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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Education & Discovery

The Thimus T-Box Will Measure Brain Waves to Tell You if Someone is Lying About That New Casserole

So you think you’re a good cook, do ya?

Let me let you in on a little secret: If you’re basing that impression on what people told you about that new casserole recipe or side dish you brought to the potluck, there’s a good chance folks are just being polite.

Sure, not always. Many Spoon readers can no doubt make their way around a kitchen. But the reality is that not everything we cook is a winner, and often times, folks are trying not to hurt your feelings.

But what if we could actually read their brainwaves to determine how they feel about food? With a new system by a company called Thimus, we can now measure brain activity as people try out food to determine how they respond to it.

The new system, called the T-Box, monitors brain activity with a headset decked out with four frontal electrodes. It collects data from the brain’s electrical activity, which the company calls ‘implicit data,’ and then analyzes it alongside survey response data (which they call ‘explicit data’) to determine how a subject feels about a certain food product. They claim they understand how each sense contributes to the final customer perception of a specific food.

Thimus believes that measuring a person’s brainwave activity alongside their responses to survey responses will give a more accurate understanding of how a person really feels about food. The reason for this is it’s often hard for humans to put into words how they feel about a specific food and to articulate whether they like it or not.

Interestingly, the company also claims that its proprietary system can inform and interpret neurological data with a qualitative understanding of the participants’ cultural heritage.

“Our methodology connects the dots of sensory, neurophysiological, and cultural data. Because it is true that our brains all function alike, but they all live experiences in unique ways.”

The Thimus T-Box is being rolled out in partnership with flavor company Kalsec, which will offer it to commercial customers for testing and at a new facility called House of Humans at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, one of the world’s leading food and ag research universities.

So, for now, If you were hoping to strap one of these contraptions on your dinner guests to see how they really feel about your cooking, you’ll have to wait until Thimus releases a home version (or somehow coax your test subjects to take a trip to the Netherlands).

You can watch a video of Thimus using neurosensing technology (pre-T-Box) to gauge subjects’ reactions to alternative proteins below to get an idea of how this technology works.

Thimus & KM ZERO on Alternative proteins - #thimustested

Whirlpool Lays Off Entire Team for Cooking and Recipe App Yummly

Appliance giant Whirlpool has let its entire Yummly team go. According to industry sources, the company recently laid off all the employees for the recipe and cooking app and website. These sources tell the Spoon that it’s unclear what the company plans to do with the property it acquired in 2017.

The news of the layoffs marks a significant de-emphasis on creating a connected cooking experience tailored around custom-designed recipes with step-by-step cooking.

“Every day, millions of consumers around the world use Whirlpool Corporation appliances to prepare meals for their families. The Yummly acquisition will allow these consumers to dramatically reduce the stress from meal planning by helping answer the age-old question, ‘What’s for dinner tonight?'” the company said at the time of the acquisition.

After Whirlpool acquired Yummly, it beefed up the content team and hired content creators to build a recipe catalog with cooking guidance. It also added features such as built-in food image recognition capabilities and put out a Yummly-connected thermometer (which is still available for purchase). The company announced an update with new features as recently as last fall.

The move to let the Yummly team go is indicative of appliance brands de-emphasizing apps with human-powered editorial-driven content, especially as some start to investigate how they can leverage generative AI to power new features and content. The Spoon has heard rumblings that other appliance brands are starting to build generative AI-powered content libraries and consumer-facing UI with mixed results. My guess is this trend will only continue, even as appliances begin to revisit their smart appliance strategies after lessons from the first wave of product build-out.

Can Food-Centric Streaming Platform Kittch Succeed Where Others Have Failed?

In 2016 I got a pitch about a hugely successful entrepreneur who was launching a streaming site dedicated to foodies.

Steve Chen, the co-founder of Youtube, was combining a love of food with his proven experience building online video to launch a new site that would “allow anyone to direct, produce, and host their own food show.” Called Nom, the site debuted at SXSW on March 9, 2016, and went live to the general public a few days later.

