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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

The Weekly Spoon

The Spoon Weekly: Heinz Freestyles Condiments, Cana Shuts Down

Cana Shuts Down

Cana, the company which was building an appliance that they claimed could create and customize virtually any beverage, shut down last week, The Spoon has learned.

According to numerous Linkedin posts from previous employees, the company could not secure funding and laid off all of its employees last week. Cana, which had raised $30 million in January last year, promised to have the product ready to ship sometime this year. But despite having a working prototype and brand partners in place, Cana could not raise the “funding necessary to build a production line for manufacturing and shipping devices.”

The news comes just two months after the company brought on none other than Sir Patrick Stewart of Star Trek fame to be a brand ambassador, a hail mary move that didn’t work out.

Like many startups nowadays, Cana found the drastically reshaped funding environment just too difficult to survive. Consumer hardware startups have had a particularly tough time in recent years, and Cana’s climb was made even more difficult given the task of developing and building a consumables production infrastructure.

The Cana vision of a make-anything drink machine always seemed a bit too good to be true, so it’s a bummer we’ll never see if they could have made it work if they had gotten more funding.

Read post.

Attention Automated Food Retail Startups: Take Your Innovation to the Big Apple! (Sponsor)

The MTA is seeking a qualified vending operator to provide services consisting of furnishing, installing, stocking, maintaining, managing, and operating vending machines at locations within various New York City Transit (“NYCT”) stations!

Does your platform have what it takes? Learn more here about submitting a proposal for this opportunity today!

Heinz Introduces REMIX, a Coca-Cola Freestyle for Condiments

We weren’t expecting Heinz to show up with a cool new product this week, but a big company surprises you every now and then. 

No, it’s not MayoChup or Wasabioli, but the Heinz REMIX, a vending-machine-sized sauce dispenser that lets customers create personalized sauce mixes.

The new machine, which the company claims to have developed from concept in just six months, can create up to 200 sauce combinations from a base of sauces that includes ketchup, ranch, Heinz 57 Sauce, and BBQ Sauce. From there, the customers can mix in what the company calls “enhancers, ” including jalapeño, smoky chipotle, buffalo, and mango at varying intensities (low, medium, high).

The product, which is part of the company’s “Away From Home” (AFH) division, will debut later this month at National Restaurant Show.

The product is reminiscent of the Coca-Cola Freestyle, which lets customers create weird combinations of sodas to their heart’s content. However, unlike the Freestyle, it’s unclear how many restaurants are willing to cede floor space to a giant condiment mixer. Sodas are something customers actually pay for, and I’d gone to places just so I could use the Freestyle. So while the REMIX might be a draw for condiment-conscious consumers, restaurants will need to be sure the extra cost of having a REMIX adds enough to the bottom line in recurring or new customers to make it worth it.

But who knows, maybe all those RanchUp or Mango 57 nerds out have been waiting for the moment when they can finally express themselves.

Dispatches from Israel Food Tech Ecosystem: Anat Natan, CEO and Cofounder of Anina

The Spoon’s Joy Chen recently caught up with Anat Natan, the co-founder and CEO of Anina. Anina is an Israeli startup that takes imperfect food and transforms it into ready-made meals in pods. Food waste has significant economic and environmental implications, and it is estimated that the greenhouse gas emissions from food contribute to 7% of the overall greenhouse gasses emitted globally. They talked about the technology that powers Anina, operating in markets outside of Israel, and what she believes sets Israeli founders apart. 

J: Talk to me about the technology behind Anina. 

A: We create these laminates, these vegetable sheets, and we try to incorporate as much food waste as possible. The laminate is strong but flexible. We try to take the ugly produce, and we try to incorporate all this food waste in our production process because we care about all the factors of the produce outside of how it looks. A third of the produce in the US goes to waste due to aesthetic reasons. I think there’s a catch-22. As consumers, we want to be more and more sustainable, consume more sustainable brands, and support sustainable production. But on the other hand, we become, as consumers, more concerned about what’s perfect. 

After we create these laminates, we mold them, we fill them, and we close them. Our technology is protected IP, and this IP contains the process from fresh produce to the pod, including the laminate. We’re registering it in the US, the EU, Israel, and Singapore. 

J: Did you choose those markets because those will be your first entry points? 

A: Our go-to market is divided into two approaches. With the US, our brand will have partners to get to the market efficiently and reach customers in the right and creative way. With the rest of the world, we are going to use a B2B approach, which is a joint venture. We bring to the table what we know how to do, which is the production process and R&D. And everybody does what they know how to do best. The partners know the market, the consumers, and the supply chain. We start by creating pilots, and we’re going to conduct pilots in Israel, Spain, Andorra, and Singapore to understand the right way to approach the market. And after that, we will create a long-term collaboration with them. 

J: What type of consumer testing have you done so far? 

A: So much. We have conducted external research in Israel, Spain, in Italy (with Barilla) and very in-depth design thinking research. In the US, we have done a market analysis that organizes qualitative, quantitative, demographics, and surveys. Every time we ask the question, do you understand what it is? Do you know how to use it? We give the product to people to try at home and then answer surveys. Anina was established in June 2020, and I’ve been conducting research since August 2020 because I believe that innovation needs to go hand in hand with understanding how to approach the consumer. Obviously, they cannot imagine what they don’t have in front of them. But you have to evaluate what they think to make sure that you don’t bring an alien to them eventually. 

Read our full interview with Anat here. 

Restaurant Tech

Two Years After Buying Spyce, Sweetgreen Launches Infinite Kitchen Robotic Restaurant

Last week, Sweetgreen opened the company’s first robotic restaurant in Naperville, Ill, a suburb of Chicago.

The new automated restaurant, which the company calls Infinite Kitchen, comes almost two years after the company acquired Spyce Kitchen, a startup building automated robotic makelines.

The Infinite Kitchen name is not new; Spyce first used the name when it launched its second-generation robotic kitchen platform in November 2020 and, like the new Sweetgreen Infinite Kitchen, the system was visually reminiscent of the Creator burger makeline. The system’s conveyor belt runs under ingredient dispensers that drop customized mixes of fresh ingredients into bowls. 

In the video and the press release, Sweetgreen takes pains to make clear that while it sees automation as a way to add efficiency to operations and enhance the customer experience, they are not doing away with humans as part of the Sweetgreen experience.

“Every meal begins with human hands,” says the video’s narrator, “from our local farmers to our team members, all there to guide you through the process.”

With the Infinite Kitchen, Sweetgreen has also rethought the customer process flow, integrating digital touchpoints (including self-service kiosks similar to those from Spyce).

You can read about the launch of Sweetgreen’s Infinite Kitchen here.

CRISPR

Pairwise Rolls Out First CRISPR-Edited Produce to U.S. Restaurants

Pairwise, a startup specializing in developing gene-edited produce, today announced the launch of its first product, a CRISPR-developed mustard green. The new product, the Conscious Greens Purple Power Baby Greens Blend, will launch into the restaurant/food service channel in partnership with the food service specialist Performance Food Group.

The launch of gene-edited produce by Pairwise comes almost three years after the company got the sign-off from the USDA for its gene-edited mustard green. Mustard greens aren’t usually found on menus due to their pungent smell and bitter taste, but with changes engineered by CRISPR, Pairwise hopes to create a nutritious alternative to kale and Brussels sprouts that also tastes good.

While the Conscious Foods blend with Pairwise’s mustard greens will be the first publicly announced CRISPR-edited produce available in the US market, the product follows the launch of gene-edited tomatoes in Japan in late 2021. That product was produced by Sanatech Seed, which used CRISPR to increase the amount of γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) in the tomatoes, a supplement that researchers claim can reduce blood pressure and improve moods.

