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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Delivery & Commerce

Virtually Staffing the Physical Drive-Thru

Generally speaking, restaurants with drive-thrus have often fared better than most over the last year and a half of shutdowns, dining room restrictions, and overall uncertainty. But even as demand for this format rises and major QSRs say they’ll focus more on it in future store designs, wait times at the drive-thru have gotten longer, the accuracy of orders more dubious.

Lots of companies are throwing tech at the problem to try and solve it. One of the more interesting we’ve come across recently is from Bite Ninja, which supplies restaurants with “virtual” cashiers and drive-thru operators that can take orders remotely. This has the potential to speed up the order-taking process and simultaneously addresses the labor issues currently impacting the restaurant industry.

Bite Ninja essentially lets restaurants outsource their staffing needs for the drive-thru lane to gig workers that take orders from their own homes, or wherever they happen to be. Workers — also known as “ninjas” — sign up for a shift via the Bite Ninja platform, which manages the scheduling and logistics of getting the worker set up with their shift at the restaurant. It also trains workers on both the technology (it’s Bite Ninja’s own proprietary system) and how to take a restaurant order, both generally and for specific brands. 

Customers pulling into the drive-thru lane will see the cashier’s face appear on the ordering screen. The cashier will then walk the customer through the ordering process. From a customer experience perspective, the drive-thru process isn’t significantly altered. You just happen to be talking to a person that’s not actually at the restaurant (and through a system with reportedly better audio quality).

Bite Ninja’s cofounders are no strangers to the QSR world. The idea for the platform started at one of cofounder Will Clem’s own restaurants, Baby Jack’s in Tennessee. Clem, who is also one of the original cofounders of cultivated meat company Memphis Meats (which as since rebranded as Upside), decided to use his laptop and a videoconferencing tool one evening to take orders at his drive-thru remotely. After realizing how well the concept worked, he and cofounder Orin Wilson decided to try offering the Bite Ninja platform to the wider industry. 

Clem and Wilson say their platform can increase order accuracy and upsell rates for restaurants. For workers, it’s a way of making extra money without having to clock in at the actual restaurant. And it goes without saying that having your drive-thru cashiers work remotely is more social-distancing-friendly than on-premises work.

While the technology is currently only up and running at Baby Jack’s, Clem and Wilson told The Spoon they have been contacted by “most of the major fast food restaurants in America” and are currently onboarding a few of them. (Actual names of brands will be disclosed once a trial period is completed.) And drive-thru isn’t the only place we may soon be able to find Bite Ninja. The company says its platform is also currently available as a front-of-house kiosk, and that curbside, phone, and online ordering capabilities are in the works.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more about Bite Ninja’s place in the restaurant industry, join The Spoon and guests on August 17 for a virtual Restaurant Tech Summit. Bite Ninja will join the likes of Wow Bao, Fat Brands. Sevenrooms, Kitchen United, and many more companies and individuals from the restaurant industry. Grab a ticket here, and come ready to ask some questions. 

More Headlines

86 Repairs Nabs $7.3M in Funding for Restaurant Maintenance Tech – The Chicago, Illinois-based company says the new funds will help the company build out more products for its maintenance and repairs management platform for restaurants.

Gorillas is Hiring Up to Expand its 10-Minute Grocery to San Francisco, LA and Chicago – The speedy-delivery service is prepping to make a move out west and hiring for a number of different positions across the state of California.

FreshRealm Raises $32M for Fresh, Prepared Meals – This most recent round of funding will be used to expand FreshRealm’s production facilities, with the goal of opening additional facilities throughout the country for increased distribution. 

Afresh CEO Matt Schwartz Explains How AI Can Help Grocery Retailers Place “the Perfect” Order

For grocery stores, measuring demand and managing orders for fresh foods can be a maddeningly difficult task that more often than not ends in lots of unused food getting thrown out. After all, bananas have a much shorter shelf life than, say, a bag of rice, and a lot of existing supply-chain technologies and processes were designed with the latter in mind.

“Existing tools don’t work for fresh food,” says Matt Schwartz CEO and cofounder of a San Francisco, California-based tech company called Afresh.

