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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Coronavirus

The Spoon team is working hard to bring you the latest on the impact of COVID-19. Bookmark this page for our full archive on the pandemic and how the food industry is embracing innovation to fight back.

On April 6th, The Spoon had a full day virtual summit on COVID-19 strategies for food & restaurants. You can watch all the sessions from our virtual strategy summit here.

You can also check out this COVID-19 resource page for food and restaurant industry.

Starbucks in Coronavirus-Stricken Washington State Removing Tables and Chairs in Move Towards Take & Go Format

Here in Washington state, we’ve already seen restaurants pivot to new business models to deal with the fall out of COVID-19. And now, some select Starbucks have started to remove tables and chairs for customers and transition to a take-and-go format.

You can see what this looks like at the Starbucks in my own small town of Edmonds on the outskirts of Seattle:

In addition to removing the tables and chairs (or, more accurately, pushing them all into a corner), this Starbucks location has also removed the creamer station and workers are offering to add these to customer orders. Napkins have also been removed.

While Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson had hinted earlier this week they might move towards pick-up only formats, this is the first time that I’ve seen or heard of it in action.

As I wrote yesterday, traffic to restaurants in Washington and other states has tanked by up to 50%. Judging by the relatively crowd in this normally crowded Starbucks, the dropoff has been similar.

Update: A few hours after this post, Starbucks announced that it was going to a nationwide “to-go” model for at least two weeks.

This One Graph Shows How Bad Things Are For Restaurants Because of Coronavirus

If pictures tell a story, the one below is not a pretty one for restaurants:

The chart, which I created using data from OpenTable, shows the percentage difference year over year on each day for diners from February 18th all the way through yesterday, March 13th. OpenTable has data available for each state (you can check your own state here), but for this chart I included those areas most impacted by Coronavirus as well as Florida, which seems to be emerging as a hotspot. I’ve also included the data for the total of the United States.

What does it show? That restaurant traffic went from what looked like decent growth in places like Washington state just a month ago to simply dropping off a cliff. Data for yesterday, March 13th, showed Washington state restaurant traffic was down by 53%. New York, also grappling with an outbreak, traffic was down 54%.

While traffic hadn’t dropped to the same extent in California or Florida, it’s trending that way, and the United States as a whole has seen traffic drop by 36%.

What’s struck me is the velocity of the decline. Last week total US traffic at restaurants was down 8% compared to the previous year. Just a week later, the drop was over four times that.

Looking beyond the US, the picture doesn’t get any better. Below is a chart showing how coronavirus is hitting countries like Mexico, Germany and Ireland.

Interestingly, Ireland’s restaurant industry saw the biggest overall drop this past week, with its restaurant traffic down by 54% as of yesterday, compared with just 13% a week prior.

COVID-19’s impact on the restaurant industry is expected to only get worse in coming days. We’ve seen some of the industry’s biggest and most successful names already grappling with this change and having to furlough or lay people off. Because of this, we’re looking to highlight some of those companies stepping up to help. If your company is offering resources or discounts to help restaurants impacted by coronavirus, drop us a line at tips@thespoon.tech.

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Restaurants and Partners Innovating to Survive During the Coronavirus

The COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent social distancing are affecting many folks, but one of the groups that’s been the hardest-hit is the hospitality industry, especially restaurants. So we at The Spoon are putting together a list of companies in or adjacent to the food and restaurant space who are offering ways to help foodservice establishments struggling during the coronavirus.

Please feel free to leave any additional companies in the comments section or email us at tips@thespoon.tech. We’ll be updating the list. Stay safe and healthy out there!

SOFTWARE HELPING RESTAURANTS

Photo: Foodetective

Switzerland: Foodetective

Plenty of restaurants are trying to focus more on takeaway and delivery, but third-party delivery services can charge high fees that cut into restaurants’ already razor-thin margins. Foodetective is trying to let restaurants keep more profits in their pockets by offering free takeaway and delivery platform for restaurants — in Switzerland. Swiss restaurants can go onto Foodetective’s website and set up a profile to sell their food online without having to pay commissions to delivery services.

