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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Kickstarter: The Travel Decanter Helps You Take Your Booze on the Go

Summer in my hometown means free concerts in the park, and nothing beats a sunny evening relaxing with friends and family while listening to a cover band recreate all your favorite hits of the 80s and 90s. Perhaps this summertime high is why I’m so intrigued by the Travel Decanter campaign on Kickstarter.

The Travel Decanter is pretty much what it sounds like: a way to transport booze without bringing along the whole bottle. It’s a hand-blown glass decanter that holds 500 ml of wine, whiskey or whatever your drink of choice is, protected by a double-walled stainless steel case that separates into two tumblers.

While the Kickstarter campaign says its good for travel (no leaky bottles in your luggage), I don’t know if I’m that desperate for a drink on the road. What I do like about it, however, is its simplicity and usefulness. Lugging a full bottle of wine to the park is a bit cumbersome, and you need to pack things like corkscrews and cups. The integrated design of the tumblers in the Travel Decanter distills (pardon the pun) all that down into a simple package. It protects your drink, keeps it from leaking, and provides two cups. Plus the mouth is wide enough for ice so you can pack different types of drinks like margaritas in your pic-a-nic basket.

With 11 days to go in its campaign, the Travel Decanter has already blown past its goal of $24,000 to raise more than $230,000. You can still grab a single Travel Decanter for $44, and it is projected to ship in December of this year (though it seems like there are some complications with international shipping, according to FAQ).

The Travel Decanter continues the recent trend of crowdfunded redesigns of common drinking vessels like the Mosi Tea Brewer and the Bolde protein drink shaker. But as with any crowdfunded hardware project, caveat emptor. A great design and prototype is one thing, manufacturing at scale is another. Just ask the folks who backed the Rite-Press.

While the Travel Decanter won’t be ready for this set of summer concerts, I’m tempted to pledge to pick one up for next year.

Can You Turn a Pringles Can Into a Solar Hot Dog Cooker?

Ugh. I hate getting suckered into writing about marketing promotions for CPG companies, and yet, here I am wondering if this “hack” to turn a Pringles can into a solar cooker is real. Because I’m not made of stone, this seems kinda… cool?

Just in time for the Fourth of July, Pringles posted a video in a promoted tweet (ugh) showing how to transform its iconic cylindrical can into a sun-powered hot dog cooker. You cut a hole in the side, remove the chips, drill holes in either end of the can and place a skewered hot dog inside.

Place your Pringles cooker in direct sunlight on a day that’s at least 78 degrees, and after an unspecified amount of time (“ensure food is fully cooked” is all it says), voila! One sun-cooked hot dog in a Pringles can.

I live in the Pacific Northwest and today is, predictably, cloudy, so I can’t try it out right now, but the idea of it makes sense. It’s basically like a cardboard version of the GoSun solar grill, which uses parabolic mirrors to transform direct sunlight into enough heat to make a meal (even on a mountaintop).

So fine, Pringles, you win. I will go out and buy a can of your delicious chips to see if I can turn that can into a solar cooker when the sun comes out later this week. But if it works, I’ll be impressed and won’t feel suckered at all.

Did You Even Back the Bolde Bottle Shaker for Your Protein Drinks, Bro?

If you go to a gym, then you’re probably familiar with what might be considered the mating call of the musclebound: the rattle of a protein drink being shaken vigorously, its metal whisk ball smashing up clumps of whey powder inside a plastic bottle. But a new Kickstarter campaign is looking to silence those shakes with a new type of design.

The Bolde Bottle passed its $30,000 goal this week, after just a couple of days on Kickstarter. Unlike most shaker bottles out there, the Bolde Bottle is made from stainless steel, not plastic. According to the campaign, a lack of plastic means that the bottle won’t trap odors (leftover protein shake after a day in a gym bag does not smell great), plus the metal body is more durable and won’t wind up as another piece of plastic waste.

But the bigger innovation for the Bolde is it flipping how the mixing happens. Rather than the rattle-y ball, the mixer is affixed to the top of the thermos, so it doesn’t move. Bits of protein powder or whatever move around and through its stationary rungs. This also eliminates that ball skittering up and down the bottle every time you take a drink.

