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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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The Food Robot Roundup: Alfred Joins the Military, Wings Hits Milestone

While much has been made about White Castle rolling out the Flippy 2 fry station robot to 100 more of its 350 locations, we thought we’d take this chance to showcase some smaller news stories from the food robot universe in this week’s food robot roundup.

Robot Chefs Enlist in The Military

We’ve seen food robots in restaurants, hospitals, universities, and malls, but placing them on military bases is new. The U.S. Department of Defense is deploying Dexai Robotics’ automated sous chefs to ten military U.S. military bases. The robotic arms use AI and computer vision to interact with their surroundings and use standard kitchen utensils to prepare various meals. The ten robots will cost the department $1.6 million to reduce food waste, improve sanitation, and keep facilities adequately staffed. The first one was deployed at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield California at the end of last year in a dining facility that serves around 950 people a day. 

For Dexai, the news is just another sign of the company’s momentum. The Boston-based startup also recently made news through a new trial of its robotic system with Gordon, one of the biggest foodservice companies in the country. The two companies are trialing Alfred, the salad-assembly robot at Gordon’s developmental test kitchen in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Wing’s Flock Grows

Drone service Wing announced this week that it had completed 200,000 commercial deliveries, with a significant amount of them in its primary market of Australia. It makes more than 1,000 deliveries a day and has Australia’sring with Coles, one of Australia’s leading supermarket chains. 

The partnership will involve Wing making deliveries in Canberra, Australia’s capital, and sparks debate of the efficacy and viability of drone deliveries in rural vs. urban areas. In some cases, such as when Australian-based drone company Swoop Aero has delivered Pfizer vaccines to Malawi, drones have been used to deliver critical supplies (like medicine) to hard-to-reach areas. Vaccines require ultra-cold chain conditions, and the Swoop Aero drones can bypass global supply chain bottlenecks to distribute vaccines in remote communities. In the case of a city-based delivery like with Wing, drone delivery can reduce traffic congestion, accidents, and greenhouse gas emissions. 

In general, last-mile delivery has been rapidly growing and this week multicultural grocery delivery service Weee! announced $425 million in funding. We also covered Kiwibot’s $7.5M pre-series A funding a few weeks ago and the global last mile delivery market size is projected to be $128.54 billion USD this year. 

The Turnkey Robotic Restaurant

You’ve heard of software-as-a-service and even robots-as-a-service, but have you heard of restaurants-as-a-service? This week Nala Robotics debuted Nala Marketplace, a network of customizable robotic chefs that can prepare recipes from various cuisines and enable restaurateurs to launch a new digital restaurant in a day. The marketplace goes hand-in-hand with the robot kitchens Nala produces, which involve a system of multiple robots using articulating arms, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to prepare, cook, and serve food. 

Restaurant chefs and owners will be able to upload recipes and menu items to the secure database and create a virtual storefront. From there, customers will be able to access these menu items and place orders sent directly to the chefs in the robot kitchen. It all sounds very futuristic, but the first Nala Marketplace location opened last month in Naperville, Illinois, where several other restaurants by Nala Robotics are operating. 

According to Ajay Sunkara, cofounder and CEO of Nala Robotics, Nala Marketplace reduces labor expenses by 60 percent, and restaurants can be set up in less than 24 hours. This has significant benefits for restaurant owners since upfront costs and labor costs can make it difficult to start a restaurant. Additionally, the flexibility of the robots to make food from many cuisines expands the options beyond the capabilities of human chefs and could also enable restaurateurs to start ghost kitchens.

Meet Dashbotics

After acquiring robotic bowl food vending machine startup Chowbotics last year, it seems that they’re expanding their food robot plans internally as well. Doordash filed trademark applications in December and early February for the names Dashbotics, Tex-Mess, and Queso Your Way. The first could indicate a plan to integrate Chowbotics into Doordash and position the platform as a white-label offering for other restaurants to launch their own consumer-facing kiosks, or it could be a sign of Doordash looking to leverage their own brand for the robotic kiosks.

Tech-Powered Retail is Flourishing in the Food Industry. Everywhere Else, Not So Much

When B8ta launched in 2015, I loved the idea. What wasn’t there to like about a highly experiential, tech-powered retail concept where consumers could try out cool new gadgets and companies could get invaluable early feedback about their products?

The same with Amazon Books, which opened the same year. I mean, sure, it almost seemed cruel that the dominant e-tailer was going to head to head with Barnes & Noble on their turf, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t intrigued to see how the tech giant might rethink physical goods retail.

Fast forward to this year, and within the span of a couple weeks, we’ve learned both B8ta and Amazon Books are closing their doors.

Contrast this with the world of food retail. Everyone from Amazon to Walmart to upstarts like Nourish & Bloom are employing cutting-edge technology like AI, robotics, and more to power new food shopping experiences. So why is it that tech-powered food retail is flourishing while other retail concepts seem to struggle?

Part of it may be due to changing consumer habits post-COVID. B8ta founder Vibhu Norby talked about this when explaining the company’s struggles with Modern Retail:

“Although foot traffic began to tick back up, “a lot of specialty retailers like us, we had a much slower recovery curve,” Norby said. “A lot of landlords – they were looking at percentages, looking at averages…trying to determine who they should give concessions to.” 

That slower-than-expected recovery led the company to close 15 of its stores roughly a year ago to cut costs, even though b8ta was still on the hook for leases. “We didn’t really have a choice…part of the plan was to negotiate settlements of different types with the landlords,” Norby said. Eight stores in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York and Texas remained open. 

