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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Future of Grocery

Thank You, Walmart and Safeway, for Keeping Us Fed. Now Fix Your Confusing and Misleading E-Commerce

Grocery stores have been a bright spot in this otherwise dark time of global pandemic. Store workers are braving an on-edge public and risking infection to stock shelves or come out to our homes to deliver groceries. I appreciate and thank them for all their hard work.

So it’s not on the front lines where grocery stores have an issue right now. Instead, it’s on the back end, in the way big grocery retailers manage and communicate about e-commerce orders, where the problems seem to be happening.

Like millions of others, my family has been self-isolating for a couple of weeks, which means more grocery shopping online. I’ve used Safeway for delivery and Walmart for curbside pickup. Both have problems with the way they relay information about out-of-stock items.

Before going off on too much of a rant, I should note that I’m extremely lucky. My wife and I are still employed, we are sufficiently stocked with food, and if need be, we can easily and safely go to an actual grocery store. But there are a lot of people in worse off situations, and those people need a consistent and reliable method for ordering groceries from home.

I also understand that we are in unprecedented times, and as such, people are stocking up/hoarding, so some items are just aren’t available. I have yet to find toilet paper anywhere online, and evidently everyone is baking loaves of sourdough, so there’s a run on flour.

The problems I’ve encountered with Safeway and Walmart is that those platforms accept and process my online order, leading me to believe all items are in stock and that I’ll get everything I need/want. Then, literally a couple hours before the scheduled pickup or delivery time, I get notifications telling me some items are out of stock and I won’t receive them.

In the case of the Safeway, it was a delivery order that had been placed a week and half prior. So during that time, I assumed my entire order would arrive and didn’t make any other plans to get groceries. Thankfully, the only things the store was out of were flour and yeast (to make bread, he admitted, sheepishly), and not more necessary staples like eggs or milk. But there was a gap of a week and a half in between the time I placed the order and the delivery date. At some point in there, Safeway should have communicated that items are out of stock so I could figure something else out.

The same thing happened with Walmart when I ordered food for curbside pickup. The system accepted my order the day before, leading me to believe everything was a-okay! Then the next day, shortly before I drove to the store for pickup I got an email from Walmart that basically said, “Just kidding! We’re out of a bunch of stuff you ordered.” Some of the items, like toilet paper, I kinda figured might disappear, but there were also things like fruits and vegetables in there that suddenly couldn’t be fulfilled. This was more baffling because Walmart is a logistics and supply chain monster. Why, then, was the online ordering so far off from reality in the 24-hour period between when I placed my order and when I picked it up?

Again, the reason for this whole rant is that as we are told to shelter in place and avoid crowds (especially if you’re older), e-commerce will become increasingly important, depending on how long this outbreak lasts. It’s critical that people can feel confident in the online orders they place. I’m fortunate in that I have the time and means to compensate if something goes awry. But there are lots of people who don’t, and lots of people who can’t go into the store because they have young kids, or are sick who will rely on online grocery shopping. If it’s too difficult to align store inventory with demand at a store, then retailers should improve and clarify messaging around orders so that people understand that what they receive may change, and if it does, give them ample time to either prepare for the outage or make substitutions.

For the most part, online grocery shopping is great! And I really do appreciate all the work Walmart and Safeway are putting in quickly to make it happen. We just need to make some changes to make sure we aren’t worse off in these worst of times.

We’re spending every day tracking the impact of COVID-19 on the world of food. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our analysis and hear stories from the front lines.

Instacart to Add 300,000 Shoppers

Instacart is bulking up. The company announced today that it is responding to the surge in demand for its grocery delivery services by adding 300,000 shoppers to its platform over the next three months.

Instacart shoppers are the workers the company uses to go into stores, pick out the items customers order and deliver them. In a corporate blog post, Instacart Founder and CEO Apoorva Mehta wrote:

Today, we have more shoppers on the Instacart platform than ever before. Given the continued customer demand we expect over the coming months, we’ll be bringing on an additional 300,000 full-service shoppers to support cities nationwide. As more people look for immediate, flexible earnings opportunities during this time, we hope that Instacart can be an additional source of income for those looking to earn while also delivering for the communities in which they live.

Instacart operates in more than 5,500 cities. In a press release announcing the news, Instacart said that in the past few weeks, it has seen order volume grow by more than 150 percent year-over-year, with average customer basket size also increasing by 15 percent. The additional 300,000 full-service shoppers will more than double the size of its shopper workforce.

