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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Future of Grocery

The Grocery Store is the Food System

For most of us, the food system isn’t a distant farm or a produce distribution center. It’s the grocery store. We push carts through brightly lit aisles where abstract forces—supply chains, agricultural policy, consumer trends—become tangible reality. The supermarket is where the nation’s entire food apparatus converges in a single, accessible arena. The grocery store isn’t just a participant in the food system; it is the food system in miniature.

This is where supply meets demand in its most direct form. Every product on the shelf represents a long chain of decisions: a farmer’s crop choice, a manufacturer’s formulation, a regulator’s approval. And every purchase we make sends a ripple back up that chain. For consumers who are generations removed from farming, the grocery store is our most immediate encounter with agriculture itself. To understand the state of our food system, look no further than your local grocer.

What we find there reveals both the system’s greatest achievements and its deepest contradictions. The grocery store offers us unprecedented abundance while masking troubling uniformity. It promises choice while concentrating power. It connects us to global supply chains while disconnecting us from the sources of our food. Understanding these contradictions is the key to understanding how our food system really works—and how we might change it.

The Paradox of Abundance

Walk down any aisle in an American supermarket and you’ll confront what appears to be infinite variety. Hundreds of cereals crowd the breakfast section. Dozens of yogurt brands compete for refrigerator space. An entire wall of nutrition bars promises everything from weight loss to spiritual enlightenment.

Yet behind this kaleidoscope of branding lies striking uniformity. Those hundred different nutrition bars? Most are built from the same handful of commodity crops—corn, soy, and wheat. The cereal aisle’s rainbow of boxes contains variations on the same basic theme. We’ve created the illusion of choice through brand variety while consolidating actual agricultural diversity into a narrow selection of crops.

This isn’t accidental. It’s the logical outcome of an agricultural system optimized for scale and efficiency above all else. Corn, soy, and wheat dominate not because they’re the most nutritious or delicious, but because they can be grown at massive scale and processed into countless products. The grocery store, in all its apparent abundance, reveals the hidden monotony of American agriculture.

The same consolidation extends beyond ingredients to the stores themselves. While shoppers see thousands of brands, most grocery retail is controlled by a handful of chains. These companies decide which products get premium shelf space, which suppliers get contracts, and ultimately which farmers stay in business. The grocery store that feels like a marketplace is actually a carefully orchestrated system where a few powerful players control most of the outcomes.

Shelf Space Storytelling

In this landscape of managed abundance, brands face a brutal challenge: capturing a shopper’s attention in roughly two seconds with a few square inches of package real estate. The front of a package becomes prime territory where complex stories must be reduced to their simplest essence.

This is where nuance dies. A product made with heritage grains grown by a cooperative of small farmers using regenerative practices might simply become “ancient grains” on the front of the pack. The food system’s infinite complexity gets flattened into marketing slogans that prioritize emotional appeal over substantive information.

The grocery store environment itself works against deeper understanding. Hurried shoppers navigating fluorescent-lit aisles while juggling shopping lists and crying children aren’t in the mood for agricultural education. Those well-intentioned photos of smiling farmers become invisible wallpaper. The little signs explaining sustainable practices can’t compete with the thousands of other messages bombarding consumers.

This dynamic warps the entire system. Brands that master simple, powerful messaging thrive regardless of their actual practices. Those that try to communicate complicated truths often struggle to compete. Over time, the market rewards not the best food, but the best marketing. And consumers, hungry for real information but overwhelmed by choice, grab whatever package speaks most clearly to their immediate concerns.

The Geography of Access

The grocery store’s role as the food system’s public face becomes starkest when we map stores across different communities. In affluent areas, shoppers debate the merits of grass-fed versus grain-fed beef while sipping kombucha from the in-store café. Twenty miles away, families navigate Dollar Generals where the “fresh” section consists of a few bruised bananas by the register, if that.

This geographic apartheid in food access follows predictable patterns that mirror broader inequalities. Wealthy communities get full-service supermarkets with extensive produce sections, in-house nutritionists, and specialty departments. Poor communities get convenience stores and small grocers with limited selection and higher prices. The cruel irony is that those who could most benefit from affordable, nutritious food have the least access to it.

These disparities reveal how our food system distributes power. When some communities get full-service grocery stores while others are left with food deserts, we’re seeing the system’s priorities made visible. Profit drives location decisions, not nutrition or community need.

Yet alternatives are emerging that point toward different possibilities. Some retailers use profits from wealthy stores to subsidize locations in underserved areas. Mobile markets bring fresh produce directly to food deserts. Community-owned cooperatives keep food dollars circulating locally while ensuring democratic control over food access. These experiments reveal what’s possible when we design food distribution around community needs rather than just market logic.

The Collective Action Paradox

Every grocery shopper faces the same psychological trap: “I’m just one person. My choices don’t matter.” This thinking, perfectly rational at the individual level, becomes problematic when multiplied across millions of shoppers. It’s the same psychology that suppresses civic engagement more broadly—one voice rarely changes everything, but when everyone thinks this way, we get the outcomes we deserve by default.

