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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Michael Wolf

See 3D Meat Printers, a Pizza Robot and The Modernist Cuisine Kitchen in Action at SKS

Every October, one of my favorite things about the Smart Kitchen Summit — the Spoon’s flagship conference for food tech leaders — is getting to see the latest and greatest technologies in the world of food on display.

Over the years that’s included everything from smart ovens and waiter robots to 3D-printed popsicles as entrepreneurs bring their latest creations to Seattle to show off what they’ve been building and to meet other food tech innovators.

And while nothing can replace getting to see (or taste!) the latest product that could change the world of food and cooking in person, one of the limitations of a physical world conference is what can actually be physically transported to Seattle. Sometimes, it’s just not feasible to get a product — or something like a tech-powered kitchen — on a plane.

But with Smart Kitchen Summit virtual, we can go anywhere in the world to where creators are building their innovations, from the a lab to the kitchen and into a barn. (All of these will happen this year.) And we can have a food tech innovator show us what they’re building first-hand.

Here are some of the things you can expect at SKS this year:

  • Novameat CEO Giuseppe Scionti will show us in a live demo how his company is making plant-based 3D-printed meat.
  • We’ll see a cultured seafood lab in California, food dispensing pods in Maine and food robots in India during our Startup Showcase.
  • We’ll get a guided tour of the Modernist Cuisine kitchen with the Modernist’s head chef, Francisco Migoya.
  • A new restaurant pizza robot will debut live on camera.

Not only that, with the built-in networking features of SKS Virtual, you’ll get to meet, ask questions and even have one-on-one video chats with many of the innovators at SKS 2020.

SKS starts next Tuesday, so get your ticket here. If you’re attending from overseas and can’t watch live, don’t worry: your SKS ticket will get you access to Spoon Plus, where we’ll host all the videos from SKS.

Don’t miss out on seeing the latest in food tech. Get your ticket today and we’ll see you at SKS!

A Quick Walkaround Tour of Smart Kitchen Summit Virtual

Here at the Spoon, we’ve been spending most of our days getting ready for Smart Kitchen Summit 2020, which takes place Oct. 13–15 and, this year, is completely virtual.

One thing that’s become clear over the past few weeks is that many folks haven’t attended, let alone spoke or exhibited at, a virtual summit before. Heck, for us, this is our first big one as well.

So I thought it would be worth while to give a quick guided tour of what our event will look like by giving a tour of Hopin, the virtual event platform where we are hosting SKS 2020.

One of the reasons we chose Hopin is that it includes all of the various “locations” you normally see when you attend in-person events: a Main stage, areas for breakout sessions, exhibit areas and, of course, networking space.

And we plan to take advantage of all of these different features to make for a great interactive three days of conversation, workshops, demos and networking.

Some of the things we have on tap:

  • A live demo of 3D printing plant-based meat from NovaMeat
  • A tour of Modernist Cuisine Kitchen
  • A debut of a new restaurant-scale pizza-making robot
  • Live sessions with Startup Showcase finalists demoing everything from cultured seafood labs to taste-altering cutlery to home cooking robots.

And that’s just the beginning. Add in conversations and one-on-one networking with the leaders of companies in kitchen tech, future food, restaurant tech and more, and we are super excited about helping you come away from SKS with great ideas and the right connections to help you build your next business.

You’re probably thinking that’s great, but what exactly does a virtual event look like? Don’t worry. I did a quick walkthrough of Hopin to give you a better understanding of how it all works. Just click play below to take a quick tour.

Once your done, make sure to get your ticket to SKS because you will not want to miss out!

The Food Tech Show: Amazon Intros Palm-Pay, Bear’s New Servi Robot

This week the Spoon team got together to talk about yet another potentially controverisal bit of palm reading tech from Amazon and other news from around the food tech world, including:

As always, you can get the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download the episode directly to your device or just click play below.

Meet the Startup Showcase Finalists for Smart Kitchen Summit 2020

While much of the food world has been impacted by the pandemic, there’s been no shortage of investors, inventors and innovators looking to reinvent the food system.

To me, this excitement about food tech is especially evident from the flood of interest in our sixth annual Startup Showcase, which takes place at this year’s (virtual) Smart Kitchen Summit. We were overwhelmed with applications from companies wanting to participate at our annual event that showcases the most interesting new startups building innovative new products for the future of food and cooking.

And so we’re excited today to announce the 10 finalists that will be showcasing at the Smart Kitchen Summit Oct. 13th-15th. These startups are innovating in everything from cultured meat to food waste to restaurant robotics to taste-altering utensils.

