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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Jet.com’s Founder Launches Wonder, a Logistics-Driven Bet on The Future of Restaurants

Today Marc Lore, the ex-CEO of Walmart.com and founder of Jet.com, formally announced the launch of Wonder, a ghost kitchen-driven delivery brand powered by high-profile chef recipes and cook-en-route delivery vans. The company currently is delivering food to four cities in Union County in northern New Jersey and has plans to expand to New York and beyond in 2022.

Wonder has reportedly raised an eye-popping amount of money for a company that only formally announced itself today. According to reports, the company has already raised over $500 million in capital, which likely means a valuation in the multi-billion dollar range. The impressive raise is due to Lore’s track record of building highly successful and disruptive e-commerce businesses. Lore’s Jet.com effectively became the core engine of Walmart’s e-commerce efforts once the retail giant bought the company for $3.3 billion in 2016.

The company has partnered with several high-profile chefs to develop recipes and lend their names to virtual restaurants that Wonder will turnkey. Seventeen restaurants and chefs have partnered with Wonder, including Bobby Flay, Nancy Silverton, Daisuke Nakazawa, and Marcus Samuelsson.

The company was founded in 2018 by Lore and was initially run by his brother Chad. However, in 2019, former Diapers.com exec Scott Hilton took over in 2019, and now, Lore – who had mainly been acting in an advisory capacity – is stepping as the company’s CEO.

According to a detailed report in Yahoo News, Wonder will utilize a licensing model that pays a one-time fee to chefs and will then operate out of a 40 thousand square food commissary kitchen where meals are assembled. Each chef’s restaurant brand is assigned its own delivery van, which is operated by a dedicated employee who responds to orders in the app. Once an order comes through, the runner begins preparing the meal in the Mercedes runner van custom-equipped with special oven. Meals are expected to arrive at the customer’s door within 30-40 minutes.

In some ways, the Wonder business is reminiscent of Zume, a one-time restaurant tech darling that also used a centralized production facility and cooked the food (pizzas in the case of Zume) en-route to the customer in a delivery truck. However, unlike Zume, Wonder’s oven-equipped vans take the food all the way to the customer’s door (Zume used a two-stage delivery network where scooters would deliver the pizza to the customer). Another major difference between the two is much of Zume’s focus was on building a robotic pizza-making machine, while Wonder utilizes in-house chefs to prepare their meals.

Lore’s vision of highly-centralized food production combined with a logistics network to reach the end customer is an evolutionary step forward from Zume and others, combining many of the various advancements we’ve seen in e-commerce, food delivery and ghost kitchen/virtual restaurant models over the past few years. While other regions like China have been developing highly-centralized food production and delivery models over the past decade, the US is beginning to play catch up via interesting new models built upon high-tech advances and an accelerated appetite for food delivery over the past couple of years.

While it’s too soon to say whether Lore’s new company will be as successful as his past, it looks like he has the capital, culinary partnerships and logistics know-how to give it a good run.

Introducing Manna Cooking, the Recipe App That’s All About Community

The idea for Manna Cooking came, in a way, from CTO and co-founder Guy Greenstein’s mom — a private chef who cooks all-vegan, all-kosher food. It dawned on Greenstein one day that his mom’s workstation was totally unmanageable, a chaos of notebooks and binders overflowing with heavily annotated recipe clips. He searched for an app that would help her to streamline things but came up empty-handed.

So Greenstein teamed up with his childhood friends and co-founders Josh and Rachel Abady to create a platform that would allow users like his mom to organize, customize, and share recipes. The app, Manna Cooking, is making its official debut today on the Apple App Store. I got on Zoom last week with Josh and Rachel (the company’s CEO and CMO, respectively) to learn more about the launch.

The name of the app was inspired by the three co-founders’ early years at a Jewish day school. “Manna is what supposedly fell from the sky to nourish the Israelites — to give them everything they needed,” said Rachel, who came up with the name. “Our app is supposed to be your buddy in the kitchen that gives you everything you need to cook.”

Rachel and Josh led me on a tour of the app over Zoom. The digital environment is bright and easy to navigate, made friendlier by Chef Mic, the app’s cartoon personality. The app draws on popular social media features to help users discover new recipes: You can flick through recipes dating app-style in swipe mode, or scroll through other users’ posts in the discover feed. Users can also create and import recipes themselves.

Manna follows through on its promise of creating a single, centralized space for users to manage their recipes. In the cookbook environment, the app allows you to edit any recipe you’ve liked and save a new version. (The app also automatically flags recipe ingredients that might be incompatible with your diet.) When you want to start cooking a dish, the app guides you through the recipe one step at a time in much the same way Google’s Maps app takes you step-by-step toward your destination, saving the need to scroll back and forth between an ingredients list and instructions.

