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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Spoon Tank: The Spoon Team Watches and Gives Play-by-Play on RoboBurger’s Shark Tank Pitch

Like many, we’ve been long-time fans of Shark Tank, especially when the crew brings food-related products into the tank.

This year the sharks have seen quite a few food pitches, and it seems like there’s been a particular emphasis on food robots. Because we have lots of thoughts on these pitches, we thought we’d watch it Mystery Science Theater 3000 style and throw our commentary in from the peanut gallery.

You can watch the full video of our play-by-play below. Let us know if you like it and if there are any other pitches you’d like us to comment on.

Halla’s Spencer Price: Grocers Will Create ‘Unique Grocery Store for Every Shopper’ in The Future

Next up in our Smart Kitchen Summit speaker preview series is Spencer Price, the founder of Halla.

Halla has built an AI personalization and recommendation platform for grocery store providers. According to Price, the turning point for his company and the broader grocery store industry was when Amazon acquired Whole Foods.

“When Amazon acquired Whole Foods in 2017, it sent grocers into this innovation frenzy,” said Price. “I think the main driving force for grocers to want to look at this type of tech back then was that Amazon generates over one-third of all of its product sales revenue from their recommendation with the ‘You may also like’ and ‘customers also bought’ type product suggestions. Grocers do not have a passive piece of AI that drives a third of their sales, and that is what we enable grocers to do. We give them that competitive weapon to fight back in this World War grocery.”

Price thinks that while the grocery industry is lagging behind other industries, such as entertainment, when it comes to personalization, they are looking to AI to make up ground.

“Netflix isn’t just on a one-account basis. Within an account, you have a handful of profiles in your household, and each profile sees a completely different set of suggested categories, titles within those categories, and even different cover art for each one of those titles that’s likely to resonate with you as a specific end user.

“Grocers are a little bit behind these content platforms, but I think in 10 years time, we will see a very similar thing, and it’s going to be even more exciting because if you can give every single shopper their own unique grocery store, that’s going to make for both the fastest and most efficient and of course, most inspiring shopping experience. Grocers want to move quickly.”

Price’s company was acquired by Wynshop in March. Price says the company brought over his entire team and that Halla remains an independent business unit within Wynshop.

The Spoon Talks With Halla's Spencer Price About AI's Impact on the Grocery Business

You can hear Price speak at Smart Kitchen Summit on June 4-5th in Seattle. Get your ticket today!

You can read the full transcript of our conversation below:

Michael Wolf: All right, I have with me Spencer Price, the CEO of Halla, now a part of Wynshop. It’s been a while since we caught up. We wrote a first article about you guys since then, and you guys have changed a lot since then.

Spencer Price: We have changed a lot since then, yes.

Michael Wolf: At that point, you were very much focused on being a personalized recommendation platform based on a lot of different data. I still think that’s a lot of what’s pretty true, but you guys did evolve since then.

Spencer Price: Yeah, so 2018 was a transitional period. We had developed, as you said, a personalized recommendation engine centered on food and beverage products. And we had a mobile app that would recommend restaurants and even specific dishes from those menus to users or groups of users with varying taste preferences, dietary restrictions, et cetera. And that was 2017 to 2018.

When Amazon acquired Whole Foods in 2017, it sent grocers into this innovation frenzy. There was a demand for us to gut the tech from the app, license it B2B, and we ended up sunsetting the mobile app, which feels like a lifetime ago now. And all we’ve done is deploy personalized recommendations, search and substitutions for online grocers ever since.

Michael Wolf: I didn’t know that that had such a big impact. It makes sense, in retrospect, the acquisition of Whole Foods by Amazon. But like you said, there was this frenzy and a wake up call to existing grocers, and that sent you in a completely different direction.

Spencer Price: Exactly. We had some innovative nimble online grocers as well as some legacy retailers that knew they needed to step up. I think the main driving force for grocers to want to look at this type of tech back then was that Amazon generates over one-third of all of its product sales revenue from their recommendation with the ‘You may also like’ and ‘customers also bought’ type product suggestions. Grocers do not have a passive piece of AI that drives a third of their sales, and that is what we enable grocers to do. We give them that competitive weapon to fight back in this World War grocery.

Michael Wolf: I love that; World War grocery sounds like a movie, starring you guys apparently. But I mean, look at the last 18 months, right? I think the world’s woken up to AI. It’s permeated all the press and the pop or consciousness largely due to the exposure of things like ChatGPT and generative AI to everyone. It seemed like like six, seven years ago, a lot of people were building ontologies and had a custom code, to make their AI to get certain outputs. But now, with generative AI, you can basically do prompts and get a lot of the same results. And these large language models just keep getting bigger. Can you talk about how your business has changed by incorporating larger langue models and generative AI?