The release of the Sanatech Seed tomatoes came roughly the same time gene-edited fish became commercially available in Japan. In late 2021, Kyoto-based Regional Fish Co., Ltd. started selling genome-edited “Madai” red sea bream and “22-seiki fugu” tiger puffer fish which were edited to grow bigger.

Read the full story here on The Spoon.

Vertical Farming

Plenty’s New Vertical Farm To Produce 4.5M Pounds of Leafy Greens From a Single City Block

Today indoor ag startup Plenty announced what it claims is the world’s most advanced vertical farm. Located in Compton, California, the company says the farm is designed to yield up to 4.5 million pounds of leafy greens annually, occupying just a city block’s worth of space.

Using a highly-automated robotic system in what the company describes as a 3D vertical design, Plenty claims its patented technology will yield up to 350 times that of a conventional farm. Unlike most other vertical farms that grow produce on flat planes that mimic the field, Plenty’s 3D system uses vertical towers nearly two stories high. Plenty believes that their design architecture makes indoor farming more efficient by allowing them to grow more produce in less space. The company also uses robotics in nearly every step of the process, from planting to harvest

“After investing nearly a decade into research and development, ​​Plenty has cracked the code on a scalable platform for indoor farming,” said Plenty CEO Arama Kukutai. “With Plenty’s first commercial farm, we’re proving that our uniquely vertical indoor farms can deliver a reliable, year-round supply of fresh produce with positive unit economics.”

Read the full story at The Spoon.

Alt Protein

New Study Claims Cultivated Meat’s Current Path Is Significantly Worse for Environment Than Beef

A new life-cycle analysis by researchers at UC Davis has concluded that the current path of the cultivated meat industry’s commercialization process is potentially orders of magnitude worse for the environment than beef produced through animal agriculture, producing anywhere from 4 to 25 times more CO2 than traditionally produced beef.

The analysis, which at this point has not been peer-reviewed, stands in stark contrast to previous life cycle analysis (LCA) studies that have concluded the environmental impact of cell-cultivated meat – which the study calls “animal cell-based meat” or ACBM – is significantly less than that of traditionally produced beef. However, according to the new research, the problem with previous LCAs is that they do not accurately represent the environmental impact of the current technologies being used in the assumption sets for forecasts within the techno-economic models.

In particular, the study (which was first written about in IFL Science) says the significant environmental impact associated with the purification required of growth medium has not been fully accounted for in previous studies. According to the UC Davis researchers, these previous studies had “high levels of uncertainty in their results and a lack of accounting” for what they believe is the necessary endotoxin removal required for growth media. Accounting for the required purification is essential say the study’s authors, and they believe that the fossil fuel needed for purified growth medium components using the current anticipated commercialization process is anywhere between 3 and 17 times that of the reported “high” scenario for that of traditional boneless beef production.

While the researchers state their study is more accurate than previous LCAs that didn’t accurately model the cost of the production of the purified growth medium, they go on to say that is because the cost built into these techno-economic models is based on current systems being developed for the near-term commercialization of ACBM. They say that the industry would be better off as a whole if some of the key issues were solved before the industry focused on commercial scaling, such as developing a more “environmentally friendly method for endotoxin removal” or “the development of a technological innovation that allows for the use of an inexpensive animal cell growth media produced from agricultural by-products.”.

Read the full story at The Spoon

The Weekly Spoon: Electrolux’s Kitchen of the Future & Taco Bell’s Reimagined Restaurant

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Electrolux Launches GRO, a Kitchen System Designed to Encourage More Sustainable Eating

Can a kitchen’s design help us eat more sustainable, plant-forward diets?

Swedish appliance manufacturer Electrolux thinks the answer is yes and, to that end, has launched an ambitious new kitchen system concept to help us get there.

Called GRO, the new system is comprised of a collection of interconnected modules that utilize sensors and AI to provide personalized eating and nutrition recommendations. According to the company, the system was designed around insights derived from behavioral science research and is intended to help encourage more sustainable eating behavior based on recommendations from the EAT-Lancet report for planetary health. The company will debut the new system at this week’s EuroCucina conference.

“How can a thoughtful kitchen slowly nudge you to more sustainable choices,” asks Tove Chevally, the head of Electrolux Innovation Hub, in an intro video to the GRO system. “To make the most of what you have, to buy smarter, and eat more diverse?

To see a video of the new GRO and to read the full story, head here.

Do you have the next big idea for the future of food & cooking? Apply to tell your story at SKS INVENT!

Taco Bell’s Vision of the Future Includes High-Tech Dumbwaiters & Lots of Drive-Thru Lanes

I’ve always been fascinated with dumbwaiters. An elevator built specifically to deliver food between floors of a building, the dumbwaiter is an idea that is both ridiculous and fascinating.

And while I can’t be sure that someone like Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos doesn’t have dumbwaiters built into their homes (though Bezos would probably prefer robots and Trump manservants he could yell at), what I am sure of is the dumbwaiter has, for the most part, largely gone extinct as part of modern life.

Until now. That’s because Taco Bell sees them as a potentially integral part of their restaurant of the future. Called Taco Bell Defy, the taco chain’s new restaurant concept includes an elevated restaurant with multiple drive-thru lanes, food lifts, and a lot of digital integrations.

While I wouldn’t, unlike others, claim this new concept possibly “the most ambitious” prototype in restaurant history, I would say it makes a whole lot of sense for a restaurant chain that does most of its business through a drive-thru. While many chains have developed drive-thrus that have multiple order lines, the choke point always comes later when cars zip-up into a single line to get their food. By spreading out the hand-off of food to four lines, the choke point of a single window for food handover is eliminated.

You can read the full post here. 

Smart Kitchen

Meet Celcy, a Countertop Oven With a Built-In Freezer That Will Cook Meals For You

Say you’re leaving for work and want to come home to a fully cooked meal? Or better yet, you want to line up a work week’s worth of meals and just want them prepared when you get home?

You might be a good candidate for the Celcy, an autonomous cooking appliance that combines a countertop oven with a freezer that stores the meals until ready for cooking.

The Celcy, which is currently in development, will store up to four meals in a freezer. Cooking can be rescheduled via an app or on-demand via request. When it’s time to cook, the meal is shuttled from the freezer compartment on the left side into the cooking compartment side on the right. A built-in elevator lifts and deposits the frozen meal in the top upper right cooking chamber where it is cooked for consumption.

You can read the full post here. 

Food Retail Tech

Circle K Planning To Deploy Seven Thousand AI-Powered Self-Checkout Machines

Mashgin, a maker of computer-vision-based self-checkout machines, announced today it has signed a deal with Circle K parent company Couche-Tard to deploy seven thousand self-checkout machines at the convenience store chain over the next three years.

The move follows the initial deployment of Mashgin systems at nearly 500 Circle K stores across the United States and Sweden since 2020. The move by the second-largest convenience store chain in North America with almost seven thousand stores will represent one of the largest ever deployments of self-checkout systems to date.

For Mashgin, the deal represents its biggest customer win yet and is yet another sign of why the company was able to recently raise a $62.5M Series B round at an impressive $1.5 billion valuation. The move represents a 700% total increase in deployments over its current installed base.

The Mashgin self-checkout system is installed at the checkout counter and enables customer checkouts without scanning barcodes. As seen in the video interview from CES in January, customers can essentially toss their items onto the small checkout pad, and the system will automatically recognize and tabulate the products.

To read the full story, head here.

Future Food

Cocuus Raises €2.5M to Scale Industrial 3D Food Printing for Plant & Cell-Based Meat Analogs

According to a release sent to The Spoon, 3D food printing startup Cocuus has raised €2.5 Million in a Pre-Series A funding round to scale up its proprietary 3D printing technology platform for plant-based and cell-cultured meat analogs. The round was led by Big Idea Ventures, with participation by Cargill Ventures, Eatable Adventures, and Tech Transfer UPV.