The Bolde also has a screw off compartment on the bottom to hold said protein (or whatever), and a food-grade silicone cap to prevent leaks.

All this innovation doesn’t come cheap though, bro. One 16 oz. Bolde bottle will cost you $39 if you snatch one of the remaining pledges at that level. Afterwards, the price jumps to $44 for one bottle. Oh, and you’ll have to wait until December before they start shipping. Meanwhile, you could just pick up a plastic 28 oz. Blender Bottle for $8. At Bolde’s hefty price, hopefully the company has avoided the pitfalls that beleagured the crowdfunded Rite Press, and will actually make it to market.

Then the only sound you’ll hear at the gym is your own huffing and puffing.

Review: Magic Spoon is the (Expensive) Kids’ Cereal for Adults, and is Magically Delicious

I have an 8 year old, but we don’t ever buy him sugar cereals, in part because I know I would gobble up most of the box. At my age/metabolic rate, the effects of Lucky Charms tends to linger a lot longer than I’d like them to.

Which is why I was excited to learn about Magic Spoon, which brands itself as “Childlike Cereal for Grown-Ups.” The cereal comes in four varieties: Fruity, Chocolate, Cinnamon, and Frosted, and boasts that it is high in protein, keto-friendly, non-GMO, gluten-free, grain-free, soy-free, wheat-free and has nothing artificial.

Magic Spoon is able to get all the sweetness without all the junk through Allulose, which can be found in certain fruits like figs and raisins.

It all sounds too good to be true and there must be some catch. There is, and it’s the price. You can only buy Magic Spoon in four-packs for a whopping $40. That’s ten bucks for a 7 oz. box of cereal. You can pick up two, 40 oz. boxes of Cheerios for less than $8 on Amazon.

OK, so it’s expensive, and you have to order it online, and thus wait for your breakfast. I actually bought mine about a month ago and had to wait for delivery because the backorder wait time was so long.

So, how does it taste?

Awesome. Magic Spoon tastes awesome.

I dug into a bowl of the Fruity cereal this morning and it tastes just like the sugary cereal of my youth, but has only 8g of carbohydrates 0g of sugar and 3 net carbs for keto counters (Froot Loops has 26g of carbs, 12 grams of sugar and 23 net carbs). It doesn’t really taste like any actual fruit, it tastes “pink” to my tastebuds (which is probably influenced by its shocking pink color), but Spoon Founder, Mike Wolf thinks it tastes exactly like Froot Loops. Regardless of any synesthesia, I ate a whole bowl and was ready to eat more.

If I’m honest, I preferred the Cocoa flavor, which was more in-line with what was advertised on the box and had a mellow chocolate flavor. I’ll update this post when I try the Cinnamon and Frosted (there’s only so much cereal I can eat in one sitting).

My one complaint is that there is a slight aftertaste, it’s not bad, it’s just more like a slightly metallic and, ironically, artificial feeling reminiscent of pre-packaged protein shakes (which is probably because of the whey protein isolate in the cereal). But that’s a minor quibble.

If Magic Spoon catches on, I suspect bigger CPG companies will have to look at jumping in with similar cereals, though they will have to figure out how to appeal to nutrition-conscious customers without cannibalizing their existing sales.

Will I plunk down another $40 for more? I’m not sure yet. That probably depends on how long these 28 oz. of Magic Spoon in my pantry lasts.

The bigger point is, I went from zero boxes of cereal in my house to four, which I will happily eat and share with my 8 year old.

Maybe.

Make Bread Great Again: Talking Bread Puts Branding (and Trump) on Loaves

Ever wanted an inspirational saying, company logo or the face of Donald Trump on a loaf of bread?

Ok, probably not, but if you do I have good news for you: Israel startup Talking Bread has created a machine to do just that.

The company’s bread “brander” burns an image on bread using the essentially the same technique with which livestock would be marked using a branding iron, only instead of branding cows, the machine stamps logos, pictures of Trump and Kim Jong Un and basically anything you could want on thousands of loaves of bread an hour.

