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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Sharing Economy

An Airbnb for Air Fryers? How the Sharing Economy is Slowly Coming to Home Appliances

Back in 2016, the CEO of Swedish appliance company Electrolux floated the idea of possibly using a sharing economy model for washing machines.

“We have a few fun ideas we are testing, like: how about a laundry Uber, where people share their unused laundry time?” Jonas Samuelson said at the time.

While Electrolux never did launch an Uber-for-laundry service, it did eventually launch a subscription vacuum-as-a-service business in Europe for its robotic vacuum. Even so, the idea of sharing economy meets home appliances really hasn’t gotten much traction.

Until now. Kinda.

That’s because Tulu, an Israel/NY startup is bringing a version of the appliance-as-a-service concept to apartments and condos in the United States, the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Israel. The company, which just raised a $20 million Series A funding round, offers short-term rentals on everyday household items like air fryers, printers, micro-mobility products (e-scooters), and more. They also power small shops for consumables like food.

The company, which started its shops in 2019, sees its concept of household goods-as-a-service as being in line with the mindset of everyday consumers who have gotten accustomed to sharing economy models.

“So I think that the best way to capture what Tulu is is that we’re part of a fundamental shift in consumption paradigms that are moving from this equation of ‘I want something, so, I buy it,’ into the equation of ‘I need something, therefore, I use it,” Yishai Lehavi, CEO and co-founder of Tulu, told Techcrunch. “We’re accelerating this already existing mindset and saying that everything in our daily life can become such a service.”

While I do think he’s right and the idea of short-term rentals for home goods is a perfect fit for those living in multi-family housing, it’s worth noting that Tulu isn’t a true two-sided peer-to-peer marketplace like Uber or Airbnb. It’s closer to a Lime e-bike model, where the supplier of the goods is the platform owner, while the other side is the consumer. This might be a small distinction and ultimately one that doesn’t matter to customers of Tulu (and future services like it), since in the end they still get the benefit of temporary ownership & usage no matter if the appliance is rented from a company or a private owner.

Where we are seeing true peer-to-peer sharing economy models in kitchens is via home cook marketplaces like Dishdivvy and Shef. These platforms give those with a kitchen and a little cooking capability an opportunity to monetize their ability and appliances, while also giving buyers a faster way to get what they want: finished meals.

It wouldn’t be surprising to see companies like Tulu, cottage food marketplaces, and even surplus food sharing services like Olio continue to gain traction in coming years. Inflation, increased urban density, and acceptance of new sharing models will continue to push many consumers to reject ownership as the default model when it comes to home appliances.

Home Food Marketplace Shef Raises $8.8M Seed Round

Homemade food marketplace Shef announced today it has raised $8.8 million in seed funding. The round included participation from Y Combinator, Craft Ventures, and M13 with participation from founders and executives from Instacart, TaskRabbit, StubHub, AngelList, Lyft, Airbnb, and Yelp.

Shef says that right now, it is focused on expanding its service, which is available in various regions around the U.S., to provide opportunities for chefs and other restaurant workers that are indefinitely out of a job because of COVID-19 and independent restaurant shutdowns. “Our mission has always been to help immigrants and refugees make a meaningful income. We’ve now expanded that mission to include feeding frontline healthcare workers and putting laid-off restaurant cooks back to work,” Shef cofounder Alvin Salehi said in a statement.

Salehi, a former White House tech advisor, and food entrepreneur Joey Grassia founded the service in 2018.

Via the Shef website, home chefs can post menus as well as designate which days of the week meals are available for delivery. All “shefs” undergo an application process as well as food safety certification training. 

Shef said in today’s press release that it has about 4,000 applicants on its waitlist at the moment, and that the popularity of the service has “skyrocketed” since the start of the pandemic.

Meal-sharing marketplaces are a relatively new concept in the U.S., where they’ve only recently become legal. In California, where Shef is based, AB626 was signed into law in 2018. Glendale, CA-based DishDivvy offers a similar service via its mobile app, and NYC-based WoodSpoon has a marketplace connecting home chefs with consumers on the East Coast.

However, in other states, the practice of selling meals out of your own kitchen remains illegal, which makes these services spotty in terms of availability. Whether the shutdown of many restaurant dining rooms and the accompanying loss of jobs changes that remains to be seen.