Spencer Price: Yeah, so the way that generative AI has taken shape thus far has, of course, been through chat bots. One of the things that those, at least from a consumer-facing standpoint, one of the things that chat bot ask technology with LLMs, Gen. AI, et cetera, plays into e-commerce at large and potentially grocery down the line is conversational commerce.

We don’t see that as being a particularly exciting use case, particularly in this category where people are adding usually a couple dozen items to their basket. They’re not saying, you know, I need help finding the right sweater that matches these pants. It’s a household you’re shopping for with different dietary restrictions, taste preferences. And that’s where language models don’t necessarily perform best. That’s where recommender systems have decades of tried and true proven methods.

And so that’s still a foundational component of our science. However, for one of our solutions, search, LLMs allow for a much more robust level of understanding natural language. So we had our own raw sort of NLP models that we developed in -house a few years ago, that we’ve been fine tuning, and now we can incorporate some of these open source transformers and LLMs to take our vertical eyes, rather than a generalist sort of assistant, our vertical eyes recommender systems and layer them with this cutting edge technology that allows for the generation of synonym lists and a better understanding of things like typos. But the risk with using just generative AI to try to develop these highly specialized models in a category that’s clearly so nuanced and personal is the hallucinations. I was recommended a beef and banana soup from chat GPT. And I got to tell you that that feels a ways away. I did not. It was terrifying to be honest.

Michael Wolf: Did you make it?

Spencer Price: I did not. It was terrifying, to be honest.

Michael Wolf: Well, I’ve been talking to a lot of folks who are in this area of food and beverage that are trying to deploy AI centric solutions. And like you said, a lot of the LLMs have this problem with hallucination. They’re oftentimes, they’re ingesting the world of the broader internet, but they don’t necessarily go deep on things like food and beverage. So I’ve heard companies that are building special, small language models that can couple into large language models. They’re doing kind of these transformers that provide the intelligence. Sounds like you guys have your own kind of approach to that. And you’re using LLMs as the conversational smart interface that is just so much more savvy than it would have been in the past. And then diving deep into your knowledge set.

Spencer Price: Precisely. We are using these new state of the art technologies, both as sort of a research platform to understand what we can benefit from and leverage and also where the watch outs are, like the example I just shared. One thing that you’d imagine might be really nice, whether it’s with a small language model specific to what we’re doing, or using the best of these large language models.

One use case that probably strikes you as obvious is groceries have a notoriously dirty data problem. And so maybe there’s a way to clean up these product catalogs and inventories and descriptions and attributes. The challenge is you can’t run the risk of things like health claims, nutrition facts, or marketing descriptions being completely wrong. And we’ve seen a lot of inaccuracies in using it for that.

So everything we do with LLMs has a human in the loop to make sure that none of those inaccuracies end up facing a user. But by and large, what sets us apart is layering in, as you said, our knowledge base, which is an ontology of every single product, but more than that, the essence of each product, knowing that orange, for example, is a distinct flavor. It is a product and it’s also a color. And LLMs are not built to have those nuances at play to the level of sophistication that you need them to be. Does that make sense?

Michael Wolf: Yeah, it does. What are you most excited about if, 10 years down the road, you’re building systems that use technology like AI in terms of the grocery shopping experience? What do you think will change the most?

Spencer Price: So I think that personalization historically took a lot of different shapes, and then they all kind of converged five to 10 years ago by having truly individualized browsing experiences on content platforms. Netflix isn’t just on an account basis, but within an account, you have a handful of profiles in your household, and each profile sees a completely different set of suggested categories, titles within those categories, and even different cover art for each one of those titles that’s likely to resonate with you as a specific end user. Spotify acquired Echonest, and they were able to map out all the different attributes down to subjective metrics like the danceability of every single track in their library, now they have the most robust music recommendation engine in the world, and people love them for that, and I’ve never left as a result.

In online shopping, we’re talking about products now, not content. We’re a little bit behind these content platforms, but I think in 10 years’ time, we will see a very similar thing, and it’s going to be even more exciting because if you can give every single shopper their own unique grocery store, that’s going to make for both the fastest and most efficient and of course, most inspiring shopping experience. And we’re not there yet, but we have all the rails to get there in a lot less than 10 years. Depends how much. Grocers want to move quickly.

Michael Wolf: That’s exciting, getting Mike’s grocery store tailored towards me. That’s perfect. Tell us about the Wynshop deal. You guys got acquired, which is exciting news for you. What does that mean?

Spencer Price: So our biggest channel partner to reach retailers and have our personalization technology directly embedded into an e-commerce platform was with Wynshop. And they’re the leading provider of e com platform technology on a white label basis to grocers all over the continent and a handful of international accounts as well. And we’ve been working with them for a few years. We love the team. We think they have a clearly differentiated product and they got to know us, our team and our tech. And it was just a pretty perfect match, to be honest, to have what we’ve developed baked in as more of a base level set of functionality, as well as being able to offer premium levels of functionality for these grocers that they can opt into if they want.