That the company is seeing such a spike in demand is not surprising. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced people into stocking up for what could be a long haul indoors. Many people adopting social distancing find it easier to have food delivered rather than interact with the (potentially contagious) general public at the grocery store.

I count myself among that surge in Instacart traffic even though it’s not available where I live. Instead I used it to order food for my elderly parents who are in a high-risk population and still stubborn about going to the grocery store in person.

Anyone who has tried to order groceries online recently has assuredly run into lengthy delays (I ordered from Safeway a week and half ago and it arrives tomorrow)(hopefully) and out-of-stock error messages. Instacart is among a number of companies looking to hire a lot of people immediately. Amazon wants to bring on 100,000 people for its delivery operations, Kroger is hiring 10,000 across the country, and Walmart plans to hire 150,000 new workers.

With COVID-19 decimating the restaurant industry and estimates that five to seven million service and kitchen jobs could be lost, any job could be a lifeline for those in need until this pandemic passes.

Just remember that all these Instacart, Amazon, Kroger and Walmart workers are on the front lines, putting themselves at risk going into stores and to your homes. So be kind and tip them generously.

Goodr Delivers Groceries and Surplus Food to Hungry Students, Seniors in Atlanta

“Hold on, I have to get my credit card.” Jasmine Crowe, CEO of Goodr, was grocery shopping in the middle of our call earlier today. She was at the store not stocking up her own pantry but buying grocery staples for one of the dozens of families that are using Goodr’s expanded program to get fresh food during this tumultuous time. 

Goodr is an Atlanta-based startup providing the logistics needed to redistribute surplus food from large businesses (think: Coca Cola, Chick-fil-A, etc) and to non-profits feeding the hungry. And with the coronavirus outbreak shutting down schools and, consequently, taking away free lunch from students, Goodr is stepping up to make sure that kids in the Atlanta area still have healthy food to eat.

To feed students, Goodr is working with school cafeterias which are still preparing packaged meals. The company picks up and delivers these meals to designated apartment drop-off zones in areas where many students live. They’re on track to deliver meals to over 40,000 students in the Atlanta school district.

Separately, Goodr is introducing another new service to drop off groceries to families who can’t afford to (or aren’t physically able to) shop themselves, or can’t make it to food pantries. “It’s like Instacart, but it’s free,” Crowe explained to me. Since the grocery delivery service doesn’t rely on surplus food, Goodr pays for the groceries through individual sponsorships (you can do it too, if you like).

In addition to grocery and student meal drop-off, Goodr is also delivering fully prepared meals cooked by partner chefs to seniors that might be hesitant to venture out and purchase food, or don’t have the financial ability to do so. Crowe said that the seniors have the option to ask that the food be dropped off outside their door to reduce the risk of contamination. Finally, the company is increasing the frequency of Goodr’s pop-up surplus food grocery stores.

These emergency initiatives are all happening on top of Goodr’s current surplus food deliveries from offices to nonprofits. “It’s still business as usual,” Crowe told me.

To increase their delivery capacity Crowe said that Goodr has hired 10 new drivers. They try to hire drivers that were recently laid off from their jobs and pay them $20 per hour. Crowe told me that Goodr uses the Google Maps Paperboy API to direct drivers through the most efficient routes. Currently, one driver can deliver groceries to six or seven families in an hour and a half. I’m from Atlanta and, knowing the traffic situation there, that’s pretty incredible.

Goodr typically gets a lot of its donations from offices and restaurants, many of which are closed or in the process of closing. Crowe told me that right now, they’re sourcing “a little bit from everywhere.” The company is still getting donations from some food partners, like Mercedes-Benz and Coca-Cola, and is also taking food from companies that are going out of business and clearing out their fridges and pantries. 

Crowe doesn’t know how long those donations will last, however, or how long Goodr will be able to keep the lights on. Like many other food companies, it is not immune to the struggles that come with our new COVID-19 reality.

Nonetheless, Crowe said they’ll keep doing what they can and paying their team for as long as they can. “I’m a believer in good Karma,” Crowe told me as she finished her grocery shop. Then she had to go deliver the food to an Atlanta family, or senior, or student, and do it all over again.

My Elderly Parents Kept Going to the Grocery Store, So I Finally Instacarted for Them (and It was Great!)

