Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Crypto

Tom Collichio and Spike Mendelson’s Pizza NFT Goes Live

Chefs Tom Collichio and Spike Mendelson officially launched CHFTY Pizza NFT project this week. The official “mint” or release of its 2777 unique pizza designs began this week, with the pre-sale started yesterday Wednesday, March 23 and the public sale opening today.


Each NFT is priced at .07 Ethereum (worth $204 as of this writing) which will net CHFTY founders around $566,000. NFT holders will have access to virtual and in-person pop-up events, classes, kitchen accessories + apparel and more. CHFTY Pizza’s Discord has more details including an AMA the team did over the weekend to rally support and add people to the insider “Slicelist” for pre-sale access.

Chefs talk NFT and CHFTY at SimulATE Mini-Summit

Chefs Mendelson and Collichio joined The Spoon at our virtual February 1st SimulATE Food Metaverse + NFT Mini-Summit to discuss their upcoming NFT, its intended purpose and why it was important for the chef community to be involved in the development of Web3.

Mendelson commented, “(Post pandemic) I felt left behind in Web 2.0 and technology, as a restaurant tour and chef. And I was fighting to learn really quick on how to develop your own app, how to drive traffic from those third-party stores to your own app, but we were really way behind that point. So we want to enter NFTs right.”

When Collichio noticed artists and other creators were using NFTs as a way of keeping their own IP and driving revenue back to themselves when releasing their art, the two began a conversation on how to leverage NFTs for chefs and foodies. And out of that, the project that would become CHFTY Pizza was born.

The IP in the culinary world is difficult to protect in the age of digital food content and shareable recipes and food creation — and restaurateurs and chefs are in need of new pathways to profits in a post-pandemic world.

“What this does is that’s going to enable a restaurant term to expand way past their brick and mortar. This is where the world’s going, so we can either sit there and dig our feet and go no, we’re not going to do this or we can embrace it and get in front of it. And I think that’s what Spike and I are doing,” remarked Chef Collichio.

What’s next?

If you’re able to grab one of the 2,777 tokens during the pre or public sale, you’ll have to stay tuned and see what rewards and utilities will be added. First up, CHFTY Pizzas is hosting its first in-person event for token holders in Washington, DC, and will include meet and greets with founding Chefs Tom and Spike along with Andrew Zimmern, Maneet Chauhan and Kristen Kish.

To listen to the entire discussion on restaurants, NFTs and CHFTY Pizza, join Spoon Plus and get access to all virtual event archives.

Food meets the metaverse

Join us for SimulATE Spring Summit virtually on May 4th

Get early bird tix for our food metaverse, NFT + Web3 summit

This Farmer’s Market Vendor Has Accepted Bitcoin for 5 Years. Here’s How Things Have Changed.

Back in 2017, before much of the general public had given cryptocurrency a second thought, Alessandro Stortini started accepting bitcoin as a form of payment at his local farmer’s market stand, La Pasta.

Since that time, virtual currencies have become mainstream as everyone from grandmas to pro athletes have jumped into the world of crypto. In fact, from 2017 to 2022, the number of crypto wallets went from under 12 million to over 81 million by January of 2022.

If you’re like me, you’d figure with almost seven times as many cryptocurrency wallets out there, the number of people looking to spend their virtual currency to buy pasta at their local farmer’s market would have gone up. Not so, according to Stortini.

“We got way more customers paying with bitcoin in 2017,” Stortini said.

Stortini told me the reason for that is because back in those early days, crypto owners were more willing to use it as a form of payment.

La Pasta’s QR Code for accepting crypto payment

“There was more buzz back then and more people not doing it as an investment, but instead just spending it.”

According to Stortini, as bitcoin and other crypto markets crashed in 2017-18, many continued to spend their cryptocurrency as they tried to unload it. However, as cryptocurrency values hit the stratosphere in recent years, that’s all changed.

“More people are holding than ever,” Stortini said. “It’s harder to get it out of people than back then.”

Stortini operates at 18 different farmer’s market locations across the Puget Sound region per week and gets, on average, one or two cryptocurrency transactions per day at each location. The type of coin varies depending on the location.

“Edmonds (a city north of Seattle) is the more heavy crypto market. Edmonds is all bitcoin. West Seattle and Capitol Hill are really obscure coins. A lot of Monero and trendy coins like Doge.”

Stortini, who’s helped a couple of his fellow farmer’s market vendors get set up to take crypto payments, says accepting bitcoin and other coins has just gotten easier over the years.