I caught up with the company CEO Gilad Cohen at Seeds&Chips this week where he told me about his company’s products and the why he thinks stamping messages on baked goods is a white space (and bread) opportunity.

“I thought bread can be much more than food,” said Cohen. “If you eat the food and a minute later you forget what you ate, it doesn’t really matter.  But now we can change the way you look at bread.”

In one sense, Talking Bread is similar to Ripple and Selffee in that much like these companies, the Israeli startup sees food as a messaging and marketing platform. However, unlike these products – both of which are for the lower-volume capacity of restaurants and events – Talking Bread is built for the factory floor. The company’s first product, the Bread Wizard 9000 (yes, that’s its (awesome) name), can stamp up to 18 thousand loaves per hour, while the just-introduced Bread Wizard 5000 is for smaller bread production facilities with a capacity of a few thousand loaves per hour.

You can check out my interview with Gilad Cohen below, and when  you’re done with that, you can see the Bread Wizard 5000 here.

Talking Bread @ Seeds & Chips 2019

Alpro Lets You Have Your Plant-Based Fried Chicken (and Eat the Bucket, Too)

I went vegetarian a few years ago, but one meaty food I still miss is fried chicken. The good news is that starting tomorrow, I’ll have a plant-based option to feed that craving — if I’m willing to take a flight to the UK, that is.

In honor of Plant Power Day — which is apparently a thing and falls on March 7 — British vegan food company Alpro will unveil a Plant Based Bucket (PBB), which is essentially a meatless take on the ubiquitous UK staple of fried chicken and french fries (or as the Brits say, “chips”). The meal will include nuggets made of mushrooms and Alpro’s almond milk, as well as sweet potato fries and a creamy vegan garlic dip (h/t Metro).

But the culinary experience doesn’t stop with what’s inside the packaging. The actual bucket is edible, too, made of a combination of nuts, spices, and seeds. Watch the video below to see how the feast is made, plus some nice footage of a hungry diner digging first into the meal and then the bucket it came in.

Alpro is a CPG company that makes plant-based dairy and doesn’t have any brick-and-mortar stores. Therefore, the PBB will be available only through Deliveroo. Diners in London and Manchester can snag an edible bucket of their own for £5 ($6.59). The company hasn’t specified if the PBB will just be available for Plant Power Day or if it will become a longer-term offering.

They’re not alone when it comes to reinventing traditional meat products using plants. In both the UK and the U.S., a couple other companies are taking advantage of plant-based-mania and making vegan versions of fried chicken. Seattle Food Tech makes plant-based nuggets to sell in institutional dining halls, and the Cap’n himself is hopping on the fried chicken bandwagon: KFC is reportedly developing a vegan fried chicken option which will roll out on U.K. menus as early as this year.

The PBB also highlights another trend in the food world: eco-friendly packaging. A lot of fast-food packaging isn’t recyclable, which means it ends up getting tossed into a landfill. To address a growing outcry over the massive amounts of plastic in said landfills, QSR and major food corporations like McDonald’s and Starbucks are scrambling to develop recyclable or biodegradable packaging. Even KFC has promised to convert to renewable plastic sources by 2025 (though sadly they haven’t made any promises about edible fried chicken buckets). By going beyond just recyclable and making their packaging edible, Alpro is getting itself some sustainability points — as well as a “wow” factor.

I’m not sure how good the bucket will actually taste, or if I’d want to eat something that had been hanging out in a random Deliveroo courier’s bag and seems to have the Alpro logo painted on its exterior. But nonetheless, edible/biodegradable packaging is certainly an interesting concept, especially when it comes to food and meal kit delivery. I wonder if the PBB will start a trend that turns into more bread bowls for soup or lettuce leaf-wrapped sandwiches.

Until then, it might be time to hop on a plane to London to try this PBB out for myself to see if it satisfies my fried chicken cravings. And my bucket cravings.

