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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.

Moe’s Southwest Grill Opens Kiosk-Only Restaurant

Atlanta, GA-headquarterd Moe’s Southwest Grill is best known for its fast-casual take on Mexican food. It could also soon be known for the tech it uses to get said Mexican food to customers in a more contactless format. Today, the chain announced that its new kiosk-only location is open for business in Pittsburgh, PA.

This is the first of what will be multiple kiosk-only locations for Moe’s. The chain had originally planned to launch its Pittsburg location as well as one in Charlottesville, VA in the first quarter of 2020. It’s unclear if the pandemic was the reason for the delay.

The kiosk-only Moe’s is exactly as it sounds. The restaurant, owned and operated by Moe’s multi-unit franchisee, Mike Geiger, features multiple kiosks from which customers can directly order and pay for food, skipping the need for human-to-human interaction. 

One POS terminal and cashier will be available for customers that prefer ordering and paying for their meals via another human being.

The role kiosks play in the future of ordering and paying for restaurant food is still being determined. These standalone machines that require you to touch a screen could be seen by more wary customers as germ repositories. However, keying items in on a screen still requires less human-to-human interaction than talking to a cashier, and there’s also indications that facial recognition and gesture tech could soon become part of kiosk design. Others, like this restaurant in Sweden, are placing kiosks behind glass walls and in doing so making them accessible to outside foot traffic. 

For now, the Moe’s in Pittsburgh will feature regular old kiosks that accept Apple Pay, university cards (for college students in the surrounding area), and cash. Cash, in particular, is important, since one of the issues with digital payments at restaurants is that they exclude millions of unbanked and underbanked individuals in the U.S. While cashless payments are the norm in some countries (see: Sweden), it’s unlikely restaurants across the U.S. will go full-on cashless anytime soon. Self-order kiosks and other contactless restaurant tech coming out of the pandemic will need to account for that fact. 

Run a Restaurant From Your Phone, Thanks to This Latin American Tech Startup

Click through any restaurant industry publication in these pandemic-stricken days and you’ll likely assume that to run an off-premises restaurant, you need to load up on as much tech as you can. But as we’re fond of saying here at The Spoon, when it comes to restaurant tech, quality matters way more than bells and whistles. For all the contactless dining kits, delivery integrators, and AI-enabled tools out there, it’s the simpler solutions often create more value for the restaurant.

A Mexico City-based startup called remotekitchen appears to be betting on that idea with its new restaurant tech platform that essentially lets restaurant operators run a business directly from their mobile phones. That includes everything from promoting their restaurant to taking orders and processing payments. And for independent restaurants in Latin America — many of whom are not even online — that’s all they need.

“We are mobile and this [solution] is working for a smartphone-first operation,” David Peña, remotekitchen’s founder and CEO told me over the phone last week. With fellow cofounder and company COO Diego Vielma, he walked me through the technology and how it can get restaurants up and running with their off-premises strategies.

The company started as a delivery-only kitchen in 2019 and quickly pivoted to software in response to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. As has been well-documented, worldwide shutdowns have decimated restaurants as we know them, and there’s been much ado over the prohibitive cost of doing delivery via third parties like Grubhub and Uber Eats. So it’s perhaps not surprising that when remotekitchen started tinkering with its own software, others took note.

As restaurant tech goes, the remotekitchen platform is an extremely simple setup. A Basic plan gets you a website (those already online can simply add an “order” button), an app for receiving orders, coupon/promotion management. Those who opt for the Plus plan also get their own branded iOS and Android apps and the ability to process payments online. Either takes about a day to set up, and restaurants can also sell meals via a Facebook integration.

There’s a good reason for the simplicity here. Peña says that unlike the U.S., Latin America’s restaurant tech is “far from being developed.” Tech solutions are hard to come by, and even when they’re available, they’re overly complex.

“This is an industry that is working with almost no resources, almost no labor, so the whole industry is running on the smartphone of the owner,” he explained, adding that he’s seen many restaurants simply taking orders through WhatsApp. 

On top of that, roughly 96 percent of independent restaurants in Latin America are not online at all. There are no menus to peruse via the web, and third-party services like Uber Eats are out of the question, given the high commission fees associated with those companies.

The crew at remotekitchen bundled all of these factors together and have built a solution to address them that works on any device and is most appropriately suited to mobile devices. “We believe we can unlock a new market by giving access to a technology,” said Peña.

