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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Delivery & Commerce

Great Restaurant Ideas: Video Manuals, Weather-Based Sales Predictions, and More

Restaurant Business is currently running a great feature packed with “50 Great Ideas” that restaurants are putting in action to boost engagement and sales.

Here are a few smart moves that caught our eye:

Video training manuals. Arby’s has an internal video platform that hosts sub-two minute staff training videos that are often user-generated. These snack-sized snippets fit with how millennials staffers seek out and discover knowledge for self-learning.

Forecasting weather and sales. Mad Greens in Denver, CO, ties a weather prediction service into its ordering software to help gauge sales, plan accordingly, and reduce food waste (rainy day = worse sales).

Instagram-friendly booths. The Boston Chops steakhouse designed a table that lets users move arm lights and change their intensity to help them snap that perfect (viral) dinner ‘gram.

Some of the ideas in the list point to broader tech-driven trends: integrating new data points into existing systems for better predictions, better leveraging social media, and enhanced delivery options. Others are more basic, like creating a happy hour for kids and dogs.

You should definitely check out the full list for a lot of ideas that are sure to become mainstream soon.

What the New McDonald’s Flagship Tells Us About the Fast Food Giant’s Future

One of the most famous McDonald’s locations in the world just got a major makeover, inside and out.

The former Rock N Roll McDonald’s reopened last week as a new flagship store, and “redesign” is an understatement. The fast food giant unveiled a 19,000-square-foot structure and a business strategy that are all about two things: staying eco-friendly and improving the guest experience through digital.

So yes, that means there’s a lot of tech involved in this new iteration of an old fast food standard. Dubbed an “Experience of the Future” restaurant, the Chicago location incorporates all McDonald’s latest tech initiatives.

Self-order kiosks — which McDonald’s now plans to install in 1,000 stores each quarter — are front and center. Customers can browse, order, and customize food items, which a McDonald’s employee brings the food directly to the table. It’s a setup company CEO Steve Easterbrook calls “repurposing labor,” and it reportedly is creating more jobs, rather than leaving people unemployed. For those who prefer ordering the old-fashioned way, there are still four cashiers, and yes, they still take cash.

Kiosks are now in about 5,000 McDonald’s restaurants across the U.S. Adding 1,000 per quarter is part of the company’s plan to have kiosks in nearly all freestanding restaurants by 2020.

Better accommodating mobile is another key part of McDonald’s self reinvention. While there are fewer parking spaces in general (it is Chicago, after all), the new flagship has dedicated spaces for those doing curbside pickup via their mobile app. There will also be space to serve more Uber Eats drivers efficiently — another crucial part of McDonald’s rebranding strategy.

But plenty of chains are revamping their business strategies to focus on mobile and kiosks. What sets McDonald’s apart just a little bit more is the actual location. The Chicago flagship building is a massive steel, wood, and glass structure with 27-foot windows, an enclosed arboretum with birds, and over 70 trees on the ground level. It’s basically an Apple store with Big Macs. The location also has a solar pergola with 1,062 panels that can power about 60 percent of the restaurant.

None of these changes are specific to the Chicago location, though; they’re part of a $6 billion effort to “modernize most U.S. restaurants by 2020.”

In some cases, that word “modernize” could be be a BS term drummed up by a marketing department. The reason I believe McDonald’s is that this redesign — the current one as well as future stores — addresses multiple hot-button issues at once: digital ordering may be convenient, but it produces more waste and emissions, even when drivers are third parties or paying customers. That’s where those solar panels come in, as McDonald’s can use them to collect renewable energy and offset some of its non-renewable energy consumption onsite. (The Chicago restaurant is also in the process of becoming LEED certified.) Meanwhile, the addition of table service and Easterbrook’s “repurposing of labor” suggest that our fears of robots taking over might be overly pessimistic. For now, at least, automated services will just become another fixture in the restaurant.

But there’s one thing I can’t shake: at the end of the day, McDonald’s is still serving fast food, which, to name another hotly debated item, conflicts with increasing consumer desire to eat whole, health(ier) foods. Foliage and solar panels are great, but they don’t curb obesity, diabetes, or heart disease. McDonald’s is doing some work in this area. Burgers are now “100% fresh beef” that’s cooked to order. They also unveiled an initiative this year to make the Happy Meal a healthier option.

