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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Michael Wolf

Impossible Foods Opens a Burger Stand in Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena

Nowadays, if you want to have an Impossible Burger, you have your choice of thousands of fast food joints or grocery stores to pick up the plant-based patty.

But last night, the Impossible Burger showed up in a new kind of place: its own.

This week Impossible and Climate Pledge Arena, the world’s first net zero-carbon sports arena, announced that the Impossible patty had been named the venue’s official burger. They also announced Impossible is opening two branded food stands in the home of the NHL’s newest franchise, the Seattle Kraken.

Called Impossible Market, the new plant-based burger stands featured a menu with the Impossible Burger, Impossible chicken nuggets, and other items made with Impossible plant-based beef like chili fries and street tacos.

While the Kraken is the main attraction at Climate Pledge, the newest NHL team did not play last night. Instead, the debut event at the arena and for the Impossible Foods Marketplace was the Foo Fighters concert. Since I was at the show with my wife to do “research,” I figured I’d stop by and check out the Impossible new burger stand.

The Impossible Market is viewable from the concourse.

The Market features a large selection of drinks, packaged food like candy and popcorn, and ready-to-eat warm items.

Food from the kitchen sits under a warmer ready to be picked up and purchased.

You can watch the cook flip Impossible burgers and buns on the grill.

Warm dishes like the chicken nuggets and street tacos sit next to the grill, ready to be picked up by customers.

The prep and cleaning stations

The menu with sports venue pricing: $15 for an Impossible Burger, $16 for the cheeseburger. The prices reminded me of the early days of Impossible Burger when you had to pay $15 or more for the plant-based burger.

The Impossible Marketplace is just one-feature of the new net-zero venue. Throughout the arena you could see an emphasis on creating a more climate-friendly place to watch live entertainment.

And in case you were wondering, it was a pretty good concert.

While Impossible has been showing up at ball parks for some time, this week’s opening of the Impossible Marketplace marks the first time Impossible has its own restaurant in a sports venue. I have to wonder if it’s the first of many.

Instacart Acquires Smart Cart and Grocery Checkout Technology Startup Caper AI

Today Instacart announced they had acquired Caper AI, a smart cart and grocery checkout technology company. Instacart confirmed to Techcrunch they paid $350 million for the company.

In Caper AI, Instacart acquires a portfolio of automated checkout and smart cart technology solutions, many of which are deployed in major national grocery retailers across North America. One such retailer is Kroger, which began deploying “KroGo Powered by Caper” smart shopping carts at a store in Kroger’s hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, earlier this year.

Caper’s latest generation smart carts feature machine vision that allows shoppers to place the items in the cart and bypass counter checkout altogether.

Caper also has an automated checkout solution targeted towards smaller format stores. The company’s AI Counter utilizes a scale and machine vision to recognize up to 10 items and automate the checkout process.

According to the announcement, Instacart plans on integrating Caper’s technology into the Instacart app as well as both its in-store and online experiences for its grocery partners. One interesting potential application hinted at is a shoppable recipe integration with Caper’s smart carts: “Over time, Instacart expects to integrate Caper’s technology into the Instacart app and the ecommerce websites and apps of its retail partners, allowing customers to build online shopping lists and browse recipes ahead of time and check off their lists as they go. And, for Instacart shoppers who shop on behalf of customers, they can also utilize the carts to find items more efficiently and bypass long checkout lines.”

With the move, Instacart adds another tool to a growing arsenal of e-commerce and in-store technology solutions targeted towards grocery providers at a time many are beginning to question their relationship with the company. Over the past decade, Instacart has provided many grocery chains an easier glide path for moving into e-commerce and in-store shopping automation, areas with steep learning curves that grocers with tight margins have historically been more than happy to outsource. However, some grocers see Instacart’s in-store shopping service as taking too big a cut and possibly disintermediating them in the process.

However, as Instacart grows its enterprise technology solutions, I expect we’ll increasingly see its flagship shopper service decoupled from its technology as it looks to serve larger retailers who want greater control over the customer relationship. Since the start of the pandemic, many grocery retailers have started to roll out and standardize around their delivery services, which means a fast-growing market for technology solutions. My guess is Instacart is anticipating this as it rolls up some of the best-in-class independent solution providers as it prepares for an IPO soon.