There are currently about 10,000 recipes on the app. Some are from a collection of pre-approved websites from which users can instantly import recipes; some were created by the app’s beta testers; and some were curated by Manna’s in-house recipe creator.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced Greenstein and the Abady siblings to take an unconventional approach to fundraising. They had secured some funding pre-COVID (including from David Greenstein, Guy’s father and a co-founder of the brand incubator Wonder Brands) but the pandemic scorched opportunities to proposition restaurateurs and other funders. “But we realized, even more than it’s about food, our app is about community. So if we’re a community, why not use the community to be the source of our funding as well?” Josh said.

The team used Wefunder to raise about $150,000, which helped them to create a beta version of the Manna Cooking app. That crowdfunding approach also helped the team to create a pool of dedicated beta testers: “Our first wave of testers really had skin in the game, because they had given us funds anywhere from $100 upwards,” Rachel said. “So we already had built-in super testers.”

Manna has partnered with restaurateur and chef David Burke, giving users access to simplified recipes for restaurant dishes. They’ve also identified brand-aligned social media influencers, who are creating recipes, providing feedback, and helping to promote the app.

This spring, Manna will work on raising a more conventional seed funding round. In the next couple of months, the team plans to lock in a partnership with a grocery retailer, which will allow them to launch an automatic ordering feature.

But the team’s number one priority is user acquisition, and their success there may hinge on how well the platform fosters in-app community building. At the end of the day, the promise of the app is to provide a simplified, social cooking experience, especially for users with specific dietary needs — people who want to cook gluten-free food, or vegan food, and get inspired by others who cook and eat like them.

As Josh put it: “There’s millions of people who fit each of these descriptions, and each of them should feel like they have a community that they can engage with in one, centralized place.”

Sidewalk Robot Specialist Serve Raises $13 Million From Uber, 7-Eleven & Wavemaker Labs

Serve Robotics, the autonomous sidewalk delivery robot spinout of Postmates (which itself was acquired by Uber), has announced a $13 million expanded seed round of funding. The new funding round includes several strategic investors, including former parent Uber Technologies, Delivery Hero backed DX Ventures,7-Eleven Inc.’s corporate venture arm, 7-Ventures, and Wavemaker Labs.

According to the release, Serve plans to use the new funding to accelerate its technology development and expand into new markets. The company, which has been trialing its delivery bot in the West Hollywood neighborhood, recently started to expand its executive ranks as it prepares to scale.

“This is a space that has kind of reached readiness for scale,” Serve CEO Ali Kashani told The Spoon in November. “So we are at a very pivotal point where we are no longer trying to develop something. We have developed something, and now we are putting it to use.”

For each of Serve’s new strategic investors, an alliance with the sidewalk robot company potentially adds another arrow to their automation quiver. For its part, 7-Eleven has been trialing autonomous automobile delivery with its partner Nuro in the California market, but has yet to partner up with a sidewalk robot partner. It will be interesting to watch if the company begins to trial with Serve in the California market in the coming months as it expands its efforts in autonomous delivery.

European delivery giant Delivery Hero had some early trials with sidewalk delivery startup Starship, but has since been relatively quiet on the sidewalk delivery front. However, the company’s head of special projects for its middle eastern delivery group, talabat, recently hinted that delivery robots and drones could become commonplace in the near future.

“I do see delivery robots being implemented quite soon, in specific scenarios,” said Maria Estevan, Head Of Special Projects at talabat, in a recent article on Delivery Hero’s website. “We can already see it at foodora, it’s already there. We just need to make it bigger, scalable, and adapted to the conditions of each country, its requirements, regulations, and culture. But to me, they are actually already here.”

For Wavemaker Labs, the company has largely been investing and incubating a lineup of different food robots ranging from its back-of-house frybot in Flippy from Miso, an autonomous pizza-making machine in Piestro, and its robotic kitchen robot in Nommi. With Serve, the food robotics-focused venture studio adds a food delivery robot to its portfolio of investments for the first time.

DoorDash Enters Ultra-Fast Grocery Market, Hires Couriers in Break From Gig Worker Model

Today DoorDash announced it is entering the hyper-competitive ultra-quick grocery delivery market with the launch of a new DashMart location in New York City. According to the announcement sent to The Spoon, the new location will stock up to 2000 items and complete deliveries within 10-15 minutes of a customer’s order.

The new initiative follows the launch of DashMart, DoorDash’s own branded dark grocery network, in 2020. The expansion into hyper-fast is a logical next move, especially for a company with as robust a nationwide logistics and delivery network as DoorDash.

