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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Israel’s BioBetter Gets Funding for its Tobacco Plant Protein Technology

Analysts predict the value of the cultured meat market will reach $2.8 billion in 2030, which isn’t bad for a sector that has yet to produce a viable mass consumer product. While many global regulatory agencies decide if/when to give lab-grown beef, chicken, fish, etc., the green light, there is no shortage of companies working on supporting this nascent space.

Among the latest to see the merit in providing the underlying technology for the cultured meat space is Israel-based BioBetter, which has landed $10 million in  A-round funding. This significant injection of capital will be instrumental in further building out its company, which uses tobacco leaves to develop growth factors (a material that stimulates cell production) to lower costs and increase lab-grown meats’ production.

BioBetter has developed a unique protein manufacturing platform for producing growth factors (GFs) using tobacco plants (Nicotiana tabacum) as natural, self-sustaining, animal-free bioreactors. The field-grown tobacco plants offer a new, sustainable, efficient, and flexible response to the market need for more competitively priced GFs, specifically insulin, transferrin, and FGF2. These compounds are necessary to make cultivated meat commercially viable.

“Tobacco plants actually have many advantages, including large biomass and fast-growing rate, their ability to yield multiple harvests year-round. Tobacco is not a food crop, and its foul-tasting alkaloids prevent it from being eaten by any animals, which makes it especially suitable for the production of growth factors,” Amit Yaari, PhD, CEO of BioBetter, told The Spoon via email. “No nutrients are extracted from the plants, but the tobacco plant cells are turned into small bioreactors, each manufacturing growth factor, according to the DNA sequence inserted into their genome.”

A bioreactor is defined as a vessel in which a chemical process is carried out which involves organisms or biochemically active substances derived from such organisms. For many plant-based foods and beverages, a bioreactor is a physical tank, such as that used by a brewery. Inside, genetically engineered microorganisms are cultivated with a substrate to create a mycoprotein burger, beer, or kombucha. Using a self-contained abundant available bioreactor lowers the cost of lab-grown meat. Every company in the world of lab-grown meat would agree that product pricing is a significant obstacle.

The $10 million round is led by Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), with additional investment from Milk and Honey Ventures, and the Israeli Innovation Authority (IIA). Erel Margalit, founder and executive chairman of JVP & Margalit Startup City, a Jerusalem-based innovation space, explains the economic advantage of using tobacco for growth factors. “Growth factors form the key building blocks for cell-cultured proteins. But costs currently run anywhere from $50,000 to $500,000 per gram of FGF2 (basic fibroblast growth factor). BioBetter’s technology can lower these costs to just $1 per gram.”

With its, investment BioBetter will expand to a larger pilot plant within the Tel Hai Industrial Park in the Upper Galilee Region of Israel. The new site will increase its tobacco plant-processing capacity, enabling it to meet its current global pool of commissions from cell-based meat cultivators. Shoseyov said that BioBetter is speaking to several companies in the cultured meat space but wouldn’t name any potential partners.

As for its immediate future, Yaari said, “We plan to scale up our production facility during 2023 and begin sales and supply of food-grade growth factors in Q1 2024. The tobacco plant suffers from a bad reputation, but we put it to good use.”

Millo’s New Motorless Blender Features ‘Magnetic Air Drive’

Millo is back.

Founded in 2015, Millo is a food tech appliance company that jumped into the market with an innovative small blender that produced smoothies and other blended concoctions with a quiet motor. As company Adam Trakselis, CEO, told The Spoon that the idea for the initial product came from the fact that the machine he used for his post-exercise blended beverages was so loud it woke his family. “So I would have to wait until everyone wakes up to use the blender.”

The noise issue led Trakselis to look for solutions to an appliance that hasn’t seen much innovation for decades. The first iteration of Millo sold around 1,000 units, but supply-chain issues with semiconductors forced the Lithuanian company to look for a new path. That new path is the Millo Air, the company’s next generation of the product which they just launched on Kickstarter.