In short, this move and others are part of Instacart evolving into a more diversified omnichannel grocery technology arms dealer.

Watch Flippy Make Fries at CaliBurger’s Newest Location in Washington State

Today CaliBurger announced they’d opened the first restaurant since the onset of the pandemic. The latest addition to the burger chain is in Shoreline, Washington, and to mark the importance of the occasion, the company brought a friend: Flippy the fry robot.

CaliBurger’s use of Flippy at the north Seattle location is the first deployment of Miso Robotics’ fast food robot in the Seattle market. According to the release, Flippy will start at the fry station, but the restaurant expects its new employee to be somewhat versatile:

While the Shoreline store will use Flippy for french-fry cooking initially, Flippy can also cook chicken breasts and tenders, onion rings, sweet potato waffle fries in addition to fries. The system’s image recognition technology allows for real-time quality control to prevent any food quality errors during the cooking process and before any food items reach customers.

The new CaliBurger location is also the first time the chain has deployed PopID’s pay-by-face technology. PopID, which launched their pay-by-face network in southern California last year, allows the consumer to create an account that ties a debit card to their biometric ID (i.e. their face). The customer is able to also pull up information such as favorites and loyalty points once ID’d at the point of sale.

As for Flippy, CaliBurger CEO Jeffrey Kalt had the now-standard company line we hear every time a new robot is installed in a new location: the deployment of Flippy will allow the humans to focus on customer-facing jobs and, as a result, will improve the overall guest experience.

“The deployment of Flippy enables CaliBurger to retrain our staff to spend more time tending to customer needs to better improve the guest experience, while supervising the robotic system that’s handling the cooking,” said Kalt. “This results in happier workers, more satisfied customers, and a more profitable business.”

You can watch the video of Flippy in action below:

Watch Flippy the robot make fries at Caliburger in Shoreline, Washington

Spyce Closes Location of First Robot Restaurant as It Turns Focus To Sweetgreen

When Sweetgreen acquired robot restaurant startup Spyce in August, one of the outstanding questions was whether the new owners would continue to operate the standalone Spyce restaurants. Finally, it looks like we now have an answer.

According to a post today by Spyce on their Facebook page, the company’s original location at Downtown Crossing in Boston will close at the end of this week.

From the post:

To our DTX Family:

Since our recent Sweetgreen acquisition, we’ve been working hard each day on our mission to scale healthy food and bring the magic of Spyce to more communities. In the next chapter of this long journey, we’ll be closing our DTX location after evening services on 10/22 to focus on developing technology for sweetgreen restaurants.

Downtown Crossing will always be a special place to us! We opened our door back in 2018 as a few fresh-faced college grads with an out-there dream to make healthy food more accessible through automation. We were different! But you gave us a shot and for that, we owe you so much.

With the closure of the downtown Boston restaurant, it’s worth speculating how much time remains for the remaining Spyce location. While I wouldn’t be surprised if Sweetgreen closed it as well, I can also see the company continuing to operate the Harvard located restaurant as a test-lab for potential new technology.

In the announcement about the acquisition, Sweetgreen said it was evaluating where and how it would integrate Spyce’s technology into its restaurants. It looks like that process is starting. The company indicates in the post that the existing team will be offered positions at the Harvard Square location or in a Sweetgreen location.

As for myself, I’m a bit bummed that we’ll be saying goodbye to this standalone Spyce location. I visited there with my son in 2018, and it was one of the highlights of our trip.

The Week in Food Tech Funding: Culture Biosciences & Tufts Nab Funding as Interest in Scaling Cell Ag Grows

Over the past 12 months, money has poured into cultivated meat startups as venture investors, celebrities, and governments look to get in on what many believe is the next big thing in alternative protein.

However, as the excitement grows, some are taking a harder look at how to scale the production of lab-grown meat to make a dent in the larger animal-based meat market. According to one estimate, the industry will need up to $30 billion invested in cell-based/fermentation production capacity if the alternative protein market hits just 11% of total meat consumption by 2035 and significantly more if consumer adoption exceeds expectations.

Much of that $30 billion will be directed to capital investment in building out long-term production capacity. However, before we get there, the industry first needs to invest in organizations building the necessary technology and production platforms to enable scale-up. This week saw two significant investments intended for just that: Culture Biosciences ($80 million) and Tufts University & partners ($10 million).

