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News

December 15, 2023

Pipedream Launches First Underground Delivery Network in Atlanta

Forget drone delivery. The cool kids are taking it underground.

That’s at least the vision of Pipedream, a startup building a system to enable delivery through underground pipes. The company, which is based in Austin Texas, has announced the launch of its first underground delivery network in partnership with Peachtree Corners, a smart city development in the broader Metro Atlanta region.

The new system in Peachtree Corners stretches nearly a mile, linking the development’s shopping center to Curiosity Lab’s 25,000-square-foot innovation hub. The Curiosity Hub is part office park, part event center, and now the employees who work there can order food and select (read smaller) items from local restaurants and stores and have them delivered via Pipedream’s underground delivery robots via the tube network.

With the announcement, Pipeline has released a video showcasing its first deployed delivery network, and it’s pretty cool to watch. As you can see below, the system basically looks like a small underground train network where robots pull the payloads through the pipes to their end destination.

First Ever Underground Delivery

Spoon readers will remember that we’ve covered Pipeline in the past, most recently after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was spotted checking out a demo of Pipeline. At the time, Pipeline CEO mentioned that the company was targeting master-planned communities and was showing off an early system in the Atlanta area. Now, just six months later, their system has been launched in the Atlanta suburbs.

With the launch of the system, this looks to be what may be a first in terms of an actual automation-powered pipe delivery network, and now that it’s launched, it will be interesting to see if other master-planned communities embrace the idea. For its part, Pipeline is also working with brands to build out pilots for its underground delivery where it makes sense, such as with Wendy’s as a way to deliver food to drive-up customers.

December 14, 2023

Smart Kitchen Summit Returns to Seattle in 2024

The Smart Kitchen Summit, the pioneering executive summit focused on the digital transformation of the consumer meal journey, is excited to announce its return in 2024. In 2024, SKS will return to its birthplace, Seattle, Washington, scheduled for June 4-5th.

“I’m thrilled that SKS is making its return to Seattle next year, where our journey began,” said Michael Wolf, SKS founder and Spoon publisher. “While we had over ten thousand of the SKS community join us for virtual events during the pandemic, there’s nothing like seeing, touching, and tasting innovation. I look forward to connecting with those helping rethink how we do things in the world of food and cooking in person.”

Themes For 2024

SKS 2024 will focus on some of the most important themes around the innovation-driven transformation of how we shop, cook, consume, and convene around food. Some of the key themes and questions that will be explored during the two full days at SKS include:

AI’s Impact on Food: Exploring how AI is transforming every part of the food value chain, including how consumers find, purchase, and prepare food. How can food companies, appliance brands, retailers, and more harness the power of this incredible technology?

Food Waste and Sustainability: How can innovation-powered changes can we make to reduce food waste along the consumer meal journey?

Food and Nutrition Personalization: The technology and tools exist to create personalized food and nutrition plans that lead to better health outcomes. How can the food industry adapt in a world in which GLP-1-based drugs are creating a murky outlook for traditional food brands?

Automation & Cooking: Automation is becoming critical in the commercial kitchen. How will it fit in the consumer kitchen and our food lives?

On-Demand, Decentralized Food Manufacturing: The packaged-goods food ecosystem is wasteful. Can new forms of on-demand, decentralized food production technologies like 3D printing reduce the packaging and waste of traditional CPG models, and how will these systems scale in commercial and consumer settings?

Food Discovery & Meal Planning: We’re more likely nowadays to find a new recipe on TikTok than in a cookbook. As food retailers & CPGs lock into these new discovery channels to enable purchase journeys, will the consumer of the future join them?

Kitchen Electrification: Induction cooking systems are both more efficient and better for the environment, but consumers are hesitant to adopt them. When will the electrification of the consumer kitchen happen, if ever?

Startup Showcase

In addition to two full days of TED-style presentations, panels, workshops, and networking, SKS is bringing back our pioneering Startup Showcase. Launched in 2015, the SKS Startup Showcase has been instrumental in connecting startups with investors, corporate partners, and even opportunities like appearing on Shark Tank. Startups who are building the next great technology that they believe will change how we shop, cook, store, or consume food in the home are encouraged to apply today.