Maybe (more) third-party delivery services here in the U.S. will take note.

Photo: Bbot

Nationwide: Bbot

Steve Simoni, founder of smart ordering software provider Bbot, told The Spoon that they would be providing discounted setups of their software to help restaurants better support delivery and pickup. Simoni said that they won’t charge the monthly fee for their software until June 1.

“We’re trying to make it cost effective and easy for them,” he wrote to us. However, participating restaurants will need to figure out their own delivery service to partner with to actually get the food to diners’ doorsteps.

Photo: Lavu

Nationwide: Lavu

Restaurant PoS system provider Lavu Inc. just released its Corona Virus Relief plan. According to a Linkedin post by Lavu’s CEO Saleem S. Khatri, the company is no longer charging software payments to restaurants that are shut down in response to the outbreak.

Lavu is also waiving fees for Menudrive, its online ordering platform, so restaurants focusing more on delivery don’t have to pay as much to third-party services.

Finally, Khatri wrote that Lavu has partnered with an undisclosed capital partner to help restaurants in dire straits gain access to short-term capital.

RESTAURANTS REINVENTING THEMSELVES

Seattle: Addo

Chef Eric Rivera is known for his wacky, creative theme nights at his Seattle restaurant addo. But in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, he has started diversifying addo’s offerings to cater to diners who might be cautious to dine out in a group setting.

Seattlites can order to-go meals from addo @ home, which includes three pre-prepped meals plus wine, for pick-up or delivery. Rivera has also created addo pantry, a source of dry goods, hot sauces, and more made in-house which people can pre-order for pickup or delivery (delivery comes with a flat fee). Pick-ups and deliveries for addo pantry start on 3/22.

If you’re looking for a way to pay it forward in these uncertain times, Rivera just launched addo for the people. Through the program you can purchase $9 bowls of take-and-heat food either for yourself or as donations to local charities. The bowls are currently available for pickup at addo and Rivera and his team are in the midst of partnering with charities to coordinate food drop off.

Photo: Canlis restaurant in Seattle

Seattle: Canlis

James Beard Award-winning fine dining restaurant Canlis is completely reinventing itself in the wake of the coronavirus. The restaurant will shut down its dining room starting on Monday, March 16 and will pivot the following day to offer three new dining options: takeout-only breakfast option The Bagel Shed, pickup lunch offering Drive On Thru, and a meal delivery service called Family Meal.

All new offerings will be based on the Canlis restaurant site in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle, and the delivery range for Family Meal will be roughly 7 miles away from the restaurant. “Fine dining is not what Seattle needs right now,” reads Canlis’ new website. “Instead, this is one idea for safely creating jobs for our employees while serving as much of our city as we can. We’ve got this, Seattle.”

CREATOR GOES TAKE OUT

San Francisco’s hamburger restaurant, which already has robots that make its food, has gone to take out and delivery only. The restaurant has also taken on what seems like sci-fi level measures, as the company told us via email:

Our engineers have worked around the clock to create a transfer chamber that protects the inside of the restaurant from outside air yet still allows us to transport completed meals, in their hermetically sealed bags, out to customers. The chamber uses a positive pressure system combined with a self-sanitizing conveyor.

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Do you know of other restaurants/online platforms/services that are helping foodservice establishments survive during the coronavirus outbreak? Comment below or send us a tip at tips@thespoontech!

Updated: Grubhub Defers Commission Fees From Independent Restaurants, Sets up Charity Fund

Update: According its terms and conditions, Grubhub’s “relief” program defers rather than waives restaurant fees. Restaurants that sign up for the program are required to pay back fees at the end of the relief period. While that has no solid date yet, Grubhub “anticipates that such date will be no later than March 29, 2020.” At that point, restaurants have four weeks to pay back those commissions. 

