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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

metaverse

BurgerDAO Wants to Create a Decentralized Web3-Powered Burger Chain

Web3 has reached the burger joint.

A new community called BurgerDAO wants to create a decentralized burger franchise. According to the announcement, the group is looking to create a ghost kitchen burger chain with funding derived from the sale of tokens for the organization via Juicebox.

Owners of BurgerDAO tokens would have a say in the operational structure as well in things such as menu creation. The group also plans to use funding from token sales to eventually hire an operational staff (and likely pay service fees to a ghost kitchen company). According to the group, the operation’s profits would go back into the treasury, which would result in appreciation in the value of the tokens.

The group lays out three overall milestones for their Web3 burger franchise, the first one being the launch of the first virtual BurgerDAO restaurant location. The group puts the cost of reaching this milestone at upwards of $1 million and details four specific deliverables for getting to this first milestone: finding a ghost kitchen partner, deliver-apps integration, branding, and menu creation, and the launch of an NFT for BurgerDAO contributors.

If you think a million bucks sounds like a lot to get a virtual restaurant off the ground, you’re right, but the group explains they may not need all of it:

Will it actually cost $1M? Probably not. But we know opening a restaurant is tough (see above) even with the advent of cloud kitchens. While the DAO will help us make decisions, we will be the ones working with the cloud kitchen, testing ingredients, pay for marketing tests, and other administrative expenses. Opening a basic deli or pizza joint (brick and mortar location) costs between $200-$500K depending on the location just to give you a frame of reference.

From there, the group lays out plans for further expansion of their decentralized ghost kitchen burger franchise, which includes the eventual opening of a brick and mortar location in a specific city and hiring a full-time staff.

On the one hand, the idea of a decentralized burger franchise is interesting, but I suspect it won’t be easy to pull off. In explaining the motivation for the concept, the group points to the inspiration of MrBeast Burger and companies like Virtual Dining Concepts (the virtual restaurant startup which is operationalizing MrBeast) but then asks why a MrBeast or VDC should take home all the profits? The group then explains much of their initial costs will be in finding and working with a kitchen operator (this type of work is what VDC does for the MrBeast Burger franchise and its other virtual restaurant concepts).

In other words, BurgerDAO is against the idea of centralized management and gatekeepers, but will likely need to find a group that has relationships with kitchen operators or build a relationship with and pay a for-profit ghost kitchen operator themselves.

They also haven’t answered the biggest challenge for virtual restaurants: brand building. The most successful virtual restaurants have been able to leverage an influencer’s reach, or they’ve been ones that have already tapped into the existing successful restaurant brand like Wowbao. While companies like NextBite have been able to spin up completely new virtual brands and get broad reach across several markets, they’ve had lots of venture capital to fund the brand-building for their concepts.

All that said, while the group has a big hill to climb, I’m interested to see if they can pull off their web3 burger concept. BurgerDAO is part of a broader movement in the restaurant and food space away from traditional operating models, which includes the move towards automation-powered centralized food production, the move away from physical front-of-house dine-in, and now the embrace of web3 and metaverse-powered digital concepts.

If you’d like to learn more, attend The Spoon’s Metaverse/NFT virtual mini-event on February 1st (Hurry, the first 400 tickets are free!).

Make Pie in the Metaverse? Designer Creates AR Kitchen Assistant With Snap Spectacles

One day when Lauren Cason was making a pie with her dad, it wasn’t long before talk turned to her job.

As an XR designer who helps big brands figure out how to use technology like augmented and virtual reality, Cason explained to her father how augmented reality glasses like the Snap Spectacles work. As she was talking, Cason had an epiphany: she could make a prototype to show him.

“One of the things that’s really cool about the Spectacles is that you can prototype stuff with them very quickly,” Cason said during an interview with The Spoon. “So we worked on the pie, and then I spent the afternoon putting the prototype together, and I made a video.”

The video, which you can see above, shows the view of someone working in the kitchen with an AR lens designed to help them cook. The lens puts relevant information such as cooking temperature and countdown timers over items cooked on the stove and in the oven. Cason also created the ability to pull up a recipe by touching a specific area within the cook’s view and even had a note from her dad appended to the dough roller reminding her not to over-roll the dough.

As soon as Cason put the video on Twitter, it blew up. People loved it, including chefs, who told her they would use something like this in their restaurants.

Lauren Cason

“They said, ‘I don’t know if I would really use this at home, but I would totally use this in my industrial kitchen,'” Cason said.