In other words, physical goods retail had struggled for years and COVID just made things much worse, killing walk-in traffic during the worst part of the pandemic and permanently reducing traffic during the long and slow recovery.

Another big reason is that most retail industries outside of food have already been cannibalized by e-commerce. Items like books and electronics, which is pretty much all Amazon Books sold. Of course, it has to be noted that Amazon itself is as responsible for the death of physical goods retail as anyone, all of which makes the Amazon Books concept seem something of a self-indulgent thought experiment. But thought experiment or not, it does say something that a company as inventive and tech-forward company as Amazon couldn’t make physical retail work.

Finally, it may have a lot to do with how entrenched physical retail food shopping is, even two years into a period of massive growth for online grocery shopping. The reality is that even after grandma and grandpa finally tried Instacart, most people, young and old, continue to shop for some or all of their groceries at their local store. That’s for many reasons, whether it’s the difficulty of selling fresh food online or the last-minute nature of many dinner plans. Still, I imagine the biggest reason is this: Consumers like to see, touch, smell, and taste the food before buying it.

I still think there’s a future for new retail concepts, but potential operators should tread carefully and make sure it’s not an industry where consumers can easily buy the product on Amazon or elsewhere.

And, if possible, sell some food.

NotCo Built a Unicorn Using AI To Accelerate Food Innovation. CEO Matias Muchnick Tells The Spoon How They Did It

When Matias Muchnick started NotCo in 2015, food innovation was a slow-moving process.

“Food R&D was three guys in lab coats, doing trial and error in a developmental kitchen,” said Muchnick in a recent interview with The Spoon. “Reading research papers from 1980 about using soy to replace animal-based ingredients. That was it. So whenever you have an industry that has a very obsolete technology, then a lot of bad things happen.”

He and his co-founders wanted to create new plant-based food products, but they wanted to do it in a new way that didn’t rely on antiquated methodologies. Eventually, they started wondering if using technology like artificial intelligence could help them make better decisions and help create new types of food faster.

They decided yes and started building an extensive database of information about all the components that create the taste and experience of food.

“Your machine learning will always be directly proportionate to the amount of data and the dimensions of data that you collect,” said Muchnick. “So from the very beginning, understanding what data was relevant for the objective that we were trying to do, which was replacing animals with plants, was important to us.”

Their database was comprised of chemical and biological attributes that made food what it is and the attributes that impacted the human perception of taste, texture, smell, and color. The goal, said Muchnick, was to create a large enough database of information to use their AI (which would eventually be called Guiseppe) to create a whole line of new plant-based food products.

“We wanted to build a general-purpose artificial intelligence,” he said. “Not an algorithm that is only great at doing mayo, or a burger, or yogurt. The things you’d like from a burger are very different from what you’d like from yogurt, so (we wanted to know) how we could get a real understanding of the human brain to create an algorithm that would attack all of the categories of products. That was super important from the get-go.”

Seven years later, his company is an alt-protein unicorn: the company is growing very fast in the North American alt milk category, just started a joint venture with a food giant, and this week debuted a new alt-meat product at the natural foods show in Los Angeles.

So how does the platform that made all that possible work?

Muchnick gives an example of how the process would work if Giuseppe were used to, say, make a new kind of cheese.

“The algorithm comes up with this crazy amount of recipes and processes attached to each ingredient that we put into it,” said Muchnick. From there, they would take recipes and take them to the “AI test kitchen,” where a group of fifteen chefs try the product out, make the recipe, and then have it evaluated by a trained panel.

“The trained panel gives feedback to the algorithm. Maybe the formulation was good or bad, we feedback the algorithm with the good things and the bad things. So we feedback the algorithm with the many dimensions of the sensory aspects.”

Muchnick says its this continous loop where AI-generated concepts, recipes, and processes are tested in a kitchen, critiqued with feedback, which is then fed back into Guiseppe, which helps NotCo’s AI get better and better.

“You get an algorithm that is working on improving every single day with 1000 recipes.”

But it’s not just recipes getting better, but the optimization of processes around which they run experiments. Muchnick gives the example of a project on frothing plant-based milk. Instead of spending months experimenting with different ways to achieve it, Muchnick says it will help show faster routes to success to help deliver results in a week.

“Instead of starting from scratch with every food formulation you want to create, or any expression you want to create, the AI is telling the food scientist to go through different routes. The algorithm is optimizing every single set of experiments.”

And its this process and the success ultimately drew in Kraft Heinz to consider working with NotCo.

“Kraft Heinz said, guys, you do food products in a quality we’ve never seen before, at a pace we’ve never seen before, and with an agility and an execution that we haven’t seen before,'” said Muchnick. “‘How do you guys do it, and how can we partner up?'”

The answer to that question would eventually be a joint venture.

“They were like, ‘Why don’t we bring superior plant-based products with the familiarity of our brands and with your know-how of executing amazing R&D based products?'”

“And,” said Muchnick, “we’re like, ‘Yeah, I mean, that makes a ton of sense.'”

If you’d like to hear my full conversation with Muchnick about how they are using AI to accelerate food development, just click play below.

Cana Unveils Pricing for Molecular Beverage Printer, Gives a Peek Inside

Today Cana, a company building a countertop drink printer that makes nearly any type of beverage, announced pricing for the drink machine, beverage cartridges, and the estimated ship date for the product.

Called the Cana One, the company’s first countertop beverage printer will have a limited time price of $499 for the first 10 thousand orders, after which it will be priced at $799. Customers can reserve a Cana One at the lower price for $99 on the company’s website (the $99 will be applied to the purchase price).