Culture Biosciences helps companies developing future food products with its bioreactor-as-a-service platform. The company introduced its first product a couple of years ago, a cloud-connected benchtop bioreactor service for cell-culture and bioprocess development. With their new round of funding, Culture looks to move beyond the bench with cloud-connected 5L and 250L bioreactors-as-a-service that will help firms optimize for pilot scale bio-manufacturing.

The second investment isn’t a traditional venture investment, but the $10 million USDA funding award to Tufts University for a cultured protein center of excellence is a vital investment nonetheless. In partnership with others, Tufts will lead an Institute for Cellular Agriculture to develop foundational technologies and processes to enable the cultivated meat industry to progress towards scaled production. The foundational work done by this organization will include everything from research on next-generation cell-culture medium to the development of education and leadership programs for the cultivated meat industry.

As companies try to take cultivated meat from the lab to the manufacturing plant, some question if cellular agriculture will ever be able to scale upwards cost-effectively and safely enough to justify all the investment. While we won’t know the answer to this question for a few years, it’s an encouraging sign that investments are being made to address the next big challenge in cellular agriculture.

And now, the rest of this week’s funding news:

Food Supply Chain

TrusTrace – $6 Million: TrusTrace, a Sweden-based startup building food supply chain traceability software solutions, has raised a $6 million Series A funding round. TrusTrace uses blockchain, AI, and bots to track products as they navigate their way through the supply chain. The company claims to have 8 thousand suppliers and 250 thousand products on the platform. My guess is TrusTrace and other traceability platform players are getting lots of inbound inquiries as everyone from ingredient and component suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers are trying to figure out how to work through the great 2021 supply chain disequilibrium.

Plant-Based Food

Grounded Foods – $2.5 Million: Plant-based cheese maker Grounded Foods has announced a $2.5 million raise. The company, founded by the husband and wife team of Shaun Quade and Veronica Fil, makes cheese products with hemp seeds and cauliflower. Grounded is already in 160 different retail locations today and plans to use the funds to expand further in the US and to set up for expansion into Europe.

Ag Tech

Kuva Space – €4.2M ($4.9M): Kuva Space, a provider of realtime agricultural data using space-borne hyperspectral camera technology, has raised $4.9 million. The company plans on using the funding to launch a constellation of six-unit nano-satellites to gather imagery in the 400 to 1,100 nanometer band. The company provides data that helps farmers optimize fertilizer and irrigation needs, optimal harvesting times, and early-stage pest or plant disease detection. With its second generation satellites, the company plans to expand its carbon monitoring capabilities.

Food Waste

Orbisk – €2.4M: Orbisk, which provides professional kitchens with automated analysis of food usage and associated waste flow using machine vision and AI, has received a €2.4 million grant from the European Commission’s European Innovation Council (EIC). The data from Orbisk’s analysis allows customers to adapt processes and purchasing to better manage and reduce food waste. Orbisk won the EIC funding with a pitch for its ‘Binspector’ project, under which the company will invest in dynamic AI models to increase accuracy and rapid adaptation in international menus, as well as further development of its food management algorithms.

Fish Tech

OptoScale – $4.1m (£3m): Optoscale, which makes machine vision and sensor technologies real-time monitoring of fish farm stock, has raised £3 million led by SWEN Capital Partners. The Norway-based company says it can analyze up to 200,000 fish per day using its technology, which compares with 50 to 100 fish using traditional analysis methods. Optoscale, which currently operates in Norway, Canada, and Scotland, plans to use the money to expand operations to Australia, Chile, and Iceland.

Restaurant Tech

ResQ – $39 Million: Well that was fast. After raising $7.5 million in a June seed funding round, ResQ, which provides a software platform for managing restaurant repair and maintenance tasks, has raised a $39 million Series A. Through their platform, restaurants can request, manage, and pay for a service, as well as manage the documents for these things. ResQ also connects restaurants with a network of contractors able to perform those services. The company’s list of available services includes HVAC, refrigeration, electrical, janitorial, plumbing, pest control, grease trap cleaning, preventative maintenance, and most anything else needed to keep a restaurant kitchen up and running. Since its seed round, the company has said its customer base has grown from seven states to 36 in the US. They plan to use the funding to grow their team by 400%.

