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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Restaurant Tech

Catering Startup Platterz Raises $43.8M CAD, Rebrands as Thriver

Corporate catering startup Platterz announced today it has rebranded as Thriver and raised a $43.8 million CAD (~$33 million USD) Series B funding round. The round was led by Viola Growth, with participation from Vertex Ventures Israel, Union Tech Ventures, Journey Ventures, and FJ Labs, as well as existing investors Aleph and Altair Capital. This brings Thriver’s total funding to $54.7 million (USD).

Since its inception in 2015, Thriver has operated primarily as a corporate catering program offering both group and individual meals as well as perks like the Treat Card, which employers could use to subsidize employees meals. Over time, however, the platform has broadened into what Thriver calls a “food and culture platform.” That means offering not just meals and meal plans to companies, but also community-building activities meant to bring employees — especially remote ones — together.

Thriver has the pandemic to thank for some of its motivation to expand into corporate culture beyond food. Scores of employees that once trekked to the office each day are now working from home. That’s an obvious dent in any corporate catering business that relies on employees working in offices. 

Thriver is addressing this by offering remote “experiences” for workplace teams that are meant to be culture-building activities employees can do together from their own homes. Thriver lists cooking classes, cocktail making, yoga, language lessons, virtual escape rooms (?!!), and many other activities as part of its remote activities. 

It’s a unique approach in terms of catering companies addressing the sudden effect of the pandemic on their business. Others, like Ox Verte and Freshly, now focus on home delivery for employee meals. Uber for Business says it can feed anyone from an individual working from home to a 1,000-person virtual event.

For its part, Thriver said in today’s release it will continue to offer its food platform along with these new remote activities. New funds will go towards expanding into new markets, building more capabilities into its platform, and growing the Thriver team. 

TouchBistro Acquires Loyalty and CRM Company TableUp

Restaurant management platform TouchBistro today announced its acquisition of TableUp, a company that makes loyalty and marketing software for the restaurant biz. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

TouchBistro said in a press release sent to The Spoon that it will fully integrate TableUp’s CRM and loyalty capabilities into its existing platform. Dubbed TouchBistro Loyalty, the new product will be released in phases, with an introductory product hitting North American markets “in the coming weeks,.” Through it, TouchBistro’s restaurant customers will be able to use the software to power loyalty programs, create more personalized marketing campaigns for guests, and offer more promotions. 

Once a simple POS system, TouchBistro has been steadily adding features to its platform to transform it into the kind of all-in-one front-of-house management tool most restaurant tech companies are peddling these days. In 2019, TouchBistro launched its own reservations and guest-management features. Its system works for both in-house orders and those for off-premises.

That ability to serve to-go customers is a must nowadays for restaurant tech systems. With many dining rooms still shuttered because of the pandemic, restaurants have little choice but to focus on their off-premises strategies. Restaurant tech companies in turn must broaden their systems’ capabilities to meet those new requirements. We’ve seen the likes of Sevenrooms, Presto, Toast, and others do just that over the last few months in an attempt to stay relevant in world where the restaurant front of house is becoming alarmingly less relevant. 

At the moment, loyalty programs and personalized marketing don’t rank as high on the list of customer concerns as things like cleanliness or ease of use with new off-premises-focused tools. However, loyalty and marketing features themselves aren’t going by the wayside anytime soon, even if a lot of restaurant dining rooms are. That makes TouchBistro’s acquisition of TableUp a worthy long-term play as restaurant tech companies continue to redefine themselves.

UK Regulators Finally Approve Amazon’s 16% Stake in Deliveroo

The UK’s Competition Markets and Authority (CMA) has at last approved Amazon’s 16 percent minority stake in food delivery service Deliveroo. The CMA’s findings, released today, note that the proposed Amazon-Deliveroo deal “has not resulted, and may not be expected to result, in a substantial lessening of competition (SLC) within a market or markets in the United Kingdom (UK) for goods and services.”

That concern — that Amazon’s investment in Deliveroo would lessen competition and consumer choices along with it — has hindered the investment since it was first announced back in May of 2019. For a quick recap, here’s how the saga has played out since then:

  • May 2019: Amazon announces its participation as the largest investor in Deliveroo’s $575 million Series G funding round.
  • July 2019: The CMA opens an investigation into Amazon’s investment, saying there were “reasonable grounds” that such a deal would mean the two companies would “cease to be distinct.”
  • October 2019: The CMA launches a formal probe into the deal.
  • April 2020: The deal gets initial approval, with the CMA citing “significant decline in revenues” for Deliveroo thanks to the pandemic.
  • June 2020: Regulators grant provisional clearance of the deal.