Location Details

SKS 2024 will be held at the beautiful Block41 event center in the heart of Seattle. Block41 has two full floors of event and exhibition space, two full kitchens, and an outdoor space for our celebration and happy hour on June 4th.

Join Us

Mark your calendars and save the date for June 4-5th in Seattle. If you are interested in speaking at SKS, submit a speaker application today. If you’d like to bring your company’s product to Seattle and share it with the SKS and Spoon community, please fill out our sponsor form. And if you’d like to purchase a ticket, you can get our Super Early Bird pricing between now and February 29th, 2024.

We look forward to welcoming you in 2024!

December 12, 2023

Tech-Powered MOTO Pizza Raises $1.85M as It Eyes Drone Delivery & Expansion to California

Before the pandemic, Lee Kindell ran a travel hostel in Seattle, where he was known for the tasty pizza he served his guests. A couple years and a pandemic later, he’s running Seattle’s hottest restaurant and has just closed his first round of funding.

In an interview with The Spoon, Kindell has revealed that MOTO Pizza has raised $1.85 million in funding from what he describes as strategic, private “non-venture capital” funding. He says the new funding will help the company execute on its plans for the next twelve months, plans which include the chain’s first move outside of Washington State.

According to Kindell, MOTO will open its first location in California in Indian Wells, a city in Coachella Valley nestled between Palm Desert and La Quinta. California’s first MOTO will reside within the Indian Wells Tennis Garden tennis facility, where it will serve up pizza at big events such as the Indian Wells Tennis Open in March 2024. The company also has plans to expand to new locations within Washington State, including up north to Bellingham and over on the east side in Bellevue.

Beyond store expansion, MOTO is expanding its technology portfolio, including trialing a salad-bowl robot from Vancouver’s Cibotica. For Cibotica, which publicly debuted its bowl food robot last week, MOTO is their first announced trial partner in the US.

Kindell told The Spoon that MOTO will also start delivery via drone in 2024, signing a deal with Zipline to deliver pizza by the end of next year. Last month, Zipline achieved a significant milestone when it launched its first “beyond visual line of sight” (BLVS) delivery. MOTO is the second pizza partner for Zipline in Washington state after the company announced it was working with Pagliacci in May.

Kindell said that while he’s heard from several VCs interested in investing in MOTO, a modest investment felt right for the coming year.

“We felt like it was too early for us to raise through VC,” said Kindell. “We wanted to take advantage of the demand and attention for MOTO and use it to grow, while implementing the new technology into our growth. I think we will have the model we’ve been working hard towards next year, and then we can put together a big raise. We’ve already captured some attention with some VC, and that’s pretty exciting.”

“My end game is a successful autonomous pizza operation, and I can’t wait for it!”

December 7, 2023

With Launch of Bowl Food Robot, Cibotica Points to Dispensing Technology and Small Footprint as Differentiators

This week, Canadian food robot startup Cibotica announced that its first food robot is fully operational in a multi-brand ‘digital food hall’ called Food Republic in Vancouver, Canada. According to the company, the fully robotic makeline named Remy can assemble up to 300 salads per hour utilizing the company’s proprietary dispensing technology.

Images of Remy, Cibotica's food assembly robot

Cibotica cofounder Ashkan Mirnabavi says that after he opened his first restaurant in 2019, he experienced the challenges firsthand around finding and training employees to keep his restaurant up and running. The former engineer turned restaurant operator started looking at available automation technology but felt none of the available solutions fit what he was looking for, so he joined forces with his two other cofounders, Darius Sahebjavaher (CTO) and Soroush Sefidkar (co-CEO), to start a food robotics company.

Once they started looking at different technologies, such as robotic arms, Mirnabavi said they knew they had to build a system that integrated with existing restaurant operations. They soon started thinking about building a robotic makeline and focused on a system that had the flexibility to do a variety of ingredients and fit into existing restaurant kitchen spaces.

