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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Delivery & Commerce

Unilever & Robomart Rolling Out Mobile Ice Cream Shops in Los Angeles This Summer

If you live in select neighborhoods in LA this summer, you won’t have to wait for that familiar ice cream truck jingle before running outside to grab a cold treat.

That’s because you can order one to come to your house by using the store-hailing app of Robomart via its partnership with Unilever. Last week, the two companies announced they are partnering up to trial a fleet of mobile ice cream shops powered by Robomart’s technology under Unilever’s virtual ice cream brand, The Ice Cream Shop.

Here’s how it works: Customers hail the mobile Ice Cream Shop to their location using Robomart’s mobile app. Once it arrives, the user swipes across the app to open the vehicle’s door. Robomart’s checkout-free system allows customers to select their ice cream and walk away without tapping or pulling out a credit card.

Robomart founder Ali Ahmed told The Spoon that the Ice Cream Shops would run seven days a week for at least 12 hours a day. Robomart employees will drive the stores (interaction with the stores is fully automated) and restock the mobile shops at Robomart operations hubs.

Some might feel that using a Robomart Ice Cream Shop isn’t the same as that iconic childhood experience of hearing that familiar jingle, grabbing your change, and racing outside to grab a treat. This tech-powered approach is also much less accessible than the old-school ice cream truck since it requires someone to have a smartphone and someone old enough to have digital payment capabilities.

Concerns aside, there’s something to be said for being able to bring the ice cream truck to you, mainly because the everyday ice cream truck isn’t so everyday anymore.

For Robomart, the deal follows last year’s rollout of its mobile storefronts in West Hollywood. According to Ahmed, the company now has about 100 Robomarts “booked” under contract. After the trial, Ahmed says Unilever and Robomart plan roll out the Ice Cream Shop in new neighborhoods in LA and into other parts of the country.

Instacart Brings Caper’s AI-Powered Checkout to Fenway as It Transforms Into a ‘Retail Enablement Platform’ Company

Last fall, Instacart acquired smart checkout startup Caper AI as it looked to bulk up its technology solutions to offer retailers who want to enable contactless checkout. This week, the company has relaunched Caper’s system and announced one of its first locations for the system: Fenway Park.

Instacart is making its Fenway debut thanks to Aramark’s Sports and Entertainment, the same group that helped Bartesian’s automated bartender gain entry into the luxury suite in different ballparks this season.

Physically, the Caper Counter looks to be no different than the product Caper offered as a solo company. The only difference is Instacart now owns it. The system uses computer vision and sensors to identify items based on shape, color, size, and other features. The customer can load up to ten items into the Caper Counter at a time.

When Instacart acquired Caper last fall, I suggested that the acquisition looked to be part of an effort by the company to transform itself into a digital platform arms dealer as more grocery providers looked to make online grocery one of their core competencies and questioned whether Instacart’s online grocery service was disintermediating them from their customers.

From my post:

…as Instacart grows its enterprise technology solutions, I expect we’ll increasingly see its flagship shopper service decoupled from its technology as it looks to serve larger retailers who want greater control over the customer relationship. Since the start of the pandemic, many grocery retailers have started to roll out and standardize around their delivery services, which means a fast-growing market for technology solutions. My guess is that Instacart is anticipating this as it rolls up some of the best-in-class independent solution providers as it prepares for an IPO soon.

This effort to transform itself is precisely what is happening. Over the past month, the company announced the Instacart Platform, a suite of technology offerings for grocers and retailers to help them with digital transformation. The company has also changed how it describes itself. At the time of the acquisition last fall, the company called itself ‘the leading online grocery platform in North America.‘ In today’s announcement, the company has swapped the term online grocery platform company for what it calls a retail enablement platform “that works with grocers and retailers to transform how people shop.”

For those who want to see the Caper Counter in action, the automated checkout system will be available at three different locations at Fenway Park starting today.