Millo Air operates using a magnetic air drive (aka MAD). This axial flux stator generates magnetic fields, which turn a magnetic disc inside the blending lid without any physical connection. Without any turning parts inside the base, it is extremely quiet. In addition, the new model is smaller than the first generation making it even more portable. The drive, however, is more powerful than the original, with a top speed of 15,000 RPM.

According to the company, the first blender version received product innovation awards from IFA Berlin 2019 – the largest consumer electronics show in Europe, and was the SKS Startup Showcase winner in 2019. Moreover, in 2021 Millo received an award from Amazon as one of the top 20 most innovative products launching on its platform.

Trakselis has a vision for using a magnetic air drive far beyond his new blender. As he stated, “Our goal is to innovate the kitchen industry and to reduce electronics waste at its core by producing ten times fewer appliances. We are on a mission to establish magnetic air drive as a new sustainable kitchen standard – a home kitchen needs only one magnetic drive to power all the rotation needed devices.”

For example, a major appliance company can use the Lithuanian invention in a kitchen range. The stove can have a mix of induction burners and a magnetic air drive that can be used to power small appliances. Because of Millo’s successful use of MAD in its new product, other major manufacturers in the kitchen space have been in contact to explore use cases and partnerships. “You have one single cooktop that can have an induction for heating, and we have magnetic coupling fabrication. And if you combine them, you have one solution for all your needs in the kitchen, which is seamless,” he said.

Turning to the new Kickstarter, the company hopes to use some of the lessons learned from its initial campaign in targeting influencers and being more thoughtful about its channels. Five years of experience, the CEO says, has provided the company with some valuable marketing lessons. The campaign to raise £8,817 ($10,038) will last 30 days with the minimum pledge of £152 ($175) to land a Millo Air along with a smart blending lid, an on-the-go cup, drinking lid, charger, and magnetic hook. The Millo Air is expected to retail for $299 after the Kickstarter drive is over.

Better Meat Co. Serves Legal Foie Gras To Hungry Silicon Valley Workers

No trip to Silicon Valley would be complete without a visit to one of the sumptuous dining experiences at companies such as Yahoo, Google, Adobe, and LinkedIn. We’re not talking private dining rooms with white table clothes; employees and guests (especially employees) are treated to five-star dining every day, at no charge. And, if someone is hungry between scheduled meals—no worry; there are more snacks on hand than you would find at your neighborhood grocery store.

Thanks to its relationship with Bon Appétit Management Company, a Palo Alto-based café and catering service, Better Meat Co. is pulling a sleight of hand by offering foie gras to the employees at LinkedIn’s Sunnyvale officer cafeteria. The trick here is that foie gras is illegal in California, so Better Meat substitutes fungi for duck or goose liver. For good measure, Better Meat is showcasing its deli turkey slices, also made from mycelium called Rhiza. Rhiza (the Greek word for root) is a whole food, complete protein that’s allergen-free, neutral in taste, and has the texture of animal meat.

Showcasing is the keyword here. At this point in its lifecycle, Better Meat Co. is more of a supplier than a producer, offering its mycoprotein to partners such as Hormel for inclusion in its existing and new products.  As CEO Paul Shapiro explains, Better Meat Co. is focused on what it does best—“Our real expertise is in the fermentation and creating this extremely meat-like and versatile ingredient,” he told The Spoon, “But every once in a while, we like to showcase what the ingredients can do and the fact that it can make things as diverse as a turkey slice and foie gras really showed that. And so, in California, it’s illegal to sell foie gras, but now there is an option to enjoy that same delectable experience.”

Better Meat Co. walks a tightrope like others in the plant-based protein and cultured meat sector. Once a viable product has been developed, they face the option of taking their creations directly to the market (B2C) or taking the safer B2B route where a company offers its product to food manufacturers for their use in existing or new products. Shapiro, known throughout his industry as a visionary, realizes his company can take both paths to success.