Founded in 2017, the Spanish startup has developed a toolbox of different 3D printing technologies under its Mimethica platform to enable the printing of different types of foods. These include Softmimic, a technology targeted at hospitals and eldercare facilities that transforms purees into dishes that look like real food (think of a vegetable or meat puree shaped into a “steak”), LEVELUP, an inkjet printing technology that prints images on drinks like coffee or beer (like Ripples), and LASERGLOW, a laser printer platform that engraves imagery onto food.

Read the full post at here.

SCiFi Foods Raises $22M With Andreessen Horowitz’s First Investment in Cultivated Meat

SCiFi Foods, a Bay Area-based food tech startup, announced that it has raised a $22 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), making it a16z’s first investment in the growing cultivated meat market. The company, formerly known as Artemys Foods, also announced that it will be adding a new board member, Myra Pasek, the General Counsel of IronOx, who will be utilizing her expertise from Tesla and Impossible Foods to help SCiFi Foods bring its novel plant-based and cultivated meat hybrid through regulatory approval to the market. 

The new funding raises SCiFi Foods’ total funding to $29 million and will primarily be used to scale R&D efforts, build out the leadership team, and market the company. 

The Spoon sat down with CEO and co-founder, Joshua March, to learn more about SCiFi Foods’ new name, a hybrid meat product, and what it looks like to raise funding from one of the most famous venture capital firms during a recession.

Read the full interview with Joshua March here.

Food Robots

Xook Raises $1.3 Million to Roll Out Robotic ‘Food Courts in a Box’ in The US

If you’ve ever visited a cafeteria at a tech giant like Google or Facebook, you probably found that the food is just as tasty (or tastier) and often better for you than what you might order at a corner restaurant or make in your own kitchen.

But according to Xook CEO Raja Natarajan, this kind of access to an abundance of tasty, healthy, and free food is more the exception than the rule for US office workers. This is very different from countries like India, said Natarajan, where most corporate employers provide access to cafeterias stocked with food options for employees. This is why, after trialing a prototype for what he and cofounder Ratul Roy describe as a “food court in a box” in Bangalore, they are eyeing the US for the rollout of their robotic kiosk.

“In countries with high labor costs and high food costs, it is very hard to offer this kind of experience unless it comes with automation,” Natarajan told The Spoon in a recent interview.

To read the full story, click here!

The Spoon Weekly: Cow NFTs, Impossible Gets New CEO, Farm Robots Rising

This is the Spoon Weekly, a collection of some of the most interesting stories from the past week. Make sure to subscribe to get the top food tech news delivered straight to your inbox.

‘It’s Like a Driver’s License for Cows’: Why One Wyoming Company is Creating NFTs for Cattle

Back when Rob Jennings helped found the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition back in 2017, he knew he needed to find a use case that resonated with residents of the Cowboy State. It didn’t take him long before he settled on beef.

“Back then, there was a lot of conversation around about how grass-fed, grain-finished Wyoming fat cattle beef was being mixed into commodity feed yards with lesser animals, let’s say,” Jennings said on a Zoom call with The Spoon. “And so we developed this idea about how you could use blockchain to verify the animal’s provenance.”

Back then, Jennings worked with the University of Wyoming to develop the technology for his first blockchain startup called Beefchain. And while he and other early blockchain enthusiasts found the idea of putting the information about a steer on the blockchain exciting, Jennings found the response more muted when explaining the technology to ranchers, mainly because many of them still couldn’t see the immediate value of such a tech-forward solution.

That’s when Jennings started to think about ways to utilize NFTs. With the early implementations of storing cattle data on the blockchain, Jennings said they would hash an entire excel spreadsheet and put it on the bitcoin blockchain.

“Yes, you’re putting the information there, but it wasn’t functional,” said Jennings.

You can read the full story here.

Meet the All-New Samsung Kiosk: Powered by GRUBBRR (Sponsor)

Working with less staff? Maximize your workplace efficiency with Samsung and GRUBBRR’s affordable labor solution.

Alt Protein

Impossible’s New CEO Will Need to Navigate a Fast-Changing Plant-Based Meat Marketplace

This week Impossible Foods announced that founding CEO Pat Brown is stepping down from his current role and assuming the new role of Chief Visionary Officer. The company’s new CEO will be longtime Chobani exec Peter McGuinness, who recently served as the yogurt pioneer’s president and COO.

Explaining the move in a company blog post, Brown said that as Impossible has grown in size and scale, he’s had less time to devote to strategic initiatives, communicating the company’s mission to the public and policymakers, and guiding R&D for new products. Brown said the demands on the role of CEO at Impossible Foods will only continue to grow, which means now is the time to appoint a proven executive to lead the execution of the company’s day-to-day business.

From the post:

Peter and I will work together to lead Impossible and its long-term strategy, combining our complementary strengths and experience. Peter will be our CEO and a director, and will report to the board. I will continue in my role as Founder and director, and take on the role of Chief Visionary Officer reporting to the board, leading research and technology innovation, strategic initiatives, public advocacy and, most importantly, our mission. 

McGuinness comes aboard at a time of uncertainty for the plant-based meat industry. Starting last fall, we began to see signs of a potential slowdown in sales across the segment. This year, companies like Kellogg’s are warning of continued soft sales and predicting a possible shakeout.

You can read the full post here. 

The Netherlands House of Representatives Passes Motion to Legalize Samples of Cell-Cultured Meat

Last week, the Netherlands’ House of Representatives passed a motion to make the sampling of cell-cultured meat legal. The passing of the motion, proposed by the D66 and VVD parties, is being hailed by Dutch cell-cultured meat companies as an important step towards legalizing the sale of cell-cultured meat at retail.

Maastricht, Netherlands-based Mosa Meat is famously co-founded by Mark Post, who kickstarted the lab-grown meat industry when he created the world’s first cell-cultured hamburger back in 2013. The company applauded the move by its home country’s government as a first step towards legalizing the consumption of the product.

The move “speaks volumes about the momentum that is building for innovation in sustainable meat production,” the company told Dutch TV organization RTL.

Dutch politicians are understandably proud that their country is seen as the birthplace for cell-cultured meat innovation and see this move as one that will help them continue to stay relevant as startups around the world race to bring their products to market.

To read the full story, click here.

Kitchen Tech

Canadian Sisters Launch Capra Press, a French Press That Doesn’t Oversteep and Eliminates Messy Cleanup

Mia and Zoey Knobler had a love-hate relationship with the French press. The two sisters from British Columbia loved the richer flavored coffee that resulted from the steep and plunge appliance, but hated the messy clean-up and the over-brewed coffee resulting from continued exposure to the grounds.

So they set to making a French press that had all the upside of that full-bodied first pour but not the downside of over-brewed coffee and sludgy cleanup. The result was the Capra Press, which debuted this week on Indiegogo and has raised over $32 thousand as of this writing.

The sisters teamed up with product designer Jeff Polster to create a French press with two interesting differentiators. The first is a mesh filter that seals after pressing, preventing bitter coffee from over-extraction. The filter utilizes silicon umbrella valves that seal the grounds into the bottom after plunging.

The second feature is a removable bottom that enables easier cleanup. Called the “grounds-keeper,” the twist-off bottom allows the user to dispose of the grounds into the trash or compost.

Read the full post here.

Food Robots

Chipotle Trialing a Tortilla-Making Robot Named Chippy, Eyeing Wider Rollout Later This Year

Today Chipotle announced they have launched Chippy, a tortilla-making robot.

The company is working with Miso Robotics, the company behind the Flippy fast-food robotic arm robot. As you can see below, Chippy is a slightly modified variation of Miso’s Flippy bot, only instead of flipping burgers or frying potatoes, the bot is optimized to make Chipotle’s tortilla chips.