With this final approval, the CMA did warn Amazon that that increasing equity ownership of Deliveroo could result in further investigation, according to CNBC.

The approval comes at a time when consolidation is rampant among third-party food delivery services worldwide. The CMA finally approved the Takeaway.com’s acquisition of Just Eat, a deal that has created the largest food delivery service outside of China. The newly formed Just Eat Takeaway.com then swooped up Grubhub. Uber Eats, meanwhile, had been looking to buy Grubhub but backed away from such a deal in part because of the regulatory scrutiny the move would raise. Instead, it acquired Postmates in July.

With the pandemic still wrecking much havoc on the restaurant industry, we will probably see more of this consolidation — and probably a good deal of scrutiny, too — before the year is out.

Survey: Safety Is Now a Top Concern for Restaurant Customers Ordering Off-Premises

A quality off-premises restaurant experience is no longer just about food arriving on time and fries not being soggy. According to restaurant tech company Toast’s latest report, attention to cleanliness and safety is one of the top three concerns for restaurant guests for both delivery and takeout orders.

The Toast report, which The Spoon received a copy of, surveyed over 700 restaurant guests around how their expectations have changed as a result of the pandemic and what they consider to be an ideal restaurant experience today.

Almost half, or 48 percent, of guests surveyed placed cleanliness/safety as the top third concern for delivery orders, behind quality of food and ease of ordering. Another 40 percent placed it as the second main concern for takeout orders.

Seeing as we’re in the middle of a global pandemic, it makes sense that safety has wound its way to the top of the list for restaurant consumers. (As a category, cleanliness and safety were much lower on the list of concerns when Toast published a similar guest survey in January.) But Toast’s report also found that guests are ordering takeout more frequently than delivery.

From the report:

“7% of guests reported ordering takeout through a third- party app multiple times a day. 9% of guests reported ordering takeout through a restaurant’s app or website once a day. 16% of guests reported ordering takeout through a restaurant’s app or website multiple times a week. And 20% of guests reported ordering takeout through a restaurant’s app or website once a week.”

Cost, of course, remains a big issue with third-party delivery apps. That’s especially true now, with many restaurants trying to offset the high commission fees these services charge by raising delivery prices. But given the pandemic we are in, safety is obviously a growing concern.

One reason takeout might be more popular right now than delivery is that food goes through more touchpoints when someone drops it at your house, since the meal has to be collected by a driver. Issues around delivery drivers tampering with food abounded even before the pandemic. In response, some chains now offer tamper-free packaging. But even setting that aside for a minute, customers still have to worry about the cleanliness of the driver’s vehicle, whether or not that person is sick, and if they are wearing protective gear. Toast noted in its report that, at least for now, customers “might prefer the level of control over cleanliness and safety they get when picking food orders up themselves.”

Toast recommends that restaurants communicate frequently and clearly with customers about steps they are taking to keep their businesses safe. However, it can be tough to guarantee safety if the food is leaving their hands and going to the customer via a third-party delivery service. There’s no quick fix for that, unfortunately, since most restaurants can’t afford to keep their own delivery fleet. For now, restaurants should continue prioritizing cleanliness on takeout orders and hope their third-party delivery counterparts are doing the same.

As Buffets and Hot Bars Close Down, LeanPath Launches New Mobile Solution

LeanPath today announced a new mobile version of its product that helps fight food waste in commercial kitchens. The new LeanPath Go is an item-based mobile tracking system that the company claims was specifically designed for the changes COVID-19 has brought to food operators, namely the shutting down of buffets and hot bars.

Typically, LeanPath’s product offerings use a combination of food scale, camera and cloud computing to help combat waste in high-volume food operations like cafeterias. Kitchen staff puts pre-consumer (i.e., to be served) food on the scale. The camera then snaps a picture of that food and sends the photo to LeanPath for analysis. LeantPath categorizes the reason for the waste (food was burnt, or spoiled, etc.) so that kicthens can better understand why food is getting thrown out and from that information train their staff to reduce waste.

All that, however, was before COVID-19.