The company will ship everything necessary to make a drink – the sweeteners, alcohol, and the molecular drink cartridges – to the customer’s home. When the Cana One auto-detects that cartridges are getting low, the company will automatically ship them to the customer’s home.

How much the Cana One user pays for ingredients largely depends on consumption. Customers will order drinks and pay anywhere from $0.29 to $2.99 per beverage. The more a customer consumes, the more they pay, and the faster Cana is shipping out replenishment to their doorstep.

Above Left: Current Cana Prototype. Above Right: Cana Design as Presented on Website

The company showed the Cana One off to CNET in advance of today’s announcement. Not surprisingly, the current prototype being shown to press doesn’t quite look (at least on the inside) like the design concept of the Cana One on the company’s website. As you can see above, the sugar and spirits cartridges in the conceptual design on the right are high-polish and are not transparent, as seen in the working prototype on the left. Cana did not show off the molecular ingredient cartridge during the reveal demo this week, but you can see what they suggest it will look like in the conceptual design on the right.

CNET editor Brian Cooley sampled five drinks from the machine – cold brew coffee, two blueberry coolers, a grapefruit sparkler, and a mimosa – all of which took on average about 30 seconds to make. According to Cooley, all the drinks were good but were not exact replicas of the original versions.

One interesting aspect highlighted in the company’s new hero reel on their website is an emphasis on creators. The company will feature recipes from creators on the Cana touchscreen. Since users can create their own recipes, featuring popular recipes from individuals makes sense. However, at this point, it’s unclear how recipes are discovered or how creators will be compensated for their unique mixes.

According to the announcement, the Cana One is expected to ship in early 2023, but with the following caveat: their current ship date is “based on current visibility into its supply chain.” That caveat probably is smart, given the current chaos in worldwide supply chains and the uncertainly brought on in recent weeks due to war in Ukraine.

You can watch the CNET video about the Cana One below:

Are We Ready for Humanoid Robots Like Ameca to Take Our Food Order?

If you watched the news coming out of CES, you probably saw a robot named Ameca talking to attendees on the trade show floor.

The robot, whose human(ish) eyes and facial expressions had Elon Musk freaked out when it showed up on Twitter last December, went viral during CES in January as press and attendees tweeted out videos of the humanoid interacting with attendees.

Ever since CES, I haven’t been able to shake the image of Ameca and wonder when we might see a robot like her at my corner restaurant. And, once humanoid robots start to show up in our restaurants, I can’t help but wonder how exactly consumers will feel about it? After all, it’s one thing to show off futuristic technology at a geek-filled conference like CES. It’s another to see it in your local restaurant.

Why wonder, you ask? After all, aren’t today’s front-of-house robots more R2D2 than C3PO, and didn’t a spokesperson for the company behind Ameca say it’s probably a decade before a robot like her is walking on the streets amongst us.

Because it’s only a matter of time. My guess is we’ll start to see humanoids like Ameca in customer service roles within five years, first in scenarios where interactions are limited to a focused topic (like ordering food) and the robot is either immobile (standing behind a register) or where mobility is limited to a small spacial terrain.

So if I am right and that’s the case, it’s worth asking: will consumers embrace or run away from humanoid robots working at their local restaurant?

Industry research would suggest it depends. In a research paper published in 2018 entitled “Human Or Robot? the Uncanny Valley in Consumer Robots”, researchers describe a test in which they showed participants images of three different customer service workers – a highly but imperfectly human-like robot, a human, and a human posing as a perfectly human-like robot – and told them a chain of stores is considering employing them.

The results showed people felt most comfortable with humans and least comfortable with almost-human robots. Interestingly, while respondents weren’t as comfortable with the perfectly human-like robot as they were humans, they did feel slightly more comfortable with perfectly human-like robots than ones that were slightly off. This suggested to the researchers that once consumers can no longer discern small differences that make a humanoid seem slightly uncanny, they become more comfortable.

The receptivity of humanoids might also depend on where people live. The same researchers conducted a test in the US and Japan where they showed survey respondents pictures of robots with moderate or high human likeness and also photos of humans. Japanese respondents tended to see the robots as significantly less uncanny than Americans and were more likely to see the robots as having more “human nature.”

Researchers theorized these differences in reactions between Japanese and US respondents might be cultural. They suggest that in countries like Japan where religions like Confucianism and Shinto teach that spirits live in both animate and inanimate objects, consumers may be more likely to grant human nature onto robots. They contrast this with the US, where Christianity, a religion that believes only humans have souls, is dominant.

While consumer perceptions tied to religious or local value systems are important, it’s also worth recognizing that collective perceptions in society do change over time. As robotics become more commonplace, everyday consumers may just become less freaked out about them. Today’s novelty could become tomorrow’s everyday reality, if you will.

And while only time will tell, my guess is operators might opt to be more conservative, at least in the near term, when deploying humanoid robots. After all, if almost-human robots freak out consumers, restaurant owners might be safer installing something closer to Chuck E. Cheese than some real-world version of the kid from Polar Express.

The International Fresh Produce Association Launches Technology Accelerator

This week, the International Fresh Produce Association (IFPA) announced they were launching a technology accelerator to attract companies interested in entering the global produce market. Fresh Field Catalyst is a six-month immersion program for companies (start-up, scale-up, and corporates) to help them integrate into the fresh produce and floral industry.

I caught up with Vonnie Estes, the VP of Innovation for the IFPA, to learn more about the program and understand why an industry trade association for fresh produce is launching an accelerator.