Is The Regulatory Tide Turning Against Ultra-Fast Grocery’s Dark Store Model?

Every week last year, it seemed a new story dropped about a tens millions of dollars funding round going to an ultra-quick store concept.

These startups, often with funny names like Gorillas, JOKR, Buyk and GoPuff, utilize networks of dark stores nestled into residential or mix-used neighborhoods to ensure deliveries can get to consumers within the promised time.

Not surprisingly, as these apps have risen in popularity, existing brick and mortar stores like NYC bodegas have not been happy. Not only are these news apps taking away business, but the addition of new delivery riders are adding traffic and sometimes leading to confrontations with locals.

The pushback by store owners and some residents has been heard by local politicians. According to the New York Post, a New York politician named Christopher Marte is introducing legislation that would ban these companies from advertising 15 minute delivery times.

Another politician, NYC councilwoman Gale A. Brewer, thinks they’re illegal. “They’re going to kill the wonderful Latino restaurants, the wonderful bodegas, the wonderful delis, every single wonderful mom-and-pop supermarket,” Brewer said at a recent press conference. “These Gopuffs and JOKRs and Gorillas gotta go!”

And it’s not New York where there’s pushback. In Amsterdam, where there are 31 dark stores, citizens have started to launch petitions against the dark store networks and to track their behavior on Instagram. A recent story in Ars Technica details how one dark store startup named Zapp disrupted life on one narrow street in a neighborhood called Fagelstraat.

Alex, who has lived on the street for seven years and requested anonymity to avoid further conflict with riders, says there are now 10 to 15 deliveries each day, and giant lorries regularly block the narrow road. “It’s a 24/7 business,” he says, “so riders are coming in and out late at night and early in the morning. At 2 am, I often have people standing in front of my window, smoking and talking really loudly while they are taking a break.” After a month of this, riders and residents started squaring off as tensions boiled over, Alex says.

The growing push for legislation and pushback by consumers had led some investors to become more skeptical of the model. Kunal Lunawat, co-founder and managing partner of Agya Ventures, points to thin margins and the commitment to medium to long-term leases signed using venture funding.

“There appeared to be no consideration given to the economics of these leases over a 1-3 year period,” Lunawat said.

In some ways, the dark store startups are using the same ‘move quickly, break things, ask for forgiveness later’ model pioneered by other disruptive startups (think Airbnb and Uber) over the past decade. And just like home share and rideshare apps eventually saw a wave of new rulemaking at the state and city level, I expect that NYC and Amsterdam are both a sign that a similar wave of legislation and potential bans around dark store models is underway and could take years to iron out.

It will be interesting to see if consumers (and investors) will continue to believe in these new companies as they come under increasing fire.

Are Food Delivery Lockers the Next Must-Have Home Amenity?

Everywhere you look there are delivery lockers. Grocery stores, apartment buildings, office lobbies.

So why not at our home?

If you’re Jeremy High, the idea makes lots of sense. As a luxury home builder in the central California market of Monterey, High works closely with clients spec’ing out features customized around their lifestyles. A recurring ask he hears from his customers is they want a way to ensure that food delivered to their home is safe and kept at the right temperature.

The more he heard this, the more High wondered if a solution existed to help his customers. When he realized there wasn’t, he decided to build it himself.

High’s product, eventually called the Fresh Portal, is a food and package delivery locker built into the side of a home. It has temperature control zones for either hot or cold food and would be accessible both from the outside and inside. It would be managed by an app and integrated with third-party delivery service providers like UberEats or Amazon Fresh so they can access the outside of the locker and insert a delivery.

For High, who first thought of the idea in 2014 and filed for a patent a year later, the product needed to be installable both in new builds and retrofits. To make that possible, he designed the Fresh Portal to use an install concept similar to that of a retrofit window, where the installation process pierced the building envelope, and then the installed product is integrated with the home’s existing waterproofing.