It’s very early days for the company, which is still in testing phase. They are currently working with just 10 restaurants, though Vielma said that over 50 are on a waiting list and will be able to use the software once remotekitchen “really understands how we are adding value to this small group of restaurants.”

One thing that may help that progress along is the company’s recent participation in food business accelerator Food-X. When remotekitchen joined the cohort back in March, they had no product on the market. Without any technology to back it up, they quickly launched a landing page and started signing up restaurants and figuring out how their product could add actual value to the Latin American restaurant industry.

“They actively seek out feedback and iterate as quickly as any team we’ve worked with so the product gets better and better, not because of guessing, but because they are engaged with their customers, their advisors, and their investors to understand what works and what doesn’t,” Peter Bodenheimer, Partner and Director at Food-X, added over email.

That this past Food-X cohort was entirely remote actually helped. Vielma noted that staying in Mexico City and doing a virtual cohort let the company stay focused on their core market and in communication with the restaurants surrounding them.

At the moment, remotekitchen is developing the final part of its product before they officially go to market. From there, the company plans to start raising its seed round.

The overarching goal is to empower any restaurant to get online — no small feat when the majority of your target region is currently offline and a pandemic is currently wrecking havoc on the entire industry. A huge part of the restaurant industry’s evolution will be the shift towards more and more off-premises orders, for which an online component is pretty much mandatory these days.

Peña says that remotekitchen’s long-term goal “is to enable universal access to healthy delicious and affordable food by democratizing the marketplace.” In other words, anyone can be a restaurant, thanks to mobile-first restaurant technology. 

Six Flags Adds Mobile Food Ordering to Its Theme Parks

There is no way you could get me to go to a theme park right now. Too many people in one place, too much complacency and too many unknowns about where we are at with this pandemic.

However, theme parks across the country are pushing past their COVID-19 concerns to re-open. As they do, they are implementing new procedures to create social distancing and minimize viral transmission as much as possible. Part of those procedures is mobile food ordering.

Six Flags announced last week that it was rolling out mobile food ordering and contactless payment across all of its parks. Guests just need to download the Six Flags mobile app, which allows them to choose their restaurant, place their order and pay. The app then gives them pickup instructions.

Six Flags isn’t the first to offer mobile ordering. Disney theme parks, which haven’t opened to the public yet, have reportedly expanded their mobile ordering and contactless payment options as well. And for a while there, it looked like Disney was even thinking about delivering its food to the front door of annual passholders.

Beyond theme parks, mobile ordering and contactless payment are quickly becoming table stakes for any restaurant. Fears of becoming a coronavirus hot spot have restaurants doing extra scrubbing and removing contact points that lots of people touch.

In places like theme parks, which involve masses of people and lines, I also wouldn’t be surprised to see the implementation of something like WaitTime. WaitTime uses computer vision and AI to monitor room occupancy (so there aren’t too many people in one room), and can measure crowd densities so establishments can map out where they need to thin people out.

Despite mobile ordering and contactless payments, studies show people are still wary about going back to restaurants (I get it!). If they do go back to theme parks, it won’t be because they can suddenly order a churro from their phones. But if they can’t resist the siren song of roller coasters this summer, perhaps it will get more people more to adopt mobile ordering and use it across more restaurants.

ResQ Launches Checklists to Help Restaurants Manage COVID-19 Cleaning Guidelines

ResQ, a software platform that lets restaurants manage repair and maintenance tasks, announced today the launch of its Checklists feature. With it, the company aims to help restaurants better handle “the exhaustive list of health and safety guidelines for reopening to reduce the spread of COVID-19,” according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

The new feature is available for free to restaurants in the U.S. and Canada, and joins ResQ’s growing collection of tools, which also includes maintenance management and invoicing, asset management, and workflow management for maintenance tasks. ResQ counts Pizza Hut, Tim Horton’s, and other well-known chains among its restaurant clients. 

Checklists digitizes the old pen-and-paper process of assigning daily upkeep tasks to restaurant staff. In a pandemic era, that list of tasks is considerably longer and might include things like disinfecting high-touch surfaces much more frequently, wiping down all screens (POS, kiosks, etc.), cleaning the lobby more frequently . . . the list goes on and on.