Now, the global pandemic has shut down high-volume food operations like cafeterias and even hot bars in grocery stores. Instead of leaving big trays of food out all day long for hundreds of people to interact with, restaurants and grocers are turning more towards pre-packaged to-go items. To adapt, the new LeanPath Go system has ditched the food scale in favor of a mobile device.

From the LeanPath blog post announcing the new system:

Leanpath Go measures waste on an “each” basis when the unit and unit cost are distinct. A pre-packaged turkey sandwich with chips and a pickle spear, for example, is a single unit with a cost-of-goods already assigned to it. Leanpath Go’s picture-based interface allows the user to tap to track one item, or tap-and-hold for fast, multi-item tracking.

LeanPath’s new system then can help identify which items are selling (or not), and the costs associated with making that item so operators can better manage their inventory.

LeanPath isn’t the only company offering high-tech tools to fight food waste. Winnow and Phood both offer similar AI-enabled systems that use a scale and camera to automatically identify food waste in large food service operations.

In today’s crazy, unpredictable world, getting a handle on food waste and by extension the food budget, is something restaurants and other foodservice companies can actually control. And given the thin margins restaurants operate on in good times, being able to control food costs during this downturn could certainly help keep the lights on longer.

Winter Is Coming for Outdoor Dining, So Get Going With Off-Premises

In further proof that you can’t solve the current restaurant industry crisis by flipping a switch, Upserve released new data this week that shows many restaurants are still struggling with off-premises formats.

Upserve’s survey polled 421 players across different types of restaurants, including full-service/dine-in, fast casual, QSRs, and fine dining, among others. The big takeaway? More than half (64 percent) of restaurants feel “optimistic” about the future, but nearly half (47 percent) struggle with shifting their business models to online ordering and the formats that come with it.

We’ve seen this play out in real time for better and for worse throughout the last several months. Restaurants historically focused on dine-in service have had to pivot to delivery and curbside pickup, not to mention find affordable tech solutions that could enable online ordering. Businesses have struggled to master off-premises operations. They’ve gotten really creative with ad hoc tech stacks and worked much harder to communicate with their customers. And most all of them have seen a rise in off-premises orders. Upserve’s report said that as of July, its restaurant customers “have seen a 782.7% increase in Online Order sales volume growth.”

But Upserve also points out that autumn is practically upon us, and once colder weather comes, the option for outdoor seating will go away, not just for its own customers but for everyone. “It’s key that restaurants find an online ordering solution that works for their customers by the fall,” the report said.

The call to action for all restaurants right now is to get their off-premises strategies fine-tuned, streamlined, and operationally efficient, regardless of the trajectory of the pandemic or the future of indoor dining. Even if indoor dining returns in some form close to what we used to know, its chances of unseating off-premises at this point are slim to none.

Here’s Why Delivery Price Hikes By QSRs Could Spike Demand for Drive Thru

Admittedly, I brushed over news from earlier this week that some QSRs are raising their delivery prices more than 15 percent. But the more I’ve thought about it over the last few days, the more I wonder at two things: the chains’ motivations behind the price hikes and whether they’ll prompt more customers to order drive-thru and pickup to save a few bucks. 

Business Insider first wrote about the price hikes, noting that Chick-fil-A’s prices are 30 percent higher for delivery, while Starbucks and McDonald’s prices are about 20 percent higher. My own unscientific analysis compared the costs of McDonald’s double quarter pounder with cheese meal and found it to be $9.19 on Uber Eats versus $7.99 via McDonald’s own app. (Both prices are before taxes, delivery fees, and tip.)

That example is arguably not going to break the bank. But consider that since more people are staying home and ordering for the whole household, delivery orders are likely much bigger than a single meal, which could significantly raise the cost of dinner. 

Of course, part of the reason for these price hikes is that large chains, just like small restaurants, have to pay the third-party delivery piper when it comes to commission fees, which can go as high as 30 percent. Passing some of that burden on to the customer makes sense from a business perspective.

Question is, will customers want to shoulder that delivery burden when they could hop in the car, drive a couple miles, and collect their food via curbside pickup for cheaper? In many cases, probably not. For one thing, a lot of food from QSRs just doesn’t travel well and you typically wind up with soggy fries, watery soda, and lukewarm burgers. For another, we’re in economically uncertain times, y’all. 

Given all that, more customers will be motivated to order their fast food via pickup and drive thru, which may be part of these chains’ longer-term strategies in terms of price hikes. Restaurants make more money off pickup orders (no commission fees), and when orders are funneled through the business’s own digital properties, the customer data remains in-house. Over the last year we’ve seen an uptick in brands encouraging customers to order via in-house apps, while others are even launching their own full-stack delivery services. 