Two years and $4.7 million in funding later, Nom shut down.

There have been other sites with similar pitches since 2016, including YesChef, an “online education platform dedicated to cooking” complete with James Beard award-winning chefs like Nancy Silverton to teach cooking techniques and recipes. Or World Chef, a “platform for foodies; a place where truly special Chefs can share their extraordinary food experiences directly with their fans.”

And then was Fanwide’s hot-minute pivot to a chef platform in the middle of the pandemic, or GE’s attempt to create a video streaming platform for chefs called Chibo that has since shuttered.

So you’ll have to forgive me when my first reaction upon hearing the pitch for Kittch, a site that Vanity Fair calls Onlyfans for Chefs, is one of skepticism.

I hope my initial reaction is wrong, and after spending some time looking at Kittch, I suspect it could be. Kittch has assembled an impressive team that includes successful TV producer Brian Bedol, former Plated head chef Elana Karp, and big names on the investor list, including LeBron James and uber-agent (and Supermensch) Shep Gordon. Throw in a sprinkling of celebrity chefs like Marcus Samuelsson and Daniela Soto-Innes, and the team has a roster of talent and star power to make this thing work on paper.

Kittch’s design and feature set are impressive. One particularly smart feature is the marketplace that allows chefs to sell products and private dining lessons or tableside conversations with the chefs. With chefs and culinary influencers, appearances on TV and online are often loss leader activities to push a product like a line of sauces or even a visit to one of their restaurants. Kittch is building in this monetization directly into the service.

Finally, it’s worth noting that 2022 is a different time than 2016, and we’ve seen the full emergence of a robust and mature creator economy in the intervening years. Consumers are accustomed to patronage models, where sites like Patreon, Substack, and, yes, OnlyFans allow them to give directly to their favorite influencers without a greedy media corporation intermediary sitting in between them.

Of course, Kittch still faces some headwinds, including potential competition from big social platforms like TikTok, which has started experimenting with food-centric monetization features for influencers. But I’m willing to give Kittch a try, and I hope they can finally create the food-centric streaming and engagement platform that has been the holy grail of the food industry for much of the past decade.

Introducing Manna Cooking, the Recipe App That’s All About Community

The idea for Manna Cooking came, in a way, from CTO and co-founder Guy Greenstein’s mom — a private chef who cooks all-vegan, all-kosher food. It dawned on Greenstein one day that his mom’s workstation was totally unmanageable, a chaos of notebooks and binders overflowing with heavily annotated recipe clips. He searched for an app that would help her to streamline things but came up empty-handed.

So Greenstein teamed up with his childhood friends and co-founders Josh and Rachel Abady to create a platform that would allow users like his mom to organize, customize, and share recipes. The app, Manna Cooking, is making its official debut today on the Apple App Store. I got on Zoom last week with Josh and Rachel (the company’s CEO and CMO, respectively) to learn more about the launch.

The name of the app was inspired by the three co-founders’ early years at a Jewish day school. “Manna is what supposedly fell from the sky to nourish the Israelites — to give them everything they needed,” said Rachel, who came up with the name. “Our app is supposed to be your buddy in the kitchen that gives you everything you need to cook.”

Rachel and Josh led me on a tour of the app over Zoom. The digital environment is bright and easy to navigate, made friendlier by Chef Mic, the app’s cartoon personality. The app draws on popular social media features to help users discover new recipes: You can flick through recipes dating app-style in swipe mode, or scroll through other users’ posts in the discover feed. Users can also create and import recipes themselves.

Manna follows through on its promise of creating a single, centralized space for users to manage their recipes. In the cookbook environment, the app allows you to edit any recipe you’ve liked and save a new version. (The app also automatically flags recipe ingredients that might be incompatible with your diet.) When you want to start cooking a dish, the app guides you through the recipe one step at a time in much the same way Google’s Maps app takes you step-by-step toward your destination, saving the need to scroll back and forth between an ingredients list and instructions.