Alltown Fresh is Revamping the Convenience Store with Kombucha and Avocado Toast

Pull into any gas station to fill up and grab a snack, and chances are your options will be potato chips, sugary sodas, and one of those hot dogs shriveling under a heat lamp.

Unless, that is, you’re near Plymouth, MA. Around there, you can swing by Alltown Fresh, a fancified convenience store which opened in January of this year and offers high-quality coffee, kombucha on tap, house-made healthy food and smoothies, WiFi, and even a small selection of groceries.

Oh yeah, and you can fill up your car, too. Alltown Fresh’s parent company is Global Partners, a fuel company that owns and supplies roughly 1,000 gas stations throughout the Northeastern U.S. But Alltown Fresh doesn’t position itself as a gas station that happens to have pretty good food. “We want to flip that paradigm,” Alltown Fresh’s SVP of Retail Operations Ryan Riggs told me over the phone. They want their store to be a place you seek out for its food and beverage options first, and to fill up on gas second (or not at all).

Yes, there are already gas station convenience stores with QSR’s like Subways or Dairy Queen’s attached, but Alltown Fresh’s offerings — with greens-filled smoothies, Moroccan chickpea bowls, and quinoa porridge — are next-level healthy. But for those who are loyal to their road trip junk food, don’t fear. “You can still get your Snicker’s,” Riggs told me. The unhealthy food just won’t be the only option.

Choice and customization are key to Alltown Fresh’s business plan. Customers order fresh food on a kiosk touchscreen inside the convenience store, and can even customize toppings and sizes. The store also has a limited selection of groceries like dry pasta and tomato sauce, as well as a bulk section where people can stock up on nuts and grains. In future, it would be a smart play to add meal kits to the mix so commuters could stop by and swipe a kit for dinner along with their cold brew or smoothie. Alltown Fresh also has grab-and-go options like bowls and sandwiches ready for quick purchases.

The prices are higher than typical gas station fare, but for what you’re getting, they’re actually pretty good. The Green Smash (avocado, chia and pumpkin seeds on toast) is $6, and a Chili Chicken grain bowl is $13, and a small latté is $2. Considering that a latté from Starbuck’s can set you back about five bucks at this point, that’s a steal.

The company is also prioritizing plastic-free packaging, and uses chiefly recyclable, biodegradable options for the prepared food section. Obviously it’s a lot harder to get rid of plastic when it comes to the brands on Alltown Fresh’s shelves, especially when a lot of them are packaged snacks and bottled beverages, but Riggs said that they were trying to offer as many plastic-free options as possible.

As someone who has been on her fair share of road trips and often ends up subsisting off of diet soda and Cheez-Itz, I think Alltown Fresh has hit on a great concept. The store combines a few trends we’re seeing in consumer dining preferences: personalization, healthy food, and, above all, convenience, in a way I haven’t seen before. The closest comparison I can make is The Goods Mart in L.A., which is also trying to redefine convenience stores as sustainable and healthy — but they’re more bodega than gas station stop.

Riggs told me that they’re hoping to open more Alltown Fresh locations in 2019 and 2020, all of which will be in New England. Now if they could just make it to Seattle so I can fuel up on more than just a bag of sour cream & onion chips on my next road trip, it would be much appreciated.

Seattle Food Tech Launches Plant-Based Nuggets at Hospital Cafeteria

The food at hospital cafeterias (and cafeterias in general) can get a bad rap. But today in Seattle, limp salads and neon jello were replaced by crispy chicken nuggets that just happened to be made out of plants.

The Swedish Medical Center in Seattle’s Capitol Hill became the first hospital to serve Seattle Food Tech‘s (SFT) signature plant-based nuggets during a one-day pop-up event. The nuggets are made of wheat protein, soy, oil, and (vegan) chicken flavoring, and covered in a crispy breading. Each five-nugget serving contains 19 grams of protein, which is about 50 percent more than a regular chicken nugget. The hospital served a special of eight nuggets plus fries for $4.95; a comparable-sized serving of traditional chicken strips with fries is $7.50.

