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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Drive-Thru Grocer JackBe Opens First Location in Oklahoma City

JackBe, which claims to be the country’s first curbside drive-thru grocer, opened its first location this week in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, according to a release sent to The Spoon. The store will allow customers to place orders via the JackBe app and pick up their groceries at a drive-thru bay, where a JackBe employee will deliver the groceries right to their car.

The new 17,000-square-foot location carries in-demand products across a number of categories, including produce, meat, bakery, deli, and consumables. JackBe is also planning to roll out prepared meals and local brands in the future.

While JackBe claims to be the first drive-thru grocery, another startup named Opie actually beat them to it when it launched its first location in South Caroline in 2021. To be fair to JackBe, at three thousand square feet, Opie’s is something more akin to a drive-thru convenience store than a grocery store. Before Opie, Amazon opened a drive-thru pickup location in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle for customers who ordered groceries through its website. Interestingly, Amazon announced this week they are closing that location (the e-commerce giant only has one other drive-thru location).

According to Supermarket News, JackBe closed a $3.5 million seed round in April of last year and plans to raise an additional $3.5 million in pre-Series A funding to fund the building of two more stores in the Oklahoma City area in early 2023.

No Meat Factory Raises $42 Million to Expand Plant-Based Meat Manufacturing Capacity

No Meat Factory, a leading plant-based alternative protein manufacturer, announced today that it has closed a Series B funding round, raising $42 million USD. The funding round was led by new investor Tengelmann Growth Partners, with participation from existing investor Emil Capital Partners (ECP). The company plans to use the funding to expand its production footprint in North America and build out its manufacturing capabilities to service the global market, increasing access to affordable alternative proteins for mainstream consumers.

No Meat Factory will use its new BRC-certified facilities in British Columbia to produce plant-based alternative protein products for its brand partners. Products will include meat alternatives for convenience products like nuggets and hamburgers and whole-muscle alternatives. Its second production facility, which will begin operations in early 2023, will increase production capacity and provide additional manufacturing capabilities for plant-based deli and sausage alternatives.

“The traction No Meat Factory has experienced in just a few short years is evidence that consumers want greater access to plant-based alternative proteins and brands are looking for ways to deliver quality at an affordable price,” said Dieter Thiem, CEO and cofounder of No Meat Factory. “With this latest funding round, we are excited to not only expand our operations to meet the needs of our partners, but to take advantage of the support and expertise of our investors as we expand our footprint globally.”

No Meat Factory will also continue to make significant investments in its global research and development organization that focuses on commercializing the latest innovations in alternative protein.

“No Meat Factory has an exceptional founding team with decades of experience in the plant-based industry, and we are thrilled to come on board to support the company’s next phase of growth,” said Patrick Schaich, Investment Partner at Tengelmann Growth Partners.

The funding is notable because it comes at a time when the plant-based meat industry has been struggling and has seen overall VC capital going into the space decline significantly. One factor in No Meat’s Factory’s favor may be its cofounder team, which includes Dieter Thiem, who was the former president of plant-based meat manufacturing company Flora Protein (which sold to Garden Protein) and COO Leon Bell, who was previously with ADM, where he helped launch the company’s plant-based meat solutions.

Afresh Rolls Out Its AI-Powered Fresh Food Management System to 2,200 Albertsons

Afresh Technologies, a fresh food management technology company, has announced the rollout of its predictive ordering and inventory management platform to more than 2,200 Albertsons Companies stores in the United States, including Safeway, Jewel-Osco, Shaw’s, Vons and ACME. The platform, which helps store teams to better order and plan fresh produce inventory, reducing food waste and achieving superior freshness in their stores, was implemented within seven months, making it one of the fastest in-store technology rollouts in the grocery industry.

The Afresh platform also provides department managers with easy-to-use ordering tools that leverage real-time insights. The company’s CEO and co-founder, Matt Schwartz, said that “supply chain and store technology implementations typically require a multi-year transformation and radical overhauls,” but that Afresh and Albertsons Companies were able to complete the roll out of the system in just months.