“We learned that the biggest hurdle is the dispensing and accurately dispensing ingredients,” said Mirnabavi. “All these other solutions that existed, you had to have different technology for different ingredients, which makes your assembly line much bigger. And that’s where we said, ‘okay if we can come up with one solution that is capable of basically all types of ingredients with different characteristics and a different temperature,’ we might be able to solve it.”

Introducing Cibotica’s First Automated Makeline

With the system now operating in his Food Republic digital food hall, Mirnabavi and his partners are eyeing a variety of future applications and partners that can utilize its robot.

“Quick service restaurants, salad bowls, they were like an entry point for us,” said Mirnabavi. “Fresh produce processing centers, where they go through tons and tons of ingredients. Meal kit companies, there is a lot of manual work. There are markets where there are assembly lines, where people scoop different ingredients into these small, smaller, pre-packaged meals and put everything in a box. Application-wise, the market is huge.”

The market’s getting crowded quickly, with a variety of players such as Hyphen, Lab37, Eatch, and TechMagic offering robotic food assembly for a QSR’s back of house. Cibotica believes their focus on flexibility and small footprint should garner interest from restaurant partners who want to use automation for bowl food assembly in their restaurants.

As for business models, Mirnabavi says, at least for the time being, the company plans to offer a flexible model for its early customers, either through a robotics-as-a-service monthly payment plan or through the purchase of the machines. As time passes, he says they may choose to use one model over the other. The company is currently raising money for their next round of investment.

December 6, 2023

Gene-Edited Food Startup Ohalo Emerges From Stealth as AgTech Pioneer Dave Friedberg Takes the Helm

This week, longtime food and ag tech founder and investor Dave Friedberg announced on Twitter that he has taken over the CEO role for gene-editing focused agtech startup Ohalo Genetics. Ohalo, operating under stealth for the past four years, began its life within Friedberg’s investment and startup incubator The Production Board.

From Friedberg’s tweet:

“@ohalo uses gene editing to completely reimagine agriculture, creating new plant varieties in major crops that were not previously feasible, significantly increasing yields and productivity, ultimately helping farmers make more food using far less land, resources, and capital. After recently achieving some major breakthroughs, I now believe @ohalo could become one of the world’s most important businesses and will be dedicating myself to realizing its potential.”

The move comes one decade after Friedberg sold his first agtech startup, The Climate Corporation, to Monsanto for $1.1 billion. The sale of The Climate Corp was a milestone for the broader ag tech space as it marked the first time an ag tech startup had sold for over a billion dollars.

As Friedberg takes over Ohalo, the company has begun to lift the veil of secrecy. The timing of the decision to come out of stealth (as well as Friedberg taking over) likely has something to do with Ohalo’s recent wins in the form of positive outcomes from the USDA’s Regulatory Status Reviews (RSRs) of the company’s work on gene-edited potatoes.

An RSR is a request sent to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) to ask that the product, which in this case is a genetically modified plant in the form of a potato, not be regulated. Ohalo had two RSRs under consideration this year for its potato, one which focuses on higher concentrations of beta carotene – enhancing the overall health and nutrition value of the potato – and another which results in reduced glucose and fructose content in the potato, which, according to Ohalo, will reduce the adverse side effects that lead to significant spoilage during cold storage of potatoes.

In both cases, USDA’s APHIS agreed with Ohalo, essentially giving a green light for the product to move forward towards sale and consumption of the product within the U.S. without the additional oversight under 7 CFR part 340, the part of the Plant Protection Act of 2000 that gives the USDA regulatory oversight over genetically modified foods.

In the case of Ohalo’s approval (and other approvals under 7 CFR part 340), the USDA is saying that the alterations to the produce brought about using the gene-editing tools were possible through cultivation and that the risks posed by the changes were no more significant from a plant pest risk perspective than those introduced through traditional plant cultivation techniques.

Ohalo joins a cohort of gene-edited produce companies that have emerged in recent years as tools such as CRISPR Cas9 have matured and enabled breakthroughs in agriculture, healthcare, and pharma. While other ag-focused gene-editing startups such as Pairwise and Yield10 Bioscience have received significant funding over the past half-decade or so, the path towards commercialization has been slow for most and rocky for some. Benson Hill, an ag gene-editing startup with a billion-dollar valuation just two years ago, has started looking for strategic alternatives as it lays off staff.

