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Michael Wolf

May 26, 2022

We Now Have More Details on Tesla’s Drive-in Movie Theater Restaurant Plans

When Elon Musk said he wanted a drive-in restaurant, apparently he meant a drive-in movie theater restaurant.

As detailed in the plans filed with the city of Los Angeles, the new Tesla drive-in restaurant will have not one but two movie screens that will show ~30-minute movies (about the time it takes to charge a Tesla). The screens will sit on the north and west property lines and be viewable from both the rooftop area and diners’ vehicles.

You can see what the restaurant (and screens and decorative bamboo poles) might look like in the renderings below:

Below is the description of the drive-in theater portion of the new restaurant from the filing:

Finally, there will be two movie screens for viewing by people charging their cars and/or eating in the restaurant. The movies to be shown will be features lasting approximately the same amount of time as it takes to charge a vehicle (~30 minutes). The two screens will be on both North and West property lines of the site to allow people to view the screens from both their vehicles and from the roof top seating area. A decorative bamboo landscape screen will be planted on the property lines to frame both movie screens. The operational hours for the Drive-In movie theatre will be from 7 am-11 pm pursuant to the Commercial Corner standards

There are many more details, many of which were recently shared by Twitter user MarcoRP with some extra reporting by electric mobility blog Elektrek. Here are some of the particulars and questions we have about the project:

The restaurant will have lots of seating – The theater has lots of built-in seating both inside and outside. There will be two rows of theater seating on the top level, a standing bar area behind the theater seating, and multiple table rounds. On the bottom floor, there will be seating both inside and outside the rotunda-style building. There will also be charging stalls in the parking lot where Tesla owners (and I am assuming lots of non-Tesla owners) will be able to park, order food and watch video on the large screens.

You can see the parking lot schematic with the round restaurant and charging stations in the graphic below:

The restaurant will be on the site of an old Shakey’s – The future location of the Tesla restaurant is where an old (but still operational) Shakey’s restaurant stands today. The address is on Santa Monica Blvd in downtown Hollywood, not the original planned location in the city of Santa Monica near Route 66. The plot size is .565 acres with a large parking lot.

The new restaurant will run 24 hours a day – While the movie viewing hours will be restricted (7 am – 11 pm) to no doubt comply with local ordinances, Tesla wants the dining portion of its futuristic drive-in to rock around the clock.

Most parking spots will have superchargers. Who will be able to park there? – The parking lot will have 34 stalls, with 29 of the stalls having superchargers. It will be interesting to see whether Tesla imposes any restrictions on who can park in the restaurant stalls. Since the restaurant will no doubt draw in lots of tourists, parking stall demand will likely exceed availability. While many visitors will no doubt drive Teslas, chances are more likely will not. My guess is that Tesla will restrict most of the parking stalls for Tesla vehicles.

Still no hard date on opening – The filing doesn’t specify when the new restaurant would be built or open for business. While I wouldn’t hold your breath, given that this project has been gestating since 2018, it is at least encouraging that the company has drawn up plans and looks to have decided on the location.

The first of many? It’s worth wondering if this will be the first of what could be multiple restaurants for Tesla. My guess is that it all depends on how successful this location is. Sure, it’s a showcase location in the middle of Hollywood that will undoubtedly draw in lots of tourists, but I can see Tesla building more of these (or at least a modified version of the concept) as they build out their charging station network.

And Robots? The final question (naturally) is: Will there be robots?

May 25, 2022

Eat Just’s GOOD Meat Lines Up Partners to Scale Up Cultivated Meat Production

The great cultivated meat scale-up has begun. Or, at the very least, the game plan for one of the industry’s most high-visibility players is finally coming into view.

That startup is Eat Just, Inc., which has announced two significant partnerships for its Good Meat group, the company’s cultivated meat division, over the past week. The first partnership, announced last week, is with food/ag conglomerate ADM, which will partner with Eat Just to optimize the growth factors and nutrients in the cell culture growth media. According to the announcement, the two will work together to create a growth medium “for quality, cost and volume.”

The second partnership, announced today, is with ABEC, a biomanufacturing engineering and services company, to build out Good Meat’s manufacturing facilities. The multi-year agreement will see ABEC “design, manufacture, install and commission the largest known bioreactors for avian and mammalian cell culture.”

