese products through precision fermentation. 

Traditional cheese requires a significant amount of land and water to produce, puts it right up there with meat in terms of food items consumers should ideally cut back on or find outright replacements. To realistically counter that, alternatives will have to taste less like cashew or legumes and more like actual cheese. Precision fermentation may eventually be a highly efficient way to do this at scale, hence new investments like this one now going towards the space.

Deliveroo Is Running a Reusable Container Program in Paris

Deliveroo France and circular-packaging company barePack have started offering customers of the delivery service the option to get their food delivered in reusable containers, according to a report from Green Queen. Around 60 of Deliveroo’s restaurant partners are already participants in the program, which is live in Paris with plans to expand to other areas of France in the future. The program is also available to customers in the London area.

Deliveroo and Singapore-based barePack first partnered in 2020 to bring the reusable container option to customers in that city-state.

The Paris deal is similar. Deliveroo customers wanting their meals in reusable containers must first download the barePack app and sign up for a monthly or yearly subscription, which go for about $2.43 and $23 USD, respectively. The barePack app will provide a passcode users can enter into their Deliveroo account that then allows them to select the barePack option from participating restaurants at no additional charge. 

Customers can return containers to any restaurant participating in the Deliveroo-barePack Paris program. All containers are professionally washed and returned to the circular system. 

Deliveroo is the first major delivery service to offer a program for reusable containers. While 60 restaurants in a single city is only the smallest of dents, it’s nonetheless a dent in the world’s restaurant trash problem. If the Paris program is successful, it could bode well for reusables throughout the rest of Europe, where serves multiple countries, including the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and its home country, the U.K. The company also operates in Australia, Hong Kong, Kuwait, and the UAE. 

No delivery service in the U.S. has yet to implement a widespread reusables program, though the hope is that a company as large as Deliveroo could wield a certain amount of influence over others. DeliverZero is a smaller operation that offers reusable packaging in parts of the U.S., and Dishcraft offers its own “containers as a service” program for restaurants. Some chains, including McDonald’s and Burger King, are working with TerraCycle’s circular packaging business Loop in the U.S. and elsewhere.

U.S. Restaurant Foot Traffic Is Up Nearly 50 Percent From January

Foot traffic and in-store visits to food and beverage establishments in the U.S. has increased 48 percent since the start of 2021, according to new research from marketing tech company Zenreach emailed to The Spoon. 

The uptick in restaurant foot traffic seems the natural result of more Americans getting vaccinated and cities and states loosening restrictions around when, where, and with how many customers dining rooms can reopen. (It should also put to final rest earlier speculation that the pandemic killed the concept of the eat-in restaurant.)

Certain cities have seen enormous increases. San Diego, California has seen a 198 percent increase since January 2021, followed by Los Angeles (141 percent), San Jose (141 percent), and Denver, Colorado (129 percent). California had the most increases overall, with The Golden State cities taking five of the top seven spots on Zenreach’s list of increases. At the same time, California is fully reopening its economy today, which could bump its overall number of foot traffic increases even higher in the future. 

Zenreach expects foot traffic to continue increasing for the entire country. “It would not surprise me if nationwide foot traffic reaches a more than 55% lift (since January 1st, 2021) within the next three months.” Megan Wintersteen, VP of Marketing for Zenreach, said in a statement.

Of course, the foot traffic increases come at a time when the restaurant industry is dealing with a major labor shortage that’s making it difficult for businesses to offer the level of customer service they normally would. The restaurant industry is still 1.5 million jobs below pre-pandemic levels, according to the National Restaurant Association. An increase in foot traffic could further increase difficulties in delivering the kind of service customers previously expected when dining out. Unemployment benefits are frequently blamed for the shortage, and many states are now asking for proof of a job search for those seeking unemployment. Larger chains are also responding to demands for safer jobs and higher wages for restaurant workers.

Dishpatch Raises £10M for ‘Finish at Home’ Meal Delivery Service

Dishpatch, a finish-at-home meal kit service based in the U.K., has raised £10 million (~$14 million USD) in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz and LocalGlobe, who co-led the round. Other participants to the round include Stride, Entree Capital, Entrepreneur First, and several angel investors.