History proves this pessimism wrong. The organic movement started with a handful of “health nuts” shopping at food cooperatives and farmers markets. Today, organic agriculture has transformed farming practices across millions of acres. Fair trade certification, once a niche concern, now influences supply chains for everything from coffee to cotton. These changes didn’t happen because any single shopper mattered, but because enough people decided their choices mattered collectively.

The grocery store makes this collective power visible in ways that other civic engagement doesn’t. When demand for organic produce increases, stores expand their organic sections within months. When shoppers ask for local products, buyers seek out regional suppliers. When customers demand better working conditions, retailers eventually respond. The feedback loops are faster and more direct than in traditional politics.

This responsiveness is both the grocery store’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness as a democratic institution. It can quickly amplify consumer preferences, but it also amplifies inequality. The preferences of wealthy shoppers get heard loudly and clearly, while the needs of poor communities go unmet. Recognizing the grocery store as both mirror and maker of our food system means grappling with this tension.

Practicing Food Citizenship

Grasping the grocery store as the food system’s most visible expression changes how we might approach our shopping. Instead of seeing ourselves as individual consumers optimizing for personal benefit, we can think of ourselves as food citizens participating in a collective system.

This starts with diversifying our food sources. Join a CSA for vegetables. Buy meat directly from local farmers. Purchase grains from cooperatives. Keep shopping at your grocery store for everything else. You’re not abandoning the mainstream system—you’re creating alternatives that keep the entire system more honest and resilient.

Within grocery stores, practice strategic engagement. Ask questions and make requests. Store managers notice when customers inquire about sourcing, suggest new products, or ask why certain items aren’t available. Be the person who asks for a bulk section, requests local suppliers, or suggests worker-owned brands. Individual requests might get dismissed, but patterns of customer interest drive purchasing decisions.

Focus your attention where it matters most. Organic certification has the biggest impact on the “dirty dozen” produce items with high pesticide residues. Fair trade certification matters most for products like coffee and chocolate where farmers typically receive tiny portions of retail prices. Local sourcing matters most for products that travel long distances and spoil quickly. Know where your choices make the biggest difference.

Support policy changes that address the grocery store’s limitations. Back ordinances that incentivize grocery stores in underserved areas. Support policies that make healthy food more affordable. Champion regulations that require clearer labeling about production practices. The market alone won’t fix systemic problems—we need public policies that can address market failures.

The Mirror and the Maker

The grocery store will never be perfect. It will always reflect compromises between efficiency and equity, convenience and sustainability, profit and purpose. But that’s exactly why it matters. The grocery store is both mirror and maker of our food system—it reflects our current priorities while shaping our future possibilities.

Unlike far off farms or corporate boardrooms, grocery stores are where we actually encounter the food system in our daily lives. They’re where abstract agricultural policies become concrete realities. They’re where supply chain decisions show up as empty shelves or abundant displays. They’re where our collective choices about what we value get tallied and sent back up the chain.

Recognizing the grocery store as the food system means taking responsibility for what we see there. The abundance and the inequality. The convenience and the hidden costs. The choices and the illusions. These aren’t just market outcomes—they’re collective creations that we sustain every time we shop.

We are not just shoppers navigating retail spaces. We are participants in a food system that we help create with every purchase. The grocery store is where that participation happens, where our individual choices become collective outcomes, where the future of food takes shape. Understanding this is the first step toward building the food system we actually want.

—

This essay was inspired by Mike Lee’s recent podcast episode “The Future of Grocery” on The Tomorrow Today Show. Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Mike was joined by guest co-host Melanie Bartelme from Mintel, and we spoke with Doug Scholz from the California Grocers Association, Cameron Gould Saltman (ex-TikTok Food & Beverage), Michael Robinov from Farm to People, and Errol Schweizer from The Checkout Grocery Update.

This post was originally published on Mike Lee’s wonderfully written and informational substack. You can find the post here. You should subscribe!

You can listen to the full conversation below.

The Future of Grocery

Amazon Gives a Peek at the New AI Model Powering Just Walk Out Platform

This week, Amazon gave a sneak peek at the new AI model that powers its Just Walk Out platform.

In a post written by Jon Jenkins, the VP of Just Walk Out (and, as Spoon readers may remember, the former founder of Meld and head of engineering for the Hestan Cue), we get a peek at the new AI model from Amazon. Jenkins writes the new technology is a “multi-modal foundation model for physical stores is a significant advancement in the evolution of checkout-free shopping.” He says the new model will increase the accuracy of Just Walk Out technology “even in complex shopping scenarios with variables such as camera obstructions, lighting conditions, and the behavior of other shoppers, while allowing us to simplify the system.”

The previous Just Walk Out AI model was built in 2018 using generative AI and machine learning models available at the time. This technology, while advanced for the time, could only power a sequential processing of key variables – shopper movement and location in the store, what they picked up, and the quantity of each item—each action processed one after another. This sequential processing worked in most simple scenarios, but complex scenarios like multiple shoppers accessing the same area at a given time, would lead to potential errors that would need to get sorted out at checkout.

The new system differs from the previous system in that it analyzes data from multiple sources—cameras, weight sensors, and other data—simultaneously rather than sequentially. It also uses “continuous self-learning and transformer technology, a type of neural network architecture that transforms inputs (sensor data, in the case of Just Walk Out) into outputs (receipts for checkout-free shopping).”

