Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Spoon Plus

The Ghost Kitchen Deep Dive Sessions

The ghost kitchen, which had already an emerging trend prior to the pandemic, has fast become one of the most talked-about concepts in the restaurant business in 2020. Industry players ranging from well-established chains to food delivery specialists to new ghost kitchen operators are experimenting with new ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant models.

To explore the implications of these changes and hear from those pioneering these businesses, The Spoon held a day-long event discussing business models, operational strategies and lessons learned called the Ghost Kitchen Deep Dive. We talked about virtual restaurants, ghost kitchen operations and even took a tour of a next-generation ghost kitchen, delivery and take-out hub built in Boise, Idaho.

Speakers featured in these deep dive conversations include:

 

Below are the sessions from the Ghost Kitchen Deep Dive. If you are a Spoon Plus subscriber, you can watch these in full. If you would like to access these sessions, you can subscribe to Spoon Plus here.

Report: Prep, Cook, Automate – Where Tech Is Leading the Restaurant Back of House

Back-of-house processes in the restaurant tend to involve a lot more legacy hardware and closed-loop systems, which present significantly different challenges than those at the front of house. That in turn has created a slower innovation pipeline and less interest from investors. 

This report will examine current back of house processes and technologies as well as the drivers for innovation changing those things. 

 Back-of-house operations present a huge opportunity for tech companies and other startups willing to tackle the many problems that have yet to be solved in the space. Additionally, technological innovations in robotics, AI and machine learning will change the physical restaurant kitchen along with its labor needs and cooking and delivery systems.

This report is available to Spoon Plus members. To learn more about Spoon Plus, go here.

Smart Kitchen Summit 2020 Sessions, Day Three

Included below are videos from the following sessions:

  • Same-Day Delivery’s Role in the Modern Kitchen, Grocery Store and Beyond – Wilson Rothman and Kelly Caruso
  • The Tech-Powered Grocery Store – Chris Albrecht and Will Glaser
  • Building Resilient Restaurants With Tech in the COVID Era – Chris Carr, Ian Christopher, Christine Schindler, Jennifer Marston
  • Designing Consumer-Centered Products For The Kitchen – Evan Dash, Jane Freiman, Nicole Papantoniou
  • The CRISPR Revolution – Brian Frank and Tom Adams
  • Off-Premise Disruption: Restaurant Delivery & Virtual Restaurants Change The Game – Brita Rosenheim, Tom Pickett
  • Food Service: Digital Transformation & Disruption – Scott Wu, Daniel Khachab, Michael Wolf
  • Ghost Kitchen Strategies for the New Restaurant Landscape – Ashley Colpaart, Nick Avedesian, Michael Schaefer
  • I, Restaurant: Let’s Talk Restaurant Robots – Clayton Wood, Linda Pouliot, John Ha
  • Table Talk: Fermentation – The next big wave in future food? – Tim West Miller Tran
  • Table Talk: Virtual Restaurants – Kristen Hawley (Wolf Assist) Lawrence Vavra, Michael Wolf
  • Table Talk: Home Cooking Marketplaces – Surj Patel Chris Fung, Akshay Prabhu
  • Into the Modernist Cuisine Kitchen – Francisco Migoya, Michael Wolf
  • The Home Food Robot: From Rotimatic to Rosie the Robot – Khalid Aboujassoum, Pranoti Nagarkar, Michael Wolf

 

If you purchased a ticket to SKS and have not received your Spoon Plus account activation, drop us a line.

If you didn’t attend SKS and would like to see these sessions, you can subscribe to Spoon Plus here.