There are currently about 10,000 recipes on the app. Some are from a collection of pre-approved websites from which users can instantly import recipes; some were created by the app’s beta testers; and some were curated by Manna’s in-house recipe creator.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced Greenstein and the Abady siblings to take an unconventional approach to fundraising. They had secured some funding pre-COVID (including from David Greenstein, Guy’s father and a co-founder of the brand incubator Wonder Brands) but the pandemic scorched opportunities to proposition restaurateurs and other funders. “But we realized, even more than it’s about food, our app is about community. So if we’re a community, why not use the community to be the source of our funding as well?” Josh said.

The team used Wefunder to raise about $150,000, which helped them to create a beta version of the Manna Cooking app. That crowdfunding approach also helped the team to create a pool of dedicated beta testers: “Our first wave of testers really had skin in the game, because they had given us funds anywhere from $100 upwards,” Rachel said. “So we already had built-in super testers.”

Manna has partnered with restaurateur and chef David Burke, giving users access to simplified recipes for restaurant dishes. They’ve also identified brand-aligned social media influencers, who are creating recipes, providing feedback, and helping to promote the app.

This spring, Manna will work on raising a more conventional seed funding round. In the next couple of months, the team plans to lock in a partnership with a grocery retailer, which will allow them to launch an automatic ordering feature.

But the team’s number one priority is user acquisition, and their success there may hinge on how well the platform fosters in-app community building. At the end of the day, the promise of the app is to provide a simplified, social cooking experience, especially for users with specific dietary needs — people who want to cook gluten-free food, or vegan food, and get inspired by others who cook and eat like them.

As Josh put it: “There’s millions of people who fit each of these descriptions, and each of them should feel like they have a community that they can engage with in one, centralized place.”

With New Funding Mustard Adds More Relish to the Food Ordering Experience

For hungry L.A. diners unable to decide between the Caliente Burger from Tommy’s in Van Nuys and Yukdaehang from a Korean restaurant in Los Angeles, Mustard may be the perfect video condiment. The Mustard app allows users to browse, compare, select, order, and have their food delivered from a vast cornucopia of eat-it-now options. And one cannot deny the mukbang element of watching others salivate over their spicy ramen bowls.

“People are discouraged by the food ordering process,” Mustard CEO Diana Might said in an interview with The Spoon. “The format of menu ordering is outdated.”

Inspired by an uptick in food delivery during the pandemic, Might and her co-founder Chief Product Officer David Currant recognized an opportunity to give social media users an easy soup-to-nuts process to order food. It starts with a video showcasing a given menu item and ends with the ability to select a delivery service to bring it to their home in short order. The videos are uploaded by what Might call “influencers” to the Mustard platform where the content is “Mustardized” and then, for now, returned to the author for uploading to social media. The result is a clip that allows the customer to see the duck meat, Wagyu beef, or bagel up close and personal with a narration from the video creator. An icon allows the viewer to click and order what they see on the screen.

Currant explains that Mustard’s technology uses several distinct data feeds that show the restaurant’s location, menu item, price, and delivery providers. Not willing to divulge the company’s secret sauce, which combines these varied data points, Currant acknowledges the use of computer vision and that the company’s platform is extensible to other areas such as travel.

Mustard is off to a good start, recently securing a $1 million investment from Operate Studio, Newfund, Great North Ventures, and Fund LA. “Mustard is disrupting the food industry by connecting food content consumption and IRL experiences together,” says Newfund’s Christy Wang, who believes Mustard has the potential to dominate the food vertical in the social video app space. “Food videos are mostly viewed and loved on social media, yet they are not actional and informative. Mustard closes the loop by integrating the ordering and booking process right at the moment of food content consumption, providing actionable menus and interactive food experiences within one video.”

Currently, the revenue model rewards content creators with a small affiliate fee, with Mustard getting paid based on the delivery service and their special promotions and offers. At this point, Might explains, the restaurants become the beneficiaries of the app but do not pay anything for the customer acquisition. Soon, the CEO says, that could change.