Suzanne Long, Chief Sustainability and Transformation Officer at Albertsons Companies, said that “driving sustainability practices across Albertsons Cos. is essential to our business and the communities we serve. Our partnership with Afresh helps us improve ordering and better manage our inventory of fresh fruits and vegetables so our customers have access to fresher products, and we’re able to make meaningful progress toward achieving our goal to have zero food waste going to landfill by 2030.”

Afresh, which raised a $115 million series B in August (bringing their total funding to $148 million), has been gaining momentum over the past year. The company currently has its software in 3,000 stores in the US, including Heinen’s, Save Mart, Bashas, Cub Foods, and Albertsons.

BlenderCap Wants You to Make Margaritas on the Go With Its Half Horsepower Portable Blender

Want to make margaritas on the go? Then you might want to check out the new small form factor blender unveiled last week at CES by a company called Cruz.

The Cruz BlenderCap is a new portable blender that has it all in the name: It’s a bottle cap with a blender built in. The product was developed by two former Apple employees, Dakota Adams and Matthew Moore, on the side while they set up a battery factory in China for Apple. The two eventually left their day jobs and went full-time on BlenderCap a year ago.

The BlenderCap’s strength is – perhaps not surprisingly, given the former day jobs of its creators – its battery technology. The blender uses what the company describes as a ‘next-generation electric vehicle Cell-to-Pack battery architecture’, which provides a half horsepower of power.

“You can blend an entire Costco bag of ice and fill an entire Home Depot bucket with margaritas on a single charge,” Adams told The Spoon at CES. According to Adams, the BlenderCap will work with almost any vacuum-plated bottle like a Hydroflask or Thermoflask.

The BlenderCap will start shipping next month from Shanghai, where the two founders leased manufacturing space and are making 6 thousand BlenderCaps in its first production run.

“We’re leasing factory space at a really high-end manufacturer in Shanghai, and we own all the equipment and the robots building this,” Adams told Techcrunch. “So we actually have on our assembly line — we designed the entire assembly line — and we’ve got more robots than people putting this together. It’s crazy. There are glue dispensing robots, automatic screw dispensers. It’s beautiful.”

The BlenderCap is available for preorder for $129 from the company’s website.

A high-powered PORTABLE BLENDER at CES #shorts

CES 2023: GROW UP Wants You To Make Plant-Based Milk at Home

If you’re an adult, there’s a good chance you’ve weaned yourself off of cow milk in favor of a plant-based alternative. After all, not only is plant-based milk less disruptive to the digestive tract, but it’s also often healthier.

But it’s not all good news. Plant-based milk is often filled with weird-sounding additives like xanthan gum and lecithin, while some have more recognizable ingredients like sugar and salt that you may want to cut out of your diet.

So if you want plant-based milk but want more control over what goes in it, one option is to make your own. One way to make your own is to try using your blender and a milk nut bag. But if you want to automate the process and have less mess to clean up, you might want to buy a countertop machine to create nut milk for you.

The latest nut milk machine to make its debut is from GROW UP. The machine, which was at CES last week in Vegas, “brews” up to 10 different kinds of plant-based milk. To do so, it uses what its creator calls a “cold extraction” process in which it grinds the ingredients and then vacuums the liquid through a built-in filtration system. Once the milk is dispensed – which takes about 3-4 minutes – the leftover pulp can be taken out and dried to use in baked goods.

The person behind the GROW UP Milk Brewer is Luiz Felipe Rapacci, a former F&B industry veteran who has worked for big CPG brands such as Coca-Cola and General Mills in Brazil. In 2017 Rappaci moved to the US to attend UC Irvine, where he studied innovation management and entrepreneurship. After working for a food tech startup and a basmati rice producer, Rapacci started working on what would become the Milk Brewer in 2020. GROW UP is beginning to manufacture the Milk Brewer for customers and expects to have it to market by mid-spring of this year.