“The design allows us to install this rapidly,” said High. “We can install this and not do any patchwork. No paint comes out. Nothing like that.”

High, who is raising money for his company, plans to have a shippable product by sometime in 2023. He estimates the pricing for the system will be $3,450 installed.

If this all sounds a little first-world problem-ish to you, it is. None of that should be surprising since High’s typical customer has enough wealth to buy a new multimillion-dollar home.

But the luxury home builder turned tech entrepreneur does have a plan to make his food delivery lockers more accessible through subsidization. One such scenario could include a Fresh Portal included as part of a food delivery subscription service. Another is one in which the Fresh Portal earns revenues from third-party delivery service providers.

“DoorDash can deliver to a First Portal versus your porch or knocking on the door and waiting,” said High. “Efficiency and the first time delivery success metric goes up because they’re delivering to a product.”

In exchange, High believes that the delivery companies would pay his company 1% of the sale if it’s delivered to a Fresh Portal. This is all in the idea stage at this point, as High has yet to strike any deals with third-party delivery companies, and I have to wonder if they’d willingly part ways with even a thin slice of their margin.

I think High has time to figure out his subsidization models later, mostly because I see the Fresh Portal as primarily a solution for new homes or remodels for the next few years. I can see the home delivery locker becoming a trendy new homebuilder amenity, where the product’s price is rolled into the monthly mortgage payment.

Longer-term – think a ten-year time horizon – I can see a future where home delivery lockers become commonplace. Like the milk box of a bygone era, only these boxes will be refrigerated, connected to the cloud, and – if you own a Fresh Portal – built into the side of your home.

Five Predictions for Consumer Food & Kitchen Tech in 2022

Food tech prediction week at The Spoon continues, and today we’re looking at the home. And if you haven’t already, make sure you check out my predictions on restaurant tech, food robots, and plant-based meat.

Meet The Smart Food Delivery Locker

For the last few years, companies like Walmart, Amazon, and others have been trying to figure out how to deliver food when we’re not home. Ideas have run the gamut, from delivering products directly to our fridges, onto our dinner tables, depositing groceries in our garage, to even dropping deliveries into our car trunk.

All this effort would be unnecessary if homes just had temperature-controlled storage lockers, something that – at least until lately – hadn’t existed.

Until now. This month Walmart and HomeValet announced a pilot program that will deliver fresh groceries to the HomeValet smart outdoor delivery receptacle. Another company, Fresh Portal, is building a temperature-controlled home delivery box that is accessible both outside (for delivery companies) and inside the home. And then there’s Dynosafe, who appeared on Shark Tank in the spring of 2021 and got an investment from Robert Herjavec.

While companies like Yale have been making smart boxes for delivery for a little while, there hasn’t been a widely available temperature-controlled smart storage box. In 2022, I expect we’ll start seeing more deals like the Walmart/HomeValet deal, as well as some integration deals with third-party delivery providers.

Steam-Powered Cooking Gains Traction

Although steam cooking has long been a fixture in pro kitchens, it’s never taken off in the consumer kitchen. However, that could change in 2022.

Consumer steam cooking picked up, um, steam in 2020, when Anova started shipping their countertop Precision Oven. At CES this year, LG showed off a new microwave with steam cooking. And then there’s Tovala, the food delivery and steam oven startup which has started advertising it on national Sunday night football broadcasts.

While steam cooking has followed a similar path to sous vide circulators – a pro tool making its way into the home – I think it has much wider appeal. Because they know the power of steam-cooking, some chefs have pined for an affordable home combi-oven. Now that they’ve finally got their wish, 2022 might be the year consumers take notice.

Amazon Debuts a Smart Fridge

Back in 2017 when I first asked if Amazon might build on a smart fridge, all the evidence I had to go on was a couple of patent filings. Since that time, we’ve watched as the online giant launched branded kitchen appliances and worked on making Alexa a capable home cooking assistant.