According to the announcement, the deal is for the production of ten 250,000-liter bioreactors, which will form the foundation for GOOD Meat’s large-scale cultivated meat facility. The production complex, which will be located in the United States, will have the capacity to produce up to 30 million pounds of cultivated meat. The new facility will initially produce chicken and beef products and have a nationwide distribution footprint.

While 30 million pounds sounds like a lot, it represents less than one-tenth of one percent of the aggregate meat consumption in the US. Still, it’s not nothing. The planned production represents a significant leap over any other announced production capacity (Upside’s pilot plant, announced last year, will eventually have a capacity of 400 thousand pounds of meat per year).

Some may dismiss these efforts as hardly making a dent in overall meat consumption but Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick and others have made it clear that the effort to scale up this industry will take decades, not years. These efforts to produce cell-cultivated meat at this scale will undoubtedly provide lessons for an industry collectively looking to figure out the science and technology of doing something that’s never been done before.

 

May 25, 2022

Remy Robotics Unveils Robotic Ghost Kitchen Platform as It Opens Third Location in Barcelona

Remy Robotics, an automated ghost kitchen startup, came out of stealth this week as it opened its third autonomous robotic kitchen.

Remy, based in Barcelona, creates custom-built robotic kitchens tailored for the food delivery industry. For the past year, the company has been operating two dark kitchens, one in Barcelona and one in Paris, and is opening its third kitchen in Barcelona this week.

Until this point, the company has been delivering food under its own virtual kitchen brands – including a flexitarian food brand called OMG – and has cooked and sold 60 thousand meals. Now, with the launch of its third kitchen, Remy is opening up its kitchens to other restaurant brands. According to the company, its system has the flexibility to install a new robotic kitchen and have it operational in about 48 hours.

If a brand is thinking about launching a new delivery-centric virtual brand with Remy, they shouldn’t expect to use their chefs and employees to make the meals. Remy believes that automated kitchens work better when the food is optimized for robotics from the ground up.

“We maximize what robots can do,” Remy CEO Yegor Traiman told The Spoon in a Zoom interview. “The main mistake of most robotics companies is they’re trying to mimic the human and teach robots how to do the things a human would do.”

Instead, Traiman says that they configured the entire process of food making to be done by robots, developing recipes and cooking techniques based on a variety of parameters, including the shape of Remy’s own packaging and how much moisture is lost during the cooking process. The company claims that their robotic systems decide autonomously how and for how long to cook a dish, based on where a customer lives and how long the delivery will take. They also utilize “computer vision and neural networks” alongside “smart ovens and sensors controlling temperature, moisture, weight and other key parameters.”

“We develop all the equipment,” Traiman said. “Robots, freezers, fridges. Because again, in a world where everything was designed and built by humans, for humans, there is no place for robots. You’re not able to make the system flexible enough.”

A Remy robot-powered ghost kitchen can fit up to ten brands into the same space that one human-powered kitchen can operate, and, according to Traiman, it shouldn’t be a problem adding new partners.

“There is huge interest at the moment in Spain and in France,” Traiman said. “Almost every neighbor at these cloud kitchen facilities a knocking on the door asking ‘guys, can we do something together?'”

May 24, 2022

SimulATE Spring Video Sessions: The Food Web3 Summit

Earlier this month, SimulATE Spring convened the leaders pioneering in food & web3. Now you can watch all the sessions here!

The second installment of the SimulATE event series, we explore how the world of web3 will impact restaurants, CPG, ag, community building, and more.

Subscribers to Spoon Plus can get access to all of the sessions below.

May 24, 2022

Fatburger Dropping 500 NFTs Good for a Free Burger on National Hamburger Day

Another burger joint has joined the NFT boom.

This time it’s Fatburger, who has partnered up with Supper Club, a Web3 focused food club, to create the burger chain’s first NFT drop.

Unlike some of the early moves by fast-food chains into NFTs, Fatburger is making it worth your while by adding some real-world utility to their token. Those who sign up early enough to get one of the 500 limited edition NFTs will get a coupon to redeem for a free Fatburger.

Unfortunately, however, to get access to the NFT and coupon they have to jump through a few technical hoops. From the release: Guests can access their specialty NFTs through their Solana blockchain wallet and will be able to redeem a coupon for a free Original Fatburger on their online purchase, starting June 1 through the end of the month. Once a user links their wallet to their browser, the Fatburger online ordering website will register if a user has an NFT in their Solana wallet and the coupon can be applied. Coupons will be redeemable once per NFT owner and will not include add-ons.

