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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Jennifer Marston

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. The company said it is getting $16 million from Canadian investment dealerr Beacon Securities Limited, which will buy 11.9 million shares of JustKitchen at $1.35 per share. JustKitchen is also looking to raise an additional $4 million.

The company has a number of plans for this new funding, including international expansion, more software development, and some brand acquisition, too.  

JustKitchen operates what it calls “hub-and-spoke” commercial kitchens. Ingredients are prepped in a central main kitchen (the “hub”) and sent to smaller “spoke” kitchens located strategically close to customers. Once a user places an order via the JustKitchens app or website, the spoke kitchen closest to that person completes the order and a delivery service shuttles the meal to its final destination. 

This version of the hub-and-spoke model isn’t widely used at the moment, with most ghost kitchen providers operating traditional commissaries a la Kitchen United or restaurants utilizing space on their own properties. However, the definition of “ghost kitchen” no longer just applies to restaurant food. Another Canadian company, just called Ghost Kitchen, is a good example of this: Ghost Kitchen sells some easy-to-assemble restaurant food, but it also sells pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and packages of Beyond burgers. These simpler types of orders that require minimal prep lend themselves to smaller, spoke-like kitchens closer to customers and powered by a main central kitchen.

In addition to working with third-party restaurant partners, JustKitchen also operates a portfolio of in-house delivery-only restaurants. The company also offers a delivery-only grocery service called JustMarket. Users can add grocery items onto their restaurant meal orders or simply get groceries delivered directly. 

Though based in Vancouver, the company currently only operates its services in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Part of the new funding will go towards opening new spoke kitchens in Taiwan. There are also plans to expand into the western half of the U.S. and into other Asian countries later this year, including Singapore and the Philippines. In the U.S., JustKitchen will begin in Seattle, Washington and several cities in California.

DoorDash Expands to Japan

DoorDash today announced the official launch of its delivery service in Japan. This is the San Francisco-based company’s first foray into the Asia market, and its third international expansion after Canada and Australia. 

Service begins today in Sendai, a city with just over 1 million inhabitants in the northeastern part of Japan. The choice of location is in keeping with DoorDash’s strategy elsewhere, which is to focus on smaller cities and suburban markets over major metropolises. Historically, this has helped DoorDash reach customers normally outside most restaurants’ delivery ranges, and it’s arguably a factor that has kept DoorDash in the top spot for marketshare, at least here in the U.S.

Whether the company can repeat that success in Japan remains to be seen. Japan is a restaurant-dense country, which means plenty of prospective DoorDash merchants and customers. However, the country is also home to a lot of competition in the delivery space, including major services like Uber Eats and Delivery Hero.

DoorDash, meanwhile, has recently added services like grocery and convenience store delivery as a way of reaching new customer types and also standing out from the competition. (Uber also offers grocery delivery in some U.S. locations.) The company has not yet said if these services will be immediately part of its expansion to Japan. 

DoorDash went public at the end of 2020. Last month, the company reported revenues of $1.08 billion for the first quarter of 2021, up from $362 million in the previous year and beating out Wall Street estimates.

Restaurants in Sendai will also be able to use DoorDash’s Storefront feature, which lets businesses process orders and payments directly, rather than going through the marketplace. 

Virtual Restaurant Company Curb Raises €20M

Stockholm, Sweden-based ghost kitchen startup Curb announced this week it has raised a €20 million (~$24.4 million USD) round led by Point72 Ventures (h/t tech.eu). EQT, an existing investor, also participated in the round. Curb has now raised €23.2 million to date.

Curb is only a little over one year old, having been founded in May 2020 by ex-Delivery Hero employees Carl Tengberg and Felipe Gutierrez. The company raised an initial €3.2 million in December of last year, which went towards helping the company expand its delivery-only restaurant brands’ presence.