Price hike’s won’t take third-party delivery down, but if customers respond by choosing pickup, curbside, and drive-thru, the loss of business will be another swing of the hammer currently trying to crumble third-party delivery’s chances of profitability. 

Elsewhere in Restaurant Tech . . .

  • Iconic hot dog chain Nathan’s Famous has partnered with REEF to use the latter’s ghost kitchen network to fulfill more off-premises orders. The partnership is now in Manhattan, and Nathan’s has cities like LA, Portland, and Minneapolis on the horizon. 
  • Yum Brands’ digital sales hit an all time high of $3.5 billion in Q2 of 2020. The parent company of Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut notably said on the call that opening dining rooms was important but not “critical” to the company’s success. 
  • Sonic unveiled a new drive-thru design that’s further proof the drive-thru experience is also being reinvented. Contactless order and payment capabilities, expanded patio areas, and “lawn games” (?!) are all part of the new design.
  • Oakland this week became the latest city to approve a cap on commission fees third-party delivery services charge restaurants. The 15-percent cap is effective immediately and last until 90 days after the COVID-19 health emergency is over. Whenever that is. 

Wawa Goes Beyond Standard Convenience Store Fare With a Plant-Based Breakfast

Like most other types of food businesses, the convenience store is changing due to the pandemic, and that includes what’s on the menu when it comes to food. In line with that, today, convenience store chain Wawa announced a partnership with Beyond Meat to bring a plant-based breakfast option to its stores.

Dubbed the Sizzli Breakfast Sandwich, the new item will use Beyond’s Breakfast Sausage product. As of today, it’s available at 650 Wawa stores in the Mid-Atlantic region and will be available in all Florida stores from August 10 onward.

In certain parts of the country, namely the Mid-Atlantic, Wawa is practically iconic in the world of convenience store chains. But like many food businesses nowadays, it’s having to reinvent itself in the wake of changing consumer demands around healthy eating and massive shifts in how people get that food.

The chain already offers its “Wawa Your Way” menu, which offers healthier options and caters to various dietary needs/preferences (gluten-free, plant-based, etc.).

Adding a plant-based option to the menu is the obvious next step. Consumer demand for plant-based proteins has surged during the pandemic as ugly truths about the meat industry continue to come to light. The whole of the alternative protein category, including plant-based meat, is expected to grow to $17.9 billion by 2025.

But plant-based options isn’t the only change Wawa has introduced recently to meet new consumer behaviors. With more people staying at home, or just wary of mingling with strangers in public settings, the company has had to turn its attention to serving folks off-premises. Wawa struck a delivery deal with DoorDash in April, then launched curbside order and pickup in June. Just this week, the chain announced its first-ever drive-thru location, which will begin construction in August in Falls Township, PA.

Wawa’s announcements follow moves by other well-known convenience store chains to shift both their formats and products to meet the current times. 7-Eleven expanded delivery and introduced a new pickup feature in July. It too has a partnership with DoorDash. Over in Tokyo, Uber Eats is delivering food from Lawson Convenience stores. And let’s not forget cashierless checkout’s march into the convenience store realm, led by Zippin, Aramark, and others.

Wawa’s news from the week is further proof multiple intersections are happening right now between convenience stores, grocery stores, and restaurants, and between plant-based diets and traditional ones. Expect more of these lines to blur as the entire food industry continues changing at the pace of the pandemic.

Shake Shack Pivots to Drive-Thru, Adds Direct Delivery

Shake Shack said on its earnings call yesterday that it will start opening restaurants with drive-thrus, with the first of them slated to open in 2021. The chain didn’t name a location, though CEO Randy Garutti said on the call the chain plans ”to lead with traditional suburban high-traffic quarters.”

This is pivot for Shake Shack, a New York City-based chain that’s historically served urban settings. And unsurprisingly, the move is largely in response to the pandemic’s effect on in-house restaurant dining. Garutti said on the call that fewer than half of all Shake Shack’s have opened their dining rooms, and that while urban Shacks have been heavily impacted by social distancing restrictions, suburban locations are recovering faster.

The company released a rendering of the new drive-thrus (see above) that suggests these would have dedicated lanes for mobile orders as well as traditional ones. It’s a strategy already in use by chains like Dunkin’ and Chipotle. 

