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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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David Chang’s Pantry Essentials Brand Momofuku Goods Raises $17.5 Million

Today chef/entrepreneur David Chang and his team announced they had raised $17.5 million in growth funding for his packaged goods brand, Momofuku Goods.

The company, which sells “a line of restaurant-grade pantry essentials,” was founded in 2019 and spun out of Momofuku a year later. According to the announcement, the funding will be used to expand Momofuku Goods’ product offerings and support its growing operations. 

Chang’s initial success hawking Chili Crunch is no doubt one reason investors saw potential in the brand. When released in April 2020, Chang’s spicy add-to-everything sauce (author pro tip: try a dollop in vanilla yogurt) created a 20,000-person-long waiting list. Chang began to add to the product portfolio in 2021, adding air-dried noodles which have since sold more than 5 million servings of noodles to date. 

“We spent a decade testing and developing our pantry essentials, ensuring that they were up to the standards we uphold in our restaurants,” said Chang. “With this investment, I’m looking forward to bringing even more flavor to home cooks’ kitchens.” 

This type of move into packaged goods is part of a broader trend among chefs with big followings looking to capitalize on their brand equity in new and interesting ways, particularly after the arrival of COVID. Chang (who technically dipped his toe into the pantry goods pool before the arrival of COVID) is particularly well-positioned to cash in on a line of pantry essentials given his unique but often relatively simple takes on Asian food.

While they may not have the same celebrity chef cachet as Chang, the sister team behind the Omsom brand has shown how successful the Asian meal “starter” CPG business can be. Omsom started offering its sauce starters back in 2019 through a DTC model and can now be found in Target and Whole Foods.

GoodBytz Unveils Modular Robotic Kitchen That Can Make up to Three Thousand Meals Per Day

GoodBytz, a robotic kitchen startup based in Germany, debuted its new kitchen robot last week in its hometown of Hamburg at the INTERNORGA 2023 trade fair.

The GoodBytz food robot is a modular system that can be tailored around different food types and menus:

  • The refrigerated storage module can hold up between 24 and 72 different ingredients and sauces and feeds into different food assembly robots.
  • The food assembly robot modules can measure ingredients, fill bowls, place toppings, and perform cleaning functions.
  • A separate topping module can plan up to 24 ingredients and sauces into the bowls. GoodBytz offers a ‘cooking zone’ module that can output up to 3,000 meals per day if an operator wants a system set up for hot food.
  • The serving module makes up to four different types of bowls available for serving, and the output module presents the finished food ready for delivery to the customer.
  • A dishwasher module

Below is a schematic that shows the standard GoodBytz system. At 12.75 square meters – a little less than 200 square feet – the system has quite a large footprint, but that’s not that surprising given it’s essentially a self-contained professional food service kitchen.

The robot is centered around an internal chamber in which a couple of robotic arms maneuver around to gather ingredients, cook and place them into bowls. Once an order is placed, a robotic arm positions a cooking pot under the ingredient dispensing station to gather ingredients, dispense sauces and then place the pots on a shelf where they are rotated and cooked. The cooking shelf is reminiscent of the Spyce cooking system, in which the pots are spun in place to ensure proper heat and ingredient distribution.

Once the food is finished, the robotic arm picks up the cooking pot and pours the finished food into the bowl. From there, a separate robotic arm maneuvers the bowl under a dispensing station that puts vegetables and other items to complete the bowl and then places the bowl onto a conveyor belt so it can be rolled out to be picked up for serving.

GoodBytz Robotic Kitchen

The cooking robot’s sensors measure ingredients and adjust cooking times based on the dish being prepared, and the system features a touchscreen control module that allows for recipe customization. GoodBytz claims that the system, which can integrate with different ERP systems, can monitor food ingredient inventories and track ingredient freshness.

GoodBytz CEO Hendrik Susemihl told The Spoon the company uses a robotics-as-a-service business model, where the customer pays a fixed monthly service fee for the robots and an additional price-per-produced dish. The pricing varies depending on the configuration, with a cold bowl configuration differing from a configuration where meals are cooked in a convection oven.

The company’s prototype robotic kitchen was operational just three months after the company was founded in August 2021 and opened up a ghost kitchen in June 2022 to test the robot under natural conditions. GoodBytz plans to start cooking meals for its first big customer, Sodexo, in Q3 of this year. At INTERNORGA 2023, GoodBytz announced partnerships with system suppliers Palux and Winterhalter.

GoodBytz is first targeting the European market, but Susemihl said the company is eyeing expansion into the Asia and North American markets next year. The company has raised a €4 million seed round and is starting to raise its series A.