Smart Kitchen Summit 2020 Sessions, Day Two

Included below are videos from the following sessions:

  • Using Innovation To Reduce Food Waste – James Rogers (Apeel), Chiara Cecchini (Future Food Institute), Alexandria Coari (ReFED), Moderator: Jenn Marston (The Spoon)
  • Doing The Impossible: In Conversation with Pat Brown
  • Let’s Print Some Meat – a demo of Novameat’s 3D meat printer
  • From The Reviewer: What Makes A Good – or Bad – Tech-Powered Kitchen Product? – Lisa McManus (America’s Test Kitchen), Joe Ray (Wired) and Michael Wolf (The Spoon)
  • How AI is Reshaping Food Development – Riana Lynn (Journey Foods), Oliver Zahn (Climax Foods)
  • Fermentation: The Next Frontier for Foodtech Thomas Jonas (Nature’s Fynd), Brian Frank (FTW Ventures)
  • Building The New Food Platforms Mike Leonard (Motif Foodworks), Catherine Lamb (The Spoon alum) Creating a Multi-Product Future Food Company – Josh Tetrick (Eat Just), Jenn Marston (The Spoon)
  • Meet The Authors: Decoding the World with Po Bronson & Arvind Gupta – Po Bronson (Indiebio), Arvind Gupta (Genesis Consortium)
  • The Next-Gen Microwave: AI, Precision, Personalized – Steve Drucker
  • Workshop: Building a Connected Kitchen Product – Larry Jordan (Microsoft)
  • Table Talk: Product Innovation in the Future Kitchen – Jane Freiman, Greg Fish (SharkNinja), Surj Patel
  • The Asia Future Food Market – Winnie Leung (Bits x Bites), Michal Klar
  • The Japan Food Tech Revolution – Akiko Okada and Hirotaka Tanaka, SKS Japan

 

If you purchased a ticket to SKS and have not received your Spoon Plus account activation, drop us a line.

If you didn’t attend SKS and would like to see these sessions, you can subscribe to Spoon Plus here.

Smart Kitchen Summit 2020 Sessions, Day One

This post includes all the sessions from Smart Kitchen Summit Day one.

Included below are videos from the following sessions:

  • Embracing Innovation in Trying Times – Riana Lynn, Peter Bodenheimer, Ali Bouzari
  • The Changing Consumer Kitchen in the Era of COVID – Lisa McManus, Eve Turow-Paul, Susan Schwallie
  • Data Driven Personalization of Food and Cooking – Victor Penev, Nick Holzherr, Stacey Higginbotham
  • Future Fresh: Rethinking the Vending Machine – Megan Mokri, Chloe Vichot, Chris Albrecht
  • Building a Cell-Based Meat Startup – Benamina Bollag, Justin Kolbeck, Brian Frank
  • Future Kitchen Demo: The Millo Smart Table
  • The Smart Kitchen Landscape 2021 – David Rabie, Ben Harris, Kevin Yu
  • Table Talk: Food Robotics – Sean Hsu, Glenn Mathijssen, Chris Albrecht
  • Table Talk: Food Tech Investment Landscape – Brian Frank, Brita Rosenheim, Surj Patel
  • Product Demo: Meet the PizzaBot 5000
  • Workshop: Hacking Your Way to the Next Great Kitchen Product

If you purchased a ticket to SKS and have not received your Spoon Plus account activation, drop us a line.

If you didn’t attend SKS and would like to see these sessions, you can subscribe to Spoon Plus here.

An AWS For Protein? Scaling Bio-Manufacturing Platforms To Build Out The Next Generation of Food

But if you want to making a next-gen protein, there’s a good chance you’re going to have to raise millions of dollars in venture funding to build out your own bio-manufacturing factory.

Why? In large part because the platforms for creating fermented or cultured food products products at scale haven’t existed to the same degree that as in other spaces.

However, according to FTW Ventures lead investor Brian Frank, that may soon change. Like me, Frank comes from the world of computer tech where so many startups from the past two decades were built upon the terra firma of technology platforms in cloud computing (AWS), mobile apps (Apple) and social media (Facebook).

So, naturally, when we sat down recently to talk about the launch of his recent fund, I wanted to ask him about who are the platform builders in the world of alt-protein.

He said they are coming.

“In the bio-manufacturing space, we have had that for pharma and therapeutics, we’ve had co-manufacturing, but for food, it really hasn’t existed. And so we’re now getting to the stage where if I’m Perfect Day, and the reason that I raise a ton of money is because I need to build up my own factory because no one’s offering me services or capabilities to build this on top of their platform.

“However, the future that we see is that you can create a platform where people can ride on top of your technology, or you can create the way to allow people to make designer goods so that things can be tailored towards a specific need,” Frank said.