Afresh often gets labeled a “food waste” company and listed among other efforts to curb the problem of food waste at consumer-facing outlets like grocery stores. While Afresh’s store-level ordering platform can certainly help grocery retailers cut down on food waste, that’s not necessarily the main driving force behind the company. 

Over a call recently, Schwartz told The Spoon he thinks of Afresh as more of a “fresh food company” than food waste company. The system uses AI to analyze store-level data around customer demand, shipments of fresh food, sales of it, pricing and other factors. Gathering all that disparate data together, the system then makes ordering recommendations for grocers to help them create what Schwartz calls “the perfect order.” That is, “an amount that keeps you in stock for the shopper but also doesn’t cause you to drive waste from having it sit there.”

By way of example, he says it’s the difference between 14 cases of blueberries and 18: “Those four cases make all the difference when it comes to billions of pounds of waste.” 

Getting that perfect number can be complicated. Continuing with the blueberry example, Schwartz says there are a few major things grocery retailers have to consider, the first of them being customer demand. In other words, How many blueberries will shoppers want over the next few days? Retailers also have to consider existing store inventory, which can be tricky to calculate for something like berries. 

Reconciling these two things — how much a retailer has versus how much they think they will sell, also requires other types of data. That includes how many cases the shelf can hold, the shelf life of the blueberries, and the frequency of shipments, to name a few. The Afresh system connects to grocery retailers’ existing systems, then compiles the above data into a single place that a retailer making an order can view from an iPad.  

“In the long term our systems will drive decisions around inventory, forecasting, etc.,” said Schwartz.  

In a recent post for The Spoon, food tech investors Seana Day and Brita Rosenheim noted that “increased workflow and data automation solutions in the food supply chain holds significant power to help the food supply chain leapfrog into digitalization.” That includes grocery retailers, and Afresh is among several companies trying to enable this leapfrog movement. Seattle, Washington-based ShelfEngine offers a similar fresh food inventory management platform, as does a company called Crisp. Rising consumer demand for both fresh food and a more reliable supply chain (hello, panic shopping) mean we can expect a lot more software in this area in the near future.

For its part, Afresh is currently live in hundreds of stores, says Schwartz. He declined to name specific stores or chains, but said his company’s biggest partner does about $10 billion in sales every year. 

The company has raised a total of $32.8 million to date, with its most recent round being a Series A fundraise towards the end of 2020.

Food Rocket Going Beyond Speedy Grocery Through Ghost Kitchens and an Open Platform

The sudden proliferation of speedy grocery delivery startups like San Francisco’s Food Rocket has been one of the bigger food tech stories of 2021. But for Vitaly Alexandrov, Co-Founder, and CEO of Food Rocket, fast grocery delivery is just a step to a much larger play.

“In a year or two years, it will be like a commodity,” Alexandrov said of fast grocery delivery during a video chat this week, “Everyone will deliver in ten minutes.”

And he’s probably right. Throughout this year we’ve seen a number of players pop up offering on-demand, ten-minute style grocery delivery through a network of small, dark stores with a limited delivery radius. Most of the activity has been in Europe so far with companies like Getir, Glovo and Gorillas all raising big money and expanding rapidly. But we are starting to see more startups show up here in the U.S., especially in New York City. Fridge No More, JOKR and Gorillas all operate in the Big Apple, and Gorillas recently announced its jumping across the country to open up stores in Food Rocket’s hometown of San Francisco.

But Alexandrov isn’t worried about Gorillas, or any of the other competitors that will undoubtedly come to his hometown, in fact he welcomes them. “When there are many competitors, the market grows faster,” he said. The idea of ten minute grocery delivery is very new, and customers need to learn a whole new way of treating grocery shopping more like a utility. Alexandrov said that more competitors in a market vying for customers means there are more companies educating customers about this new type of service. The result is a larger pool of knowledgeable customers and that rising tide should lift all (speedy) boats.

If that does play out, and that’s a big IF as we still need to see if these speedy grocery startups can scale, how will each service differentiate themselves? For Food Rocket there are two phases to its future growth. Alexandrov said in the near term, one of the ways Food Rocket will stand out is by offering its own line of ready to eat meals. To do this, the company will add ghost kitchens to its operational network. So in addition to staples like milk and eggs, you could also get your lunch or dinner delivered, and menus can be tailored to tastes of the specific neighborhood served.