C3 – $10 Million: Virtual restaurant/host kitchen platform company C3 has raised another $10 million in strategic funding from Swiss private capital firm, Lurra Capital, just a few months after it had raised a $80 million Series B. C3 (short for Creating Culinary Communities), works with kitchen operators (host kitchens) to fulfill orders for virtual restaurant brands. As of mid-year, the company operated about 40 virtual restaurant brands. The company plans to open 1,000 virtual brand locations by year’s end and has plans to open 12,000 globally by 2023.

Food Robots

Future Acres – $1.7 Million: Farm robotics startup Future Acres has raised $1.7 million via equity crowdfunding on Seedinvest. The company makes a self-driving robot called Carry that utilizes GPS and computer vision to navigate around the field and haul up to 500 pounds of produce. The company, which has raised a little over $400 thousand in pre-seed funding, plans to use the funds for product development, payroll, marketing and operations.

Video: Melibio’s Darko Mandich on Making Honey Without the Bees

Honey is a$7 billion industry. While honeybees themselves are not in danger (at least today), the focus on honey production is problematic for the broader bee ecosystem since farmed honeybees compete with wild bees for food and ultimately hurt biodiversity.

All of this is why a Serbian bee industry executive named Darko Mandich became fascinated with the idea of making honey without bees. His company MeliBio uses precision fermentation, synthetic biology, and plant science that replaces bees as the honey-making medium. The result is a “honey” with the same taste, texture, and mouthfeel of natural honey without any harvesting from bees.

Since the company recently released its first plant-based honey, we thought it would be good to catch up with Darko to talk a little about his honey and how he got the inspiration to start the company.

Making Honey Without Bees With Melibio

Tired of Cold Take Out? SavrPak Believes It Has The Answer With New Packaging Prototype

Although everyone seems divided in these tumultuous times, there are still a few things in this world we all can agree on: Jeopardy won’t be as good without Alex Trebek, Facebook is evil, and cold food sucks.

While we can’t do too much about the first two, the final one might be a solvable problem, at least according to SavrPak. That’s because the company has debuted a new delivery packaging prototype that it claims will keep food at a safe temperature.

This is important because once food drops below 140o F, bacteria forms on the food’s surface. Unfortunately, that doesn’t take long for food packaged up in the typical foam or molded pulp packaging.

According to SavrPak, the company’s new packaging prototype can keep food at 140o or above for more than 20 minutes. While the typical wait for food ordered via a delivery service like DoorDash is about 40 minutes, a good chunk of that time is waiting in the prep queue and the actual making of the food, and 20 minute time window is about the average time it takes for a food package to arrive at the customer’s door once it’s picked up by the delivery driver.

And not only is hot food safer, but it also tastes better. And while there have been research projects on everything from using exhaust fumes of delivery vehicles to using inductive heating and chemicals as ways to keep food warm in transit, the beauty of SavrPak’s approach is its simplicity. SavrPak new prototype uses a small plant-based patch that is placed in the food packaging that extracts moisture and keeps the food warm. The packaging is insulated, and the combined impact is warmer (and less soggy food).

The soggy-free food part is no surprise for those familiar with SavrPak’s history. The company was originally called Soggy Food Sucks after Bill Birgen developed a patch to keep the lunches he made to take to work at his day job as an aerospace engineer from getting soggy. After patenting the technology and debuting it at The Smart Kitchen Summit’s Startup Showcase in 2018, companies from around the world began to contact Birgen. Last year, the company rebranded to SavrPak, and Mark Cuban even decided to invest after co-CEO Greg Maselli sent him a cold email.

I asked Birgen how it feels to create successor technologies and see the company grow beyond that original concept he came up with for your work lunch?

“It’s been incredible to see SAVRpak resonate with people and businesses around the world,” said Birgen. “I’m most energized about our plans to help the food industry be more sustainable. We see huge potential in SAVRpak’s ability to extend the shelf life of produce and reduce food waste.”

According to company co-CEO Grant Stafford, the company’s new packaging prototype is being trialed by Kitchen United and a variety of QSRs, and he expects the product to roll out in both the US and Mexico this quarter.