We got to taste SFT’s nuggets at the Smart Kitchen Summit last October, and they were pretty good. The company has since tweaked the recipe, and the newest version is crispier on the outside and juicier on the inside. There’s a tiny bit of a soy aftertaste, but a swipe of barbecue sauce or ketchup easily masks that. Passers-by at the hospital who stopped for a sample seemed to be fans of the plant-based nuggets, with a few even saying that they wouldn’t have known that they weren’t eating chicken.

Photo: Catherine Lamb

While SFT’s pop-up at the hospital is just a one-day experiment, it’s been the company’s plan all along to sell their nuggets wholesale to large institutional dining establishments like corporate and hospital cafeterias and school lunchrooms. Led by CEO Christie Lagally, who cut her teeth at Boeing and the Good Food Institute, SFT doesn’t want to just make really good-tasting vegan nuggets; they want to revolutionize the plant-based manufacturing process so they can make good-tasting nuggets accessible to big groups of people at low price points.

SFT has raised $2 million in VC funding and last year completed a stint at the prestigious Y Combinator. Lagally told me the company has four institutional customers in place, though she wouldn’t disclose which ones. It also recently doubled its staff and commissary kitchen space to ramp up production to supply the new partners. Next up, Lagally and her team are developing “chicken” patties, “chicken” strips and “fish” sticks.

Judging from the reaction at the Swedish Medical Center, SFT won’t have a problem tempting customers to try its nuggets, or getting instiutional partners to serve them. Now it just remains to be seen if the startup can scale sustainably and keep costs down. A tall order to be sure, but with SFT’s team (specifically Lagally’s engineering background) and its smart go-to-market strategy, I’m betting we’ll soon see a lot more of their plant-based nuggets popping up in cafeterias.

Apeel Brings Its Longer-Lasting Avocados to Europe

Holy (long-lasting) guacamole! Today Apeel Sciences announced that it’s partnering with Belgium-based produce importer Nature’s Pride to bring their long-lasting avocados to the European market.

If you don’t know, Apeel Sciences is a California-based startup that makes an edible post-harvest coating for fruits and vegetables (called Edipeel) which can significantly increase produce shelf life. Edipeel-coated avocados — Apeel’s first product — are currently available in select grocery stores in the Midwest, including a string of Costco’s.

Nature’s Pride’s new Edipeel-coasted avocados will have a co-branded label to increase consumer awareness around Apeel’s mission. The companies expect that the long-lasting avocados will be available mid-2019 in select retail stores in Europe, as long as they gain EU regulatory approval. There’s no word as to where in Europe Apeel/Nature’s Pride will first roll out the avocados.

The timing is ripe (sorry, I had to). Roughly 88 million tons of food is wasted in the EU every year. In 2012, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that roughly 50 percent of fruits and vegetables in the EU go to waste, and over half of that waste occurs after food is brought home from the store.

Apeel’s edible coating won’t help Europeans (or anyone) be better about eating all of their produce, but it will give them a longer window before said produce goes bad. According to their website, Apeel’s technology has led to a more than 50 percent decrease in food waste at the retail level. If those statistics hold true in Europe, it could take a huge dent out of those 88 million tons of food waste.

In August of last year Apeel raised $70 million, bringing the total funding for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed startup to just north of $110 million. Next up, Apeel plans to tackle citrus and asparagus.

Cat Cora Thinks It’s Time to End the Stigma Around CBD, Starting with Crab Cakes

You might know Cat Cora as the first female Iron Chef on Food Network’s Iron Chef America, or the first female inducted into the Culinary Hall of Fame. But what you might not know is that this culinary celebrity is also an outspoken advocate for cannabis — specifically CBD — as a health and wellness ingredient.

While at Seattle’s Cannacon this week I got to watch Chef Cora whip up a feast worthy of a white tablecloth, all of which was infused with CBD. “The effect of CBD is not a high,” said Cora. She — along with many people around the world — views CBD as a wellness ingredient, not an intoxicant.