Jenkins writes that the new system will be better at navigating these complex situations that would result in potential errors with the previous system. He detailed a scenario where a shopper picks and puts down multiple varieties of yogurt, and while doing so, another customer reaches for the same item or the freezer door fogs up and obscures the cameras’ view. In this scenario, the new system processes inputs from various sources such as weight sensors on the fridge shelves and continuously learns from these inputs, eventually deciding which are most important in order to accurately sort out who took what.

The post also gave an update on the current installed base of Just Walk Out technology. According to Amazon, Just Walk Out is currently in 170 third-party locations, including airports, stadiums, universities, hospitals, among other locations. The system is installed in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada and the company plans to double the number of third-party stores with the technology in 2024. 

U.S. Online Grocery Expected to Hit $120B by 2028 as Grocers Focus on Building Out First-Party Delivery

According to a new report just published by researcher Bricks Meets Click, U.S. online grocery sales are expected to hit $120 billion by 2028. The report forecasts that the e-grocery segment will grow at a 4.5% clip over the forecast period, three times the growth rate of the in-store grocery segment, which is forecasted to grow 1.3% during the same period.

Total eGrocery sales, which Bricks Meets Click defines as including Delivery, Pickup, and Ship-to-Home, are projected to account for 12.7% of total grocery sales in the U.S., up 170 basis point (bps) versus 2023. The researcher forecasts that online grocery, excluding Ship-to-Home (orders sent via common carriers like FedEx, a service that most grocers do not offer), will represent 10.7% of total grocery sales in five years.

“Two factors are creating significant headwinds that impact our eGrocery forecast,” said David Bishop, partner at Brick Meets Click. “First, the market is maturing. Nearly all of the people interested in online grocery shopping have used it at least once by now. Second, even though inflation has recently fallen faster than expected, its cumulative effect continues to drive a flight-to-value behavior in grocery shopping and that will slow topline sales growth.”

With increased competition in a slower-growing market, retailers are likely to concentrate on enhancing their first-party (1P) platforms to better control costs and improve the customer experience. This strategy aims to counteract the pressures from third-party (3P) platforms, which have traditionally dominated the market but tend to be more expensive for consumers.

According to Bricks Meets Click, pickup sales are expected to grow faster (5.4%) than delivery (4.4%) or Ship-to-Home (2.8%) through the forecast period, and pickup is expected to account for nearly 47% of all online grocery sales at the end of five years. This growth will be fueled by an increasing number of pickup options, particularly in suburban markets where delivery services currently dominate. This shift reflects a strategic expansion by retailers to cover more geographical areas and meet growing consumer demand for convenience.

Micromart Wants to Create Just-Walk-Out Convenience Anywhere With Its Just-Plug-In Cabinets

Earlier this month, we learned that Amazon is phasing out its Just Walk Out technology at its Amazon Fresh grocery stores. The company didn’t say much about the reasoning behind it, but one likely reason is customers never valued skipping the checkout line in a traditional grocery store shopping experience as much as Amazon anticipated.

But that doesn’t mean shoppers don’t value speed to completion and low-friction shopping experiences. Getting in and out quickly is highly desirable when watching a ballgame or picking up something quickly for lunch during the workday. That’s why Amazon will continue to keep its Just Walk Out technology in sports stadiums and in its Amazon Go fast-format convenience stores, which are typically located in busy downtown office corridors.

Still, do we need whole stores outfitted with cameras and sensors? What if we could condense all this down to a couple of cabinets that can sit in any condo or office lobby?

That’s the idea behind Micromart, an eponymously named micro-market platform from the same Toronto-based team behind Kitchenmate. Micromart’s solution uses AI-powered image recognition technology, putting it into standalone refrigerated cabinets that fit anywhere with a little floor space and a power outlet to plug the cabinets in.

To open the locked refrigerated or freezer cabinet, the customer taps with their phone. They open the cabinet, grab the item(s) off the shelf, and once they close the cabinet, a receipt is generated. If the item is a meal that needs to be heated, the customer can then heat the meal in a “smart cooker” that is attached to the cabinet.

The addition of a food heating system is one of the major differentiators for the Micromart solution, something that company CEO Yang Yu says they developed for Kitchenmate. Kitchenmate, which The Spoon covered way back in 2019, started as a combination food-to-go service for condos and offices. According to Yu, it was while looking for available technology to enable easy unattended purchases of their Kitchenmate meals that the company realized they would need to make their own smart fridges and commerce system.

“We started with the heater,” said Yu. “That was the only thing we had, but then we realized we needed to put the food somewhere, so we built a fridge. When we built the fridge, we were looking at AI companies that did just-walk-out technology, but all of them had issues, and they were all very expensive. And none of them were very accurate. So we had to build our own.”

After building just-walk-out technology for their fridge and deploying it in different locations, they realized the refrigerated cabinets and the heating system were the business. Not long after, Micromart was born.

One reason that Yu and his team saw this as a potential big business is the realization that many office buildings are shutting down cafeterias, often replacing them with just a couple of vending machines. While some solutions, like Farmer’s Fridge, provide fresh options, there aren’t many choices for fresh and hot food.

“Nobody wants to eat vending food,” said Yu. “There’s definitely success stories around healthy vending, but you’re not going to get the variety and the hot food that people expect out of a cafeteria.”