DishDivvy Partners with DoorDash to Deliver Home-Cooked Meals

Today DishDivvy, an online marketplace for home-cooked meals, officially announced its integration with DoorDash to facilitate food deliveries. Previously, hungry folks who had purchased a meal from a home cook over DishDivvy’s platform had to go and pick up their homemade lasagna/spanikopita/pad thai themselves. Now they have the option to pay a mileage-based delivery fee to have it delivered directly to their door.

DishDivvy may have just officially announced the news, but CEO Ani Torosyan wrote to me today that the startup had been making deliveries with DoorDash since 2019. “We held off on announcing because we wanted to test the integration and really understand delivery when it comes to home kitchen operations,” she wrote. Since then she said that they have iterated on their integration, but wouldn’t reveal exact details.

The official news comes just a couple weeks after DishDivvy announced it would be expanding from its home state of California into Utah. Torosyan said that they hadn’t tested DoorDash delivery in all of Utah yet, but that as of now there is some coverage in the state. She added that third-party delivery of home-cooked food is completely legal in both California and Utah.

DoorDash’s costs for the home-cooked food are a bit pricey: $6 for delivery within a 3-mile radius. That might seem excessive when you could just zip over and pick it up for free. However, adding the delivery option allows DoorDash to reach a wider audience: those extremely strapped for time, people without access to a car, anyone who is mobility-challenged, or doesn’t want to leave the house, etc. etc.

It may seem like a relatively small step, but integrating with delivery shows that DishDivvy is serious about making the cottage food marketplace a legitimate food option available to all — not just a niche audience. Well, at least in those states that allow the sale of home-cooked food.

DishDivvy to Expand Homemade Food Marketplace to Utah

Talented cooking hobbyists of Utah, you’ve got a new potential side hustle. Yesterday DishDivvy, a marketplace which connects home cooks with hungry neighbors, announced that it had begun operations across Utah.

DishDivvy is a mobile app that lets preapproved home cooks sell food to local consumers. The startup helps home cooks get certified and onboarded onto their platform. They also handle all ordering and payment internally, and can even help arrange for home delivery. Utah will be the second territory for Glendale, CA-based DishDivvy, the first being its home state of California.

DishDivvy wasn’t the first company to try and create a cottage food marketplace. Josephine was an early entrant in the food sharing economy, similarly connecting home cooks with hungry consumers. Due to regulatory issues they were forced to suspend operations at the end of 2017. However, with the passage of California law AB-626 (which was pushed forward by Josephine’s team), DishDivvy was able to commence operations in California at the end of 2018.

Utah has just passed a similar law with H.B. 181, The Home Consumption and Homemade Food Act. Under the law, home cooks in Utah are “exempt from any state, county, or city licensing, permitting, certification, inspection, packaging, and labeling requirements,” provided they comply with certain requirements set in the law. Therefore Utah residents, like Californians, are now able to sell homemade food directly from their home — as long as they have the proper permits to do so and follow some basic rules (food must be for home consumption, sold directly to consumer, etc).

We at the Spoon have been intrigued by the idea of a home cook marketplace for awhile. It’s an interesting way to give people a supplementary revenue source, keep money within a community, and connect neighbors, all while cutting down on food waste. That’s why we named DishDivvy one of our FoodTech 25 for 2019.

Last June, when Mike Wolf wrote about AB 626, he noted that “California often leads the country when it comes to forward-leaning legislation” and that the new law “could open the door for nationwide legalization and give a framework for home food entrepreneurs.” It seems like California has indeed opened that door for Utah — and I’m guessing we’ll see some more states pass laws to welcome cottage food industry in 2020.

Zuul Kitchens Is Launching a Huge Ghost Kitchen Facility Next Week in NYC

Come next week there will be a new kitchen in town, but it won’t have any dining room attached. Zuul Kitchens, a ghost kitchen facility that will exist solely for the purpose of helping restaurants fulfill delivery orders, will launch operations in New York City starting in September, according an article from Eater NY.