Grubhub announced this morning at a press conference in Chicago that it is setting up a charity fund and also temporarily suspending its collection of commission fees for qualified independent restaurants in the U.S. The initiative, which is a response to the COVID-19 pandemic now impacting daily life around the world, is in collaboration with mayors of large cities around the country, according to a press release emailed to The Spoon.

In the release, the delivery service noted that not collecting these commission fees will provide cash flow relief to independent restaurants, who along with bigger brands can expect to see as much as a 75 percent drop in sales because of the pandemic. More customers are choosing (or mandated) to stay home, which means significantly less foot traffic headed to restaurants. And some cities are putting restrictions on the restaurants themselves. In NYC businesses, for example, must reduce their capacity by 50 percent beginning today at 5 p.m. 

Bigger brands (think Chipotle, McDonald’s) have billion-plus-dollar digital businesses to fall back on in this scenario. For mom-and-pop restaurants as well as smaller chains, the slowdown due to coronavirus could be life-threatening to business.

More delivery orders would help, but as I wrote earlier today, third-party services like Grubhub and DoorDash collect per-transaction commission fees that can absolutely gut a business’s bottom line. Which is why it’s encouraging to see Grubhub stepping up and acknowledging the changes it needs to make during this time. Currently, the company is working with mayors of Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, Boston and Portland.

At the same press conference today, Grubhub also said it is setting up a fund that will let proceeds from its Donate for Change program go towards charities that support drivers and restaurants impacted by COVID-19. Through the program, customers can round up the change from each order and donate it. The service will match donations from its subscription service members.

Most of the major delivery services are now offering features like contactless delivery. Some, like Postmates, have set up their own funds to support workers affected by coronavirus. The hope is that others will follow with further measures to protect local businesses as well as the workers transporting our food.

Grocery Stores Get Scrubbing with Extreme Sanitizing Measures

My wife commented yesterday that in all our years of marriage, our fridge and pantries have never been this stocked. Dry goods, frozen foods and pasta sauces? Check, check and check.

But even with that (hopefully sufficient) amount of preparedness, there are still perishable food items that we go through pretty quickly. Milk, fruit, yogurt, etc. So we are still making trips to the local grocery store. On one such trip this week, we saw how our supermarket is going to new, extreme lengths to stay clean and reassure nervous shoppers that it’s okay to go in.

First, all the shopping carts are being sanitized. You can’t even bring the cart back into the store yourself. They stay outside, where employees then take them and give them a thorough wiping down before bringing them back into the store. The same wipe downs happen with the credit card machines after each use.

These same types of sanitation protocols are going at other retailers. We at The Spoon have seen it at our local Costco and PCC Market, and The Island Pacific Supermarket chain in California sent us a press release this morning announcing all of the new sanitation procedures it has put into place.

Like so many new behaviors this pandemic is creating, I wonder if these safety measures will just become the new norm. If you take two seconds to think about it, it’s kind of crazy that we all use the same checkout touchscreen without some kind of wipe down in between. The supermarket is the place sick people go to buy medicine! After this subsides, how many of us will carry around Clorox wipes in our pocket to give touchscreens or ATMs and shopping carts a quick once over?

There isn’t a lot of good to be found with this outbreak, but better hygiene procedures for the public places we frequent might just be one of them.

Week in Restaurants: How Restaurants Are Responding to Coronavirus

Restaurants large and small face a major sales slump due to declining foot traffic and mandates from city governments to reduce capacity in the dining room. Meanwhile, larger chains are under pressure to provide more paid sick leave to their workers, and based on the number of businesses now focusing on to-go and delivery formats, we’re about to see a massive surge in delivery orders. Here’s what the week in restaurants and restaurant tech looked like in the wake of a pandemic.