Cason also got helpful feedback on other aspects of the video. For example, in the first version, a recipe would pop up when the cook tapped on the microwave and a recipe showed up, but some felt the information would obscure the view of the oven as the cook looked around.

“Some folks gave me the feedback that it might be a safety issue if you can obscure the cooktop and the flame area with the recipe,” Cason said. “So I changed it.”

When Cason bakes cookies in the second prototype version of her AR lens, not only does the recipe stick in one place on the wall, but it also includes visual placement guidance on the cookie sheet to help the baker evenly space the cookie dough.

Talking to Cason, my mind began to envision all sorts of ways in which augmented reality could be used as a cooking assistant both in the consumer and professional kitchen alike. Our talk also confirmed what I already suspected: augmented reality, of all the broader technologies that are being grouped under the term metaverse, is the most mature and ready to be useful in real world situations like our kitchens.

When I asked Cason about the metaverse, she said that it’s an interesting time for both the technology and the term itself. However, she also expressed cautious skepticism, especially when it came to big companies like Facebook’s embracing the technology.

“One of my old bosses gave a really good talk about the term metaverse and he said that Facebook was ‘cookie licking’ right now.” Cason said. She explained that the term cookie-licking is when a company treats a new technology space like a plate of cookies, only instead of eating the cookie, Facebook is essentially just picking one up, licking it, and putting it back on the plate.

They’re saying “I’m not going to eat the cookie right now, but I don’t want anybody else to eat the cookie either,” Cason said.

For now, Cason doesn’t concern herself with what cookies Mark Zuckerberg is choosing to lick on the metaverse cookie sheet. Instead, she just plans on continuing to keep iterating on her prototype so her dad – and maybe even a professional chef or two – can bake cookies in the real world with a bit of help from AR.

Restaurants, Welcome to the Metaverse

Restaurants, welcome to the metaverse.

It’s not just a vision that’s 5 or 10 years away. It’s here now. 

For Halloween, Chipotle created a virtual restaurant inside the online game platform Roblox to give away $1 million in free burritos. Fans and gamers could enter the restaurant, experience a Halloween-themed Chipotle, and get a promo code for a free burrito in the real world.

This is a preview of what we can expect to see in the years to come. The next generation of diners will order their food and discover where they are going for their next night out from inside augmented and virtual worlds created by the likes of Epic, Roblox, and Facebook. And the best hospitality companies (and hospitality tech companies) will not wait too long to adapt.

Here are seven ways that restaurants will change in the metaverse:

  1. Marketplaces – apps won’t be the primary ordering channel anymore once more people begin to participate in the metaverse. Companies like Doordash, UberEats and GrubHub will need to rethink their strategy as ordering and discovery will be embedded in more interoperable experiences. Doordash moving to become a pure logistics API is smart because they will be protected if they lose the ordering portal in the metaverse — someone still has to deliver the food after all.
  2. Marketing – brands will start integrating food into virtual experiences. Instead of traditional email marketing, restaurants will be able to recreate their physical space in the metaverse and invite guests from around the world. The metaverse will create new opportunities to test promotions and loyalty programs, just like Chipotle showed by launching their Boorito promo as digital-only this year.
  3. Reservations – the interface for booking a table will completely change. Diners will do a quick virtual tour before booking the specific table they want. Pricing will be dynamic for the very best tables.
  4. Delivery – ghost kitchens will be the building blocks of group ordering in the metaverse. You’ll be able to share a meal with your friends delivered to you at the same time even if you are halfway across the globe.
  5. QR codes – QR codes will be more than just menus. They will be the access point for augmented reality. Friends from the metaverse who can’t make the night out will be able to join in on the fun and send your party a bottle of champagne to celebrate.
  6. Payments – while we expect restaurants to always take dollars, we think the metaverse will have a few different major cryptocurrencies that rise to the top over the next 5 years. The currency that a restaurant accepts will be part of its identity and marketing efforts.
  7. Membership – members-only hospitality experiences like SOHO house will extend their house into the digital realm. Members will have access to exclusive digital worlds if they own the right (non-fungible token) NFT to get in the front door. These NFTs will be traded on open marketplaces as keys to different clubs.

Most of us love sitting down with friends at a restaurant with a chill vibe and having a great conversation in the real world. The metaverse will not change that. Restaurants will continue to provide those unique experiences. But within the metaverse, restaurants will be able to reach more guests that might not always be able to show up in person.

Steve Simoni is CEO of BBot, a maker of smart ordering technology for restaurants and the hospitality industry.