Why is an organization focused on fresh produce starting a technology accelerator?

The fresh produce industry has the potential to provide solutions to almost every major global health and economic challenge we are facing. When we formed the new association, International Fresh Produce Association, built on the legacies of PMA and United Fresh, the goal was to create an association primed to address tomorrow’s challenges – including leading from the front and demonstrating our relevance to the world. 

Part of that work is showcasing the potential and possibility for innovators with technologies that can be adapted to the produce industry. The accelerator, Fresh Field Catalyst, is designed to bring those with an adaptable technology into the produce market by creating a bridge into the industry, creating industry connections, and minimizing risks by sharing industry learnings and lessons to those exploring the produce market for the first time. 

Can you briefly talk about the story of how this idea came together?

Based on my interactions at non-industry events and engagements, I’d argue that many investors and innovators are unaware of the kind of opportunity they have in the produce industry. The perishability of our product means that our supply chain is fast-paced, providing a phenomenal environment for testing, iteration, and improvements. Our products are critical and available in almost every community across the globe, providing not only an ability to make a huge impact on what matters to people the most, but also an enormous opportunity for scaling and growth.  

As we looked to scale the opportunity for technology in the produce industry and what other groups are doing, we had to ask ourselves, what can we offer that no one else can?   What do companies need most? 

Connections. Contacts. Risk mitigation. An open door. 

We knew that we could scale our impact and help bring transformative tech solutions to our industry by throwing open the door to innovators who already have tools ready to be adapted to our industry needs.

Many accelerators take equity in the companies, but you chose not to. Can you talk about your thinking process?

Right now, we want to bring technology into the industry with the least number of barriers. This is a new program and we are figuring out what is best for the industry, the companies, and IFPA. With most incubators/accelerators the negotiation of equity is one of the hardest parts and ends up blocking out some companies.   I’m not saying we would never look at taking equity, but for this first cohort, we want to get it up and running as soon as we can to bring technology to the industry.

Are there any specific technology areas you are excited to see involved in your accelerator?

There are so many challenges to the industry that we are looking to solve! We are open to all solutions to the big problems – labor, climate change, food waste, digitalizing. And also solutions that just make things work better. We will show companies how to enter the produce industry to solve the problem they are solving elsewhere – in other countries or other industries. We are looking for solutions, the technology applied is up to the company.

We have a great opportunity to learn not only from other industries but also from those innovators coming from different regions. One of the difficult challenges to overcome as it relates to technology and produce is the need to cater to different commodities and conditions. A more diverse field of innovators provides so many more opportunities to learn and generate new ideas. 

Is this something we will see every year?

Yes. We plan to do this every year. The program will grow as we learn. For example, we might move toward more themed challenges.

Q&A: The Spoon Talks With DoorDash’s Tom Pickett About Why The Delivery Giant Acquired Bbot

Earlier today, DoorDash announced they had acquired Bbot, a maker of order & pay software solutions. We sat down with DoorDash’s chief revenue officer Tom Pickett to hear about the thinking behind the deal. Answers have been edited slightly for clarity.

What motivated you to do this acquisition?

We’ve been watching this space over the course of the last year, and we’ve seen it evolve from this contactless solution to something that we feel is going to be a core part of what restaurants use going forward. In a similar way, online ordering wasn’t that big of a thing before COVID, but as COVID happened and digital commerce started to become a more important thing for the restaurant, we accelerated efforts and built our Storefront product and that’s now part of the arsenal for any restaurant. And so we think the same thing is starting to happen with digital ordering. I’d say we’re still in the early side of that, but we see the same trends, and we want to get ahead of it and make that easy for restaurants to be able to adopt.

Do you plan to sunset the Bbot name and replace that with DoorDash eventually?

We haven’t made final decisions on that yet, so for now, it’s still Bbot.

Anyone who’s gone into a restaurant with any degree of frequency over the past six months has had the option to pay at the table. That just seems like it’s the frequency that is just going up and up and it makes it much more convenient for the customer. I think the waiter is probably pretty happy with that as well.

From the waitstaff perspective, Bbot has told us that there’s more leverage in the model. So waiters can handle more tables and, in the end, that translates to more tips. So the waitstaff generally is happy with this type of solution. The restaurant management staff is generally happy because they can handle more demand.

And what we’ve also found is that customers tend to order more when they have access to a digital solution. That could be just because of the latency of having to wait for a waiter, and if the customer wants to order that extra drink, they can just go ahead and pull it up on their phone and order that. But the ticket size tends to go up with a digital solution.

What will (Bbot CEO) Steve Simoni’s role be post-acquisition?

Steve will be joining our product organization and he will be leading our digital in-store solutions that we continue to build. The first step is we want to integrate the Bbot solution into our broader technology stack. He’ll be driving that. And this will become part of our broader suite; if you think about Storefront, plus digital online, plus a digital in-store ordering solution, we want to make that integrated and easy to onboard and sell into our broader base of restaurants.

You are responsible from a sales perspective for both Bbot and Chowbotics (the bowl food robotics startup DoorDash acquired last year). While these are obviously very different products, they are both a part of an effort by DoorDash to diversify its product offering. Do you see any similarities between these two businesses?

On one hand, they both have to do with efficiency. The digital in-store solution is an efficiency lever, but it’s also a great customer experience addition as well. So it’s really the combination. Restaurants are learning how to operate more efficiently and the Bbot solution definitely helps in that regard. Chowbotics, on the one hand, can be an efficiency lever, if you think about Chowbotics as a back of store model, but the other side of robotics is a front of store model where we put that out to expand the footprint so it’s really more of a sales growth model.