The problem is that there is no industry standard for that list. Back when restaurants first started to reopen, the National Restaurant Association released some suggestions around cleaning and sanitizing, but those are more guidelines than detailed instructions. Nowhere is there a definitive guide to sanitizing a restaurant during a pandemic.

ResQ’s Checklists doesn’t claim to be the definitive guide, but it does go pretty far in addressing the many tasks restaurants must do on a daily basis in order to meet the new standards for sanitization. With the feature, managers can create customized checklists specific to their business and space, and also take advantage of pre-loaded “COVID-19 prevention” checklists:

Via the ResQ app or website, a restaurant manager can create a new checklist or edit an existing one. Each checklist can be assigned to a specific staff person and given a frequency (e.g., “hourly”). For restaurants with multiple locations, checklists can be assigned to specific stores, ensuring standardized cleaning and sanitization processes across a brand’s locations.

Managers can track the progress of each task and, because the entire system exists in the ResQ app, pretty much anything except the cleaning itself can be done remotely. 

ResQ joins a number of companies using tech to help restaurants keep up with new expectations around cleaning and sanitization. PathSpot’s scanner uses visible fluorescent spectroscopy to monitor how well employees have washed their hands. Fujitsu’s AI-enabled sinks can also closely monitor hand washing. Elsewhere in the restaurant, some businesses are putting their touchscreen kiosks behind glass, which is easier to clean and doesn’t disrupt operations.

Keeping a restaurant extra-sanitized is paramount at a time when many consumers are still wary about going out to eat and COVID-19 cases are on the rise in some states. Like I said above, there’s no one set of rules every restaurant in the country must follow, which makes the proper sanitization something of a juggling act these days. Software like ResQ’s can at least standardize the process for restaurants across their own locations, not to mention help track how well their staff adhering to their tasks.

ezCater Lauches Relish to Reimagine Corporate Lunches

In case you hadn’t heard, the buffet as we know it is dead. That includes the catered office buffet. Now, as people head back to the office, companies need new ways to provide lunch that’s more sanitized, more socially distanced, and still quick and convenient for workers.

Online catering marketplace ezCater launched one such way this week. Relish, as the service is called, lets employees order from a selection of local restaurants then delivers all food directly to the office, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Using Relish, companies can choose which days of the week they want lunch catered to the office and set a budget for how much employees can spend. Relish then offers meal suggestions from local restaurants near the office. Employees can choose their food from the suggestions, and all meals arrive individually packaged to a central drop-off point in the office. 

Companies cover the delivery costs and can choose to subsidize some or all of the meals.

Like other areas of foodservice, office catering is undergoing a reinvention, thanks to the pandemic, and catering services are trying to become integral parts of companies’ return-to-work strategies. With more employees working from home for the foreseeable future, some brands, like Ox Verte and Slow Up, have created direct-to-consumer channels that deliver to employees home offices. Recently, too, Uber for Business launched its Vouchers program, which lets companies customize the types of meals they want to cater, whether it’s for a single employee working from home or a 1,000-person virtual event.

It’s too soon to tell which of the above strategies will prove most popular among corporate customers looking to subsidize employee lunches. Getting large numbers of people back to the office before there is a COVID-19 vaccine could prove challenging. The ability to pivot in this pandemic world is especially important for ezCater, which has raised roughly $320 million in funding. It’s tough to scale your corporate catering when corporations aren’t going into their offices.

On the flip side, once a vaccine is found and more people physically head back to work, the company could emerge as a leader thanks to its early start in redefining the concept of office lunches.  

S2G Ventures’ Managing Director on the 4 FoodTech Trends That Will Rise Post-COVID (Spoon Plus)

I wanted to (virtually) sit down with Krishnan to discuss S2G’s recent white paper entitled “The Future of Food in the Age of COVID-19.” It outlines four foodtech trends that S2G expects will grow in the coming months and years: digitalization, decentralized food systems, de-commoditization, and food as as medicine. Krishnan and I unpacked these four trends — and speculated about how investors will change their focus post-COVID — in our call.

