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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.

November 10, 2023

Cafe X’s Robot Barista is Now Slinging Coffee in Tesla’s Berlin Giga Factory

This week, Cafe X CEO Henry Hu retweeted Elon Musk, who had tweeted out a video showcasing a flythrough video of Giga Berlin. The reason? Tesla’s newest Giga Factory serves coffee and tea using one of Hu’s robotic coffee shops.

While the robot barista’s arms are painted red with the words Tesla printed on them, anyone familiar with the Cafe X robot coffee shops will instantly recognize them.

Lobby of Giga Berlin just finished and it’s filled with cool tech for visitors! https://t.co/W57MTLbkrw

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 10, 2023

Cafe X was one of the early arrivers in robot-powered front-of-house food service, but in the last couple of years, the company’s been quiet as it closed most of its San Francisco locations. In recent months, however, Hu has been tweeting about the company shipping out new Cafe Xs and getting Tesla merch, so it’s probably not too surprising one showed up in a Giga Factory. It probably didn’t hurt that one of Cafe X’s original investors is Jason Calcanis, a close associate of Elon, who has been actively pushing the idea.

Cafe X’s last venture round that was disclosed was in 2020, and it recently raised money via the crowdfunding platform Republic. The company’s disclosure on Republic said its robot cafes at SFO generated $700 thousand in 2022 alone and that the company had shipped five robotic coffee shops in 2022. As of early spring, the company said it had orders for ten more in 2023 and expected to ship a total of 50 this year. The company listed the cost for a Cafe X at $285 thousand with an annual software and service cost of $15 thousand.

November 9, 2023

Remy Launches in U.S. With Robot-Powered Virtual Restaurant in NYC Called Better Days

This week, Remy Robotics opened in the U.S. with a robot-powered virtual restaurant brand in New York City called Better Days, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The launch comes after the Spain-based startup spent the last few years operating a hub-and-spoke model of robotic-enabled ghost kitchens in Spain and France, where the company says it has produced and delivered over 100,000 meals.

According to company CEO Yegor Traiman, he hopes to merge the convenience of fast food with the quality associated with fine dining, all powered by robots.

“Remy Robotics exists to do what was previously thought impossible – make high-quality, delicious food consistently, accessibly, and profitably at scale,” said CEO and Founder Yegór Traiman. “With the launch of Better Days in New York, we are taking major steps, we’re just starting to show what is possible. Our goal is to make good food at an affordable price available and accessible to everyone while creating better jobs and improving the work environment for chefs.”, said Traiman.

Readers of The Spoon may recall that Traiman and his engineers created an entire food production flow around robots instead of designing the robots to mimic human chefs. Remy has redesigned the cooking process to be more robot-compatible, focusing on the precision and consistency of machines. The result is a system where AI-powered robots prepare food based on algorithmic recipes that factor in delivery times and other logistical elements.

“We develop all the equipment,” Traiman told The Spoon in an interview last year. “Robots, freezers, fridges. Because again, in a world where everything was designed and built by humans, for humans, there is no place for robots. You’re not able to make the system flexible enough.”

According to the company, the new restaurant will utilize human chefs to prep the food in a central commissary before it is transported to what it calls “node kitchens” where robots do all of the cooking. The food is refrigerated before being transferred to an oven and cooked using what the company calls “algorithmic recipes” in robotic ovens. From there, Remy says AI algorithms work with sensors to control food’s quality by monitoring the food’s internal temperature and uses a scale that calculates moisture reduction. According to Remy, they can adjust cook times automatically for orders depending on whether they are placed for delivery, takeout, or dine-in.

While the company is calling Better Days a “restaurant”, it is, for the time being at least, what looks to be only a virtual brand, serving up meals through delivery via the company’s own app and third-party delivery companies such as Grubhub, DoorDash and Uber Eats. According to the announcement, Better Days will feature main courses built around meals with rice, veggies and proteins such as chicken and salmon. All the entrees are priced between $7 and $16.

If you live in the New York City market, you can check out and order a meal from Better Days via their website or their app.

November 8, 2023

Bear Brings Its Robots To Hospitals Through Partnership With Sodexo

When John Ha started Bear Robotics, he was a computer scientist with a restaurant side hustle who thought he might make the lives of his servers easier through automation technology. Since then, his robots have shown up in restaurants across the globe to lift some of the burden of physically demanding restaurant service jobs.

As it turns out, there are many other physically demanding jobs, one of which is nursing, which is why this week’s announcement by Bear of their deal with Sodexo makes sense. According to the company, they’ve closed a deal with food service giant Sodexo, where Bear’s robots will support staff and patient care within healthcare facilities.

According to a report from McKinsey & Company, the potential for automation to take on mundane tasks could free up nursing activities by 15 percent, allowing healthcare workers to focus more on patient care. Furthermore, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the healthcare industry will grow 16 percent from 2020 to 2030, adding about 2.6 million new jobs.

“In partnership with Sodexo, we will be enhancing the future of work for healthcare professionals and maximizing the value of their time with patients through seamless integration of technology and efficiency,” said Juan Higueros, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Bear Robotics.