Zuul will open its first facility in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. According to the Eater article, the 5,000-square-foot space will house nine kitchens and house Sweetgreen, Junzi, and other chains looking to grow the number of delivery orders they can fulfill. Restaurants will pay a monthly membership fee (undisclosed at the moment) that covers kitchen space as well as equipment.

Ghost kitchens are basically restaurant kitchens without a dining room or front-of-house operation. Back in December of 2018, The Spoon predicted that the rise of ghost kitchens would be a major trend unfolding over 2019. So far, that’s been the case. Kitchen United, a major player when it comes to offering restaurants shared kitchen facilities for delivery-only orders, has been rapidly expanding across the U.S., opening or planning to open locations in Atlanta, GA, Austin, TX, Columbus, OH, as well as Washington, D.C. and NYC. Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick runs a network of delivery-focused facilities called CloudKitchens. Outside the U.S., Starbucks opened ghost kitchens in China to fulfill delivery orders and Uber is rumored to be dabbling with them in Europe.

Ghost Kitchens serve a couple of different purposes. They provide a place for existing restaurants to fulfill more delivery orders and also serve as facilities for food entrepreneurs and restaurants to test out new concepts. For example, restaurant group Lettuce Entertain You just announced a partnership with the folks behind the Whole30 program to open a virtual, delivery-only Whole30 Restaurant, with food delivered by Grubhub.

For the SoHo locations, Zuul will focus on established restaurants that have existing brick-and-mortar locations but are looking to grow their delivery orders.

Zuul told Eater it is aiming to fulfill delivery orders in 15 minutes total from the time the order is placed, which would certainly satisfy consumers’ need for speed when it comes to food nowadays. Whether or not the company can meet that goal on every order will depend on the people actually delivering the food. Zuul is using Uber Eats, Grubhub, and DoorDash services for the actual delivery, so part of the 15-minute strategy is at the mercy of those couriers. That said, Zuul is apparently offering drivers a waiting area that includes plenty of phone charging stations, places to sit, and refreshments like coffee and tea, all of which could entice drivers to arrive a little early so they’re onsite as soon as an order is ready for delivery.

For now, Zuul will focus on the New York market, which means it won’t have a ton of direct competition at first. That will surely change once Kitchen United comes to town.

Will California’s AB-626 Bill Serve Home Cooks, Entrepreneurs, or Tech Giants?

When AB-626 (also known as the 2018 Homemade Food Operations Act) passed in California last year it ushered in the start of what we at The Spoon have started calling the Home Cook Economy. Now, home cooks in the Sunshine State are allowed to sell up to 60 meals a week and make up to $50,000 in annual revenue.

Yesterday the L.A. Times ran a story on the Home Food Economy in which author Frank Shyong argued that AB-626 is not, in fact, helping the immigrant and low-income cooks that it promised it would.

Shyong certainly makes some valid points — especially when it comes to immigrants and immigration officials — but I finished the piece feeling that we had some very differing views on what exactly AB-626 would look like.

First of all, Shyong seems to think that most home cooks who will take advantage of AB-626 are trying to start their own food business. To that end, he argues that the bill is too vague in its language about what constitutes a “meal,” and the 60 meals per week/ $50,000 annual revenue caps make it too difficult for entrepreneurs to actually make a living off of sales from homemade goods.

True. But the way I understood it, AB-626 was never meant to facilitate full-fledged cottage food businesses. Instead, it was intended to offer economic empowerment through supplementary income via home-cooked foods.

To confirm this I called up Ani Torosyan, founder of DishDivvy, a Glendale, CA-based company with a mobile app that connects consumers with pre-approved home cooks in their area. She also had a few issues with the L.A. Times article. “If you get anywhere close to $50,000 gross revenue… you really should be going to an industrialized kitchen,” she said.

In short, AB-626 is not for people who are looking to start a full-fledged food production business. It’s for home cooks that are looking for a little bit of extra money, or maybe want to dip their toe in the food business before they decide to ramp up production and rent out a commercial kitchen space.

Reading the piece, I was a little surprised by Shyong’s argument that more than any other party, AB-626 would end up benefiting tech giants. He predicts that the home-cook economy will quickly be dominated by tech giants like Uber who will step in to help home cooks — many of whom have no entrepreneurial experience of their own — do things like manage payments, market their product, and ensure last-mile delivery. In exchange for a percentage of their profits, of course.