Parents, especially elderly ones, can be stubborn. They have their routines and will stick to ’em by gum. For my septuagenarian parents, it’s going to their local grocery store, which they love (my dad actually had his 65th birthday party there).

But as the COVID-19 shroud continues to unfurl across the nation and people are being asked to stay at home, going to the grocery store, especially if you’re elderly (sorry, mom!), seems like not such a great idea anymore.

We’ve already seen some grocery stores create special, early hours where only seniors can shop, which is a good idea. But honestly, I would prefer if my parents didn’t have to go out in the world at all, at least for the next few weeks.

I’ve been telling them about online grocery shopping since this pandemic began, and how it could be an option for them to get food without leaving their house. They politely nodded and said that yes that was an option, and then went to the store anyway. My mother in particular is pretty tech-savvy, so the concept of getting groceries online wasn’t scary to her; I think it was more about their routines.

As this pandemic transmogrified a full-on international crisis, I upped the pressure on my parents to give up the grocery store. But they kept going. I don’t live near them (otherwise I’d shop for them), so finally yesterday I Instacarted for them. And it was fantastic.

I live in a rural area where Instacart isn’t available, so I hadn’t used the service yet. But after downloading the app, I was able to plug in my parents’ address, find their local store, and start shopping.

My Instacart Shopper was super helpful at finding product replacements.

My mom sent a list of items and I placed the order. While I was expecting deliveries to be delayed at least a few days, surprisingly there was a same-day window. Aces!

What I appreciated was how my shopper, Julia, was communicative throughout the whole process. Understandably, a lot of what I ordered was out of stock, so she sent suggestions and photos of options (or lack thereof, almost all of the bread was gone). Finally, I left instructions for her to just drop off the groceries on my parents’ front porch (no touching!). Julia sent me a pic when the delivery was done and I FaceTimed my parents to let them know.

I’m deeply aware that we are asking more of gig workers and delivery people than ever before. In this case, Julia is literally helping keep my parents fed. Instacart has a pretty crappy track record when it comes to treating its workers well. Given that their shoppers are on the front lines of this pandemic, Instacart better damn well step up and do the right thing (all of the tip I left should have gone to Julia). It would also be cool if Instacart offered something similar to Chatt.us, wherein you could buy groceries for someone else in need (because with all the restaurant closures and job losses, there is going to be a lot of need).

I realize that many of you reading this are probably saying Duh, Chris, we know all about Instacart. Great! I’m sharing this story because in these strange times, we can re-think how we use our existing resources to help others. Anecdotally, I’ve heard from a bunch of friends who are struggling with their parents going out for groceries. If you are concerned for your elderly parents, and have the means and can use a tool like Instacart or Safeway online or Walmart for them, maybe consider it.

Will this experiment push my parents into online grocery shopping? I don’t know yet, they say they are stocked for a few weeks. But hopefully when I bring up Instacart again, they won’t just nod their head politely.

We’re spending every day tracking the impact of COVID-19 on the world of food. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our analysis and hear stories from the front lines.

As Online Grocery Shopping Surges, Walmart Leads the Retail Pack (and Could Stay There)

With COVID-19 limiting movement in some cities and raising new concerns about being out in public among groups of people, there’s been a surge in online grocery shopping. And according to a piece in Bloomberg yesterday, Walmart was the top destination for online grocery shopping, which could translate into being the long-term leader in the space.

Bloomberg writes:

As online grocery shopping goes mainstream, Walmart will be the main beneficiary. One-third of shoppers surveyed by Gordon Haskett Research Advisors on March 13 said they bought food online over the past week, and of those, 41% were doing so for the first time. For those newbies, Walmart was by far the most popular option, capturing more than half of orders. Amazon and its Whole Foods chain garnered only 14%.

Now we don’t know how big the sample size of this survey was, but the results seem in-line with what we would expect. Walmart is a massive retail operation with a broad distribution of physical stores, so it makes sense it would be a big beneficiary of our current situation.

Prior to the global pandemic, Walmart and Amazon had been locked in a heated battle for supremacy in the online grocery space. The two retail giants exchanged tit-for-tat moves over the past year: Walmart launched and rolled out Delivery Unlimited for groceries nationwide, Amazon waived delivery fees for its Prime members, Walmart started testing its own Amazon Prime-like membership service, and Amazon started building its own physical grocery store locations.