The Deep Dive interview is available for subscribers to Spoon Plus. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

Panda Express Launches Its Own Delivery Service. Other Restaurants Could Follow

Panda Express has, in its own words, “cut out the middleman” as far as restaurant delivery is concerned. This week, the QSR chain announced it has launched its own delivery service, and also said was planning for 30,000 new hires, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The chain, which is owned by Panda Restaurant Group, had actually been planning to launch its own delivery service in a year’s time, according to the press announcement. The pandemic accelerated this timeline. Even with dining rooms reopening, they’re doing so at reduced capacity, and many would rather order takeout or delivery and eat in the comfort of their own home. But fees for using third-party delivery services a la Uber Eats or Grubhub can stack up quickly. For consumers dealing with job uncertainty or unemployment — two widespread things right now, thanks to he pandemic — ordering delivery with any amount of regularly just isn’t financially possible right now.

Panda Express noted the exorbitant fees in its announcement, and said with this new delivery service, guests “will not incur additional fees typically found on third party sites.”

However, a Panda Express spokesperson confirmed to The Spoon that Panda Express will still be available on third-party delivery services, “such as Uber Eats and Postmates.” So this new delivery service could be the start of a slow transition towards bringing off-premises operations back in house.

Which is definitely a post-pandemic trend to watch. Not that we’re post-pandemic yet, one of the many flaws in our food system the COVID-19 crisis put a spotlight on is the relationship between third-party delivery services and restaurants. Sky-high customer fees, even higher commission fees for businesses, shady business practices, and tipping policies for workers are all griefs the restaurant industry has voiced in the past year. To offset some of the high costs of doing delivery, restaurants have to raise their prices for customers. 

Restaurants are being urged by many in the industry to try and pull some of their off-premises strategies back in house in an effort to regain some control over their operations and, more importantly, their customer data and relationships. One analyst recently went as far as to say that “In the longer-term, many restaurants are going to see the value of investing in an in-house system for delivery orders.”

That won’t happen immediately. For many businesses, in-house delivery is actually more expensive than using a service like Uber Eats. But it could well be that the pandemic, the subsequent restaurant industry meltdown, mass unemployment, and a recession spur more restaurant into action in terms of finding ways to take more control back of their off-premises operations. If nothing else, this will definitely be a trend to watch in the latter half of 2020.

As far as the 30,000 new hires, Panda Express told Nation’s Restaurant News that new positions will exist to “execute the new health and safety operations and procedures, such as contactless service, curbside assistance, drive-thru assistance, expediters for to-go and online ordering, as well as new cleanliness protocols.”

Ritual Brings Its Online Order Platform to the U.S., Makes It ‘Free for Life’ for Restaurants

Today, online ordering app Ritual announced the U.S. launch of Ritual ONE, its online order platform that lets restaurants host and process digital orders through their own websites rather than using a third-party delivery service. That includes takeout, curbside pickup, delivery, and other off-premises formats, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The Ritual ONE tool will first be available in the U.S. to restaurants in Chicago, IL.

Based in Toronto, Ontario, Ritual’s order-ahead app has up to now been mostly geared towards the office lunchtime crowd, allowing workers in the same office or location to piggy back off one another’s orders.

Ritual ONE actually integrates directly into a restaurant’s main system, effectively becoming a piece of the business’s tech stack, rather than an add-on that has to managed separately. For businesses that are not already online, Ritual can create a customizable menu.

Ritual created its Ritual ONE service in response to the COVID-19’s devastating impact on the restaurant industry. The tool is actually a joint effort by Ritual and the City of Toronto. Through it, restaurants can accept digital orders through their own digital properties, rather than having to go through a third-party delivery service like DoorDash or Uber Eats to process delivery and pickup orders (though they would in most cases have to use those services for the last mile of delivery).

Lower commission fees is the big selling point here. Typically Ritual charges restaurants a $49 monthly fee for each location for Ritual ONE. However, given the ongoing state of the restaurant industry, the company noted in today’s announcement that “any current or new Ritual customers in the Chicago area will receive the service for free for life if they sign up by July 10.”

That, too, could be a major selling point. One of the major beefs with third-party delivery is the staggering commission rate those services extract from restaurants — up to 30 percent of each transaction, in some cases. Small and/or independent restaurants, in particular, can have their bottom lines decimated by such fees. The shift towards more off-premises orders has only made the issue worse, since restaurants that could previously get by on dining room sales are now forced to offer takeout and delivery. Usually, that means working with third-party services and handing over those hefty commission fees. 