Shake Shack had a 49 percent nosedive in same stores sales for the second quarter, though that number is slowly improving, the company said. Digital and off-premises are a big reason the figure wasn’t lower.

And drive-thru lanes are just one piece of that off-premises strategy. On the call, Garutti highlighted the brand’s recent efforts, which include curbside pickup, Shack Tracks, a ghost kitchen in the U.K., and increased focus on digital ordering. In the second quarter, sales through the brand’s own app “more than tripled” compared to the same period last year. 

Perhaps most important, Shake Shack will start offering direct delivery via its own digital properties. Garutti plainly stated that the motivation behind this move is “keeping guests within our native infrastructure and deepening our ability to connect directly with them over time.” 

Direct delivery is becoming an increasingly important part of major restaurant chains’ digital arsenal, and is already in use by Panda Express, the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, and others. The benefits of direct delivery, where orders go straight to a restaurant’s own app, rather than getting funneled through a third-party delivery app, are obvious. Restaurants pay lower commission fees, since third parties like Uber Eats are only delivering the food, not processing the order. And brands retain valuable customer data they would otherwise not be able to access. 

None of Shake Shack’s announcements this week are particularly eyebrow raising, which is in itself an important point. Every day, off-premises gets further entrenched in consumers’ minds as the de facto restaurant format for quick service and fast casual. Adding drive-thru or curbside, doubling down on digital, and exploring direct delivery are quickly becoming the standard for those chains that can afford them. Those standards were emerging long before the pandemic arrived, and will exist long after it leaves.  

Phood Fights Food Waste with Scales, Computer Vision and AI

With the pandemic still raging, restaurants are struggling to stay in business. One way restaurants can help stave off permanent closure is to make sure whatever money they have now is being spent properly and not going to waste. One way to do that is to measure the food being used in meals… and the food going to waste.

Phood is a company that uses a combination of scales, computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) to help restaurants, cafeterias and other eateries better understand and optimize how their food inventory is being used.

There are three parts to the Phood system: a scale, a camera and a software backend. Food is placed on the scale either before going into a dish (to see how much is being used to make meals) or afterwards (to see how much waste is being generated). There’s a camera mounted above the scale that uses AI to automatically identify what each food item is.

Phood’s system also integrates with a restaurant’s existing POS and inventory management software to track how much of a particular item is being used and who supplied it. Based on that information, restaurants can then realign both production and ordering to reduce waste. So if a cafeteria or restaurant winds up with too many leftover mixed vegetables, that point is highlighted in a Phood dashboard so the manager can take appropriate action (make less or order more).

On its website, Phood claims that its solution can help reduce food waste by 42 percent. I spoke with Phood Founder, Luc Dang, by phone this week and he said Phood can provide a cost savings of 8 – 10 percent. In the thin margin world of restaurants, those savings can go a long way.

Phood, which began using computer vision and AI in its product last year and has raised $100,000 in seed funding, isn’t the only company fighting food waste in this manner. Winnow, which raised $12 million last year, uses a similar scale, computer vision and AI approach. LeanPath does much the same thing to help change behavior in the kitchen (e.g., less wasteful chopping of veggies or trimming of meat).

During these unpredictable times when the future of just about every eatery hangs in the balance, using a tool like Phood could not only help close down food waste, but also play its part in helping keep restaurants open.

Denny’s Off-Premises Sales Have Almost Doubled Thanks to the Pandemic

Denny’s announced on its Q2 earnings call this week that average weekly sales for off-premises orders have almost doubled since the start of the pandemic, from $4,000/week in February to $7,900/week in July.

Like other restaurants that have historically been known for their in-dining room experiences, Denny’s found itself having to quickly pivot when the pandemic hit. Speaking on the call, John C. Miller, CEO of the Spartanburg, S.C.-based chain, outlined the ways in which his company has adapted to the changes.

Those efforts included continued focus on Denny’s long-established Denny’s on Demand platform, which allows guests to place online orders for pickup and delivery. (The chain’s menu is available through most of the major third-party delivery services.) Like others, it also added curbside pickup and, once stay-at-home restrictions began to loosen, converted areas of its parking lots and sidewalks into outdoor seating.

The reinvention of the restaurant menu is another common theme to emerge from this pandemic. And by reinvention, I mean pared down selections that allow kitchens to work more efficiently. Denny’s was no exception here, having streamlined its own menu to focus on its most popular items, and offering family-style bundles, as well.