I’m going to risk oversimplifying the matter here by saying McDonald’s could do more to accelerate its these efforts. Offer more more fruits and veggies as side options. Deter excessive soda drinking by charging for refills. Serve plant-based burgers instead of triple cheeseburgers.

Granted, too many health-conscious options and it wouldn’t really be McDonald’s as we know it. Oddly enough, the mega chain could use that to its advantage. They more or less invented fast food as we know it. Why not modernize the notion of it while they’re reinventing the business?

IBM Issued Patent For Drone-Delivered Coffee Based On Your Cognitive State

Having just arrived back from Japan a couple days ago, I grabbed an extra cup of coffee this morning to help me get over the fog of my jetlag. In the future, my extra boost of caffeine may come courtesy of a drone that knows — preemptively — when I’m feeling a little low-energy.

That’s because IBM was issued a patent last week for a system that would deliver coffee via drone based on a person’s current mood or cognitive state. The patent, called “Drone delivery of coffee based on a cognitive state of an individual”, utilizes sensor data and other indicators to know when a person is sleepy.

According to the patent, data  from wearables, cameras and analysis of past behavior could be used to determine “sleep cycle, bed time for the last N days, a joint measure of the characteristic for two people (e.g. husband and wife), and current blood pressure, or heart rate.” The patent also describes utilizing contextual information like a person’s calendar to determine whether they’re in need of additional alertness. Have a meeting that morning? Keep eye out for coffee drone!

The drone system described in the patent could also deliver coffee to an office or other room full of people and dynamically decide who is most in need of a little caffeine. From the patent: “…if it is known that a meeting participant is meeting with a senior supervisor, and the participant prefers coffee when under stress, the confidence level L can be increased” that someone may want a cup of coffee.

While this patent seems like a strange one for IBM, the company is notorious for its prolific patent filing and, not unlike others, sometimes creates interesting scenarios no one else has yet envisioned and file a patent for it. That said, the concept of preemptive delivery is one that seems to be gaining steam. The Spoon uncovered a patent issued to Amazon (another prolific accumulator of patents) in February for predictive restaurant ordering.

So are we headed for a world where products just show up before we even push a button or know ourselves we’re in need of a pick-me-up? Maybe — but I can see how some consumers would find this type of preemptive determination a bit too pushy, particularly if the system is expecting payment for these products.

On the other hand, utilizing data to understand where there is high demand for a product is something that companies like Zume are already doing today, and I can see how preemptive delivery to areas with groups of people where there might both an undisclosed and unsatiated demand makes sense.

Either way, I don’t expect to see coffee delivering drones showing up unannounced at my house for some time.

Now excuse me while I go put another pot of coffee on.

Shake Shack Gives Self-Service Kiosks a Second Chance

A little over a year ago, Shake Shack opened its first-ever location powered by self-service kiosks in the East Village. At the restaurant, all ordering and payments were made through digital kiosks — no human intervention necessary.

Except human intervention actually was totally necessary. In a matter of months, customers practically declared mutiny and Shake Shack abandoned the concept. “The kiosks are also supposed to make things go quicker, but the wait is even longer,” one commenter noted.

But it seems the Danny Meyer-backed chain is giving the concept another go. This week Shake Shack announced it will expand its kiosk locations; but with some differences from the pilot.

Most notably, the selected stores will feature a more hybrid concept, offering both cashiers and kiosks. This combo is a wise move on Shake Shack’s part, since kiosks still cause a fair share of confusion and there are many who would benefit more from interacting with an actual person. Guests will also be able to use cash if they prefer, as the card-only payments were a point of grief with the original kiosk-concept location. Right now, Shake Shack currently has five locations that offer this hybrid kiosk-human structure, and plans to open more in areas like San Francisco and Seattle, where labor costs run especially high.

And labor costs will continue to be an issue. On its second-quarter earnings call, Shake Shack reported that those increased year over year by 26.3 percent, partially driven by increases to minimum wage.