Helping restaurants bypass those fees, at least in part, is something many restaurant tech companies say they can do nowadays. Toast, ChowNow, and others have all made announcements for restaurant tech packs that gets rid of the high commission fees charged by third-party delivery services. Though no one yet has gone as far as to promise free software for life, as Ritual just did. That could be incentive enough for restaurants to try the service out as they struggle to find ways to meet the new expectations around off-premises orders.

Bevi Will Socially Distance Its Smart Water Coolers With Touchless Tech

As restaurants reopen and (some) employees go back to the office, ensuring sanitary, socially distanced public spaces is a major topic of discussion, and contactless is fast becoming a requirement for everything from restaurant menus to grocery deliveries to lunch.

Your office water cooler can join that list now, too. Today, Bevi, a tech company that makes smart water coolers for office and commercial spaces, announced a new touchless dispensing feature meant to make it machines feel more sanitized and socially distanced to users.

The Bevi machine dispenses both still and sparkling water in a variety of flavors. The system involves an internet-connected dispenser that hooks up to a tap water source. Up to now, users could set flavors, carbonation levels, and other preferences using a touchscreen built into the machine. But come July 13, both new and existing Bevi machines will offer touchless dispensing that utilizes an individual’s mobile phone, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Come July 13, Bevi will send an on-screen animation to all its machines that includes instructions on how to use touchless dispensing. To enable the animation, companies just have to run a simple software update. From there, users can scan a QR code, which will replicate Bevi’s dispensing menu on their own personal screen. The same options for drink customization (carbonation levels, flavor, etc.) will appear on the user’s phone just as they would have on the machine’s touchscreen.

On the surface, the update seems a small one, but actually, these micro innovations from the tech world play an important role in making the world, or at least your office or local restaurant, a more sanitary place. While the scale of germophobism varies from one individual to the next, the pandemic has definitely called into question our use of these screens in public settings.

Various efforts are in place to address those concerns. Restaurants across the world are being urged to adopt contactless menus. My colleague Chris Albrecht makes a good argument for gesture control on kiosks and smart dispensers. Others are releasing facial recognition technology on their machines, so that a user need only have their face scanned to access the customer profiles and past orders. 

But facial recognition systems are expensive and come with a double side of privacy concerns. In lots of cases, it may be that a simple QR code is more feasible for a business to implement, especially if it’s for something simple like dispensing a lime-flavored water.

That seems to be Bevi’s thinking behind its new feature update. Doubtless we’ll see many other device-makers rolling out their own touchless functionality in the near future.

Gaming, Glass Houses, and Other Signals of Restaurant Recovery

Everyone’s talking about Just Eat Takeaway’s acquisition of Grubhub this week, so let’s talk about mannequins in restaurants instead.

At a virtual workshop for The Spoon this week, Max Elder, a Research Director at the Institute for the Future, referenced restaurants that are currently using mannequins to fill up tables left empty by social distancing rules. The example is what he calls a “signal.” Signals are, as Elder explained, “small or local innovations happening today, with potential to grow in scale and geographic distribution.” They are one small thing happening right now that can eventually accelerate into a widespread trend that changes an industry or, as Elder suggested, the entire food system.

The restaurant industry is full of these signals right now as businesses struggle to adjust to the new reality of reduced capacity in the dining rooms, an emphasis on to-go orders, and social distancing guidelines. Some things, like curbside pickup, have already become full-on trends everyone is doing. But plenty of restaurants are innovating on a much smaller scale, whether it’s through a new technology, product, or creative approach to social distancing. See the mannequins example above.

Will all of the signals currently out there in the restaurant industry become widespread trends? It’s too soon to tell, but they all provide some specific, granular detail on about new restaurant experiences and unique ways businesses are working to change the way we eat. In the spirit of that, here are a few noteworthy signals that may or may not become widespread but show us that innovation is alive and well in the restaurant biz.

Gaming gatherings. Fancy a little D&D with your to-go latte? Hex & Company, a board game cafe in NYC, set up an online gaming service to keep customers in touch with its brand (and also probably give them something to do) during shelter-in-place restrictions. 

People in glass houses. A shoutout to virtual workshop attendee QQ for bringing this up during the session. A restaurant in Amsterdam is making it safer for diners to eat out by enclosing them in tiny greenhouse-like glass structures while they eat. (See image above.) The concept is compelling because it serves up a unique restaurant experience that’s socially distanced at the same time.