In October 2021, Better Meat Co. and Hormel’s venture division entered an exclusive partnership to bring new mycoprotein and plant-based protein products to the marketplace. “Companies like Hormel have dramatically larger product development teams than we do,” Shapiro said. “Once our ingredients are in the hands of experts at companies like Hormel Foods, we are confident that the next generation of alternative meats will be more convincing and economical than ever.”

Perdue is another partner of Better Meat Co. In June 2019, the Sacramento-based company launched a national partnership with Perdue Farms – a leading chicken producer in the U.S. The company will provide Perdue with plant-based blends mixed with Perdue chicken to create the Chicken Plus product line.

While relationships with Hormel and Perdue make sense in the short run, neither, at his point, shows the breadth of Better Meat’s possibilities. In-house products developed by its food scientists and chefs range from Rhiza-based beef to fish to pork and may lead to the company—at some point—going directly to consumers.  “I think you can expect to see that,” Shapiro said of such future plans. “We want to be able to bring our micro protein to as many people as possible, and we want to make it humane, easy to eat and affordable for everyone.”

According to Crunchbase, Better Meat has raised $9.6 million, the bulk of which came in a July 2020 round of $8.1 million. The new funding is led by Greenlight Capital and Green Circle Foodtech Ventures, and Johnsonville, the maker of Johnsonville Sausages. Another financing round would be expected for Better Meat Co to scale enough to bring its branded crabcakes and deli slices to hungry, healthy consumers.

A Robot-Powered Pasta Restaurant in Tokyo is Just the Beginning for Startup TechMagic

Back in 2017, I was in Tokyo for the first SKS Japan and thought I’d look around to see if I could find any robot-powered restaurants. I didn’t have much luck. In fact, about the only one that showed up during my search was a tourist attraction in Shinjuku, which wasn’t so much a robot restaurant as it was a dinner theater show that could only be described as Care Bears meets Mad Max Fury Road

Five years later, things have sure changed. Not only have automated mini-restaurants like Yo-Kai popped up around town, but there’s also a robot pasta restaurant slinging plates of noodles right across from Tokyo Station. That new restaurant, called E Vino Spaghetti, pumps out plates of pasta at a rate of over one per minute with its 3-axis robot.

Called P-Robo, the robot was designed by a Tokyo-based startup called TechMagic. The company spent three and a half years developing the robot, says company CEO and founder Yuji Shiraki.

TechMagic CEO Yuji Shiraki

The restaurant is owned by the Pronto Corporation, a subsidiary of Suntory. Pronto has over 300 restaurants around Japan, and TechMagic is working to deploy robots at 50 or so over the next three years. And that’s just one project; according to Shiraki, the company has deals to build robots for several large corporations, ranging from a large and well-known Korean company to Cup Noodle giant Nissin.

As for the P-Robo, I was impressed with how quickly it worked in a fairly small space. The robot preps the sauces and toppings, heats the noodles (which are pre-cooked and frozen, standard for noodle and pasta restaurants), combines it all in a spinner and then delivers the meal down along a conveyor belt to the plating station. From there, the meal is put on a plate, and a human worker does final prep for delivery to the customer. Afterward, the robot washes and cleans the prep bowls.

TechMagic Pasta Robot: Noodle cook, saucing, plating all in one minute.

The idea to build a food robot first came to Shiraki when he visited his grandmother. Over 90 years old, Shiraki saw she could not cook for herself and so started to think about how a home cooking robot might help her. However, he soon realized that Japanese kitchens were too small to build the type of robot he envisioned, and he started thinking about building robots for restaurants. It wasn’t long before he quit his job as a management consultant and founded TechMagic.

That was five years ago. Since then, the company has raised $23 million in funding (including a $15 million Series B last September), received a patent for its pasta-making robot, and plans to create its own chain of robot-powered franchise restaurants.

At the rate Shiraki and his team are going, Tokyo might just be filled with restaurant robots when I come back for SKS Japan 2023. And who knows, someday soon, I may even see a TechMagic robot closer to home.