SideChef’s Kevin Yu Eyes Next Phase of Growth After Raising a $6 Million Series B

I first encountered SideChef’s CEO Kevin Yu at a rooftop party during CES in March 2015. At the time, SideChef was in its early stages, having been founded just a couple of months prior, and I was beginning to explore kitchen technology. The first Smart Kitchen Summit would take place only eight months after our meeting.

In November, Yu traveled to Seattle to participate in the inaugural Summit and subsequently became a regular attendee at SKS events. After some time had passed since our last catch-up, I invited Yu onto the podcast to discuss his company’s recent funding and inquire about his vision for its future.

I first encountered SideChef’s CEO Kevin Yu at a rooftop party during CES in March 2015. At the time, SideChef was in its early stages, having been founded just a couple of months prior, and I was beginning to explore kitchen technology. The first Smart Kitchen Summit would take place only eight months after our meeting.

In November, Yu traveled to Seattle to participate in the inaugural Summit and subsequently became a regular attendee at SKS events. After some time had passed since our last catch-up, I invited Yu onto the podcast to discuss his company’s recent funding and inquire about his vision for its future.

Originally, SideChef was a recipe app designed to assist users with cooking. In those initial years, SideChef and similar companies like Innit and Drop/Fresco concentrated on connecting various appliances and developing a tech-driven guidance system for kitchen use.

“We started as just a recipe app to teach a person how to cook,” said Yu. “But then that grew out, and it was like, ‘Hey, wait for a second’, we can help you with not just how to cook, but we can also help you with meal planning, we can help you get your groceries, we can connect that into a smart kitchen device and make that automatic as well, too.”

As SideChef formed partnerships with appliance brands, retailers and CPG brands also expressed interest in connecting and digitizing the shopping experience. This interest intensified with the onset of the pandemic. Consequently, Yu and SideChef focused on shoppable recipes, as it was a more straightforward revenue generation method.

“I think shoppable recipes themselves are just the tip of the iceberg,” Yu commented. “We sent out over 3 million online orders to our retail partners last year through this experience.”

The company plans to use its new funding to leverage the infrastructure it has developed over the past decade. Image recognition technology is one area that could help them do this, as it has potential applications across the entire food ecosystem, from inventory management to automating cooking settings on smart kitchen appliances.

“We believe image recognition is a catalyst-type technology that we hope to continuously build upon the partnerships that we have,” Yu stated.

I’ve been somewhat down on the smart kitchen recently, as it seems companies—especially big brands—have not been innovative. When I asked Yu his thoughts about this, he acknowledged the issue but attributed it to a normal stage in market evolution.

“I think part of the plateau you’ve observed is because some companies, after taking their first swing, have felt that it’s not worth it to try again right now,” said Yu. “Maybe they don’t want to be the leader in this area. Or maybe they don’t have a confident route or sometimes even a confident group to be able to leave those charges internally.”

Despite the obstacles encountered by some players in the smart kitchen industry, Yu remains optimistic about the future of smart kitchen innovation.

“This is about unlocking the value and entering the next chapter, which is where most of this additional investment funding will be directed,” Yu said.

You can hear my full conversation with Yu below.

TurtleTree Debuts Animal-Free Lactoferrin

TurtleTree, a biotechnology startup using precision fermentation to create bioactive ingredients such as animal-free milk proteins, has announced it will debut its precision-fermentation derived lactoferrin, which has the commercial name of LF+, tonight at a tasting event in San Francisco.

The bioactive milk protein, which the company says is nicknamed “pink gold” due to its high-cost and pink hue, is much sought after for its health benefits, including immunity, iron regulation, and digestive health support. However, conventional extraction techniques require massive amounts of cow’s milk – up to 10,000 liters, the equivalent of a week’s worth of milk production from nearly 50 cows – to obtain just 1 kilogram of purified lactoferrin. Because of this, traditionally derived lactoferrin costs anywhere between $700 to $1,500 per kilogram, which has been a gating factor in the broader adoption of this valuable protein.

By using precision fermentation, which uses microbes embedded with lactoferrin’s recipe to produce the protein, TurtleTree hopes to offer a more affordable and sustainably-derived form of lactoferrin to the market in LF+. If they are successful, the company may be one of the first startups launched in recent years to target proteins for infants (and beyond) using cellular agriculture to bring a scaled, revenue-generating product line to market. More broadly, the company may have also engineered an approach to make lactoferrin more widely available to consumers through a variety of products.