Apparently, the customization for Chippy included producing tortilla chips with varying degrees of seasoning to mimic the imperfect work product of more carbon-based life forms. “Everyone loves finding a chip with a little more salt or an extra hint of lime,” said Nevielle Panthaky, Chipotle’s Vice President of Culinary, in the release. “To ensure we didn’t lose the humanity behind our culinary experience, we trained Chippy extensively to ensure the output mirrored our current product, delivering some subtle variations in flavor that our guests expect.”

According to the release, Chipotle is currently testing Chippy at their innovation hub in Irvine, Calif., with plans to integrate Chippy into a Chipotle restaurant in Southern California later this year.

“The company is leveraging its stage-gate process to listen, test and learn from crew and guest feedback before deciding on a national implementation strategy,” the release said.

In other words, Chipotle is trialing Chippy to evaluate (and possibly prepare for) a potentially wider rollout of the robot to essentially automate the chip-making process.

To read the full story, click here!

Growmark, One of North America’s Largest Ag Coops, Tests a Farming Robot from Solinftec

Growmark, one of North America’s largest agriculture supply cooperatives, has partnered with agtech solution provider Solinftec to trial a new scanning and field monitoring robot.

According to the announcement sent to The Spoon, the new robot is powered by a neuro-network that features a detection algorithm to scan for crop health and nutrition, insects, and weeds, as well as monitor the entire field and provide real-time insights back to the farmer.

Growmark will trial the new robot for the bulk of the 2022 farming season and work with Solinftec to optimize the technology for planting to harvesting. This trial is the first evaluation of a farming robot under Growmark’s AgValidity­ testing program, the coop’s program to evaluate new ag technology products.

Growmark’s partnership with Solinftec is a sign of growing interest in automation on the farm. Coops serve as an important channel for new technologies to make their way into everyday use on the farm. With a network of regional FS coops that spans 40 states and into Canada, Growmark holds significant sway in technology used by farmers.

You can read full post here.

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.  

The Spoon Weekly: Another Shazam for Food, Alexa Debuts New Meal-Rec-Tech

Snap The Latest to Create a ‘Shazam for Food’

Haven’t we seen this episode before?

While many of us had a good laugh back when Silicon Valley’s Jian-Yang launched a Not Hot Dog app, the truth is big tech has been rolling out Shazam for food features for quite some time.

The latest company to create an augmented reality/AI-powered food recognition feature is Snap with Scan Food. Snapchat users can scan food by opening up the AR bar within Snapchat from the main camera menu option. From there, they choose to scan and click a picture of the food item. Snapchat’s AI will process the image and suggest a recipe from partner Allrecipes and other information, such as Wikipedia pages, associated with the item.

One reason for this is food is one of the easiest product categories to recognize and around which to create databases. It’s also because food recognition unlocks numerous commerce, health and nutrition tracking, and kitchen management scenarios if done right.

To read the full post and our review of Snap’s new feature, click over to The Spoon.

Food Tech Is Heading to CES!

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!

Amazon Alexa Debuts ‘What to Eat’ Feature

Amazon Alexa Expands Food Personalization Features With Launch of ‘What to Eat’

Last week, Amazon launched a new personalized meal recommendation feature for Alexa called ‘What to Eat?’. The new capability, which was part of a slate of new features for Alexa first teased at the end of September, gives users recommendations for restaurants, recipes, prepared items, and more based on their preferences.

What to Eat is an expansion of the personalized food recommendation capabilities of Alexa that the company began rolling out earlier this year with the ‘What’s for Dinner’ feature. Where What’s for Dinner offers personalized recipe ideas based on past purchase behavior, What to Eat goes a step further by recommending options based on a user’s dietary preferences and restrictions shared with Alexa.

You can read the full article about the latest evolution of Alexa’s food personalization technology at The Spoon.

Sponsor Message

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Restaurant Tech

Our Ghost Kitchen Future Will Be Automated

Back at the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2019, Adam Brotman, the CEO of restaurant tech startup Brightloom, suggested if he was a young entrepreneur and wanted to start a restaurant business, he’d create a ghost kitchen powered by a food making robot.

I haven’t stopped thinking about this comment ever since.

The combination of food produced via robots with a ghost kitchen model makes so much sense, in part because both are new approaches that help reduce two of the most significant cost drivers of the legacy restaurant business: real estate and labor.

Consider the real estate costs of starting a new sit-down restaurant. Some estimates put the typical down payment required for the commercial space somewhere between $150 to $350 thousand dollars in a market like LA. And that’s before you even get to the cost of renovation and installing a new kitchen, which can cost up to a quarter of a million bucks

You can read the full story about the symbiotic relationship between food robots and ghost kitchens, here.

Kristen Barnett Launches Hungry House, an ‘Anti-Ghost Kitchen’ Ghost Kitchen

It seems a day doesn’t go by nowadays without a new ghost kitchen concept popping up.

While all that growth can be exciting, the ghost kitchen land grab has its downsides, at least according to Kristen Barnett. The former COO of ghost kitchen startup Zuul told me today in a video call that the industry’s rapid expansion has often meant low-quality food, a lack of transparency, and, well, just way too many chicken wing restaurants.

To counter this, Barnett has launched a new company called Hungry House, which she describes as an ‘anti-ghost kitchen ghost kitchen.’

What does that mean?

“We are actively being intentional about some of the more negative sides of the ghost kitchen industry that the public has come to know,” said Barnett. “Hungry House really was created as a reaction to that, seeing a way to flip those maybe less than ideal characteristics of the industry on its head and say ‘No, what happens if we infuse transparency, we tell customers it’s Hungry House making the food, we have a physical storefront that people can actually order at and see the kitchen and see the team?’”

You can read the full story about Hungry House here.

Aquaculture Tech

The Kingfish Company Wants to Lead a Tech Revolution in Aquaculture

Earth’s ocean ecosystems are deteriorating. Wild fish stocks are increasingly vulnerable. And yet by the year 2050, global demand for seafood may have increased by as much as 80%, according to research from the Blue Food Assessment.

The Kingfish Company wants to help satisfy some of that demand while reducing the environmental toll of seafood production. The agtech company launched its first land-based aquaculture production facility in the Netherlands before introducing its flagship line of yellowtail kingfish products in Whole Foods Markets across the U.S. Soon, Kingfish will bring its production operations to the U.S. with a new facility in Maine.

Earlier this week, The Spoon joined Kingfish founding partner and CEO Ohad Maiman on Zoom to find out more about the company’s aquaculture technology and plans for expansion.

To read the full interview with the CEO of Kingfish, head here.

Food Robots

Meet Nommi, a Robotic Bowl Food Kiosk

Last week, Wavemaker Labs announced the launch of a new startup and bowl-making robotic kiosk concept called Nommi. Nommi will be “a standalone robotic kitchen that is able to produce and dispense any grain-, noodle- or lettuce-based dish through a fully integrated cooking system.”

Nommi is the latest robot startup concept to emerge from Wavemaker Labs, the food automation incubation studio behind Miso Robotics (Flippy, a back-of-house fry and grillbot), Bobacino (boba drinkbot), Future Acres (farm assistant) and Piestro (pizza kiosk). What’s unique about Nommi is the company is a product of a partnership between Wavemaker, C3 and chef Masaharu Morimoto, each of whom hold equity in the new company.

“As we started developing it, we really wanted to get partners to allow this to scale quickly, and really kind of stack the deck before we start playing,” said Buck Jordan, President and Co-Founder of Nommi and CEO of Wavemaker Labs, in a recent zoom interview with The Spoon.

To read the full story about Nommi, click here.

Kitchen Tech

Is Home Fermentation The Next Big Kitchen Tech Opportunity?