Maybe it’s no big deal for anyone who’s already fluent in NFTs and web3. I’m also sure there are enough Fatburger fanboys out there who will spend the time venturing into the world of web3 for the first time to learn how to install a wallet plugin on their browser, save their recovery phrase, and then connect to the Fatburger website to redeem the coupon.

But like we’ve said before (and others like Adam Brotman have been evangelizing), the consumer user experience needs to be much easier than it is now when it comes to using NFTs. My guess is it will get there- someday – where it will be as easy as tapping your phone or scanning a QR code to buy and use NFTs. Unfortunately, that point is definitely not now.

If you’d like to scoop up a Fatburger NFT on National Burger day, head on over to the Fatburger mint page early on May 28th.

May 24, 2022

Bear Robotics Debuts Hospitality Robot Designed for Multistory Hotel & Office Buildings

At this week’s National Restaurant Show, hospitality robotics startup Bear Robotics unveiled a new bot targeted at multi-floor commercial and residential spaces.

Called Servi Lift, the new robot incorporates several firsts for a Bear product, including an interactive touch screen, security doors, a large video display screen for advertising, and mobile app integration.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the Lift is the integration with commercial and residential security and elevator systems. While Bear is keeping the details quiet for now, the Lift is designed to navigate through office building community “gates” and call and operate elevators. My guess is the Lift likely requires a reasonably modern building system to enable direct integrations (I can’t see the Lift calling an elevator in some of those old NYC elevators, even some of the electric ones).

The Lift also features an automatic charging station to dock between deliveries. In the Lift intro video below, you can see the charging station situated in the dining area. It’s not hard to envision how new or recently retrofitted hospitality spaces in the future will have banks of robot charging stations as the reliance on automation in service roles grows.

The Lift also has a number of consumer interaction features, including app integration, the ability to notify customers they’ve arrived via phone call, and an on-robot touch screen where consumers can enter security passcodes to access their deliveries. While the interaction flow visualization looks seamless in the video above, my guess is that operator employees will accompany the robot in early deployments to make sure it arrives at its destination and the consumer experience is good.

Bear Robotics COO Juan Higueros teased the new delivery bot was on its way when I caught up with him in March: Higueros said the company plans to create a robot model that can travel to multiple floors in a building and create a larger model robot with additional carrying capacity. Beyond that, he said the company is also starting to think about other ways to bring automation to restaurants to help make the lives of service industry workers easier.

While the company was showing off a prototype of the Servi Lift in their booth at the National Restaurant Show this week, it’s not immediately clear when production units will be commercially available.

You can watch the Lift concept video below:

Meet Servi Lift

May 23, 2022

After Getting Derailed by COVID, Smart Food Container Startup Silo Attempts a Come Back

Back in late March of 2020, Silo CEO Tal Lapidot had a decision to make. The dark clouds of a global pandemic had gathered overhead, threatening to derail his company’s progress on finishing a product he’d been working years to deliver.

The product, called the Silo food storage system, was a new take on a stale category where most everyone used the same plastic containers their parents had used before them. The Silo featured lots of cool bells and whistles, including a built-in scale, Alexa integration, and spoilage notifications. The big idea, though, was a vacuum seal system that promised to extend shelf-life of food by up two to three times.

It turned out that lots of people liked the idea of a better food storage system and the company was flying high when it ran a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2018 that raised over $1.4 million. I was one of them, becoming backer #2531 after I plunked down $219 for the ‘enhanced basic’ reward package that included the Silo base and four containers. The promised ship date was April 2019, but after having backed a few hardware projects before this one, I knew ship dates were less hard promises than loose guidelines.

Lapidot and his team had been regularly posting updates on the progress of the company on Kickstarter, and the backers were, for the most part, both understanding and encouraging. With COVID-19 infections spreading and a whole lot of uncertainty about the virus, Lapidot felt he had no choice but to send his workers home. He posted an update on Kickstarter letting everyone know about the situation:

We hope this update finds you well, and you and your loved ones are staying safe. Since our last update, the world has changed in terrible ways. Unfortunately, this has significant implications for all businesses, including ours.

Silo recently had to pause all operations as the whole team is under stay-at-home orders, which, unfortunately, also caused the delay in sending this update. As a hardware startup, we have tried at first working from home, but this has proven to be highly inefficient as we cannot make actual progress without our team having access to our office lab and equipment.