“It’s just like scanning a Venmo. A lot of the vendors at this point have a QR for their Venmo or for other things.”

So what does Stortini do with the virtual currency he gets from his customers? Like other crypto enthusiasts nowadays, he’s long on bitcoin and other coins.

“I’ve never cashed out any of this stuff we’ve taken through the business. But, with one or two transactions a day, it’s better to let it sit.”

Slim Jim is creating a “Meata-verse” and a marketplace for virtual food

Last year, the meme-based cryptocurrency dogecoin got its first public earnings callout from the company that owns meat stick brand Slim Jim. Conagra Brands CEO Sean Connolly pointed to the social engagement from active dogecoin and Shiba Inu meme coin communities as big factors in Slim Jim’s win in the Adweek March Madness-style brand competition.

And now, it seems the company’s interest in Web3 technology goes beyond the gimmicky marketing campaign. Coindesk reported yesterday that Slim Jim had recently filed for trademarks under “Slim Jim,” “Meataverse,” and “Long Boi Gang” that announce plans for a virtual marketplace comprised of NFTs, virtual food products and virtual goods.

The filings also discuss “providing a metaverse for people to browse, accumulate, buy and sell virtual food products” and seem to indicate that the meat snack food brand will try and take a leading role in leveraging virtual environments to extend its reach and engage the next generation of consumers in immersive experiences.

Slim Jim joins other food brands like Nestle and McDonalds with forays into combining food and Web3 technology as consumer interest in crypto and NFTs continues to rise.

To understand what the food metaverse might look like and why food brands across industries including restaurant, grocery, and CPG are planting their flags in Web3, join The Spoon community on May 4 for Simulate Spring Summit: Food Metaverse + Web3 virtual event. Early bird tickets start at $75 – register here.

Emily Elyse Miller Wants to Reinvent Breakfast Cereal. That Means Vegan Ingredients, Edgy Mascots, and (Of Course) NFTs

Emily Elyse Miller knows a thing or two about breakfast.

Not only has the one-time journalist and fashion trends forecaster written a book on the topic (complete with 380 recipes from 80 countries), but she’d also run a consulting company that helped world-renowned chefs like Enrique Olvera develop breakfast events.

But after years of writing and teaching about first-meal, Miller realized that cereal, the centerpiece of the American breakfast for generations of kids and adults, had gone stale. So she decided to start a cereal company of her own to reinvent the category.

Called OffLimits, Miller’s company created a line of irreverent brands like Dash and Zombie, each with its own ‘moody mascot’ and a clean ingredient list.

The funky mascots were important for Miller, because while she loved the rainbow-colored pop culture she grew up with in the cereal aisle, she felt it was time for something new.

“Tony the Tiger is not cool,” said Miller. “Cereal is one of the only products that carry culture in this unique way, and that culture has not been updated in decades.”

Emily Elyse Miller

Miller worked with artists to design the cereal brands’ characters and boxes. Now, she sees NFTs as a natural evolution to bring the creations to life and connect directly with the OffLimits’ community.

“The mascots have moody personalities, and there are highs and lows to those personalities too,” said Miller. “They have mental health issues as much as they have kind of successes and wins, and I think that’s what makes the brand so right for building out in the Web3 space.”

New to Web3, Miller initially started small by giving away NFTs during a pop-up at the Art Basel art fair last December in Miami Beach. Attendees of the pop-up scanned a QR code to claim an NFT for what Miller describes as the first-ever “NFT cereal toy.” The giveaway was gamified, so some who scanned got an “exploding cereal” NFT and given an OffLimits cereal variety pack.

The Art Basel NFT giveaway gave Miller confidence to go bigger. “My first NFT protect was just so I could understand who would claim it and if people would care at all,” said Miller. “People very much cared, so that helped just like solidify that I get to pay a lot more attention to this.”

That extra attention resulted in a new NFT project announced this week called “Best Cereal in the Metaverse.” The project will feature a collection of 2,500 NFTs (.111 Etherium (~$290)), each with its own unique artist-created spin on an OffLimits’ mascot. In addition to unique artwork, NFT owners gain access to the private discord and can participate in the custom cereal box design process by submitting an NFT they own to be featured on a custom-designed cereal box. Each NFT holder will also get four of the custom-designed boxes of cereal shipped to their home.

OffLimits is part of a bigger trend of upstart food brands pushing into NFTs. Startups like Bored Breakfast Club, Liquid Death, and Yerb have all launched NFT projects over the past few months as a way to directly connect with their customers and create a new commerce model. For Miller, while all of this is exciting and represents opportunity, there’s still lots of work to do.