The move towards precision fermentation to produce functional proteins is a sign the company has evolved since it was founded in 2019. When The Spoon first interviewed the company, they focused primarily on using cell-cultivation methods to produce breast milk analogs. According to CTO Max Rye at the time, the company was using cell-cultivation techniques to grow mammary gland cells in a lab that would lactate milk. Company CEO Fengru Lin speculated early on that their first product would be human breast milk.

Fast forward to 2023, and the company has become more diversified in its approach to utilizing cellular agriculture techniques after bringing on some key hires skilled in the application of precision fermentation, a move that looks to have accelerated its path toward revenue with the commercialization of its animal-free lactoferrin. The company hopes to launch LF+ in the fourth quarter of this year.

You can watch the TurtleTree hero reel on their new product below:

Unlocking The Future of Nutrition with LF+, TurtleTree’s Unique Lactoferrin

Are Deep Sea Fish Farms the Future of Aquaculture? Forever Oceans Thinks So

The growth of aquaculture has been one of the big stories in the fishing industry over the past couple of decades, as fish raised in farms has grown from about 20% of captured fish in the 1990s to half of all fish caught in by 2020, according to a report issued by the United Nations.

But fish farming, while lauded by many experts as a way to relieve stress on ever-declining wild fish populations, is seen as rife with problems by others. Critics say fish farms can expose local fish populations to parasites such as fish lice, as well as antibiotics, and other chemicals. They also say farms pollute waters with unnatural amounts of concentrated fish feces emitted from farm enclosures. Farmed fish also can escape enclosures, which can pose harm to wild fish populations through interbreeding, especially if the farmed fish are genetically modified.

But a new generation of fish farming startups believe that pushing aquaculture away from the shore and into the deep sea, aided by the use of advanced technology such as sensors, automation, and artificial intelligence, will alleviate many of the problems associated with near-shore fish farming and produce a cleaner, more abundant harvest that is desperately needed to feed a growing global population.

One such company is Forever Oceans which has developed a system for farming fish miles offshore in the open ocean. The company, a spinoff of Lockheed Martin, says it can place its fish enclosures 10 miles offshore, up to 6000 thousand feet deep, and allow them to essentially drift naturally in the ocean’s current using a “patented single-point mooring.”

Forever Oceans uses sensors and cameras to monitor water quality and fish behavior, and “AI-driven” management software can make precision adjustments to feeding amount and timing and control hazards such as algae blooms. Underwater images captured by the system’s cameras are processed by what the company describes as biomass software to determine when the fish are ready to harvest. The entire process, which the company says drastically reduces the amount of human interaction with the fish population, is managed hundreds of miles away in a central operations center where a “single employee can monitor and manage our entire global network of farms via their laptop or mobile phone.”

Forever Oceans and other startups in this space believe that pushing fish farms further offshore and deeper underwater allows the fish to live in a more natural environment. Deep ocean currents, they say, can wash away pollutants and naturally clean enclosures, which keeps disease to a minimum. Proponents also believe these systems are better than land-based systems because open ocean farms utilize deep ocean tides as a natural filtration system, resulting in less energy usage and better access to naturally provided nutrients.

While it’s too soon to tell if deep-sea fish farming grows to become a significant slice of the overall aquaculture market, it definitely has momentum. Ever since the first deep-sea aquaculture project launched off the shores of Norway in 2018, a number of startups like Forever Oceans, Mowi, Innovasea, and Blue Ocean Mariculture have started to work on systems to enable fish farming in the open ocean.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this new movement for pushing fish farms into the deep ocean is not without its critics. Last fall, a coalition of environmental groups filed a legal challenge to a permit for a facility off the coast of Florida owned by Ocean Era, a company that has deployed Forever Oceans technology. They claim the EPA issued the permit without adequately vetting the facility’s environmental impact.

For its part, Forever Oceans continues to push forward, building out farm systems across the globe. Last June, the company said it would farm 2,500 tonnes of fish to be harvested over the next 12 months from their Panamanian farm and would bring on more fish capacity from farm sites being developed in Indonesia and Brazil. And this week, the company announced its farm-raised Kanpachi, a popular sushi-grade ray-finned fish, is now on the menus of  75 restaurants across the U.S, including Charlie Palmer Steak in Napa and Michelin-star Gravitas in Washington D.C.

(UPDATE): Betterland Foods, Maker of Candy & Milk With Animal-Free Whey, Is Seeking a Sale

UPDATE: A spokesperson for Betterland reached out to The Spoon with the following statement:

“betterland foods™ is not closed down. It is currently being prepared for sale and is in talks with several CPG brands. After seeing a proof of concept with the success of both WOO and betterland milk, and after looking at the current market and retailer landscape, betterland foods decided to bundle the brands and sell to a larger CPG to capitalize on the success of the formulations and the potential for the brand to flourish with more resources. Given her experience selling think!® to Glanbia, she (founder Lizanne Falsetto) believes this is the best approach.“

It appears that Betterland Foods, a startup launched last year to create dairy and chocolate using Perfect Day’s precision fermented animal-free whey, has closed its doors.