That’s where the kiosks come in: “We are learning how the kiosk experience changes the flow in the front-house, the extent to which we are back to speed at service, kitchen throughput, how it best enhances the guest experience, its ability to deliver labor leverage in the future and how ordering behavior may be impacted,” said CEO Randy Garutti.

Automation in quick-service restaurants is becoming more and more commonplace, to make an understatement — and it’s not hard to see why. Analysts say that kiosks could help McDonald’s recoup $2.7 billion in sales. The fast food leader said it plans to add kiosks to 1,000 stores every quarter for the next two years.

And kiosks were all the rage at this year’s National Restaurant Association show, which had products from 365 Retail Markets, Adusa Inc., and Apex. And those are just the first three on the alphabetized list.

Shake Shack stands a somewhat better chance of succeeding with kiosks this time around. That’s partly because they’re still accepting cash and party because people’s perception towards automation has shifted since the first iteration. Consumers in general are more comfortable with kiosk interfaces in 2018 than ever before, whether at the airport or eating lunch.

However, it’s best not to paint too rosy a future at the moment. Shake Shack and others may be touting an ideal solution with these kiosk-cashier hybrid locations, but there are no significant numbers yet on how well the locations will perform. And with labor costs continuing to rise, the pressure to automate more and more restaurant operations will increase. Understanding when and where to do that — and when and where not to — will be key to any fast-casual chain’s success.

Interested in the future of restaurant tech? Come to the Smart Kitchen Summit! Use discount code SPOON for 25% off of tickets. 

Wendy’s Just Aggressively Expanded Delivery in North America

This week Wendy’s announced it has expanded third-party delivery options in North America in what’s clearly a move to better compete with McDonald’s and other fast-food restaurants as consumers demand more and more delivery.

Among other announcements during the company’s latest earnings call, Wendy’s CEO Todd A. Penegor noted that roughly 40 percent of the company’s restaurants in the U.S. and Canada now offer delivery, up from 25 percent at the end of the first quarter.

“The consumer has an appetite for convenience and we have seen this through our delivery economics,” he said, adding that check sizes have been “1.5 to 2 times higher on delivery orders.”

On the call, Wendy’s also reiterated its commitment to technology, including its new Digital Experience organization, which works on leadership changes, agile software development, and, of course, further developing the company’s mobile strategy. Current CIO David Trimm will retire in early 2019, which Wendy’s says will provide a chance to “refocus [their] leadership structure” to leverage more tech.

Wendy’s kickstarted delivery services at the end of 2017 by partnering with DoorDash in the U.S. and SkipTheDishes in Canada. On the aforementioned post-quarter earnings call, Wendy’s also reported that delivery is the number one area of business in terms of customer satisfaction. That’s huge, considering fast food isn’t inherently designed (cooked?) for travel, and a lot of fast food chains still struggle to keep food high-quality.

Take McDonald’s. The daddy of all fast food chains expanded its Uber Eats-powered delivery operations to about 5,000 stores in the U.S. in less than two years. They may be the most aggressive in terms of expansion right now (Wendy’s currently operates about 2,500 locations with delivery), but food quality remains an issue, most notably with soggy fries.

Not to be forgotten, Burger King is also ramping up efforts in both digital and delivery. While BK has experimented with delivery in the past, the company has been slower than its competitors to adopt it on a large scale. Even so, there are some who approve of BK’s slower ramp up, noting that a steady speed can “show what some of the potential pitfalls are.” Said pitfalls include losing some control of one’s brand to third-party services, as well as the food quality issue.

Delivery still represents only about 3 percent of all restaurant orders, fast food or otherwise. Most days it seems like more, given all the news we read about the market. But it’s still hard to tell if this trend towards getting fast food delivered to your home is a fad or an actual long-term strategy. For now, the question seems more about who can strike the best balance of timing, quality, and strategy to, erm, deliver what customers want most.

Uber Eats Trades Its Flat Delivery Fee for Sliding-Scale Payments

As of yesterday, Uber Eats’ standard $4.99 delivery fee is no more. In its place is a pricing tool that calculates an order’s delivery fee based on the distance between customer and restaurant.

CNET reports that Uber Eats has been analyzing what deters some people from ordering via the third-party delivery service. “What became obvious was that we needed to change something about our core fee feature,” Uber Eats product manager Ben Dreier told CNET.