Onstage Cora whipped up crab cakes with mango coulis and avocado salsa, adding a teaspoon of CBD isolate (a powder that contains 99 percent CBD) to the crab mixture. She also mixed together a mocktail of pomegranate juice and muddled mint, poured over ice cubes made with Above Water, which contains 15mg of CBD in each 20-ounce bottle.

After the demo, Cora spoke candidly about what drew her to begin advocating for marijuana legalization and de-stigmatization in the first place. She saw both her parents pass away from cancer and witnessed firsthand how medical marijuana could have alleviated some of their pain. She has been experimenting “publicly” with different ways to cook with CBD for the past year and a half.

Plenty of companies are working to make CBD more accessible as a cooking and baking ingredient. Azuca infuses CBD into granulated sugar and sugar syrup, which you can add to everything from coffee to cookies. Levo is a countertop device that helps you infuse CBD into fats, like butter or olive oil. Stillwater has an odorless CBD powder which can incorporate into everything from tea to cookies, and Tarukino has a water-soluble CBD serum that can be added easily to any drink (even water).

“This is the new Prohibition,” she told the audience, referring to the fact that cannabis is technically illegal in all states, even the ones that legalize it. “I want to take the stigma out of it, I want to debunk the myths around how cannabis can be used.” For example, you don’t have to eat a bitter CBD tincture or a stale gummy to experience the wellness benefits of CBD. Instead, you can use them as functional ingredients to make really elevated dishes — including crab cakes worthy of an Iron Chef.

Goodr Launched Free “Pop-Up Grocery” Store Featuring Surplus Food for MLK Day

In anticipation for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Atlanta-based startup Goodr launched a service project to reduce food waste and feed the hungry in MLK’s home city.

Goodr has partnered with the Atlanta Hawks to launch a “Pop-Up Grocery” event in tandem with the Hawks’ court dedication at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Recreation and Aquatic Center in downtown ATL (h/t Black Enterprise news). Over the weekend, roughly 100 local seniors came out to take advantage of the pop-up, which features free surplus food (like fresh produce, deli products and bread) from Goodr’s Atlanta grocery partners.

This isn’t the first pop-up grocery event from Goodr, which uses blockchain to redistribute excess food from businesses and venues to non-profits which provide food to those struggling with hunger. In a statement to The Spoon, Goodr’s CEO Jasmine Crowe said “Pop-up free grocery stores are a signature Goodr event, and one of our favorite ways to bring food to the gathering spaces and even the doorsteps of people who need it the most.” This particular “store” was only open this past Thursday, to kick off the Hawk’s MLK Day programming, but Crowe said that one of their goals for 2019 is to pop-up in a new place every two weeks.

In this job, you see a lot of companies leveraging technology for technology’s sake. Sometimes it’s really nice to read about a company that’s tackling widespread issues in the food system — like food waste and hunger — head-on, especially on a holiday dedicated to remember the legacy of a man who fought for equity and justice.

When we spoke to Crowe in preparation for this year’s Smart Kitchen Summit, she told us that Goodr has plans to be in 20 cities by 2020. Hopefully that will mean a lot more pop-up grocery stores, a lot less food waste, and a lot more people with access to fresh, healthy food.

CES 2019 Video: SeedSheet Launching Sensor for Idiot-Proof Home Gardens

Much as I love the idea of home gardening and picking fresh herbs from my windowsill to sprinkle over a pasta dish, anything I try to grow at home usually ends up dying within a few weeks. I either forget to water my plants, or else they perish due to weeds or lack of sunlight.

Maybe I should give Seedsheet a go. We wrote about this startup, which makes sheets that have pods of seeds embedded in a weed-blocking fabric, back in 2017, just a month after they got half a million bucks from Shark Tank investor Lori Greiner. Basically, it’s an idiot-proof garden.

And soon it will become even more easy to manage: in June, Seedsheet will launch a bluetooth sensor which you can stick in your Seedsheet-covered pot to give real-time data about ambient light, soil moisture, and more.

We caught up with Seedsheet CEO Cameron MacKugler on the CES floor to talk about what’s next for his company and the home gardening space in general. Give it a watch below:

The Spoon Talks to Seedsheet At CES 2019