Category: Delivery & Commerce
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If Serve Robotics CEO Ali Kashani has his way, more restaurants in the near-term future will offload the last mile of their deliveries not to human couriers but to wheeled rover bots that can autonomously traverse the streets en route to hand over your food. Serve started life as a part of Postmates, eventually spinning…
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Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Farms has raised an additional $6 million in pre-Series A funding, bringing the total round to $16 million (h/t Wamda). Those leading the round include Aramco’s venture arm Wa’ed, the Saudi government-owned Future Investment Initiative (FII) Institute, KAUST, Global Ventures, AppHarvest, and Bonaventure. The $6 million announced over the weekend follows…
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The restaurant industry has changed drastically over the last 18 months when it comes to tech. What was once a sector slow to change and reticent to embrace digital is now practically at bursting point in terms of the many technological solutions available to restaurants. As food tech investor Brita Rosenheim recently wrote, “the past…
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Before the off-premises boom, there was no question of restaurants owning their relationships with customers. One pandemic and a whole lot of digital tools later, and that ownership is a little less certain, and restaurants often give up valuable customer data and feedback to bigger tech companies (e.g., third-party delivery services). Now, however, a number…
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This following a guest post from Warren Tseng, a long-time operator, investor and advisor in the restaurant and ghost kitchen industries (full bio below). The food industry has managed to squeeze about 10 years of innovation into just 18 months thanks to the pandemic. This in turn has given rise to a variety of ghost…
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Thanks in part to the pandemic and the changing restaurant experience, there is more interest in food robots these days. While we’re not yet at the point where counters, kitchens, and drive-thrus are fully manned by these bots, there is a steadily growing number of choices when it comes to machines that can speed up…
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Wendy’s announced this week it will expand its number of delivery-only kitchens via a partnership with ghost/mobile kitchen provider Reef. With the deal, Wendy’s plans to open 700 more of these kitchens over the next five years in the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom. Wendy’s and Reef first announced their partnership in 2020, when…
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If the last year and a half was about how restaurants could survive, this next stretch will be all about how they are and will continue to adapt to all the changes they’ve absorbed in the recent past. A lot of those changes have been around tech. In fact many would argue the restaurant biz…
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Via a partnership with longtime franchisee Border Foods, Taco Bell is set to launch a new store design the QSR chain says will “simplify drive-thru time significantly,” according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Dubbed Taco Bell Defy, the initiative was first announced at the beginning of 2021, when the store prototype surfaced.…
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Something we’ve pondered here at The Spoon is how age verification might work for vending machines that sell beer or booze. We’ve seen other automated alcohol dispensers like Hop Robotics and Rotender rely on the venue where they are installed to have humans do the ID checking (think: a beer garden area at a festival).…
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Fat Brands, parent company of Fatburger, Hurricane Grill & Wings, and others, was something of an early mover in the world of delivery-only and virtual restaurant concepts. The SoCal-based company, which owns several restaurant brands, was one of the first to trial delivery via third-party services. And when the pandemic hit last year and shut…
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WoodSpoon, the New York City-based online marketplace where home chefs can make their food available for ordering and on-demand delivery, announced today that it has raised a $14 million Series A round of funding. Restaurant Brands International (RBI) led the round with participation from World Trade Ventures, Victor Lazarte and other individual investors. This brings…
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