Starbucks Considers Switching to Delivery, Takeout Format

Starbucks already temporarily suspended its reusable cup program last week. Then yesterday, in a letter to customers, company CEO Kevin Johnson wrote that the chain is considering an off-premises-only model for some stores for the time being. That would mean customers could only order via the Starbucks mobile app, and all orders would have to be for pickup, delivery, or drive-thru. Johnson said closing entire stores outright would be a last resort, and that any changes made to store formats would be decided on a “community-by-community and store-by-store” basis.

NYC Restaurants Must Reduce Capacity

New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio said Thursday that New York City bars and restaurants must reduce capacity by 50 percent starting today at 5 p.m. Gatherings for 500 people or more have been completely banned. De Blasio said small businesses affected by this change have the option of no-interest loans to consider, and those who face eviction should check the city’s website for free legal assistance.

 

Restaurants Add Paid Sick Leave for Workers

Darden, the parent company of Olive Garden, Longhorn Steakhouse, and Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen launched a new sick leave policy this week where employees earn one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked. The new policy applies to about 180,000 restaurant workers across Darden’s portfolio. A Darden spokesperson mentioned that this is a permanent change that has actually been in the works for some time. “We did accelerate the rollout given the current environment,” he added.

McDonald’s announced paid sick leave for up to two weeks for employees that are asked to quarantine themselves due to coronavirus. The policy applies to corporate-owned stores only. Workers are currently demanding paid sick leave for all employees across both corporate and franchise locations.

Noodles & Company is also now offering emergency pay for quarantined workers at company-owned stores. The plan is similar to McDonald’s, where hourly workers who normally do not get paid sick time will receive paid time off if they are unable to work after being diagnosed with or quarantined because of COVID019. The company is said to be working on a longer-term paid sick leave policy for employees. 

Starbucks, in addition to its moves above, is also now offering catastrophe pay to workers who have been diagnosed with or exposed to COVID-19, as well as anyone who “comes into close prolonged contact with someone in their store or household” who has the virus, according to a letter from company president Rossann Williams. These groups are eligible for up to 14 days of catastrophe pay. Additional pay replacement “may be made up to 26 weeks” if an employee is still unable to return to work.

Hey, Delivery Companies: It’s Time to Make Social Distancing Profitable for Restaurants, Too

To delivery or not to delivery? That question, asked frequently nowadays, just got more complicated in the wake of the World Health Organizing (WHO) declaring COVID-19 a pandemic.

Food tech expert and Modernist Cuisine’s former technical director Scott Heimendinger left a tweet yesterday that not only highlighted the issue but also underscores how complex potential solutions are:

https://twitter.com/seattlefoodgeek/status/1238118335427923970?s=20

Restaurants operate on absurdly thin margins during the best of times. Overhead costs like labor, inventory, rent, equipment, card processing fees, and a litany of other deductions all eat away at these thin margins. Now businesses are seeing sales nosedive as more and more consumers opt to stay home instead of going out to eat. For example, in the Seattle area, where the first U.S. deaths from coronavirus occurred, some restaurant sales have dropped as much as 40 percent. As the number of cases throughout the country rises, there could be a ripple effect, particularly in crowded urban areas like NYC, Boston, San Francisco, and other cities.

You’d think delivery would be the answer to this problem of declining foot traffic. After all, you order delivery from Joe’s Pizza or wherever, and you manage to feed your family without leaving the house while putting money in the restaurant’s coffers, right?

Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. Third-party delivery services like DoorDash, Grubhub, and others are, to borrow, Heimendinger’s word, “notorious” for gutting restaurants with hefty commission fees which are sometimes as high as 30 percent of each transaction. However, most small and independent restaurants still use these services for delivery because they lack the resources to manage the entire delivery process (drivers, marketing, technical logistics) themselves. So more customers staying home because of COVID-19 could translate to more delivery orders, but that won’t necessarily improve restaurants’ bottom lines.

Third-party delivery services are also known for ethically questionable policies around how they treat the folks shuttling the food from the restaurant to the consumer, from sketchy tipping policies to fighting legislation that would reclassify these gig workers as employees and give them access to health benefits and paid sick leave. 