According to Bear, the pilot programs are set to launch in the United States in 2024.

October 31, 2023

Drone Delivery Operator Flytrex Receives FAA Go Ahead to Fly Without Visual Observers

Drone delivery startup Flytrex and its partner Causey Aviation Unmanned (CAU) announced today they have been granted an exemption by the FAA to operate drones ‘Beyond Visual Line of Sight’ (BVLOS) without the requirement of visual observers.

The newly acquired authorization enables both companies to scale their delivery services across American suburbs as the waver permits their drones to fly longer distances beyond a pilot’s visual line of site.

According to Flytrex, BVLOS approval is one of the most advanced regulatory approvals to date and paves the way for the scaling of CAU and Flytrex’s delivery operations, contingent upon meeting certain conditions and limitations.

Automatic Drone Pickup | Flytrex

The news comes on the heels of the company’s unveiling of its autonomous pickup feature, which enables Flytrex to automate food delivery via drone fully. With the new capability, a Flytrex drone flies to the restaurant, picks up the food for delivery, and takes the order to the customer’s home.

Flytrex drones, which can carry up to 5.5 pounds of food, fly up to speeds of 32 miles per hour. And while the drones can handle each mission entirely autonomously, the company says that they still have FAA-certified drone operators overseinge each mission.

The BVLOS approval comes after CAU, the operator for Flytrex, received Part 135 certification in January, essentially giving the the company the official go ahead to deliver food, beverages, and other goods across the country.

October 30, 2023

Key Takeaways From The First-Ever Food AI Summit

Last week, we convened some of the leading voices in AI and food at the inaugural Food AI Summit in Alameda, California, to discuss how this technology is transforming the food industry.

The conversation spanned the entire food system, examining the impact of AI on farming, food development, restaurants, personal nutrition, and household use.

It’s All About The Data

Throughout the day, it became clear that one of the most significant drivers for achieving highly functional and powerful AI systems is building them around the right data. Once you’ve trained the AI on good data, the insights derived from these platforms will far surpass what was previously possible.

Erica Bliss, the Chief Operating Officer of Mineral, believes where AI will really excel is in aggregating ‘multimodal’ data into a unified, synthesized analysis.

“It’s about integrating satellite imagery, soil data, weather data, historical yield data, camera data, and scouting notes from someone walking the field. The real power is in aggregating diverse and complex data types,” she said.

The Biggest Advances Will Come From a Combination of Human Knowledge with AI

The question of whether AI can replace human knowledge and innovation was a recurrent theme throughout the day. Oliver Zahn, the CEO of Climax Foods, believes that AI will not replace human knowledge. Instead, he sees the combination of technology and humans as a game-changer.

“People have this romantic notion that we have an algorithm, and you just tell it to make whatever cheddar, egg scramble, and then it will just tell you exactly how to make it,” said Zahn. “It’s vastly more complicated than that. In many cases, the humans are actually much better than the algorithms. And in real life, I don’t think anybody will ever write an algorithm and create a data set that is rich enough to do that. The algorithms give us a little bit of an edge over traditional food science companies, and in some cases, they give us a bigger edge.”

Erica Bliss believes that while AI will increasingly help farmers at both a systemic and individual farm level, it will be the combination of AI and human knowledge that will form the “Iron Man suit” amalgamation of capabilities that will lead to transformational outcomes.

“There are things that humans are incredibly good at that AI is not good at,” said Bliss. “And so if you’re aiming to get the best yield forecast, it is really the human plus machine that’s driving a far better outcome.”

AI Will Power Much More Personalized and Accessible Health and Nutrition Advice

Noosheen Hashemi, CEO of January, which offers a personalized nutrition and glucose tracking platform, believes AI will empower individuals with chronic conditions like type 2 diabetes to better monitor and anticipate the effects of their diet.

“There are things we have done you simply cannot do without AI,” said Hashemi. “We can build a digital twin of a person using wearable data and user-reported data. We’re then able to predict their glycemic response to any of the foods in the 32 million food database. With AI, we can also give counterfactuals like ‘you ate this, but if you had eaten this, this would have been your response.'”

Looking forward, Ari Tulla of Elo Health thinks AI-powered coaches could make healthcare much more personalized and accessible.

“Today, we live in a world where a doctor has 10 minutes to half an hour a year for you,” said Tulla. “What if you could have a bot or somebody that can talk to you like your personal trainer at the tune of 30 to 50 hours a year? That could have a very big impact.”

AI Will Have An Impact at the Macro and Hyperlocal Levels

David Lee, the CEO of Inevitable Tech, believes that AI will not only address the challenges of increased production due to a rising global population and climate change but also aid in making individual farms more financially sustainable.

“Around forty percent of farms break even or do any kind of variable profit, which means most farms operate at a constant loss,” said Lee. “AI isn’t just about serving these big global problems like food security. I can also address the very individualistic, local problem, which is to create financial sustainability, local and specific, to the unit of a farm anywhere in the world.”

The First-Ever Food AI Summit Could Be The Start of Something Big

During his comments, Ari Tulla commented on the event itself, believing it could be the beginning of something big.