If you’d like to watch the founders of these companies pitch and go into a virtual session where they will show off their products and answer questions, get your ticket for the Smart Kitchen Summit today!

Minnow Technologies

Minnow Technologies is making an Amazon Locker for fresh takeout food. The connected food pickup pod can house takeout meals in an antimicrobial environment. Pods can be placed virtually anywhere and restaurants, food halls and other food businesses can leverage them to provide their customers and delivery providers with a safe and way to grab and go.

Cultured Decadence

Cultured Decadence is a cell-based tech startup creating a system that can produce seafood like crabs and lobsters sustainably. It does this using cell culture and tissue engineering techniques for the high-value portions of crabs and lobsters, producing no shells or wasteful organ pieces. It can also potentially eliminate the need for wild harvesting altogether and help create a more sustainable ocean ecosystem.

Satis.ai

Satis.ai is a full-stack operating system for restaurant kitchens. The system uses live camera feeds in kitchens to analyze cooking processes and provide actionable feedback to back-of-house staff in real time as well as give owners/managers business intelligence to help increase efficiency, inventory ordering and customer order accuracy.

Zymmo LLC

Zymmo’s platform is a meal marketplace and foodie social network that gives chefs a place to connect with local food lovers and potential customers. Zymmo allows chefs to publish their menus, promote their events and facilitate ordering and payments all in one app.

Bonbowl

Bonbowl is a small appliance startup making an induction-based heating cooktop along with patent-pending cookware that can be used to cook with and eat from safely. Their induction technology enables power efficient cooking that uses half the power of electric stoves of similar size. The Bonbowl pot doubles as a bowl that consumers can eat right out of, eliminating a longer cleanup process and additional hardware.

Nymble Labs

Nymble Labs makes Julia, a domestic cooking robot that helps consumers cook healthy meals for their families. The cooking robot only requires users to select a recipe, chop up or gather the ingredients for said recipe and insert them into the device. Users press a button and Julia does the rest: heating at the right temps, adding ingredients at the right time, stirring and simmering until the meal is done and ready to be served.

Taste Boosters

Taste Boosters is the startup behind SpoonTEK, the world’s first taste-altering utensil. Using taste buds, the human body’s sensors and their patent-pending ionic technology, SpoonTEK can alter and enhance taste and flavor of any food dish.

Vobil

Vobil is a startup that’s developed a voice-based e-commerce technology platform that links food ordering to connected car interfaces, allowing for entirely voice-based ordering, checkout and navigation to the store in real-time.

Kitche

Kitche is a free app for iOS and Android phones that helps users reduce food waste at home by helping change personal habits with what they buy and consume. The app uses a connection with an OCR (optical character recognition) engine and a food ontology database to help users know what they already have at home, even when they’re on the go. The app helps users understand how much money they waste every time they throw food out at home.

Piestro

Piestro is an automated pizzeria startup that has created a standalone, fully-integrated cooking system for artisanal pizzas. From start to finish, it takes three minutes to make a pizza. Piestro will be able to press pizza dough, spread sauce and shredded cheese, add up to six desired toppings, and calculate the perfect cooking time based on the ingredients and humidity. Orders can be placed either in person at a public location (e.g., shopping malls, college campuses, movie theaters, hospitals or airports) and cooked in front of the customer. Customers can also opt to get the pizza even closer to their door by ordering through an app for delivery.

The Kitchen Tech Patent Watch: Meal Lifecycle Management, Fridge Order Buttons, Stoves With Stereos

The world of food and cooking patents is both wonderful and weird.

Many patents are often a big deal and can sometimes give an indication of what a company or person has in mind for a new product. At other times, those product-makers seem to be taking ideas out of the pages of science fiction books and trying to write patents just in case the imagined future ever arrives. (If you’re Nathan Myhrvold, you may even have a science fiction writer help develop the idea behind the patent.)

Since I periodically check in on what’s been issued to see if there’s anything interesting on the horizon, I thought I’d share a few of the kitchen-related patents I came across in my latest search.

Meal Lifecycle Management System

We think a lot about the meal journey here at The Spoon and often wonder how technology can be used to assist its various stages, including planning, cooking, inventory management, storage and shopping.

According a recently issued patent to Bradley Charles Ashmore, the Meal Lifecycle Management System is a holistic system to track a person’s food inventory in real time, calculate nutritional makeup of ingredients and help in the planning.