DoorDash’s new effort also represents a significant departure from the company’s traditional gig worker model. Instead of using freelancers to deliver groceries for its new effort, DoorDash will hire its own couriers for the first time. The company plans to hire sixty workers to staff the effort, each getting paid $15/hour plus benefits and tips to start. The new couriers will work for a new DoorDash subsidiary named DashCorp.

The move to hire a courier workforce is, in part, due to pressure from states like New York, which have begun to pass legislation placing greater protection on gig workers. The move also makes sense in that the ultra-fast grocery model requires a ready stable of couriers to deliver goods to consumers as they come in.

“Millions of people across the country turn to platforms like DoorDash to earn supplemental income when, where, and how they choose, providing them with unique flexibility and choice that is so valuable,” said company president Christopher Payne. “We’re proud to be a leader in providing economic opportunities that fit the lives of so many people. And now, we’re excited about the new employment opportunity that DashCorps offers for a different type of work.”

DoorDash’s latest moves follow discussions by the delivery giant to invest in Berlin-based fast-grocery pioneer Gorillas. The talks, which would have given DoorDash a buy option on the Berlin-based company, eventually fell apart, and it’s unclear how much of DoorDash’s newly launched fast-grocery initiative was a direct result of the fizzling effort between the two companies. Whatever their intention, it’s clear now with the launch of its first fast-grocery outpost and the launch of DashCorp that DoorDash is building infrastructure for roll-your-own strategy in this nascent but fast-growing market.

For Gorillas, JOKR, Gopuff, and others in this new space, DoorDash will undoubtedly represent a potentially significant new competitor. The delivery company commands a 55% market share in the US food delivery market and a year ago had 20 million monthly active users. While JOKR, Gopuff, and others have had no problem raising eye-popping amounts of venture funding, these companies have to invest much of their venture funds into user acquisition and logistics, areas which already have been well-developed by the more mature DoorDash.

With Ember’s New Raise, The Company Eyes Expansion Into Smart Baby Bottles & Cold Storage

Up until this point in its history, Ember’s been known for one thing: smart mugs.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, the company’s flagship precision heated mug is a pretty cool device that not only keeps your coffee at the perfect temperature, but can reveal insights like that 10:51 AM is peak coffee drinking time across America.

But for anyone who’s talked to the company CEO Clay Alexander, an inventor with over a hundred patents to his name, you get the sense that he and Ember have lots of cool new ideas up their sleeves they’d like to bring to market if they only had the time and money. While I’m not sure about how much time Alexander has on his busy hands nowadays, he and Ember look to have taken care of the money part with their just-announced $23.5 million funding round.

In the press release announcing the new funding, Ember mentions both its cold chain technology and precision heated baby bottles as areas they plan to invest in. From the release: This expansion includes Ember’s Cold Chain Technology, which seeks to disrupt the current pharmaceutical cold chain with the world’s first self-refrigerated, cloud-based shipping box.  The company also has plans to grow its consumer vertical with revolutionary technology to improve infant feeding and further releases in innovative drinkware solutions.

The company’s cold shipping box technology will keep vaccines and other temperature-sensitive medical supplies at a constant temperature as they make their way to their destination. Alexander first teased the idea back in 2018 in a podcast with The Spoon, when he told me the company had already built a prototype that uses the company’s semiconductor-powered refrigeration technology to keep up to forty vials refrigerated at a constant temperature.

“You could strap that thing on the back of a moped and send it into a village in Haiti and save lives,” said Alexander.

During that same conversation, Alexander also talked about how heating water for his infant daughter made him realize baby bottles could be an excellent potential application for precision heating technology. “You pull it out of the fridge, and there’s a little base you couple to the bottle,” Alexander said. “When you couple it, it heats the milk and formula to 98.5 degrees, which is body temperature.”

While the announcement indicated the company would expand into new consumer drinkware products, I was a bit bummed there was no mention of one of Alexander’s neater ideas: precision-heated dinnerware. It’s a product the company already had working prototypes for in 2018: “It just looks like a dinner plate, but it’s magically keeping your hot food hot and your cold food cold,” said Alexander at the time. The plate would have heating zones, that would allow cold potato salad to stay cold and heat food like steak and, if you move your steak, the heat will track under the plate.

Whatever they have in store, I’m intrigued to see the company add new products beyond their original smart coffee mug.

Spoon Weekly: Starbucks Animal-Free Milk Review, Bitcoin Restaurants, Alt-Meat Sales Drop

It may be almost holiday time, but the food tech news keeps on coming. Plant-based meat slowdown, Starbucks animal-free milk trials, Bitcoin restaurants. Read all about it.