Do you think we’re going to start seeing more of these types of acquisitions, not necessarily from DoorDash, but across the landscape?

I think we already are seeing some of that. Just look across some of the recent announcements, I think we’re early in the ecosystem. A lot of technology players out there, so I think there’s going to be a natural evolution, one way or the other through acquisitions, some of those technologies are just not going to make it over time.

Thank you for your time.

You’re welcome.

DoorDash Acquires In-Venue Order & Pay Specialist Bbot

Food delivery giant DoorDash announced today they have entered into an agreement to buy Bbot, a New York-based maker of order and pay software for restaurants. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Bbot, which offers a suite of off-premise and in-venue ordering solutions, is best known for its in-venue QR code offering that allows customers to pull up the menu, order, and pay for items with their phones. The company has seen rapid growth over the past couple of years as restaurants raced to upgrade their digital ordering capabilities and install contactless payment solutions during the pandemic. The company’s fast growth led to not one but two funding rounds in 2021 and was enough to convince Doordash to scoop up the company.

For DoorDash, which launched its restaurant e-commerce platform DoorDash Storefront in 2020, the BBot deal helps expand its digital suite to include payment and in-venue offerings.

“We’re excited to bring our combined suite to an even wider selection of merchants across the hospitality space – including bars, hotels, and ghost kitchens – so these businesses can engage with more customers, increase their quality of service, and grow sales,” said Tom Pickett, DoorDash’s Chief Revenue Officer, in the release.

The Bbot deal is the latest in a string of recent acquisitions for DoorDash. The company moved into Europe with an $8 billion acquisition of Wolt late last year, and before that, acquired robot bowl-food maker Chowbotics.

For Bbot, today’s news marks the culmination of a journey that started with building a robotic beer delivery system on the ceiling of a bar. The company added QR code ordering as almost an afterthought to enable customers to order beer delivered via the conveyor belt.

“After launching in January of 2018, the next place was like ‘I’ll take all of it except the robots,'” said Bbot CEO Steve Simoni in an interview with The Spoon last year. “That was March of 2018. From there, we pivoted fully into that.”

Cultivated Meat Has a Production Capacity Problem. Yossi Quint Has a Plan to Fix It.

Yossi Quint wants the cultivated meat industry to succeed. However, to reach its potential, he thinks the nascent industry has one major hurdle to overcome: a severe lack of production capacity.

Quint arrived at this conclusion while working at McKinsey, where he often worked on projects for clients in the food and beverage industry. During one deep dive into the cultivated meat market, he became convinced that this new form of food production had the potential to be a multibillion-dollar industry, but would never fulfill its potential unless it can increase production by orders of magnitude over its current capacity.

To get there, Quint believed that equipment used to make cell-cultivated meat – giant metal vats called bioreactors – needed to be built specifically for the market. That’s because bioreactors used by today’s cultivated meat producers are usually modified versions of hardware made for the pharmaceutical industry, an industry with completely different unit cost economics than that of food.

Out of this challenge, the idea for his company was born. Ark Biotech is building next-generation, high-volume bioreactors for the cultivated meat industry. I sat down with Quint to discuss the challenges of developing hardware for the cultivated meat industry and where he sees the infrastructure market going in the future. The answers have been lightly edited for brevity.

Why did you decide to start the company?

I was working at McKinsey had the opportunity to work with many different companies. And I had a chance to dig pretty deep into the cultivated meat space and think in-depth about what was needed in this industry to succeed over time—doing everything from consumer insights work to thinking about how to reduce unit economics and scale up. But, as I dug into scale-up, I quickly realized that biomanufacturing will be the bottleneck for this industry to grow. And that there are very few, perhaps no players, out there that are offering sensible solutions for industrial-scale cultivated meat production.

Today we’re seeing lots of companies building their pilot production plants. Over the next few years, as the industry figures it out and moves towards industrial scale, how big do you see cultivated meat bioreactors getting?

In pharma, there’s this trend towards smaller, single-use bioreactors. Single-use bioreactors are bioreactors with a bag inside that you switch out. They are very high OPEX (operating expense), but it reduces the contamination risk. But for the blockbuster drugs, you still have 10,000 to 25,000-liter bioreactor tanks. There’s no reason cultivated meat can’t be produced at that size or even larger.

What are the challenges that need to be overcome to move to bigger bioreactors?

There aren’t necessarily intrinsic issues. There are challenges when you reach a bigger scale; A contamination event has a larger cost because you’d have to throw out the batch, so that’s one reason to think about minimizing the size or guidance or ceiling. But to us, it’s a very simple optimization equation of ‘every batch is worth X dollars, the chance of contamination is y, where along the curve do you want to play’?

There are some thermodynamics, more physics and chemistry elements, such as where can you get the uniformity of the cell culture in the bigger size bioreactor. And that’s uniformity of oxygen, of making sure that mixing works correctly. It’s also making sure that the temperature can be uniform throughout.

A lot of what we’re working on is, how do you design bioreactors in ways that are different than what you’d see off the shelf today or from a specialized company, that could operate at bigger sizes?

Why are bigger bioreactors so important?

We care about size because it’s just a major cost lever. As a CAPEX (capital expense) cost lever and an OPEX (operating expense) cost lever.

Explain what you mean by that.

As a CAPEX lever, you get economies of scale. A lot of the cost of bioreactors is the manufacturing, and just you don’t need twice as many people producing twice the size. Most bioreactors have their own seed train (ed note: seed trains are used to generate an adequate number of cells for the inoculation of the production bioreactor). If you double the size of the bigger bioreactor, you only need half as many seed trains to get the same volume.