Frank sees these new platforms serving as a couple different roles, the first of which is in accelerating design. Much in the same way a processor design company like ARM Holdings helped an entire industry of computing companies build semiconductors around their intellectual property, new companies with IP and design expertise in key pillars of future food can be used to accelerate design in new ways.

Frank gave Geltor – a company in which he was an early investor – as an example around which a company can leverage in designing new core food components rather than starting from scratch.

“The idea of Geltor as a platform is the idea that they can make proteins, collagen and gelatin to service any number of different needs because they’ve shown they can do it for a couple different categories: in cosmetics, in nutraceuticals, and very soon, you know, in food,” Frank said.

He also pointed to a second group of companies that are starting to serve as infrastructure platforms that new food innovators can leverage as they look bring their products to market at scale. He gave Culture Biosciences – one of the Spoon’s Food Tech 25 for 2020 – as an example.

“Culture Biosciences is basically building out multiplex strain (yeast or bacteria) development rigs that are automated and analyzed,” said Frank. And so if I have a specific need of a strain to do X, they can multiplex and run a bunch of different tests to find the stream that works best. And then they can hand that back to you and say, Here you go, here’s that stream that you wanted that does x and does x at the highest volume or rate.”

Frank and I talked about a whole host of other topics, including the evolution of the future protein space into three areas of innovation, as well as the innovation happening in food packaging. If you’d like to see my entire interview with Frank, Spoon Plus subscribers can just click below. If you’d like to learn more about Spoon Plus, just go here.

Spoon Plus: The Consumer Food Waste Innovation Report

Nowadays, governments, grocery retailers, industries like agriculture and grocery, tech companies, and many others are working to fight food waste at both the local and international level. In the developed world, at least, much of that focus over the last 12 months has been on the consumer kitchen, which is responsible for by far the most food waste in those regions.

This report will examine why so much food is wasted in the consumer kitchen, what new technologies and processes can be leveraged to fight that waste, and the companies working to change consumers’ relationship to both food and waste.

Report highlights include:

  • One-third of the world’s food goes to waste annually. In the U.S. and Europe, the majority of that waste happens downstream, at consumer-facing businesses and in the home.

  • Food waste at home is a three-part problem that stems from a lack of awareness about waste, inadequate information and skill sets around home cooking, and the convenience economy driving consumer behavior.

  • Grocery store shopping, current recipe formats, inconsistent date labels, and a lack of smart storage solutions for grocery purchases and restaurant leftovers are the main drivers of at-home food waste.

  • The refrigerator itself may be one of the single biggest contributors to food waste. Moving forward, appliance-makers will need to consider overhauling the appliance’s entire design to help consumers fight food waste.

  • Solutions for fighting food waste will come from a range of different players. For tech companies, areas of focus will include more smart appliances and more tech-enabled storage systems as well as meal-planning and meal-sharing apps.

Companies profiled in this report include LG, Samsung, Vitamix, Smarter, Ovie, Bluapple, Mimica, Blakbear, Silo, Mealhero, MealBoard, Kitche, No Waste, Ends & Stems, and Olio.

Introduction: The Size of the World’s Food Waste Problem

In 2012, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released the first edition of its now-famous report, “Wasted, How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food From Farm to Fork to Landfill.” That report proved to be a groundbreaking look at the inefficiencies in the U.S. food system that lead to massive amounts of food waste from the farm all the way into the average person’s kitchen. 

The report also proved to one of the biggest catalysts for change in recent years. Since its publication, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced federal targets to cut food waste by 50 percent by 2030 — the first goal of its kind in the U.S. Similarly, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 12.3 seeks to “halve global food waste at retail and consumer levels, as well as to reduce food loss during production and supply.” As NRDC noted in the second edition of “Wasted,” published in 2017, food businesses have made commitments to reduce waste, and 74 percent of consumers polled say fighting food waste is important to them. Most recently, the Consumer Goods Forum launched its Food Waste Coalition that aims, in part, to support SDG 12.3 by focusing on consumer-facing areas of food waste like home and retail. And these are just as sampling of the countless efforts happening on both international and local levels in the war on food waste.

Even so, the oft-cited figure, that one-third of the world’s food supply goes to waste, is as relevant now as it was nearly a decade ago when NRDC first published its report.