If you haven’t already subscribed to our newsletter, do so here to get the Spoon Weekly delivered to your inbox.

Will Jack Dorsey’s Block Usher In The Bitcoin Restaurant Era?

Here’s what we know: On Monday, Jack Dorsey announced he’s stepping down immediately from the top job at Twitter. On Wednesday, his payments company Square said it would change its name to Block and would, among other things, double down on cryptocurrency, blockchain, and building a decentralized payment system. I haven’t checked the news today, but I’m guessing he may have announced he’s creating a robot society or has plans for a teleportation system.

What does it all mean (besides the robots and teleportation)? For one, Jack Dorsey has had a busy week. But it also means the same guy who helped usher in real-time social media and democratize digital payments for small businesses may now be the one who helps make it easier for average Joe to buy everyday things with cryptocurrency.

Because right now, it isn’t easy. Crypto isn’t nearly as liquid as other conventional payment methods such as cash or credit. Sure, you can trade crypto without any problem – anyone with a Coinbase or Robinhood account knows that – but good luck paying for a bottle of mouthwash or buying a Big Mac with that wad of Dogecoin burning a hole in your crypto wallet.

So what can Dorsey do about it? Simple: with Square Block, he has all the different parts to make a payment value chain for crypto that will take it from what is mainly a highly volatile investment vehicle today to a street-spendable retail currency of tomorrow.

Click here to read the full post about Jack Dorsey’s Bitcoin bets.

The Spoon & CES Bring Food Tech To The World’s Biggest Tech Show

Did you know food tech will be a featured theme for the first time ever at the world’s biggest tech show in January and The Spoon is CES’s exclusive partner to help make it happen? 

There’s still time to grab a booth! If you want to sponsor the event, let us know. See you in Vegas!

Starbucks is Trialing Animal-Free Milk. I Decided to Try it Out to See If It Tastes & Foams Like Regular Milk

In case you haven’t heard, Starbucks is trialing animal-free milk in the Seattle market. No, we’re not talking Oatly or another plant-based milk, but a milk with cow milk-identical proteins made in a lab.

The alt-milk is from Perfect Day, a company that uses precision fermentation to create its proprietary β-lactoglobulin animal-identical milk protein. The company’s protein, which received GRAS approval from the FDA last year, has primarily been sold to consumers in the form of ice cream (and soon cream cheese), but not in the form of a milk product. However, this move could signify that one could be on the way.

The company created a special 2% “barista-blend” version of its alt-milk especially for the Starbucks trial. Starbucks is currently trialing the milk at two locations in the Seattle market, Bellevue (a city east of Seattle) and Renton (south of Seattle).

Since I live in Seattle, I decided to head on over to Bellevue and see how precision-fermented milk tasted in a cup of Starbucks coffee.

Click here to see how Perfect Day’s animal-free milk foamed and tasted.

Zippin Checks In at JFK With Autonomous Checkout Technology

In a hurry but still hoping to grab a snack before you jump on your flight? If you’re at JFK in New York City, you might be in luck, at least if you’re passing Gate B 42. Because that’s where the airport just teamed up with Zippin, a maker of AI-powered cashierless checkout technology, and SSP America, an airport foodservice operator, to launch a new grab-and-go convenience concept called Camden Food Express.

According to the release sent to The Spoon, here’s how it works: Customers enter the store through a turnstile tapping their credit card as they enter and begin shopping by picking items off shelves. As they do, Zippin’s AI system automatically identifies the items and builds the customer’s virtual cart with the corresponding monetary value. When the customer leaves the store, the total amount spent is automatically charged to the card the customer used to check-in at the store entrance.

For Zippin, its partnership with JFK and SSP is a nice feather in the cap for a company with a portfolio of deployments, including hotels, stadiums, and grocery stores. Zippin’s move into airports follows other cashierless tech platforms like Amazon’s Just Walk Out, which showed up in Dallas airport earlier this year.

Click here to read the full story about Zippin’s deployment at JFK.

What The Heck is Causing The Plant-Based Meat Slowdown?

No two ways about it: Plant-based meat has hit a sales slump.

According to recent data from market watcher SPINS, sales in the overall plant-based meat market dropped 1.8% year over year for the four-week period ending October 3rd. This follows an even bigger drop in the category earlier in 2021 starting around April, when the plant-based category dropped over 15% year over year.

The drop in overall plant-based meat sales jibes with what some industry bellwethers are seeing. According to Michael McCain, the CEO of Maple Leaf Foods, his plant-based meat sales dropped in every channel the company sells into in the third quarter of this year. McCain was perplexed as to the reason and said the company is reevaluating their “investment thesis”.