As for the Production Board, where Friedberg has spent the majority of his time the past few years as he invested and spun up food and ag tech concepts around a variety of areas ranging from gene editing to bioreactors to beverage printing, he says he will continue to stay on some boards, while his team continues the investment work that he had been involved with on a day-to-day basis before the move.

“This is a big change for me personally, I haven’t been an operating CEO for 7+ years.. but the mind-blowing results the @ohalo team have accomplished make this decision a no-brainer,” said Friedberg.

December 4, 2023

Scoop: Travis Kalanick is Building Restaurant Robots With Help of Uber’s Former Head of Self-Driving Cars

For the past half-decade, former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has been endeavoring to reimagine how restaurants operate by building a nationwide network of ghost kitchens under a business called CloudKitchens. That business, which he and his team constructed stealthily under a holding company called City Storage Systems (CSS), was joined at the hip by another technology business called Otter, which sells restaurant order management software.

Now, the Spoon has learned that Kalanick’s CSS is building its own restaurant automation and robotics business under the name Lab37. According to company sources and a blog post quietly published by the company in September, Lab37 has built its first restaurant robot, a bowl-making robot called (what else?) Bowl Builder.

The Bowl Builder, which makes hundreds of hot or cold bowls per day, is fully NSF-certified and its dimensions are 20′ wide by 9′ deep. The system can handle the entire process of making bowl food, as bowls run on a conveyor belt under 18 different dispenser modules for ingredients and sauces before getting sealed, utensils added, and bagged up for pickup.

The Spoon has learned that Lab37 is headed up by Eric Meyhofer, an executive and automation innovator who formerly ran Uber’s self-driving car unit for years (and racked up quite a few patents during that time). Meyhofer, who is listed on LinkedIn as a co-founder of Carnegie Robotics – a robotics development lab that helped to give birth to Uber’s self-driving car unit – also served as a commercialization specialist at Carnegie Melon University, his alma mater and widely recognized as the world’s leading robotics research university. Meyhofer does not list Lab37 on his LinkedIn profile.

Lab37 is located in a warehouse on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. The location includes a commercial research and development kitchen, fabrication shop, engineering office, electrical engineering lab, assembly lab, and testing lab.

Lab37 has been trialing the Bowl Builder out through its Hungry Group virtual restaurant division, which is described as a R&D kitchen company building “the future of dining, where diverse options, cutting-edge convenience, and technology unite.” According to the company, the Hungry Group’s R&D kitchen is in the same warehouse where the Bowl Builder food robot was designed, tested, and assembled.

The Spoon has learned that the early trials with the Bowl Builder have gone very well, and locations that have tried it out have seen substantial increases in revenue. According to a Lab37 spokesperson, the company plans to trial the Bowl Builder in additional locations in the coming months, including more CloudKitchen locations.

One potential customer of Lab37’s Bowl Builder is Salted, a fast-growing bowl-food startup that has leaned heavily into the ghost kitchen model in recent years. While Salted has several physical brick-and-mortar locations, its CEO, Jeff Applebaum, has indicated that much of the company’s future growth will come via ghost kitchens. The Spoon has learned that Salted is a customer at a number of CloudKitchen’s locations.

Interestingly, this news comes just a few weeks after Spain-based Remy Robotics announced they were also working with CloudKitchens for its US entry. The Remy robot, which uses a robotic arm and looks to have a smaller footprint than Lab37’s Bowl Builder, debuted in the US under Remy’s Better Days virtual restaurant brand in the New York City market.

Stepping back, this latest revelation about Kalanick’s push into food automation shows his current journey is not too dissimilar from the one he took with Uber. As with his former company, Kalanick is moving from a startup concept that rethinks the traditional usage model of a long-standing industry (it was taxis and travel with Uber, and now it’s restaurants with CSS) and is building enabling technology as the second (or third) act to help realize this vision. He’s using the well-worn tech industry playbook of building “picks and shovels” for an industry, but only after spending time showing the industry there’s a way of doing things that’s is much different than the long-standing model.