Sources close to the company have told The Spoon that Betterland closed down earlier this year. The websites for Betterland Foods dairy and Woo Bars are no longer active.

The company debuted with significant fanfare in early 2022, touting the impressive background of its better-for-you industry veteran founder Lizanne Falsetto. Falsetto, who helped pioneer the nutrition bar category with the launch of thinkThin brands, came out of retirement to launch the new company, citing her concern for the toll traditional animal agriculture is taking on the planet.

“I am disturbed by the toll of food production on the planet, and I kept a close eye on climate-friendly protein innovation,” Falsetto wrote on Linkedin. “I fell in love with the health benefits and eco-friendly footprint of cow-free protein, but what’s more, I began to develop a vision.”

Betterland Foods and Woo were two of the first of a growing list of external go-to-market partners for Perfect Day for its animal-free dairy proteins. The maker of precision fermented dairy products diversified its strategy of launching internally developed brands through holding companies such as Brave Robot and began to work with external partners over the past couple of years. Betterland and Woo, which are still listed as brand partners on the company website, look to be the first of the company’s external partner brands to exit the market.

While Falsetto’s experience launching a better-for-you brand in thinkThin (which she sold to Glanbia in 2015) was a promising indicator Betterland could help create a new category utilizing animal-free protein, the results a year later show that even the strongest of resumes is no guarantee in noisy, saturated markets. Both dairy and candy are highly competitive categories in which consumers tend to be loyal to brands they know and love. With precision fermentation, this difficulty is compounded by the reality that messaging the uniqueness and benefits of animal-free-but-identical inputs is nuanced, something we’ve witnessed as Perfect Day itself has worked through different framing as it’s pushed its products into the market.

Speaking personally, it’s a bummer to see Woo and Betterland disappear. I tried the Woo chocolate bar and thought it tasted great, and while I never got a chance to try Betterland milk, I’ve had milk with Perfect Day’s animal-free protein and thought it was the best alternative milk I’ve ever sampled.

I’ve reached out for comment to both Perfect Day and Betterland and will update this story when we get a response.

Food Tech Founders Navigate Turbulence of SVB Collapse & Subsequent Fed Intervention

If you’ve ever traveled overseas when big news happens at home, it can feel disorienting.

I felt that to a certain degree last week when The Spoon team was in Europe to attend the HIP conference in Spain and to travel to the Basque Culinary Center. Like many of you, I was trying to keep on top of the news about SVB’s collapse and wondering whether the bank’s collapse would lead to a 2008-like contagion, but all the while doing so from a different time zone and a foreign country.

But that feeling of discombobulation was no doubt minor compared to what many food tech founders felt as they tried to figure out what all this meant to their companies. Many were directly impacted by having the bulk of their funds sitting in SVB accounts, and I watched updates on Twitter, Linkedin, and other social channels as founders communicated in real-time as they navigated the impending financial crisis.

One of those companies was Omsom, a fast-growing CPG brand founded by sisters Vanessa and Kim Pham to deliver Asian flavor mixes to consumers via DTC channels. The company published an open letter via Instagram late last week to explain how they were processing the crisis and to appeal for help from their customers.

“Silicon Valley Bank collapsed yesterday in the second largest bank failure in American history — and they were our bank,” they wrote. “This is an open letter from our founders on what happens next + how you can help 🙏🏽.”

Like many founders, they were filled with trepidation about the coming week before the Fed, US Treasury, and the FDIC announced their plans for dealing with the crisis.

Shiru’s Jasmin Hume of Shiru not only felt the confusion a founder must feel when hit with this kind of news but, like me, was trying to navigate the news while traveling overseas. She documented how she was dealing with the crisis while traveling in Japan en route to Spain on her Linkedin:

The past few days have been exhausting learning and responding to SVB’s collapse while in Japan on business. The next few days won’t be any easier, and thinking about them sort of takes my breath away:

Today I’m flying to Spain where I have an 18 hour stop to pick up my 10 month old son who’s been there with family. During the stop I need to work with my team to navigate and act on anything affecting Shiru given whatever SVB updates are on Monday. Monday we’re also announcing a huge, regularly scheduled, milestone for Shiru (more on that soon!). On Tuesday I fly to SF with my son (something like 4 flights, around 30 h traveling combined over the next 2 days across 17 time zones – half of that with a baby). Then back in the office in Alameda Wednesday for 5 on site visits and tastings with investors/partners followed by a speaking engagement at Future Food-Tech Thursday and more conference stuff Friday. All this while helping a very jet-lagged baby re-adjust to his home in Oakland.