“While people were excited to learn about an NFT (with the first project) and potentially claim it, the amount of questions that we got and education that we have to do for our community who are not crypto native is a lot,” said Miller. “So brands need to take their responsibility.”

That responsibility also means talking to other brands curious about the Web3 space and conveying what she’s learned.

“I’ve been talking to so many brands about how they can be more involved in the space,” said Miller. “For me, everything’s about functionality, which is why I wanted this project to have a lot of layers. I wanted to involve our existing community to help grow a larger community of artists and just keep a circle of engagement going. That’s why I feel like there needs to be a physical product for something digital, trying to keep a good balance.”

If you want to sign up for the OffLimits NFT, you can do so here.

GourmetNFT Want to Help Culinary Creators Monetize Recipes & Food Experiences Using NFTs

The tried-and-true cookbook is dead. Long live the fractional cookbook.

The movement toward secure, one-of-a-kind recipes and food experiences are fueled by advances and acceptance of the technology surrounding Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). It could be a way to move beyond one-dimensional food presentations and feed the growing number of foodies who want more bells and whistles in their gourmet interactions. And then, there are chefs, who, faced with shrinking margins and the impact of COVID-19 on their businesses, are always on the hunt for new revenue streams.

“It has always baffled me as to why chefs and culinary creators, who are essentially IP creators and artists don’t get royalties unless they get into the whole hassle of writing and publish a cookbook,” Ruth McCartney, part of the team behind GourmetNFT, said in an interview with The Spoon. “When NFTs came along, my mind went to individual recipes and for foodies to be able to curate and compile all of their favorite recipes and cook from their iPads.”

McCartney believes those in the food industry—from three-star Michelin chefs to up-and-comers making indigenous pasta in Brazil—need to be rewarded for their skills. Like her brother—Sir Paul McCartney of that minor band from Liverpool.

“I think it’s a good way not only for chefs to be treated like rock stars,” she said. “It’s an iTunes for chefs.”

Liquid Avatar, a Canadian firm that focuses on the verification, management, and monetization of personal identity, and its subsidiary Oasis Studios, a multimedia NFT content-creation company, provide the technology and artistry that powers Gourmet NFT. David Lucatch, Liquid Avatar’s co-founder and president, believes GourmetNFT can take advantage of his company’s technology to securely and quickly allow consumers to purchase a range of recipes and culinary adventures.

One such adventure is a multisensory weekend at David Skinner’s Houston restaurant, eculent. Skinner’s reputation in the food world could have a Pied Piper effect inspiring other noted chefs.

“The road to publishing a cookbook is paved with good intentions however schedules get in the way,” said Skinner. “But with Gourmet NFT, Chefs can upload one recipe, one image, one video at a time as they are already creating a short form variant of the content for social media. Over time, they will have amassed what amounts to a digital cookbook.”

But, as the people behind GourmetNFT and others who follow the space know, using NFTs to share recipes alone will not cut it. For a recipe to be considered “copyrightable”—not to mention entertaining— “bonus material” such as inside tips or custom videos must be part of the deliverable. Beyond such individual digital assets as instructions on making George Harrison’s favorite custard, McCartney explained that goods and services could be delivered using the secure platform.

“Chefs can also make money by putting put a QR code on their dedicated Gourmet NFT website as well as put (the code) on their menus, to-go boxes, and build their own fan clubs and traffic to their fractional cookbook page,” McCartney said. She pointed out the example of Brazilian Chef David Rivillo, a man noted for his inventive pasta creations. Rivillo is signed to an exclusive deal with GourmetNFT and will sell singular pasta with his digital presence.

All of which begs the question: Will NFTs spell the end of printed cookbooks and the vast expanse of subpar YouTube cooking videos?

Ruth McCartney said she has spoken to leading publishers about the opportunity; the response, she says, is, “We don’t do NFTs—That’s art.”

Ready or Not, OneRare’s Supreet Raju Wants to Welcome You to the Foodverse

While we can’t (yet) enjoy food in all its multisensory glory in the virtual world, Supreet Raju thinks connecting food to the metaverse makes perfect sense.

“Food has to be eaten in the real world,” said Raju, co-founder OneRare, a food-centric metaverse. “But there’s a lot of things that can happen in the virtual world apart from tasting it.”

Raju, who spoke last week at SimulATE, the Spoon’s Web3 food summit, pointed to the popularity of Instagram and TikTok videos and how people love cooking shows, even if they can’t taste the food being made on their screens.