In 2020, food waste is a multibillion-dollar problem with environmental, economic, and human costs that grow more urgent as the world advances towards a 10-billion-person population. The United Nations’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates food waste’s global carbon footprint to be 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases, and that economic losses of this food waste total $750 billion annually. The United Kingdom’s Food Waste Recycling Action Plan (WRAP) notes that keeping food scraps out of landfills would be the equivalent of removing 20 percent of cars in Britain from the roads. Meanwhile, over in the U.S., rescuing just 15 percent of the food we waste could feed 25 million Americans each year, or well over half of the 40 million Americans facing food insecurity.  

Worldwide, different regions waste food in different ways. UN estimates show that per capita waste by consumers in Europe and North America totals to 95-115 kg/year. That number drops significantly, to 6-11 kg/year, in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeastern Asia. Overall, 40 percent of losses occur at post-harvest and processing levels in developing countries. Not so in developed nations, where over 40 percent of food waste occurs at retail and consumer levels.

Given the enormous amounts of waste occurring at the consumer level in Europe and North America, it makes sense that recent efforts towards fighting food waste now go towards understanding how and why food gets wasted downstream, at grocery stores, restaurants, and, most importantly, within consumers’ own homes.

The full report is available to subscribers of Spoon Plus. To find out more about Spoon Plus, click here. Use discount code NEWMEMBER to get 15% off an annual or monthly subscription. 

Human Improvement Founders Want to Make Cricket Protein Palatable for Masses

McCarty points to rapid attitude shifts towards cannabis (McCarty and Campbell were executives at cannabis startup Dosist prior to HI) in recent years and think a similar shift could be coming for crickets. In cannabis, “you’re seeing a massive of stigma shift that I’ve never seen having anything in that space, at that scale, and that speed,” said McCarty.

How do you get a similar stigma shift with insects? According to McCarty, much of it will have to do with marketing.

“I’m always amazed that marketing is driving people to make bad decisions,” said McCarty. “Being ethical and responsible people, shouldn’t we be driving people to make good decisions with marketing?”

Part of that marketing and messaging has a lot to do with how the product looks. HI’s sleek and colorful packaging is a departure from the typical big tubs of protein powder found on store shelves in the health and wellness aisle. And while the packaging doesn’t scream crickets, the founders also wanted to be very clear about the ingredients list on the food label.

According to Campbell, all of this was intentional.

He notes the HI’s packaging “jumps off the shelf” and is designed to “steal [market]share from underperforming products” currently out there. Speaking of reactions to the product, he adds that the company has received everything from, “Oh my goodness, someone’s finally got it right” to “You guys have got to be crazy, no one’s ever going to buy this” and everything in between. “We’re far more impressed with the positive response we’ve had,” says Campbell.

But still, why did two executives who spent their lives at companies like Starbucks and the fast-growing cannabis space decide on crickets?

According to Campbell, the idea came in spring of 2019 when he was working with an innovation lab and looking at other alt proteins. Around that time, he started looking for the most nutrient-dense protein out there that also had a good environmental footprint.

The answer he got back: “We’ve known for thousands of years, it’s insects.”

And now, HI’s protein powder can be found in numerous grocery stores and through Amazon and the company’s website. The company has also managed to bring the product to market without raising any venture funding.

“So we’ve kept it very lean from the start, unlike a lot of companies we see in the space that go and raise millions of dollars of venture financing, have huge teams and beautiful offices,” said Campbell. “We said, ‘Let’s make sure we’ve got a product that consumers love, first and foremost, and then once we’ve got that, then let’s invest behind and build that.’ So we’ve been very diligent about our process to date.”

Spoon Plus subscribers can listen to my entire interview with Josh Campbell and Derek McCarty below. If you’re interested in subscribing to Plus, you can learn more here.

SideChef’s Kevin Yu on the Future of the Kitchen in a Time of Unprecedented Change

He ran a company called SideChef, which made a recipe app, while it was early days for connected appliances and step-by-step guided cooking, Yu was already looking for opportunities to take his recipe app and use it as a central command system for appliances.

It was just six months later Yu was on stage at the first Smart Kitchen Summit talking about how this future we discussed in Austin.