So yeah, about six weeks ago, we joined the team. They brought on all the day to day, all the personnel, we remain an independent business unit within Wynshop, but obviously it’s not like there’s any walls up. We work with everybody there very well. They put some resources behind us and yeah, the goal is both to service their existing accounts and future customers as well with the tech we’ve built and the new stuff we’re building.

Michael Wolf: All right, well, Spencer, congratulations. You worked hard for years to build the product and then create a opportunity for you. So I’m looking forward to talking more with you in Seattle in June at the Smart Kitchen Summit. How can people find out more about Halla and Wynshop?

Spencer Price: Yeah, well, thank you so much for the opportunity and the congratulations. You can still find us even though we don’t go by holla .io, we’re just holla now, at halla .io and winshop .com, W -Y -N, shop.

Michael Wolf: Cool. Hey, well, Spencer, thanks so much for spending time with me, man.

Spencer Price: Thank you so much, Mike. Look forward to seeing you in June.

SKS 2024 Preview: Clayton Wood Talks The Current State of Food Robotics

We’re just one month away from the Smart Kitchen Summit, so we’re going to be checking and hearing from some of our speakers.

First up is Clayton Wood, a long-time entrepreneur who has been navigating the food robotics market for the last five years, first as the CEO of Picnic (which debuted its robot at SKS 2019), talking about the challenges and opportunities he sees in this market. You can watch the full interview by clicking play below or read some of the highlights in the transcript below.

The Spoon Talks to Food Robotics Entrepreneur Clayton Wood.

Michael Wolf: I imagine that a lot of startups in the food robotics space are probably wanting to get your advice because you ran one of the early pretty successful food robotics companies with Picnic. Talk about some of the conversations you’re having and maybe some of the, are there early stage entrepreneurs in the space that are coming to you say, hey, we have an idea.

Clayton Wood: Absolutely. I started getting inbound interest in being an advisor as soon as I left Picnic, a little over a year ago. I’ve talked to a large number of companies in the space. Many of them are at the same spot, which, given market conditions, isn’t too surprising, which is they’ve got an idea. They’ve probably got a product or a prototype, having trouble raising their first round, having trouble finding product market fit. And just trying to make that leap into kind of being a more mature company. It’s a tough spot under any circumstances, but in market conditions, the last few years have made it especially difficult.

Michael Wolf: One of the things about food robotics is it’s a long path to getting into market. It’s a lot of capital. And with the venture capital winter that is seemingly lasting forever, it seems like a tough time for food robotics companies.

Clayton Wood: It very much is. I know at Picnic, we started in what I finally refer to as the free money era, where you raised one round just to get to the next round, and raising money wasn’t really that much of a question. Now it’s a huge problem. The challenge that food robotics companies have specifically is that as the market tightened up, it became very conservative, and conservative investors don’t like hardware in general.

Food tech is seen as a challenging category of hardware. So if you’re looking at, you know, show me when you’re cashflow positive, show me when you’re profitable. It’s very, very difficult as a food hardware company to show that because it’s such a new field. Product market fit is elusive and being able to say when that those financial metrics will turn right side up is really challenging. It’s just a really tough time for all startups, but I think food robotics, food hardware is especially a challenging category, and has been for the last two or three years.

Michael Wolf: One of the things about Picnic was I felt like it was a next-generation pizza food robotics company and that it was purpose-built around building pizzas. It wasn’t one of these where someone got a general-purpose robotic arm and would just move things around within a confined space. And you’re still seeing those sometimes. What are some of the if you’re giving advice to a food robotics company in terms of building out a system and thinking it through what ultimately may succeed in the market, what would you tell them?

Clayton Wood: Yes.I think it’s one of those signs, you’re absolutely right about the arms and the big footprints. It’s one of those signs of a new, immature market. People haven’t seen food robotics, they don’t know what to think about it. We had people at trade shows looking at the Picnic robot and they’re in the pizza business, and they’re watching it make a pizza and they’re going, ‘does it make the pizza?’ It’s really hard to just wrap their head around it.

I think the challenge, it’s common to a lot of technology companies, but especially true in food robotics, you’ve got to start with the customer. What’s the customer’s pain point, and what can they actually use? And unfortunately, not uncommonly, people start with ‘what can my product do?’ and ‘how can I make it do it in a real fancy, impressive way and how fast can it do it or that sort of thing?’

Those numbers are nice and you get people excited, but it’s not really what the customer needs. And ultimately, the real challenge in food robotics is integration. How will your device get integrated into a commercial kitchen so that the kitchen can continue to operate, do what it needs to do, and do it without disrupting the process? And until there are new concepts that are really built around automation and those are starting to emerge. I used to say no one who has a kitchen has a pizza robot sized hole in their kitchen that they’re just waiting to plug it in.