Heimendinger  addressed this in another tweet, asking followers, “Are you aware of any delivery services stepping up to change their fee structure to help restaurants retain more of their revenue during the #COVID19 crisis?”

And in fact, some of these services have made moves in that direction. All of the major services have or are readying contactless delivery features, which limit the human contact between drivers and customers. Uber, DoorDash, and Postmates have been in talks to set up a fund that would compensate drivers affected by COVID-19. Independently, Postmates has also launched two different funds: one to cover medical costs for drivers affected by COVID-19 and the other to temporarily waive commission fees for new merchant partners operating small restaurants.

There is no guarantee that any of these measures will be able to adequately protect workers. At the same time, I agree with Heimendinger that local restaurants need consumers’ support at a time when foot traffic will continue declining as social distancing becomes more widespread. 

I don’t believe there are any easy answers to this issue. If we double-down on delivery orders, we help pay workers’ wages, but we’re also only reinforcing an unsustainable business model that is decimating local restaurants. If we forgo delivery as well as dining in, we’re also helping decimate local restaurants.

The onus is on the delivery companies. DoorDash, Grubhub, and others need to be waiving or at least reducing restaurant commission fees right now. More of them need to help cover medical expenses for checkups and provide paid sick leave so that drivers who aren’t feeling well and potentially infected aren’t out making the rounds and possibly infecting restaurant workers and customers. At least some delivery fees for customers should be waived, as those premiums add up quickly and make restaurant meal delivery out of reach for lower-income families. Finally, delivery services need to accelerate the availability these changes now if they want to avoid playing the villain yet again.  

Future Food: How Might COVID-19 Affect Alternative Protein Sales in the US?

This is the web version of our weekly Future Food newsletter. Subscribe to get the most important news about alternate and plant-based foods directly in your inbox!

Whether you’re in the office, practicing social distancing, or trying to stock up on oat milk, there’s no way to avoid it — talk of COVID-19 is everywhere. We spoke to a few startups this week who have been impacted by the coronavirus, and while some cited production delays or higher material cost, I was intrigued to see one response from plant-based cheese company Grounded Foods (whose fermented cauliflower cheese I sampled last month). Here’s what Grounded’s co-founder Veronica Fil had to say:

When coronavirus hit… I imagine dairy supply came under more threat than ever (especially coupled with supply shortages arising from Australia’s post-bushfire economy). I think that’s why Grounded suddenly had such a spike in interest. There’s a lot of focus around our products providing a more resilient alternative to dairy, and one that’s not so reliant on international trade forces.

Fil’s response made me wonder — how is the COVID-19 outbreak affecting other alternative protein companies in the US?

Photo: Beyond Meat

First, let me say that since the coronavirus has only been on the world stage for a few months, we don’t yet have any cold, hard data on how it’s affecting sales of animal vs. non-animal foods. Everything that follows is speculation on my part, based off of talks I’ve had with other industry insiders and my friends and family.

One thing we do know is that there’s no evidence that food is a vector of disease spread for the coronavirus. But there is evidence that the disease began in animals and then migrated to humans in a “wet market” in Wuhan, China. So while you’re definitely not going to get coronavirus from eating meat, in an overabundance of caution some consumers might still be wary of consuming animal products — and more amenable to sampling plant-based options.

Plant-based foods often have longer shelf lives than their animal-based counterparts. This might not be as much of a deciding factor for meat, which you can easily freeze, but is more relevant for dairy. As consumers stock up on staples like canned goods and toilet paper, they might be more apt to throw alt-dairy in their cart (like the aforementioned oat milk), assuming they’d stay fresher for longer.

Supply chains are another thing that could well be affected by COVID-19. Import restrictions in China have dramatically slowed down the country’s exports of meat and poultry. Alternative protein companies who import their plant-based ingredients from other countries, especially China, could also face production slowdowns as trade slows.