In addition to the refrigerated cabinets and the food heating system, the Micromart solution comes with software as a service that lets retailers track and forecast inventory, electric price tags, and built-in digital ad displays that the operator can customize. The company’s offering also includes a Shop consumer app that can be customized with the operator’s branding. Pricing for a three-cabinet system is $19 thousand for the cabinets, plus transaction and monthly SaaS fees.

Micro-markets aren’t new. Researchers estimate that the micromarket business in the US was almost $4 billion in 2022 and expect it to grow by 13% through 2030. However, many of the solutions are not much more than refrigerators with RFID scanning or weight sensors built in. Other solutions, like those deployed at airports, require the customer to pick up the items and go through a self-checkout scan, often with a store employee eyeing them from close by. Micromart wanted to marry the lighter footprint of older cabinet systems with the more advanced Amazon Go-like vision systems.

“The whole premise behind this was that you could literally put it anywhere in North America,” said Yu. All you need is a standard electrical outlet, and you plug it in, and it works.”

According to Yu, the Micromart solution will debut at the NAMA show in May.

Big Tech Set Its Sights on Reinventing Checkout. Consumers Said ‘Not So Fast’

When it comes to technology and grocery shopping, one primary focus for grocery chains and technology providers in recent years has been the checkout experience.

Amazon and various other technology companies have been developing platforms to enable consumers to skip the checkout counter. These platforms aim to transform the shopping experience into something akin to walking into a giant pantry, loading up your cart, and then walking out without going through a checkout line.

Others (including Amazon) pushed technology into the shopping cart, enabling customers to check out products as they walked through the store, get coupons and ads for special deals, and learn more about items via a built-in touchscreen.

And then there’s online grocery shopping. After two decades of slow adoption by both grocers and shoppers, a pandemic forced every major grocery chain to invest heavily in enabling the easiest of all grocery buying options: letting us shop at home and have our groceries delivered to our door.

Meanwhile, everyday consumers continue to do things the way we’ve always done things. It’s a lazy Sunday, and you’re in no hurry? Get in line and chat it up with the cashier and bagger. Are you hurrying to return to work or arrive home in time for dinner? Jump into the self-checkout line and get out as soon as possible. Too busy to head to the grocery store at all? Order online and have stuff delivered to your home.

In other words, grocery shoppers are not a monolith. Most of us change our behavior depending on the current situation.

But what about Just Walk Out? It’s a radically tech-forward evolution of checkout, but one in which Amazon appears to have widely overestimated just how many people would use it and how easy it would be to implement. As I said in last week’s Food Tech News Show (FTNS), self-checkout fits most shoppers’ needs when they are in a hurry, and there aren’t that many situations where consumers feel they need to skip checkout altogether.

As for self-checkout, it definitely isn’t perfect and could be made a much better experience. As Scott Heimendinger said on the FTNS, self-checkout can sometimes be unnecessarily difficult, almost like plugging in a USB. Amazon and others should probably spend their time using technology to make self-checkout work better.

We love robots - FTNS

Target is doing something about self-checkout, changes which it claims will allow shoppers to get out quicker. According to the company, self-checkout lines with cameras were able to check out twice as fast as self-checkout lines without a camera. Of course, their motivation is mostly somewhat self-motivated, driven by the retailer’s desire to limit theft, so my guess is there’s a good chance they can bungle the rollout if it doesn’t deliver clear benefits and customers are feeling spied on.

All that said, while some shoppers may not like it, the combination of computer vision and self-checkout might be the future, particularly if it makes the self-checkout experience less painful than it currently is. Because of this, Amazon should look at repurposing its Just Walk Out into a self-checkout accelerator, not a platform for making shoppers feel like they are shoplifting. For now, however, they’re emphasizing the rollout of their Dash shopping carts, a solution that is unclear if shoppers are asking for. Others, like Instacart, are also betting big on as well. The company had a blog post touting their progress today, saying they plan to have ‘thousands’ of shopping carts deployed by the end of 2024.

Just Walk Out and other light-touch self-checkout will thrive in the near term in shopping contexts where a consumer needs one or two items and is in a hurry, such as airports and stadiums. One of the smartest implementations I’ve seen with self-checkout is at Costa Coffee at SeaTac airport, where they had a Mashgin AI-powered self-checkout station with a dedicated line for customers who just wanted drip coffee. In other words, a quick and low-touch checkout solution for a product with a high degree of certainty where customers are often in a hurry.

The bottom line is that everyday shoppers will continue to shop the way they’ve become accustomed to, choosing between three primary methods: full-service checkout, self-checkout, and delivery. More advanced technology should primarily focus on improving these existing modes. New technology that allows (or forces) consumers to change their behavior should only be used in scenarios that make sense.

Otherwise, consumers will reject it, and retailers will be forced to retrench, just like we saw last week with Amazon’s pullback of Just Walk Out.

Amazon Pulling ‘Just Walk Out’ from Amazon Fresh Grocery Stores

According to a story published in The Information, Amazon is planning to pull its Just Walk Out cashierless technology from its large-format grocery store, Amazon Fresh.