Michael Wolf: You know, there are a couple of founders out there on the smaller side that I think are innovating. They’re not a big chain. So you see like Andrew Simmons, which I think you talk a lot with. You see Lee Kindell up here in Seattle with Moto. And I imagine there are others that are showing how you can be a smaller operator and almost build your new restaurant concept around utilizing kind of off-the-shelf robotics. It’s not like a Zume, where they raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Softbank and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to build our own robot, do this custom thing.’ These smaller operators are taking a system like Picnic’s and saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to build a new concept that is essentially centered around automation and kind of move forward.’ I feel like they’re pioneering in a sense. Do you think that’s going to be what we’re going to see in the future, more people pioneering concepts that are leveraging automation because they think that can help them scale better?

Clayton Wood: I love to see that. I think Andrew and Lee are brilliant, and I’d say, you know, they’re unfortunately they’re at the far end of the open-minded innovator scale. They’re both kind of willing to move things around and try things, and they’re not just open to innovation, but they embrace it and they seek it out. I don’t think that’s really the persona that I’d use to describe most people in the restaurant business.

If you have that kind of open -minded approach, there’s all kinds of things you could do and you can adapt. If you don’t want to adapt, you say, this is the way I do things. Can you help me? That’s where you run into an integration challenge. But I think what I love about what Lee is doing at Moto and what Andrew is doing with Mama Ramona’s Pizza Roboto is they’re showing how it can work. They’re sharing real world experiences.

Andrew is doing his whole build -in public diary on LinkedIn, which I think is brilliant and super useful because he’s sharing the wins and the losses. But it shows that it can work, you’ve just got to adapt. And I think that’s a lot of the product market fit in these early days is about adapting on both sides. The customer has to be willing to adapt a little bit and the product companies have to go in realizing that regardless of what they may think, they haven’t built a perfect machine and they need to be willing to tweak and change and reconfigure to make the best fit.

Michael Wolf: Okay, you’ve been in this business for half a decade now, you’re advising companies. What are you excited about in terms of food robotics? And are there spaces you think you’d like to see more entrepreneurs or inventors go in terms of building automation around food?

Clayton Wood: I’ve seen some in the home space as well as the restaurant space who are starting out with products that already solve some of the challenges that we’ve seen really block some of the earlier companies. Building devices that are drop-in replacements for a make line, for instance. Acknowledging the fact that if you have the way a restaurant operates, workers are seldom just dedicated to a station standing there all day. The automation needs to work even if the person is only giving intermittent attention. You need to see things like a holding station where if you’re making 10 salads a minute, well, if there’s nobody there to catch the 10 salads, they need to be suitably caught and retained and held there.

And it needs to work around the way the workflow goes in the kitchen, which is multitasking, short staff, and it needs to solve real problems. And the nice thing is you can solve different problems and make it work. I’ve heard people say that, well, the automation didn’t really save me any labor because I only had one person working there anyway. I still need one person working the automation, but the consistency means the cook goes well. The pizzas cook really well because they’re all consistent.

Food waste is another area where food waste is a huge problem, especially in the pizza category, but I think it’s also a problem in other categories as well. If you can eliminate food waste, just food waste alone can pay for the system. So I think if you’re an automation company or product developer, thinking about all the different ways you can add value, but it can only do that if it works with that particular operator.

So you’re going to find the customer who is doing something the way that your machine is designed to do it. If you can make 200 dishes an hour, that’s brilliant and that sounds really impressive, but how many restaurants are making 200 of the same thing every hour? Not that many. And so you may not really have a big market if that’s your claim to fame and that’s really the reason you want somebody to buy it and that’s how your economics work. If people are making 20 an hour, is it still economical? Does it still pay for itself?

Michael Wolf: You mentioned home and you’re seeing some things that are exciting you. And you don’t have to necessarily name names, but home has been really tough to crack for food robotics. And you’re seeing some interesting ones that broke over some of the barriers that were challenging in the past. What are you seeing there that’s exciting?

Clayton Wood: Home is tricky because it’s gotta be, it’s gotta be small. It’s gotta be versatile. Um, it can’t lock you into, you can only do, you can only use it if you buy our packet of pre -packaged food. Um, so I’ve seen one or two players in there who are, who are solving that, who are offering pre -packaged food or recipes, but you can also customize and add your own ingredients, but making a pretty versatile device. So I think that’s a category that has promise, but it’s especially tricky because even if you’ve got something that works brilliantly, you’ve got the whole, it’s a consumer market, and how do you break into consumer markets? You know, got to build a brand and get everybody’s attention. And that’s just, that’s a world that I’m less familiar with. And it’s a pretty daunting challenge to break into that consumer market.