November 28, 2023

Tech-Powered Regenerative Chicken Joint ‘Mt. Joy’ Opens Second Restaurant in Seattle

This week, Seattle-based regenerative restaurant chain Mt. Joy announced it’s opening its second location in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. The new location – Mt. Joy’s first brick-and-mortar location after opening a food truck this fall – will be nestled next to Seattle’s only Sweetgreen on the corner of 11th and Pine in a brick building formerly home to the Stout Brewery.

A new restaurant opening usually doesn’t cross our radar, but what makes this one particularly interesting is the grandiose vision of its founder, Robbie Cape. Cape, who made a name for himself first at Microsoft and then as CEO and cofounder of health tech startup 98point6, has plans to open a nationwide chain of tech-forward regenerative chicken sandwich shops. While several big restaurant chains have made small moves to burnish their regenerative bonafides (small enough that some have labeled these efforts a new form of greenwashing), Cape has made it clear that his chain – and especially his chicken – will be built entirely around hyperlocal, extremely transparent regenerative sourcing practices.

“When I say regenerative to every component of the supply chain and bringing joy to all the constituents, I really do mean it,” Cape said when The Spoon sat down with him this September at his food truck opening. “And I know it’s audacious. And I know we’re not going to get it right on every one all the time. But we’re going to try, and we’re going to keep trying to get better.”

Cape knew when he came up with the idea that creating a fully regenerative-focused chicken sandwich chain would be a heavy lift, particularly for someone without any previous restaurant experience. Because of this, he started cold-calling restaurant folks, including Seattle-famous chef and restaurateur Ethan Stowell, to soundboard the idea.

Above: Mt. Joy CEO Robbie Cape with Company’s Chief Agricultural Officer, Grant Jones

“The first lesson that I learned when I was starting to get feedback from people in the restaurant business about this cockamamie concept that I had around building a restaurant around regenerative is the food has to be great. Someone told me, ‘You got to know Robbie, no matter how good this story is, it won’t matter unless the food is the best,'” said Cape. “And so that was one of the reasons I set out to try to meet Ethan Stowell, which was not easy. He’s a celebrity, and I didn’t know that I had any connection to him. It turns out I do. But I reached out via the ‘Contact Us’ form on his website.”

As it also turns out, Stowell liked the idea and came on as cofounder (as would Stowell’s former executive pastry chef, Dionne Himmelfarb, who ran point on designing Mt Joy’s menu). Once Cape had his chef(s) on board, he set about building the rest of the team, including bringing on a marketing person, a farmer with experience in regenerative farming practices, and a tech person. Surprisingly, for a tech entrepreneur, it was this last hire – chief technology officer – that Cape initially had the most reservations about.

“I sat down with Ethan and said, ‘I’m a little reticent about raising this with you, but I think that we need a technologist on the founding team because we want to build a new way of interacting with the restaurant.’ So I started to pitch it like, ‘I think we need a technologist,’ and Ethan’s like, ‘Robbie, absolutely, we do. 100%.'”

And it’s this part of the Mt. Joy equation – the customer interaction piece – where Cape’s (and CTO Justin Kaufman‘s) technology background shines through. When I visited Mt. Joy’s food truck installation in the fall, there was a QR code that showed me the way to the app, and once I ordered my chicken sandwich and fries, I got a text notifying me when my food was ready.

That’s all pretty standard stuff nowadays, but Cape sees the digital order flow as a way to create new and interesting personalized experiences tailored around preferences and past order history.

“When you come to restaurants, they never know who you are,” Cape said. “They don’t know what you ordered last time. They forget about you, like every time it’s new. When you go to Google, Google knows you. When you go to Apple, they know you. We need to know you.”

While I wasn’t as convinced by Cape’s belief that he could differentiate around digital ordering interfaces as he was, I figured he and his CTO would develop some interesting ideas. However, I was convinced about his effort to source every single ingredient through local farmers and food companies, something which was already evident in the menu. Every ingredient listed the source and the mileage it had traveled before being put on the menu. About the only thing that traveled over a hundred miles were spices like paprika which aren’t grown in the Seattle market.