Curb operates what’s essentially a virtual food court, with many of the items meant to evoke street food. It’s collection of delivery-only restaurants include a Mexican-American concept, a burger restaurant, salads and bowls, and chicken wings, among other offerings. All concepts, menus, food preparation, design, and other branding elements are created in-house. Curb also operates its own tech stack. While specific details are not widely available publicly, the company has said it prioritizes data tracking and analysis to improve operations across its supply change as well as monitor customer demands and alter menu items accordingly. 

The company’s operation currently serves customers in Stockholm and Copenhagen, Denmark. Customers of Curb can order via a number of third-party delivery services that differ based on availability in a given location. Orders are prepped and fulfilled in ghost kitchen locations.

Taster, headquartered in London, U.K., is probably Curb’s nearest competitor in terms of what it offers. Like Curb, Taster has its own portfolio of virtual restaurants. Order prep and fulfillment is done in house, and items are available via third-party delivery platforms. The company raised $37 million at the beginning of May. In the U.S., a company called C3 offers a similar model to both Curb and Taster, with restaurant tech company Lunchbox powering the back-end technical capabilities of its virtual food hall.

Curb, meanwhile, says it will use its new funds to further develop its tech stack and grow its overall operations. 

Better Meat Co. Completes Its Production Facility for Fermented Mycoprotein Ingredients

Plant-based ingredient maker Better Meat Co.’s new fermentation plant, which will produce the company’s mycoprotein ingredient Rhiza, is up and running as of today in Sacramento, California, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

Rhiza is a fungi-based protein analogue with a naturally meaty texture and neutral taste. Because it is a whole food, it requires less processing than, say, pea protein, to get a meat alternative customers would actually want to eat. Better Meat Co. says the product can be used either on its own, as a complete replacement for meat, or as a “meat enhancer” that gets blended with traditional protein. 

To get Rhiza, the company uses a fermentation process where fungi feeds on a basic crop such as a potato to create a biomass that can be harvested with minimal processing. The process is similar to those of Quorn or Enough, companies that also use fermentation-based mycoprotein production. 

Since Better Meat Co. is a business-to-business company, it will sell Rhiza to food companies that can use it in their own products. Adding an ingredient like Rhiza to an existing meat product can improve the latter’s overall nutritional profile. For example, it could reduce the amount of cholesterol typically found in a traditional burger patty. The company also claims its product has more iron than traditional beef, more protein than eggs, and more fiber than oats.

The new facility in Sacramento will include both lab and office space. It will primarily serve as a R&D facility in addition to producing “thousands of pounds of finished product per month,” according to today’s news release. 

Survey: Indoor Ag to Expand, Add More Tech in 2021

Growers expect to add more technology to various forms of indoor farming for the rest of this year and into the next, according to indoor farm analytics company Artemis’ 2020 State of Indoor Farming report released yesterday.

The report, done in partnership with Startle, is based on a survey of 205 enterprise horticulture facilities, including those with high- and mid-tech greenhouses, indoor vertical farms, and container farms. Respondents answered a number of questions related to crop yields, labor, suppliers, and input. Underlying all of these things is the continued march of technology into the indoor farming space.

A commonly known point the report notes is that indoor ag typically requires more technology than traditional agriculture. For example, while glass greenhouses still use natural sunlight, the addition of LEDs can speed up the grow process for plants or provide more light in parts of the world where sunlight isn’t abundant. Meanwhile, more indoor ag companies these days are turning to tech that can help workers manage operations — an especially important point as farms get bigger and bigger.

To that end, survey respondents’ number one reason for implementing tech is “managing operations more efficiently” (39 percent of respondents). Lowering the cost of production (20 percent) and increasing yield (19 percent) were next. Getting better-quality crops, interacting with customers more effectively, and meeting food safety and compliance standards were also on the list.

In the next year, 19 percent of respondents said they plan to implement data and analytics, while 18 percent will add climate control systems and 17 percent will add labor tracking and cultivation management software. Following those items, growers plan to add more LEDs as well as post-harvest automation equipment and organic nutrients. Remote monitoring and automated scales for weight measurements were also mentioned.