The second phase of its future involves opening up its platform to other retailers. Over the next three years, Food Rocket will continue to build out its network and fine-tune its inventory management, fulfillment and delivery routing systems. At that point, Food Rocket could allow a more traditional retailer like Albertsons or Kroger to use its platform for fast delivery, and it’s easy to see why retailers could be interested.

If Food Rocket’s type of fast delivery catches on with consumers, two-hour or even half-hour delivery of groceries could be considered too slow. Instead of building out their own speedy delivery infrastructure, retailers could just use Food Rocket’s and launch immediately wherever Food Rocket is operating. It’s similar to the way retailers partnered with Instacart to establish delivery (and it could carry the same pitfalls). Though Alexandrov says it beats existing third party services because Food Rocket delivery people are employees — not contractors. So when an order comes in, the system doesn’t have to take the time to find a driver willing to fulfill the order (of course, having employees also drives Food Rocket’s costs up).

But that vision of Food Rocket’s future is still a ways off, and a lot needs to happen before that vision can pan out. More immediately for Food Rocket, Alexandrov told me that the company’s next move is expanding to cover roughly 95 percent of San Francisco by September and then it’s on to Los Angeles, where Food Rocket has already signed leases in West Hollywood and Santa Monica. Alexandrov said that in order for the business to work, stores need to be set up in locations where its limited delivery radius can cover 50,000 homes. That means Food Rocket won’t be coming to my rural neck of the woods anytime soon, but it, along with the other speedy delivery startups, may be taking off in a city near you soon.

Will LG Make a Meal Out of its new Outdoor/Indoor Delivery Robot?

Consumer electronics giant LG unveiled a new indoor/outdoor rover robot at the Ubiquitous Robot 2021 conference yesterday in South Korea. The company aims to test the new robotic platform at the end of this year.

Though a number of Korean news outlets reported the story, there weren’t a ton of details available about the new robot. We know it was developed in conjunction with MIT Associate Professor Sangbae Kim at LG Boston Robotics Lab, and that the four-wheeled robot can adjust the gap between its wheels to adapt quickly to uneven terrain for a smoother ride.

But there are still plenty of questions unanswered questions. We don’t know what level of autonomy the robot has. For example, is it completely self-driving or is it teleguided? Will it be available outside of Korea, and if so, when? What industries is LG looking to sell this robot to? Given the robot’s ability to minimize jostling as it travels, food and meal delivery seems like a no-brainer. Additionally, the Aju Business Daily reported that LG released the following statement along with its new robot: “The integrated next-generation delivery robot is the result of our preemptive response to customers’ increased demands for non-face-to-face services.” Meal delivery was among the first services to go contactless during the pandemic last year, so it makes sense that such delivery would be on LG’s roadmap.

This isn’t LG’s first foray into robotics. In January of this year the company debuted its BaristaBot to serve coffee to workers at LG’s headquarters in Seoul. Last December, the company began using its CLOi robots to make deliveries from convenience stores to people inside its LG Science Park in Seoul. And in July of 2020, LG partnered with Woowa Brothers and the Korea Institute for Robot Industry Advancement to develop robot waiters.

What makes this latest robot more interesting than its previous robo-plays, however, is how it could alter the existing robot delivery market. Startups such as Starship, Serve and Kiwibot have been making robo-deliveries for years at this point, but what neither of those companies have is scale. LG is a giant electronics company that is better equipped to mass produce these rovers and bring their costs down. With its global reach, LG could then sell or lease robots more cheaply than existing robot companies to third-party delivery services (Uber Eats, DoorDash, etc.). You can kind of see a blueprint for such a deal in the recent Grubhub/Yandex partnership. Additionally, a company with the brand recognition and reputation of LG could also help spur adoption from reluctant potential partners and get more robots making deliveries.

NOTE: The LG image featured in this post is via The Korea Bizwire.

Are Robots and Drones the Next Residential Community Perk?

The New Haven in Ontario Ranch residential community boasts 12 acres of private amenities such as parks, a pool, a clubhouse and… robots and drones. That’s right, residents of this “Connected and Convenient Community,” in Ontario, California are getting some sci-fi upgrades that further illustrate how technology is driving a new wave of premium perks for those who can afford it.