Since that time, much of what we talked about in those early days in Austin has materialized: appliance manufacturers have added connectivity and SideChef has struck deals with many of them to integrate its content and technology. They’ve created their recipe format that atomizes the cooking process and allows for them to launch things like their shoppable recipe integrations.

So in a year with so much change, I thought it would be good to once again catch up with Kevin and his US manager director Carolyn Eschbach to get a read from the front lines of the connected kitchen. We talk about the company’s Facebook Portal integration and the launch of their Premium offering, as well as the rapid changes in consumer behavior. We also talk about how the current state of the connected kitchen.

Subscribers of Spoon Plus can see the full interview below. To learn more about Spoon Plus, click here.

Restaurant Tech Roundtable: Reinventing The Back of House With Digital Technology

In this panel session, you’ll hear insights how how everyone from small operators to the country’s biggest QSR chains are using technology to improve operations, make their kitchens safer and to help roll out new menus in real-time.

Here are Jenn Marston’s take-aways from session:

More automation. Back of house automation isn’t just about robots making burgers. It has much more to do with digitizing operational processes to make them more efficient. That could mean a robotic arm doing manual tasks. But it could also mean using tech to replace paper-and-pen accounting books or taking a better, more granular analysis of food inventory to cut down costs.

More operational efficiency. Related to automation, the back of house will become more about making operational processes faster and more efficient. One of the panelists went as far as to say efficiency is the biggest thing for restaurants to get right. That’s especially true with fewer people eating in dining rooms and instead ordering takeout or delivery meals that are constantly evaluated for convenience and speed in addition to quality.

More transparency. The pandemic has arguably brought a greater desire for transparency when it comes to our restaurant food, and tech-savvy companies will respond with a variety of solutions. That could include installing software in a restaurant that can tell a customer exactly where their order is at any given moment (e.g., “on the grill,” “out for delivery”) or a tool that better informs them of a restaurant system’s security measures.

Spoon Plus Subscribers can watch the full session below. If you’d like to subscribe to Spoon Plus, you can learn more here.

How CRISPR Could Create Produce That Lasts Longer, Tastes Better, and Won’t Make Pickers Bleed

Pairwise is one of the companies making a name for itself developing new types of products using CRISPR. The company is developing consumer-facing brands of produce that offer unique characteristics created through the use of CRISPR toolsets.

I caught up the CEO of Pairwise, Tom Adams, to discuss what the company is working on and to get his thoughts on how CRISPR will change the food system. Below are some excerpts from my interview. Spoon Plus subscribers can watch the interview and read the full, unedited transcript.

What are some examples of these types of CRISPR products with direct consumer benefits?

So a product that we’re interested in, sort of it’s a longer term product, is to create a cherry without a pit. You can imagine being able to just pop a cherry in your mouth and really enjoy that healthy, healthy fruit. Cherries are in season right now. They’re great, but I keep ending up with purple fingers from eating them all. I’d love to be able to just pop them over my mouth and eat them like grape. So that’s the kind of thing where we’re taking it down the barrier so that a consumer can really enjoy the cherry differently.

Now we’ll do other things that help with the overall production system. One of our ideas with cherries is to make it so you can produce cherries year round like we’ve done through 60 years of breeding with blueberries. We now have blueberries every day and I didn’t use to get blueberries every day but now I do.

How could CRISPR could accelerate the development of new forms of produce compared with traditional cross-breeding of crops?

There actually is a pitless plum that somebody isolated a few years ago. It’s not a good tasting plum, so it’s not a variety that sold. But you can cross plums and cherries, and you get chums or clerries or something. It’s not a cherry or a plum anymore. The Bing cherry was bred in 1880 and Bing cherry since then is a clone of that original tree. So if you cross them, that’s not a Bing cherry anymore.

You want to get back to the Bing cherry, you’d cross the chum back to the cherry probably 7 or 8 or 9 times until you get a little bit more cherry genome in it each time until you’re almost cherry again. That’s probably 150 years from now you’d have a pitless cherry. But with gene editing, I know what the mutation is that really resulted in the loss of the pits, so I can just go directly into the cherry and make that mutation. It’s the same endpoint that I would have gotten to through the breeding. It’s just 150 years faster.