“We as audiences, we never eat that food, but we look at that food, and we are so tempted to tune in. So I think virtual food also makes a connection with people.”

Raju and her husband started OneRare during the lockdown of the pandemic. They began with the idea of food NFTs, where users would collect ingredient NFTs and would use them to claim a dish NFT. The vision grew quickly, and soon they were thinking of a full metaverse with in-world games, chef and brand partnerships, and exchanges of virtual assets for real-world utility. Adding to the momentum was the $2 million-plus raised in November via an NFT drop.

“It was supposed to be a simple project where you collected ingredients to claim your dish NFT. But from there, we’ve added layers. We started thinking about games. Then we started thinking about the utility of NFTs. And here we are, creating the first foodverse in the world.”

Part of the vision includes working with food brands, chefs, and restaurants to bring them into the metaverse and offer residents of OneRare real-world utility in the form of coupons for food, unique recipes they can use, and more.

This week, the company struck its first brand partnership with Urban Platter, an India-based ingredient provider. OneRare players will be able to use tokenized Urban Platter ingredients in in-game recipes and eventually will be able to exchange them for ingredients in the real world. Over time, the ingredient company plans to launch a virtual store in OneRare’s Foodverse where visitors learn about products and even shop.

Not surprisingly, in a world where most people still can’t explain Web3 or blockchain and virtual reality is still for early adopters, there are lots of skeptics when it comes to the idea of a foodverse.

While it may take some time, Raju thinks the skeptics will come around.

“When Instagram came in 2009, brands never took it seriously for the first two, three years,” said Raju. “And then they saw a chef who was just making recipes at home get to like 5 million followers, get his own cookbook, and then get his own restaurant. That’s when chefs and brands started saying, ‘oh my God, we need to make an Instagram account.'”

In the long term, Raju envisions the OneRare foodverse weaved into the broader metaverse, where OneRare powers virtual food experiences in other virtual worlds. The company plans to integrate with other Web3 platform companies to get there, and one example is Chumbi Valley, an NFT role-playing game the company partnered with last year.

“We look at ourselves as the food people here,” said Raju. ” We want to put it on the blockchain. You need an energy drink to train for a race? We’ll be there. You need pizza for your party? We’ll be there. That’s the kind of way we’re building OneRare.”

You can watch my full interview with Supreet Raju below.

It Started as a Meme. Now friesDAO Is On Track to Buy a Restaurant After Raising Over $4M Selling NFTs

When Bill Lee and Brett Beller started talking about the idea of using a DAO and NFTs to buy a McDonald’s, they were mostly joking around.

“There was always this joke since the beginning of crypto where if you just traded very poorly, or if you lost a lot of money, you could always work at McDonald’s,” said Lee, an advisor to friesDAO, in a recent interview with The Spoon. “And we just thought it would be hilarious if we got together and said let’s try and buy McDonald’s as a DAO so we can guarantee ourselves a future job.”

The two continued talking and became intrigued enough by the idea to start a Discord server, tell a few folks, and see what happens. Within a few days, a couple thousand had joined the Discord, and it became clear that what started as a meme was now something many were taking very seriously.

“As people started joining, we realized that the pressure is on now,” said Lee. “People are actually wanting to do this for real.”

Different members of the server offered to pitch in, and before long, they had assembled a crew to make it happen. One person started a website. Another registered a domain. Someone put together the documentation. And just like that, a Discord server that had launched after Christmas was a DAO with momentum and real money: As of this week, friesDAO has over $4 million in a treasury.

In the short time the project has been together, Lee and the rest of the team have given lots of thought to how it might work. For token holders, Lee said that while they will have a say in the oversight and direction of the restaurant and get access to real-world benefits like free food, what they won’t get is any ownership equity in the restaurant. That would essentially categorize the effort as equity-based crowdfunding and subject it to much stricter regulatory oversight.

As for the purchase structure and ongoing oversight of the business, the group’s considered a number of ways to do this. While one idea is an outright purchase of an existing restaurant through a contracted third party, another possibility they’re exploring is structuring the deal as a loan to an existing franchise operator to buy another restaurant. This would allow the DAO to rely on the operator’s expertise in running a restaurant, preserve capital, and scale to more cities, all while negotiating real-world benefits for token holders into the terms of the deal like coupons for free food.