Last week New Haven celebrated its grand opening with an event that featured the mayor of Ontario receiving a drone delivery of beer and other goodies from the New Haven Marketplace and the Brew Haven brewery, both of which are located at the community. But this wasn’t a one-off thing. Drone delivery is being baked into the growth of New Haven and will be offered as an ongoing service.

Brookfield Residential, the developer of New Haven, is in the process of building 59,000 news homes and has partnered with the City of Ontario and Airspace link to create a drone-safe and drone-friendly community. An Airspace Link rep emailed The Spoon explaining:

The next phase is to permit a designated take-off and secured landing location with access control for drone delivery operators to provide the services for the local retailers to the community. Final phase will include the deployment of some physical infrastructure to support these operations at scale (surveillance, deconfliction, communications).

But New Haven’s tech ambitions aren’t solely in the sky. In April, the community rolled out Gita, a small robot on wheels that paired with and followed a person around, acting as another set of hands to carry drinks/snacks/whatever. That program seems to have ended in June and we’ve reached out to New Haven to see if Gita will make a comeback.

It’s not too hard to see how perks like drone delivery or a robot assistant could sway people to buy a home in a residential community. Drone deliveries take just minutes so restaurant meals arrive piping hot, which would be a nice option to have on hand. And having a robot carry stuff for you isn’t just convenient, it seems like you could bundle in a robot with the purchase of each home so everyone got their own li’l mobile assistant.

New Haven’s drones and robots are part of a larger movement to include high-tech amenities in high-end residential communities. Cashierless checkout convenience stores in apartment complexes is another perk we’ve seen pop up over the past year, with Aramark and AWM Smart Shelf opening such a store at the Nineteen01 complex in Santa Ana, CA, and Accel Robotics opening up one at the Vantage Pointe high-rise in San Diego, CA. Ghost kitchens could be another amenity if the recent deal between C3 and Akera Living catches on with residents of Kenect communities.

The goal with all these perks to to place them on-site so people don’t really need to leave their community. They can access whatever they need in the comfort of their own compound. In the case of Accel Robotics, offers “last step” delivery so residents don’t even have to leave their apartments to get goods.

Of course, the only way to access these perks is to have enough money to afford a house in a high-end development. New Haven homes range from the $500,000s for townhomes to the high $600,000s for a single family home. It’s certainly nothing new that those with money get first access to modern conveniences, but hopefully tech companies will find a way to be more equitable in distributing their innovations to communities that can actually use such conveniences, rather than just those that can afford it.

Netled and Oh My Greens Sign €15M Contract to Bring More Vertical Farming to Sweden

Finland’s Netled has signed a three-year investment agreement with herb grower Oh My Greens, the two companies announced today. The agreement is worth €15 million (~$17 million USD) over three years and will provide Sweden-based Oh My Greens with Netled’s turnkey vertical farm called Vera.

Netled’s Vera system comes as a few different forms, the smallest iteration being a cabinet-sized farm that lives in the produce section of a grocery store. Netled also offers a larger in-store model, a larger “compact” model (8 meters by 6 meters), and an industrial-scale version that is modular and can be added to as product demand increases. 

It’s this larger industrial version of Vera that Netled will provide to Oh My Greens, which is owned by Swedish-American investment, management consultancy, and social impact firm Applied Value Group. Oh My Greens sells its potted herbs in Sweden and hopes to gain more share of the market in Sweden through the Netled partnership. Speaking in today’s press release, CEO Moses Isik said his company considered 17 different vertical farming technology providers before deciding on Netled and its Vera system.

The indoor farming system includes LED lighting, a dynamic spacing system, HVAC, a nutrition system, automation software, and production management and horticulture intelligence software. The idea is to provide clients with a plug-and-play vertical farming system that grows more plants faster and saves companies on CAPEX and OPEX costs. 

The deal with Oh My Greens means Netled can build up more of a presence in Sweden, where companies like Urban Oasis and Grönska already operate vertical farms.

Moving forward, Netled will provide technical and consultancy services for its technology while Oh My Greens works on producing and supplying produce to Stockholm retailers. For now, that’ll largely be the usual vertical farming fare of leafy greens and herbs.