The Dishpatch service is a cross between a meal kit company and a restaurant delivery service. The company works with local restaurants to offer consumers a pick of weekly meals that are delivered on Fridays. All food is fully cooked at the restaurant but arrives to customers’ homes cold. Customers themselves handle the final heating and preparation, aided by detailed instructions that accompany that food. 

Dishpatch, which has called itself “the antithesis of Deliveroo,” launched during the pandemic as an in-between option for off-premises restaurant meals that’s not quite restaurant delivery but not a box of raw ingredients a la HelloFresh, either.  

The finish-at-home meal kit concept as a whole became popular in 2020 during the pandemic. For many restaurants, particularly higher end ones, throwing a fully prepped hot meal into a takeout box and handing it over to a delivery courier was less than ideal. However, with dining rooms closed for the majority of 2020, businesses had to make revenue from other channels. Finish-at-home meal kits provided a way for restaurants to participate in delivery without compromising the integrity of their food concepts. Many of the restaurants now on Dishpatch’s platform started working with the company, which was founded in 2020, for exactly this reason. 

Dishpatch currently has 25 restaurant signed to its platform that delivery to the London area — over 50 miles from the city center in some cases. Funds from this seed round will allow 20 more restaurants to join the by the end of the year. The company will also further develop its tech, marketing, distribution, and customer service.  

California Giant Berry Farms and OnePointOne Team Up to Grow Berries Indoors

More than once in the last few months, indoor farmers have named berries the next important crop for controlled environment agriculture (CEA). California Giant Berry Farms added further weight to that claim today by announcing a partnership with OnePointOne, a technology company that specializes in vertical farming. 

The eventual goal of the partnership is to increase berry output as well as grow crops closer to consumers. To do this, California Giant will work with OnePointOne to develop “an exclusive strawberry cultivar,” an aeroponic vertical farming system that will grow berries. OnePointOne will provide the tech, which includes AI and robotics, while California Giant will share its expertise and existing data for berry growing.

Speaking in a statement, OnePointOne CEO and co-founder Sam Bertram said that his company’s robotics, AI, and plant scientists will “identify the ideal moment for planting, pollination, flowering and picking that will result in strawberries of the highest quality and Brix levels.” The data from these learnings will then be shared with California Giant and potentially used in traditional field growing, too. 

California Giant joins the list of traditional berry growers currently partnering with indoor vertical farming companies. Driscoll’s announced a partnership with California-based Plenty towards the end of last year, and just a couple months ago, Chile-based Hortifrut launched a partnership with New Jersey-based AeroFarms. 

Berries being highly perishable fruits that can easily be damaged in shipping, they make for a logical choice when it comes to choosing crops for indoor farms located closer to consumers. Fully controlled environments, like vertical farms, largely eliminate the need to use pesticides, while close proximity to customers means the berries spend less time in transit. 

California Giant and OnePointOne currently have vertical farming structures in California and Arizona, and plan to expand across the U.S. over time. 

Consolidation Comes for the Restaurant Back Office

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Consolidation of restaurant tech companies has been a topic for years. And in the last few months, deals like PAR’s acquisition of guest loyalty platform Punchh and Squarespace nabbing hospitality company Tock suggest M&A is alive and well in restaurant tech. 

News from the last week suggests that the next big area of restaurant tech up for consolidation is the restaurant back office. 

Toast, which wants to be the Swiss Army Knife of restaurant tech, recently said it is acquiring xtraCHEF, whose software digitizes and organizes back-of-house and back-office tasks. Think accounting, scheduling management, inventory management, and budgeting. While Toast’s partner network features a number of different back-office software platforms, restaurants can integrate into their systems, the full acquisition of xtraCHEF means Toast can add to its own ever-growing list of software products for restaurants. 

Shortly after the Toast news, Restaurant365 said it was acquiring Compeat, which digitizes labor, accounting, vendor relationships and other tasks for restaurants. In this case, Restaurant365 is itself a back-office company, with software that does much the same thing as Compeat. The acquisition suggest Restaurant365 wants to increase and improve its capabilities in this area. 

Both deals are notable because, until now, the back office has been less of a priority for restaurants and has received way less investment money over the years than front-of-house tech and customer-facing tech. Amid a broader industry consolidation (see above), this past week’s deals suggest a greater need, or at least desire, from restaurants for more precise management over their bookkeeping, inventory taking, and other behind-the-scenes tasks.