And a big part of that fee is having to pay $4.99 regardless of whether you ordered a cup of soup or eight burritos. Plus, it’s hard to justify paying nearly $5 for food delivery if it takes less than 10 minutes to walk to the restaurant. But then again, I’m a fairly active person who works from home, so I don’t have any excuses. Others have legitimate reasons to order nearby delivery. A close friend of mine used to tend bar in Brooklyn and almost every night would get tacos delivered from across the street because he couldn’t leave the bar premises for dinner. Working parents, or parents with multiple kids, are other use cases that come to mind.

Perhaps most importantly, there are individuals for whom food delivery isn’t a luxury or even a “nice to have.” For those with disabilities affecting their mobility, or those with chronic illness, walking 5 to 10 minutes to pick up dinner is a physically taxing event at best, and more often than not impossible.

It’s estimated that ordering close by will range from $2 to $3; longer distances will fall in the $6 to $8 range. The changes will also allow Uber Eats customers to set a “max booking fee,” which lets users set the limit on what they’d spend on delivery. The app then filters out any restaurant whose delivery fee wouldn’t fall within that range.

This new system is now in place all U.S. cities where Uber Eats operates.

Grubhub already offers a sliding scale delivery fee, only they leave that number up to the restaurants themselves. Restaurants also decide whether to set a minimum amount a customer must spend in order to have the food delivered. By contrast, Uber Eats has always allowed customers to order as much or as little as they like, which won’t change with the new pricing system.

While this fee structure will most likely incentivize customers to order more delivery from places close to home, the higher fees for longer distances could also be a business boost for Uber Eats, particularly in rural and suburban areas, where there are at least a few miles between houses and restaurants. Uber’s already stated it plans to IPO next year, and this potentially large new revenue stream is likely part of that plan. That is, unless people balk at the high cost of getting McNuggets delivered to their suburban door.

Elsewhere in Uberworld, yesterday — the same day Uber Eats announced its new price structure — the New York City Council voted to cap ride-sharing services. That means cracking down on the number of vehicles that ride-share services can have on the road. The Council approved halting new licenses for ride-sharing services for one year, so the city can “study the booming industry.” If the new regulations prove popular, other cities could adopt similar measures.

Uber Eats “drivers,” however, don’t necessarily need a car to make deliveries. Uber even claims that “most deliveries are door-to-door.” In other words, people are walking (or biking or whatever) to the restaurant to pick up the order, then walking to the customer’s door.

Even in places where walking is out of the question, there are food delivery options for Uber Eats that don’t necessarily need cars. Earlier this year, Uber acquired electric-bike startup Jump. You can’t take a bike on the freeway, but there are plenty of markets in smaller cities and up-and-coming urban areas where a speedy electric bike could easily increase food deliveries. Solutions like that may be what protects Uber Eats from the shakeout that will happen because of these new ride-sharing regulations, and make the efforts to adjust the pricing model worthwhile.

Seahawks Fans Can Now Buy Beer With Their Fingerprints. Is That a Good Thing?

Planning on a Seahawks game in the near future? Leave your wallet at home.

Ok maybe take your wallet, but you won’t need it to buy beer and snacks during the game, or even to enter CenturyLink Field. CLEAR, who makes biometric scanning technology, has teamed up with the Seahawks as well as the Seattle Mariners and the Seattle Sounders to get fans through security faster and allow them to purchase concessions without an ID or credit card.

If you do much traveling, you’ve probably already seen CLEAR’s technology at work in airports, speeding up the security checkpoint process for those who enroll. It’s also in a handful of sports arenas around the country, where it’s used mostly for entry into games as well as access to VIP areas. CLEAR members, who pay $15/month, do an initial scan of their biometrics at a CLEAR kiosk (below). CLEAR stores that information (the company is Safety Act Certified), and can access it whenever someone scans a fingerprint on one of its machines.

At Seattle sports games, CLEAR will not only speed up entry into games, it also marks the first time the technology will be used to simultaneously verify your ID and pay for alcoholic beverages. And while CLEAR is at other sports arenas around the U.S., the Seahawks are the first NFL team to have gotten involved with this technology.