Cape wasn’t flustered when I told him his list of sources for each ingredient was impressive, but replicating it beyond Seattle would require rebuilding the supply chain in each new market.

“It’s true, it’s hard, a little more expensive, but it’s mostly like that’s an intellectual game,” said Cape. “So you have a team who’s going to have to really be thinking about sourcing, and we’re gonna have to build these relatively local supply chains. But as it turns out, there’s a lot of products. There are a few areas where we might have a few challenges, and our answer to that is we’ll be transparent.”

If you’re in the Seattle market and want to find out what a fried chicken sandwich sourced from regenerative farming practices tastes like, you can visit Mt. Joy’s newest location starting December 1st.

November 27, 2023

After Last Year’s Thanksgiving Disaster, I Bought a Combustion Thermometer. The Result Was Juicy, Just-Right Turkey

In 2021, I hit a Thanksgiving home run.

After deciding to brine a turkey for the first time, the results were much better than expected. Guests were happy, compliments were given, and when I learned we were hosting again last year, I figured it’d be easy to replicate the juicy, delicious result.

But I was wrong. Last year’s turkey was a disaster, so overcooked that the thing was pretty much an inedible piece of gristle.

What happened? After reviewing the steps and comparing them to the previous year, I realized I simply left the turkey in my old oven for too long without taking the bird’s temperature. When I did take it out to check it with my old-school thermometer, it had an internal temperature of 200 degrees and was climbing quickly. Experienced hands will know that’s WAY too hot – over 35 degrees hotter than the suggested cooking temperature – and the results were what you’d expect: a turkey was so overcooked it was all but inedible.

Needless to say, this year, I wasn’t taking any chances. I was going to invest in a smart thermometer and keep track of the bird’s temperature in real-time.

Which one? I decided I wanted to go with the Combustion because I liked the idea of keeping an accurate read on the bird’s temperature from core to surface (as well as ambient temperature) via the thermometer’s eight sensors. I also wanted to take advantage of Combustion’s predictive technology, which would give me a countdown and notify me when it would hit the target temperature.

I took the Combustion thermometer out of its bright yellow box on Thanksgiving morning. I’d downloaded the app to my phone a day prior, enabled it to connect via Bluetooth with the Combustion app, and ensured the thermometer was fully charged. I estimated the turkey would take about four hours to cook at 300 degrees (that’s with convection – if I didn’t use convection, I’d have cooked it at 325). I put in a target temperature of 160 degrees, knowing the bird’s core temperature would continue to rise after I took it out of the oven and waited.

After about 30 minutes, the Combustion gave me an estimate for when the turkey would hit my target temperature. Unsurprisingly, it was cooking slightly faster than my initial estimates, but I was prepared because I had the Combustion.

I watched the countdown clock tick downward, and when it hit 160 degrees, the app told me it was time to pull out the turkey. I double-checked the temperature with my old school thermometer and it matched the temperature reading on my Combustion thermometer. I put foil over the bird and let it sit for about 45 minutes before carving it up.

The result? A juicy, just-right turkey.

You’re probably asking why I didn’t use a smart thermometer before, and it’s a good question. The answer is I should have, but I figured at the time I could just do the math myself. As it turns out, however, older ovens can be a bit unpredictable (as can turkey cooking time estimates), and now the Combustion will be a permanent fixture come turkey cooking time.

Could I have used another thermometer? Maybe, as long as it has enough sensors to measure the core, surface, and ambient temperatures. While the original Meater had two sensors, it couldn’t measure core, ambient, and surface temperatures. However, Meater’s latest thermometer, the Meater 2 Plus, has five internal sensors and an ambient sensor, so I figured that would have worked great as well.

But after my experience, I recommend the Combustion predictive thermometer. The company tries to get you to buy the pair of the thermometer and the yellow kitchen clock, but I found the app works just find (and meant less clutter on my counter). You can buy the thermometer by itself right now for $119, or buy the thermometer and clock for $159.

November 22, 2023

Google Announces Winners of the Single-Use Plastics Challenge

This week, Google announced the winners of the Single-Use Plastics Challenge, an open-invitation challenge where the company invited startups to present solutions that help reduce plastic waste. The challenge, which launched this past spring, had Google testing out those products that met state and federal requirements and Google’s Food program standards in the company’s U.S.-based cafes and MicroKitchens.