Walmart already having physical locations definitely gives it an advantage in this time of social distancing. Walmart stores are there for people brave enough to actually go out and shop in person. The stores also act as a distributed network for home deliveries, or can provide pickup locations for online orders.

I myself am putting this last scenario to the test. I live in a more rural area and while delivery from my local Safeway couldn’t be fulfilled for more than a week and a half at the time of ordering, I can do an at-store pickup from Walmart tomorrow. Aside from a couple of minor hiccups, the Walmart app and online experience was pretty easy. Most everything I wanted was in stock, and if it wasn’t, they made it easy to swap.

As more people are forced into online grocery shopping for the first time they will go to where they can get the food and supplies they need in a timely manner. With Amazon struggling to keep up with delivery demand, Walmart, with its network of stores could become people’s de facto preference. And once they have an account set up with Walmart, re-stocking pantries will be that much easier as this lockdown continues and into a time in the hopefully not too distant future when we can emerge from our homes.

Online Grocer Farmstead Seeing 70 Percent Growth, Doubling Headcount to Keep Up

Farmstead has suddenly found itself on the front lines of the COVID-19 epidemic. The online grocer is based and delivers only in the Bay Area, where a shelter in place order was recently put into effect. As a result a lot of people are ordering food online and Farmstead, which has been around for a couple of years, now finds itself struggling to keep up with demand.

I spoke with Pradeep Elankumaran, Farmstead Co-Founder and CEO this morning, and he told me that back in normal non-coronavirus times, his company had at best 10 to 12 percent week over week growth. Three weeks ago, when the severity of the situation started settling in, that number jumped to 40 percent week over week growth. The following week was 50 percent wee/week growth over that. In the third week of the, should we call it a “panic?”, Farmstead’s week/week growth was 70 percent.

That is a lot of growth in a very short amount of time. Farmstead is currently doubling its headcount of pick-and-pack workers and delivery drivers to keep up, going from 70 workers to 140.

Farmstead’s hook has always been its AI-powered inventory management. The company builds microhub distribution centers in neighborhoods and uses its algorithms to make sure each one has just enough stock: not too much so that some goes to waste, and not so little that orders can’t be fulfilled.

Elankumaran said that even with the spike in demand, his software has been mostly effective at adapting and managing the situation. He attributes that success to a couple of key parameters that go into its algorithm. First, when you order from Farmstead, you don’t know if an item is out of stock until after you click on it (other online grocers will grey out an item when it’s gone so you can’t even click). While this is a wasted click for the consumer, it gives Farmstead more data on what consumers actually want, which allows the company to continue to feed its system.

Second, Elankumaran said that the sell by date for every item in the store is listed. That way they know how long each item they have will last and can prioritize distribution accordingly.

Farmstead’s system can’t totally prevent items being out of stock. During the first week of the outbreak, it sold out of pasta, for example. But because Farmstead knew everything people were trying to buy (even if they couldn’t) and how long that item lasts, they were able to adjust accordingly for the subsequent weeks.

Another side effect of the COVID-19 shopping, Elankumaran said, was that people are buying more fresh produce online through Farmstead. Buying fruits and vegetables online was something people typically didn’t do as they like to be in the store to look at and touch items before buying them. But when you are on lockdown, any safe port in a storm and all that. Plus, people may be waking up to the fact that between store workers and other shoppers, each piece of fruit could be touched by a lot of people while sitting at the store.

The fact that Farmstead doesn’t have an actual store that’s open to the public could also benefit the company. It’s a warehouse so the only people touching your food are the workers there, which is something Farmstead can exert greater control over.

As we’ve talked about before, COVID-19 is forcing new behaviors across the meal journey. While sudden demand is putting a strain on Farmstead and other grocery delivery services, these companies will adapt, and presumably work out the wrinkles in order to stay alive, and perhaps create a new normal in the way people shop for food.

Grocery Stores Get Scrubbing with Extreme Sanitizing Measures

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tastermonial Lets You Scan Grocery Items to See Which are the Best Fit for Your Diet

Sticking to a diet — or avoiding an allergen — is hard enough without having to worry about potentially hidden ingredients in grocery products. Does that jerky have soy in it, or do those potato chips actually contain dairy?