Stateside, many future food startup founders were trying to navigate the crisis while also trying to showcase their products at one of the food industry’s biggest confabs, Natural Products Expo West. One such founder was Darko Mandich of Melibio, a company that makes a honey alternative via precision fermentation. Mandich was working at the booth when he started getting a barrage of text messages from associates about the SVB crisis.

“From three different investors, I received text messages that were going around,” Mandich said in an interview with Food Dive. “‘Have you seen the news?’ ‘Are you guys exposed to SVB?’ ‘Darko, you might need to react on this.'”

“And I was like, ‘What’s happening?'” Mandich continued. “Then I checked out the news, and I was really shocked.”

Many of the founders impacted by the crisis expressed relief once the Fed, the Treasury, and the FDIC issued a joint statement on Sunday outlining how they would assure all depositor funds in SVB and another financial institution, Signature Bank, would access to all of their deposits on Monday, March 13th.

Omsom updated their Instagram message upon news of the US government’s intervention: as of 6:15p ET, a statement was released by the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and FDIC saying that all SVB depositors will have access to their accounts starting Monday 3/13! We won’t breathe easy until we have access to our funds, but this is DEFINITELY a win 😭.

But like founders across the startup world, those leading food tech companies are newly aware of institutional risk and are figuring out how to manage it going forward.

Stephen Kalb, the CEO of Seattle-based Shelf Engine, started transferring his money out of SVB on Monday, telling PBS he had learned a “very hard lesson.”

“I obviously now know banks aren’t as safe as I used to think they were,” he said.

Food Rocket Comes Down To Earth As Yet Another Speedy Grocery Startup Closes Its Doors

It seems almost a lifetime ago when, in 2021, a gaggle of ultra-fast grocery store startups with interesting names like GoPuff and Gorillas raised gonzo amounts of cash.

We all know what happened since the go-go funding days of the quick grocery boom. While I wouldn’t call last year’s pullback a canary in the coal mine, it was one of the first segments in the broader food tech market to send a signal that the era of easy money ended.

And so last week, amid a simmering systemic financial crisis, we got the news that Food Rocket, a fast-grocery startup that launched service in San Francisco in 2021, has closed its doors.

Here’s the entirety of the statement sent out from the company:

Food Rocket, a rapid grocery delivery startup, ceased operations in March 2023 after exhausting its funding. In spite of overall profitability, Food Rocket ran out of capital while struggling to raise additional funding. The recent downturn in the capital market made it difficult to get a bridge from its investor retail company Alimentation Couche-Tard, and the founding team made the difficult decision to shut down its operations in the United States.  

“We believe that the rapid delivery industry has disrupted the retail market and changed consumer behaviours. Unfortunately, current economic conditions reshuffled the tech market and presented significant challenges in the venture capital market. The decision to cease operations was incredibly hard, and we put in 100% up until the very last day, trying to stay afloat for our customers and team members.,” said Vitaly Alexandrov, CEO and founder of Food Rocket. 

At this point, no one is probably surprised about the shutdown of one of the smaller players in this segment. Fast grocery’s well-publicized struggles amidst a downturn in funding and broader questioning of the segment’s business case were the writing on the wall for a company like Food Rocket. Combine that with the fact that the company closed during a week in which everyone’s attention was elsewhere, and the sound of the company’s doors closing barely made a whisper.

Ironically, Food Rocket’s shutdown comes just about the time when company founder Vitaly Alexandrov predicted fast grocery would be commonplace.

“In a year or two, it will be like a commodity,” Alexandrov told The Spoon in 2021. “Everyone will deliver in ten minutes.”

While his prediction didn’t quite come true – mainly because most things do not need to be delivered with that level of urgency and same-day delivery suffices for the bulk of our needs – I think larger players like Amazon and Walmart have made progress in building out their capabilities for fast delivery. Longer term, the rollout of new delivery and micro-manufacturing technologies will almost certainly speed up the pace at which consumers can satiate their needs nearly instantly.

Unfortunately for Food Rocket and many of its peers, they won’t be around to see the day when nearly-instant delivery becomes ubiquitous.

Video Sessions: Food Robotics Outlook 2023

We also heard from entrepreneur and restaurant operator Andrew Simmons, who is reinventing his neighborhood restaurant with digital technology and robotics.