Autonomous Restaurant Startup Yo-Kai Express Expands in Japan, Announces New Investors

This spring, Yo-Kai Express ramen vending machines showed up at Tokyo Station, Haneda Airport, and Shibaura Parking Area. During its Japanese debut, the company worked with Ippudo to sell bowls of the hugely popular ramen chain’s noodles through its automated mini-restaurants.

And sell noodles they did. According to Yo-Kai CEO Andy Lin, during the first week, the Tokyo station machine sold a hundred bowls of ramen per day. That strong demand apparently impressed Ippudo enough to not only greenlight more Yo-Kai machines distributing their ramen in the near future, but to also invest in the company.

The news of the expanded relationship was shared as part of a press conference and on-stage session at SKS Japan on Friday in Tokyo. In addition to the news of Ippudo’s investment (through its parent company Chikaranomoto Holdings), Yo-Kai also shared that Japan Tobacco (JT) would be participating in the funding round. JT has a significant processed food business, and Yo-Kai will begin selling the company’s TableMark udon noodles through its vending machines. The total capital invested by the two companies via the Series A round was not disclosed.

According to Yo-Kai CEO Andy Lin, both companies see Yo-Kai as a way to connect to new customers in places where they might not otherwise reach.

“We are their extension,” Lin said. “They don’t need to spend the capital. We are their micro-store.”

Yo-Kai’s Japan country manager Keiji Tsuchiya told me that CPG brands like the idea of using Yo-Kai to trial new food concepts. He said while established food companies with well-known brands might be slow to launch a new product through traditional channels, they can trial new products much more quickly and easily with Yo-Kai. Some, said Tsuchiya, even launch a “virtual” brand concept on Yo-Kai to see how consumers respond.

“For a Japanese food company, selling products with their own name brand is a long process,” Tsuchiya said. “They need to get board approval to start something. It takes one to two years. But with a virtual brand, it’s much easier.”

According to Lin, Yo-Kai plans to expand its Japan vending machine footprint from the current total of three to ten in the near future. They also plan to continue to expand in the US and are talking with other large brands in places such as Korea about entering their market.

Beyond Meat Enters Japan Through Exclusive Agreement With USMH

Beyond Meat is entering Japan through a new partnership with one of the country’s largest grocery store holding companies in United Super Market Holdings (USMH).

The new agreement, announced on Friday in Tokyo at the SKS Japan conference, is a distribution and product development deal through which USMH will have exclusive distribution rights of Beyond Meat branded products in Japan as well as the ability to use Beyond’s meat in new products developed for the Japanese market.

Products co-developed under the partnership will be sold under USMH’s Green Growers brand, a brand initially launched by the grocery chain to sell lettuce grown via the company’s vertical farm “plant factory” called TERRABASE. These products, the first of which will include Beyond’s minced plant-based ground beef, will also include Beyond’s branding on the products in something akin to a “powered by Beyond” style branding approach. Products developed under the Green Grower brand will be tailored to specific formats and tastes of the Japanese consumer.

The co-development partnership between USMH and Beyond will be done through a new open innovation initiative from USMH called “AKIBA-Runway”. USMH launched AKIBA-Runway in March of this year as a way to work with other companies to utilize their technologies to create new products for their customers.

For Beyond, the deal with USMH is the company’s second attempt to enter the Japanese market. The company’s first attempt was going to be through a partnership with investor Mitsui, which had invested in Beyond back in 2016. However, the two companies announced in 2018 that the plan to enter Japan had been shelved.

But now with USMH, the plant-based meat company will enter the market in partnership with a powerful grocery chain with deep knowledge of Japanese consumer preferences and tastes. USMH, which has over 500 retail outlets in Japan through its MaxValu, Maruetsu and Kasumi chains of stores, has a wide reach across Japan.

For USMH President and CEO Motohiro Fujita, the new deal delivers in part on a vision he discussed the last time he spoke at Smart Kitchen Summit Japan in 2019. At that event (SKS Japan is put on in partnership with The Spoon and SigmaXYZ), Fujita talked about how he wanted to disrupt the Japanese grocery store market through innovation. Fujita told The Spoon that this deal and innovations delivered through AKIBA-Runway are the results of that vision he outlined on stage in the summer of 2019.