One startup is trying to make grocery shopping more transparent and personalized. Tastermonial is a new startup based in the Bay Area which offers a link between personalized nutrition services and actual food brands. Users can download the Tastermonial app and use it to scan products on grocery shelves. The app then extracts nutritional data and gives viewers a readout of the item, noting whether or not it would be a good fit for them to eat, based off of their pre-saved dietary profile. If it’s not, Tastermonial will recommend other, better-suited grocery products available via delivery through one of their retail partners.

Founded in July 2019 by Bude Piccin, the startup launched a beta version of its app in January 2020 and currently has about 200 users. Thus far Tastermonial’s database includes over 400,000 SKUs, including everything from CPGs to frozen and refrigerated foods. Piccin said that they pull nutritional data from public databases.

On a recent phone call, Piccin told me that the app can only scan items and give both a general evaluation (good choice for many diets) and a personal evaluation (not suitable for you based on your profile). They plan to roll out the ability to purchase through retail partners later this year, starting with Piccin’s former employer, Amazon.

Thus far, users have to input their own dietary preferences and any food allergens, however, Tastermonial plans to let users link its app to microbiome- or DNA-driven food personalization services to automatically upload their nutrition profile. The company is already in talks with DAYTWO, a personalized nutrition company which recommends recipes to individuals based on their microbiome.

Tastermonial’s app is free to use. The company plans to make money by adding a small fee (5 to 10 percent) onto each sale through their retail partners. There’s also a SaaS play. Piccin said that Tastermonial will partner with personalized nutrition services, like DAYTWO, to provide the ingredient layer to those recipe recommendations. She explained that Tastermonial’s database could help users select the most health-appropriate foods for their suggested meals — all of which could be delivered to their door.

Since the company is so early-stage, it’s hard to predict if it’ll be able to follow through on its plans to become the go-to interface for grocery shopping based on your nutrition. But Tastermonial is tapping into a trend that, like Hansel, is so hot right now: personalization. (So hot, in fact, that we had a whole conference dedicated to personalization a few weeks ago in NYC.)

In addition to Tastermonial, there are several other companies racing to bring personalization to the grocery store. Pinto (formerly Sage Project) and DNA Nudge are two startups that pull from individuals’ nutrition profiles to help them decide which retail products are best suited to their needs. According to Piccin, Tastermonial’s differentiator is its ability to connect users with alternative products that are better for them, if the grocery options don’t cut it. “We’re connecting to that practical side,” she told me.

My question is whether or not consumers will actually take that extra step. Will people really create an entire online grocery order for one or two items, pay a premium for delivery, and wait for it to show up at their door?

Tastermonial is betting on it. Considering that 81 percent of consumers never order groceries online, that’s a risky bet, which is why I think that Tastermonial’s SaaS play has more potential than the app itself. As personalized nutrition services become more popular, more and more people will be looking for ways to easily shop for the best ingredients for their individual needs. If it becomes part of the personalized nutrition services themselves, Tastermonial could help make the process just a little bit easier.

InFarm’s High-Tech Vertical Farms Head to Canadian Grocery Stores

InFarm is bringing its in-store vertical farming systems to Empire supermarkets across Canada, according to a press release from Empire. The partnership will launch this coming spring and put InFarms’s high-tech farm pods in stores across that country, including at Empire subsidiaries Sobeys, Thrifty Foods, and Safeway Canada. 

Berlin-based InFarm, which raised $100 million in June of 2019, has struck multiple deals with grocery store chains around the world over the last several months, including Irma in Denmark, M&S in the UK, and Kroger stores in the U.S. The company is one of many startups developing vertical and/or indoor farming solutions meant to shorten the food supply chain by growing greens closer to food stores.

With InFarm, that means growing those leafy greens and herbs inside the produce section of stores. The company’s indoor farms come in the form of enclosed pods that use the hydroponic grow method, meaning plant roots are submerged in a nutrient-enriched water supply and no soil is involved. Cloud-based software controls the temperature, watering schedule, and light and humidity levels of the farms, adjusting those elements based on plant type. 

There are two major benefits to this in-store approach to vertical farming. Zero pesticides are used in the grow process, and greens can be harvested onsite, reducing carbon emissions since food doesn’t have to be transported to the store from a distribution center. 

Better-tasting greens is another one of InFarm’s claims. By precisely adjusting light, temperature, water levels, and other elements, vertical farmers can create ideal growing “recipes” for each plant type meant to bring out the optimal amount of flavor.