The system combines a scale that tracks both weight and overall size footprint of both packaged and unpackaged food (a “pressure-sensitive pad”) and also uses an app on a smartphone to track the meal journey.

The image below — Figure 12 from the patent — shows how it tracks the transfer of a food item (peanut butter) from jar to bread, recognizing both the type of food and the amount.

A true food inventory management and meal journey assistant are holy grails for the smart kitchen. This patent is one of many we’ve seen in recent years that try to tackle it and, from what I can tell, has one of the biggest scopes in terms of how much it tries to manage.

The Voice and Button Activated Fridge Restocking System

While Amazon and others have been working on voice assistants and reorder buttons, and fridge manufacturers have been working on cameras and sensors to tell us what’s inside our fridges, no one has really brought it all together to create a full food replenishment system that works well.

If a new patent by Midea is any indication, that company is exploring ways to build refrigerators that incorporate a restocking system that integrates with voice assistants. The system would include a variety of sensor technologies to track food inventory, as well as a human presence detector and bio-authentication tools such as a fingerprint reader. The biggest focus of the reordering system is, however, a physical button the human would press near the food compartment to actually confirm order suggestions by the voice assistant.

The idea behind a built-in confirmation buttons is to give the user more control over their purchase decisions, enabling them to confirm before they actually buy something.

Of course, this type of human approval is not always what companies like Amazon have in mind. Heck, the company has even been issued patents for systems that anticipate what you may want and buy it for you.

While some may see a built-in order button this as adding friction to purchasing, I like the idea of having a final confirmation before a transaction goes through, rather than simply offloading the entire decision-making process to a bot.

Stoves With Stereos

And from the ‘is this really necessary?’ department comes this patent that was issued this month for incorporating an audio system into a cooktop.

From the patent:

“It is known that individuals often use their kitchen every day to cook food. It is also known that an integral component in the cooking of food in a kitchen is the stove. Individuals often like to enjoy audio media when cooking in the kitchen. However, none of the usual appliances in the kitchen are configured to play audio media for a user. Therefore, there is a need for a stovetop oven having an integrated audio system to create a more comfortable environment for a user.”

Not sure about you, but with more and more smart speakers coming to market at very low cost and the wide availability of Wi-Fi powered stereo systems, I’m not seeing the need for actual integration of a stereo into the stovetop itself.

An AWS For Protein? Scaling Bio-Manufacturing Platforms To Build Out The Next Generation of Food

But if you want to making a next-gen protein, there’s a good chance you’re going to have to raise millions of dollars in venture funding to build out your own bio-manufacturing factory.

Why? In large part because the platforms for creating fermented or cultured food products products at scale haven’t existed to the same degree that as in other spaces.

However, according to FTW Ventures lead investor Brian Frank, that may soon change. Like me, Frank comes from the world of computer tech where so many startups from the past two decades were built upon the terra firma of technology platforms in cloud computing (AWS), mobile apps (Apple) and social media (Facebook).

So, naturally, when we sat down recently to talk about the launch of his recent fund, I wanted to ask him about who are the platform builders in the world of alt-protein.

He said they are coming.

“In the bio-manufacturing space, we have had that for pharma and therapeutics, we’ve had co-manufacturing, but for food, it really hasn’t existed. And so we’re now getting to the stage where if I’m Perfect Day, and the reason that I raise a ton of money is because I need to build up my own factory because no one’s offering me services or capabilities to build this on top of their platform.

“However, the future that we see is that you can create a platform where people can ride on top of your technology, or you can create the way to allow people to make designer goods so that things can be tailored towards a specific need,” Frank said.

Frank sees these new platforms serving as a couple different roles, the first of which is in accelerating design. Much in the same way a processor design company like ARM Holdings helped an entire industry of computing companies build semiconductors around their intellectual property, new companies with IP and design expertise in key pillars of future food can be used to accelerate design in new ways.

Frank gave Geltor – a company in which he was an early investor – as an example around which a company can leverage in designing new core food components rather than starting from scratch.

“The idea of Geltor as a platform is the idea that they can make proteins, collagen and gelatin to service any number of different needs because they’ve shown they can do it for a couple different categories: in cosmetics, in nutraceuticals, and very soon, you know, in food,” Frank said.

He also pointed to a second group of companies that are starting to serve as infrastructure platforms that new food innovators can leverage as they look bring their products to market at scale. He gave Culture Biosciences – one of the Spoon’s Food Tech 25 for 2020 – as an example.