The price for the countertop milk maker will be $599 and is available for pre-order. The price is a bit on the high-end, considering there are other plant-based milk makers on the market today for less than half that. That said, none of the ones I’ve seen make as many types of plant-based milk as Grown Up claims their brewer will make (10). GROW UP also has what looks like an easy-to-use touchscreen with pre-configured options that allow users to easily choose different types of plant-milk.

You can watch our interview with Rapacci from the show floor at CES below.

Milk Brewer Makes 10 Types of Plant-Based Milk!

Wonder Pulls a Zume, Drops Futuristic Food Trucks as it Pivots to Lower Cost Operating Model

According to a report this week in the Wall Street Journal, food delivery startup Wonder is laying off employees and will begin to phase out its signature food delivery trucks in the hopes of creating a lower-cost operating model.

This is a massive shift for a company that became the talk of the food delivery business for a high-touch approach built around its delivery vehicles. Wonder not only brought the food to a customer’s home, but it cooked it curbside in vans that had become ubiquitous over the past year and a half in the North Jersey market in which it operates.

According to the Journal, the company will pivot to a more conventional ghost kitchen model, operating ten kitchens around New Jersey and New York. In addition to delivery, Wonder will offer in-location dining and pickup at locations.

Tightening venture capital markets have cast a pall over the startup world over the past 12 months, and today’s news suggests that even superstar fundraisers like Wonder founder Marc Lore aren’t immune to investors’ darkening moods. It had always been an open question whether Lore could continue to raise enough money for an operating model that looked incredibly expensive from the outside, and now it looks like we have our answer.

Lore told the Journal he believed the current model would require another $1 billion in investment over the next two years to expand its mobile truck fleet. Lore now hopes to raise $350 million over the same time period.

In some ways, Wonder’s pivot is reminiscent of Zume, another high-flying startup that used custom-made delivery trucks and raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Zume, which made pizzas using robotic technology in central locations, used its customized delivery trucks with built-in pizza ovens to cook food on the way to customers. By early 2020, the company had run into financial problems and started pivoting away from its food trucks. It wasn’t long before Zume gave up on pizzas altogether, and today the company is a compostable food packaging company.

Now, the question for Wonder going forward is whether it will be able to maintain its momentum with customers in its current markets without the part of its business that most sets it apart from traditional delivery. Wonder has been extremely popular in the market it operates in, in large part due to the high quality and white-glove service enabled by its trucks.

Without that, will Wonder become just another – albeit very expensive – ghost kitchen startup? Only time will tell.

Cargill (Yes, That Cargill) Shows Off Smart Food Locker System at CES 2023

Most people know Cargill as a massive food conglomerate with a huge share of the total food commodity market. But considerably fewer people know the same company responsible for about 25% of total US grain exports has a digital business unit that incubates technology products more akin to something you might see from a Silicon Vally startup.

One of those products on display at CES 2023 was Chekt, a smart food locker system for restaurants, stadiums, and other food service-centric businesses. The Chekt system, which you can see demoed in the video below, automates the handoff of prepared food to customers or delivery drivers. The lockers can be configured to be hot and cold in the same unit, allowing a restaurant or other food service business to hand off a warm meal and cold drink to consumers from the same locker.

A Look at the Chekt storage locker system from Cargill at CES 2023

The way the lockers work is customers can order on their phone from their table or seat, and they receive a text when the food is ready. The customer then heads to the locker, responds to the text to notify Chekt they are ready for pick up, and the locker unlocks.

According to Cargill digital business lead Eric Parkin, the Chekt system is deployed at the Pittsburgh Penguins stadium and at restaurants on the US west coast. Parkin says that restaurants like Buckhorn BBQ are seeing as many as 70 orders a day going through the locker system for customer pick-up or delivery drivers.

Cargill’s Chekt system is just one of many smart locker systems for food pickup that have appeared over the last couple of years. As the pandemic accelerated the transition towards delivery and contactless pickup, companies like Cargill, GRUBBR, Minnow, and others have stepped in to fill a need for restaurants and others to automate the final handoff of food to their customers.