As anyone who’s ever been to a sports game knows, wait times to get into the venue, and to buy food and drinks are often downright exhausting. Scanning a fingerprint instead of fumbling with a wallet is an obvious time saver. Or in CLEAR’s own (somewhat philosophical) words, “When you are you, instead of something in your pocket, life is more frictionless, more secure, and more predictable.”

For the stadiums, it not only eases congestion at the entrance gates and minimizes the risk of someone trying to purchase booze with a fake ID.

CLEAR is only in a few stands at CenturyLink and Safeco fields right now, but the concept of biometrics at entertainment venues could boost a wide range of business in future: music festivals, movie theaters, and even the local bar, to name just a few.

Or it could just alienate people who, perhaps rightly so, are wary of handing over their fingerprints to purchase a beer. Biometrics have few guard rails in place right now around user privacy, and many (including yours truly), have concerns around how invasive the technology could become in terms of how it gathers and uses data. Plus, despite advocates talking up the secure aspect of the technology, biometrics produces data, which remains susceptible to hackers. In other words, once your face or thumbprint or DNA are in the system, they’re that much harder to protect.

Don’t get me wrong, I think biometrics as a way to improve business holds a ton of potential. But if the most recent Facebook saga shows, we’re not taught, as average consumers, to think twice before handing over information about ourselves in exchange for entertainment. Biometrics will become the norm at some point, in entertainment settings and otherwise. So by all means, use CLEAR to get your $15 drink at the next Seahawks game. Just know you’re handing over way more than a fingerprint when you send yours into the datasphere.

Report: SoftBank Cooking Up Potential $750M Investment in Zume

Bloomberg reported yesterday that Softbank Group is in discussions to invest from $500 million to $750 million into Zume, the Bay Area company that uses a combination of data, robots and specially outfitted vans to deliver hot pizza.

When news outlets write about Zume, they often focus on the robots that help make the pizza. While those are cool, the company is really about data and last-mile logistics. As we’ve written before:

Zume takes into consideration hundreds of data points, such as day of the week, weather, school calendars and more to develop predictions around how much pizza and what types of pizza will be ordered in a given location. From there a food delivery vehicle cooks up the pizza on the move and delivers it with precise timing.

This could benefit Softbank for a couple of reasons. First, Zume recently announced that it was expanding beyond pizza and bringing its delivery expertise to other types of cuisine. Basically, it is setting up a consultancy to provide Zume’s data prowess to help any restaurant figure out how to deliver their food more efficiently.

As Alex Garden, Co-Founder and CEO of Zume told us at the time of that announcement, “The truth is that we’ve developed a tech stack that will allow any restaurant to power the next generation of their business.”

As restaurant delivery grows, a platform like Zume’s could theoretically ensure that food ordered from any type of restaurant would arrive piping hot and fresh. (No one wants soggy, tepid fries.) Not for nothing, it’s also a way for Zume to scale nationally without a capital heavy investment.

Softbank’s move also plays nice with its other investments. Just yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Softbank was in talks to invest in Alibaba’s Ele.me food delivery service in China. In March of this year, Softbank led DoorDash’s $535 million Series D round, and the company also owns a 15 percent stake in Uber, whose Uber Eats food delivery is growing like crazy.

From Zume’s perspective, the Softbank investment would obviously strap a booster rocket on its growth. Zume has been very methodical in its growth so far, expanding its pizza delivery only in the Bay Area. That type of cash would fund geographic expansion as well as give it the runway to broaden into new cuisines.

We’ve reached out to Zume for confirmation and will update this post when we hear back. UPDATE: Zume replied to us with a “no comment at this time.”

Walmart to Sell Gobble Meal Kits — but Only Online

Gobble announced a partnership today to sell its meal kits through Walmart’s e-commerce site (via Fortune). The move will get Gobble’s meal kits in front of Walmart’s vast online audience. However, it looks like it won’t put them physically in stores, which has been the trajectory for most remaining meal kit companies.

Gobble‘s hook in the crowded meal kit delivery space is that its meals only take 15 minutes — and one pan — to prepare. The company par cooks sauces, grains and pasta, and pre-slices vegetables and meat, to take some of the work out of meal preparation and shorten the cook time.