The company hopes to make its service even more user-friendly by eliminating the friction in the delivery process. Now, an influencer uploads its video to Mustard to be mustardized (tagged with price, restaurant location, delivery service, etc..). The same influencer uploads it to social media—most often Tik-Tok or Instagram. Might says it won’t be long before videos can be sent directly to Tik-Tok from the Mustard platform.

In theory, Mustard is available worldwide but is focused on the 8,000 restaurants in the Los Angeles area with more than 1,000 active users. The initial goal is to expand into other parts of southern California and grow organically throughout the United States.

FryAway Turns Your Used Cooking Oil Into a Disposable Solid

When used cooking oil gets poured down the drain, it doesn’t disappear. It ends up in sewer systems, where it congeals. Over time, more oil and other debris amasses, forming blockages called fatbergs—which cost some cities millions of dollars per year to clean up, and can also cause sewer overflows that pollute surrounding waters.

The alternative method for getting rid of cooking oil—pouring it into a plastic container or glass jar, waiting for it to congeal, and then throwing it away—isn’t perfect, either, as it relegates a recyclable container to a landfill.

FryAway offers another solution. The plant-based powder transforms liquid oil into a solid that can be scooped out of the pan or fryer and thrown away. This week, The Spoon joined FryAway’s founder and CEO Laura Lady on Zoom to find out where the idea came from, and how the product works.

The story of FryAway starts with Lady’s own love of cooking. “Not only am I from New Orleans, I’m also a Latina from New Orleans, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that we love fried foods,” she told The Spoon. “I cook a lot at home. I fry a lot. I am guilty of having poured oil down the drain and not really thinking about where it went.”

Lady first learned about fatbergs and sewer overflow through conversations with friends. At one dinner party, a friend brought up a Japanese product that solidified cooking oil, making it easier to throw away. The idea caught Lady’s interest, and after looking into the product, she decided to develop a similar solution for the U.S. market.

Before FryAway, Lady worked in marketing and product development for children’s toys. “I think product development in general is very much about solving problems creatively. When it comes to toys, you’re trying to figure out how to bring a character to life,” she said. In founding FryAway, she carried over that problem-solving experience into the food space. “It was like bringing two universes together—one being my love for building brands and products, and the other being my love for food.”

During the product development process, Lady drew on chemistry knowledge from her undergraduate years. “I started researching, reading, trying to figure out how an oil could be solidified,” she said. “And I came across the process of hydrogenation, where you add hydrogen to a molecule to harden it.”

Hydrogenation is a familiar term because the process is used in the food industry. Margarine, for example, is made by solidifying vegetable oil using hydrogen-rich saltwater. And that’s basically how FryAway works: You stir the product (a hydrogenated fatty acid) into your used cooking oil while it’s still hot, and a reaction occurs between the two, causing the fat to solidify.

“Once the mixture cools down to room temperature, you start seeing that transformation from liquid to a gelatinous form to a waxy, hard substance that can then be tossed in the trash,” Lady said. “As it solidifies, it will also trap all of that gunk and debris that’s left behind when you’re frying, so that all of that comes out of the pan in one easy step.”

Two versions of the product (one for pan frying, and one for deep frying) are available to consumers on the company’s website and via Amazon. The team is mostly relying on word-of-mouth marketing to raise awareness about the product.

While larger commercial kitchens are already required to use oil remediation services and grease traps, there could be applications for FryAway in smaller restaurants and catering operations, Lady said.

The company has plans to launch a third product in early 2022, and after that, Lady will continue to explore other solutions for repurposing used cooking oil. Driving that expansion and exploration is the idea that we all want to take care of our shared infrastructure and environment—but need simple ways to improve our habits. “At the end of the day,” Lady said, “it’s about making life easier for those of us who love to cook.”

Is Home Fermentation The Next Big Kitchen Tech Opportunity?