“Culture Biosciences is basically building out multiplex strain (yeast or bacteria) development rigs that are automated and analyzed,” said Frank. And so if I have a specific need of a strain to do X, they can multiplex and run a bunch of different tests to find the stream that works best. And then they can hand that back to you and say, Here you go, here’s that stream that you wanted that does x and does x at the highest volume or rate.”

Frank and I talked about a whole host of other topics, including the evolution of the future protein space into three areas of innovation, as well as the innovation happening in food packaging. If you’d like to see my entire interview with Frank, Spoon Plus subscribers can just click below. If you’d like to learn more about Spoon Plus, just go here.

Set It & Forget It: Creator of The Oliver Cooking Robot Hopes to Usher in the Era of Unattended Cooking

Forget Top Chef. The most interesting contest in the kitchen in recent years has been the battle to become the all-in-one cooking appliance.

Air fryers, smart pressure cookers, slice and dice multicookers and even stand mixers have been throwing elbows in the fight for countertop space and consumer dollars.

But what if an entirely different category of cooker won the hearts and minds of consumers as the indispensable kitchen helper? That’s the hope of Khalid Aboujassoum, founder of Else Labs, who makes a little device called the Oliver.

So what exactly is Oliver?

“It’s a smart cooking robot,” said Aboujassoum in an interview with The Spoon.

The kitchen robot is something we’ve been writing about here at the Spoon since early days and, while we all like to envision science fiction futures with a robotic chef cooking for us every night, the only kitchen robots that have found any success so far are uni-taskers like the Rotimatic.

But according to its inventor, Oliver can do much more than one thing really well.

“It’s a recipe library, meal planner, shopping assistant, and expert chef all in one,” said Aboujassoum,

While you wouldn’t exactly call the Thermomix or other digital powered kitchen multicookers “robots”, these appliances are popular with chefs and home cooks alike because they can do so much. And the thing is, they’re adding more functions all the time. The Thermomix recently added shopping capabilities that allows the user to essentially make meal kits and order them on the fly.

But according the Aboujassoum, the major difference between Oliver and the multicooker is how much they can do during the cooking process.

“They (multicookers) are guided cooking,” he said. “The Oliver can do unattended stovetop cooking.”

What he is talking here about just how much a device can do without the consumer being involved. According to Aboujassoum, Oliver can cook the entire meal while the user goes off to take a nap or watch some TV.

“The user basically browses the recipes, selecting a recipe, loads the ingredients and then walks away,” said Aboujassoum.

This is where it’s worth looking at how the Oliver works. The user preloads the prepped ingredients into dispensing chambers that sit on the lid. Once the user selects the recipe on a connected app and hits cook, the Oliver dispenses ingredients into the single pot cooking chamber where a stirring arm mixes the food.

Ultimately, a conversation about unattended vs guided cooking is one about where and when the consumer gets involved in the cooking process. Multicookers like the Thermomix guide a cook through a meal with step-by-step recipes, and can do pretty much everything including chopping and grinding ingredients.

With the Oliver, the unattended part is true but, because it doesn’t have a built-in blade, the user may need to do a little more up front work to prep ingredients in advance and put into the ingredient chambers.

I do think the concept of a home cooking robot is promising. I’m sure there are many busy folks who would be happy to let a robot do the heavy lifting while they go do chores or relax.

Consumers who want to get their own cooking robot will soon be able to back Oliver via crowdfunding. The device will launch on Indiegogo on September 29th and early backers can get in on the appliance for $530.

For those of you who are wary of backing hardware on crowdfunding sites, you might be assured that folks behind Oliver have been working on the product for a good part of a decade (an early generation prototype of the Oliver was on display at Smart Kitchen Summit 2016) and, according to Aboujassoum, the product is ready to go.

“We could have launched two years ago or three years ago,” said Aboujassoum. “We refuse to sell unfinished product. That’s kind of our story, our strategic execution philosophy. And today we are done with the product.”

Aboujassoum said backers of Oliver should expect to get their cooking robot in June of 2021.

With the Oliver hitting the market and the Nymble on its way as well, 2021 could prove an interesting year for cooking robots. Others, like the Gamma Chef, are still in development and could make an appearance.

So hopefully we’ll know soon if the era of unattended cooking is upon us.

Kenwood Partners With Drop to Add Scale Function to the Cooking Chef Stand Mixer

You have your smart ovens, coffee makers and fridges, but what about a smart stand mixer?

Now’s your chance.