Michael Wolf: All right, well, we’ll be talking about both the restaurant, robotic space, as well as the consumer space at the Smart Kitchen Summit. Lee Kindell will be there. Clayton, you’re going to be there as well, June 4th and 5th in Seattle. And I’m excited to see you there, man.

Clayton Wood: Looking forward to it.

You can hear Clayton at Smart Kitchen Summit on June 4-5th in Seattle. Get your ticket today!

Why GFA’s Unceremonious Drop of Climax is a Big Win For the Company & the Plant-Based Cheese Category

For the past week, the alt-protein world has been abuzz about the news that the Good Food Awards had quietly dropped Climax Food from the list of finalists and, according to Climax, snatched the winner’s trophy from them due to a convoluted and confusing set of rationalizations by the organization.

Washington Post broke the story last weekend in an article titled A vegan cheese beat dairy in a big competition. Then the plot curdled (is there a title for best article headlines? If so, WaPo may have just ran away with it).

The article detailed how Climax was listed among the finalists when the GFA announced them in January and how Climax was quietly informed that same month that they had actually won it all. An uproar among industry insiders ensued, fueled by a blog post from well-known cheese industry influencer Janet Fletcher, questioning whether vegan cheese is actually cheese. The post featured quotes from traditional cheesemakers who, unsurprisingly, felt that cheese not made from animal milk should not be included.

“My take is that it’s not really cheese,” said cheesemaker Mateo Kehler of Jasper Farms in the post.

The story took a turn when Climax Foods CEO Oliver Zahn was informed by the WaPo journalist working on the story that Climax had been taken off the list of finalists and, as he would soon learn, had been disqualified from the competition altogether. From there, Climax and GFA provided differing accounts of what happened, with GFA offering up a confused and convoluted explanation that seemed to hinge on the fact that Climax had included Kokum butter in its original entry, an ingredient that they claim is not designated as GRAS (generally regarded as safe). Zahn claimed that the entry requirements didn’t specify that ingredients needed to be GRAS-certified, a claim backed up by the Internet archive version of the rules as stated in January.

As WaPo was working on the story, Zahn spoke to a few other journalists (myself included) about the news in anticipation of the WaPo story’s release. When I first talked to Zahn, he was worried about the impact of the news and was frustrated that his team had bought tickets and made hotel reservations in anticipation of receiving an award. However, his biggest frustration was that he felt the award would raise the visibility of his product and be an important milestone for the vegan world.

via GIPHY

Above: The Good Food Awards

As it turns out, the controversy surrounding the GFA awards and the organization’s unceremonious retraction of the winner’s trophy might just be the best thing that’s ever happened to Climax and the plant-based cheese category. That’s because it’s clear that even though Climax didn’t receive the award in the end, the publicity from GFA’s rake-step is better and more far-reaching than if the organization had actually gone through with the right thing.

Sure, Climax winning the award would no doubt have been a nice feather in their cap, but would it have gotten them featured as a bit on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert?

Meanwhile… Amazon Cat Returned | Gull Screeching Champion | Vegan Blue Cheese Beats Dairy

When I caught up with Zahn after the WaPo story had come out and dozens of follow-on stories had appeared about the news, he seemed more at peace. Of course, a jump in sales will probably do for you.

“Sales are good,” Zahn told me.

Stepping back, that a panel of judges saw a plant-based cheese as not only on par but actually better than a product made with dairy is forcing the industry and consumers to have a conversation, one in which I imagine many will side with Climax. Sure, today many in the industry are claiming distinctions without a difference when it comes to the actual final product, saying things like real cheese “has a story” and plant-based cheeses aren’t “agricultural products” (huh?). But in the long run, when consumers happily begin choosing great-tasting vegan cheese, the industry (and the GFA) will have to follow their lead.

You can watch my interview with Oliver below.

Climax's Oliver Zahn Talks About Good Food Awards Controversy

‘Amazon for Proteins’: Shiru Launches AI-Powered Marketplace for Proteins

Shiru, a company that utilizes AI to discover plant-based novel proteins, has announced a new marketplace in ProteinDiscovery.ai that lets anyone search, discover, pilot, and buy molecules for food, agriculture, personal care, and advanced material applications.

Shiru claims that its protein marketplace is an industry first. It allows researchers and product builders access to a database of 33 million-plus molecules and search via sequence, functional use, and expression.

“With ProteinDiscovery.ai we’ve made the world of natural proteins for industrial applications accessible. We’ve even added the ability for users to easily purchase samples, creating the ‘Amazon for proteins,’” said Shiru Founder and CEO Dr. Jasmin Hume. “We’ve been using AI to identify high-value, novel, scalable proteins for years, fueling our own product development. With significant recent interest from CPGs and ingredients companies alike, we decided to open our toolbox to everyone.”

I caught up with Hume to learn how the new protein discovery engine works. You can watch the video of our conversation below.