Maple Leaf wasn’t the only one. Beyond, where company CEO Ethan Brown came out and said the plant-based meat company had seen its sales drop 13.9% year over year and forecast a potentially bumpy road ahead.

So what’s going on here? Fast-growing nascent markets are supposed to go up, not down and down some more.

While there’s no way to know for certain without more data. it’s worth taking a stab at potential causes for the drop in plant-based meat. 

You can read why plant-based meat sales are suddenly sluggish here.

The Media Was Fascinated with a TikTok Video of a Robot at Denny’s. Here’s What it Means.

Maybe it was a slow news week. Perhaps it was the sight of pancakes hitching a ride on a robot at America’s late-night diner. Whatever the reason, it seemed like every news organization wrote the same story about a TikTok video of server-robot showing up to dish out breakfast at a Denny’s.

They all had a variant of the same headline: “Viral Video of Robot at Denny’s Sparks Debate.” From there, the authors sifted through comments made by TikTok viewers, some cheering the idea of faster service and lower tips, others angry about a robot stealing a job.

While the sudden interest in a social media post about a server robot may say as much about the modern media landscape as it does about the use of robotics at restaurants, the reality is Denny’s deploying robots is kind of a big deal. After all, as America’s most famous 24-hour diner, Denny’s holds a special place in our collective consciousness, a place where almost anyone can get a cheap meal as well as apply for – and often get – a job.

And it’s these two things that Denny’s represents – a place with affordable food and an employer of everyday Americans – that seemed to be in tension with one another when looking at both the comments on the video on TikTok as well as the framing by the media.

To read the full story about Denny’s server robot, click here.

Hazel Technologies Announces New California Hub To Expand Produce Conserving Technology

Starting in the mid-twentieth century, the advent of new fertilizer production technologies allowed the world to grow crops at a new scale. While that so-called Green Revolution helped producers to feed more people than ever, it also created a focus on crop production rather than systems efficiency. And that imbalanced focus has led to a worldwide agricultural system that wastes about a third of the food it produces, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

During a stint as a chemistry fellow at the Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern University, Dr. Aidan Mouat wondered what could happen if we used chemistry to create a new revolution — one that targeted the food supply chain. That idea led to the 2015 launch of Hazel Technologies, a Chicago-based company that manufactures high-tech produce packaging and storage solutions to extend shelf life.

Read the full story about Hazel’s new hub, head over to The Spoon.  

Now That Square is Block, Will Jack Dorsey’s Company Make it Easier to Buy Dinner With Bitcoin?

Here’s what we know: On Monday, Jack Dorsey announced he’s stepping down immediately from the top job at Twitter. On Wednesday, his payments company Square said it would change its name to Block and would, among other things, double down on cryptocurrency, blockchain, and building a decentralized payment system. I haven’t checked the news today, but I’m guessing he may have announced he’s creating a robot society or has plans for a teleportation system.

What does it all mean (besides the robots and teleportation)? For one, Jack Dorsey has had a busy week. But it also means the same guy who helped usher in real-time social media and democratize digital payments for small businesses may now be the one who helps make it easier for average Joe to buy everyday things with cryptocurrency.

Because right now, it isn’t easy. Crypto isn’t nearly as liquid as other conventional payment methods such as cash or credit. Sure, you can trade crypto without any problem – anyone with a Coinbase or Robinhood account knows that – but good luck paying for a bottle of mouthwash or buying a Big Mac with that wad of Dogecoin burning a hole in your crypto wallet.

So what can Dorsey do about it? Simple: with Square Block, he has all the different parts to make a payment value chain for crypto that will take it from what is mainly a highly volatile investment vehicle today to a street-spendable retail currency of tomorrow.

So what are Block’s business units?:

Square – the company’s original product (which will retain the Square brand) covers the digital payment portion of the equation. The company sells retail point-of-sale systems and has created restaurant-specific platforms and services.

Cash App – Started as Square Cash in 2015, Cash App is a personal banking, money transfer, and investment app for consumers. The app added crypto trading in 2018.

TBD – Announced earlier this year, TBD (long name TBD54566975) is a decentralized financial services unit. The launch of TBD followed other crypto-centric moves by the company such as creating a Bitcoin hardware wallet.

And perhaps most importantly, Dorsey and Block have the passion and conviction that cryptocurrency is the future and will eventually become our everyday currency. The company so much as said so when it began to buy and hold Bitcoin last year. “We believe that bitcoin has the potential to be a more ubiquitous currency in the future,” said Square’s Chief Financial Officer, Amrita Ahuja, at the time.