Shiru’s Partnership With Puratos Adds Further Credibility to its Protein Discovery Platform

In the world of food tech, decisions made on viable data are good, and a lot of data is even better. But with Shiru, a functional ingredient discovery company, with a dataset of more than 450 million known proteins, you are in rarified air and a welcome partner to forward-thinking companies.

With that in mind, Shiru has announced a new partnership with Puratos, a Belgium-based company that supplies food ingredients for bakeries. Shiru’s Flourish platform will evaluate naturally occurring proteins that could serve as a next-generation egg replacement.

“At Puratos, we truly believe that collaborations can fuel innovation within the food ecosystem,” stated Paul Baisier, Chief R&D Officer at Puratos. “As a company rooted in biology and science, Shiru is the perfect partner in the Puratos’s journey to finding novel uses for proteins discovered by Shiru’s Flourish platform as functional food ingredients that are sustainable, healthy, and delicious. Together with Shiru, we will be able to accelerate our plant-based product innovation pipeline for the benefit of our customers and consumers.”

Julian Lewis, Shiru’s Vice President of Business Development, told The Spoon why his company is excited about this partnership. “(Puratos) will help us scale up these (egg replacement) proteins using their fermentation facilities to a large kind of food grade sample, where we can then do more extensive food application testing. And through this partnership, we have a clear path to fully scaling these ingredients and bringing them to market.”

At this stage of its life cycle, Alameda, Calif.-based Shiru lives for such a partnership. Its database Flourish Flourish uses AI and machine learning to analyze its database of nearly 450 million proteins found in nature. Each application—for example, a plant-based meat company that wants to add taste to its burgers—identifies ingredients that will solve that specific functional ingredient challenge. This business model, Lewis explains, might expand to his company by commercializing some of its discoveries.

“There’ll be other food categories where we might collaborate, or we might do it ourselves,” Lewis said of opportunities down the road. “We might end up in a hybrid where we’re doing some stuff ourselves and collaborating with experts in other fields just to accelerate its market path.”

Functionality is Shiru’s secret sauce, which is the ability to target a specific property of a particular food product. Lewis explains:

“There are three categories we can play in. There’s replace in which we substitute an ingredient for one that, for example, doesn’t work properly. A second is taste. And what we mean by that is some plant-based foods are not that good, and I have yet to find a vegan cheese that works. Lastly, it is to transform. What new foods could be generated in the future that is not replacing traditional products, which are just new things? And maybe we can do that by discovering new functional protein.”

One of the side benefits of working with a complex database is the ability to help food manufacturers get away from using relatively unhealthy ingredients in some plant-based products that give the impression of being a clean alternative. “We’re aiming to provide a much better toolkit of ingredients to the food developers trying to create plant-based foods,” Lewis said.

Lewis adds that while Shiru is currently generally focused on the plant-based world, there’s no reason it will not be a player as the cultured food business develops. “All food has, I would say, taste and texture challenges, so with cultured meats, some additional ingredients may be required. And we’re already working on the early stage with players in that space as well. Our goal is to create more sustainable food ingredients that are both required and interesting.”

The Spoon is Back in Tokyo for SKS Japan

The Spoon is back in Japan!

That’s right, we’re back in Tokyo this week for the sixth Smart Kitchen Summit Japan, the first time we’ve been back in person since 2019 (for obvious reasons). The event started in 2017 and has grown to become the country’s biggest conference focused on food and cooking innovation.

Over the next three days, we’ll hear from some of the country’s most innovative startups, researchers, scientists, and academics about how Japan’s food tech scene has evolved over the past few years. We’ll be talking alt protein, cellular agriculture, smart kitchen, restaurant tech, and more.

If you’d like to attend virtually, you can pick up your ticket here. We’ll also be bringing you some interviews on The Spoon, so keep an eye out for that.

Japan is one of the most innovative and exciting places in the world for culinary innovation, and we couldn’t be more excited to spend the next three days talking food tech in Tokyo. Join us!