There’s been a fermentation boom in restaurants over the past decade. Chefs everywhere are using the age-old technique to make everything from kimchi to katsuobushi, and nowadays, it’s not out of the ordinary for high-end restaurants to have a head of fermentation on staff.

And now, thanks in part to the pandemic and the rise of experimentation in food making, more people than ever are doing fermentation at home. Anyone who’s tried to create a sourdough starter, brew kombucha or make sauerkraut has dabbled in fermentation whether they know it or not.

Still, fermenting is still viewed as something of a black art. Part of it is the weird and slightly creepy terminology (mother, anyone?). Mostly, though, it’s also because the act of farming bacteria to create tasty and healthy new foods is a far cry from the usual activity of assembling and cooking our meals in our kitchen.

The New Sous Vide?

But what if it wasn’t? What if, like other pro cooking techniques that have entered the consumer kitchen, fermentation got an assist from technology to help would-be home fermenters with their craft? Could some innovation and little cool hardware help make fermentation more mainstream, like the sous vide wave that started nearly a decade ago?

That is the hope of a couple of entrepreneurs I caught up with recently at the Smart Kitchen Summit. Fred Benenson’s Breadwinner helps home bread bakers know when their sourdough starter is ready. Tommy Leung’s company Hakko Bako is making a fermenting appliance for the home.

Both see a big future for home fermenters, a future that starts with making the process a little less mysterious.

“I remember I was talking with a close friend of mine when I was starting work on Breadwinner,” said Benenson. “I could tell he was like a little sketched out by the idea that there was this jar of goo.”

Benenson knew that his friend wasn’t alone. There are millions of people around the world who see these jars as mysterious and a little scary. If he could just provide a little more clarity, they wouldn’t be as scared of fermentation. They’d also end up making better bread.

That’s where Breadwinner comes in. Originally conceived as a “social network for yeast” where home cooks could share their stories of loave-making, Benenson also started working on a hardware device that monitors starters. The idea behind both was to give more information.

“Humans have had kind of an innate relationship to fermentation for a long time,” said Benenson. “In terms of making it more approachable, you think of any situation that’s got a lot of uncertainty and confusion, and you’re trying to learn it for the first time, the more you can reduce that uncertainty, the better you feel about engaging with it.”

Leung also wants to make fermentation more approachable. To do that, he is creating both a home and professional kitchen appliance to bring precision to the process.

“Our goal is just to make fermentation easy,” said Leung. “So it means to provide temperature control and then use the technology to make the process easier.”

That precision and control is necessary, in part, because fermentation is so different from the usual act of cooking in the kitchen.

“Most of the things you’re doing in the kitchen, then you’d like to be prepping in the morning and then like serving and cooking it,” said Leung. “Fermentation happens over hours, days, weeks and months.”

Both Benenson and Leung are bullish about fermentation as being potentially the next big professional kitchen technique that could be mainstreamed through innovation.

“The top chefs are already fermenting,” said Leung. “They’re already creating these like amazing flavor experiences. I think like with food usually starts in the Michelin restaurants and then it moves to more like casual dining, and then to the home. So I definitely think it’s going to be a huge part of the future.”

“I’m bullish there,” said Benenson. “I think it will be a while before we have all of our ducks in a row to make the case but it’s what I’m hoping for. I think fermentation is gonna start to sound a lot less scary.”

So is home fermentation the next big kitchen tech opportunity? You can decide for yourself after watching my full conversation with Benenson and Leung below.

SKS 2021: Meet Culineer, an App That Connects Home Cooks With Local Food Producers

Time to meet our next startup for the Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase: Culineer. Culineer is an app that helps home cooks find recipes and connects them to local farmers and food producers.

When asked why she created Culineer, company cofounder Jodi Frank said it started with her own challenges as a home cook.

“I wanted to solve my own frustrations with cooking,” said Frank. “Most home cooks share my frustration that it takes so much time and energy to decide what to make, find your recipe, get ingredients. By the time you get home, you don’t have any time to cook. So I wanted to make all that a lot more simple.”