Many vertical farming companies make this claim, along with those about reduced water usage and carbon footprint. What the indoor ag industry needs next is more public data backing these claims up. With other companies — notably Square Roots and Freight Farms — striking deals of their own to get vertical farms closer to food stores, more hard numbers will be needed to show us when, where, and how these high-tech farms can be most useful in the overall food system.

InFarm will launch a range of herbs at two Safeway stores in Vancouver this spring, according to the press release, and Empire will also put farms in stores across seven Canadian cities.

Postmates, Instacart Join No Human Contact Delivery Efforts in the U.S.

Food delivery service Postmates today announced what it’s calling Dropoff Options, a function that lets customers choose how they want to receive their deliveries. According to a company blog post, users can “choose to meet their Postmate at the door, as they have before, meet curbside, or go non-contact and have deliveries left at the door.” 

Postmates customers order their meals as usual then select their delivery method during the checkout process (see image above).

The post itself doesn’t mention coronavirus, but it doesn’t have to. Around the world, delivery services now offer various forms of this contactless delivery, where couriers and customers have no physical contact and in some cases don’t even see one another face to face. 

The bulk of the efforts so far have been in China, where the outbreak originated. Restaurant chains and delivery services — Ele.me, Meituan, McDonald’s, and KFC, to name just a few — are working together to limit the amount of human contact that happens during food delivery dropoffs. Drivers and couriers must wear masks, have their temperature taken, and disinfect their hands and delivery bags before and after each run.

South Korea’s top two delivery services, Baedal Minjok and Yogiyo, have also seen an uptick in food delivery orders and requests for couriers to leave packages on the doorstep.

Stateside, Postmates isn’t alone in its efforts to introduce more contactless delivery. As Business Insider noted, Instacart has also implemented contactless delivery with a service called “Leave at My Door Delivery.” The grocery delivery company told BI that it has actually been testing this service for several months and decided to make it available to all customers after seeing a “surge” in demand for it.

With “Leave at My Door Delivery,” Instacart customers can opt to have their grocery orders left at their doorstep during the designated timeframe for their order. 

Other food delivery companies, including Grubhub, DoorDash, and Uber Eats, have not yet implemented any kind of contactless delivery for their operations.

These new services from Postmates and Instacart so far only address the issue of one human getting close to another. They do not yet address steps like disinfecting the insulated delivery bags couriers use or taking workers’ temperatures — actions that are as much about the safety of drivers and couriers as they are about customers. One Instacart worker told the Financial Times that the company still wasn’t providing items like hand sanitizer or disinfectants. While Instacart’s new contactless delivery is “a step in the right direction,” it doesn’t “reduce our overall risks of exposure because most of our risks we actually encounter while shopping,” the worker said. 

Instacart workers in particular are exposed to more germs because part of their job involves moving around a grocery store, touching a shopping cart, and picking up items from shelves. But all gig economy companies should be factoring in the safety of their workers as they implement contactless delivery services.

Which is where the robots may come in. My colleague Chris Albrect has written more than once, we live in a time when delivery robots and driverless vehicles are actually available. Undelv has already said it would make its driverless delivery vans available to deliver food, medicine, and other supplies to quarantined areas. And as Chris pointed out, rover bots like those from Starship or Kiwi “could be an easy humanless way to deliver meals and medicines around the clock in densely populated areas.” I would add drone technology to that list of possible solutions.

Granted, outsourcing delivery jobs to drones would eat into gig workers’ pay. As well, a number of regulatory issues around autonomous delivery vehicles have yet to be addressed, which limits how widely these technologies can even be used. But whether by robot, masked workers, or some other solution that’s yet to be thought of, the contactless delivery method will get way more popular in the next few months — and probably alter the food delivery landscape for good in the process.

Online Grocery Shopping Surges Amidst Coronavirus (So Tip Your Delivery Drivers!)

The Spoon is headquartered just outside of Seattle, and with a rise in coronavirus cases here over the weekend, things are understandably a little… tense. This tension was on full display at my local Safeway last night, where the cleaning supply and dry goods sections of the store were picked over and barren.

The rapidly spreading virus has sparked a rash of panic buying here and across the U.S. as concerned citizens stock up in the event of a societal collapse. The Washington Post writes:

Shelf-stable and frozen foods were in high demand. At a Trader Joe’s market in Mountain View, Calif., the freezer section was cleared out of pizza and most ready-made meals by Sunday evening. There was no pasta or rice left. One woman’s cart was piled to the brim with frozen mushroom ravioli. Another cart was filled with six gallons of milk.