On the OPEX side, every seed train has laborers that are working, often 24/7, running experiments, changing parameters. And so, if you are able to double the size or triple or ten times the size, you don’t need ten times the laborers, you might need the exact same number of laborers.

Will all bioreactors be the same?

The bioreactors we’re designing are widely applicable to a very large swath of the industry. There are corner cases, but we’re trying to have bioreactors that will fit 95% of companies.

But there are a few bioreactor designs that we’re working on because if you’re doing a scaffolding system, that likely looks very different and you’ll need a very different looking bioreactor if you’re doing suspension cells. And so we are designing different bioreactors to fit those different use cases. Things like media or animal type. are heavily impactful to the parameters of the bioreactor, but we don’t think that changes the core bioreactor design.

The models will depend on their production methods. And it could be that you actually have two models, you have one model, where their cells are still growing in suspension, then you might want to then get a formed product and move into a second bioreactor. So there’s a number of companies that will have two production bioreactors today.

In the future, what does the cultivated meat industry production look like? Is it highly centralized, or does each city have its own ‘meat brewing’ center?

If I were to say 10 years, it’s still gonna be highly centralized. We’re gonna have megaplants. There’s just so many efficiencies that you get at scale.

Will they be regional?

It could be regional. It just depends on how big we want to go. I don’t think there’s gonna be one plant that supplies the US. It could be two or three plants in California that are very big the same way AB InBev has just a handful of massive plants.

Can you explain why bigger production plants are better?

One of the reasons that I think bigger plants make sense, at least as an interim step, is that we really think about the COGS (cost of goods sold) in a very deep way, a lot of which is like how do you get really cheap access to whatever the basal medium is. And to get really cheap access, you probably want to be located near where corn is shipped in, or whatever your other big ingredients are. You want to be near rail lines. You just want to get those economies of scale on the upstream. You also want to be co-located near cheap energy and preferably renewable energy. And so when you think about some of the inputs that you want, and just OPEX, and also where there is available labor, it’s harder to see a world in which you have a small production plant that’s in a skyscraper in New York.

Thank you for your time.

You’re welcome.

The Spoon Weekly: Home Delivery Lockers, Shopify For Food Robots

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Are Food Delivery Lockers the Next Must-Have Home Amenity?

Everywhere you look there are delivery lockers. Grocery stores, apartment buildings, office lobbies.

So why not at our home?

If you’re Jeremy High, the idea makes lots of sense. As a luxury home builder in the central California market of Monterey, High works closely with clients spec’ing out features customized around their lifestyles. A recurring ask he hears from his customers is they want a way to ensure that food delivered to their home is safe and kept at the right temperature.

The more he heard this, the more High wondered if a solution existed to help his customers. When he realized there wasn’t, he decided to build it himself.

High’s product, eventually called the Fresh Portal, is a food and package delivery locker built into the side of a home. It has temperature control zones for either hot or cold food and would be accessible both from the outside and inside. It would be managed by an app and integrated with third-party delivery service providers like UberEats or Amazon Fresh so they can access the outside of the locker and insert a delivery.

To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.

Read The Top Food Tech Stories of The Week!
Home delivery storage lockers, cow-free milk, and more!   Subscribe to the Spoon to keep up on the latest!

SIMULATE IS BACK THIS SPRING!
So much is going on in Web3 meets food, we’re going to bring SimulATE back in May! Use The Spoon newsletter discount code NEWSLETTER for 10% off early bird tickets!

New Podcast!
This week we caught up with Stephen Klein, the CEO of Hyphen, who is trying to democratize restaurant robotics with his modular makeline. Listen at The Spoon or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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A Conversation With Wildtype’s Justin Kolbeck About Building a Cultivated Seafood Company

Wildtype, a San Francisco-based cell-cultivated seafood startup, today announced it has raised a $100 million Series B funding round. The round, the largest to date for a cultivated seafood startup, is being led by private equity firm L Catterton and includes a number of high profile investors such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr. (through his Footprint Coalition and Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions) among others.

The new funding comes after the company’s June 2021 launch of its pilot production plant. With its new funding in pocket, Wildtype plans to expand the production capacity of its cultivated salmon and to begin work with culinary and restaurant partners.

I sat down with company CEO Justin Kolbeck to learn more about what he sees in Wildtype’s future. According to Kolbeck, expanding production would not have been possible had it not been able to build a pilot production plant with its $12.5 million Series A.

“The organizing thought there was let’s build a pilot plant on Series A money,” Kolbeck said. “And we built the world’s first operational cultivated seafood pilot plant. Was it intended to be our go-to-market plant? No, the idea was, how could we set something up quickly and modularly, that we could add capacity to, and start learning from as we scaled.”

And according to Kolbeck, they learned a lot.

“If we had waited till now to start building the thing, we wouldn’t have had the data, we wouldn’t have the know-how to inform something like what is a sensible floor plan? Because we wouldn’t have gone through the motions of growing cells, creating the scaffold, seeding the cells on the scaffold, and so on. And now we’ve done that, we’ve learned a heck of a lot.”

You can read and listen to our full conversation with Justin at The Spoon. 

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Food Robots

Hyphen Wants to Be The Shopify for Restaurant Robots

Imagine you’re a culinary student with dreams of owning your own restaurant.

In days past, that journey towards restauranteur would take 10 to 20 years as you cut your teeth, gained experience, and saved enough money.