There’s been a fermentation boom in restaurants over the past decade. Chefs everywhere are using the age-old technique to make everything from kimchi to katsuobushi, and nowadays, it’s not out of the ordinary for high-end restaurants to have a head of fermentation on staff.

And now, thanks in part to the pandemic and the rise of experimentation in food making, more people than ever are doing fermentation at home. Anyone who’s tried to create a sourdough starter, brew kombucha or make sauerkraut has dabbled in fermentation whether they know it or not.

Still, fermenting is still viewed as something of a black art. Part of it is the weird and slightly creepy terminology (mother, anyone?). Mostly, though, it’s also because the act of farming bacteria to create tasty and healthy new foods is a far cry from the usual activity of assembling and cooking our meals in our kitchen.

Read the full story the rise of home fermentation tech, click here.

Witness the Many Forms of Food Waste Innovation

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Since the start of 2021, we’ve seen numerous developments that showcase how vast and varied the efforts to fight food waste have become. Sachets that slow food spoilage. Hyperspectral imaging to analyze avocados. Vodka made from old crackers. A skincare line. 

All of these examples (and many others) underscore both the need for innovation and the fact that we’re getting more of it nowadays when it comes to food waste. Food waste, after all, is a global problem with environmental, monetary, and human consequences. To mitigate climate change and build a more resilient food system, the planet needs to meet food waste reduction targets set down by the United Nations, the USDA, the EPA, and others, including the UN Sustainable Development Goal of cutting food waste in half by 2050 (UN SDG Target 12.3.1).

Even just a few years ago, both the issues and the UN goal were mere abstraction to many outside the food industry. After all, it’s hard to visualize statistics like “one-third of the world’s food goes to waste” or “food waste’s global footprint is 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases.”

Fortunately, groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), ReFED, the World Wildlife Fund, and others have worked tirelessly over the last several years to bring the topic of food waste closer to center stage in the conversations about our food system. In fact, ReFED estimates that the total amount of food wasted in the U.S. has leveled off since 2016, while food waste per capita has decreased 2 percent over the last three years. Meanwhile, investment is slowly but surely trickling into the space, with companies like Apeel, Imperfect Foods, and Silo closing large rounds of funding in the last several months.

Still, there is a lot of work to be done, which is where innovation can play a big role. Food waste happens at every stage of the food supply chain, from items left in the field to rot to those dumped own the drain or sent to the landfill. To curb the waste, we need more investment in the kind of infrastructure that can measure, rescue, and recycle organic waste and prevent it from going to landfills and incinerators. We also need a huge collective effort from food producers, manufacturers, retailers, restaurants, capital providers, and others, with innovation at the center of those actions. 

Many are already bringing new technologies and processes to the food supply chain to try and make waste less possible. One need only glance briefly at the level of innovation currently happening around food waste to understand the breadth of entrepreneurs, companies, and agencies using their collective brainpower to build more food-waste-fighting solutions.

But rather than read a big ol’ list of companies, I instead encourage you to join us next week, on June 16, for the Food Waste Insights + Innovation Forum. The Spoon has teamed up with ReFed for the all-virtual event, which will include chats with experts across the food supply chain as well as panels and innovator demos.

At this event, we want to highlight innovators in the food waste space, acknowledging the work of companies developing everything from biosensing technology for the supply chain to shelf-life extension tools for grocery retailers to those evolving and improving the date-labeling system in the U.S. Add grocery order automation, upcycling, solutions to at-home food waste, and many other areas to that list.

The event will also connect innovators — whether you’re onstage or in the audience — with investors and capital, and will even include a session dedicated to how companies can go about raising money for their company. An open networking/demo time will also allow investors to ask one-on-one questions to innovators and vice versa.

Got ideas you want to share about how to reduce food waste? Or maybe you’re looking for a new idea or partner to help supercharge your own company’s efforts in this area, or you just want to learn more about this growing movement. Whichever the case, register today for this half-day event.

More Food Tech Headlines

LIVEKINDLY Collective Acquires Seaweed Burger Maker, The Dutch Weed Burger – The Dutch Weed Burger makes a range of meat analogs using seaweed as the hero ingredient. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Print a Drink 3D Prints Designs Inside a Cocktail, Develops Smaller Machine for Corporations – Print a Drink has created two working robots (one in the U.S. and one in Europe) that can print out custom designs inside drinks.

NPD: Shipments of Plant-Based Proteins to Restaurants Up 60 Percent Year Over Year – Shipments of plant-based proteins from foodservice distributors to commercial restaurants were up 60 percent year-over-year in April of 2021.

Europe? The U.S.? Israel? Which Country Might Be Next to Approve Cultured Meat

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Ever since Eat Just nabbed the world’s first regulatory approval to sell cultured meat in Singapore (and followed that milestone up by actually selling it), myself and many others have wondered which market will be next. 

The question was asked again this week when an article from Food Navigator zeroed in on Europe, noting, “Europeans want to know when it will be their turn: when will cultivated meat be served on EU plates?” It seems the most probable answer is three to five years. 

With Singapore already selling cultured meat at restaurants, five years seems a long time. But David Brandes, the Managing Director for Belgium-based company Piece of Meat, noted to Food Navigator that “bureaucracy and political interest” hold back the regulatory process, and that the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA)’s risk assessment process alone takes nine months.

Still, the European Commission has a clearly defined process for bringing cultured meat to market that is known as the Novel Food authorization, which makes it a logical market to try and bring a product into. For example, Mosa Meat, based in the Netherlands, has said it is focusing on Singapore and Europe for its first launches, specifically citing Europe’s Novel Food authorizations as a reason. Europe is also home to many other cultured meat companies, including Blue Biosciences, Mirai, and CellulaREvolution.

On the other hand, many have their sights set on the U.S. as the next destination for the sale of cultured meat. In 2019, the FDA and the USDA issued a formal agreement to jointly oversee regulation of cultured meat using existing frameworks. (The framework does not apply to cultured seafood, which is regulated exclusively by the FDA.)

U.S.-based companies are still leading the cultured meat industry, too, and have attracted huge amounts of investment in the recent past, including Memphis Meats’ $161 million round in 2020, BlueNalu’s $60 million fundraise, and, of course, Eat Just’s recent $200 million fundraise. The latter — still the only cultured meat company in the world cleared to sell a product — hasn’t explicitly said it will next launch commercially in the U.S. In a recent conversation, Eat Just founder and CEO Josh Tetrick only hinted, saying “I think it’s more likely than not that we’ll see clearance sometime in the next two years. I hope it’s this year — we’re going to be ready if it is. But it’s hard to tell.”

Additionally, California-based BlueNalu has said its products will launch in the second half of 2021, though it hasn’t yet said where. And an organization known as the Alliance for Meat, Poultry, and Seafood Innovation, which includes Memphis Meats, New Age Meats, Eat Just, and others, is dedicated to advancing the reach of cultured meat in the U.S.

Let’s also keep one eye on Israel. While its a smaller market than the U.S. or Europe, the country is like Singapore in that its government is very keen on advancing cultured meat. That includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyah, who in December of last year became the first head of state to taste cultured meat. He noted at the time that Israel will “become a powerhouse for alternative meat and alternative protein.”

Israel is also home to the world’s first restaurant dedicated to cultured meat, SuperMeat’s The Chicken. No products are sold their. Rather, consumers apply to gain entry then give detailed feedback in exchange for tasting the company’s cultured meat product. (Spoiler alert: it’s chicken.) 

There are also a growing number of companies coming from Israel, including Aleph Farms, Future Meat, and MeaTech 3D, which already publicly trades on the Tel Aviv stock exchange. 