The majority of growers, 73 percent, also plan to expand significantly over the next five years, with a combined expansion of 544 acres total. Mid-tech greenhouse companies — glass or polycarbonate greenhouses that use some tech but not “to the full extent possible” — will expand the most, at 206 acres, followed by container farms at 156 acres and indoor vertical farms at 84 acres.

Echoing this, numerous companies in the space have announced expansion plans in the last few months, from vertical farm company Kalera’s ongoing trek west across the U.S. to Square Roots’ expansion of its container farm network and a second 60-acre greenhouse from AppHarvest. In terms of acreage, greenhouses are likely to grow the most, since they typically don’t use vertical farming technology and often grow crops that require more space than the compact leafy greens that are so popular.  

And speaking of leafy greens, those along with herbs still account for almost half of all crops grown via indoor ag right now (26 percent and 20 percent, respectively). Microgreens (16 percent) are next, followed by tomatoes (10 percent). Other crops, such as strawberries, may become more prevalent as companies leverage new technologies and methods for growing indoors.

Oakland Residents Push Back Against a Forthcoming CloudKitchens Location, Citing Trash, Traffic, and Parking Issues

Residents of Oakland, California are pushing back against the opening of a new ghost kitchen location from Travis Kalanick’s super-secretive CloudKitchens company (h/t Berkeleyside). The facility is slated to open in July. But in an online petition, residents argue that the city of Oakland issued permits for the building quickly “without public notice or any consideration of the impacts on our neighborhood.”

The planned CloudKitchens facility at 5325 Adeline St. in North Oakland will house space for 35 commercial kitchen spaces, which is huge by ghost kitchen standards. The kitchens would operate seven days per week, 18 hours per day, according to the online petition. 

Those opposed include the Golden Gate Community Association and the Oakland Neighborhoods for Equity. These groups as well as residents of the North Oakland neighborhood are pushing for a freeze on construction at the forthcoming CloudKitchens location until the city can address a list of concerns around having a massive ghost kitchen facility in the area. That includes more traffic from the assumed influx of drivers that will be coming and going from CloudKitchens, a loss of parking for neighborhood residents, and “a more dangerous Adeline Street” because of these things. The petition also cites noise, exhaust, odors, and pests as other potential problems. 

This is not the first time CloudKitchens has gotten pushback from residents of a city. Earlier this year, those in Chicago’s North Center neighborhood complained of traffic, parking, and garbage issues from the CloudKitchens facility that opened in 2020. The city finally intervened, but only after police recorded numerous parking violations , calls for disturbance, and crashes in the span of three months.

Nor is this the first time the issue of ghost kitchens’ impact on surrounding neighborhoods come up. As the format has grown in popularity over the last year or so, restaurants, kitchen operators, and city residents alike have surfaced the discussion about the impact of these facilities on daily life and local business, not to mention basic safety on the streets. Talks stand to get even more nuanced as major ghost kitchen operators like CloudKitchens expand and more restaurant chains redesign their store formats to accommodate the uptick in pickup, delivery, and drive-thru orders.

Oakland residents are asking their city to delay the CloudKitchen’s opening as well as its number of food businesses and hours of operation.

McDonald’s Drive-Thru Plans Need to Factor In Franchisees

The big to-do in the drive-thru lane of late is news that McDonald’s is testing automated ordering at 10 locations in Chicago, Illinois. 

The tech is based on an acquisition McDonald’s made in 2019 of voice-tech company Apprente. Through it, intelligent systems, rather than human beings, take the drive-thru customer’s order and send it to the kitchen for fulfillment. At an investor conference last week, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said the company is seeing 85 percent accuracy on orders, with only about 20 percent of orders across the 10 stores requiring human intervention.

While Kempczinski is confident we’ll see voice-ordering at all McDonald’s drive-thrus in the next five years, he added that consumers shouldn’t expect to see it widespread as soon as next year. “There is a big leap between going from 10 restaurants in Chicago to 14,000 restaurants across the U.S. with an infinite number of promo permutations, menu permutations, dialect permutations, weather — I mean, on and on and on and on,” he said at the conference.