COVID-19 doesn’t seem to be slowing plant-based meat companies’ focus on the Asian market. Beyond Meat, for example, still plans to open a new facility on the continent by the end of 2020. That update came a few weeks ago on the company’s recent earnings call, so it’s unclear if recent virus escalation has upset those goals.

As I said above, it’s too early to make any sort of sweeping generalization about whether coronavirus is boosting or hurting sales of plant-based foods. But with the pandemic far from contained, we’ll likely soon start to see more data on how the disease is affecting the entire food system in general, including alt-protein.

For now, I turn to you, Future Food readers. Have you (or your company) noticed any shifts over the past few months? Please email us at tips@thespoon.tech to share!

Houston, we have cell-based meat (and fish)

This week I wrote a story about how NASA scientists determined that some red lettuce grown on the International Space Station (ISS) was not only safe to eat, but was just as nutritious as lettuce grown on terra firma.

As someone who always has alternative protein in the back of her mind, I couldn’t help but think back to October when Israeli startup Aleph Farms announced that it had successfully grown animal muscle tissue cells in space, also aboard the ISS. Then I saw a tweet from Mike Selden, the co-founder of cellular aquaculture company Finless Foods, reminding me that their technology was also in use during the aforementioned test.

https://twitter.com/MikeSeldenFF/status/1237830865461239809

Finless Foods collaborated with Aleph Farms and Russian biotech company 3D Bioprinting Solutions, which provided the 3D bioprinter to extrude the animal tissue cells. What I didn’t realize was that during the experiment Finless Foods printed some cells of their own: fish cells.

We’re light years away (figuratively, not literally) from astronauts being able to print enough meat or seafood to sustain themselves on multi-year journeys. But maybe soon, NASA will do a study on the nutrition of 3D printed, cell-based animal or fish tissue, just like they did with the lettuce.

Photo: Beyond Meat

Protein ’round the web

Stay safe out there and remember, #CancelEverything.

Dark Days, Resets and the Eventual Birth of Good Things

If you’re old enough to remember 9/11, you remember how crazy and upended everything felt in the days, weeks and years following that day.

There was the immediate shock of watching the planes hit the buildings – I still remember the sound of my wife’s voice when she called me into the room and pointed at the television – and then there was the long period of uneasiness in the following days of entering a time where there was no defined playbook.

It’s been a couple decades since and memories have faded, but I’ve never forgot how that moment in time not only altered things in a big societal way – politics, travel, international relations – but also how it set into motion lots of smaller changes in so many lives, changes that ultimately sprouted into new relationships, careers, and even new businesses.

One former coworker of mine quit his job as a technology analyst and went into the FBI to fight terrorism. Another woke up and realized he needed to get serious about his life and went on to start one of tech industry’s most well-known tech blogs. There are million other stories like this of lives inalterably changed across the country and around the world.

And while it’s too early to tell just how extensive the damage of the COVAD-19 coronavirus will be, it’s pretty obvious at this point that there will be many more deaths, economies will continue to slow and many jobs will be lost.

My suspicion is the impact will be big, on the scale of what we saw in 2001, and because of this we’re going to go through a reset that we’ll all have to grapple with. Resets can be bad in many ways – sickness, death and job losses are all very bad things – but I hope down the road we’ll also see some good.

We talked on this week’s podcast about the potential ways in which the coronavirus could accelerate change in the world of food, increasing adoption of fairly new technology and ways of doing things such as human-less check out, automated food dispensing and more.

But I think the bigger impact in the world of food and most other industries will be realized over a longer time horizon, in ways that only come with the way a reset makes us, societally and individually, rethink things in meaningful ways.

Forced to say home, cancel travel, and social distance? Difficult, no doubt, but such down time also means an opportunity to think about what it all means and to reassess. New business ideas, many of them taking into account our new mutual reality, will spring up and over the next year, two years, decade.