But imagine if you could build a restaurant today or in the near future leveraging automation and software? There would be no big location remodel and a big loan to pay for it. Instead, you’d use a virtual restaurant model powered by fractional pay-as-you-go food robotics, food ordering apps, and third-party delivery, all allowing you to bring something to market in months instead of a decade?

That’s the kind of world that Stephen Klein wants to build. Klein’s company Hyphen announced this week that they’d raised a $24 million Series A funding round, and so I decided to catch up with him to hear about his vision for the company and the food robotics marketplace.

In short, what Stephen and his co-founder Daniel Fukuba believe they are building a Shopify for restaurant robots.

“Instead of enabling merchants to compete with the likes of Amazon, we’re enabling restaurants to compete with the likes of DoorDash,” said Klein.

According to Klein, the big delivery companies are sucking up data from smaller restaurants and using that to compete with them. He believes if the smaller and regional players – as well as new food entrepreneurs – were able to use Hyphen’s automation technology to scale up new offerings, they’d have a much better chance to compete with the big players.

To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.

Alt Protein

Kraft-Heinz and NotCo Form Joint Venture for AI-Powered Food Products

This week Kraft-Heinz and NotCo, the food tech company behind the NotCo brand of plant-based foods, announced they are forming a joint venture to develop a lineup of plant-based food products.

According to the announcement, the new company will leverage the strengths of both companies to develop and bring to market a new line of plant-based products. Called The Kraft Heinz Not Company, it will leverage NotCo’s patented AI platform to develop the food products, while Kraft-Heinz will offer up its production capabilities and formidable sales channels to help bring the products to market.

In joining forces with NotCo, Kraft-Heinz is partnering up with one of the hottest new brands in the fast-growing alt-milk category. The Chilean-based startup has secured distribution deals with a number of premium natural and organic food retailers such as Whole Foods, Sprouts and others since entering the US market in late 2020. The deal also gives the CPG stalwart access to the startup’s patented AI product development platform.

And its this AI platform, which goes by the name Guiseppe, which NotCo cites for its fast success in the US market. Guiseppe works by sifting through huge datasets from the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Agricultural Library and other sources to find ingredient and processing combinations that would best mimic the elements (flavor, texture, etc.) of real meat or dairy in plant-based analogues. The goal is to find the types of combinations that can create a product that completely mimics traditional meat and dairy — a feat few if any plant-based protein-makers have yet to achieve.

You can read the full story at The Spoon

Betterland Foods Debuts Cow-Free Milk Powered by Perfect Day’s Animal-Identical Protein

This week Perfect Day and betterland foods announced the debut of betterland milk, a new cow-free milk using Perfect Day’s animal-identical whey protein produced via precision fermentation. According to the announcement, the new alt-milk will deliver “the same cooking, whipping, steaming, frothing, and baking functionality” as animal milk.

The partnership with betterland foods follows a familiar playbook for Perfect Day, which has previously gone to market with consumer brands incubated within The Urgent Company (TUC). Like Brave Robot ice cream and Modern Kitchen cream cheese brands, betterland milk will use Perfect Day’s genetically engineered whey (beta-lactoglobulin). However, unlike TUC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Perfect Day, it appears betterland foods is a young startup formed independently of Perfect Day.

That’s not to say that betterland founder Lizanne Falsetto, an experience consumer products founder who previously cofounded thinkThin (a maker of nutrition bars), didn’t create the company with Perfect Day’s cow-free proteins in mind. From the announcement:

“When I saw what Perfect Day founders Ryan and Perumal were doing to cultivate nutritious, more sustainable milk proteins, I felt the pull to not only get back into the industry, but to help build a portfolio of products that taste great, while being better for the planet,” said Falsetto. “That’s when betterland foods was born.”

You can read the full story at The Spoon.

Food & Web3

GourmetNFT Want to Help Culinary Creators Monetize Recipes & Food Experiences Using NFTs

The tried-and-true cookbook is dead. Long live the fractional cookbook.

The movement toward secure, one-of-a-kind recipes and food experiences are fueled by advances and acceptance of the technology surrounding Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). It could be a way to move beyond one-dimensional food presentations and feed the growing number of foodies who want more bells and whistles in their gourmet interactions. And then, there are chefs, who, faced with shrinking margins and the impact of COVID-19 on their businesses, are always on the hunt for new revenue streams.

“It has always baffled me as to why chefs and culinary creators, who are essentially IP creators and artists don’t get royalties unless they get into the whole hassle of writing and publish a cookbook,” Ruth McCartney, part of the team behind GourmetNFT, said in an interview with The Spoon. “When NFTs came along, my mind went to individual recipes and for foodies to be able to curate and compile all of their favorite recipes and cook from their iPads.”

To read the full story, click here!

Smart Kitchen

Haier Patents a Fridge That Cooks Eggs

If you’re like me, you think the refrigerator can use a rethink. Outside of adding a few smart features like Wi-Fi, internal cameras, and touchscreens, the biggest and most expensive appliance in our kitchen hasn’t changed a whole lot in recent decades.

Which is why I was intrigued to see this patent by Haier for a fridge with an internal egg boiler.

The patent, which was issued earlier this month to GE Appliance’s parent company, describes an appliance with an internal system for boiling eggs.

It works like this: The egg boiler is built into the refrigerator door. Once the system controller determines the boiler has eggs loaded into it, it orders hot water into the boiler to cook the eggs. After the eggs are cooked, the cooking chamber is flushed with cooler water to cool the eggs off. An alert is then sent to the user which would open the egg boiler and remove their finished eggs.