That isn’t too surprising. The last year or so devastated the restaurant industry. Excepting chains with deep pockets a la Chipotle, those that have managed to hang on are operating off margins even more razor-thin than they were before the pandemic. Better management of inventory, invoices, vendor relationships, and so forth means a better overall view of where costs in a restaurant are going, which could ultimately save businesses money at a time when there isn’t much of it to be had. Those restaurant tech companies that can are swooping in to add more tools for the back office in the hopes of staying at the top of a restaurant tech space that’s currently more bloated than Taco Bell’s pre-COVID drive-thru menu.

Whether digitizing the entire back of house will make enough of a noticeable difference in restaurants’ margins will be determined only at some point down the road, when more restaurants have swapped pen and paper for mobile apps and other software. If they do. After all, these systems aren’t free to implement, so it remains to be seen how many restaurants, particularly small and/or independent ones, do so in the near future.

In the meanwhile, restaurant tech consolidation will continue. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if a company like Restaurant365, which though large still only focuses on one area of the restaurant, were picked up by an even larger all-in-one platform like Toast. 

Stay tuned . . .

More Restaurant Tech Headlines

Starbucks Reinstates Its Reusable Cup Program With a Low-Tech Twist – Starbucks will reinstate its reusable cup program in the U.S. on June 22, more than a year after suspending the program because of COVID-19-related safety concerns. 

JustKitchen Raising $20M, Expanding into the U.S., Asia – Vancouver, Canada-headquartered JustKitchen announced this week it is in the process of raising $20 million to expand its network of ghost kitchens and virtual restaurant brands.

Virtual Restaurant Company Curb Raises €20M – Stockholm, Sweden-based ghost kitchen startup Curb has raised funding to expand its ghost kitchen network and virtual restaurant portfolio.

Popmenu Raises $65M for its Restaurant Digital Marketing and Ordering Platform

Popmenu, a digital marketing and ordering platform for restaurants, announced today that it has raised a $65 million Series C round of funding. The round was led by Tiger Global Management with participation from new investor Salesforce Ventures and existing investors Bedrock Capital, Base10 and Felicis Ventures. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Popmenu to $87.1 million.

Popmenu’s online suite of tools allow restaurants to build their own branded websites, with dynamic, interactive menus. Restaurants can also coordinate delivery or pickup, enable customer reviews and generate follow-up digital marketing promotions. Popmenu also offers a contactless ordering software package (something made more important by the pandemic) that allows guests to scan a QR code with their smartphone to view and order off of restaurant menus.

During the pandemic last year, when dining rooms were shut down, the restaurant industry turned to delivery and takeout to stay alive. The easiest way to do that was to join up with a third-party delivery service like Uber Eats or DoorDash. But that easy path to delivery came at the cost of handing over both the customer relationship (i.e., ordering and sales data) and the ability to control branding. Some restaurant tech companies even went as far as calling the pandemic “a wakeup call” for restaurants around where, how, and by whom their data gets accessed.

As an alternative to delivery marketplaces, Popmenu bills itself as a tool restaurants can use to control the customer’s journey from the time that person lands on the person’s website to the time they click the order button and their credit card is charged.

This rebuilding of direct relationships between restaurants and consumers is something many software services tout nowadays, with everyone from Toast, Square, Olo, and other offering some form of direct ordering capability. Squarespace’s recent acquisition of hospitality management platform Tock will likely add more competition to this space, too.

At the same time, however, delivery services themselves are bringing their own “commission-free” ordering platforms to market. Grubhub, DoorDash, and Uber Eats have all announced some version of this concept in a bid to keep restaurants (and their data) firmly entrenched in their own ecosystems. 

For its part, Popmenu says it will use the new funding to accelerate the development of its Popmenu Max, which bulks up its all-in-one solution with some AI-powered features.

Restaurant365 Acquires Back-Office Software Company Compeat

Restaurant management platform Restaurant365 announced this week it has acquired Compeat, which makes software to help restaurants manage their workforce and the back office. Restaurant365 will continue to support Compeat products and customers after the deal goes through, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Restaurant365 is itself a back-of-house-focused company, with a cloud-based software platform that gives restaurants a single, digital place to manage their accounting, payroll, scheduling, inventory, and other back-office tasks. The system integrates with other tools in the restaurant, including POS, vendor, and banking systems. 