And then last fall, Business Insider wrote about Project Pulse, Amazon’s top-secret smart fridge project. According to insiders, the fridge would include machine vision and other advanced technology tell us when food’s about to expire, and automatically order & replenish through Amazon. The effort is reportedly being led by the same group that developed Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology and has been in the works for a couple years.

Truth be told, the smart fridge category could use Amazon. The market has grown stale as big US appliance brands have slowed down their efforts in this space, including market leader Samsung. While the South Korean appliance giant has historically been the most aggressive among the bigs in the category, Samsung didn’t make any substantive announcements about Family Hub at CES this year other than adding it to the Bespoke Fridge line. There are also signs that the company may be shifting its focus to its new Home Hub as the center of its smart home strategy.

Bottom line, if an Amazon smart fridge becomes a reality in 2022 (and I think it will), it would catalyze some much-needed innovation from other large appliance makers.

Home Food Waste Technology Comes Into Focus

Smart composting appliances are one nascent category within home food waste innovation coalescing into a legitimate category. Kickstarter darling Lomi has finally started shipping, Vitamix, known for lits blenders, is shipping its FoodCycler FC-50, and a variety of others are on the way.

But composting is the last stop on the food waste mitigation express, and everyone would be better off preventing food from heading to the compost bin. To do that, we need better food storage, something a startup called Uvera is working with its food storage system that uses UVC light to kill bacteria and extend shelf life. There’s also Blakbear, who is working on a food storage system that would measure gasses emitted from food to help measure shelf life. And though they’re long overdue, startup Silo has told me they should be shipping in 2022.

For their part, most appliance brands still don’t seem to have a cohesive strategy for helping consumers reduce food waste, but that didn’t stop them from talking up sustainability at CES year. I hope all the talk translates to more action in 2022.

AR Takes Guided Cooking to the Next Level

Ever since Thermomix pioneered the category of guided cooking with the launch of the TM5 (and more recently the TM6), there’s been an array of companies building tech to assist consumers as they cook. In the last few years, that’s meant voice assistants from TinyChef and Amazon, software and connected cooking hardware from Hestan and others, and we’ve even seen futuristic concepts like this one at SKS 2020 that monitors eye glances as a way to help a consumer manage meal-making.

But the biggest leap forward in cooking assistance might come in the form of augmented reality. Last fall we saw Snap release their food scanning app that utilizes their augmented reality bar to help provide contextual information for items scanned by the phone, and last month we wrote about a cool demo of how a pair of AR glasses could significantly level up the home cook’s capabilities in the kitchen. And while Lauren Cason’s demo was just that – a demo – I expect some appliance makers may have taken notice of how powerful the combo of cooking and augmented reality could be.

We have a couple more prediction posts to come, so make sure to tune in next week!

How Do You Train AI-Powered Checkout To Recognize A Product? In Vegas (& Elsewhere), You Throw It Like Dice

When it comes to training machine vision and AI-powered retail checkout systems, packaged goods and locally created food items are treated very differently.

That’s at least according to Mashgin, a maker of touchless checkout systems. Company spokesperson Toby Awalt said that’s because another store on the network has likely already added that bag of chips or candy bar to their 10 thousand plus item database.

Not so when it comes to locally made food items.

“CPG items, we have to do less and less because there’s enough overlap,” said Awalt, who gave us a walkthrough of the system at CES 2022. “But for dishes, we’ll do every time.”

According to Awalt, adding a new food menu item for a restaurant doesn’t take that since most cafeterias or restaurants only serve between 15 and 50 items.

“You can do that relatively quickly,” he said.

Still, a new packaged good has to be entered into the system now and then. Whenever that happens, the operator has to position the package in several different positions to give the system enough info to recognize the product whenever it shows up under the camera.

Mashgin’s Toby Awalt Rolls the Häagen-Dazs

“I actually do dice rolls with the product,” said Awalt, throwing a Häagen-Dazs ice cream bar onto the tray.