Mothballing the project meant bringing his team back from China, where the company had been working with a contract manufacturer preparing to build the product. They’d already invested in the tooling for the product manufacturing run, one of the most expensive parts of building a hardware product.

“The idea was, once COVID subsided a bit, we would restore the operations, ” Lapidot told me in a phone interview. “But as you know, that took longer than expected.”

A couple of years longer than expected. While a big part of it was due to an inability to work on the product both in their office in Israel and on-site in China, an even bigger issue was the company soon ran out of funding. Although they’d managed to raise an impressive amount of money with their Kickstarter, the cost of engineering a product and manufacturing systems for over 5 thousand backers would cost much more than $1.4 million. Lapidot had expected this and managed to find investors for the company, but once COVID hit, one of them got cold feet.

“When COVID erupted globally, I got a phone call saying ‘hey, listen, we’re not going to transfer the funds’,” Lapidot said.

From there, with a furloughed team, stalled operations in China and a lack of funds to get things going, Silo entered a period of stasis as Lapidot just tried to keep the lights and preserve the company’s assets while he searched for new funding.

“The situation sort of stagnated, and we tried to figure out how we can get back on track.”

Two years on, things are finally starting to look up. The company has found a new investor to help fund the production run for the product, and now Lapidot is working to get the company back to where they were in the spring of 2020 when the world shut down. A big part of that is trying to reassemble a team and ramp up engineering and technical talent.

“We basically just send everyone home one day, and so there was no organized process of preserving the knowledge,” Lapidot said. “So we have everything, and now we’re trying to get to where we were.”

Other challenges include a lingering lack of critical components due to COVID-related supply chain disruptions. And then there are the continuing travel restrictions to China as the country tries to tamp down a new wave of COVID infections.

“We cannot travel to China because it’s 21 quarantine days just to enter, and it’s not very simple even to get that approval,” Lapidot said. “So it’s going to be a bit more challenging because we have to work more remotely instead of being there.”

According to Lapidot, the company has enough funding for an 18-month runway for the company, and his focus is on getting the first units of the product built. He has started building an engineering team and has reestablished ongoing contact with the manufacturers.

The biggest challenge, according to Lapidot, will be securing the critical components they need to build the final prototypes. They need those to finish debugging the system to prepare for manufacturing, after which they plan to send out factory-made units later this year.

In the meantime, Lapidot knows that the early goodwill he had among backers has evaporated as his updates have gone silent since last July as he has tried to figure out how to get the company back on its feet. Like many stalled Kickstarter projects, most of the messages from backers nowadays are less words of encouragement and more of the “what happened to my money?” variety.

Lapidot told me he plans to apologize to the backers and that he will be transparent about where things are in an upcoming update.

“I know people got hurt from the situation and I feel horrible. We didn’t want this situation. I’ve been a backer on the Kickstarter community for a while. Being in the doghouse after you have seen it from the other side, it’s not an easy experience.”

May 20, 2022

Forget Smart. Samsung’s Latest Fridge Focus is Creating Giant Custom Photo Walls

Who needs fridge magnets when you can create a giant photo wall with a picture of your kids, furbaby, or dream vacation getaway instead?

That’s exactly what you can do if you own a Bespoke fridge from Samsung. According to a release sent to The Spoon, owners of Bespoke fridges can now create custom fridge panels featuring a photo or artwork. The new feature can be added to a new Bespoke fridge or swapped out with a panel on an existing unit.

To create a Bespoke custom printed panel, users go to the Mybespoke website, upload a picture or artwork, edit the layout, and submit the panel for print. Each custom printed panel will set you back $250. The new custom-designed panels feature will be available later this year.

Okay, so pictures printed on your fridge isn’t exactly high-tech, but it is definitely a sign of where Samsung’s head is nowadays when it comes to their fridge lineup. It’s not like Samsung has forgotten about its Family Hub fridge line exactly, at least not yet. After all, they did announce some fairly modest improvements at CES, and you can get a Family Hub version of the Bespoke line. But it’s clear, at this point, that their primary focus seems to be their design-forward lineup with Bespoke.

All of which speaks to the state of the smart fridge market. No one has really cracked the code on figuring out how to leverage smarts to make food management truly easy. Sure, big screens are nice, as it using Alexa and auto-replenishment of grocery staples. But none of them, in our view, is doing a great job of helping us take inventory or reduce food waste without a whole lot of work on the part of the user.