Web3 & Bubble Tea: FriesDAO Closing In On First Restaurant Acquisition

FriesDAO is closing in on its first restaurant purchase.

The group, which managed to raise over $5 million via an initial token offering in the spring of 2022, has identified a boba tea/frozen yogurt store in New York City that it describes as an “absentee store (no daily owner operation needed).” The group says the location is currently profitable.

To make the deal even more interesting, the FriesDAO team says “a very popular NFT collection” has offered to give the group full support with possible partnership implications if the DAO chooses to brand a store with the NFT. In a post on Snapshot, FriesDAO explains that partnering up with the NFT collection (which they do not name) is attractive because, in part, any commercial revenue restrictions from the NFT license would be removed.

“This would potentially allow us to own the store directly, explore and set our own policies, increase community engagement through creative endeavors, and possibly start our own franchise.”

Over the past six months, the group has been sifting through various proposals with mixed success. In a previous announcement, FriesDAO disclosed they had been in discussions with an operator of a Jersey Mike’s franchise to buy its location, but the deal fell through once the operator backed out.

The DAO now looks like it’s found a purchase target. After getting nearly unanimous consent from backers via an online poll, the DAO is planning to send a Letter of Intent (LOI) today, FriesDAO advisor Bill Lee told The Spoon.

If the deal (which will cost about $165 thousand) goes through, I’ll be curious to learn which NFT collection the group has been in discussions with. The success of Bored & Hungry has shown that branding a restaurant with a popular NFT can add buzz and drive customer visits.

The group’s choice of a boba tea spot makes sense, since spin-up costs for new locations are likely to be much lower than that of a traditional fast food joint. Lower capex costs could help accelerate expansion should the DAO move forward with an NFT-branded franchise model.

Israeli Startup Mermade Gets Seed Funding for Its Lab-Grown Scallops

Mermade is more than just another food tech startup with a laboratory-oriented process to manufacture an alternative protein. The Jerusalem-based company’s method of using algae to create scallops has set it apart and attracted significant early-stage investment.

The company has announced an oversubscribed $3.3M seed round as it showcases a circular cellular agriculture technology for producing cultivated scallops. In doing so, Mermade attacks two problems at once: bringing sustainable, good-tasting scallops to the public at a below current market price. Most cultured meat companies struggle with the economics of meeting or beating the cost of beef, chicken, or conventional seafood.

In an interview with The Spoon, company Co-Founder and CEO Daniel Einhorn explained the differences in his company’s business and technology approach. “We thought is why not pick some meat product that eliminates as much as possible of that food engineering challenge and just focus on those huge biological challenges,” Einhorn said. “Scallops, they have a fairly similar size, and each unit is a fairly similar size and shape. And texture taste is the same all throughout the cuts. Those are huge unfair advantages compared to our direct competition– other startups trying to replicate the more complex meat products.”

Mermade says it is the first company in the world to produce scallops using cellular agriculture. The company intends to develop a product and reach laboratory-scale production by 2023, reaching consumers and restaurants after that. Mermade will use the funds to employ more stem cell and algae researchers, accelerating the company towards this goal. The scallop is the first product the company will develop out of a diverse seafood portfolio that will gradually arrive on the market.

The use of algae to recycle the cells’ growth substrate is a clear distinction for Mermade. This cellular interpretation of traditional aquaponics was termed by the company Cytoponics, and the company has filed several patent applications related to this circular production method.

Related to the cost issue, Einhorn states, “It’s a big market segment and one that it has a very high price point, which is important because the main challenge right now is driving costs down. We’re trying to integrate all parts of our design into this prototype to bring cost even close to market parity.”

“In the next few years, consumers worldwide will be able to buy cultivated scallops (Coquilles Saint Jacques) made by Mermade in a supermarket or restaurant, at an affordable price and with the same quality and taste as the original food. Using Cytoponics as our production platform, we could also produce a variety of other cultivated seafood products such as calamari, shrimp, crab meat, and more.”