Shopic Raises $10M for its Clip-On Smart Cart Cashierless Checkout Solution

Smart shopping cart startup Shopic announced today that it has raised $10 million in equity funding. The round was led by Claridge Israel, with participation from existing investors Entrée Capital, IBI Tech Fund, and Tal Capital. This brings the total amount raised by Shopic to $21 million.

The Tel Aviv, Israel-based Shopic creates cashierless checkout retail experiences through its a device that clips on to the handles of existing shopping carts. The Shopic device has cameras and a touchscreen, and uses computer vision to recognize products placed inside the cart. The Shopic system keeps tally of everything in the cart and ties in with a store’s POS so customers can skip the checkout line and get charged automatically upon leaving.

Shopic also promotes its smart carts as advertising vehicles and real-time inventory management systems. In addition to presenting an ongoing receipt as people shop, the touchscreen can also display customized digital promotions and ads based on data such as a customer’s shopping history. Because Shopic’s system is keeping track of what items are placed in the cart (and taken out) and when, it also provides real-time inventory insight as well as information about how customers shop.

The cashierless checkout space has seen a ton of funding and installation activity around the world so far this year. There are a number of solutions coming to market including retrofitting stores with cameras (Trigo, Grabango) and smart shopping carts (Caper, Veeve). Even Shopic’s very specific sub-section of turning existing shopping carts into smart carts is getting crowded, with other players such as SAI, WalkOut and Nomitri vying for grocery retailer dollars as well.

All of this action illustrates how adoption of cashierless checkout is certainly accelerating, thanks in part to its contactless nature and fears stirred by the pandemic. But despite all the funding and the momentum, it will still be awhile before it crosses over into the mainstream. I recently spoke with the CEOs of cashierless checkout startups Trigo and AiFi. The Trigo CEO believes we’ll see cahierless checkout options in every major city of the world as early as next year. That could mean there’s just one store offering it, however. AiFi’s CEO said we’re about a decade away from cashierless checkout becoming mainstream.

In its press announcement today, Shopic said that it is already deploying solutions with major grocery chains around the world, and will use its new funding to accelerate commercial activities and expand its team.

86 Repairs Nabs $7.3M in Funding for Restaurant Maintenance Tech

Restaurant tech company 86 Repairs has raised an additional $5.3 million, bringing its total funding for its seed round to $7.3 million, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Investors in this latest raise include TDF Ventures, Gordon Food Service, MATH Venture Partners, Revolution, and Cleveland Avenue. To date, 86 Repairs has raised $8.8 million.

Chicago-based 86 Repairs says the new funds will help the company build out more products for its maintenance and repairs management platform for restaurants.

The 86 Repairs system manages repair and maintenance processes for restaurants by digitizing information about all a restaurant’s equipment, and then handling the bulk of the work when there is an issue. For example, if a walk-in cooler breaks down, the restaurant calls or texts 86 Repairs, who handles things like troubleshooting, warranty checks, and setting up an appointment with a preferred technician. The company says it takes care of all communication, scheduling, and dispatching with a restaurant’s preferred equipment vendors.

The 86 Repairs platform also includes a “data insights” portion that displays things like incident history and overall spend on maintenance repair. The idea is to give restaurants one central location at which to view all data about all maintenance, even for large, multi-unit chains. To that end, a number of different chains already use the platform, including McDonald’s, Jimmy John’s, Sonic, and Famous Dave’s.

As predicted, both interest and investment in restaurant back-of-house technologies has increased since the start of the year. Though U.S. restaurants are for the most part reopened at full capacity, the need for cost-cutting and cost-saving measures is more important than ever.

ResQ, which just raised $7.5 million, is the other notable restaurant tech right now focused on repairs and maintenance.

Software that can digitize the maintenance management process makes sense for larger chains like McDonald’s. For smaller, independent restaurants — the benefits may be a bigger question mark. Spending money on another software subscription may or may not be justifiable, depending on how much a restaurant is able to save in overall maintenance and repair costs.