Separate from the technical feats the system must accomplish, there is also a huge number of franchisees to consider in the process of a wide-scale implementation. There are currently 38,000 McDonald’s operating across roughly 115 countries. The majority — 93 percent — are franchisees. Getting them onboard may be no small feat, either.

Disputes over technology have created tension between McDonald’s and its franchisees for years now — going all the way back to when some franchisees argued against having to offer Uber Eats to customers. The latest disagreement between the two groups concerns a $423-per-month fee corporate has been charging franchisees to cover a $70 million lag in outstanding technology fees. The National Owners Association (NOA), a group of McDonald’s franchises that formed a few years back, has gone as far as suggesting it create a technology cooperative to give owners more control over technology-related decisions. Ernst & Young is currently conducting a third-party audit of the fees in question.

All of which is to say, now may not be a great time to attempt a major rollout of what will probably be a costly system. How costly voice ordering will be for franchisees is unclear just yet, but it would presumably require setup and maintenance costs at the very least. And as we saw with McDonald’s Dynamic Yield acquisition, implementation, and eventual downgrade, not all new tech brings a justifiable amount of return on investment for franchisees. 

Labor also presents some urgent items to consider. 

While automating drive-thru ordering via a system like Apprente’s could aid in the current struggle against the current labor shortage, franchisees will still have to spend time and money training their employees to use the tech and work alongside it. In many cases, that means training them to learn when to not get involved.

At the investor conference, Kempczinski said one learning from the existing 10 implementations of the new tech was training crew to “not want to jump in” as soon as there is a question or pause from the system. “We’ve had to do a little bit of training of ‘just keep your hands off the steering wheel, let the computer do its work,’” he told investors, adding that it took time for crew members to learn to “trust” the technology. 

While McDonald’s hasn’t officially confirmed this, it’s likely franchisees would be in charge of training for the above. That in turn would mean operators and manages must first get comfortable with the tech themselves. And, given the high rate of turnover in QSRs, this could potentially eat up a lot of time if a manager were continually having to train new hires.

Many see the digitization of the drive-thru as essential. The drive-thru lane has become progressively slower over the years. The pandemic didn’t help that latter point, since lockdowns turned the drive-thru into one of the main order channels for restaurants, making overall wait times even longer. Other QSRs, including Chipotle, KFC, and Burger King, have all announced plans to make their drive-thrus more high tech to speed up wait times and improve order accuracy. Clearly McDonald’s needs to compete. This time around, though, it also needs to make sure it thoroughly considers its franchisees’ needs in the process.

More Headlines

Presto Launches a Bundle of Tech Tools to Help Restaurants Reopen With Fewer Staff – Restaurant tech platform Presto today launched a new product bundle it says is meant to help restaurants keep their operations up-to-par in the midst of the ongoing labor shortage.

Tesla May Soon Open Its Own Restaurant – Tesla has filed a trademark under restaurant services, which suggests the automaker may be finally working to realize its dream of combining its charging stations with an old-school drive-in restaurant.

Yum China’s New Program Will Teach Digital Skills to Children in Rural Areas – Yum! Brands spinoff Yum China is investing in more digital education for underserved areas. 

Barilla’s Venture Arm Is Launching the Fourth Cohort of Its Good Food Makers Accelerator. Applications Are Open

Pasta-maker Barilla’s Venture Group, BLU1877, announced this week that applications are open for the next cohort of its Good Food Makers accelerator. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the forthcoming program will be BLU1877’s fourth since starting the accelerator in 2018 with San Francisco, California-based incubator Kitchen Town.

Past participants to the eight-week Good Food Makers program include Plant Jammer, Renewal Mill, and Regrained, among others. Typically, each startup chosen to participate in a cohort receives $10,000 to use for business growth during the program as well as mentorship opportunities and the possibility of further collaboration with Barilla. Those chosen for cohort four can expect the same set of benefits.