We still need to be realistic. There could be many dark days ahead. But, while many of us are going to have to grapple in the near term with potentially big disruptions to our lives, careers and businesses (I run an event business and I’m thinking about what this all means), I am still hopeful for what will be millions of inspiring stories of human resourcefulness and ingenuity that spring out of this globally shared experience in the coming years.

The Food Tech Show: How Coronavirus is Accelerating Certain Food Tech Sectors

It’s a scary and confusing time, so I hope getting together with some familiar food tech friends will give you a 30 or so minute respite from the madness.

One warning in advance though: we do talk a little coronavirus, but we do look at the possible bright side for some of those sectors in the food tech space where the outbreak could accelerate adoption.

Other stories we discuss in today’s pod include:

As always, you can find The Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your pods. You can also download it direct to your device or just click play below.

Audio Player

Newsletter: Silver Linings from the Dark Cloud of COVID-19

Look. I don’t want to write about COVID-19 again, and you probably want to give your brain something else to think about. But given the impact it is having across the food tech landscape, with new developments continuing to happen every day, it seems derelict if I don’t write about it.

However! Despite the dark cloud coronavirus continues to cast over the country, there are some silver linings to be found. So let’s find the good in all this bad.

Dark cloud: Dire straits for dine-in restaurants
Things are not looking good for restaurants whose main business is customers eating on-site. Technomic released the results of a survey last week that found 3 in 10 consumers plan on eating out less as people avoid public spaces and… other people. Worse, Technomic found that of those people refraining from eating out, 31 percent say that reduction will last for one to three months.

Silver lining: Delivery and drive-thru to the rescue?
While people may not dine as much on-prem at restaurants, Technomic is quick to point out that this could be a boon for drive-thrus and delivery only restaurants like pizza delivery places.

And if consumers dealing with COVID-19 in the US are like those in China, we should indeed expect a rise in demand for restaurant delivery. Third-party delivery companies like Postmates and Instacart are already preparing by implementing new no-human-contact delivery options.

Dark cloud: Panic shopping leaves supermarkets bare
If your local Safeway is anything like mine, the cleaner aisle and the dry goods aisle are both pretty picked over if not completely bare. People, fearing a quarantine are stocking up in case they need to wait this whole thing out for a while. That’s not great, especially if you’re not able to get out to the store until later (after everything is picked over) because of work or mobility issues.

Silver lining: Online grocery gets a boost
Because of this outbreak, more people are trying online grocery shopping. NPD says that 21 percent of US consumers ordered perishable groceries online in the past month (as of March 2), which is up from 18 percent at the same time last year.

True, perhaps only industry watchers in grocery and food tech may find a boost in online shopping a silver lining, but if people are forced into trying online grocery shopping, then we can more quickly gauge how many consumers will stick with grocery e-commerce once this emergency passes (and it too, shall pass). This faster turnaround will also help retailers see any ROI faster on the logistics infrastructure investments they’ve been making over the past couple of years (read: robot micro-fulfillment, self-driving vehicles, etc.).

Dark cloud: The gig economy and health insurance
Questions around the ethics and business practices of third party delivery services have been swirling around for a few years now. Businesses like Uber Eats, DoorDash and Postmates are built on cheap labor in the form of contract workers, not employees. Gig economy startups are so desperate to keep workers as contractors, they are spending tens of millions of dollars to fight new employment rules in California.

Contract workers, however, don’t get healthcare. As a result, gig workers are faced with a choice: stay home and lose money, and maybe even pay an extraordinary amount out of pocket to be seen by a doctor; or continue to work, increasing the chances of becoming another vector for the disease.

Silver lining: The gig-reckoning
It’s unfortunate that it has taken a global pandemic to give gig-based startups any semblance of a conscience, but at least coronavirus is forcing the issue. It’s not much, but Uber, DoorDash and other gig startups are “in talks” to set up a fund to help pay workers afflicted with COVID-19. As my colleague Jenn Marston wrote:

One possible result of the current outbreak is that it could prioritize the issue of gig workers’ rights and spur both regulators and tech companies into action faster. Coronavirus isn’t the last public health crisis we’ll see in our lifetimes. As gig economy jobs become the norm for a growing number of the population, ensuring better protection for workers’ health needs to be built right into the job description.