As we’ve seen, the logistics of providing fresh food for delivery by mail are complicated and expensive. Just last month, meal kit company Chef’d abruptly shut down because of exactly this issue. Its assets were acquired and going forward the company will foresake mail order to focus on retail opportunities.

Just about every meal kit company is jumping into the grocery aisle pool. Blue Apron is selling kits in Costcos, HelloFresh kits will be sold in Giant Food and Stop & Shop locations. Not to mention grocers like Kroger and Albertsons, who doubled down on meal kits and acquired Home Chef and Plated respectively. Even smaller supermarket chains like New Seasons are launching their own meal kits.

Founded in 2010, Gobble has raised nearly $30 million in venture funding, and Fortune estimated that the company brought in between $25 and $50 million in revenue last year, but has still not made money. An interesting footnote to this Gobble/Walmart deal is that Gobble’s VP of Supply Chain and Operations used to be the VP of Supply Chain at Walmart.

While this is undoubtedly a good step in the right direction for Gobble, it seems like just that — a step. Part of the issue we’ve had with mail order meal kits here at The Spoon is their inflexibility. Parmesean chicken and brown sugar salmon may sound good at the time I click to purchase them online, but by the time the meal kits arrive, my palate may have moved on — and I’m stuck with a box of food that I have to make before it goes bad.

Convenience makes meal kits in the retail aisles a much better play. The ability to select and grab a meal kit for that evening while you’re already out running errands (or even from the office fridge on your way home) better aligns your preferences and your actual meal.

You also have to wonder how this fits in with Walmart’s overall meal kit plans. As of June this year, Business Insider reported that the retailer was selling individual and small meal kits from Home Chef, Sun Basket and Takeout kit online — but those specific Walmart links in the story no longer work.

Perhaps more importantly, Walmart is working on its own meal kits, which will be available in more than 2,000 of its stores this year. On the surface, it seems like Walmart is leaving the logistical hard parts of meal kits to someone else (read: Gobble), and keeping the retail aisles for itself.

Now we just have to wait and see if Walmart shoppers want to gobble up Gobble’s meal kits.

Podcast: Talking Food Delivery With Freshly’s Michael Wystrach

A few years ago, Michael Wystrach had left a career in finance and was looking to get healthy.

The problem? He hated cooking.

Lucky for him, not only did he own a restaurant, but he also had a good family friend who could design a healthy meal plan for him. He soon had his own chefs preparing nutritional meals for him, and it wasn’t long before he was in the best shape of his life.

Wystrach knew not everyone could have chefs prepare food for them, so he started thinking about how others like him could get healthy food delivered to their home and soon the idea for Freshly was born.

In this episode, I catch up with Michael and talk about those early days, how Freshly differentiates from others in a highly competitive market, and where he sees both the industry and company headed in the future.

You can listen to the episode below, download it here or subscribe in Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service.

EAT Club Suspends Operations in New York City

Corporate catering service EAT Club is suspending operations in New York City as of today.

EAT Club sent us the following statement about the matter:

EAT Club will be suspending service in New York City as of Friday, 8/3. As part of our ongoing market assessment, we believe that suspending service in this saturated market is the right move for our young business at this time. Following our acquisition of Farm Hill earlier this year, we continue to see strong growth in both the Bay area and Los Angeles— delivering over 20k meals per day – and want to focus on new and existing markets with the greatest immediate growth potential. – Doug Leeds, CEO, EAT Club

We reached back out to EAT Club to see if those NY employees were laid off, or if they have been reassigned within the company. We will update this post as we learn more.

As the company mentioned, the move comes just a few months after EAT Club acquired Farm Hill, a different corporate catering service, and got a new CEO (Leeds).

But it’s also in line with the larger shifts we’ve seen happening as the corporate catering sector matures. In May, Peach laid off 33 percent of its staff after a “sales experiment” didn’t pan out. In April, Square augmented its Caviar service by acquiring “certain assets” of Zesty. But elsewhere, ezCater raised a whopping $100 million for its corporate catering, and expanded into France through its acquisition of GoCater.