They also have the know-how. “We believe there needs to be a global native currency for the internet,” Dorsey said as his company launched the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance (COPA) last year. Since that time, the company announced it would build a decentralized Bitcoin exchange in early 2021 and just last month TBD published a white paper detailing a protocol for such an exchange.

This is the type of hard, in-the-trenches work needed to create a more friction-free cryptocurrency financial system and, from all the looks of it, Block and Dorsey are intent on leading the way.

Once that happens, I imagine diners may someday more easily be able to buy dinner using cryptocurrency than was experienced by the folks behind Dinner Dao during their first-ever meal for the NFT dinner club. While the group really wanted to pay for dinner with the Ethereum they pooled together for their club, they had to resort to using a Coinbase credit card that converted the crypto to US dollars.

With the launch of Block, there’s a good chance that in five years (or maybe sooner), Dorsey and company will have put all the necessary tech, systems, and financial guide rails in place so when we buy a Big Mac, we can do so with crypto. At that point, Dorsey will have completed yet another society-shifting technological feat and, who knows, can finally get to work on that teleportation network we all want.

Hazel Technologies Announces New California Hub To Expand Produce Conserving Technology

Starting in the mid-twentieth century, the advent of new fertilizer production technologies allowed the world to grow crops at a new scale. While that so-called Green Revolution helped producers to feed more people than ever, it also created a focus on crop production rather than systems efficiency. And that imbalanced focus has led to a worldwide agricultural system that wastes about a third of the food it produces, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

During a stint as a chemistry fellow at the Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern University, Dr. Aidan Mouat wondered what could happen if we used chemistry to create a new revolution — one that targeted the food supply chain. That idea led to the 2015 launch of Hazel Technologies, a Chicago-based company that manufactures high-tech produce packaging and storage solutions to extend shelf life.

Mouat, Hazel’s co-founder and CEO, told The Spoon that the company’s technologies will save about 500 million pounds of food from going to waste this year. And with a funding arsenal that includes about $90 million in private equity as well as grants from the USDA, the company is working on expanding, starting with a new hub in Fresno, Calif.

A primer on how Hazel’s technology works: The company’s packaging products extend the shelf lives of perishable foods, but not by adding chemicals to the foods themselves. Instead, they release ingredients (in the form of vapor) that help to control the atmosphere around the foods. One product, a sachet the size of a sugar packet, releases ingredients that counteract ethylene — a molecule that accumulates in the atmosphere around packaged fruits and vegetables, and triggers metabolic responses that make them go bad.

Hazel’s Aidan Mouat

Hazel also offers technologies that slow down microbial growth and sprouting. The company’s products come in different forms, from pads and papers that can be inserted into packages, to larger-scale solutions for entire warehouses.

The new Fresno location will bring Hazel closer to California’s bounty of fruit and vegetable producers, facilitating closer cooperation. “In order to do the best analytical postharvest work we can do, we need to be able to simulate the supply chain as perfectly as possible,” Mouat told The Spoon. “And that requires us to be on site with our customers, performing commercial-scale studies in order to truly understand the full ROI and impact that our products can provide for them.”

For instance, Hazel will be able to perform more on-site trials for customers like the Specialty Crop Company, the world’s largest fig producer. It’s the difference between “sending some fruit back east, or getting it to them today, so they can throw in a sachet and pack it today, and get back that real-time data,” Erik Herman, a farming and sales officer at the Specialty Crop Company, told The Spoon.

Mouat said that Hazel has broken ground on the new hub, and that the team is hoping to open the office by the end of this year.

Along with a customer support office and research center, the Fresno facility will incorporate a microdistillery. “As part of our zero waste focus, and in keeping with one of my various hobby interests, we do a lot of distillation of fermented food,” Mouat said. “It’s a great way to make sure that we squeeze out every last calorie, even from our test fruit.”

In the future, Hazel plans to expand its presence in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Oceania, establishing a network of food science research centers. The company will also work on expanding its range of product offerings to protect meats and other foods outside of the produce category.

Hazel also has its eyes on another kind of growth. The company wants to apply its technology at all of the stops along the food supply chain, from the pre-farm stage all the way to retail. The team even hopes to launch a line of consumer products sometime in the next few years.

To Mouat, the key to Hazel’s expansion lies in the accessibility and adaptability of the company’s packaging solutions. Hazel’s products can be integrated into existing supply chains around the world without the need for investment in new infrastructure or heavy equipment.

“You’re not going to be able to protect every crop on the planet, every category of food, with the one-channel approach of reconfiguring supply chains to suit the benefits of some new technology you’re trying to offer,” Mouat said. “If you want to approach a truly democratic solution for world agriculture, you have to lower the use barrier as much as possible — and we’ve done that.”