My guess is that over time we’ll see nearly every stadium in the US deploy similar solutions, where lines can get long, and people are in a hurry to get back to their seats. Larger restaurant chains that depend heavily on pickup orders and delivery will also likely make these a fixture, and there’s a good chance they’ll become commonplace in universities and large multifamily residences.

Haura Unveils a Modular Food Factory for the Kitchen at CES 2023

Nestled in the basement of the Venetian Expo center last week at CES, a startup from Italy showed off a machine that its inventor hopes will empower home cooks to do pretty much anything their heart desires: making home-made pasta noodles, roasting coffee beans, making cheese, brewing beer and lots more. In short, the machine, called the Haura, is intended to be a modular food factory in a box.

The Haura comes with three major features that unlock all of that flexibility: a motor to power different add-on modules (lasagna-maker, blender, cocktail shaker, sauce and frosting shippers, etc.), an induction heating surface for cooking, and a built-in extruder to enable home cooks to make food that usually requires pro-style equipment.

“The extruder means that you can automate a lot of processes that you only industrial food-making machines,” Haura spokesperson Matteo Pressacco told the Spoon. “For example, if you need to make pasta, candies, snack bars, are confectionery packed, baby’s food, everything can be automated.”

A Look at the Haura Food Factory at CES 2023

The company is working on a number of different modules, ranging from a lasagna maker to a beer brewer, that can be plugged into the appliance’s motor or extruder. This modularity gives the box its flexibility and sets it apart from other all-in-one cooking appliances.

The machine will have its own 10″ touch screen that shows the progress of any food-making project, including information such as temperature and humidity. The Haura will have what the company calls the F-OS, short for Food Operating System, that will enable the operation of the appliance. Different cooking instruction sets, called F-Apps, will come with pre-set processes for operating the machine and allow the user to cook a variety of foods through repeatable, step-by-step processes.

The inventor of the Haura is Angelo Pressacco, a mechanical and electrical engineer, who worked with chef Dario Zuliani on the conceptualization of the Haura.

The patented machine is still in the design phase, and it’s not clear at this point when it will be shipped to consumers. Let’s hope they can pull it off, because if Pressacco and his team can bring their idea to market, they may just create an entirely new category of home food-making appliance.

Kara Water Shows Off Its Air-to-Water Dispenser at CES 2023

At CES 2023, Kara Water showed off its Kara Pure water dispenser that takes moisture from the air and turns it into drinking water.

The Kara Pure combines three functions into one machine. The machine uses the process of desiccation to gather water from the air and accumulates up to 2.5 gallons (10L) of water per day. The machine also acts as a water purifier and dispenser, making it an all-in-one water machine, only without the need to replace water jugs every few days.

Air-to-Water Dispenser at CES 2023 #shorts

Kara Water isn’t the first company to show off water-from-air technology at CES. Watergen, which sucks in air and cools it to a dew point to create water droplets, demoed their machine in 2019 and debuted the working model a year later. Zero Mass Water, which uses solar power to capture moisture and turn it into drinking water, showed off its machine at CES 2019.

Kara Water was founded in 2017 by Cody Sooden and Michael Di Giovanna. The two wanted to create a machine that could produce clean drinking water free of contaminants. Sooden’s interest in the technology started after he began experimenting with capturing water from air while studying architecture. He eventually wrote a research paper on harvesting moisture from the air, which eventually became the genesis of the company’s technology.

The company ran a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo and raised $722 thousand dollars. The company announces it had finished production of its first units and started shipping to backers last month.

The Kara Pure is available now, but at a price of $3,799, it’s most likely priced a little high for consumers and will probably show up in offices or coworking spaces. The company’s founders have already started working to sell the technology in emerging markets like India, where contaminated water is a significant issue.

Brava Debuts the Brava Glass at CES 2023

Brava, a maker of smart oven technology, unveiled the Brava Glass smart oven this week at CES. The new model is the first update since the company debuted its eponymous in 2018.