We’re still waiting for that and hope someone will come up with that game-changing innovation soon. If you’ve got a big idea about that, why don’t you let us know and show it off at SKS Invent in October.

May 18, 2022

Has The Era of Private Label Plant-Based Meat Arrived? Motif Thinks So With Launch of New Line

Last year, the execs at Motif Foodworks figured they’d make some finished products to showcase the company’s next-gen plant-based ingredients in alt-beef, chicken, or pork.

The tests went so well that the company, which normally focuses on making plant-based meat building blocks for other manufacturers, has decided to launch its own line of finished-format private label products targeted at the foodservice and food retail markets.

Motif announced this news today as part of a release that led with the news of Robert Downey Jr’s Foodprint Coalition investing in Motif Foodworks. In fact, the launch of the new line was almost a footnote in a press release with the headline “Robert Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition Ventures Joins Motif FoodWorks in its Effort to Reimagine Plant-Based Foods.”

Sure, it’s exciting to announce a celebrity investor, but the truth is you can’t walk on a red carpet nowadays without turning around and knocking over an alt-protein investing movie star. So the private label launch is the more interesting news of the two and, I’m guessing, more impactful long-term for Motif’s business.

From a business perspective, it’s a smart move to chase a market that accounts for 17% of meat in North America and almost half of all meat sold in Europe. While the private label has only been a small part of plant-based market thus far, some like Trader Joe’s and Walmart have already launched some lines of their own branded alt-meat products, and I’m sure the trend will only continue to grow in the coming years.

And that’s just food retail. The private label opportunity is probably even more significant in foodservice, where the allure of having a branded plant-based burger is probably declining for restaurants. The company is betting on its HEMAMI (Motif’s umami flavor technology) and APPETEX (its texture/mouthful tech) as differentiators in a crowded plant-based food market. I think they’re right since the reality is these types of tech-forward advances are beyond the scope of typical suppliers of meat for food retailers and restaurants.

I also think a healthy private label business is good for the broader plant-based meat industry, which still needs to work on bringing the price differential down between traditional meat and plant-based products. And with the food industry’s continuing battle with inflation turning consumers to store branded products, it seems like it might be time for the era of private-label meat to begin.

May 13, 2022

The Backbar One Is The Robot Bartender Your Parents Would Approve Of

Here at The Spoon, we’ve seen a bunch of bartender bots over the years. From early efforts like the Bartesian to weird animated robot bartenders, we’ve covered pretty much every new product that automates drink dispensing for home or restaurant.

So when the email came into my inbox about the Backbar One, I figured yet another liquor-loving engineering team had programmed a robot arm to pour drinks and decided to start a company.

Boy was I wrong. From the looks of it, someone’s figured out how to create an automated drink dispenser that fits perfectly into the workflow of a restaurant bar and creates drinks at a high enough volume to handle cocktail duties at the busiest of restaurant chains.

As can be seen in the walkthrough video below, the Backbar One integrates with the restaurant’s existing point of sale system. Once a drink order is put in, it is sent to the Backbar One where the bartender looks at the order, clicks the screen to start the process, drops a glass or shaker down on the conveyor belt, and then the machine automatically starts making the drink. Liquor and other ingredients are added, and the drink is ready in about 10 seconds. The bartender adds the garnish and puts the drink on the server’s tray. According to the company, the Backbar One can make up to 300 drinks per hour.

Backbar One Demo Video

The Backbar One has two storage drawers, including a refrigerated top drawer that has room for 12 containers to hold juices, syrups, mixes, and grenadines. The bottom drawer is where the liquor is stored, with room for 28 1 liter or 750-milliliter bottles.

The Backbar One is the most recent example of a trend I’m beginning to see from the latest generation of foodservice robots targeting high-volume restaurants where the design emphasizes seamless integration into existing service industry employee workflows. Much like the automated makeline of Hyphen or the new Sippy drink-dispensing robot from Miso, the Backbar One just feels like the engineers spent time with restaurant operators when putting together the design concepts. In other words, it seems purpose-built, practical, and useful, something an operator of a single independent restaurant or a chain would want to implement if they wanted to increase the productivity and profitability of their bar.