B.T. Sweets Unveils Cambya, an Alternative Sugar Made From Plant-Fibers and Botanicals

When serial entrepreneur Dagi Pekatch began showing early signs of developing Type 2 diabetes, he began to study the negative health effects of sugar. His research not only showed him he wasn’t alone – in just the United States, one in three people have prediabetes and worldwide, it is estimated that 422 million people live with diabetes – but also made him realize our sugar addiction represented a huge opportunity for a better alternative. It wouldn’t be long before he co-founded a start-up called B.T. Sweets in 2019, which this week unveiled its first product: Cambya, a sugar alternative made from soluble fibers, botanicals, and monk fruit.

Cambya is a one-to-one sugar replacement, meaning that it uses the same measurements used for standard white sugar. For example, if a muffin recipe called for 1/2 cup of cane sugar, then a 1/2 cup of Cambya could be used instead. Since soluble fibers are one of the main components of this alternative sugar, the company says this improves digestion and increases satiety.

Sugar poses a major problem in our modern society: we eat way too much of it, and it’s making us sick. Of course, while many other alternative sweeteners like stevia, erythritol, monk fruit extract are already widely available, it is well known that many of these zero sugar sweeteners have a bitter or “off” aftertaste. With more consumers choosing to reduce their added sugar intake, the sugar-alternative market is projected to be worth $10.2 billion USD by 2026.

Another start-up called The Supplant Company has a similar idea to Cambya. This company also uses plant fibers to craft a low-sugar, high-fiber sweetener, but what sets Supplant apart is that it uses the fibers of agricultural side streams like corn, wheat, and rice. DouxMatok and BetterJuice are two other companies in the food tech space that have also developed sugar reduction technologies.

Cambya operates on a plug-and-play model where it will work with both new and existing CPG companies to achieve the goal of creating products with lower added-sugar content. Manufacturers have the option to only use Cambya, or blend it with other sugars. According to the company, Cambya has been tested in many confectionery applications, in everything from cake to pudding to ice cream. Cake without all the sugar (and negative health effects!) and sounds pretty sweet to me.

Starbucks is Trialing Animal-Free Milk. I Decided to Try it Out to See If It Tastes & Foams Like Regular Milk

In case you haven’t heard, Starbucks is trialing animal-free milk in the Seattle market. No, we’re not talking Oatly or another plant-based milk, but a milk with cow milk-identical proteins made in a lab.

The alt-milk is from Perfect Day, a company that uses precision fermentation to create its proprietary β-lactoglobulin animal-identical milk protein. The company’s protein, which received GRAS approval from the FDA last year, has primarily been sold to consumers in the form of ice cream (and soon cream cheese), but not in the form of a milk product. However, this move could signify that one could be on the way.

The company created a special 2% “barista-blend” version of its alt-milk especially for the Starbucks trial. Starbucks is currently trialing the milk at two locations in the Seattle market, Bellevue (a city east of Seattle) and Renton (south of Seattle).

Since I live in Seattle, I decided to head on over to Bellevue and see how precision-fermented milk tasted in a cup of Starbucks coffee.

When I walked into the coffee shop, one of the first things I saw at the counter was a sign that said: “Try Your Favorite Beverage With Animal-Free Milk.” The sign said this animal-free milk is lactose-free (but does contain milk allergens). The sign also had a QR code which, when scanned, brought up a survey page on my phone titled “Perfect Day Milk Customer Questionnaire.” The page gave a brief description of this new milk and asked questions like “What questions do you have about “animal-free” milk? and “Should Starbucks offer animal-free milk at all of our stores?”.

Interestingly, the questionnaire didn’t ask how the milk tasted compared to cow or plant-based milk. To figure that out, I ordered two drinks: a tall caramel macchiato with animal-free milk and a tall caramel macchiato with regular 2% milk.

When the drinks arrived, they were essentially identical, except that the Perfect Day milk drink had a “DF” on the label (which, the barista explained, stood for “Dairy-Free”).

The reason I ordered a macchiato was, outside of it being a pretty tasty beverage, I wanted to see how precision fermented milk foamed when steamed compared to cow milk. When I took the lid off the drinks, it was clear it foamed up just fine, as you can see from the picture below (DF milk drink is on the left, cow milk drink on the right):

The real test, however, would be how it tasted. And after tasting both drinks side by side, I can say that this version of precision fermented milk tasted exactly like cow’s milk. The foam was just as, well, foamy, and the actual milk taste in the dairy-free version was not discernably different than that of cow’s milk. In fact, from a taste and experience perspective, the two drinks were identical.

Which, of course, is the goal.