For this latest cohort, Good Food Makers is looking for companies developing solutions for the following:

  • Circular Economy: Companies developing circular-economy solutions for upcycling pasta regrind, wheat brand, and bread crust
  • Better Food Delivery: Solutions that improve the preparation, logistics, automation, packaging, and recipe development of food delivery
  • Digital Nutrition Guides: Digital platforms that address the nutrition and sustainability of food items
  • Easy Meal Routines: Healthy meal kits and services

Good Food Makers has always run small in terms of the number of companies it selects for each cohort. This time around, the program will pick one startup for each of the above topic areas. In addition to specializing in one of the topic areas, applicants should also have, according to the announcement, “proven business results” and the “ability to demonstrate transformative ideas and approaches to supporting a better food system.” As with past cohorts, Kitchen Town will help with the selection process.

The program will kick off in September. For now, all programming is virtual, though BLU1877 notes that there is a possibility of in-person collaboration depending on the location of the chosen teams and current COVID-19 regulations.

Applications are open through August.

MeaTech 3D Files a Patent for Printing More Cultivated Meat

Bioprinting startup MeaTech 3D has filed a patent with the United States Patent Office (USPTO) it says could significantly improve the manufacturing process for its cultivated meat.

The Ness Ziona, Israel-based company has since 2018 been developing a method for cultivated meat that relies on 3D bioprinting. Cells are extracted from the animal (without harming it) and transferred to bioreactors, where they multiply before getting differentiated into different cell types, such as fat and muscle. That process is, with some variation, akin to just about any company developing cultivated meat right now.

Where MeaTech’s method starts to differ is when the bio-inks come into play. The bio-inks are formed from the cell types mentioned above, like muscle and fat, and scaffolding material, which provides structural support cells can adhere to as they grow and mature. Once the inks are loaded into a 3D bioprinter, they are printed to, in MeaTech’s own description, “assemble cells as they would be found in a conventional cut of muscle.” The printed product is incubated to form tissue and eventually become a full cut of meat that goes to the consumer. 

Needless to say, nobody’s buying full cuts of steak from MeaTech on store shelves at the moment. The company has so far only printed a carpaccio-like layer of meat, which is considerably thinner than a ribeye-sized cut of meat. It will likely be years before the latter emerges as an actual product, though MeaTech has recently announced a pilot production facility that will help in this process.

The company’s main competitor in this area is Aleph Farms, also based in Israel. Earlier this year, Aleph said it had developed a 3D-printed ribeye cultivated steak. Elsewhere, however, many cultivated meat companies continue to focus on unstructured meat like grounds, nuggets, and patties.

MeaTech says the patent filed for this week will give the company more control during the printing process, increase printing speeds, and allow for a greater variety of inks. The end goal, of course, is to improve the manufacturing process overall in order to get the company closer to making whole cuts of meat. 

  

Chile’s NotCo Nabs Investment From Danny Meyer-Affiliated Growth Equity Fund

Alternative protein company NotCo announced this week it has received an investment from from Enlightened Hospitality Investments (EHI), a growth equity fund affiliated with Union Square Hospitality’s Danny Meyer. Financial terms of the investment have not been disclosed at this time, though the company says it has raised “more than $130 million to date” and intends to get to a $1 billion valuation by the end of 2021.  

Chile-based NoCo says the investment will help it further expand in the U.S. and launch new products in the Latin America market. Currently, NotCo sells its pea protein-based milk alternative to U.S. consumers at Whole Foods stores and through online retailers Veji and Imperfect Foods. In Chile, Brazil, and Argentina, the company also has burger, mayonnaise, and ice cream alternatives. 

NotCo puts special emphasis on Giuseppe, the AI platform powering the company’s products. Giuseppe sifts through huge datasets (for example, from the USDA’s National Agricultural Library), to find ingredient and processing combinations that would best mimic the elements (flavor, texture, etc.) of real meat or dairy in plant-based alternatives. The goal is to eventually find flavor and ingredient combinations that can exactly mimic a burger, slice of cheese, or glass of milk.