The Brava Glass fixes what, for many, is the biggest shortcoming of the original Brava: not being able to see inside the cooking cavity. Ok, technically you could peek inside, but only by using the camera that resides inside the cooking chamber of the original Brava. But with the new Brava Glass, no cameras are needed (thought it does have one) as you look inside the Brava through a pane on the front door.

According to Brava spokesperson Steven Barush, the company had always intended to put a see-through glass on the door of the Brava, but didn’t want to rush it. That makes sense, especially considering that Brava’s cooking technology uses high-intensity light. To make looking inside the Brava with the naked eye without getting sun-blinded possible, the Brava Glass has a 97% tint says Barush.

As you can see below, even with a significant tint, the internal cooking light brights things up enough to get a good view of the inside of the oven.

A Look at the Brava Glass at CES 2023

The new Brava Glass with retail for $1,995 (compared with $1,295 for the original Brava) and comes with accessories like a cast iron dish, a muffin tin, a bread pan and more. The company expects the Brava Glass to shipping in early April.

Fridge Cam Maker Smarter Launches New Models at CES, Announces Acquisition of Chefling

Smarter is off to a busy 2023. At CES in Las Vegas today, the fridge cam and kitchen tech startup announced a new lineup of fridge cams. And, if that wasn’t enough, the company also announced they have acquired smart kitchen software maker Chefling.

The new lineup of fridge cams includes an update to the company’s original model. The FridgeCam2 has an extended 3-month battery life, an upgraded processor, and easier one-click set-up via the device’s Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. In addition to new FridgeCam, the company also introduced the FoodCam Mini, a small form-factor model that can be placed in the fridge or the pantry.

Smarter is also debuting the FridgeCam Pro this week, a model targeted at appliance manufacturers who want to retrofit a fridge cam into their refrigerator models without significant redesign. According to Smarter, the Pro model, which is powered by a USB-C connection, can be added to a fridge without having to make expensive modifications to an OEM’s pre-existing hardware.

Above: Smarter Image Recognition Technology

In addition to new hardware, the company announced it had acquired Chefling, a startup whose software helps home cooks manage food inventory, create shopping lists and plan meals. Smarter plans to pair Chefling’s food inventory database with its food image recognition capabilities to create what it says is the most advanced food inventory management system available.

Chefling, which got early traction through a partnership and investment from Bosch, has been pretty quiet for the last year and a half. By putting its software into the hands of Smarter, it gives its technology new life through the newly combined companies’ fuller suite of software targeted at the difficult task of consumer inventory management.

“The software offered by Chefling is the missing piece of the puzzle in terms of providing a full end to end service,” Chrisian Lane, CEO of Smarter, said in a release sent to The Spoon. “Taking the hard work out of stock keeping, meal planning and deciding what you need to buy next. We have automated the entire planning and cooking experience, making it the ideal assistant for the kitchen”.

Smarter also announced a new inventory management software tool it calls KitchenSync. The tool, paired with Smarter’s computer vision, can determine whether food is in stock or not. The software can factor in other sensor data (such as a weight sensor) and determine whether an item needs to be replenished. The software can also integrate with a customer’s online grocery service and can match food inventory to purchases.

If you want to check out Smarter’s new FridgeCam lineup, they’ll be at Showstoppers at CES.

Smarter Managing Director Isabella Lane will be on stage tomorrow at the CES Food Tech Conference on the future of cooking session.

SKS Invent 2022 Video Sessions

In fall 2022, we asked the question that got it all started: How will the consumer meal journey change over the next decade as technology and innovation around new business models are introduced at every step from farm to consumer plate.

The result was a two days full of learning, community and connections at SKS 2022.

This is the full video archive of all the sessions at SKS 2022.

You can see the list of speakers from SKS 2022 at the original event page here.

Panel: The State of the Smart Kitchen

Almost a decade into the industry’s effort to digitize the consumer meal journey, it’s time to take stock: Where are we and where are we going?