The Spoon Weekly: David Chang Loves Food Tech, Cultivated Meat U, Amazon Fridge

This is the web version of the Spoon weekly newsletter where we wrap up of some of the most interesting stories in Food Tech. If you’d like to subscribe to The Spoon Newsletter, you can do so here.

David Chang Dives Into Food Tech

There may be no one with more culinary street cred in America today than David Chang. Not only has the New York-based chef won multiple James Beard awards and seen his restaurant Momofuku called the country’s most important restaurant, but Chang himself is widely recognized as an astute observer of the food world who always has his finger on the pulse of the country’s culinary zeitgeist.

And what’s on Chang’s mind these days is a whole lot of food tech, at least if his new series on Hulu, The Next Thing You Eat, is any indication. While the six-episode series isn’t available until October 21st, we do have the video preview, which features shots of everything from food delivery bots to lab-grown meat to indoor robotic farms, so we thought it would be fun to play a game of ‘guess who’ and see how many people and companies we can recognize from the food tech revolution. 

You can see the different food tech startups and leaders we identified on The Spoon. If you see any we missed, drop us a line.

The Spoon & CES Bring Food Tech To The World’s Biggest Tech Show

Exciting News: The Spoon is CES’s exclusive partner to bring food tech to the world’s biggest tech show!

Many remember the debut of the Impossible 2.0 burger in 2019, a watershed moment for both the company and the plant-based meat industry. There’s also been food robots, ice cream makers and much more that have made a big splash at the big show.

However, up until this year, any food professionals coming to CES were attending despite the lack of a dedicated food technology and innovation area in the exhibition space or in the conference tracks. Because CES is *the* great convener in the tech world, we felt food tech needed representation. This led The Spoon to rent out the ballroom of Treasure Island for a couple of years running to produce Food Tech Live. We wanted to give the food industry a central place to connect and check out the latest and greatest in food innovation.

But now that’s all about to change as food tech hits the big time this coming January. CES announced in June that food tech is going to be a featured theme for the first time ever at the big show. We couldn’t be more excited, in part because we will get to see even more cool food tech innovation, but also because CES has chosen The Spoon as the dedicated CES partner for the food tech exhibition and conference portions of the show!

Personally, this is a big deal as CES has been the one constant in my career as a journalist, analyst and entrepreneur, so I am very excited to help bring food tech to the big show!

Read my full post here with the news and, if you’d like to bring your food tech innovation to CES, let us know here.

We Called It: Amazon is Building a Smart Fridge

Amazon is building a smart fridge.

That’s at least according to a report from Business Insider, who reports that Amazon is building a fridge that would utilize machine vision and other advanced technology to monitor food in the refrigerator, notify us when it’s about to expire, and automatically order & replenish items through Amazon.

Dubbed Project Pulse, the initiative is being led by the company’s physical store unit, the same group that developed Amazon Go’s just walk out technology. Other teams, such as Lab 126 (its California-based hardware team that developed the Echo) and Amazon’s grocery unit are also contributing to the effort.

Here at The Spoon, we’re not all that surprised Amazon wants to create a fridge, mostly because we (I) predicted it nearly four years ago. When I asked “Is Amazon building a smart fridge?” in 2017, I tried to connect some of the dots I saw in Amazon’s commerce and devices businesses. And let me tell you, there were a lot of dots.Read more about why we suspected they were building a smart fridge at The Spoon.

Alt Protein

USDA Awards $10 Million to Tufts University to Establish a Cultivated Protein Center of Excellence

Last night, news broke of the USDA’s $10 million award to Tuft’s University to establish a cultivated protein research center of excellence. The award is part of a $146 million investment announced by the USDA on October 6th by its National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s (NIFA) Sustainable Agricultural Systems program.

This is a big deal. The US has fallen woefully behind other countries in its support for developing next-generation food technology, which is why I suggested early this year that the Biden administration create a US taxpayer-funded food innovation hub. This does that for cultivated meat.

It’s also a sign that the US education system is racing to develop a curriculum for a field that – at least up to this point – has lacked the kind of well-established curriculum as other strategically essential fields such as computer science or biotechnology.  It’s about time since cultivated meat is a unique field unto itself which requires an educated and qualified workforce to power if it is to reach its full potential.

