Category: The Weekly Spoon
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This is the web version of our weekly restaurant tech newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry. Virtual food hall, meet the augmented-reality restaurant menu. You’ll soon be best friends. Hear me out. Over these last few weeks, multiple news bites around virtual food halls have surfaced.…
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Inexplicably, I’ve always wished I could have experienced the Automat in its heyday. Created at the tail-end of the Nineteenth Century, Automats consisted of a wall of cubbies containing simple food and beverage items users could unlock for a nickel. It was essentially fast food before fast food existed. Fast forward to 2020, and it…
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Since we now live in a world where the to-go order is the main attraction at restaurants, we need to start treating the issue of excess single-use packaging with a whole lot more urgency. Clearly I’m not the only one to have that thought, as two major QSR chains made sustainability announcements of their own…
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Ghost kitchens. You’ve heard about them nonstop since the pandemic overturned the foodservice industry and forced almost every restaurant in the country to go off-premises. And with the fate of the restaurant dining room still very much uncertain (see below), we’ll see more restaurants turn to the ghost kitchen model in the future. That’s a…
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A worrying point that comes up a lot in conversation these days is that sustainability has taken something of a backseat while food businesses scramble to fight the pandemic. So it was encouraging to read this week that burger chain behemoth McDonald’s is continuing its sustainability initiatives and just completed construction on its first “net…
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The surprise hit story on The Spoon this week has been our recent post on Mexico City-based remotekitchen, a startup that’s building a mobile-first restaurant-tech platform that, theoretically at least, only needs a smart phone to operate. I highlight this story not because I think every restaurant needs to pare down their tech stack to…
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Of all the reinventions the restaurant is undertaking right now, menus are one of the more fascinating. Between calls to action about paring down the size of their menus, offering disposable ones, or, preferably, going full-on digital and contactless, restaurants have a lot of choices and decisions to make when it comes to how they…
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This is the web version of our newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry. A couple of years ago I came across a restaurant in Dallas, Texas that featured a menu written entirely in emojis. It was unexpected and creative, yet clear enough that a server didn’t…
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This is the web version of our newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry. I was going to use this newsletter to write about pandemic profiteering and the report that Uber wants to buy Grubhub. Then this gem of a dire headline hit: one in every four…
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This is the web version of our newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry. Things I never thought I’d live to see: a global pandemic shutting down the economy, the McDonald’s snuggie, and fast food restaurants requiring reservations to dine in. But with the restaurant biz on…
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This is the web version of our newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry. If you like a good fight, the one around restaurant commission fee caps is worth watching. I spent the better part of three-plus hours the other day tuned into the New York City…
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Even an introverted work-from-home veteran like me is starting to get kind of daffy during this here quarantine. But I will say that being stuck at home has given me a lot of time to think (and write) about the state of the restaurant industry, and I catch myself imagining what eating out will be…
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