I agree that tech companies will play a role in shaping the home-cooking industry — this day and age, it’s inevitable. In fact, it was a tech company who first paved the way for the home-cook economy. C.O.O.K. Alliance, a group founded by the now-defunct startup Josephine which was one of the first to give home cooks a platform from which to sell their food, was one of the primary advocates for AB-626. Even without an official marketplace, sites like Craigslist, Facebook, and even Nextdoor have served as platforms on which people can buy and sell homemade food.

But I don’t think that tech companies will destroy the heart and soul of the home-cook economy. And neither does The Spoon’s Michael Wolf.

Back in June he wrote a piece responding to a different L.A. Times article which took a similarly worried view about the opportunistic role that tech giants could play in the emerging home cook economy. Wolf argued that even if Uber or Airbnb did enter the home meal sharing market and charge 15 percent fees (which is what DishDivvy currently charges), so what? As long as legislation is in place to ensure food safety and third party fee transparency — both of which are clearly outlined in AB-626 — why not open up a new, flexible market opportunity to budding food entrepreneurs?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the home cooking marketplace is another example of how complicated it is doing business in a tech-filled world. Yes, the home meal sharing economy is a ripe target for hungry tech businesses to take advantage of people. Which is especially dangerous when the target beneficiaries would be immigrants, people of color, and women.

But in the end, it boils down to what the home cooks want. If tech giants can give them access to an instant audience, providing a marketplace that new food entrepreneurs can easily plug into, then I say bring it on. But for now, it’s smaller tech startups like DishDivvy that are paving the way in the home food sharing economy.

Sure, Big Tech players will likely enter the home-cook economy in order to grab a piece of the (homemade) pie. In fact, AirBnB has already done so: Shyong references how the company sponsored the passage of AB 626, likely because homemade food preparation is a key part of some of its “experiences.” But there’s also a future where tech companies can help grow the home cook economy without destroying it.

Are Hourly Home Kitchen Rentals the Next Sharing Economy Opportunity?

Call it uberization, the sharing economy or collaborative consumption, the idea that people may have something others want and can rent or sell a portion of it frictionlessly through online marketplaces has changed the game for industries ranging from hospitality to transportation.

Food and cooking is no different. Uber Eats, virtual kitchens and the fast emergence of home cooking platforms in the wake of the passage of AB-626 has shown us food system business models are ripe for reinvention through the power of peer to peer.

But what about home kitchens? More specifically, what if we could simply rent a neighbor’s kitchen – built in appliances, blenders, countertops and everything else – by the hour?

While many of us have an oven, cookware and all the cooking gadgets needed to whip up a tasty meal, others are forced to eat out, have food delivered or impose on a friend either because they are kitchen-less or just don’t have the right set up to cook the big holiday meal or entertain in the way they would like.

What got me thinking this could happen is the recent news that by-the-minute hotel stay app Recharge has moved into the home market. If you’re not familiar with Recharge, they are known for offering access to hotel rooms on a by-the-minute basis so people can nap, shower or…whatever. It works with 50 hotels and now the company says they’ve signed up over one thousand homes for the platform.

With homes available by the hour, I have to think kitchens will be a central attraction for many. Whether it’s hosting a dinner party, baking cookies for the holidays or cooking a week’s worth of home meals for the family, there are all sorts of use cases where hourly access to a kitchen just makes sense.

In a way, hourly access to home kitchens is an extension of what we’re already seeing in the maker market, where concepts like that of Tinker Kitchen have emerged for people who want to get into a fully equipped kitchen to cook a souffle or try out a new cooking appliance.

“We are aimed at people who usually wouldn’t step into a commercial kitchen,” Tinker Kitchen creator Dan Mills told the Spoon last August.  “It’s food for personal enrichment,” he said.

Enrichment makes sense for the aspirational and hobbyist chefs among us, but there are probably lots others who just have an immediate need to make some food or host a party. A platform for renting a home with a nice kitchen would meet that kind of need quite nicely.

So will a sharing economy for the home kitchen take off? It’s too soon to say for sure, but my guess is yes. And the best part is? You can always book an extra hour to take a well-deserved nap on someone else’s bed when you’re done with that culinary masterpiece.