“I’ve been at those events where there are a hundred people in the room, and you know this is the beginning of something,” said Tulla. “Ten years from now, some of us will look back and say, ‘I was at the first Food AI Summit.'”

We sure hope so! Thanks again to our speakers, sponsors, and attendees for making the first Food AI Summit a huge success!

October 24, 2023

Cow NFT Platform CattlePay Paves the Way for Direct Sales With Heartland Deal

The last time we checked in with Rob Jennings of CattleProof, he was getting his cattle NFT platform off the ground. The idea was to create a permanent record of the life of a cow that followed it along the supply chain so that current and prospective owners all the way to a restaurant down the line that purchased beef would have a record of age, genetics, ranch of origin and more.

The idea is an interesting one, not only because it helps create better transparency into the history of a head of cattle, but also because it opens the door to more efficient way for prospective buyers and sellers to do business. Nowadays, if someone wants to buy a head of cattle, a sales transaction typically involves using a sale barn, an auction marketplace that facilitates the sale between buyer and seller. All well and good, except the resulting transactoin can take a week to ten days to process and often involves marketplace fees and commissions that can reach up to 10% of the total transaction.

Instead of using this slow and costly process, Jennings wants to make buying and selling cows as seamless (and low-fee) as buying or selling a stock – or NFT – through a digital marketplace. To that end, his company CattleProof has done an integration with Heartland, a payment processing company to launch CattlePay, an electronic payment system that allows cattle owners to buy and sell cattle via credit and debit cards and ACH payments.

“The idea is how do you create a more direct buyer to consumer payment system, minus all the fees and blockchain payments?” said Jennings in a interview with The Spoon. “And then, how do you inch your way towards getting real time settlement? Because that’s the other big thing: how do I get my money now?”

According to Jennings, the bigger vision of not only creating a lower-cost way to buy and sell cattle, but to create a friction-free way for buyers and sellers to connect. This means creating something akin to an Openseas for cattle, but without the complexity of having crypto wallets and all of the other blockchain related tech that often intimidates and turns off the uninitiated and non-crypto-pilled among us. To get there, CattleProof system will handle all of the web3 in the background, and offering the benefits of a blockchain proof of record and transaction system to the cattle buyers.

“Our goal is to in order to get cattle producers to participate, there’s got to be a return on investment,” Jennings told The Spoon in a recent interview. “And part of that return on investment is trying to find them ways to reduce these middleman fees.”

Jennings says he expects that the CattleProof system to launch in the first quarter of 2024.

October 19, 2023

Want to Try AI-Powered Cheese & Sausage? Join Us on October 25th at the Food AI Summit

So, what does food designed by AI taste like?

Next week at the Food AI Summit, you’ll have a chance to find out! That’s because not only will we have sessions by founders, inventors, and executives exploring how to bring food to our plates using the latest in artificial intelligence, but we’ll also get a chance to taste it!

After a full day of sessions that includes leaders from Pepsi, Afresh, ReFED, Chefman, Innit, Mineral and more, we’ll network and sample food from Shiru and Climax Foods! The founders of both companies will be on hand to talk about the process behind developing AI-powered plant-based food, so you will definitely want to stick around and join us!

You can check out the full-day agenda and great list of speakers over at the Food AI Summit page. If you’d like to join us, use the coupon code SPOON at checkout for $100 off tickets.

We’ll see you next week!

October 19, 2023

Pitchbook: Food Tech VC Deals Inch Up After Receding For the Past Two Years

Like many segments across the venture investment landscape, the food tech sector has seen a significant pullback in investment over the past couple of years. However, according to a new report from Pitchbook, there are early signs that investors who have kept on the sidelines may slowly be pushing their chips back on the table.

According to Pitchbook’s Q2 2023 food tech investment segment analysis, total food tech deals for Q2 increased over the previous quarter by 13.3% to 268 total deals, up from 197 deals in the first quarter of 2023. Total deal value was down just a smidge, dropping to $2.2 billion in Q2 2023 from $2.3 billion in the first quarter.

The Pitchbook report states that the uptick in total deals in Q2 could be an early sign of a potential return of investors to the sector. According to the report, there are indicators that investors have “significant dry powder reserves and may be slowly returning from the sidelines to resume deploying capital.”

Looking at how the Pitchbook analysis breaks down the food tech sector by segment, the biggest overall sector in Q2 was food e-commerce, which accounted for over $1 billion in Q2. According to Pitchbook, food tech e-commerce deal values were driven by late-stage investment in companies like Getir, which nabbed a $475 deal in 1H 2023. Other big deals of note in the first half included a $230 million deal in meal replacement startup Yfood (a deal which had Nestle acquiring a majority ownership stake in the company) and a $172M series C investment in alt protein startup Meati.

Speaking of alt protein, the Pitchbook analysis is somewhat bullish on the sector, predicting that the global alt protein market will grow from $76 billion in 2023 to $423 billion in 2033, a compound annual growth rate of 19%.

If you want to read the Pitchbook report, you can download a copy here.

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