Worth noting is that MeaTech 3D has also filed to go public in the U.S., which may suggest where its sights are set in terms of initial commercialization. Future Meat, too, has also said it plans to launch in the U.S. by 2022 via restaurants and direct-to-consumer sales. So while Israel may not necessarily be host the world’s second commercial sale of cultured meat, it may well provide the companies doing so elsewhere. Say, in the U.S.

Other Headlines

Tyson’s Raised & Rooted Expands into Plant-Based Burgers, Brats and Italian Sausage. Tyson Foods’ plant-based protein brand, announced today that it is expanding its lineup with three new offerings: burgers, Bratwurst and Italian sausages. 

Sweden: Stockeld Dreamery Launching First Plant-Based Cheese This Week. Plant-based cheese startup Stockeld Dreamerly, will launch its first product, Stockeld Chunk, at select stores in Stockholm, Sweden on May 6. 

OmniFoods Plans to Launch Its Plant-Based OmniPork Products in the U.S. This Year. OmniPork, the plant-based meat line from Green Monday subsidiary OmniFoods, will launch in the U.S. later this year.

Anatomy of a Digital Restaurant

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When Taster, a virtual restaurant company headquartered in London, announced its $37 million fundraise last week, co-founder and CEO Anton Soulier made clear that his company is trying to “redefine what it means to be a restaurant group in the 21st century.”

The company, founded in 2017, started out cooking food for its virtual restaurant brands from its own dedicated kitchen spaces then selling items via third-party delivery platforms like Uber Eats. Previously, Soulier was an early team member at Deliveroo, so he knows a thing or two about doing a delivery business — most importantly, how delivery has to continue to evolve.

Along those lines, Taster is taking a slightly different approach to the virtual restaurant nowadays. Instead of making the food itself, Taster licenses its five brands out to existing restaurants. The setup brings benefits to both sides. Restaurants can to make extra revenue by selling more delivery orders to not just their existing customers but fans of the virtual brands. Taster gets to expand faster, since it’s no longer having to handle every single order itself or build out kitchen infrastructure. As of last check, the company, which also has teams in Paris and Madrid, has more than 60 restaurant sites in nine cities acorss the UK, France, and Spain. The new funding, a series B round led by Octopus Ventures, will ensure further expansion for Taster’s brands.

In many ways, Taster could be seen as something of a blueprint for the digital-age restaurant chain, because it gathers a few different concepts that are popular into a single platform:

Underutilized Kitchen Space

Taster’s current model is built on helping restaurants put underutilized kitchen space to work. Businesses with extra kitchen space can license one or more of Taster’s restaurant brands and run it out of their own properties. It’s a way of offering a delivery brand without incurring the expense of a long lease with a traditional commissary space, which is too expensive for many restaurants. 

This “license a virtual restaurant” approach has become more commonplace over the last several months. Chicago-based Wow Bao started licensing a delivery-only version of its menu to other restaurants in 2020. Ordermark created an entire sister business around connecting restaurants with underutilized space to virtual brands. Restaurant company C3 has taken the concept beyond restaurants and is licensing its virtual food brands to hotels and luxury apartment properties.

Menus Designed for Delivery

From its inception, Taster has billed itself as a digital food court, serving up street food reimagined for delivery. In other words, the food is supposed to travel well. The company also involved Michelin-star chefs in the design of all its restaurant brands’ menus. 

In theory, at least, that ensures a certain level of quality stays intact throughout the entire journey the food takes from the kitchen to the customer. Even before the pandemic turned most of the restaurant biz into one giant takeout operation, issues with food quality were a major problem for delivery. This is another reason restaurants are now creating or licensing virtual brands instead of trying to repurpose their existing menus for to-go boxes. Under this arrangement, dining room food gets to stay where it belongs, in the dining room, and delivery orders are comprised of food that was built for travel.

Versatile Tech

Good food is the single most important part of any virtual restaurant. Arguably, the runner up is technology. It’s not enough anymore for a system to be simply be able to process digital orders and payments. Because of the growing order volume, delivery tech also needs to integrate with the back of house operations, track inventory and drivers, communicate with customers and integrate with the restaurant’s main POS system. It also needs to be able to integrate with third-party delivery services a la Uber Eats or Deliveroo.

To run a virtual restaurant out of their own kitchens, restaurants could cobble together various third-party solutions to get the above features under one roof. Or they could attempt to build an in-house system from the ground up. Both approaches have their drawbacks, from time and money to compatibility issues between different pieces of software. 

It’s another reason licensing a brand from a company like Taster or C3 or NextBite seems more practical at this point. Taster’s system, for example, can process orders and payments, help manage the kitchen, and track quality control, among other things. Users can also choose whether they want to order Taster brands via third-party delivery apps or Taster’s in-house app. Restaurants licensing Taster’s brands need not actually concern themselves with any of these logistical puzzles — the company handles all of the technology itself. C3’s tech is very similar, and there will doubtless be plenty of other such systems emerging in the near future.   

There’s little chance this “license a virtual restaurant” model will go out of vogue once lockdown restrictions ease and more cities around the world reopen their economies. Off-premises meal formats like delivery are at this point a normal part of doing business for restaurants. And as Taster’s recent fundraise suggests, interest in the evolution of the virtual restaurant is higher than ever.

Landry’s a restaurant group that owns Morton’s The Steakhouse and Bubba Gump’s Shrimp, said in a recent interview that most of the company’s restaurant brands will start accepting bitcoin as payment in the coming months. CEO Tilman Fertitta cited “the next 90 days” as a timeframe.

Starbucks is using its AI technology, Deep Brew, to further improve personalization for customers but also to track vaccination progress throughout the world, the company said on its recent earnings call.

Uber recently announced a new feature,  Pickup and Go, that lets rideshare users see nearby restaurants and order/pickup food while they are in transit.

Back to School for Virtual Food Halls

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We’ve said it once (actually, a lot more than once), we’ll say it again: university towns are the ideal testing ground for new meal delivery-related endeavors. Little wonder, then, that when launching its next virtual food hall, hospitality platform C3 (Creating Culinary Communities) chose Graduate Hotels, which operates more or less exclusively across America’s major college towns.

C3 specializes in delivery-only restaurant brands that cater to many different food types, from burgers to caviar. For this latest partnership, it will take over kitchen operations at Graduate Hotel properties, effectively turning those spaces into ghost kitchens for its virtual restaurant brands from which customers can order digitally.

A key piece of this news is that food will be available to the entire community, not just guests of the Graduate Hotel. For restaurant brands under the C3 umbrella, that means exposure to tens of thousands of individuals from student body populations, many of whom are already partial to digital ordering when it comes to how they get their meals. Just ask companies like Aramark, which acquired order-ahead app Good Uncle in 2019, Grubify, which was developed by Columbia students, and robot delivery company Starship’s college-centric user base. There are also, of course, the usual suspects: third-party delivery services like DoorDash and Grubhub.

Universities, and university towns with them, are an obvious testing ground for meal-related tech. Companies like C3 and those above have something of a captive audience, given that most campuses feature lots of bodies in a relatively small geographical area, people eating at all hours of the day/night, and a younger audience that has grown up using technology. Add faculty, staff, local residents, and hotel guests to that list, and that’s a massive potential customer base for C3 and its restaurant brands to reach when it launches at Graduate Hotels.

That we haven’t seen more of these virtual food halls on college campuses isn’t surprising, since students have been largely absent from their campuses — and therefore from college towns — for nearly a year because of the pandemic. However, as of last check, many colleges plan to reopen in the spring. Behaviors around how consumers get their meals has already shifted towards more digital ordering and to-go-friendly formats like delivery. By the time class is actually back in session, these behaviors will be even more firmly cemented into daily routines.

Side note: it would not be surprising to eventually see a virtual food hall like C3 team up with a robot-delivery company like Starship to further streamline operations, get deliveries out faster, and make them more socially distanced. 