Virtual tip jars. We’ve written about this one before. Out-of-work servers and bartenders can receive Venmo tips from folks they may never have served, thanks to efforts like this one in Chattanooga. The contactless aspect of these virtual tip jars could make the concept at attractive sell even once we’re past the pandemic.

Restaurant relief kitchen. When fine-dining restaurant Alma Cocina Latina had to close its doors because of the pandemic, owner Irena Stein turned it into a relief kitchen for food-insecure individuals around Baltimore. The concept was so attractive it eventually got the backing of José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen.

If eating inside a glass greenhouse or playing Magic the Gathering via your local coffeeshop’s server seems kind of strange, that’s good. One of my favorite moments of this week’s workshop was when Elder said, “Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.” As the restaurant industry enters a new era, we’ll need as many left-of-center ideas as we can possibly get.

Another Day Another Grubhub Rant

OK let’s actually talk about Grubhub. Or rather, let’s talk about what Just Eat Takeaway inherits if its deal to acquire Grubhub is approved by shareholders and goes through.

To quickly sum up the news, this week Amsterdam, Netherlands-based Just Eat Takeaway confirmed its $7.3 billion deal to acquire Grubhub. The sale creates a combined 360,000 restaurant clients across 25 countries, and roughly 70 million customers. 

Just Eat Takeaway, which is itself a newly formed company, also gets an automatic in with some of the strongest food delivery markets in the U.S., New York City and Grubhub hometown Chicago among them. It gets access to other markets across North America and therefore can take a hefty swipe at U.S. market leader DoorDash, and it will become the largest food delivery service in the world outside of China.

The deal, which is expected to close in the first quarter of 2021, also means Just Eat Takeaway will inherit the many (many, many) highly controversial aspects about Grubhub.

Over the last year alone, Grubhub has been accused of using misleading websites and phone numbers to charge restaurants extra fees, listing restaurants on its site with which the service doesn’t even have a deal with, and it’s stood behind the arguably unethical commission fees it charges restaurants. When he pandemic struck the U.S. in full force and restaurant dining rooms closed down, Grubhub didn’t waver from those fees. It merely offered a vaguely worded announcement about deferring fees for a temporary period, and the company spoke out against the mandatory caps many city governments have placed on those fees.

Uber, a former Grubhub suitor, reportedly balked at these shady business practices, which were one reason among many that deal went south. Just Eat Takeaway hasn’t made any mention of them in official statements or interviews so far, though in an interview with NRN this week the company said it was attracted to Grubhub’s business model. It’s too soon to know what that means for restaurant clients, but it doesn’t exactly instill confidence that things will change.

Unless consumers themselves opt out of using those services. One of the things Elder mentioned in his talk today was that everyone has a stake in the future of food. For restaurants and delivery, that means customers can help dictate the direction of the industry by the places where they eat and and the services they order from. No, every consumer that reads about the above controversies won’t delete their Grubhub and/or Just Eat Takeaway apps. But it’s worth remembering, as we’re forced to redesign the food system, that everyone’s actions, right down to the $5 sandwich order, will have lasting impact on the future of food.

Tune Into The Spoon’s Startup Pitch Session

Let’s end on a non-rant this week by highlighting the wealth of startups out there working around the clock to help change the food system for the better. Next week, The Spoon will host a Startup Pitch Session you can tune into via CrowdCast to see what some of these companies are up to.

For this first-ever Food Tech Pitch Sesh, Better Food Ventures’ Brita Rosenheim and Sansaire founder Scott Heimendinger will judge three food tech startups pitching their products. It’ll be great fun, with lots of constructive feedback you’ll likely be able to take and apply to your own business.

Join us next week, on June 18 at 10 a.m. PST. Register here to save your spot.

This is the web version of our newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry.

Panasonic and PopID Aim to Make Paying With Your Face the Norm at Restaurants

Using facial recognition to order and pay for food has long been an intriguing concept for restaurants, albeit one that comes with a bit of a creep factor. But now that the pandemic has accelerated the need for contactless systems in restaurants, it may become more widespread.

Case in point: this week, Panasonic and Cali Group’s PopID announced a new partnership that lets restaurant customers pay with their faces at drive-thrus and kiosks. PopID’s technology, which includes its PopPay “wallet,” will be integrated into Panasonic’s ClearConnect Kiosk, which offers restaurants the hardware, software, and UI/UX design needed to install self-order kiosks at restaurants. The two companies will also jointly integrate PopPay at drive-thru systems.