As she started to focus on solving her own cooking struggles, it didn’t talk for the former industrial safety executive long to realize that so much of what you cook at home is rooted in your local community. “I really started to think about my own needs,” said Frank. “Food like super persona, and it’s inherently connected and communal.”

And because no one is more integrally connected to the local food community than farmers, Frank knew it was critical for Culineer to make that connection.

“Culineer helps bridge that gap between the farmers and what they are producing with the home cook.”

You can watch our conversation Frank in the video below. If you want to connect with Frank in person and see her pitch at the Smart Kitchen Summit, get your ticket today!

The Spoon Interviews - Culineer

Shiok Meats Acquires Gaia Foods, Will Add Beef to Its Cultured Meat Lineup

Shiok Meats, a company best known for its developments in cultured seafood, has acquired a 90 percent steak in Gaia Foods, according to Tech in Asia, which broke the news. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Through the deal, Singapore’s Shiok Meats will add “a variety of red meat products” to its roster, since the company will be able to draw on Gaia Foods expertise in developing cultured beef. Gaia, also based in Singapore is also developing cultured pork and mutton.

Both companies are targeting markets in Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Japan, Taiwan, India, and South Korea. Shiok Meats hopes to blend cultured beef and shrimp in order to create a product that can be used in a variety of dishes, from dumplings and noodles to spring rolls.

Shiok raised an undisclosed round of bridge funding last month that will go towards building out a production facility in Singapore. The company said at the time of the funding that it plans to launch commercially in that market by 2023 at the latest. Speaking to Tech in Asia today, company CEO Sandhya Sriram said Shiok Meats is ready to “power through to commercialization.”

Singapore is currently the only country in the world that has granted regulatory approval to sell cultured meat, and to just one company, Eat Just. Gaining its own approval — in Singapore and elsewhere — will be a major next step for Shiok on its path to commercialization. 

Beyond regulatory approval, Shiok Meats and every other company developing cultivated meat has a host of challenges to contend with before consumers can buy their products en masse at restaurants and grocery stores. Those challenges span everything from making cell lines more available to finding cheaper, less ethically hazy growth mediums, and educating the average consumer about what cultured meat actually is and why we need to consider it as a protein source in the first place.  

Gaia founders Vinayaka Srinivas and Hung Nguyen will lead the Shiok Meats technical team’s development process for cultured red meat products for the company moving forward. Meanwhile, Sriram told Tech in Asia that deals like this one will become “priorities” in the near-term future for the company.

Make Beats at the Breakfast Table with Reese’s Puffs AR Cereal Box Drum Machine

After seeing Mark Ronson’s “Watch the Sound” series on music, my 10-year-old son is now very into drum machines and beats. And while he would love a vintage Roland TR 808 to kick off his burgeoning music career, I think instead I’ll get him a box of Reese’s Puffs cereal.

Not that I think a bowl of Reese’s Puffs is the breakfast of champions, but a new promotional box for the cereal out now features an augmented reality drum machine on the back. I received a press release about the new cereal box beatmaker this morning. Usually when I get these types of emails, I immediately toss them. But as I looked at the information, it actually seemed like a pretty cool use of technology, so I went out and bought a box this morning (with apologies to my wife, who does not yet know there is a giant box of sugar cereal jammed into our pantry).

Here’s how it works. On the back of the box is a diagram of the RP-FX drum pad. You scan a special QR code with your mobile phone and it takes you to a special Reese’s web app that accesses your phone’s camera. Place cereal puffs wherever you like on the drum pad spaces and then hover your camera phone over the box. Using AR, the app “reads” where you placed your puffs and generates a beat accordingly. Move the puffs around and the beat changes.

It’s definitely not high fidelity or Pro Tools quality production, but it actually works surprisingly well. Once you have your beat just as you like, you can use the app to record it, so you can share it with friends or use it as the basis of your next club banger.

You can hear the one I whipped up this morning here (or, you know, wait a few months and it’ll be all over the radio).