As part of the move, the company will begin to deploy its Dash smart shopping carts. Like Just Walk Out, the Dash carts have embedded computer vision, allowing customers to scan products as they put them in the cart.

“We’ve also heard from customers that while they enjoyed the benefit of skipping the checkout line with Just Walk Out, they also wanted the ability to easily find nearby products and deals, view their receipt as they shop, and know how much money they saved while shopping throughout the store,” Amazon spokesperson Jessica Martin told Chain Store Age. “To deliver even more convenience to our customers, we’re rolling out Amazon Dash Cart, our smart-shopping carts, which allows customers all these benefits including skipping the checkout line.”

That Amazon pulled it from Fresh stores (of which there are 44 locations, nearly half in California) isn’t the end of Just Walk Out. The company plans to continue using the technology in its small-format Amazon Go stores and stadiums (such as Lumen Field).

The move, which comes as part of a larger effort to redesign its Fresh stores, is yet another sign that the company’s retail and grocery strategy remains somewhat rudderless. The company paused its Fresh expansion in February of last year before deciding to apparently unpause it later in the year. It has also closed its Fresh pickup format early this year.

My guess is that part of the challenge is that the company seems confused about whether it’s a technology platform provider or one serious about pursuing its own grocery store business. The acquisition of Whole Foods signaled the company was serious about grocery, but since then, it has continued to expand its efforts to pioneer AI and computer vision formats while seemingly neglecting to evolve the Whole Foods stores as the grocery-buying public started craving more flexible solutions around things like curbside pickup.

This move seems to signal that Amazon’s grocery business is beginning to embrace the post-Bezos era (he’s largely stepped away from day-to-day and is focused on his rocket company), moving on from being a company that often pushed new and experimental concepts at the expense building businesses with more conventional, straightforward approaches. According to The Information, the company plans to “spruce up” its stores “across the board” as it prepares to expand Amazon Fresh locations later in 2024.

As Online Grocery Sales Flatten Post-Pandemic, Shoppers Lock In on Pick-Up as Preferred Method

As the world continues to normalize and behaviors regress to the mean post-pandemic, online grocery shopping is no different. According to a new report from online grocery research firm Bricks Meets Click, online grocery shopping in the U.S. dropped 3.1% in September vs last year, going from $7.8 billion in September 2022 to $7.5 billion this year.

According to the firm, a decline in order frequency and total dollars spent per order were the main culprits for the drop in online grocery revenue. The average number of orders per monthly active user (MAU) fell 8% year-over-year, finishing at 2.31 this year compared to 2.52 for September 2022. For recurring online grocery customers (shoppers who have used e-grocery four or more times), the average order value dropped from $104.39 in September 2022 to $100.49 this September.

This suggests that as most folks are comfortable returning to the world again, there is likely a natural adoption ceiling for online grocery shopping even as more grocers offer the service. Those who are either too busy with their lives to grocery shop or who can’t or don’t want to shop in the physical world likely will continue to be the most devoted users of online grocery shopping, while others will likely continue to mix in-person shopping with the occasional use of online grocery shopping.

One bright spot for online grocery is pickup. This shopping format, where shoppers order online and have their bags run out to them at a designated parking lot area, continues to eat into home delivery. According to Brick Meets Click, pickup was used by 58.7% of monthly active online grocery shoppers, compared to 53% of orders in September of 2022. First-party delivery (delivery by grocer or third-party service like DoorDash) dropped from 40.4% to 38.8%, and ship-to-home (delivery by common/contract carriers like FedEx) fell from 42.4% last year to 39.9% this September.

On Eve of IPO, Instacart Bolsters Grocery Tech Platform, Including New Features For Caper Smart Shopping Cart

Today, Instacart rolled out a slew of new updates to its grocery technology platform, updating capabilities across its white label turnkey digital commerce platform, its AI-powered search capabilities, and new features for its Caper Cart smart shopping cart. The new feature-set rollout marks further integration of the string of acquisitions the company has made over the past couple of years as it refashions itself from a pioneering personal-shopper service to a technology arms dealer for grocery retailers.

One of the key upgrades was around the company’s white-label commerce platform, Instacart Storefront. The company, which counts Costco among others as customers for the Storefront platform, gives access to Instacart’s machine learning technology, access to its white label mobile app, and a variety of other features. The company also talked up its ability to connect the online and app experience to in-store shopping via list sorting by aisle, highlighting in-store promotions and discounts, and enabling customers to use store loyalty cards.

This spring, Instacart rolled out generative AI conversational search via its website and now has added it to the in-store experience via the app. According to Instacart, the app will give customers access its ChatGPT integration via search, alongside Instacart’s own product data and proprietary AI models.

And finally, the company announced a slew of upgrades for its Caper Cart smart shopping cart. The new updates will allow customers to order made-to-order items like deli sandwiches or custom cakes directly from their Caper Cart, and will also enable retailers to offer incentives like coupons and points for completing actions like adding certain items to a cart or trying the Caper Cart for the first time. The company also is rolling out a Caper Cart dock, a permanent charging and storage place for Caper Carts.

These moves are further evidence of a strategic pivot I wrote about two years ago, in which Instacart transitions itself into a provider of technology solutions for grocery retailers:

With the move, Instacart adds another tool to a growing arsenal of e-commerce and in-store technology solutions targeted towards grocery providers at a time many are beginning to question their relationship with the company.