The Spoon Talks With Shiru About New Protein Discovery Marketplace

Pipedream Raises $13M as It Looks to Build Underground Middle Mile Delivery Network

Underground delivery startup Pipedream Labs announced it has raised $13 million in funding. Company CEO Garrett McCurrach disclosed the funding, led by Starship Ventures, with participation from Cortado Ventures, Myelin Ventures, and others, in a post on LinkedIn.

The new capital infusion will primarily be utilized to enhance Pipedream’s “Instant Pickup” service and kick-start the construction of an ambitious middle-mile network in an as-yet-unnamed city. This network aims to facilitate quicker, more cost-effective urban deliveries.

What the company calls its Instant Pickup service is when it deploys its underground delivery technology at a grocery store, restaurant, or retail store. According to McCurrach, an Instant Pickup system enables a restaurant or grocery store to hand off an order to a customer in less than 15 seconds. The company says it has 100 preorders for Instant Pickup systems, a number which likely includes its Wendy’s pilot announced last year.

The company says it will also select a city to build its first large-scale middle-mile network installation. While McCurrach doesn’t say in which city they will first break ground, he did include a graphic of a map of the Phoenix metro area with a diagram outlining a “small middle mile network”

McCurrach: “This year, we will be selecting a city to build our first middle-mile network (a large-scale underground delivery network that makes current deliveries faster and cheaper in a city) and collaborating with local government and city officials to maximize the benefits of our low-cost, fast delivery system for all their citizens. Construction is set to begin this year, with plans to start utilizing the network by next spring.”

My guess is the company will likely find a lot more near-term traction for its Instant Pickup business, as extremely short-range delivery within a given plot of land is much easier to deploy than a city-wide installation. It also doesn’t hurt that the company’s push into curbside pickup and fast food drive-thrus comes at a time when grocery stores are growing their pickup business and quick service restaurants are reimagining how they handle drive-thru.

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.

The Food Tech News Show: A Look at Our Food Lives in The Year 2055

Welcome to the Food Tech News Show! You can watch the show live here at 1 Pacific/4 Eastern or on Streamyard, YouTube, or LinkedIn.

Fast Food Facial Recognition? - FTNS

This week Mike and Carlos be joined by Future Market’s Mike Lee to talk over some of the most interesting stories of the week. Mike Lee will also talk about his new book Mise,  which paints four different scenarios depicting the potential direction of our future food system.

Here are all the stories we’ll be talking about.

Bored & Hungry Closes – Food & Web3: A check in on where things are

In March 2022, NFT and crypto investor Andy Nguyen purchased Bored Ape #6184 along with three Mutant Apes and soon decided to establish a Bored Ape-themed restaurant named Bored & Hungry. The restaurant opened its doors on April 9, and by the end of its first day, it had served 1,500 burgers and had lines stretching around the block.

Two years later, Bored & Hungry has closed.

Last week, Nguyen announced on Instagram that the restaurant’s original location in Long Beach, California, was closing. He shared that they had sold the concept to a franchising company from Asia known as HUNGRY Dao.

Is AI-Powered Customer Interaction at Fast Food & Retail Giving Up too Much Privacy?

A Fast Company article titled “How fast food is becoming a new surveillance ground” looks at how new customer interaction layers using things like bio-authentication, cameras, profile information, and more are a new risk for gathering information about the public. 

And earlier this week, we saw Steak n Shake launch facial recognition nationwide for check-in.

Are we going through an airport or going to buy a surf and turf?

Vow Thinks Imitating Meat We Eat is Bad Approach. Enter the Quail Parfait. 

Green Queen: The Syndey-based startup is today launching its cultivated Japanese quail in Singapore’s Mandala Club, after the country’s regulator gave it the go-ahead to sell the product. But unlike other rollouts of cultivated meat, where chefs are supplied with the meat itself (which they then incorporate into dishes), Vow is taking a novel approach. What restaurant kitchens get is a parfait containing its cultivated quail.

Mike’s Book about The Future of Food

The four future visions in Mise (pronounced “meez”), which range from the year 2033 to 2067, are created to help people understand the potential long-term impact of things that are happening today in the world on our food system. The book identifies 5 major happenings in society, technology, the economy, the environment, and politics (abbreviated and referred to as the STEEP factors) that will have a profound impact on the way the world produces and consumes food.

As Bored & Hungry Shuts Its Doors, It’s Worth Looking at State of Web3 and Food


In March 2022, NFT and crypto investor Andy Nguyen purchased Bored Ape #6184 along with three Mutant Apes and soon decided to establish a Bored Ape-themed restaurant named Bored & Hungry. The restaurant opened its doors on April 9, and by the end of its first day, it had served 1,500 burgers and had lines stretching around the block.

Two years later, Bored & Hungry has closed.

Last week, Nguyen announced on Instagram that the restaurant’s original location in Long Beach, California, was closing. He shared that they had sold the concept to a franchising company from Asia known as HUNGRY Dao.