As noted earlier, I typically shy away from covering promotional stunts like this. But as a parent and a fan of both music and technology, this promotion is actually worth, well, promoting. Besides, using a cereal box to build your own beat sure beats digging for a cheap plastic toy at the bottom of one.

Plant Jammer Expands Its Food Waste Tech to Aldi, RIMI Baltic

Aldi Süd and RIMI Baltic are among the first large food companies to implement Plant Jammer’s new food-waste-fighting widget on their websites, according to a press release from Plant Jammer sent to The Spoon. Consumers can use the widget to track and manage food waste in their own homes.

Plant Jammer is best known at this point for its AI-powered cooking assistant that helps users create recipes from the existing inventory in their fridges and pantries. The idea is to provide consumers with more ways to use all of their at-home food inventory, so less waste goes down the drain or into the landfill.

Copenhagen, Denmark-based Plant Jammer nabbed a €4 million (~$4.7 million USD) investment last year. At the time, Plant Jammer said it planned to expand by licensing its API to third parties who could then build customized experiences for their own customers.  

The Empty Your Fridge widget is an offshoot of that goal. Companies can implement the technology with a single line of code. From the end-user perspective, a person simply selects the ingredients they have at home in the fridge and receive a customized recipe from the system in return. Users can also input preferences and dietary concerns, factors that will also impact what recipe gets generated by the system. 

Worldwide, food waste at consumer-facing levels, including the home, is a multibillion-dollar problem that’s also a big contributor to global emissions. The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 12.3 aims in part to halve global food waste at retail and consumer levels. Reaching that goal will be the work of governments, nonprofits, consumers, and startups building out new processes and technologies.

Helping consumers learn more about how to use their existing inventories will be a big part of this. Speaking in a statement today, Plant Jammer CEO Michael Haase noted that a “lack of cooking flexibility” in many consumers is a direct contributor to at-home food waste.

Plant Jammer says it aims to launch the widget on 100 food company websites by the end of 2021 and on 5,000 by 2023. Longer term, the company hopes to educate 1 billion people on cooking and food waste.

Yelp Now Lets Restaurants List Vaccine Requirements (and Ward Off Backlash)

There is probably nothing more 2021 than Yelp announcing today a new feature that allows businesses to list their vaccine status and requirements. It is also very 2021 that in the same announcement, Yelp felt the need to reaffirm internal processes to help mitigate any online backlash listing these requirements might incur.

In a corporate blog post, Yelp wrote:

To help consumers understand how a business is currently operating as pandemic guidelines continue to evolve, today, Yelp is announcing two new, free attributes – “Proof of vaccination required” and “All staff fully vaccinated.” Users will be able to filter by these attributes when searching for local businesses on Yelp and will easily see “Proof of vaccination required” indicated on restaurant, food and nightlife businesses in search results.

These vaccine attributes adds to Yelp’s existing COVID-related labels allowing businesses to list their mask requirements.

While the vaccine rollout this past spring helped people in the U.S. regain some sense of normalcy, the Delta variant surge has rekindled health and safety concerns and resurfaced questions around the safety of eating inside at restaurants. As such, allowing businesses to detail their vaccine requirements on Yelp seems like a really helpful idea because it sets expectations and eliminates any confusion when selecting a restaurant.

However, in these times, detailing information about vaccine protocols is not an anodyne statement. As such, in that same corporate blog post, Yelp reaffirmed the measures it is taking to minimize online backlash against a restaurant as it relates to promoting their COVID protocols, writing:

For businesses that activate “Proof of vaccination required” and “All staff fully vaccinated” on their Yelp page, we are putting protective measures in place to proactively safeguard them from reviews that primarily criticize the COVID health and safety measures they enforce.

Yelp implemented similar content monitoring features when it launched business attributes highlighting Black, Latinx, Asian and LGBTQ-owned businesses.

Yelp said that since January of this year, it has removed nearly 4,500 reviews for violating content policies as it relates to businesses’ COVID precautions.