According to Mashgin, the company recommends the system capture 20 to 50 total positions of a product so it can recognize the product from various angles and also distinguish between different variations within the same product line (such as two different flavors of ice cream or potato chips).

You can watch a walkthrough of the Mashgin system below.

The Spoon checks out Mashgin's AI-Powered Checkout at CES 2022

In 2022, Consumers Want to Order Healthier Delivery Food

At the beginning of every year, millions of people set intentions to better themselves, and many of their resolutions revolve around health and wellness. Of course, food plays a crucial part in health, so it’s no surprise that many resolutions end up being specific to food. This year, Nextbite, a virtual restaurant company, conducted a survey to understand what exactly customers want when it comes to delivery food and their diet goals.

The company surveyed 1,046 US consumers aged 13-54 years old in December 2021. One key takeaway from the survey was that 49 percent of the consumers plan on ordering healthier delivery food in 2022. Of these consumers, 59 percent of them order food for delivery at least once a month or more, while 41 percent plan on ordering more food for delivery this year.

Eating healthier is not a surprising resolution, as it is one that often makes it in the top three most common resolutions. In the survey, 49 percent reported that they desired to eat healthier this year, and this was a top goal of consumers aged 18-34 years old. Eating healthier does not necessarily mean following a specific diet; only 6 percent of consumers said they planned on trying to follow a trend diet like Whole360 or keto.

In 2020 and 2021, we turned to comfort food to deal with the emotional and mental impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yelp gathered up data in 2020 to determine what the most popular delivery items in different states were during the COVID-19 pandemic and created the map above. As you can see, many of the items, such as donuts, pizza, nachos, Belgian fries, and hot wings, would not be classified as health foods. According to DoorDash, the top two popular items ordered in 2020 were chicken sandwiches with a side of fries and mac and cheese.

Often reliant on quick-service chains, delivery food is traditionally viewed as unhealthy. However, by adding fresh and nutritious food dishes to delivery menus, restaurants, and ghost kitchens can change that perception while encouraging health-motivated customers to keep ordering food for delivery.

February is the month where upwards of 80 percent of New Year’s resolutions fail. Consumers may want to commit to vegan grain bowls and green smoothies now, but later this year, revert back to ordering hot chicken wings and deep-dish pizza. Despite the surge in the new COVID-19 variant at the moment, 2022 looks promising due to the fact children are returning back to school, adults are working in-person, and events are being held again. The way 2022 plays out may be a determining factor if consumers turn back to comfort food or stick to wholesome options.

Uber Eats and Motional to Provide Driverless Food Delivery in 2022

Food delivery platform Uber Eats and driverless technology company Motional announced last week that they are partnering to pilot autonomous food deliveries. The companies plan to launch this service in Santa Monica, California, in early 2022.

The delivery vehicle provided and operated by Motional, a joint venture between Hyundai Motor Group and Aptiv, is the fully electric Hyundai IONIQ 5-based robotaxi. The scope of the autonomous delivery service will be small to start; the electric vehicles will only deliver curated meal kits from select restaurants in Santa Monica on Uber Eats.

The design of Uber Eats drone in 2019.

Although this is Uber Eat’s first attempt at developing driverless car delivery, the company actually experimented with drone delivery in 2019. The design, which included six rotors, was unveiled at the Forbes Under 30 Summit with the intention of testing it out in San Diego in 2020. The drone could apparently carry a dinner for two and had a round trip range of 12 miles. However, since the announcement in 2019, we haven’t heard any other news about the delivery drones.

Uber Eats is certainly not the only company that has taken a stab at autonomous food delivery. In 2018, Postmates (which was acquired by Uber Eats) introduced Postmates Serve, an autonomous sidewalk delivery robot and associated food delivery service platform, which has been running pilot trials in Hollywood. During summer 2021, Grubhub and Yandex announced that they would be bringing food delivery robots to college campuses. Earlier this month, 7-Eleven and Nuro announced a partnership to pilot autonomous food deliveries in Mountain View, California.