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

And, right on time, the new product suite comes just as the company is set to price its IPO as soon as next week.

Robomart Debuts Fully Autonomous Mobile Grocery Store Concept As It Announces $2M Seed Round

Robomart, the company that introduced the store-hailing concept at CES in 2019 and started rolling out its first pilot store last year, announced a new model for its mobile store concept this week with the Robomart Haven. The Haven, which will join the first-generation Robomart (now named Oasis), will be available for retail partners starting in 2025.

Unlike the Oasis, which targets ice cream purveyors, restaurants, and cafes, the Haven resembles a convenience store on wheels. According to CEO Ali Ahmed, the Haven can stock over 300 separate SKUs and hold thousands of individual products for sale. The Haven will also act as a small walk-in mobile store, allowing customers to walk inside and shop.

And unlike the Oasis – which are retrofitted vans with drivers to pilot them – Ahmed says that the Havens will be fully autonomous. Spoon readers might remember that the Oasis (then just called Robomart) was initially intended to be a fully autonomous vehicle, but at some point, the company realized building a fully autonomous vehicle to carry its retail storefront was a lot to bite off for a first product. So instead, they chose to use drivers for their first version of the mobile store and create a fully app-controlled shopping experience (the drivers don’t interact with the customers, according to Ahmed).

But with the Haven, the plan is to make it fully autonomous, according to Ahmed.

“The Haven will not be a retrofitted van with a driver cabin,” Ahmed told The Spoon. “It will be a fully driverless offering that gives us the ability to retrofit the entire space inside to serve our customers.

Ahmed says that the company still doesn’t plan to be “an automobile company,” – meaning they still have no plans to make their own car – but instead plan to work with various automakers to convert an automobile into a Robomart Haven.

With a bigger footprint, Ahmed says future partners will be able to entirely white label and customize their Haven and will be able to have multiple types of food storage (ambient temperature, frozen, cold, or heated) within the vehicle. This differs from the Oasis, which only offers one kind of food storage (such as frozen for its ice cream partner Ben & Jerry’s).

The news of the Haven comes alongside the announcement of the company’s seed funding round of $2 million led by W Ventures with Wasabi Ventures, SOSV, HAX, and Hustle Fund, among others participating. The funding is a vote of confidence for a company that has shown significant traction over the past year, inking deals with seven partners and having a total commitment as of this week for 106 Oasis mobile storefronts.

So far, those storefronts have only been pilots, but Ahmed says they will soon be fully commercial rollouts. While he wouldn’t commit to giving a specific date, Ahmed says that the post-pilot Oasis machines will be out this year, and they will start taking orders for new ones next year. The Haven, which will roll out sometime in 2025, is also open for orders.

Instacart’s AI-Powered Shopping Cart Arrives at ShopRite and Fairway Market

Today Instacart announced that ShopRite in Spotswood, New Jersey, and Fairway Market in Kips Bay, Manhattan are the first two locations to deploy the company’s latest generation smart shopping cart.

The new Caper Cart, which the company announced last September, is the third generation of the AI-powered smart shopping cart platform and the first version of the cart built entirely on the watch of Instacart, which acquired Caper AI (the startup behind the Caper Cart) in October of 2021.

The updated Caper Cart has scales, sensors, touchscreens, and computer vision to enable self-checkout by the customer. Despite the added features, it is slimmer and lighter than the previous version and has 65% more capacity. Perhaps most important for grocers, the new cart system comes with stacked charging, allowing them to charge batches of carts at once and eliminating the need to charge carts individually or swap out batteries.

From the release:

To get started, customers at the ShopRite of Spotswood and the Fairway Market in New York City can grab a Caper Cart at the front end of the store. Powered by AI and computer vision technology, the Caper Cart recognizes and scans items as they are placed in the Cart, allowing customers to easily stay on budget with a running total shown on the screen. To checkout, customers simply scan the barcode displayed on the Cart’s screen at the store’s self-checkout area.

Instacart’s win with Wakefern Food Corp (a retailer-owned cooperative that includes ShopRite and Fairway Market) comes as its competitors in the smart shopping cart space continue to move forward. In January, smart cart startup Flow announced they’d inked a thousand shopping cart commitment from German retailer Expresso. A month later, Shopic announced they’d locked down a deal for two thousand smart carts with Israel-based grocery chain Shufersal. Stateside, Amazon has deployed its Dash cart to numerous locations.

Not all startups in the space have found the road easy, however. Seattle-based Veeve recently announced it was pivoting towards becoming an extension of grocery retailer media networks, using its in-store shopping cart add-ons as yet another digital screen to offer up promotions and ads to in-store shoppers.

According to Instacart, the carts are available at the ShopRite of Spotswood and will soon be introduced at the Fairway Market in Manhattan.

The Instacart Caper Cart Shopping Cart

Israel’s Brevel and Vgarden Team Up to Add Taste to the Alt.Cheese Market

Vegans would agree that cheese is one of the more difficult foods to put aside when entering the plant-based world. A decade ago, vegan cheese options were lacking, and even though the choices have skyrocketed, finding a smoked gouda cheddar. Mozzarella, or provolone’s taste closely approximates its dairy counterpart, has been challenging. Yes, some smaller artisan brands do a respectable job, but finding a creamy, melty vegan cheese that nails taste and texture is a tall order.