Given all that, it seems C3 picked an optimal time to launch its virtual restaurants in the college town market — before everyone else rushes to do the same.

The Automat Comeback is Getting Legit

Another obvious meal-delivery concept that will in all likelihood hit college campuses one day soon is the net-gen Automat, a point underscored by the recent launch of Automat Kitchen in Jersey City, New Jersey.

These new versions of the mid-century staple are just as they sound: high-tech versions of the old cubby-style system a la Horn & Hardart. The difference nowadays is that instead of dropping a nickel into a slot to retrieve a meal, users can order ahead via an app and use a digitally delivered code to unlock the cubby door.

Towards the end of 2020, I wrote that the Automat would make a comeback thanks both to technology and to the industry-wide change towards takeout meals the restaurant biz has absorbed.

The Automat is well-suited for the pandemic era (which will probably last longer than the actual pandemic) because of it’s quick, cheap, and truly contactless nature. There is no human-to-human interaction involved with either placing a meal in a cubby or scanning a code to remove the food. And as ghost kitchens, delivery-only brands, and virtual food halls proliferate (see above), the Automat format looks increasingly attractive. 

Automat Kitchen’s version of it is a hardware/software combo that features made-to-order meals meant to be healthier takes on the comfort foods of yesteryear. It’s located in an office building connected to a shopping mall, so as the population ventures back to physical workspaces and stores, this location will see a lot of traffic.

Automat Kitchen joins the likes of the forthcoming Brooklyn Dumpling Shop as well as Minnow and Starbucks in bringing the automated cubby system to the restaurant experience. Expect plenty of other implementations to emerge this year.

Starbucks is considering more drive-thru-only stores with zero seating, the company said in its recent earnings call. Other possible future formats include significantly smaller location sizes and the ever-popular double-drive-thru lane concept.

Chipotle is testing out carside pickup at 29 of its locations in California. Customers order via the Chipotle app and, upon arriving at the restaurant, hit the “I’m here” button to get their food.

Mealco, a company that helps chefs create delivery-only brands, raised $7 million in seed funding. The round was led by Rucker Park Capital along with FJLabs and others.

And Now, a Moment for Culture(d Meat)

If you’re doing it right, your Thanksgiving leftovers should be gone by now (so many turkey+stuffing+gravy sandwiches!).

Evidently, preparing for Thanksgiving in the middle of a year-long pandemic was a “logistical nightmare” for BIG TURKEY (Butterball, Perdue, Foster Farms, etc.), thanks to labor shortages and reduced family gatherings.

This got me wondering how long it will be before we see lab-grown, cultured turkey on the tables. Sure, cultured meat still has to overcome issues around scale, affordability and widespread governmental approval. And there are some who doubt whether cultured meat will ever become a thing at all.

But as an industry sector, cultured meat’s march towards our dinner table continues to make gains. Just this week, Eat Just announced today that it received the world’s first regulatory approval to sell cultured chicken in Singapore. And that’s just the latest development capping off what has been a robust year in the cell cultured meat space that has also featured:

  • Meat-Tech announced that it had successfully 3D-printed a cultured beef fat structure composed of bovine fat cells and bio ink grown from stem cells
  • Future Meat is using fibroblast cells to help bring down the cost of cultured meat
  • SuperMeat opened up a restaurant that serves its cell-based chicken (in exchange for your opinion)
  • NovaMeat started testing its 3D printing technology on cell culture + plant-based meat hybrids
  • BioBQ is developed cell-based brisket
  • Vow is developing a cell-based meat platform portfolio that includes goat, pork and kangaroo
  • BlueNalu announced it’s opening a new production facility next year for its cultured seafood
  • Mosa Meat said it achieved an 80x reduction in medium cost for creating lab-grown meat
  • Higher Steaks created the world’s first lab-grown bacon and pork belly

And that doesn’t even include the Ouroboros Steak art project that designed a kit for creating cell-based human meat. (Relax, it’s not real.) (We hope.)

While 2020 has been a pretty garbage year for the most part, that just hasn’t been the case for cell-based meats. As you can see from the assortment of stories, lot of companies are working on the problem from a lot of different angles, and all of them are making progress.

Now, we won’t be serving lab-grown turkey next year (or, presumably the year after that), but watching all these startups innovate on food tech that could help make food production more abundant and equitable is something to be thankful for.

Upcoming Virtual Events from The Spoon

The Ghost Kitchen Deep Dive – December 9th – An all day event looking at the fast-changing ghost kitchen & virtual restaurant market.

Food Tech Live 2021 – January 11th – Check out the latest food tech innovation to start 2021 at our annual food tech product showcase.

Tetra’s Tiny Dishwasher (Finally) Headed to Market

Heatworks’ Tetra countertop dishwasher is an example of a product that I totally don’t need and yet totally want.

We first covered the Tetra back at CES 2018, where we were enthralled by the diminutive dishwasher that could clean a few settings of dishes with only a half gallon of water in ten minutes. Fun!

Well, things have been quiet on the Tetra front since that CES and we were wondering if the device would ever actually make it to market. Turns out, the company was trying to solve the complex issue around soap dispensing in its machine.

This week, Heatworks announced that it has partnered with BASF to make that complicated mechanism and bring the Tetra to market. According to the press announcement, the improved Tetra “will be designed to deliver custom solutions and dosing, dependent on the selected wash cycle, ensuring each cleaning cycle is optimized. Tetra’s cartridges will last for multiple loads and consumers will be able to sign up for a subscription, so that cartridges are shipped to them automatically.”

That last part about a proprietary soap cartridge is a bit of a bummer. We’re not a big fan of Keurig-style solutions that lock you into a particular ecosystem. But we are happy to see that the Tetra is still alive and expected to be available in the back half of 2021.

Blendid.com, Jamba Juice, Walmart, AI, Robot, Smoothy, Kiosk, Dixon, Ca, 111220

More Headlines

Exclusive: Blendid and Jamba Co-Brand New Smoothie Robot – The robot is now open for business at a Walmart in Dixon, California. This is the first co-branded robot from Blendid and its second to open up at a Walmart.

Zuul Teams Up With Thrillist to Launch Rotating Ghost Kitchen – A series of 10 different NYC restaurants will each hold a two-week residency offering exclusive delivery-only meal offerings made out of Zuul’s ghost kitchen facility in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood.

The Spoon’s Plant-Based Egg Round-Up – Plant-based eggs are poised to become the next big thing in the plant-based space, and it can be hard to keep up with all of the companies involved in this industry. We’ve pulled together some of the emerging and bigger players in this space.

3D Meat Printing Startup SavorEat Goes Public – The Israeli startup has had an initial public offering (IPO) on Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE), raising NIS 42.6 million ($13 million) in funding.

HungryPanda Raises $70M to Provide Food Delivery to Overseas Chinese Customers – The London, U.K.-based company will use the new funds to continue its global expansion, delivering authentic Chinese restaurant food and groceries to Chinese people living abroad.

It’s Been Big Week for Grocery Delivery Robots

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You know how last week felt like it dragged on forever? Well, food tech companies sure made up for that lost time, because once Monday hit, our desk was pelted with a flurry of announcements.

One food tech area that was particularly busy this week (and it’s only Wed.), was grocery delivery. More specifically, grocery delivery via robots. Now, I’m using the word “robot” a little loosely here, but mostly that’s because it packs a little more punch than saying “It’s been a big week for grocery delivery across a variety of different autonomous and remote controlled vehicle formats.”

Things kicked off on Monday with Nuro’s announcement that it had raised a $500 million Series C round of funding. Nuro makes the autonomous pod-like R2 vehicle that got the greenlight from the federal and California governments to operate on public roads. Nuro has been doing self-driving grocery delivery tests for biggies like Kroger and Walmart.