From his post:

“Happy 2 year anniversary @JustBorednHungry!Today we say goodbye to the original Bored & Hungry location in Long Beach, CA. We also want to congratulate our partner’s from Asia, Hungry Dao – a branding and franchising company who has acquired the brand from us. It’s been an insane 2 years, that was originally supposed to just be a 3 month pop up experiment.”

While Bored & Hungry was perhaps the most high-profile effort to bring the world of Web3 to food, it was far from alone. Since the NFT trend burst into public consciousness in 2021, numerous early-adopting restaurant operators, crypto-curious chefs, and FOMO-driven corporations have launched initiatives to connect their food businesses with Web3 elements. Nowadays, most of these ventures—like Bored & Hungry’s U.S. location—have either shut down or scaled back.

A few examples:

Starbucks recently announced that it’s shutting down its Web3 loyalty program, Odyssey. According to an FAQ about the program’s transition, Starbucks said the community would close the Odyssey beta on March 31, 2024, and users had until March 25, 2024, to complete any remaining Journeys. The lead for Odyssey, Steve Kaczynski, was let go as part of the move.

In March 2022, celebrity chefs Tom Colicchio and Spike Mendelsohn launched the CHFTY Pizza NFT project, promising holders access to virtual and in-person events, classes, kitchen accessories, and more. Today, the CHFTY website is inactive, and the project’s Discord channel has been quiet for the past year.

Even some housewares brands dipped their toes into this trend, though their efforts were minor and did not gain traction. Old-school home appliance brand Crockpot released an NFT commemorating its 50th anniversary. The NFT, still available on Opensea, has not received any offers.

Web3 initiatives like Dinner Dao and Burger Dao have largely been abandoned. At the same time, FriesDAO, a group that raised $5 million via an NFT offering, suffered a lethal blow when hackers made away with most of the group’s cash.

Yet, not all Web3 food ventures have failed. The coffee subscription site Bored Breakfast Club continues to operate. Flyfish, a high-profile NFT membership dining club, is set to open this summer, albeit offering a traditional non-NFT membership option. Additionally, Blackbird, the NFT loyalty program started by Eater and Resy founder Ben Leventhal, recently launched a breakfast club and sold out within hours.

So, with the dust of the first Web3 wave now settled, where does that leave us? Was the enthusiasm for food & Web3 more hype than substance? Or is the persistence of a hearty few continuing to march forward a sign of long-term viability for this space?

At this point, it’s too early to tell. Those who realized early on that Web3 and blockchain were a means to an end to enhance consumer-side benefits may have staying power. The same goes for those who realized they can’t require significant behavior change on the part of consumers regarding onboarding. Blackbird is a good example of both here. Others, like Flyfish, have demonstrated that they can make the necessary pivots to survive.

But big brands like Starbucks? They may take a while to come back. The Seattle-based coffee company arguably still has the leading loyalty program in the food business, and the fact company management decided they didn’t need to push any further into Web3 is a pretty good indication of whether they believe it’s required to unlock significant consumer value. Clearly, at this point, they don’t.

Some, however, like Wow Bao, realize this is a long-term waiting game. As company CEO Geoff Alexander told me this week, describing his company’s entry into the Metaverse, “Anything that you do new and technology takes time for adoption.”

He’s right that things take time. And if he’s right about the Metaverse, companies like his that stick it out for the long haul might benefit most.

At this point, though, nothing is a sure thing when it comes to Web3 and food.

Gaeastar is Now Cranking Out 3D Printed Clay Coffee Cups as It Launches a Pilot With Verve Coffee

Gaeastar, a startup that makes compostable drinking cups out of clay, is officially launching its U.S. pilot with Verve Coffee on April 22nd. Verve, a Santa Cruz-based coffee chain with locations across California, will begin using Gaeastar’s coffee cups in three locations and will expand to other locations over time. The pilot launch comes after the two companies have worked over the past year to refine the prototype and integrate the cups into Verve’s business. 

For those unfamiliar with Gaeastar, the company has developed a proprietary 3D printing process that makes cups out of clay. The idea behind the company came to company CEO Sanjeev Mankotia after walking around New Delhi in the mid-2000s with his cousin. According to Mankotia, after his cousin finished a chai ordered from a street vendor, she threw the cup on the ground, breaking it into pieces. Mankotia, who was born in India but spent most of his life in the U.S., pointed out that she was littering and asked her why she had done so.

“She said, ‘It’s made out of dirt, why do you care?’” Mankotia told The Spoon last year. “And I didn’t have a response to that.”

Mankotia began to think about whether these types of cups could be used as a replacement for single-use plastics. Typically, the containers in India were handcrafted by local artisans, who sourced clay from riverbeds and made hundreds of them per day to dry in the sun, but he knew this approach would need to be adapted for the Western market.