Israel-based Brevel is teaming up with plant-based food manufacturer Vgarden to tackle the cheese challenge head-on. In a press release ballyhooing the new partnership, the companies believe the combination of Brevel’s algae-based microprotein and Vgarden’s production exercise will yield a top-notch product.

In an interview with The Spoon, Eyal  Adut, Chief of Marketing and Business Development at Vgarden, and Yonatan Golan, Co-founder and CEO at Brevel, discussed how the two companies would change the face of non-dairy cheese.

What protein is Vgarden using now, and how will Brevel’s algae-based alternative change the product?

Adut: Currently, Vgarden’s meat and fish alternatives contain high levels of pea or wheat protein. The challenge with these widely used plant-based proteins is in mild-tasting products such as cheese when a certain aftertaste is notable in these products when using those proteins. This fact, combined with Vgarden’s cheeses being allergens free (our products do not contain nuts, oats, soy, etc..), creates the situation that most of our plant-based cheeses are high in calcium, fiber and other nutrients yet contain no protein.   We   have   successfully developed cheddar and parmesan cheese with 10% pea protein, which was possible due to the relatively strong flavor of these cheeses

Vgarden intends that all of our cheeses will contain plant-based proteins, and that is why Brevel’s protein,  being taste and color neutral,   can provide us with the required solution for mild-tasting cheeses.

Golan: In terms of functionality – Brevel tries to be as inert as possible – increasing the protein of Vgarden’s cheeses without changing taste, color, or texture. Brevel has been described as a “ghost protein” – it increases protein content without noticing it is there

Will Brevel’s product be used for more than cheese, given Vgarden’s product line?

Adut: Vgarden is constantly researching novel ingredients and will continue to use other plant-based proteins for its meat and fish alternatives, as these serve different purposes, such as texture. The main challenges for novel ingredients in the plant-based industry remain taste, cost, and scale. As more consumers demand solutions for highly nutritious products, we are working with the industry to scale up novel ingredients. Vgarden’s goal is to provide healthy plant-based foods at price parity with the   animal-based   alternative, and   that   is   what   will   drive gardens ingredients choices in the future

Any chance of moving into the B2C space?

Adut: Vgarden has been active in the Israeli B2C space for nearly a decade under the Mahu Mashu™   brand, and its products are being sold in most retail stores in Australia under other brands (powered by Vgarden). Vgarden recently announced its joint venture with Cale  &   Daughters and established garden Australia, which will manufacture locally-made products for retail and food service in Australia. We are aiming to occupy any white spaces in the worldwide market with the right partners on board

What specific cheeses will Vgarden make? More of its hard cheeses and soft cheeses?   Are there certain cheeses better suited for Brevel’s protein?

Adut: That is something Vgarden is exploring and researching. The Brevel protein shows promising qualities, and we hope to incorporate it in all of our cheeses. Vgarden has developed prototypes of mozzarella and cheddar with previous versions of Brevel’s protein, which taste groups received very well.

How will you enter the U.S. market? Any chance for direct-to-consumer?

Adut: Vgarden recently announced it had formed a presence in the U.S.; Vgarden carried out thorough research of the plant-based market in the U.S. and developed its penetration strategy.   Vgarden is   currently under negotiations with some of the leading sales and distribution companies in the U.S. food sector to be able to provide for any future and current demand for Vgarden’s plant-based offerings

The Weekly Spoon: Electrolux’s Kitchen of the Future & Taco Bell’s Reimagined Restaurant

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Electrolux Launches GRO, a Kitchen System Designed to Encourage More Sustainable Eating

Can a kitchen’s design help us eat more sustainable, plant-forward diets?

Swedish appliance manufacturer Electrolux thinks the answer is yes and, to that end, has launched an ambitious new kitchen system concept to help us get there.

Called GRO, the new system is comprised of a collection of interconnected modules that utilize sensors and AI to provide personalized eating and nutrition recommendations. According to the company, the system was designed around insights derived from behavioral science research and is intended to help encourage more sustainable eating behavior based on recommendations from the EAT-Lancet report for planetary health. The company will debut the new system at this week’s EuroCucina conference.

“How can a thoughtful kitchen slowly nudge you to more sustainable choices,” asks Tove Chevally, the head of Electrolux Innovation Hub, in an intro video to the GRO system. “To make the most of what you have, to buy smarter, and eat more diverse?

To see a video of the new GRO and to read the full story, head here.

Do you have the next big idea for the future of food & cooking? Apply to tell your story at SKS INVENT!

Taco Bell’s Vision of the Future Includes High-Tech Dumbwaiters & Lots of Drive-Thru Lanes

I’ve always been fascinated with dumbwaiters. An elevator built specifically to deliver food between floors of a building, the dumbwaiter is an idea that is both ridiculous and fascinating.

And while I can’t be sure that someone like Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos doesn’t have dumbwaiters built into their homes (though Bezos would probably prefer robots and Trump manservants he could yell at), what I am sure of is the dumbwaiter has, for the most part, largely gone extinct as part of modern life.