Facing empty real world stores and an increasing fear of being in public places, there’s a surge in online shopping. According to MarketWatch:

In the past 30 days, 21% of U.S. consumers ordered perishable, edible groceries online, [NPD Groupd analyst David] Portalatin said. That’s up from 18% at the same point last year.

All this online shopping has taxed even the biggest of delivery players. Bloomberg reports that Amazon’s Fresh and Prime Now delivery services have been overwhelmed, and yesterday Amazon said delivery from both of those services would be impacted as it strains to meet up with demand.

As people find comfort in shopping from home, however, it’s important to remember that human beings are still making those deliveries. The Seattle Times notes that the boon in shopping means drivers can make more money, but they are definitely putting themselves at risk:

Some drivers have begun using hand sanitizer before and after ID checks, while some customers are applying disinfectant to grocery bags, said the gig-economy driver, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals from the companies.

Faced with an amorphous, invisible threat that does not discriminate, could literally be anywhere, and will only get worse, our current delivery and logistical systems are going to be pushed to their limits. But as we’ve noted before, this outbreak could also help push forward technological solutions that require less human-to-human contact.

Robots like those from Starship could be an easy humanless way to deliver meals and medicines around the clock in densely populated areas (they’d still need to be sterilized). And self-driving delivery vans like those from Udelv could bring people bulkier items like groceries.

That’s still a ways off, especially since we haven’t had to lockdown any U.S. metropolitan areas (thankfully) yet, and the safety tradeoffs of autonomous vehicles must still be considered. So for now we’re still reliant on humans to make our deliveries. Those delivery drivers aren’t just bringing packages, they are serving as a lifeline to the food we need to eat. If you need to panic grocery shop to feel better, we can’t stop you. Just be sure you tip your delivery driver generously.

Korea’s Meatbox 365 is an Automated Meat Vending Machine

As the coronavirus continues to spread around the world, we are watching in real time as our food systems adapt. Everyone, after all, still has to eat amidst the outbreak, but enjoying a meal or shopping for groceries around hundreds of strangers in a crowded restaurant or supermarket carries more risk than it did just a few months ago.

We’ve seen robots delivering food to quarantined patients, a driverless vehicle company offering up its technology to assist with food delivery, and over the weekend, a reader sent us the following tip:

In Korea, non-commercial, unmanned fresh food stores are popular because of the coronavirus.

Along with that brief note came a link to a Korean blog post about the Meatbox 365, an automated meat vending machine service. It’s a small, real world location that houses three different vending machines. We couldn’t get a ton of details because we read a Google translation of the webpage, but it appears that two vending machines are serving a range of meats like beef, lamb, and pork in a variety of cuts. The third machine serves salads and sides. There also appears to be a bank of cold storage lockers where you can presumably safely store your purchases for pickup later.

24시간 운영하는 고기 자판기…무인 정육점 미트박스365를 사용해보니[현장포커스]

Meatbox 365 falls neatly into the Venn diagram of topics we’re following closely here at The Spoon. First, it’s another example of the golden age of vending machines, which we are starting to enter now. The Meatbox 365 is basically a 24-hour butcher shrunk down into a very small physical footprint. Not everyone needs a pork chop at 2 a.m., but it can provide a fresh meat alternative for busy people unable to make it to an actual grocery store.

Second, as noted earlier, we are watching to see how the coronavirus pandemic alters the meal journey. An automated butcher means less human-to-human contact as people shop for meat, and people can venture out of their homes in off-hours to buy protein to avoid crowds.

Of course, the touchscreens and dispensing cavities of the Meatbox 365 machines need to be scrubbed down and/or people need to wash their hands after using the machine to minimize the risk of spreading the virus.

Based on a video posted by TechCafe, Meatbox 365 has been in operation since at least October of last year. I’d love to see any stats around Meatbox 365 sales since then, just to get a sense of how people in Korea adopt buying meat from a machine. But it would also be interesting to see stats over the past few weeks as coronavirus cases have spiked in Korea, and whether the automated nature of the machines has spurred sales.

We actually have meat vending machines here in the U.S. as well. The Applestone Meat company has two meat vending machines that operate 24/7 in New York. Though those machines aren’t as high-tech, and lack the touchscreens of Meatbox.

If you’re in Korea and have bought meat from a Meatbox, drop us a line and let us know why you did so and how the experience was!