Atish Aloor told us how his company CloudChef is creating a way to digitize the chef and building an operating system for repeatable, high-quality cooking.

Mark Oleynik of Moley and Khalid Aboujassoum of Else Labs discussed the opportunity and challenges of building cooking robots for the home kitchen.

Arthur Chow of S2G Ventures and Buck Jordan of Vebu Labs discussed the funding environment for food robotics startups and how the market’s unique characteristics make it different from other food tech verticals.

This content is for Spoon Plus subscribers. However, if you are interested, you can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

‘It’s Tough for Robotic Companies’: VCs Talk About the Funding Landscape for Food Automation

It’s not a secret that the tech industry is going through a challenging time when it comes to venture capital. The food tech sector is no exception, and, according to Vebu Labs managing partner Buck Jordan, food robotics has been hit especially hard.

“It’s tough for robotic companies,” said Jordan during the venture capital landscape session at this week’s Food Robotics Outlook 2023 event from The Spoon. According to Jordan, the overarching reason is that food robotics startups have an especially long journey to get to that first dollar of revenue.

“The challenge is that robotics is a really expensive sport. It takes two or three years to get to a commercializable major product.”

Arthur Chow, an investor at S2G Ventures, agrees.

“With valuations, the hammer has come down hard on the anvil there in the last couple of months,” said Chow. “These are really capital-intensive businesses. So you’re just looking at a math equation around valuation; how many rounds you have to raise in the future and how much you will get diluted. And then ultimately, an exit value, which there haven’t been a lot of exits.”

The reason for these long journeys to revenue is that, often, the founders of these companies have such big visions for their robotic systems.

“We all start these food robotics companies with like, ‘let’s automate everything, the biggest thing,'” said Jordan, previously a founder of Miso Robotics, the company behind the Flippy restaurant robot. “We devise these like huge, aggressive, big projects, and they’re incredibly valuable, but the capital curve to get there is so steep.”

One potential remedy to these long gestation times is taking a portion of that bigger idea and offering something useful – and quicker to market – than a hugely complicated system that takes years to perfect.

“I suspect that some robotics companies who are a little more responsible, or a little more revenue-oriented, are going to start paring down their objectives,” said Jordan.

Jordan pointed to Creator, a maker of fully roboticized restaurants, as an example of a company he believes has valuable technology that could be ‘parted out’ to the market and be successful.

Both Jordan and Chow believe that there will be a number of food robotic startups that could get acquired over the next year as well-funded companies look to roll up interesting IP. But beware, says Jordan.

“There’s an opportunity because you can buy this IP for pretty affordable prices, but you need to have a team and expertise in house to do that. And so, woe be to the pure financial investor who starts rolling these things up without having a team on board to do that.”

In the end, both investors still see an opportunity for food robotics, but believe the key will for startups to not only show a path to revenue, but clearly illustrate how they can enable new lines of revenue over time.

“It’s sort of that gradual build we’re talking about,” said Chow. “We start with one use case in revenue and it makes money there, but then you do need to, over time, build and continue to think about the utilization of the robot and an ROI.”

You can watch the full session below.

Venture Capital Food Robotics Outlook 2023

Food Tech Weekly: Restaurant Subscriptions, DeSci + Food, Microreactor-Powered Unagi

Is it me, or does every restaurant have a subscription program nowadays?

Some, like Panera, have been at it for years, but last year seemed to be when restaurants caught membership fever. Taco Bell kicked off 2022 by announcing its Taco Pass. Soon after, Subway launched its subscription for half-price footlongs to its 10 thousand biggest fans. P.F. Chang’s soon joined the party with its points-driven Platinum program.

And then there are those going the web3 route. Gary Vee’s Flyfish Club had the restaurant world abuzz after raising $14 million via an exclusive NFT membership program. A little later, we scratched our collective heads at Starbucks Odyssey, the Web3 extension of their popular loyalty program. Others, like Chubby Cattle and Wow Bao, also got into the act.

But it’s not just the chains that have subscription fever. Smaller restaurants, like Mamma Ramona’s, also see memberships as a way to drive repeat business and access potential new customers,

Food delivery exec Andrew Simmons purchased the Italian restaurant in Ramona, California, in early 2020 and soon set about completely reinventing the restaurant’s operations through technology. He not only refreshed the joint’s digital stack with a combination of Toast, Ovation, and Incentivio, but he also layered automation into both the front and back of house.

Today the Dinerbot T5 robotic server helps the wait and bus staff haul large orders to tables and bring dirty dishes back to the kitchen, and a Picnic robot pizza topper in the kitchen spits out pies at a pace of up to 130 per hour. In addition, Simmons added a new dough press, a couple of new Turbochef pizza ovens, and new refrigerators to help keep up with his higher pizza production volume. 