With (as of today) over $4.3 million in the treasury, the DAO already has enough to buy a restaurant, but the question is what kind? Lee said the group has priced out everything from a Subway to different nationally recognized burger franchises, but they will likely go after a smaller franchise first, essentially giving them a “practice run” before scooping up a bigger franchise like a McDonald’s.

According to the group’s roadmap, that first purchase should take place around June of this year.

You can listen to my full conversation with Bill Lee of friesDAO below, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you missed SimulATE, The Spoon’s food Web3 summit last week where we talked with others working on restaurant NFTs (including BurgerDAO and Flyfish Group), you can watch all the sessions here with a subscription to Spoon Plus. (Also, make sure to not miss SimulATE II, coming in May).

Here Are The Details About Flyfish Club, Gary Vaynerchuk’s NFT Restaurant Opening in 2023

While we already knew some of the basic details about Gary Vaynerchuk and VCR Group’s NFT restaurant concept, we’ve learned more in the last week about how the whole thing will work.

Here’s some of what we’ve learned and my quick thoughts:

Token as Membership. At a high level, the Flyfish Club and its NFT membership is essentially a new, crypto-ized spin on an old idea: a member’s only dining club. To start, VCR initially made a total of 1,501 membership tokens for the Flyfish Club available to the public and reserved 1,534 for the company. Membership remains valid as long as a person owns the token. As just like most NFTs, the owner can resell the token (and many are already trying to do just that) on marketplaces like Opensea.

Flyfish Has Two-Tiered Membership. Flyfish has two types of tokens available: a Flyfish token and a Flyfish Omakase token. The Flyfish token, initially offered at 2.5 Ethereum (~$8,400), gets you into the restaurant and cocktail lounge while the Omakase token, offered at 4.25 Ethereum (~$14,300), gets you all that plus entry into the exclusive Omakase room.

Frequency and Guests: A token owner can eat at Flyfish pretty much whenever they want, but they’ll have to make a reservation first. Token owners will need to call ahead up to 14 days in advance for a table. Each token holder can make as many reservations as they’d like (capacity willing) per month, and each token member can bring the number of guests allotted for a specific table (for example, if they reserve a four-person table, they can bring three guests).

Flyfish Token Owners Still Have to Pay for Food. So you just spent $14 thousand on your new membership? That’s great and all, but you better have some left over to pay the bill. As with a traditional exclusive dining club, membership fees to Flyfish are just that, the cost of entry. Food, payable in US dollars, will be purchased for each meal just as if you were at any other restaurant.

Flyfish Has Raised $14 Million in Funds So Far. That’s right, $14 million in about a week. This is impressive and signals a potentially game-changing way to start a restaurant. Of course, there can only be one ‘first’ and not everyone has millions of followers like Gary Vaynerchuk. Still, I can certainly see a lot of celebrity chefs jumping into NFT-driven membership restaurants in the next couple of years.

The Tokens are Leasable. This is an interesting (and smart) twist: Flyfish permits token owners to lease them to others on a monthly basis. Leasing essentially turns a semi-liquid asset with a limited ability for near-term recurring revenue into a potential cash cow. Say, for example, you buy a Flyfish token for $4 thousand and lease it out to executives or curious upscale foodies for $1,000 a month. This would allow you to essentially treat a token as say you would a home you purchase to put onto Airbnb: An investment with potential for both long-term appreciation potential and near-term short-term recurring revenue.

There are a lot more details on the club’s FAQ page, which I would recommend reading. Overall, I think Gary Vee and crew have created a fairly common-sense initial framework for an NFT-as-membership concept that will undoubtedly become a template for others (of which I expect will be many).

If you’d like to learn more about how NFTs will chance the restaurant and food business, make sure to join The Spoon’s Food NFT/Metaverse mini-summit on February 1st. Registration is free (but limited), so hurry up and register today!

Now That Square is Block, Will Jack Dorsey’s Company Make it Easier to Buy Dinner With Bitcoin?

Here’s what we know: On Monday, Jack Dorsey announced he’s stepping down immediately from the top job at Twitter. On Wednesday, his payments company Square said it would change its name to Block and would, among other things, double down on cryptocurrency, blockchain, and building a decentralized payment system. I haven’t checked the news today, but I’m guessing he may have announced he’s creating a robot society or has plans for a teleportation system.

What does it all mean (besides the robots and teleportation)? For one, Jack Dorsey has had a busy week. But it also means the same guy who helped usher in real-time social media and democratize digital payments for small businesses may now be the one who helps make it easier for average Joe to buy everyday things with cryptocurrency.