The company was founded in July 2021 by Daniel Einhorn (CEO), Dr. Rotem Kadir (CTO), and Dr. Tomer Halevy (COO). Investors in the seed round include the investment platform OurCrowd, Israel’s most active venture firm; Fall Line, an American VC fund specializing in AgTech; and prominent Dutch investor Sake Bosch.

Alternative seafood—both plant-based and cell-cultured—is a hot area. As The Spoon reported in April, Good Food Institue’s report, which looks at the entire alternative seafood category across plant-based, cell-cultured, and fermentation-based products, said 2021 investment brought the total invested in the category to $313 million from 2013 through 2021. Cultivated seafood startups commanded two-thirds of all investment in alt-seafood last year at $115 million, compared with $58 million invested in plant-based seafood startups and $2 million in fermentation-based seafood.

Among the companies active in this space are Wildtype, UPSIDE Foods, Gathered Foods, and Finless Foods. With all the activity in this forward-looking space, the United States—in the form of the USDA and FDA—has yet to give the green light for sales of these lab-grown alternative proteins. Only Singapore, Qatar, and to some degree, The Netherlands have given their stamp of approval.

Mezli’s Containerized Robot Restaurant Opens to Public This Weekend

Mezli, a maker of containerized robotic restaurants, is having a grand opening of its first restaurant this Sunday, August 28th, in San Francisco. The restaurant will open at the Spark Social food truck park located in the city’s Mission Bay area and run every weekend from Friday through Sunday.

The opening of Mezli comes after about two years of development after being conceived of by three Stanford graduate students. The three co-founders – Alex Kolchinski, Alex Gruebele, and Maxwell Perham – set up shop at KitchenTown, a food innovation hub and development space based in San Mateo, where they worked on their containerized robot in a large small warehouse area and developed the food across the street in KitchenTown’s commissary kitchen.

Now the company is ready to start taking orders. The way it works is the Mezli refrigerated container houses prepped and pre-cooked food made by humans in a centralized kitchen. Once customers order via a touch screen kiosk on the side of the container or on a mobile app, food is heated and plated, garnishes are added, and plated food is placed into smart lockers on one end of the Mezli container for customer pickup. According to Kolchinski, the Mezli system is able to pump out up to 75 meals per hour.

The Mezli team claims their restaurant is the world’s first fully self-contained robotic restaurant that serves a fresh and customized menu. While we don’t necessarily agree that Mezli is actually the first – after all, we’ve seen startups like Bolk are already serving up simpler bowl food offerings via their robotic kiosks around Paris, and Hyper Robotics has its fully automated robotic pizza restaurants-in-a-box serving up pies for Pizza Hut Israel – we can say that the Mezli is the first self-contained automatic system we’ve seen dishing up these kinds of complex multi-item plates of Mediterranean food.

And for the record, the food is pretty good. When I visited the Mezli team last December and had a falafel platter, I found the portion sizes generous as my meal was larger than what I got at Eatsa or through a Chowbotics-style kiosk, and included a tasty mix of proteins, rice, vegetables, and sauces.

Mezli’s meals start at $7 per meal. If any of our readers in the Bay Area stop by, drop us a line and let us know what you think.

You can watch our conversation with Mezli CEO Alex Kolchinski before last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit below (Mezli was the winner of the SKS 2021 Startup Showcase).

The Spoon talks with Mezli, Maker of Robot Restaurants-in-a-Box

Watch: Food Waste Innovation Demo Day

Last week, The Spoon teamed up with the team from ReFED to showcase innovators building food waste reduction solutions to help food retailers and manufacturers to better manage their inventory, find secondary outlets for surplus and create systems and processes for optimal on-site handling.

ReFED Food Waste Action Network | Innovation Demo Day: Refine Product Management

Featured startups that presented during this one-hour session included Too Good to Go, Galley Solutions, and KITRO.

Watch the video above to hear more about their companies and see a panel moderated by The Spoon to hear how these companies are tackling challenges to accelerate adoption and working towards creating more equitable and sustainable environments both internally and for their customers.