You can read the full story about the Tuft’s new Institute for Cellular Agriculture here.  

Revo Foods Wants To Build a 3D Printing Facility For Plant-Based Fish

Austrian startup Revo Foods produces plant-based fish products, but not the formed and fried items that are becoming increasingly common in grocery store aisles. Revo is making structurally sophisticated products: sheets of smoked salmon, salmon fillets, and sushi cuts with a realistic look and feel.

We’ve already seen cell-cultured meat startups use 3D printing to create cuts of meat with complex fat and tissue structures. Revo has brought 3D printing into the plant-based fish arena, and the company is betting that the resulting products will win over more seafood eaters.

See the full story here. 

Food Robots

Basil Street’s Pizza Robot Takes Flight With New Airport Rollout Deal

Basil Street, a maker of automated pizza vending machines, announced this week it has struck a deal with Prepango, a company that specializes in automated retail of food and beverage products in airports, to bring its pizza robot to airports across the US.

Launched this year, the Basil Street pizza smart vending machine – called Automated Pizza Kitchens (APK) – is roughly 20 square feet in size and holds up to 150 10-inch, thin-crust pizzas. When a customer places an order via the touchscreen or mobile app, the APK heats the flash-frozen pizza up using a non-microwave oven that cooks the pies in about three minutes.

Up until this point, the APK has been serving up pizzas in universities, business parks and corporate headquarters. That all changes in a couple weeks when the two companies bring the pizza bot to the San Antonio International Airport. From there, Basil Street and Prepango are eyeing launches of the APK in Chicago O’Hare International Airport, Cincinnati/North Kentucky International Airport, Indianapolis International Airport among others.

Read the full story here.

Flippy The Fast Food Robot Has Its Own National TV Commercial

Flippy’s about to hit the big time.

That’s because the fast food robot from Miso that’s in service in places like White Castle is going to be the focus of a new nationally televised commercial.

The ad opens with Flippy making fries in the kitchen of a fast food restaurant while a voiceover actor proclaims “Nothing hits the spot quite like good food, made fast.”

From there the 30 second spot toggles back and forth between a mother and daughter happily eating food and Flippy making fries back in the kitchen.

The voiceover continues: “The taste you grew up on, now made more consistent, more efficient, and dare we say, more delicous. Introducing Flippy, the world’s first AI kitchen assistant.”

The narrator brings the pitch home with the tag line, “Let the robots do the robotic work, so people can do the people work.”

To read the full story and see the Flippy commercial, click here. 

Restaurant Tech

Kitchen United Acquires Zuul: Has The Wave of Ghost Kitchen Consolidation Begun?

Ghost kitchen operator Kitchen United announced they had acquired Zuul, a ghost kitchen technology and consulting services company, for an undisclosed sum.

While this is one of the most significant acquisitions so far in the ghost kitchen space, it’s likely only the start of a wave of consolidation.

Even as funding still flows into the ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant space, many operators have realized that running an extensive network of multitenant kitchens is a capital-intensive business. Much of the recent funding in the broader ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant space has gone to companies that are creating platforms that make it easy for restaurant brands to launch new virtual brands through hosted kitchen models. While some companies, like Reef, continue down the heavy capex path powered by huge raises, venture and corporate capital has started to migrate towards hosted kitchen models and virtual restaurant brands that can take advantage of underutilized kitchen capacity in existing QSRs or independents.

Do you think the ghost kitchen space is going to see a wave of consolidation? Read the full piece at The Spoon and let us know what you think in the comments. 

PizzaHQ’s Founders Are Building a Robot-Powered Pizza Chain of the Future

Darryl Dueltgen and Jason Udrija had a choice: Expand their successful New Jersey pizza restaurant brand called Pizza Love, or start a tech-powered pizza concept that could change the pizza industry.

They decided to start a revolution.

“We’ve put a lot of time into building a labor-reduced, tech-driven concept that we believe will revolutionize the pizza industry,” said Udrija, who cofounded PizzaHQ alongside partners Dueltgen and Matt Bassil.

According to Udrija, PizzaHQ will utilize robotics and other technology to create a more affordable pizza (“almost a 50% lower price point”) while using the same recipe and high-quality ingredients of the pies made at their dine-in restaurant.