This automation – alongside the restaurant’s digital makeover – is the enabling lever for the restaurant’s subscription program. The restaurant started preselling subscriptions in late 2022 for $149 per year (or $99 on Black Friday), entitling subscribers to one pizza per week for 52 weeks. Simmons says this faster production speed and the lower per-pie cost – both enabled by automation – allow him to handle the weekly surge in volume.

And there are surges. According to Simmons, on a Friday in January, he served 183 customers in three hours, the restaurant’s busiest night ever. By the close of January – the first month pizza subscription members redeemed their awards – business was up 12% over the previous January.  Out of a total of 1,197 pizzas that were redeemable, Simmons said that they dished up 611 pizzas to subscribers, a 51% redemption rate. 

Can the growth last? One positive sign pointing to yes is the sustained success of other restaurants that have launched subscription programs. For example, Panera says that its coffee subscription program accounts for 25% of the brand’s transactions, and Pret-a-Manger’s program in the UK is used 1.2 million times per week. 

While it may be too soon to say if Mamma Ramona’s will see sustained growth, early indicators are good. According to Simmons, February is seeing a 6% increase in order volume over January. 

I’ll be interviewing Andrew later today at our virtual event, the Spoon Food Robotics Outlook 2023. If you want to listen in or ask Andrew a question, you can sign up here. 

Umami Meats Partners with TripleBar to Accelerate Cell Line Development for Cultivated Fish

Triplebar, a biotechnology company, and Umami Meats, a cultivated seafood company, have signed a letter of intent to collaborate on developing cell lines for sustainable cultivated seafood, starting with the Japanese eel according to a release sent to The Spoon.

Triplebar utilizes a microfluidics platform that it says can process thousands of complex assays per second with the noise characteristics of a liquid-handling robot. According to Triplebar CEO Maria Cho, these assays are processed using what she calls microreactors.

“The way to think about this is we take the test tube, and we miniaturize it to this very tiny microreactor that’s smaller than a human hair,” Cho told The Spoon. “And we’re able to put the thing that we want to test into this microreactor, and then the assay reagent that tests the thing that we’re looking for.”

With Umami, that “thing” they’ll be looking for is whether the cell line has the properties that it needs to grow in a bioreactor versus in an animal. That animal, in this case, is the eel, or unagi, a fish hugely popular in Japanese cuisine worldwide. Unfortunately, because of its popularity, unagi has become endangered due to overfishing. While much of the unagi sourced for human consumption is now produced via aquaculture, eel fish farms are incredibly inefficient due to the highly carnivorous nature of eels (researchers say it takes 2.5 tons of wild fish to make 1 ton of eel).

To read the full story about Triplebar’s microreactor tech, head over to The Spoon.

Spoon Partner Event

It is best to reduce wasted food early in the supply chain as it gains more of a carbon footprint the more it is transported, processed, purchased, and taken to the consumer home. This looks like harvesting everything that is grown, finding new markets to sell produce that does not meet buyer specs, and improving systems of communication that relay forecasted demands back up the supply chain to producers. Solutions may include: Imperfect & Surplus Produce Channels, Buyer Specification Expansion, Gleaning, Partial Order Acceptance, Field Cooling Units, In-Field Sanitation Monitoring, Innovative Grower Contracts, Labor Matching, Smaller Harvest Lots, and more. 

Don’t miss out and register today to learn more about the latest innovations to reduce food waste!

Podcast: How the DeSci Movement Will Change The World of Food

Do you know what DeSci is?

Don’t feel bad if you don’t, especially if, like me, food is your primary focus.

A16Z’s publication Future describes DeSci as a movement in which “a growing number of scientists and entrepreneurs are leveraging blockchain tools, including smart contracts and tokens, in an attempt to improve modern science. Collectively, their work has become known as the decentralized science movement, or DeSci.”

If you haven’t heard of DeSci by now, the reason is that while the trend’s caught the attention of the biotech and research funding worlds, it hasn’t entirely made its way into the future food conversation just yet. 

But it’s only a matter of time, so I figure there’s no better time to learn than now. To help us do that, I invited Dr. Jocelynn Pearl, a biotech scientist, entrepreneur, podcaster, and DeSci expert, onto the podcast. 

In this episode of the podcast, Dr. Pearl and I discuss the following:

  • What is DeSci?
  • How DeSci is changing the insular and outdated world of research publishing
  • The benefits of using Web3 tools like DAOs, blockchain, and NFTs in science research
  • Why DeSci hasn’t yet reached the future food industry just yet and why that may soon change
  • What the future of science research may look like with these types of tools

To listen to this podcast, listen here or get it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. 