He realized it would take a 3D printer to produce these containers at scale. However, no printers on the market were designed for the high-volume output needed to make thousands of cups daily. Over time, he and a team of engineers developed a 3D printer and built the company’s first micro-factory in Berlin in 2022. Today, the company supplies a Zurich-based coffee roaster named V-Cafe.

For its launch in the US, Gaeastar built a micro-factory in the Dogpatch industrial district of San Fransisco. The micro-factory is roughly 7500 square feet and has four of the company’s 3D printers working to make cups.

To supply the California micro-factory, the company is sourcing the clay from Sacramento, which is slightly different from the clay they are sourcing in Germany, which leads to slight differences in the finished product. For example, the California clay has a much higher iron content, which results in a finished cup with a much deeper red than those made in Germany.

While he initially thought the company would want to standardize the process and the finished product, Mankotia says that he eventually realized that slight differences in the finished product resulting from hyper-local sourcing are one of the things that their customers would celebrate.

“That’s the uniqueness of it,” Mankotia said. “Each cup comes out slightly different and has its own fingerprint in some way, which we have been delighted to see the customers love.”

Today, Gaeastar prints the cups during the day and fires them in a kiln overnight, but is exploring ways to make the process quicker. One idea the company is exploring is to integrate automation to produce cups more quickly. They are also examining using pulsed energy to finish printed cups faster than traditional fire-heat kilns.

During this initial rollout to Verve customers, the roaster will offer Gaestar cups as an upgrade option for $2. In the long term, Mankotia believes that his cups could become the primary choice for a drinking vessel as single-use falls increasingly out of favor.

“This single-use concept will go away, whether it happens two or ten years from now,” he said. “What we have created is really a new category. It’s not your $40 Stanley mug. It’s not your single-use, disposable paper plastic cup.”

“We’re refining it, not only the product but also the business model. That’s why we wanted these pilot partners with us at the start of the journey. We want to develop this product for the customer, not to sit in the lab and try to sell somebody a commodity.”

Wow Bao Launches Hot Bun Vending Machine In The Metaverse

You can now visit a hot bun vending machine in the metaverse.

No, this isn’t a plotline from the sequel to Hot Tub Time Machine, but the next chapter in the continuing push by digital-forward restaurant chain Wow Bao to expand into the Metaverse and web3. The company, which launched its NFT program a year ago, announced last week that Wow Bao has launched on Roblox, a hugely popular virtual gaming platform with over 200 million monthly global users. According to Wow Bao, their launch on Roblox marks the first time that a fast-casual restaurant has launched in the Metaverse with a loyalty program that gives away in-real-life perks.

Those physical, non-digital perks come in the form of a free box of Wow Bao products, which a player qualifies for once they enter the Wow Bao game (called Dim Sum Palace) on Roblox, complete a couple of achievements, and connect their Wow Bao loyalty program (called the Hot Buns Club). Those without a Hot Buns loyalty club membership are instructed how to join, a process that involves leaving the game, getting the loyalty website URL from from a pinned post on Wow Bao’s Twitter profile, and signing up.

With a free box of Wow Bao on offer, I decided to join Roblox and check out Dim Sum Palace. I found the mini-game slick, but after I finished my achievements—earning a bao-themed headdress and a coupon for a free box of Wow Bao—I didn’t have much to do. The most time-consuming part was signing up for and connecting to my Wow Bao loyalty account (which, to be fair, went quickly after I jumped off to Twitter and found the URL).

Stepping back, it’s worth asking why the fast-casual Asian food chain is spending all of this time and resources to create a Metaverse game that likely won’t result in any significant customer revenue in the near future. According to Wow Bao CEO Geoff Alexander, the push into the Metaverse is a long-term play that they believe will pay off as more and more gamers look to garner IRL rewards for their Metaverse exploration.

“One of the things Wow Bao has always wanted to do is be wherever the consumer is,” Alexander told The Spoon. “There are a large number of people who game, and nobody’s talking to them.”

How is Wow Bao going to attract Roblox players to its Minigame? Alexander said they plan to raise awareness through paid advertising in Roblox, discovery on the home screen, and the giveaway of 10,000 UGC.

The company worked with production studio Sawhorse Productions, which developed the mini-game, and loyalty tech companies Flaunt and Paytronix to integrate their rewards program into Roblox. The company also continued to work with Devour for their Web3 ordering.

The risk for Wow Bao is that they invest in building a Metaverse presence, and, as we’ve seen with many brand efforts over the past few years, engagement remains low and overly complex for the average user, and eventually, they exit. According to Alexander, the company thinks being patient will ultimately pay off.

“Anything that you do new and technology takes time for adoption,” Alexander said. “We’re betting that the adoption will come. Today, it might be small. Tomorrow might be a little bit bigger. It might fall, and then it might come back. We’re in for the long game.”