Once the pizza is boxed, it’s loaded into delivery vans and distributed to heated pickup lockers around Totowa, New Jersey, a borough about thirty minutes north of Newark. Customers will be able to track their delivery and will scan a QR code to pick up the pizza waiting for them in a locker. Third party delivery partners like UberEats will also be able to pick up orders from the pickup lockers and deliver to customers.

Read the full story about PizzaHQ and their pizza robot restaurant chain concept at The Spoon. 

Basil Street’s Pizza Robot Takes Flight With New Airport Rollout Deal

Basil Street, a maker of automated pizza vending machines, announced this week it has struck a deal with Prepango, a company that specializes in automated retail of food and beverage products in airports, to bring its pizza robot to airports across the US.

Launched this year, the Basil Street pizza smart vending machine – called Automated Pizza Kitchens (APK) – is roughly 20 square feet in size and holds up to 150 10-inch, thin-crust pizzas. When a customer places an order via the touchscreen or mobile app, the APK heats the flash-frozen pizza up using a non-microwave oven that cooks the pies in about three minutes.

Up until this point, the APK has been serving up pizzas in universities, business parks and corporate headquarters. That all changes in a couple weeks when the two companies bring the pizza bot to the San Antonio International Airport. From there, Basil Street and Prepango are eyeing launches of the APK in Chicago O’Hare International Airport, Cincinnati/North Kentucky International Airport, Indianapolis International Airport among others.

For its part, Prepango is no stranger to bringing new food concepts via vending machines to airports. In Las Vegas’ McCarran Airport, the company launched vending machines for Sprinkles cupcakes and Doughp cookie dough (the latter machine is called – not kidding – a ‘Doughp Dealer’). It also launched one of the first automated grind and brew espresso vending machines with Illy Caffè North America earlier this year.

The arrival of Basil Street’s pizza robot is no surprise as travelers return to airports nearly two years after the start of the pandemic. With consumers now accustomed to contactless solutions, the pace of new arrivals for airport smart vending solutions can be expected to accelerate in the next few years.

According to the release, the two companies plan to expand to up to 200 APKs in airports over the next 12-18 months.

You can see the APK in action in the video below:

USDA Awards $10 Million to Tufts University to Establish a Cultivated Protein Center of Excellence

Today the USDA and Tufts University announced a $10 million award to be distributed over a 5 year period to develop an Institute for Cellular Agriculture, a flagship American cultivated protein research center of excellence. The award is part of a $146 million investment announced by the USDA on October 6th by its National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s (NIFA) Sustainable Agricultural Systems program.

The new Institute will be run by David Kaplan, who currently heads the Cellular Agriculture program at Tufts University.

From the release:

Tufts University Professor David Kaplan, a renowned cultivated meat expert, will lead the initiative and will be joined by investigators from Virginia Tech, Virginia State, University of California-Davis, MIT, and University of Massachusetts-Boston. The new institute will “develop outreach, extension, and education for the next generation of professionals” in cellular agriculture and lead research that will help to expand the menu of climate-friendly protein options and improve food system resilience.

The new program is the first federally funded Institute at a major university with the explicit goal of developing new approaches and technologies for cultivated meat. The project includes the development of new sustainable and cruelty-free growth medium, scaffolding, and fermentation technologies that can contribute to the advancement of the cultivated meat field.

The program also aims to develop a curriculum to educate students to be future leaders in the cultivated meat space. One of the goals of the Institute will be to develop “outreach, extension, and education for the next generation of professionals for workforce development and as technology leaders.”

It’s encouraging to see the Biden administration investing in research centers of excellence for cellular agriculture, particularly cultivated meat. The US has fallen woefully behind other countries in its support for developing next-generation food technology, which is why I suggested early this year that the Biden administration create a US taxpayer-funded food innovation hub. This, in essence, does that for cultivated meat.

It’s also a sign that the US education system is racing to develop a curriculum for a field that – at least up to this point – has lacked the kind of well-established curriculum as other strategically essential fields such as computer science or biotechnology. That’s a shame because while the cultivated meat industry leverages many of the advances in other areas like biotech and CS, it’s a unique field unto itself which requires an educated and qualified workforce to power if it is to reach its full potential.