Vertical Farmer Oishii Doubles Down on Unique Japanese Varietals With the Introduction of the Koyo

Vertical farming startup Oishii has introduced another strawberry cultivar, The Koyo Berry, which will join the brand’s Omakase Berry offering introduced in 2018.

The Koyo Berry is a Japanese varietal grown outside Tokyo during winter. The berries will be grown first in Oishii’s east coast vertical farms, which use advanced robotics and traditional Japanese farming methods to produce the fruit. The Koyo Berry will be available through online grocer FreshDirect in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut for $15 MSRP per tray. The product is expected to expand to other markets, including Los Angeles, later this year.

Oishii introduced its first strawberry, the Omakase Berry, in 2018. Oishii founder and CEO Hiroki Koga decided, when building out his vertical farm, to attempt to replicate the elements of a perfect day in Japan (e.g., humidity levels, light) inside a controlled-environment farm in the U.S. This allows the company to grow the Omakase – and now the Koyo – Berry 365 days per year.

Find out by reading the full story here on The Spoon.

This Finnish Company Uses Radio Waves to Monitor and Reduce Dairy Waste

Dairy plants around the world are facing a new set of challenges as they grapple with rising raw milk costs and increasing pressure to reduce their carbon footprints as plant-based competitors try to draw a contrast with animal milk. A Finnish startup named Collo wants to help on both fronts using what it describes as liquid fingerprint technology.

According to the company, its technology can detect any type of liquid in pipes in real-time, giving companies a way to optimize production and cut product losses. Collo says its technology can keep track of the liquids in the pipes, showing exactly where the leakage is occurring. This enables dairy plants, breweries, and other liquid processors to address the problem at the point of origin.

Collo’s technology is based on an electromagnetic resonator that emits a continuous radio frequency field into the liquid. The signal reacts to interferences caused by different components, chemicals, and phases in the liquid, and the Collo analyzer immediately warns of any disturbances so that the process can be adjusted.

Read the full story at The Spoon.

Umami Meats Partners with TripleBar to Accelerate Cell Line Development for Cultivated Fish

Triplebar, a biotechnology company, and Umami Meats, a cultivated seafood company, have signed a letter of intent to collaborate on developing cell lines for sustainable cultivated seafood, starting with the Japanese eel according to a release sent to The Spoon.

Triplebar utilizes a microfluidics platform that it says can process thousands of complex assays per second with the noise characteristics of a liquid-handling robot. According to Triplebar CEO Maria Cho, these assays are processed using what she calls microreactors.

“The way to think about this is we take the test tube, and we miniaturize it to this very tiny microreactor that’s smaller than a human hair,” Cho told The Spoon. “And we’re able to put the thing that we want to test into this microreactor, and then the assay reagent that tests the thing that we’re looking for.”

With Umami, that “thing” they’ll be looking for is whether the cell line has the properties that it needs to grow in a bioreactor versus in an animal. That animal, in this case, is the eel, or unagi, a fish hugely popular in Japanese cuisine worldwide. Unfortunately, because of its popularity, unagi has become endangered due to overfishing. While much of the unagi sourced for human consumption is now produced via aquaculture, eel fish farms are incredibly inefficient due to the highly carnivorous nature of eels (researchers say it takes 2.5 tons of wild fish to make 1 ton of eel).

In describing how the Triplebar platform performs compared to traditional assay testing, Cho uses the analogy of the evolution of microprocessors. She says the company fits her microreactors on a chip that fits in the palm of your hand. That chip can process thousands of tests per second, millions per day, which she says is orders of magnitude more than tests run by humans or even liquid-handling robots. This increase is analogous to how a core-dense microprocessor performs compared to early computing technology.

In their partnership with Umami, Cho says they’ll look at how small changes to the genome produce the desired result in the cell line.

“We’re taking each of the individual base pairs in the genome and making a change in individual genomes,” said Cho. “And then, we’re oversampling that population to see what combination of changes give that final trait that we’re looking for which, in this case, are cells that grow in tanks versus animals.”

As for Umami, while its partnership with Triplebar will focus on eel, the company has plans to expand the collaboration to other types of fish. Umami says its “modular” production process works with various fish types, and the company says its platform will enable the manufacture of cultivated fish at different production sites tailored to local tastes. The company, which debuted its fish ball laksa last year in Singapore, says its product roadmap prioritizes endangered species that are IUCN Red Listed, particularly those that are unsuitable for large-scale aquaculture and face growing demand.