Because right now, it isn’t easy. Crypto isn’t nearly as liquid as other conventional payment methods such as cash or credit. Sure, you can trade crypto without any problem – anyone with a Coinbase or Robinhood account knows that – but good luck paying for a bottle of mouthwash or buying a Big Mac with that wad of Dogecoin burning a hole in your crypto wallet.

So what can Dorsey do about it? Simple: with Square Block, he has all the different parts to make a payment value chain for crypto that will take it from what is mainly a highly volatile investment vehicle today to a street-spendable retail currency of tomorrow.

So what are Block’s business units?:

Square – the company’s original product (which will retain the Square brand) covers the digital payment portion of the equation. The company sells retail point-of-sale systems and has created restaurant-specific platforms and services.

Cash App – Started as Square Cash in 2015, Cash App is a personal banking, money transfer, and investment app for consumers. The app added crypto trading in 2018.

TBD – Announced earlier this year, TBD (long name TBD54566975) is a decentralized financial services unit. The launch of TBD followed other crypto-centric moves by the company such as creating a Bitcoin hardware wallet.

And perhaps most importantly, Dorsey and Block have the passion and conviction that cryptocurrency is the future and will eventually become our everyday currency. The company so much as said so when it began to buy and hold Bitcoin last year. “We believe that bitcoin has the potential to be a more ubiquitous currency in the future,” said Square’s Chief Financial Officer, Amrita Ahuja, at the time.

They also have the know-how. “We believe there needs to be a global native currency for the internet,” Dorsey said as his company launched the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance (COPA) last year. Since that time, the company announced it would build a decentralized Bitcoin exchange in early 2021 and just last month TBD published a white paper detailing a protocol for such an exchange.

This is the type of hard, in-the-trenches work needed to create a more friction-free cryptocurrency financial system and, from all the looks of it, Block and Dorsey are intent on leading the way.

Once that happens, I imagine diners may someday more easily be able to buy dinner using cryptocurrency than was experienced by the folks behind Dinner Dao during their first-ever meal for the NFT dinner club. While the group really wanted to pay for dinner with the Ethereum they pooled together for their club, they had to resort to using a Coinbase credit card that converted the crypto to US dollars.

With the launch of Block, there’s a good chance that in five years (or maybe sooner), Dorsey and company will have put all the necessary tech, systems, and financial guide rails in place so when we buy a Big Mac, we can do so with crypto. At that point, Dorsey will have completed yet another society-shifting technological feat and, who knows, can finally get to work on that teleportation network we all want.

Dinner DAO is Creating IRL Dinner Clubs Built Around NFTs

After eating at home for much of the past 18 months, most of us are itching to get out into the real world and have dinner with interesting people. If this is you, may I suggest a new way to break bread: An NFT dinner club.

That’s the idea behind Dinner DAO, a new community creating IRL (in real life) dinner clubs using non-fungible tokens.

Here’s how it works: Prospective diners become members of a club – or Dinner DAO (DAO stands for ‘decentralized autonomous organization’) – by buying a Dinner DAO NFT. The cryptocurrency raised during the sale of the NFT is pooled in a shared treasury and used to purchase meals whenever the club gets together throughout the year.

Like many NFTs, Dinner DAO uses Ethereum because of the cryptocurrency’s built-in smart contract functionality. Dinner DAO NFTs are minted using a platform called Unlock, which creates the locks and keys for NFT membership. Membership can take the form of a season pass or even one-off dinner tickets.

Dinner DAOs are location-based, meaning members join together for dinner in a specific city. Members discuss potential restaurants using the Dinner DAO Discord, which acts as the central gathering spot for the community. From there, they vote on where to eat using Snapshot.org, a decentralized voting site popular with the crypto crowd.

The Dinner DAO concept is the brainchild of artist and designer Austin Robey. Robey, who lives in Brooklyn, created the first Dinner DAO NFT for New York City, and the first meal was at a restaurant in Little Italy called Shoo Shoo Nolita. I asked Robey how his club paid for the meal since memberships are purchased in virtual currency and most restaurants want dollars or another government-backed currency. He told me that one of the members of the club had a Coinbase debit card (Coinbase is a company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange, and where many users keep cryptocurrency balances stored in the Coinbase wallet). The group transferred Ether from the pooled treasury to the member’s debit card and Coinbase converted it to US dollars when the bill was paid at the restaurant.

“I think it feels like it would defeat the purpose if everyone’s paying with a Bank of America credit cards,” said Robey.