Gorillas is Hiring Up to Expand its 10-Minute Grocery to San Francisco, LA and Chicago

As of now, New Yorkers have just about all the fun when it comes to super speedy grocery delivery in the U.S. Companies like Fridge No More, JOKR, Gorillas and, starting next month, Buyk are all building out a network of small, delivery-only grocery stores that promise to deliver your food in as few as ten minutes

But based on its current job listings, Gorillas is prepping to make a move out west. The company is currently hiring the following positions:

Germany-based Gorillas certainly has the cash to fuel such expansion. The company just raised $290 million in March, and has raised $335 million in total. There also currently isn’t that much competition in terms of speedy delivery grocery services on the West Coast. Food Rocket launched 15-minute grocery delivery in San Francisco at the end of May. Gopuff has a number of locations across California (and Chicago), though its delivery times are a comparatively “sluggish” 30 minutes.

Gorillas, like its rivals, operates dark stores in neighborhoods that have a limited delivery radius of typically one to one and a half miles. The economics of that certainly works in densely packed urban areas like New York, Chicago or even San Francisco, but Los Angeles is sprawling (though it does have a ton of people). I’m curious to see which neighborhoods Gorillas will start with and how it will expand.

As I’ve said before, I believe this new crop of speedy delivery services are not the next Kozmo.com’s. and they have the potential to turn grocery shopping into an on-demand utility. There is power in the idea of ordering a pint of ice cream and having it arrive at your doorstep 10 minutes later, and it could upend traditional notions of going to the grocery store in person (moreso than the pandemic did).

We’ll have to wait and see on that front, but in the meantime, one good thing about the Gorillas job openings is that they are all full-time with benefits, even the delivery driver position.

Grocery, Meet the Ghost Kitchen

One year ago, Euromonitor International predicted the ghost kitchen market could be worth $1 trillion by 2030. 

The prediction, made by Euromonitor’s Global Lead for Food & Beverage Michael Schaefer, reverberated around a restaurant industry that was still deep in the midst of dining room shutdowns and restrictions related to a global pandemic. Little wonder that from that point on, many saw ghost kitchens as a kind of savior for the restaurant industry.

But Schaefer and Euromonitor were looking way beyond restaurants when they made their mega-prediction. At the time, (and later on at SKS 2020), Schaefer suggested the ghost kitchen market could reach $1 trillion because it will grow to encompass all manner of foodservice businesses: grocery outlets, dark convenience stores, and ready-made meals, in addition to restaurants. In other words, restaurants alone won’t push the market to the $1 trillion mark. Instead, it will get there because the lines between ghost kitchens, groceries, and the like will become less defined over time.

That already happening, actually, and was illustrated again recently with GoPuff’s announcement that it’s hiring staff for ghost kitchens. 

GoPuff isn’t a restaurant in any shape or form. It’s a new kind of grocery delivery service that operates in dense residential areas and promises to deliver food items to customers’ doorsteps 24/7 in roughly 30 minutes or less on average. The company’s $1.5 billion fundraise from earlier this year should indicate the popularity that the speedy-grocery-delivery segment currently enjoys. 

But GoPuff’s hiring advertisement calls for chefs as well, which suggests the company wants to add some restaurant concepts to its offerings. GoPuff isn’t alone in this. DoorDash, which began life as a restaurant delivery service, opened its own ghost kitchen in 2019 and now also operates “ghost convenience stores,” which are just as they sound. A Canadian company that’s just called Ghost Kitchens carries limited offerings from QSRs along with a mix of easy-to-fulfill grocery and convenience items like ice cream pints and frozen veggie burgers. ClusterTruck has its own virtual restaurant menu but also operates out of Kroger locations. And there are companies like C3, which operate delivery-only restaurants out of a range of physical locations, including hotels, residential properties, and other non-restaurant venues.

All of these versions of the ghost kitchen prioritize speed above pretty much everything else. They also roll up neatly into a statement Schaefer made this time last year about the trajectory of ghost kitchens.

“As more and more of the foodservice environment becomes optimized for delivery, a generation of consumers growing up with smartphones becomes accustomed and habituated to being able to order literally anything from their smartphone. That is going to drive ever-more innovation,” he said.

In 2021, that innovation appears to be the speedy delivery service. As companies further blur the lines between the ghost kitchen, the grocery, and the convenience store, they’ll launch new formats that are less about having a food experience and more about getting a food item in one’s hands as fast as humanly and technologically possible.   

More Headlines

Following Tensions, McDonald’s Cuts Tech Fees for Franchisees by 62 Percent – The company has changed its stance on the $423-per-month fee for franchisees after a third-party review of of billing. 