Until now. That’s because Taco Bell sees them as a potentially integral part of their restaurant of the future. Called Taco Bell Defy, the taco chain’s new restaurant concept includes an elevated restaurant with multiple drive-thru lanes, food lifts, and a lot of digital integrations.

While I wouldn’t, unlike others, claim this new concept possibly “the most ambitious” prototype in restaurant history, I would say it makes a whole lot of sense for a restaurant chain that does most of its business through a drive-thru. While many chains have developed drive-thrus that have multiple order lines, the choke point always comes later when cars zip-up into a single line to get their food. By spreading out the hand-off of food to four lines, the choke point of a single window for food handover is eliminated.

You can read the full post here. 

Smart Kitchen

Meet Celcy, a Countertop Oven With a Built-In Freezer That Will Cook Meals For You

Say you’re leaving for work and want to come home to a fully cooked meal? Or better yet, you want to line up a work week’s worth of meals and just want them prepared when you get home?

You might be a good candidate for the Celcy, an autonomous cooking appliance that combines a countertop oven with a freezer that stores the meals until ready for cooking.

The Celcy, which is currently in development, will store up to four meals in a freezer. Cooking can be rescheduled via an app or on-demand via request. When it’s time to cook, the meal is shuttled from the freezer compartment on the left side into the cooking compartment side on the right. A built-in elevator lifts and deposits the frozen meal in the top upper right cooking chamber where it is cooked for consumption.

You can read the full post here. 

Food Retail Tech

Circle K Planning To Deploy Seven Thousand AI-Powered Self-Checkout Machines

Mashgin, a maker of computer-vision-based self-checkout machines, announced today it has signed a deal with Circle K parent company Couche-Tard to deploy seven thousand self-checkout machines at the convenience store chain over the next three years.

The move follows the initial deployment of Mashgin systems at nearly 500 Circle K stores across the United States and Sweden since 2020. The move by the second-largest convenience store chain in North America with almost seven thousand stores will represent one of the largest ever deployments of self-checkout systems to date.

For Mashgin, the deal represents its biggest customer win yet and is yet another sign of why the company was able to recently raise a $62.5M Series B round at an impressive $1.5 billion valuation. The move represents a 700% total increase in deployments over its current installed base.

The Mashgin self-checkout system is installed at the checkout counter and enables customer checkouts without scanning barcodes. As seen in the video interview from CES in January, customers can essentially toss their items onto the small checkout pad, and the system will automatically recognize and tabulate the products.

To read the full story, head here.

Future Food

Cocuus Raises €2.5M to Scale Industrial 3D Food Printing for Plant & Cell-Based Meat Analogs

According to a release sent to The Spoon, 3D food printing startup Cocuus has raised €2.5 Million in a Pre-Series A funding round to scale up its proprietary 3D printing technology platform for plant-based and cell-cultured meat analogs. The round was led by Big Idea Ventures, with participation by Cargill Ventures, Eatable Adventures, and Tech Transfer UPV.

Founded in 2017, the Spanish startup has developed a toolbox of different 3D printing technologies under its Mimethica platform to enable the printing of different types of foods. These include Softmimic, a technology targeted at hospitals and eldercare facilities that transforms purees into dishes that look like real food (think of a vegetable or meat puree shaped into a “steak”), LEVELUP, an inkjet printing technology that prints images on drinks like coffee or beer (like Ripples), and LASERGLOW, a laser printer platform that engraves imagery onto food.

Read the full post at here.

SCiFi Foods Raises $22M With Andreessen Horowitz’s First Investment in Cultivated Meat

SCiFi Foods, a Bay Area-based food tech startup, announced that it has raised a $22 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), making it a16z’s first investment in the growing cultivated meat market. The company, formerly known as Artemys Foods, also announced that it will be adding a new board member, Myra Pasek, the General Counsel of IronOx, who will be utilizing her expertise from Tesla and Impossible Foods to help SCiFi Foods bring its novel plant-based and cultivated meat hybrid through regulatory approval to the market. 

The new funding raises SCiFi Foods’ total funding to $29 million and will primarily be used to scale R&D efforts, build out the leadership team, and market the company. 

The Spoon sat down with CEO and co-founder, Joshua March, to learn more about SCiFi Foods’ new name, a hybrid meat product, and what it looks like to raise funding from one of the most famous venture capital firms during a recession.

Read the full interview with Joshua March here.

Food Robots

Xook Raises $1.3 Million to Roll Out Robotic ‘Food Courts in a Box’ in The US

If you’ve ever visited a cafeteria at a tech giant like Google or Facebook, you probably found that the food is just as tasty (or tastier) and often better for you than what you might order at a corner restaurant or make in your own kitchen.

But according to Xook CEO Raja Natarajan, this kind of access to an abundance of tasty, healthy, and free food is more the exception than the rule for US office workers. This is very different from countries like India, said Natarajan, where most corporate employers provide access to cafeterias stocked with food options for employees. This is why, after trialing a prototype for what he and cofounder Ratul Roy describe as a “food court in a box” in Bangalore, they are eyeing the US for the rollout of their robotic kiosk.

“In countries with high labor costs and high food costs, it is very hard to offer this kind of experience unless it comes with automation,” Natarajan told The Spoon in a recent interview.

To read the full story, click here!