Sadly, given the trajectory of the disease, this probably isn’t the last time we’ll be writing about the coronavirus. But hopefully we’ll have more silver linings than dark clouds in stories to come.

Has your food tech business been impacted either good or bad by coronavirus? Drop us a line and let us know.

Amazon Go is a go!

Get yer Amazon Go!
Amazon Web Services made it cheap and easy to build out computing infrastructure, and the result was thousands of new startups springing up. Now that Amazon is selling its cashierless Go technology to third parties, will the same happen for bite-sized retailers?

Amazon unveiled its “Just Walk Out” business this week, providing the infrastructure for any store to turn on cashierless retail experiences. Customers stick their credit card in a turnstile upon entering, grab what they want and get charged automatically upon leaving.

Big retailers, which are already trying to fend off Amazon from eating the whole shopping world, probably won’t sign on, but smaller players and big brands could find it easier to create pop-up retail experiences almost anywhere.

They just need to open up their own stores in places before Amazon does. 🙂

Sweet! Truly (green) compostable packing!
Let’s end this newsletter on a good note. You know that compostable packaging you get at the restaurant or grocery store? Yeah… chances are good that’s not really compostable. It’s got forever chemicals in there.

But Sweetgreen is rolling out a new type of compostable to-go packaging devoid of those bad chemicals. As The Spoon’s Catherine Lamb wrote:

The containers are made of fibers from bagasse, an agricultural waste product, which is blended, heated, and covered with a natural coating so it won’t leak.

The only bummer is that the lids are still made from plastic. But! Those will be phased out soon. So. You know. Silver lining.

Keep washing your hands.

Postmates Launches Funds for Drivers and Restaurant Partners Affected by COVID-19

Postmates is launching two new programs this week meant to assist the delivery service’s drivers and restaurant partners impacted by COVID-19, according to an announcement from the company.

The company has set up the Postmates Relief Fund, which will cover the cost of medical check ups for its driers and couriers regardless of whether they have been diagnosed or quarantined. As of right now, drivers who have made at least one delivery in the last two weeks in any of the following states will be eligible for a credit from the fund: Wash., Ore., Calif., Nev., Utah, Colo., Ariz., Texas, Neb., Wis., Ill., Ind., Fla., Ga., Tenn., N.C., D.C., Penn., N.Y., Maine, Mass., and N.J.  

In the same announcement, Postmates also noted it is launching a pilot program that will temporarily waive commission fees for new merchant partners operating small restaurants. The idea behind the move is to give these smaller businesses a boost at a time when foot traffic to restaurants is down due to COVID-19. According to the announcement, “This Small Business Relief Pilot will waive all commission fees for businesses that are not currently delivering on the platform and operate in the City of San Francisco, but want to expand into on-demand delivery to help drive revenue as on-premise dining is impacted.”

Postmates has said it will “potentially” take this program to other cities in the U.S. as well.

Both of these efforts come just days after we learned Postmates as well as Uber, DoorDash, and other gig economy companies are in talks to see how they can band together to set up a potential fund to assist drivers/couriers infected by or quarantined with the COVID-19 virus. 

Some of these services, including Postmates, have also taken measures like implementing contactless delivery features to limit face-to-face human interactions. DoorDash joined that list this week, saying on Monday it is testing features for contactless delivery that will be launched soon. Uber, meanwhile, said it will compensate drivers — for both rideshare and Eats services — who can’t work for 14 days because of coronavirus diagnosis or quarantine.

With cases of COVID-19 on the rise in the U.S. and more employees now being mandated to work from home, we’re likely to see further demand for food delivery in the coming weeks. Stay tuned . . .