To read full story, click on The Spoon. 

Betterland Foods Debuts Cow-Free Milk Powered by Perfect Day’s Animal-Identical Protein

Today Perfect Day and betterland foods announced the debut of betterland milk, a new cow-free milk using Perfect Day’s animal-identical whey protein produced via precision fermentation. According to the announcement, the new alt-milk will deliver “the same cooking, whipping, steaming, frothing, and baking functionality” as animal milk.

The partnership with betterland foods follows a familiar playbook for Perfect Day, which has previously gone to market with consumer brands incubated within The Urgent Company (TUC). Like Brave Robot ice cream and Modern Kitchen cream cheese brands, betterland milk will use Perfect Day’s genetically engineered whey (beta-lactoglobulin). However, unlike TUC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Perfect Day, it appears betterland foods is a young startup formed independently of Perfect Day.

That’s not to say that betterland founder Lizanne Falsetto, an experience consumer products founder who previously cofounded thinkThin (a maker of nutrition bars), didn’t create the company with Perfect Day’s cow-free proteins in mind. From the announcement:

“When I saw what Perfect Day founders Ryan and Perumal were doing to cultivate nutritious, more sustainable milk proteins, I felt the pull to not only get back into the industry, but to help build a portfolio of products that taste great, while being better for the planet,” said Falsetto. “That’s when betterland foods was born.”

While this is the first consumer-packaged retail alt-milk product featuring Perfect Day’s protein, Spoon readers might remember that the company has been experimenting with milk alternatives for the past year. Last fall word got out the company trialing a special 2% “barista-blend” version of its alt-milk for Starbucks. I ventured to the east side of Seattle to try it out and found it to be exactly like cow’s milk.

While we’ve seen plant-based milk become a major category in the past few years, most brands have centered around a key ingredient like oat or almond. With the arrival of Perfect Day’s animal-identical whey on the milk aisle, I am curious to see how they – and betterland – message this to stand out from the crowd. When I tried the Starbucks Perfect Day blend, it was clear the coffee giant was still workshopping descriptions and taking surveys to figure it out.

My guess is betterland and Perfect Day will get there, in part they have a CPG veteran who has helped launch a new better-for-you category in gluten free nutrition bars leading the charge.

Betterland foods will offer two varieties of in whole and extra creamy. They will debut the product as the large natural food trade show Expo West next month and will head to retail in the spring.

GourmetNFT Want to Help Culinary Creators Monetize Recipes & Food Experiences Using NFTs

The tried-and-true cookbook is dead. Long live the fractional cookbook.

The movement toward secure, one-of-a-kind recipes and food experiences are fueled by advances and acceptance of the technology surrounding Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). It could be a way to move beyond one-dimensional food presentations and feed the growing number of foodies who want more bells and whistles in their gourmet interactions. And then, there are chefs, who, faced with shrinking margins and the impact of COVID-19 on their businesses, are always on the hunt for new revenue streams.

“It has always baffled me as to why chefs and culinary creators, who are essentially IP creators and artists don’t get royalties unless they get into the whole hassle of writing and publish a cookbook,” Ruth McCartney, part of the team behind GourmetNFT, said in an interview with The Spoon. “When NFTs came along, my mind went to individual recipes and for foodies to be able to curate and compile all of their favorite recipes and cook from their iPads.”

McCartney believes those in the food industry—from three-star Michelin chefs to up-and-comers making indigenous pasta in Brazil—need to be rewarded for their skills. Like her brother—Sir Paul McCartney of that minor band from Liverpool.

“I think it’s a good way not only for chefs to be treated like rock stars,” she said. “It’s an iTunes for chefs.”

Liquid Avatar, a Canadian firm that focuses on the verification, management, and monetization of personal identity, and its subsidiary Oasis Studios, a multimedia NFT content-creation company, provide the technology and artistry that powers Gourmet NFT. David Lucatch, Liquid Avatar’s co-founder and president, believes GourmetNFT can take advantage of his company’s technology to securely and quickly allow consumers to purchase a range of recipes and culinary adventures.

One such adventure is a multisensory weekend at David Skinner’s Houston restaurant, eculent. Skinner’s reputation in the food world could have a Pied Piper effect inspiring other noted chefs.

“The road to publishing a cookbook is paved with good intentions however schedules get in the way,” said Skinner. “But with Gourmet NFT, Chefs can upload one recipe, one image, one video at a time as they are already creating a short form variant of the content for social media. Over time, they will have amassed what amounts to a digital cookbook.”

But, as the people behind GourmetNFT and others who follow the space know, using NFTs to share recipes alone will not cut it. For a recipe to be considered “copyrightable”—not to mention entertaining— “bonus material” such as inside tips or custom videos must be part of the deliverable. Beyond such individual digital assets as instructions on making George Harrison’s favorite custard, McCartney explained that goods and services could be delivered using the secure platform.

“Chefs can also make money by putting put a QR code on their dedicated Gourmet NFT website as well as put (the code) on their menus, to-go boxes, and build their own fan clubs and traffic to their fractional cookbook page,” McCartney said. She pointed out the example of Brazilian Chef David Rivillo, a man noted for his inventive pasta creations. Rivillo is signed to an exclusive deal with GourmetNFT and will sell singular pasta with his digital presence.

All of which begs the question: Will NFTs spell the end of printed cookbooks and the vast expanse of subpar YouTube cooking videos?

Ruth McCartney said she has spoken to leading publishers about the opportunity; the response, she says, is, “We don’t do NFTs—That’s art.”