The twelve winners featured several different approaches to the massive problem of plastic waste, from edible cutlery to candy made of upcycled ingredients to biodegradable cups made out of clay. Below is a list of each winner and their product:

Climate Candy: Climate Candy a company that makes candy out of imperfect, unharvested produce. The company reduces plastic by using plant fibers in its packaging.

Eco Refill Systems: The company provides cooking oils in refillable stainless steel containers. The company’s containers can “be refilled and never thrown away.”

GaeaStar: GaeaStar, which The Spoon first wrote about in April of this year, makes clay cups that disintegrate into dust. The company’s founder got the idea while visiting India, where dissolvable, biodegradable clay cups have a long history. The company has developed a proprietary 3D printer that makes each cup in less than 30 seconds.

Homefree: Homefree makes baked goods for food service that use reusable, recyclable packaging. The company’s founder was inspired to create its packaging approach to help reduce plastic waste in the form of the standard large plastic tray and delivers both large and small cookies in formats that reduce plastic waste for food service.

Incredible Eats: Incredible Eats, a Smart Kitchen Summit finalist in 2019 (then known as Planeteer), makes edible cutlery. The company’s founder, Dinesh Tadepalli first came up with the idea for edible cutlery when he was getting his children an ice cream treat. Nowadays, the company is working with large national brands like Dippin Dots, offers both savory and sweet options, and has expanded its options into straws and sporks.

Loliware: Loliware makes biodegradable, compostable cutlery and straws out of seaweed. According to the company, its seaweed-derived resins can be made using standard plastic processing production equipment.

Pulp Pantry: Pulp Pantry makes upcycled snack chips provided in bulk packaging targeted towards food service.

Sun & Swell: Sun & Swell provides healthy snacks such as fruit and nut mixes in various compostable and reusable packaging. The company transitioned to compostable packaging in 2019 for its single-serve SKUs and recently launched a pilot program to offer bulk offerings in reusable packaging.

The Aggressive Good (TAG): TAG makes a bulk-food management system. The system includes a smart bulk dispenser that communicates inventory status and consumption trends, and the company’s reusable cartridge system enables direct shipments of bulk goods from manufacturer to retail.

PlasticFri: PlasticFri provides film-based and fiber-based packaging products using agricultural waste, wild plants, non-edible plants, and wood fibers. Their packaging formats include straws, cups, food mailers, and fruit bags.

Asarasi: Asarasi aims to make a dent in the plastic bottled water market by selling maple water (water derived from maple trees while extracting syrup) served in recyclable aluminum cans.

SOFi: SOFi creates what they describe as “plastic straws that don’t suck.” The company says its straws and cups are made with 100% paper materials, without the plastic or PFA chemicals that make straws and cups unrecyclable.

According to Google, the winners can pitch their products to large food service brands and test their products out in Google’s cafeterias and kitchens. Many of them are already being used to various degrees in various Google locations, and I had a chance to try many of these products earlier this month when I visited Google for its Food Lab.

You can watch a YouTube shorts pitch reel below that includes a description of the challenge and a company pitch from each winner.

Playlist:

November 17, 2023

Podcast: Why Are CPG Brands Freaking Out About Ozempic?

On this week’s Spoon Podcast, SuperGut CEO Marc Washington joins me to talk about why new GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy keep CPG brand CEOs up at night.

These new drugs, which got their start as a new class of pharmaceuticals that help control type 2 diabetes, have become very popular in recent years as weight loss miracle drug. They are hugely effective in suppressing appetites and reducing the overall calorie intake of those taking them, so much so that some speculate that they could have a significant impact on the overall demand for food if, as predicted, tens of millions begin to take them in coming years as prices come down and they become available in more accessible formats. 

Marc’s company, SuperGut, creates a natural alternative to GLP-1 drugs in the form of supplements, snacks and bars. His journey to become CEO of SuperGut was born out of a personal loss and a chance meeting with Dave Friedberg, the CEO of The Production Board. 