Once customers register for a PopID account, they can use PopPay at any restaurant that accepts the technology. They’ll be able to view past orders and loyalty points, reorder items, and, of course, pay for their meals without the need for human interaction. You can watch a quick explainer video here.

Facial recognition at fast-casual and QSR restaurants has been slowly gaining momentum over the last couple years. Bite, which works with ToGo’s and Noodles World Kitchen, among other restaurants, also offers facial recognition in its kiosks. Some restaurants, namely Dallas-TX Malibu Poke, have offered face recognition for years.

PopID’s tech is already in a number of restaurants, including Cali Group-owned CaliBurger, Bojangles, and Dairi-O. The Panasonic partnership is meant to expand the number of PopID deployments.

The flip side, of course, is that users have to be comfortable with giving away their face data in order to use the this convenient, socially distanced form of ordering and payments. Biometric data remains a controversial topic and comes with its fair share of security and privacy concerns. That means restaurants and tech companies deploying these systems have a responsibility to communicate with customers about how they use the data — and how well they protect it.

In a pandemic-stricken world, some of these systems actually do more than let customers order and pay for meals. Cali Burger recently launched a modified system (using PopID) that can, as well as processing ordering and payments, take staff and guests’ temperatures. A handful of restaurants, including Cali Burger, are using this feature, and if the sensors detect someone has a fever, that person is not allowed to enter the building. 

So while privacy concerns will always be a risk with facial recognition, the ability of these kiosks to actually ensure the safety of guests and staff could sway more folks to hand over their personal data. At the very least, the privacy tradeoff may seem more worth it. 

Dining With Mannequins: Max Elder on How to Think Like a Futurist About Our Food System

“Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.”

So said Max Elder, Research Director at Food Futures Lab for the Institute for the Future. Elder joined The Spoon yesterday for a virtual workshop on how to think like a food futurist during these uncertain times, and he had a wealth of tools and advice to offer attendees.

Besides the aforesaid quote, one of those nuggets was that you might be dining beside a mannequin next time you go out to eat. Sounds a little William Gibson-esque, right? Personally, I thought immediately of the ’80s film Mannequin, and some folks are no doubt creeped out by the whole idea.

But whatever images it conjures in your head, the concept actually already exists in some places. During yesterday’s workshop, Elder highlighted a Michelin-star restaurant in the Washington, D.C. area, The Inn at Little Washington, that is using mannequins to fill empty tables now that social distance guidelines require restaurants to run at reduced capacity in the dining room. 

This isn’t a widespread trend — yet. It’s what Elder calls a “signal.” Signals, as we discussed at the virtual workshop today, are facts about the present we can use to make predictions about the future. They’re especially important at a time when there’s so much uncertainty about so many parts of the food system, from the supply chain to restaurants to how we’ll get our groceries in future.

So how does one restaurant seating its empty tables with mannequins become an actual trend in the restaurant biz? For that matter, do we want it to become a trend? To answer these questions, Elder led the group in discussing the consequences, good and bad, of restaurants using mannequins as stand-in customers.

Ideas included:

  • Monetizing mannequins with ads
  • Mannequins becoming an extra item in the restaurant to clean and sanitize
  • Creating a Walking Dead-themed restaurants with mannequins
  • Ensuring mannequins are inclusive from racial, gender, and cultural angles
  • Mannequins becoming robots and therefore potential diner companions that could talk to you
  • Said robot-mannequins becoming holograms

The list goes on and on.

As a side note, mannequins and other doll-like figures aren’t just at the Washington Inn. A restaurant in Tokyo, Japan has strategically placed them around its establishment and even partnered with a clothing brand to make the mannequins as stylish as possible. And restaurant in Thailand uses stuffed animals, because who doesn’t want to eat across from a giant stuffed panda bear? 

If it all sounds a tad ridiculous, that’s the point. And as Elder and the workshop audience showed, seemingly ridiculous ideas can sometimes lead to us pondering the bigger implications of signals poised to become trends.

That’s just a smidgen of what we talked about at the workshop. To learn more about what signals are and how they become trends, what a future wheel is and why it’s important to making forecasts, and a bunch of other tools, watch the full video.

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