In short, it’s the bartender bot your parents would approve of, which is probably why food and ag venture firm Finistere Ventures (as well as HAX and others) decided to invest a $3.5 million seed round in the company. From an investment perspective, there are probably lots of drink automation startup pitch decks in circulation right now, but I’m sure the investors saw the market potential for a practical drink-making machine that would likely appeal to the Chili’s and Applebee’s of the world (where, by the way, mom and dad are probably eating right now).

May 10, 2022

Wavemaker Launches Wing Zone Labs, a Roboticized Rethink of The Popular Chicken Wing Franchise

Today Wavemaker Labs and Wing Zone announced the launch of Wing Zone Labs, a roboticized rethink of the popular chicken wing franchise.

Under the franchise agreement, Wavemaker will have exclusive rights to the Southern California region and has plans to open up to twenty locations in the coming years. According to the announcement, the new Wing Zone Labs will “focus on driving innovation for the company, helping Wing Zone restaurants unlock their full potential with end-to-end automation.”

It’s an interesting approach, one that goes beyond a traditional franchise agreement but falls short of a joint venture. The deal looks like Wing Zone has largely offloaded the financial risk to Wavemaker, who, in a sense, is offloading their financial risk by raising capital through equity crowdfunding. Wavemaker is no stranger to raising funds through equity crowdfunding, as that’s how it (and spinouts like Miso Robotics) have typically raised capital.

Of course, the ability to launch twenty new restaurants will depend on whether the company can raise the funding. The overall equity crowdfunding market has continued to grow over the past few years, but it’s unclear what persistent inflation and what could be a potential recession on the horizon will do to investor appetites.

Regardless, it will also be interesting to watch if Wing Zone begins to implement automation in stores outside of the Southern California market. The announcement makes clear Wavemaker’s new initiative will be the driving force behind automation efforts at Wing Zone, and if the restaurant chain sees positive results with Labs they may begin to encourage other franchisees to consider the use of robotics.

May 10, 2022

Yep, It Looks Like Brightloom is Powering Starbucks’ NFT Initiative

Back when we first heard that Starbucks was heading into the NFT business, I suspected a company helping them get there was a startup called Brightloom.

The reasons were pretty straightforward: Not only is Brightloom is effectively a carveout of Starbucks former digital business AND Brightloom’s CEO Adam Brotman is the former of head Starbucks digital, but there’s also the fact that Howard Schultz namechecked Brotman at the employee town hall where the subject first came up.

But if there’s any remaining doubt, I think it was put to rest this week when Starbucks published a memo co-authored by Starbucks Chief Marketing Officer Brady Brewer and Adam Brotman (who, on the piece, is titled a “consultant”) about NFTs last week in which the company detailed its plans. Titled We’re creating the digital Third Place, the memo describes how Starbucks sees NFTs as ushering in a “shared ownership model” for loyalty and sees them as digital “access passes” for experiences and rewards.

In some ways, Brotman and Weber’s memo echoes many of the same ideas we’ve heard Brotman speak about when asked about his thoughts on Web3. When I interviewed him in March, Brotman talked about how NFTs can be tickets to unique experiences for a restaurant’s most loyal customers.

Restaurants “know who their best customers are, either by name or some loyalty program,’” Brotman said. “And they give them an NFT. Say, ‘here’s a code to claim your free NFT. And by the way, we’re only giving there’s only ever going to be 300 customers that can own the NFT.”

And at last week’s SimulATE Food Web3 summit, Brotman talked about why he became fascinated with Web3. “Why I’m so turned on by the Web3 space is the idea that there’s this concept of owning a digital collectible that also doubles as an access pass.”

Brotman also discussed how the Web3-powered ownership could be a gamechanger for loyalty programs. “If you don’t understand NFTs or you don’t understand crypto, you don’t need to,” Brotman said. “If any of you ever either invested in a company, or had your own company, or had a stamp collection or a card collection, what they all have in common is that you have some skin in the game and you feel like you’re a co-owner.”

All of this may seem a bit inside baseball. Still, I think it’s newsworthy since there is a small but growing cohort of digital restaurant platformers like Brightloom, NextBite, and Lunchbox jockeying to position themselves as the restaurant onramp to Web3. And so, if Brightloom has indeed locked up the bluest of blue-chip customers (and it looks like they have), they will have established themselves as the early leader in Web3 platform horserace.

If you’d like to watch Adam Brotman talk Web3 (along with Chef Spike Mendelsohn and LA Eats’ Perrin Davidson), you can watch their session on Web3 and restaurants below.

SimulATE Spring: Web3 and Restaurants
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