That news was followed on Tuesday when Self Point, a digital commerce platform for grocers, announced a partnership with Tortoise. Through the deal, Self Point’s retail customers will be able to offer grocery delivery via Tortoise’s teleoperated robots.

Walmart itself then jumped into the news cycle with the announcement that it has partnered with Cruise to pilot the use of that company’s electric, autonomous car fleet for grocery delivery in Scottsdale, AZ.

Now, each of these tests are small, so chances are good that you won’t see robots on your sidewalk anytime soon. But these stories, along with Starship’s recent launch at Save Mart in Modesto, CA, all illustrate how the use of robotics is being accelerated in grocery.

Grocery is actually a pretty good use case for robots. First, the pandemic’s continued presence has pushed record number of people to grocery shopping online. This in turn will spur an increase in grocery delivery. As we saw early on in the pandemic, it didn’t take much to overwhelm the delivery capacity for the likes of Amazon, Kroger and Fresh Direct. Having more delivery options like robots will give retailers more throughput.

Additionally, robots are good for grocery because speed is less of an issue. If you order a burrito or a latte for delivery, you want it as fast as possible. But if you’re stocking up for the week, scheduling your delivery out for later that same day or even the next day isn’t that big a deal.

As exciting as all this robo news is, it will still be a while before there are full-on fleets of robots bringing bags full of groceries to our front door. But as this week’s news shows — it won’t feel like forever before robots are here.

Will Biden Be a Food Tech President?

With the election (mostly) behind us, it’s time to think about what a Biden Administration could mean for the food tech industry. Spoon Founder Mike Wolf took some time to map out what the President Elect might do for food, and made a few suggestions, including the creation of a “Food Innovation Czar.” From Mike’s piece:

While “Czar” appointments in the U.S. government don’t usually mean they are heads of agencies, they often come with fairly broad administrative power. In fact, one of the first appointments of a Czar by the Republican party was a “Food Czar” that looked to put broad oversight power of food pricing during the Second World War.

What would a Food Innovation Czar do? They could focus on the current food system fragility, encourage the digitization of the food supply chain, and encourage legislation and funding for new food innovation initiatives. They would also help highlight innovative new approaches, organizations, and creators who are building food future and encourage private sector investment.

He also explores tax cuts for farmers to encourage the use of new technologies, an advisory council with food tech rock stars like Jennifer Doudna of CRISPR fame, and even installing a vertical farm at the White House.

You can see Mike’s full story here.

More Headlines

Zero Egg Raises $5M for Its Plant-Based Egg Product – The eggless egg product is made from pea protein and nutritional yeast and just launched in the U.S. last month.

Highpper Aims to Make Standalone Robot-Powered Restaurants-in-a-Box – The Israeli company says it will launch its first branded pizza robo-restaurant in June.

Beyond Q3 Earnings: The Company ‘Co-Created’ the McPlant, Will Launch Version 3.0 of Its Burger – It was a roller coaster couple of days for the plant-based burger giant as McDonald’s hemmed and hawed about who exactly will be supplying the McPlant.

Spyce Kitchen Relaunches with All New Robot Kitchen, Dynamic Menu and Delivery – The restaurant, now open in Boston, is built around a re-designed “Infinite Kitchen” robot.

McDonald’s Is the Latest QSR to Embrace the Drive-Thru-Centric Restaurant Format – McDonald’s unveiled a long-term growth strategy that includes a new loyalty program, more AI and machine learning in the drive-thru lane, and revamped formats for future locations.

In-House Delivery Needs to Disrupt Delivery

Some of the talk at last week’s Smart Kitchen Summit revolved around two newish concepts that are especially compelling when it comes to thinking about restaurants: in-house delivery and disrupting third-party delivery. Together, the two could substantially shift the the off-premises meal journey of the future.

Technically, in-house delivery — also called “native delivery” or “direct delivery” — is a decades old practice championed by Domino’s, Jimmy John’s, and other restaurants that have always used their own staff to ferry orders to customers’ doorsteps. But ever since customer demand for delivery went through the roof and then some, most restaurants have found it more economically feasible to offload delivery operations to third-party services like DoorDash and Uber Eats. 

As we cover ad nauseam around here, third-party delivery comes with its own lengthy catalog of grievances, and many restaurants don’t actually make money from those orders. On top of that, they lose control of customer relationships and oftentimes their own branding. 

In-house delivery 2.0, then, is all about restaurants bringing some of that control back under their own rooftops. One SKS panelist mentioned fast-casual chain Panera as a pathbreaker in this area, as the chain still uses its own drivers for many of its orders and only offloads the technical logistics of processing an order to third parties. Bloomin’ Brands, parent company of Outback Steakhouse and Carrabba’s, also handles many of its delivery orders in-house, and Panda Express recently launched its own program that handles the entire delivery journey, from order processing to food transport.

Simultaneously happening is the rise of services like ShiftPixy, which use their technology to power custom-branded websites for restaurants that can process ordering and payments. ShiftPixy also works with restaurants to provide them with drivers, erasing third-party delivery from the process.

All of these approaches to in-house delivery were mentioned during SKS. In a discussion about the rise of ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants, one set of panelists agreed that in the future we will see a wider range of restaurants — major chains and independent mom-and-pop stores — gravitate to in-house delivery as a way of controlling their customer relationships and branding, to say nothing of dodging predatory commission fees from third-party services.

The mention of mom-and-pop shops is important to note. Right now, most can’t afford to build out their own mobile ordering and payments system and pay employees to deliver the food. That territory currently belongs to the Paneras and Panda Expresses of the world, which brings me to our second point: disrupting third-party delivery.

At SKS, more than one person I spoke to predicted that the act of unseating third-party delivery apps’ dominance over restaurants won’t come from imposing more rules and regulations, but from someone bringing a better, cheaper solution to the table. As more restaurant chains with deep pockets take back more of their delivery stack, those solutions might very well surface in the process. 

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Del Taco Is Launching a Drive-Thru-Only Concept

Following in the footsteps of KFC, Chipotle, Burger King, and other chains, Del Taco is doubling-down on the drive-thru as an important source of sales in the future. The Lake Forest, Calif.-based chain announced on its recent Q3 earnings call it will build a drive-thru-only prototype that can be placed at Del Taco locations with a smaller physical footprint. CEO John Cappasola said during the call this prototype will include “a modernized design, improved functionality, and other operational enhancements,” though he didn’t get more specific than that.

If this story sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because other chains have made similar announcements in the recent past. Most notable among them is Burger King, who several weeks ago announced its own drive-thru-centric design prototype meant to take up less physical space and serve more drive-thru orders in a shorter amount of time. 

Drive-thru has been the most important sales channel for QSRs during 2020’s lockdowns and continued uncertainty over the dining room. However, QSR Magazine’s recent 2020 Drive-Thru Study found that drive-thru times are nearly half a minute slower than they were last year, so it’s not a surprise more chains are redoubling their efforts to make the experience faster and more efficient. With winter fast approaching, outdoor dining is about to get way less appealing to consumers in many regions. Chains will need every order they can get from drive-thru, curbside, and other off-premises channels to make up for lost sales in the dining room/patio over the next several months.

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

A wider slowdown could erase up to 2 million jobs restaurant and retail, according to new research from Gusto cited by Restaurant Dive. The losses could total roughly $190 billion.

Following openings this year of three off-premises stores in Chicago, P.F. Chang’s will expand its to-go-concept to 27 locations by 2021. The company is also testing an in-house delivery service at 10 of its locations in the U.S.

As we reported this week, Burger King is piloting reusable cups and sandwich containers in New York, Portland and Tokyo next year. The program is being done in partnership with TerraCycle’s Loop, which is also doing the McDonald’s reusable cup trial in the U.K.