DaVinci Kitchen Equity Crowdfunds €500,000 for Robotic Pasta Kiosk – The company’s campaign ran from March to the end of June this year on Seedmatch, with 488 investors participating.

C3 Raises $80M to Expand Its Virtual Food Hall Concept – The $80 million fundraise will go towards further expansion in the form of signing leases with real estate developers at various mixed-use, retail, and hospitality spaces.

Gopuff is Hiring to Get Into Ghost Kitchens

It looks like Gopuff, which is best known for ’round the clock, half-hour grocery delivery, is expanding into the ghost kitchen business. According to HNGRY (subscription required), Gopuff is hiring more than 100 cooks, managers in states across the country including Arizona, Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania to be a part of its new ghost kitchen endeavor (hat tip to Grocery Dive).

A job description for a Kitchen Associate in Chandler, Arizona on Gopuff’s site reads:

As a member of Gopuff’s new Fresh Food & Local team, the Kitchen Lead role is crucial to contributing to the success of Gopuff Fresh & Local by leading and managing a vertically integrated ghost kitchen.

Ghost kitchens are commercial kitchen facilities without dining rooms that restaurant brands can rent out to create delivery-only concepts. Meal delivery and takeout, of course, have risen in prominence over the past year as the pandemic forced the closure of dining rooms across the country.

Gopuff, which has micro-fulfillment centers in 650 cities in the U.S., raised a whopping $1.5 billion in funding earlier this year and acquired fleet management company RideOS last month. The general thinking at the time of that acquisition was that RideOS would be used as part of its core grocery delivery operations. But as Grocery Dive points out, that same feet management technology could also be used for routing restaurant meal deliveries.

The ghost kitchen space has certainly been a hotbed of activity over the past year with a number of players launching and expanding services. But perhaps what is more interesting about Gopuff’s hiring spree is the latest example of the lines between restaurant, grocery retail and ghost kitchen blurring. DoorDash, which started out as a restaurant delivery service, launched its own ghost kitchen and is expanding further into grocery delivery and expanding it own dark delivery only Dash Mart stores. Walmart is doing virtual food courts via ghost kitchens. And ghost kitchen operator C3 is running ghost kitchens out of hotels and residential spaces.

For Gopuff, adding hot meals to its existing grocery delivery business makes sense, given that it aims to complete deliveries in a half-hour. In that short amount of time your restaurant food arrives hot, while your pint of ice cream stays cool. Now the onus is on Gopuff to communicate clearly what it’s brand proposition is, so people will order both from the company.

South Korea: Online Grocer Kurly Raises $200M Series F

Kurly, the South Korean startup behind online grocery service Market Kurly, announced today that it has raised a $200 million Series F round of funding. The Korea JoongAng Daily reports that this latest round was led by existing investors such as Aspex Management, DST Global, Sequoia Capital China, along with new investors like Millennium Management and CJ Logistics. This brings the total amount of money raised by Kurly to $428 million and gives the company a $2.2 billion valuation.

At the same time, Kurly also said that it would no longer seek to go public on U.S. stock exchanges and will instead IPO on a Korean stock exchange. For more on that, The Korea Economic Daily has some good background and context as to why Kurly may have made its stock market switch.

Here at The Spoon, we are more interested in the food tech angle, and Kurly is just the latest example of an online grocery startup raising big money. According to PitchBook data released last week, investors have poured more than $10 billion into grocery startups in 2021. Kurly’s $200M Series F is downright quaint compared to the $3 billion raised by Xingsheng Youxuan, or the $1.5 billion raised by Gopuff, or the $850 million raised by Getir.

Kurly’s business is also a little more traditional than many of the grocery startups raising money right now. Unlike Gopuff and Getir and the raft of smaller companies promising grocery delivery in just 10 minutes, Kurly offers its customers next-day delivery. What it lacks in speed however, it more than makes up for in size as it provides its service across South Korea.

The pandemic has driven a good deal of interest and investment in the online grocery sector. Fears of COVID-19 drove people into online grocery last year. And while online grocery sales have come down (at least in the U.S.) as vaccinations have rolled out, there is some market research showing this new e-grocery behavior will stick with consumers. Now we’ll have to see what post-pandemic reactions to online grocery are around the globe (and if it was worth all the investment).