If this all sounds like a lot of work, it is, at least for those not well-versed in cryptocurrency and NFTs. But for crypto converts, creating a Facebook group and paying for things with a regular credit card goes against the organizing principle of the virtual currency and NFT movement: decentralization. Robey and other Dinner DAO members are ok with taking more time to create a crypto-based dinner club because, in doing so, they are pioneering a new way to meet for a meal without having to rely on big technology companies or banks. In other words, they are getting together in real life by putting their dinner club on the blockchain.

“I have just have been interested in collective ownership within tech and collective governance within tech,” said Robey. “Which is part of the reason why I’ve been excited about digging into things that Unlock can do in the web three in crypto space to enable these new forms of human and corporate organization.”

Those who want to organize a new Dinner DAOs can do so by joining the Dinner DAO Discord and creating a proposal for a new city. Users vote on potential cities and, once awarded, the new Dinner DAO chapter lead will mint an NFT and put it on an exchange such as Opensea. Chapter leads are only allowed to invite two in-real-life friends and the rest must be new acquaintances. Once the eight seats are sold (each Dinner DAO club has a total of eight members), chapter members vote on a location and, finally, get together and eat a meal.

The newest Dinner DAO chapter is in Portland. The city lead is web anthropologist Amber Case, who was attracted to the idea of Dinner DAO because she felt the old-world way of splitting a check was such a pain. In her application for the Portland chapter, Case wrote she had at one point tried to create a dinner club, but “when we looked at the fundraising aspects of it, it quickly became annoying. My former co-founder and I even tried to make a startup to make it easier to split the check! We put that idea on ice while we waited for something better to emerge.”

Almost a decade later, Case has found her something better in Dinner DAO. If you’d like to look into creating a Dinner DAO, you can check out the group’s website.

The Culinary NFT Trend Is Just Beginning

If you thought the romance between the culinary world and NFTs was a quick spring fling, I have some news for you: This relationship looks set for the long haul.

The latest evidence of an embrace of non-fungible tokens by restaurants comes in the form of new promotion launches over the past few weeks by both Burger King and Dave & Buster’s.

The Burger King NFT promotion is part of an effort to raise awareness around the company’s Keep It Real campaign, a marketing initiative in which it is eliminating 120 artificial ingredients from its menu. Here’s how the program, which is powered by the Sweet NFT platform, is described in Restaurant Dive:

“Guests can scan a QR code on each Keep It Real Meal box to receive one of three collective NFT game pieces, according to details shared with Marketing Dive. When the full set is collected, guests are programmatically provided a fourth NFT, a reward that could be a 3D digital collectible, free Whopper sandwiches for a year, autographed merchandise or a call with one of the campaign’s celebrity ambassadors.

In short, the burger chain is creating a loyalty program that entices consumers with real-world rewards like burgers. In other words, a modern equivalent of the old McDonald’s Monopoly game, only built on the blockchain.

Much like Burger King’s effort, Dave & Buster’s is an NFT powered loyalty program that promises prizes, even if the odds are longer and prizes are essentially just more game tokens. The program, which also uses Sweet’s NFT platform, offers digital cards and tokens in exchange for tickets won by customers playing games in the restaurant. According to the announcement, each location will offer a unique game card and coin, and the first customer to collect all the locations will win a “1 of 1 Super Master NFT and a $10,000 Dave & Buster’s Power Card.”

Beyond these efforts by the big chains, NFTs are also making their way into higher-end cuisine. In July, chef Marcus Samuelsson turned his chicken recipe into an NFT and threw in the opportunity to eat at the chef’s restaurant. In August, food critic Agnes Chee Yan-Wei announced she’s collaborating with NOIZchain.com to create an NFT marketplace for chefs. And then there’s Gary Vaynerchuk’s NFT restaurant, where he plans to offer exclusive membership dining privileges for owners of one of the restaurant’s NFTs.

While much of the early forays into the NFT trend seemed a bit forced, the latest efforts are encouraging for a few reasons:

These NFTs offer real-world rewards, not just digital art. Digital art isn’t a bad thing, but the reality is if NFTs are ever to become mainstream, they need to translate to tangible rewards. Burger King is offering free food, while Buster & Dave’s offers the promise of free gameplay.

The rewards are available to everyone. Sweet, whose NFT platform underlies both Burger King and Dave & Buster’s offerings, call their approach “broad-scale”. What this means is there’s more than just one single copy of a digital asset everyone bids up to the stratosphere, and instead the programs offer rewards that are seemingly within reach and have similar odds to other more traditional game contests.