You can listen to our conversation by clicking below, downloading to your device, or heading over to Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

November 15, 2023

Amazon’s Roving Robot Gets a Job. Will Restaurants & Retail Bite?

In 2021, Amazon surprised company watchers when it rolled out a house-roving robot named Astro. At launch, Amazon’s cute little robot was primarily intended for domestic duties, helping out as a home security and as a roaming Alexa speaker.

Reception was tepid, however, mainly because the robot didn’t seem to do much other than act as a mobile speaker and Ring camera, and the price tag was high at $999 (and soon went higher to $1599).

Now, Amazon hopes to give its mobile robot a purpose in life by pushing it into the workplace. This week, the company announced “Astro For Business,” which the company says is “a security solution for small and medium-sized businesses that combines robotics, smart security, and artificial intelligence (AI).”

As part of the pitch, Amazon is hawking associated subscription services (of course they are), such as Ring video monitoring and a new service called “Astro Secure,” a new security subscription plan tied to Astro that will allow it to perform custom patrol routes and scheduled patrols.

The transition of Astro into the workplace makes some sense, particularly given the high price tag for Astro (which will now be $2,350 for Astro for Business) and the more obvious use case of a roving security guard for a small robot that doesn’t do much more than move around and watch things.

According to Amazon, the company has been trialing Astro in the workplace over the past year, including one food and beverage business in Hapa. According to Hapa COO Jonathan Hebel, the Astro has helped keep an eye on the kitchen and give peace of mind around potential fire hazards.

“We use industrial ovens that, if not turned off properly, can easily start a fire,” said Hebel. “I used to drive back to the office at all hours if I wasn’t confident they were shut down. Now, with Astro, I’m able to check in via live view and triple-check that the ovens are off at any time—whether it’s 6 p.m. or 2 a.m.”

Amazon’s new retail and business focus for Astro makes me wonder if the company might eventually add additional customer-service-related features, turning Astro into a mobile shopper support bot. Amazon launched a business version of Alexa years ago, but I haven’t heard of any real-world use cases in which the company’s AI assistant in a customer service role. I have to wonder if that will change with the rollout of Astro for business.

As far as enterprise robots, Astro is pretty affordable and one of the few that isn’t sold through a robotics-as-a-service subscription plan. That said, I think it will need to add additional features (like customer service) before many small businesses bite.

And who knows? Maybe at some point, Amazon will take a cue from Tesla and build out a more human-like (and creepier) robot that can actually do stuff like lift things.

November 14, 2023

Restaurants Offering Subscriptions Up 54% Over Past Year According to Square

According to a new report from payment processing company Square, the number of restaurants offering some form of active subscription plan to its customers has grown by 54% over the past year. These subscriptions – anything from a wine club to a taco lover’s pass – have become increasingly popular (among some, at least) in recent years as restaurants look for ways to create more stable revenue through automated payments and increase customer loyalty.

According to Square, over three-quarters of restaurant subscriptions remained active after one month, and 57% remained active after six months.

Of course, it should be noted that Square doesn’t represent the entire point-of-sale market for restaurants so the data might be somewhat skewed. While other POS players like Clover also offer support for subscriptions, Square has been probably the most active in building out subscription functionality over the past year. That said, given the success Square has had and the continued challenges restaurant operators face in the form of rising costs and constrained labor markets, my guess is most major POS providers will begin to offer this feature sooner rather than later.

The Square report also showed data that pained a picture of a slowly recovering, perhaps permanently changed, restaurant industry post-pandemic. Square data shows that while many urban work centers have seen their share of food and beverage transactions increase slowly since the early days of the pandemic, overall activity has largely flatlined. According to Square, downtown dining is at about three-quarters of what it used to be, a number that is primarily a reflection of a reshaped workforce that has seen many office workers continue to work from home for the bulk of the workweek.

However, Square data shows that one city has proven to be a significant outlier to the trend of decreased downtown dining traffic. According to Square, Detroit has seen its downtown dining jump an eye-popping 75% increase in traffic compared to 2019, something that’s likely attributable to strong hiring by US automakers, particularly as they look to build out their EV strategies over the past couple of years.

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