One thing you’re working on is berries. Can you tell us more?

The blackberries I buy in the grocery store, I could take or leave. And that’s because they’re the variety that had some mutations in it that allow it to be more productive through the season. This mutation just happens to be in a variety that just doesn’t taste good. It’s very high acid. It’s not a really great berry. So we’re taking berries that taste like the ones in the Northwest and we’re putting in the same mutations that you’d see on the bad tasting ones that allow for higher productivity, and adding those to the really good tasting one. And then, just for good measure, we’re also going to get rid of the seeds. It turns out that 85% of people don’t really like the seeds in blackberries from our research. And it’s a fairly straightforward path to do that and then remove the thorns as well, so pickers aren’t bleeding.

What impact could CRISPR have on food in a decade?

10 years from now, what I’d like to picture is a lot of produce that not just that has gene editing in it, but is actually more approachable for people. We all grow up being told and taught that we should eat lots of fruits and vegetables, but only 9% of people in the United States eat the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables. And given 5% are vegetarians, that doesn’t speak real well for the rest of us. So I want to see a variety of things that are more approachable for people.

You mentioned food waste. I think there’s an opportunity to make a substantial difference in shelf life. So when I go into a convenience store, it’s not a choice between a hot dog and a rotten banana. I can get a bowl of berries or something healthy like that as a snack and or pitless cherries. So that’s really our vision is to create a whole different marketplace of foods that fit people’s lifestyles. We eat a lot more food through snacking today than we did 50 years ago and we need to match our food up with that.

To watch the full interview of our interview with Tom Adams or to read the full transcript, just subscribe to Spoon Plus. 

StoreBound’s Evan Dash Wants to Create a Housewares Brand for a New Generation

“Breville was doing incredibly well,” said Dash. “They were still fairly new. And a lot of brands were chasing them to the high end. And then you had this whole like lower end, that was just in shambles, fighting over price, price price.”

While Dash didn’t want to necessarily compete with Breville or fight over tiny margins in a brutal price competition, he saw an opportunity in between the two.

“It really left this beautiful gap in the middle that we felt like we could step into with great design, great quality, great value, and a social media strategy.”

Ten years later, he and his wife sold the company they had built after growing their revenue to $100 million by focusing on that neglected middle space with their flagship namesake brand, Dash.

While the terms of the sale to French consumer goods conglomerate Groupe SEB were not announced, a conservative revenue multiple of 3-5 times sales would easily put the acquisition within the half a billion dollar territory, which would put the deal possibly higher valuation than that of the Anova acquisition by Electrolux (but well below the Instant Brands $2 billion estimated deal size).

So how did Dash go from an idea to $100 million company in a decade? According to Evan Dash, it was in large part thanks to their focus on young consumers who didn’t feel any loyalty to the brands their parents had brought into the home.

“While everybody talks about how the ‘millennials are up and coming, but they really don’t have the money to spend,’ they absolutely do”, said Dash. “And they are so influential, they’re influencing their parents generation, even their grandparents generation and a lot of cases.”

A big part of attracting the attention of those customers was through the use of social media, primarily Instagram. According to Dash, that early emphasis on Instagram was influenced by his own kids.

“They were showing the way that they could build momentum,” said Dash. “And one of them had a sports page, and he was editing jerseys of doing jersey swaps of players. And he had 10,000 followers.”

Beyond speaking to younger consumers through social media, much of the focus by Dash was creating products that not only looked different than those he and Rachel had grown up with, but were designed to be more user-centric.

“We tended to look at products with fresh eyes,” said Dash. “For example, we launched a two slice toaster early on and my head designer for toasters came to me and they said, ‘Hey, Cuisinart has one through six on their control, and KitchenAid has one through seven on their control. Can we just say light, medium, dark, defrost and keep warm?’

Armed with the resources of a company like Groupe SEB, Dash doesn’t have any plans to slow down. The company will expand into products that focus on circular economy, and Dash also hinted at plans for bigger products like refrigerators.

Spoon Plus subscribers can read the full transcript of my interview with Dash or watch the full interview below. If you’d like to learn more about Spoon Plus, you can do so here.