A handful of other companies also use AI-based methods to create meat and dairy alternatives, from Climax’s cheese to Spoonshot’s platform that identifies novel flavor combinations.   

The EHI involvement will, says NotCo, expand into the U.S. foodservice market. In Latin America, the company already has existing partnerships with Papa John’s and Burger King.

Presto Launches a Bundle of Tech Tools to Help Restaurants Reopen With Fewer Staff

Restaurant tech platform Presto today launched a new product bundle it says is meant to help restaurants keep their operations up-to-par in the midst of the ongoing labor shortage. The Staff Multiplier technology package is meant to help both QSRs and full-service restaurants reopen at full capacity even with limited workers onboard, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

From Presto:

“Presto Staff Multiplier includes a variety of technologies designed to enable restaurants to increase the guest-to-staff ratio, improve speed and quality of service, identify bottlenecks, and offer guests a superior experience.”

In terms of actual tools, that includes a feature called Vision, which uses computer vision cameras to track throughput and order accuracy, and the Line Buster/Server Assistant, which are handheld tablets staff can use to take orders from anywhere, whether in the dining room or drive-thru. The bundle also includes voice ordering and pay-at-the-table features via tabletop kiosks and QR codes that let guests order and pay from their own mobile devices.

Some of these features are not brand new. Presto began offering QR codes for diners early on during the pandemic. The computer vision system and the company’s pay-at-the-table kiosks both pre-date the pandemic. Rather than a suite of new tools, Staff Multiplier is instead a neatly bundled package of existing Presto hardware and software that can make the order and pay process faster for restaurants, and easier with fewer people on the floor. 

Presto, which counts Chilli’s, Outback Steakhouse, and Aramark among its clients, launched a similar “bundle” last year, just as restaurants began to cautiously reopen after the first major lockdown. It’s “contactless” package was one of the instances of a restaurant tech company bundling a suite of tools together and branding them as a way to help restaurants reopen. Others quickly followed Presto’s lead, unveiling their own bundles of “contactless” dining room kits.

Of course, all that got put on hold when new lockdowns and capacity restrictions once again shuttered dining rooms. Now, with vaccinations widely available and capacity restrictions lifting or already lifted, we can expect more restaurant tech companies to follow Presto’s lead and launch tech bundles branded as tools to help with reopening. Only this time, the angle is combating the labor shortage. While more complex than first meets the eye, the shortage of restaurant workers is creating difficulties for restaurant owners when it comes to delivering high-quality service to guests in the dining room. Hardware and software can’t fix some of the bigger issues at stake, like the need for wage increases, but they can help restaurants grapple with the current situation a little more easily.

Tesla May Soon Open Its Own Restaurant

Tesla has filed a trademark under restaurant services, which suggests the automaker may be finally working to realize its dream of combining its charging stations with an old-school drive-in restaurant concept. The application is currently waiting to be reviewed. 

This isn’t a new idea. As far back as 2018, CEO Elon Musk has said he wants a “retro carhop” where a menu would automatically pop up on a driver’s dash when they parked their car at the restaurant. Roller skates and rock ‘n’ roll would also be included in the package. And these restaurants would, of course, include Tesla charging stations. The company even applied for permits to build this “Supercharger station” in Santa Monica, California.

For the last few years, no work on the project has been done until building applications for said Supercharger station were submitted this year, and the trademark application filed last week. Under the latter, Tesla’s “T” logo would be trademarked for use by “restaurant services, pop-up restaurant services, self-service restaurant services, take-out restaurant services,” according to the application. 

While the name “Tesla” may not automatically conjure images of restaurants, the idea of combining a quick-service eating establishment with a charging station makes perfect sense. Consumers need something to do if they are away from home while having to charge their car. Eating a meal is an obvious activity, and many restaurant chains are already partnering with companies to host charging stations in parking lots.

Whether Tesla concocts its own restaurant concept from the ground up or partners with another brand remains to be seen.