Autonomous delivery offers several benefits, including reduced delivery fees for customers and restaurants and minimal human contact. Third-party delivery services were in high demand after the start of the pandemic, and seeing that we are still not out of it, food delivery will likely continue to be a popular choice for customers staying home.

As cool as driverless and drone delivery sounds, there has yet to be a company that has really put its concept into action, especially on a large scale. Several companies have now had the chance to pilot their concepts for a few months to a few years, so maybe, 2022 will be the year we see a wider implementation of this tech.

Food & Retail Drone Delivery Specialist Flytrex Gets FAA Approval For One Mile Deliveries

Flytrex, a startup specializing in on-demand delivery of food and retail items, announced this morning it had received approval from the FAA to expand its delivery radius to one nautical mile across all its operating stations in North Carolina.

According to a release sent to The Spoon, the company, which received approval in May of this year to operate over people, has completed “thousands” of deliveries to customers. With over 10 thousand potential customers within the company’s new expanded delivery radius, expect that pace to pick up further.

Customers interested in a drone-delivered meal can order via the Flytrex app with participating stores and restaurants. The app sends updates to the customer while the package is en route and, once the drone arrives, the package is lowered by wire into the customer’s backyards. Flytrex drones, operated in partnership with drone delivery operator Causey Aviation Unmanned, have a payload of over 6 pounds.

The news comes on the heels of a $40 million Series C funding round announced last month. The funding, which the company is using to develop its hardware further and expand its business development practices, should solidify the company as an early leader in the drone delivery market. The company, which launched its first drone delivery system in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2017, has established partnerships with the likes of Walmart and Chili’s. Flytrex is one of eight companies participating in the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) BEYOND Initiative, a program focused on finding solutions for challenges of unmanned air service integration.

Flytrex does have some competition, including the high-profile efforts of Amazon through its Prime Air group. However, nearly nine years after Jeff Bezos first wowed the world when he teased the idea of Amazon drone delivery, the mega e-tailer’s efforts have shown outward signs of potential struggle as of late. On the other hand, Manna, another backyard drone delivery specialist, continues to plug away in Europe, reaching a delivery milestone of 50 to 100 deliveries per day in the spring of 2021.

“Drone delivery is reaching new heights faster than anyone could have expected,” Yariv Bash, co-founder, and CEO of Flytrex, said. “This approval from the FAA will allow us to cater to the growing demand for fast and efficient on-demand delivery in suburban America. We look forward to continuing on this exciting flight path, bringing five-minute delivery to the millions of backyards across the USA.”

Sidewalk Robot Specialist Serve Raises $13 Million From Uber, 7-Eleven & Wavemaker Labs

Serve Robotics, the autonomous sidewalk delivery robot spinout of Postmates (which itself was acquired by Uber), has announced a $13 million expanded seed round of funding. The new funding round includes several strategic investors, including former parent Uber Technologies, Delivery Hero backed DX Ventures,7-Eleven Inc.’s corporate venture arm, 7-Ventures, and Wavemaker Labs.

According to the release, Serve plans to use the new funding to accelerate its technology development and expand into new markets. The company, which has been trialing its delivery bot in the West Hollywood neighborhood, recently started to expand its executive ranks as it prepares to scale.

“This is a space that has kind of reached readiness for scale,” Serve CEO Ali Kashani told The Spoon in November. “So we are at a very pivotal point where we are no longer trying to develop something. We have developed something, and now we are putting it to use.”

For each of Serve’s new strategic investors, an alliance with the sidewalk robot company potentially adds another arrow to their automation quiver. For its part, 7-Eleven has been trialing autonomous automobile delivery with its partner Nuro in the California market, but has yet to partner up with a sidewalk robot partner. It will be interesting to watch if the company begins to trial with Serve in the California market in the coming months as it expands its efforts in autonomous delivery.