Last week, Drop announced they’d partnered with Kenwood to build in the Drop Smart Kitchen OS platform into the latest model of the Kenwood Cooking Chef mixer, one of the older stand mixer brands in the world.

Originally invented almost 70 years ago by the company’s namesake, Ken Wood, the Kenwood Chef was an instant hit and over the past few decades the modern version of the multi-function stand mixer has continued to be Kenwood’s biggest seller.

The Kenwood Chef eventually became the Kenwood Cooking Chef with the addition of a built-in induction heating element almost a decade ago, and the modern version has a variety of attachments like pasta cutters and coffee grinders. With the Drop partnership, the focus is on the integration of the Drop scale and guided cooking functionality.

In the video below, the two companies tout the product as “Your Chef that Weighs and Cooks” (emphasis mine):

By adding a scale to a mixer that already has built-in cooking capabilities and variety of attachments, the Cooking Chef puts itself into a growing category of multi-function products that act as the cooking version of a Swiss Army knife. Products like the Thermomix and ChefIQ weigh, cook, and steam food, all things that the Cooking Chef XL can now do as well.

This isn’t the first time that Drop has partnered with Kenwood, a subsidiary of De’Longhi. Last year, the two companies launched the CookEasy+ multicooker, a product the two had started working on in early 2018.

With the addition of the Kenwood Cooking Chef XL, Drop continues to rack up impressive partnerships with some of the biggest players in countertop cooking. The company has been working with Thermomix (announced last year at the Smart Kitchen Summit) and also is working with pressure cooking giant Instant Pot.

The Inventor of the Consumer Sous Vide Circulator Heads to Anova

The Seattle Food Geek is going to San Francisco (or at least Zooming there).

Today, Scott Heimendinger announced that he’ll be assuming the role of Chief Marketing Officer for Bay area headquartered Anova, the market leader for consumer sous vide hardware.

While we usually don’t do people-moves type posts here at The Spoon, this move is interesting in part because it essentially brings two of the early pioneers in the consumer sous vide market together under one company roof.

Heimendinger, who first wrote about his early effort to create a low-cost immersion circulator on his popular food blog Seattle Food Geek over a decade ago, would go on to commercialize the idea via one of the first standalone sous vide startups in Sansaire. Alongside Nomiku and Anova, Sansaire was part of a generation of early startups to bring sous vide to the masses by moving beyond the water bath and bringing the modernist cuisine cooking technique to consumer price points

In a way, ending up at Anova makes sense for Heimendinger. Ten years after he wrote his influential article on making a DIY low-cost sous vide circulator, Anova is the last of the original three startups still standing. Acquired by Electrolux in 2018, the company has gone on to become the market share leader in consumer sous vide hardware and now is venturing into new precision cooking hardware with a smart combi oven.

And it’s the Anova Precision oven where Heimendinger and Anova first teamed up. As readers of The Spoon know, he was brought on in a consulting capacity to help develop the oven and was at CES this past year doing booth duty.

In the press release announcing the news, Anova CEO Steve Svajian had this to say about the move: “When it was time to start working on the Anova Precision Oven, I knew I wanted Scott’s expertise and insight to be on this project. Our goal was to create a countertop combi oven that would be a game-changing tool for home cooks. Scott played a key role in making that possible.”

One thing I did wonder when I saw the news is what what this meant for Heimendinger’s own product concepts. Earlier this year he’d launched a new kitchen tech company and had just filed patents for his work a couple months ago.

When I asked Heimendinger if he still hopes to build the next great cooking device, he told me that he’s continuing to work on the idea on nights and weekends. My guess is he will at some point and may just do it with Anova’s help.

Or who knows? Maybe at some point he and Svajian spin it out and try to launch the next Anova together.

The Food Tech Show: Did The Automat Ever Really Go Away?

In this week’s episode of The Food Tech Show, we talk about those new contactless systems and compare them to a technology from long ago: the automat.

Yep, that old-school idea born in New York City a century ago is back (or maybe it never left?), showing up everywhere from restaurants to condos.

Jenn Marston waxes nostalgic about the automat and other concepts that seem to be getting a second look as the food system looks to reinvent itself in the wake of COVID-19.

We also talk about these stories in today’s podcast:

As always, you can listen to this week’s podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts. You can also download the episode direct to your device or just click play below.

“Alexa, Look Into My Eyes”: New Prototype Combines Human Gaze with Voice Control to Help You Cook

There’s no doubt that voice control interfaces like Alexa and Google have had a huge impact on the way we search for recipes, access our appliances and add things to our grocery lists.