If Denny’s story of off-premises orders saving the day sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the state of most major restaurant chains the U.S. right now. McDonald’s said it made 50 operating changes to get “pandemic ready,” many of them around digital ordering and off-premises orders. Starbucks, which saw one of its toughest quarters so far, is completely overhauling some traditional sit-down locations and turning them into to-go-centric stores. 

Denny’s itself has permanently closed some of its sit-down locations due to “unforeseeable business circumstances prompted by COVID-19.”

“This quarter has proven to be one of the most difficult quarters this country and especially the full-service restaurant industry has ever seen,” Miller said on the call. And there’s no telling what Q3 will look like, since the state of the restaurant industry changes practically every day and full recovery is dependent in part on the trajectory of the pandemic.

Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf Is the Latest Chain to Embrace Direct Delivery

The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf announced today via press release the launch of its newly redesigned mobile app. Among updates to the UX and improvements to the chain’s digital rewards program, the standout feature of the redesign is direct delivery.

As a quick refresher, direct delivery is when a chain can process orders made for delivery directly through its own digital properties (i.e., app and/or website), rather than having to go through a third-party service like DoorDash or Uber Eats. The big upside here is that restaurants pay a lower commission fee to third-party services because DoorDash Et al. are only handling the actual delivery of the food, not the order processing and technical logistics. The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf currently delivers through Postmates to California and Arizona. 

The new app can process delivery orders directly. Other features, according to today’s press release, include an order-ahead menu for pickup orders at physical stores, the ability to scan, earn, and redeem points from the app’s home screen, and more customization capabilities for food and beverage items.

Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf’s app revamp comes at a time when digital properties are the main channel through which most restaurants are connecting with customers. A rise in COVID cases coupled with extremely uncertain economics has forced restaurants to rethink their approach to the digital realm. Keeping a customer (and their data) entrenched firmly in a chain’s own ecosystem is becoming increasingly important, and is one of the drivers behind this adoption of direct delivery. Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf is the latest brand to adopt this strategy, but plenty others already offer a similar approach to delivery. Panda Express recently announced the launch of its own delivery service. Outback Steakhouse and Wendy’s offered direct delivery long before the pandemic.

The move towards direct delivery doesn’t just mean potentially better margins for restaurants. It’s also fueling the growth of a specific area of restaurant tech, namely delivery integrators that sell out-of-the-box tech solutions to help restaurants bring some functions around delivery back in house.

Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf did not say in the press release if it has redesigned its app completely in-house or if it used technology from a third party like ShiftPixy. But it’s entrance into the direct delivery space is a sign that we’ll see similar moves from other regional chains in the near future as the dining room reopening remain in a constant state of flux.

A Railway Lunchbox Company In Japan Reinvents Its Packaging to Fight Coronavirus

Not all food tech needs to be high tech when it comes to creating novel solutions that aid against coronavirus infections. Awajiya, a Kobe, Japan-based company that delivers meals to railway stations, announced last week it had developed new packaging for its bento box meals aimed at shielding customers from potential infections.

Awajiya makes and sells ekiben, which are portable meals historically sold on trains and in railway stations. But while ekiben might function as a quick bite for eaters on the go, the boxes are quite a few steps up from “fast food.” Typically, the ingredients in an ekiben reflect the flavors and culture of the region in which they are sold. Ditto for the packaging, which often looks like a work of art, not a to-go box.

Awajiya’s new bento box reflects all of this. The lunches are sold at railway shops and in some department stores, most of them in and around around the city of Kobe. According to the company’s website, meals incorporate meats, seafoods, and other ingredients specific to Kobe and its surrounding areas.  

When folded according to the instructions, Awajiya’s lunchbox creates a three-sided shield-like structure around the box that can keep any airborne droplets from nearby people out of the food. It also guards against the eater’s own germs from spreading to others. Awajiya says the box is the same size as a regular bento box, making it easy to use on trains. 

While not the most high-tech development, Awajiya’s box is nonetheless a reminder that fighting COVID-19 in the food realm can be as simple as reimagining a piece of packaging or the layout of a physical space. After all, we’re in a time when reusable coffee cups are currently frowned on or outright prohibited, when menus have to be disposable or digital, and sit-down restaurants are getting reformatted for off-premises orders. A simple lunchbox may not stop coronavirus in its tracks, but it’s incremental developments like these that, when working together en masse, can go great distances to keep the world’s population a little safer.