For those that want it: exclusive real-world experiences. For those who want to pay the price for membership, NFTs can also be a blockchain-powered ticket to exclusive real-world experiences. Vaynerchuk’s NFT restaurant and Chef Samuelsson’s NFT offer tangible but exclusive things high-end foodies would be excited about, like actual food.

So while early efforts to capitalize on NFTs may have been slightly cringe-inducing, the world of food is beginning to fine-tune their crypto offerings into something that real-world consumers might actually want.

Crypto Comes for Food Tech

I’m a little embarrassed to admit this now, but at the start of the year, I sort of dived head first into the world of cryptocurrencies. I hoovered up books like The Basics of Bitcoin, The Infinite Machine, and Kings of Crypto. I bought my first cryptocurrencies and was transfixed as the value kept going up and up.

To be fair, I was, and am, more interested in the mechanics of blockchain and smart contracts, the technology powering Bitcoin and Ethereum. So when Internet omnipresence Gary Vaynerchuk introduced his new NFT restaurant concept and Brave Robot announced it was accepting crypto payments, my knee-jerk reaction was eye rolling, but after sitting with it, I get it.

On Friday, Vaynerchuk’s VCR group announced the forthcoming NFT restaurant, which doesn’t appear to have a name yet, and won’t open until the fall of 2022. The website describes the restaurant as follows:

To experience the restaurant, guests will require a membership. Memberships can be purchased through an NFT (Non-Fungible Token).

The NFT will represent ownership of your membership which will provide access to the restaurant throughout the month, in addition to unlimited enjoyment of the cocktail lounge and access to private culinary experiences.

There will be 3 different NFT Tokens representing a multitude of experiences in the restaurant.

Each NFT is an asset and can be sold or transferred in the secondary market.

Emphasis on that last part is mine, but it’s also why I’m not just going to trash Vaynerchuk’s idea outright. Membership restaurants aren’t a new idea, but typically when you’re done with your membership at one, you’re done. You have nothing to show for it except the memories. With the NFT concept, however, you could potentially sell your spot for a profit if the value of the restaurant’s NFT increases. Vaynerchuk didn’t mention this outright, but because your membership is a smart contract, it could include provisions that ensure his restaurant gets a cut of any secondary or subsequent sale of that membership. That’s additional revenue for the restaurant.

Listen, I’m not saying it’s a great solution, or that more restaurants should adopt it, or that I would ever purchase such an NFT (I wouldn’t). But at least it’s an NFT with some utitility. Unlike the digital collectibles from Taco Bell, or the virtual dining NFT, Gary V’s idea gets you access to an actual meal you can eat.

The NFT restaurant wasn’t the only bit of blockchain news in the world of food tech last week. On Thursday, Brave Robot, which makes animal-free ice cream out of Perfect Day’s fermented dairy proteins, announced that you can now pay for your pints of ice cream with cryptocurrencies. The company’s direct to consumer site will accept payments in Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, DAI, Ethereum, Litecoin, or USD Coin. Cryptocurrencies are pretty volatile, so this could wind up being either a really good idea or a bad one, depending on which way the markets go.

What both of these announcements have in common, however, is showing how cryptocurrencies are steadily creeping further into the mainstream — and how the food industry is adapting to these changes. Creating restaurant memberships out of smart contracts and accepting Litecoin for ice cream is a far cry from the 10,000 bitcoins Laszlo Hanyecz paid eleven years ago to get a Papa John’s pizza delivered. But they aren’t ridiculous notions either.

As Brave Robot noted in its announcement, part of the reason for its acceptance of digital currencies was because millennials and Gen Z are adopting the technology. That’s not a guarantee that young folks will carry cryptocurrencies to become the de facto payment method of the future, but neither Gary V or Brave Robot should be embarrassed by their recent blockchain moves.

More Headlines

Forthcoming Tesla Humanoid Robot Will Get Your Groceries, But Should it? – Instead of building a biped, why not just send a self-driving car to get your groceries?

Melt&Marble Raises €750K Seed Round for its Fermentation-Based Fats – The B2B ingredient company can create different kinds of plant-based fats for different types of plant-based proteins.

Slice Launches Tiered Packaging for Its Pizza-Centric Tech Platform – Shop owners that need more digital capabilities can graduate to the Slice Premium level, which gives them access to online ordering, a customized website, and boosted search rankings on the marketplace.

Creator Re-Opens With a New Burger Making-Robot Customers Can Control – The new robot allows users to customize their burgers with seasonings, spices and sauces dispensed to the precise milliliter.