Speakers: Menting Gao (Kitchen Stories/BSH), Ben Harris (Fresco), Kai Schaffner (ex-Thermomix, CookingPal), Michael Wolf (The Spoon, moderator)

Innovator Showcase 1: Future of Cooking

This set of featured innovators will showcase the products that are building that recreate the cooking experience. Companies include: Celcy, Cuisine Machine and Remy Robotics

Fireside: The Story of Electrolux GRO

Electrolux’s GRO concept is a complete rethink of the consumer kitchen. We talk to Electrolux’s innovation lead to hear about the process of building a new approach to the consumer kitchen in a well-established appliance brand.

Speakers: Tove Chevally (Electrolux), Michael Wolf (The Spoon)

Panel: Building an Innovation Engine for the Future of Food & Cooking

Big companies are increasingly looking for new ways to build toward the future. In this session, we hear from two global brands about how they are doing just that.

Speakers: Tove Chevally (Electrolux), Lars Roessler (BSH), Allen Weiner (The Spoon)

Innovator Showcase2 : Discovery

These companies are building products that assist consumers with new ways to connect with food. Companies pitching during this segment include Here Here Market and Eatiquette.

Fireside: Building The Star Trek Drink Replicator with Cana

Earlier this year, a new product debuted that seemed straight from the pages of science fiction: a drink replicator. The Cana is a product that will be able to make almost any type of beverage, from cola to beer to wine to coffee. We talk with the company chairman Bharat Vasan about the story behind Cana and what it means for the future of personalization in the kitchen.

Speakers: Bharat Vasan (Cana), Michael Wolf (The Spoon)

Panel: A Look Forward: Predicting The Future of Consumer Kitchen

What will the consumer kitchen look like in 10 years? To answer that question, we bring together a panel that spends lots of time thinking about where the future of food and cooking is going.

Speakers: Bharat Vasan (Cana), Chris Young, (Combustion), Joe Ray (Wired), Michael Wolf (The Spoon)

Innovator Showcase: Personalization

The future is not one-sized-fits-all. In this innovator showcase, we hear from startups building products to help personalize our experience with food and nutrition. Companies featured include: Versaware and Elo Health.

Fireside: Wonder Wants to Reinvent Food Delivery

Wonder is taking an entirely new approach to home food delivery. The startup with over $800 million in venture funding is delivering chef-created meals to homes and bringing the chef curbside to cook and bring to the front door. We talk with Wonder’s Chief Customer Officer Katherine Prime about Wonder’s vision for the future of food delivery.

Speakers: Katherine Prime (Wonder), Kristen Hawley (Expedite)

Fireside: Food Delivery & the Connected Kitchen With Tovala

Tovala has had massive success for pairing a countertop steam oven with a food delivery business. We sit down with CEO and founder David Rabie to hear about his secrets to success.

Speakers: David Rabie (Tovala), Michael Wolf (The Spoon)

Innovator Showcase: Place & Space

In this showcase, we hear from companies who are rethinking how we utilize space within our homes or the food value chain to create new ways to provide customer value. Companies featured in this pitch session include Fresh Portal, Gardyn, Impact Justice and Koko.

Innovator Spotlight: Building an Airbnb for Instant Pots With Tulu

Tulu is trying to change the way people buy and use home products. Their company is building a platform for customers to buy home products like air fryers or pressure cookers for a limited time through a sharing economy model like Airbnb. We talk with cofounder Yael Shemer to learn about the company’s business model.

Panel: Fighting Food Waste Through Innovation

We all know the stats: Nearly one-third of food is thrown away at home. How can we use innovation to reduce this number while also recognizing consumers are very fixed in their behavior? This expert panel will break it down.

Speakers: Lily Herd (ReFED), Paul Levins (Evercase) Asrar Damdam (Uvera)

Fireside: Reinventing Single-Serve Coffee With CoffeeB

In September 2022, CoffeeB debuted a new system for single-serve coffee that is a complete re-think of home coffee packaging and delivery.

Speakers: Frank Wilde (CoffeeB), Michael Wolf (The Spoon)

Innovator Showcase: Sustainability

These companies are building products that reduce food waste, packaging and more. Featured in this section: Evercase, Perks99, and Trendi.