Hopefully, the new National Institute for Cellular Agriculture at Tufts is another building block that will help create the foundation for the cultivated meat workforce of the future.

Watch The Jamba Smoothie Robot In Action In The Middle of Stonewood Center Mall

Sometimes it’s hard to visualize something in action until, well, you see it in action.

That’s why I thought this fast-motion video clip from Blendid of their new Jamba branded smoothie robot is so interesting.

In the clip, you can see the robot sitting in the middle of the mall and shoppers convening around it as it makes smoothies. The placement of the robot in the middle of the mall walkway where you typically find iPhone case and t-shirt booths illustrates why Jamba is interested in trying this new format out. The ability to drop a smoothie bot into a mall without the traditional store opens up the option of a faster-deployed, lower cost, and less permanent build-out.

Jamba and Blendid have hinted additional locations are to come. I expect if this location goes well, we’ll see more malls added to the rollout plans for the Jambabot.

You can see how the robot makes a smoothie in the video below.

Jamba by Blendid - Stonewood Center in Downey, CA

The Spoon & CES Bring Food Tech To The World’s Biggest Tech Show For First Time Ever

Each January for the past couple of decades, I’ve packed up my suitcase and headed to the Nevada desert to take part in the world’s biggest tech show, CES.

I’m not alone. CES is the singular tech show that pretty much every major industry attends along with those who watch and follow those industries.

This includes the food world. Many remember the debut of the Impossible 2.0 burger in 2019, a watershed moment for both the company and the plant-based meat industry. There’s also been food robots, ice cream makers and much more that have made a big splash at the big show.

However, up until this year, any food professionals coming to CES were attending despite the lack of a dedicated food technology and innovation area in the exhibition space or in the conference tracks. Because CES is *the* great convener in the tech world, we felt food tech needed representation. This led The Spoon to rent out the ballroom of Treasure Island for a couple of years running to produce Food Tech Live. We wanted to give the food industry a central place to connect and check out the latest and greatest in food innovation.

But now that’s all about to change as food tech hits the big time this coming January. CES announced in June that food tech is going to be a featured theme for the first time ever at the big show. We couldn’t be more excited, in part because we will get to see even more cool food tech innovation, but also because CES has chosen The Spoon as the dedicated CES partner for the food tech exhibition and conference portions of the show!

We’re busy helping to develop a half-day conference and talking to lots of companies about coming to show their products at the four day CES food tech exhibition and we can’t wait to show what we’ve helped CES build.

But we need your input too! If you are interested in showing off your latest and great food and kitchen-related product or solutions, make sure to let us know. Just head over to this form on the SKS website and drop us a line. We’ll get right back to you and let you know how you can be a part of food tech at CES.

You can read more about the program below with our official announcement, or just drop us a line to see how to get involved.

We’ll see you in Vegas!

Food tech has arrived at CES®. Leaders in kitchen, food and cooking are coming together in Las Vegas from January 5th to January 8th at CES  2022 to examine how technology is changing the global food chain. CES has teamed up with The Spoon, the leading food tech media and events partner to showcase, demo and discuss the way technology has transformed the world of food. 

While we’re sure the excitement and buzz around food tech will be everywhere, we are working with CES on two key initiatives at the show, including: 

  • The Food Tech Exhibit, an exhibit space showcasing the latest innovations and demonstrating new products from across the kitchen and food tech spectrum. This will be live on the CES show floor in the Venetian Expo. 
  • The CES Food Tech Conference, presented by The Spoon, will bring together visionary thinkers, chef entrepreneurs, appliance vendors, delivery and food retail disruptors at CES 2022. Each session will highlight the innovation and disruption happening across the food industry as a result of tech advancements like artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation, mobile accessibility and more. 

CES is fast approaching — and there are many ways to get involved before, during and after the show. The CES Food Tech presented by The Spoon area will focus solely on companies building the future of food and cooking. Booth spaces are diverse in terms of size and ability to customize – get in touch and we’ll work with the CES exhibitor team and our team to ensure you put together a space that serves you. 

If you aren’t able to secure a demo or company/showcase spot but still want your brand to be part of the inaugural year of food tech at CES, you can sponsor the CES Food Tech Conference on Day 2 of CES in the Venetian. Conference tickets for CES programming will be on sale soon.