All these machinations are also coming at a time when free corporate lunches are coming under scrutiny. Mountain View put in new rules clamping down on free lunches at Facebook, and San Francisco is looking at banning corporate cafeterias in new office construction.

Can Bitcoin, Bakeries, and Banning Straws Fix Starbucks’ Lagging Growth?

Starbucks may have projected slower growth recently, but it looks to be business as usual for the coffee retailer, and that business traversed several industries and a couple continents this week.

Most notably, Starbucks is reportedly one of the key backers of a new company, Bakkt, which the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) created to better integrate cryptocurrencies into global commerce. In other words, there’s a high possibility Starbucks might accept Bitcoin as payment one of these days.

But as my hero John Oliver says, “this is a brand new, very complicated space and literally nobody knows how it’s going to develop so you need to be careful.” And while there’s much ado about crypto lately, the reality is that Bitcoin and others remain highly volatile in terms of price, which is one of the biggest reasons more retailers haven’t adopted them as forms of payment.

That could change, partly because Microsoft is providing the cloud infrastructure for Bakkt and companies like consulting heavyweight BCG are involved. There’s also this telling statement from Starbucks: “As the flagship retailer, Starbucks will play a pivotal role in developing practical, trusted and regulated applications for consumers to convert their digital assets into US dollars for use at Starbucks.”

Starbucks has been an undisputed leader in mobile payments over the years, so its involvement in the space isn’t that surprising, and it could make cryptocurrency more attractive to investors and therefore less volatile. The question is, will it be enough to turn hype into a mainstream form of payment?

Interestingly, in some overseas markets, Starbucks has been criticized of acting too slow when it comes to technological advancements. That’s a big reason for the company’s move this week to strike a partnership with Alibaba and integrate delivery services into its business in China. Starbucks will use the Alibaba-owned food-delivery service Ele.me to enable delivery at 2,000 stores by the end of the 2018. The deal includes a virtual store that integrates with Alibaba’s apps like Alipay and Hema.

Starbucks currently has 3,400 stores in China, with plans to double that number by 2022. But it’s also facing a lot of competition in this market, particularly from Luckin Coffee, who charges less and also just raised $200 million. That said, Starbucks still controls about 80 percent of the coffee market in China, and the company claims this deal with Alibaba “opens up 500 million or more active users of those apps that will have access to Starbucks.”

Stateside, the coffee giant has a slightly different tactic: standalone bakeries. This week, Starbucks opened the first of a planned 1,000 Princi bakeries, a “high-end Italian bakery chain.” The shop serves a mix of pizzas, pastries, beer, wine, and, of course, coffee.

Starbucks backed Italian bakery chain Princi in 2016; the Seattle store is the test location for this “upscale retail strategy.” Because apparently paying almost $5 for a latte is no longer considered upscale. Starbucks opened a Princi at its Reserve Rotary and Tasting Room last fall, as well as one at the Flagship Reserve store at the Starbucks HQ. This new location is the first standalone store. NYC and Chicago locations are in the works.

Starbucks is also one of the major chains joining the movement to ban single-use plastic straws, having recently announced it will eliminate them from all stores by 2020. But with all of the above expansion, not to mention Starbucks’ general reach, which is huge, will trading straws for sip-able lids make a difference?

That’s what several folks are wondering. The Guardian even weighed the new lids against the old lid-and-straw combo and found the former to be slightly heavier, therefore using more plastic. Starbucks’ notes these new lids are “made from polypropylene, a commonly-accepted recyclable plastic that can be captured in recycling infrastructure,” but that only matters if people actually recycle the lids. The numbers aren’t encouraging — only around 9 percent of the world’s plastic is recycled. Color me cynical, but since Starbucks partially helped create the disposable coffee world we live in, I’d say the company’s going to need a bigger fix if they want to make a true impact in terms of waste reduction. Hopefully they’ll continue to prioritize addressing waste issues, even as they push to pick up those lagging numbers.

We’ll have a chance to ask more at the next Smart Kitchen Summit, when we talk to Ben Pote, Starbucks’ Director of Culinary, Global Product Innovation. Swing by if you’re in the area, and leave your thoughts, musings, and rants on all this news in the comments below.