If Starbucks and Perfect Day are using this trial to determine if they should make this milk more widely available, I expect a wider rollout may soon be on its way. Outside of the environmental benefits of precision fermented milk, it’s easy to see how offering a milk without lactose and absent potential other health concerns of factory-farmed dairy could be a big winner.

That said, I imagine the biggest challenge for Perfect Day and Starbucks will be figuring out a way to message it to customers. When I asked the cashier what “animal-free milk” is, she did a decent job describing it: “It’s supposed to mimic 2%, but it’s made in a lab, so it’s like very eco-friendly,” she told me. “But it still has milk protein in it, which makes it not dairy-free, but lactose-free.”

Again, decent, but my feeling is that some consumers might bristle at the term “made in a lab.” I know Perfect Day has been working on messaging their product, and while they’ve made progress, I would suggest dropping “lab-grown” as a descriptor. Maybe something like “brewed” or other terms borrowed from beer or other fermentation-driven beverages since, after all, companies like AB InBev are already putting their brewing skills to work in making animal-identical proteins.

If you live in the Seattle market, I would suggest you head on over to Bellevue or Renton and order an animal-free coffee drink yourself and let us know what you think.

To Feed Astronauts Safely in Space, NASA is Learning To Monitor The Spaceship’s Microbiome

To support astronauts on longer-duration missions farther away from Earth, NASA needs to figure out how to provide them with a continuous supply of nutritious food. The freeze-dried foods astronauts currently eat won’t cut it, as key nutrients in these meals gradually break down.

The Vegetable Production System, or Veggie, is one potential solution to that problem. Veggie is a suitcase-sized system used to grow plants onboard the International Space Station. It has produced three types of lettuce so far, and NASA researchers determined that one variety (red romaine) was as nutritious as its Earth-grown equivalent. A challenge for the Agency as it moves forward with the system will be to control onboard microbial contamination.

Image: Fungi gathered from Veggie system aboard Space Station, incubated to promote growth. Source: NASA

The International Space Station and other space vessels are sensitive environments. Bacteria and fungi that get carried onboard by incoming astronauts are generally non-threatening, but the wrong strain or a burst of growth could endanger the crew’s health or compromise critical equipment. NASA keeps a constant eye on microbial conditions in the space station — and in particular, the Agency is closely monitoring patterns of microbial growth on the Veggie system.

“If the crew consumes food contaminated with pathogenic organisms, they could become ill,” NASA Senior Scientist Dr. Cherie Oubre said in an Agency press release. “Or, if plant growth systems become contaminated with plant pathogens, the crops could be compromised or fail. To prepare, we must assess Veggie’s vulnerabilities and carefully monitor it.”

Astronauts on board the space station contribute to the Veggie monitoring project by swabbing different components of the system, incubating any microbes they’ve picked up on growth media slides, and then analyzing and making a record of the organisms that have colonized the slides.

Sampling began in 2019 and is ongoing. By creating a record of microbial activity through time, NASA researchers will be able to analyze growth patterns, and respond to potential problems in future plant production system designs.

Technologies developed by NASA have found applications in industries on Earth in the past. Design adaptations that the Agency develops to ward off contamination in the Veggie system could eventually prove useful in emerging food tech spaces like indoor farming and cultivated meat production.

Zippin Checks In at JFK With Autonomous Checkout Technology

In a hurry but still hoping to grab a snack before you jump on your flight? If you’re at JFK in New York City, you might be in luck, at least if you’re passing Gate B 42. Because that’s where the airport just teamed up with Zippin, a maker of AI-powered cashierless checkout technology, and SSP America, an airport foodservice operator, to launch a new grab-and-go convenience concept called Camden Food Express.

According to the release sent to The Spoon, here’s how it works: Customers enter the store through a turnstile tapping their credit card as they enter and begin shopping by picking items off shelves. As they do, Zippin’s AI system automatically identifies the items and builds the customer’s virtual cart with the corresponding monetary value. When the customer leaves the store, the total amount spent is automatically charged to the card the customer used to check-in at the store entrance.

For Zippin, its partnership with JFK and SSP is a nice feather in the cap for a company with a portfolio of deployments, including hotels, stadiums, and grocery stores. Zippin’s move into airports follows other cashierless tech platforms like Amazon’s Just Walk Out, which showed up in Dallas airport earlier this year.

The embrace of cashierless tech is part of a broader exploration by airports of food tech. In recent years we’ve seen airports roll out delivery robots, pizza robots, and coffee robots, to name a few, as well as next-generation vending machines. For JFK, the rollout of Camden Food Express follows the October launch of a multi-brand automated retail center created in partnership with Hudson.