But what if that voice assistant had a contextual understanding of where you where looking when you are cooking the evening meal?

That’s the big idea behind a new prototype from Synapse, a division of Cambridge Consultants. The new Hobgoblin technology concept utilizes machine vision to gather information about where a person is looking when issuing a voice command and applies that information to the cooking experience.

From the project page:

We have been exploring the use of computer-vision based sensing as context, and for this cooktop demonstration we augmented the VUI using gaze tracking to make what feels like a magical interaction. The cooktop infers which burner is being addressed in a voice command by using its camera tracking to know which burner you’re looking at. This way, when the system detects a person standing in front of it looking at a burner, commands can omit the burner designation, e.g. “turn that burner on,” or simply saying a level like “medium high.”

In the concept video, a user is cooking and says “Alexa, turn up the heat.” Using a camera that is built into the cooktop, Alexa is able to infer that the user is cooking because they are looking at the cooktop.

There’s no doubt that the ability to combine contextual understanding of what is happening in a room to power commands given to digital assistants like Alexa could create much more powerful potential “smart kitchen” user scenarios. One could easily imagine combining other information to create more contextually relevant experiences, including facial recognition to, for example, apply a personalized knowledge base that understands a person’s cooking capabilities or their favorite recipes.

You can see the Hobgoblin demo in action below:

Hobgoblin Smart Appliance Interface | This New User-Interface Tech Isn't Just for the Kitchen

Waste-Free Grocery Stores & Bags Made From Skinny Jeans: Ideas From the Beyond the Bag Challenge

Ed note: This post originally had IDEO as the sole creator of the challenge. It has been updated to reflect that Closed Loop Partners launched the challenge with IDEO as their innovation partner.

It’s no secret that despite efforts by grocery stores and retailers to reduce the amount of plastic they pack into the waste stream, shoppers still use a massive amount of the stuff every single day.

Because of this, Closed Loop Partners in partnership with design agency IDEO recently put out a call for innovative ideas around generating less retail waste with its Beyond the Bag challenge. The ideas range from new plastic-free reusable bags to entire grocery store concepts that use bulk dispensing systems.

Here are some of the concepts I thought were pretty interesting:

Repurposing Bags for 3D Printed Crates

A company called re:3D has proposed a system that would take plastic waste produced at retail and repurpose it at retail for 3D-printed crates. The systems would use the company’s Gigabot X 3D printer, which can print from plastic waste that has been ground up into pellets. Their proposed system would put printers at the retail point of presence.

Gigabot X: Creating a pellet printer to 3D print using recycled plastic

A Wallet That Turns Into a Shopping Bag

Moved by Tomorrow has proposed a wallet that converts into a reusable shopping bag. According to the company, the bag would hold up to 150 pounds of total goods.

Reusing Back of House Boxes for Take Home

Already in use by some warehouse stores like Costco and some more sustainably minded grocery stores, Nathan Lee proposes a system that could be used by any grocery store: replace plastic bags with the cardboard boxes which were used to ship products to the store . While it seems simple, it’s always been surprising to me that more grocery stores don’t use this concept.

Denimcle: Turn Those Unfashionable Jeans Into a Shopping Bag

If you’re like me, you probably have lots of jeans that either don’t fit any more, are worn out, or aren’t in style anymore. Sure, you could give them to your local Goodwill (also a good thing), but another idea is to take those skinny jeans and turn them into a shopping bag.

The concept would involve a “Denimcle” kiosk at retail that would allow the user to turn in their old jeans and order a bag made of denim. While the processing of the demim to bag will be done off site, I still think there are number of people who would both donate their old jeans and those that would be open to using a bag made of denim.

The Filole Bulk-Food Waste Free Grocery Store

Smartbins, a maker of bulk bin dispensing systems, has created a proof of concept for an entire grocery store utilizes bulk dispensing and resuable take-home systems. Called Filole, the idea would utilize a system that automatically dispenses measured amounts of food then prints out a label with a price and product info the shopper can then use on reusable containers. Called the S1 system, which is modeled after the IKEA flatpack concept, Smartbins says its concept can be implemented as a whole-store system or one that can be used in an existing grocery store.

Filole Market First Edit

This is only a small sample of the ideas submitted to the Beyond the Bag challenge. I’d suggest you look at the submission page if you want to see more of the interesting concepts for reducing plastic waste in our local grocery store.