Compeat offers a similar set of cloud-based tools for restaurants. In addition to its technology, the company will bring its own rather robust list of restaurant clients as well as some hotel chains to the partnership. 

Both companies offer a similar promise to hospitality businesses: to digitize and therefore simplify back-office tasks and in doing so save businesses time and money.

Restaurant365’s announcement comes right on the heels of Toast’s acquisition of another back-office/back-of-house management platform, xtraXCHEF. Other deals, mergers, and acquisitions are bound to follow. The last year has devastated many restaurants’ businesses. For those that managed to survive, keeping a tighter grip on costs is an imperative right now. Many restaurant tech companies claim that digitization and better management of the back of house can help restaurants maintain better margins.

The combination of Restaurant365 and Compeat will serve over 28,000 restaurants. Restaurant365 CEO Tony Smith will lead the new business. 

In the meantime, expect more consolidation for restaurant tech over the next several months as the industry continues its slow recovery phase.

Witness the Many Forms of Food Waste Innovation

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Since the start of 2021, we’ve seen numerous developments that showcase how vast and varied the efforts to fight food waste have become. Sachets that slow food spoilage. Hyperspectral imaging to analyze avocados. Vodka made from old crackers. A skincare line. 

All of these examples (and many others) underscore both the need for innovation and the fact that we’re getting more of it nowadays when it comes to food waste. Food waste, after all, is a global problem with environmental, monetary, and human consequences. To mitigate climate change and build a more resilient food system, the planet needs to meet food waste reduction targets set down by the United Nations, the USDA, the EPA, and others, including the UN Sustainable Development Goal of cutting food waste in half by 2050 (UN SDG Target 12.3.1).

Even just a few years ago, both the issues and the UN goal were mere abstraction to many outside the food industry. After all, it’s hard to visualize statistics like “one-third of the world’s food goes to waste” or “food waste’s global footprint is 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases.”

Fortunately, groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), ReFED, the World Wildlife Fund, and others have worked tirelessly over the last several years to bring the topic of food waste closer to center stage in the conversations about our food system. In fact, ReFED estimates that the total amount of food wasted in the U.S. has leveled off since 2016, while food waste per capita has decreased 2 percent over the last three years. Meanwhile, investment is slowly but surely trickling into the space, with companies like Apeel, Imperfect Foods, and Silo closing large rounds of funding in the last several months.

Still, there is a lot of work to be done, which is where innovation can play a big role. Food waste happens at every stage of the food supply chain, from items left in the field to rot to those dumped own the drain or sent to the landfill. To curb the waste, we need more investment in the kind of infrastructure that can measure, rescue, and recycle organic waste and prevent it from going to landfills and incinerators. We also need a huge collective effort from food producers, manufacturers, retailers, restaurants, capital providers, and others, with innovation at the center of those actions. 

Many are already bringing new technologies and processes to the food supply chain to try and make waste less possible. One need only glance briefly at the level of innovation currently happening around food waste to understand the breadth of entrepreneurs, companies, and agencies using their collective brainpower to build more food-waste-fighting solutions.

But rather than read a big ol’ list of companies, I instead encourage you to join us next week, on June 16, for the Food Waste Insights + Innovation Forum. The Spoon has teamed up with ReFed for the all-virtual event, which will include chats with experts across the food supply chain as well as panels and innovator demos.

At this event, we want to highlight innovators in the food waste space, acknowledging the work of companies developing everything from biosensing technology for the supply chain to shelf-life extension tools for grocery retailers to those evolving and improving the date-labeling system in the U.S. Add grocery order automation, upcycling, solutions to at-home food waste, and many other areas to that list.

The event will also connect innovators — whether you’re onstage or in the audience — with investors and capital, and will even include a session dedicated to how companies can go about raising money for their company. An open networking/demo time will also allow investors to ask one-on-one questions to innovators and vice versa.

Got ideas you want to share about how to reduce food waste? Or maybe you’re looking for a new idea or partner to help supercharge your own company’s efforts in this area, or you just want to learn more about this growing movement. Whichever the case, register today for this half-day event.

More Food Tech Headlines

LIVEKINDLY Collective Acquires Seaweed Burger Maker, The Dutch Weed Burger – The Dutch Weed Burger makes a range of meat analogs using seaweed as the hero ingredient. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Print a Drink 3D Prints Designs Inside a Cocktail, Develops Smaller Machine for Corporations – Print a Drink has created two working robots (one in the U.S. and one in Europe) that can print out custom designs inside drinks.