European delivery giant Delivery Hero had some early trials with sidewalk delivery startup Starship, but has since been relatively quiet on the sidewalk delivery front. However, the company’s head of special projects for its middle eastern delivery group, talabat, recently hinted that delivery robots and drones could become commonplace in the near future.

“I do see delivery robots being implemented quite soon, in specific scenarios,” said Maria Estevan, Head Of Special Projects at talabat, in a recent article on Delivery Hero’s website. “We can already see it at foodora, it’s already there. We just need to make it bigger, scalable, and adapted to the conditions of each country, its requirements, regulations, and culture. But to me, they are actually already here.”

For Wavemaker Labs, the company has largely been investing and incubating a lineup of different food robots ranging from its back-of-house frybot in Flippy from Miso, an autonomous pizza-making machine in Piestro, and its robotic kitchen robot in Nommi. With Serve, the food robotics-focused venture studio adds a food delivery robot to its portfolio of investments for the first time.

DoorDash Enters Ultra-Fast Grocery Market, Hires Couriers in Break From Gig Worker Model

Today DoorDash announced it is entering the hyper-competitive ultra-quick grocery delivery market with the launch of a new DashMart location in New York City. According to the announcement sent to The Spoon, the new location will stock up to 2000 items and complete deliveries within 10-15 minutes of a customer’s order.

The new initiative follows the launch of DashMart, DoorDash’s own branded dark grocery network, in 2020. The expansion into hyper-fast is a logical next move, especially for a company with as robust a nationwide logistics and delivery network as DoorDash.

DoorDash’s new effort also represents a significant departure from the company’s traditional gig worker model. Instead of using freelancers to deliver groceries for its new effort, DoorDash will hire its own couriers for the first time. The company plans to hire sixty workers to staff the effort, each getting paid $15/hour plus benefits and tips to start. The new couriers will work for a new DoorDash subsidiary named DashCorp.

The move to hire a courier workforce is, in part, due to pressure from states like New York, which have begun to pass legislation placing greater protection on gig workers. The move also makes sense in that the ultra-fast grocery model requires a ready stable of couriers to deliver goods to consumers as they come in.

“Millions of people across the country turn to platforms like DoorDash to earn supplemental income when, where, and how they choose, providing them with unique flexibility and choice that is so valuable,” said company president Christopher Payne. “We’re proud to be a leader in providing economic opportunities that fit the lives of so many people. And now, we’re excited about the new employment opportunity that DashCorps offers for a different type of work.”

DoorDash’s latest moves follow discussions by the delivery giant to invest in Berlin-based fast-grocery pioneer Gorillas. The talks, which would have given DoorDash a buy option on the Berlin-based company, eventually fell apart, and it’s unclear how much of DoorDash’s newly launched fast-grocery initiative was a direct result of the fizzling effort between the two companies. Whatever their intention, it’s clear now with the launch of its first fast-grocery outpost and the launch of DashCorp that DoorDash is building infrastructure for roll-your-own strategy in this nascent but fast-growing market.

For Gorillas, JOKR, Gopuff, and others in this new space, DoorDash will undoubtedly represent a potentially significant new competitor. The delivery company commands a 55% market share in the US food delivery market and a year ago had 20 million monthly active users. While JOKR, Gopuff, and others have had no problem raising eye-popping amounts of venture funding, these companies have to invest much of their venture funds into user acquisition and logistics, areas which already have been well-developed by the more mature DoorDash.

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.

The embrace of cashierless tech is part of a broader exploration by airports of food tech. In recent years we’ve seen airports roll out delivery robots, pizza robots, and coffee robots, to name a few, as well as next-generation vending machines. For JFK, the rollout of Camden Food Express follows the October launch of a multi-brand automated retail center created in partnership with Hudson.