NPD: Shipments of Plant-Based Proteins to Restaurants Up 60 Percent Year Over Year – Shipments of plant-based proteins from foodservice distributors to commercial restaurants were up 60 percent year-over-year in April of 2021.

Toast Acquires Back-Office Software Platform xtraCHEF

Restaurant tech company Toast has acquired back-of-house management platform xtraCHEF, according to a Toast statement released today. The deal follows a partnership the two companies launched in 2020. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Acquiring xtraCHEF will give Toast access to back office tools that automate tasks like invoicing, budgets, and recipe and inventory management, among other things. The pitch xtraCHEF has long given restaurants is that its software platform can help manage food costs and achieve better margins. Andy Schwartz, CEO of xtraCHEF, said the deal will combine Toast’s point-of-sale data with his company’s line-item spending details, giving restaurants “a true end-to-end view of their financial health.” 

The xtraCHEF/Toast integration already boasts a long list of capabilities, including digitizing invoices and receipts, synching daily sales data from Toast with budget targets, setting price alerts, and managing all documents in one central cloud-based location.

Up to now, xtraCHEF has been listed alongside several other integrations on the Toast site, including beverage-specific inventory platforms like Bevspot and PourMyBeer, as well as general back-office platforms like PeachWorks and Synergysuite. With the announcement of the acquisition, xtraCHEF will become xtraCHEF by Toast.

Both Schwartz and xtraCHEF CTO and cofounder Bhavik Patel will remain in their current roles for now.  

Losing margins to wasted and/or mismanaged inventory has been an issue for years, as has general organization of the restaurant back office. The pandemic-related losses restaurants have suffered over the last year and a half have made the need for more precise BOH management more urgent for many.

Many back-of-house-focused platforms exist nowadays and promise to digitize more of what goes on behind the scenes at restaurants. Galley, Statis.ai, and SousZen are other companies bringing more technology to this space. But as Toast’s Partner Network can attest, the restaurant tech space is rather bloated at the moment, which makes further consolidation a foregone conclusion. End-to-end platforms like Toast and Square will likely be snapping up other restaurant tech players in the near future as digitization becomes more mandatory for doing business.

Starbucks Reinstates Its Reusable Cup Program With a Low-Tech Twist

Starbucks will reinstate its reusable cup program in the U.S. on June 22, more than a year after suspending the program because of COVID-19-related safety concerns. 

The Seattle coffee giant halted its longtime reusable cup program in March of 2020. Since then, the chain has only served up beverages in its own to-go cups. However, as Starbucks pointed out in a letter this week, the company has a goal to reduce single-use cup waste by 50 percent by 2030 as part of a larger, multi-decade goal of becoming a resource positive company. 

The newly reinstated cup program will still offer customers that bring their own cups to Starbucks stores a $.10 discount. The company has also introduced a low-tech but seemingly effective way to get these reusables from the customers hands to the barista’s and back again: keep the cup in a ceramic mug while the barista makes the drink.

For now, the reusable program is only available to in-store customers, though Starbucks said it is “testing safe options” for reusable cups in the drive-thru lane. “For here ware” — ceramic mugs and plates — will once again be available for in-store customers, too.

Elsewhere, Starbucks is in the midst of a pilot test for its “Borrow a Cup” program, where customers can get their beverages in a reusable cup for a $1 deposit. For the program, Starbucks has partnered with Ridwell, a company that collects hard-to-recycle items, to offer a home-pickup service.

Worldwide, we throw out roughly 264 billion paper cups per year. Most of these are difficult to recycle because of their plastic inner linings. When it launched the Borrow a Cup program, Starbucks itself noted that a major hurdle to curbing this problem is convenience. “The challenge is how to make choosing reusables as convenient as you expect from Starbucks – no extra steps – especially with 80% of Starbucks beverages being enjoyed on the go,” the company said.

Other restaurant chains, including McDonald’s, Burger King and Just Salad, will grapple with a similar challenge as they further develop their own reusables programs. In all likelihood, the most effective strategy to cutting down cup waste (and packaging waste in general) will be a combination of bring-your-own-cup programs, partnerships with circular-packaging services, and regulatory requirements.