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Business of Food

June 24, 2021

Future Meat Opens Production Facility, Aims to Sell Cultured Meat in the US by 2022

Future Meat has officially opened what it says is the world’s first production facility for cultured meat. The plant, located in the company’s hometown of Rehovot, Israel, is a big step in accelerating Future Meat’s timeline for getting regulatory approval to sell cultured meat and then actually getting products onto consumers’ plates.

Future Meat says the plant can produce 500 kilograms of cultured meat per day, which is equivalent to roughly 5,000 hamburgers. Those numbers may pale in comparison to traditional meat (this McDonald’s factory produces 5 million burgers every day), but for the extremely nascent cultured meat industry, they make for significant progress. 

Prof. Yaakov Nahmias, founder and chief scientific officer of Future Meat Technologies, told The Spoon that the new facility is currently processing cultured chicken, pork, and lamb. Beef production will arrive soon. The company’s first official products to come out of the facility will be a cultured chicken breast, chicken fingers, and hamburgers. 

Earlier this year, Future Meat told The Spoon it has been able to decrease the cost of cultured meat production by 1,000x over the last three years. At last check, the company had brought the cost of its cultured chicken breast down to $7.50 USD per quarter-pound serving. It followed that up with news that the production price could drop to $2 within the next 12 to 18 months.

Future Meat’s end products will be a combination of cell-cultured and plant-based protein. Nahmias said that his company’s products are 45 to 75 percent cultured meat, with an edible scaffold made of plant protein. Cell-based protein will replace plant-based elements in future generations of product as the cost of cultured meat continues to decrease.

No technologies out there, he said, use 100 percent cultured meat. “Meat is composed of cells and a three-dimensional protein scaffold that holds the cells together. Companies are either adding the edible scaffold to the cells or adding the cells to the edible scaffold. It is pretty much the same.”

Importantly, Future Meat has also developed a serum-free growth medium for feeding cells. This allows the company to avoid using the controversial fetal bovine serum (FBS), which is both expensive and ethically controversial. According to Nahmias, Future Meat’s medium is made up of a mixture of amino acids, oils, glucose, and naturally occurring hormones. “Removing serum is a critics step in market realization of cultured meat,” he said. “Companies that fail to do that require the slaughter of dozens of calves to grow a single hamburger.” The company’s chicken, lamb, and pork cells are currently growing “in scale” without serum at the production facility.

Future Meat may be the first to open the doors on a production facility for cultured meat, but others won’t be long in coming. Bioprinting startup MeaTech 3D, also based in Israel, says it will have a production facility operational by 2022. San Francisco, California-based Wildtype also opened a production facility this week, though it is focused solely on cultured seafood at the moment and is therefore not a direct competitor to Future Meat. 

Down the line, Future Meat would like to open another production facility, ideally in the United States. For now, Future Meat is working to get regulatory approval here in the U.S., with the goal of selling its products in foodservice venues next year.

June 24, 2021

BrightFarms Launches R&D Hub for Its Growing Network of Greenhouses

BrightFarms, which operates a network of greenhouses in the U.S., is launching an innovation and research hub at its Wilmington, Ohio headquarters, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. Dubbed BrightLabs, the research facility will build on BrightFarms’ existing work growing leafy greens in a greenhouse setting aided by tech.

The company calls BrightLabs “one of the most advanced biotechnology ventures in the indoor farming industry” and one that will develop ways to improve the flavor, texture and yield of plants the company grows in its five greenhouses. Tech experts along with microbiologists and plant scientists will join the BrightLabs team, which will be led by Matt Lingard, formerly a Bayer greenhouse scientist. Lingard has recently joined BrightFarms as the VP of Agriculture.

One of BrightFarms’ biggest achievements to date is that it’s mastered the notoriously difficult task of growing spinach in a greenhouse (or any indoor ag setting). Spinach is especially susceptible to a certain kind of water mold, presenting a challenge for greenhouse and indoor ag operations that rely on hydroponic systems. BrightFarms says it already has proprietary research on the process of growing spinach indoors, and, via BrightLabs, aims to double the production of that particular crop.

Another notable aspect of BrightLabs is that the hub will allocate significant energy to studying plant microbiome, the natural bacteria that influences plant health. The company says it can do this because the greenhouses are powered by sunlight and so there is not a need to spend abundant R&D dollars on artificial lighting solutions (e.g., LEDs). “So instead of spending R&D dollars on finding expensive and energy-intensive artificial lighting solutions, we can zero in on how to simply grow better plants,” BrightFarms CEO Steve Platt told The Spoon. He added that BrightLabs plant scientists are developing proprietary ecosystems that will optimize plant microbiome to help crops flourish. “By putting the microbiome to work, we can do more of what we do best: grow great lettuce,” he said.

A recent survey found that many growers plan to add more LEDs in the future as well as climate control systems, and post-harvest automation tech. Plant microbiome did not factor into the report, and BrightFarms is still rather unique in its decision to focus on that as a means of increasing and improving yield.

BrightFarms said that the launch of BrightLabs means 10 percent of the company is now dedicated to developing “patented growing solutions” that will be applied across the company’s network of greenhouses. As noted above, there are currently five such facilities, one each in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, North Carolina, and Virginia. The company says that by the end of the year, its leafy greens will be available at over 3,500 stores.

June 23, 2021

Better Juice Raises $8M for Tech That Reduces the Sugar in Natural Juices

Better Juice, a company that uses enzymatic technology to reduce the amount of sugar in natural juices, has raised $8 million in seed funding. The round was led by iAngels with participation from Maverick Ventures, Food Tech Lab TFTL, The Kitchen Hub, NEOME, Schestowitz Group, and Semillero.

The company’s tech comes in the form of a simple machine that can be integrated into the juice-manufacturing process. This “column” contains immobilized non-GMO microorganisms. When juice passes through the column, the food-grade microorganisms convert juice sugars (fructose, glucose, sucrose) into dietary fibers and non-digestible sugars. Better Juice says this process can reduce up to 80 percent of all sugars in the juice.

A single column can produce 1000 liters of juice per 1 liter column.

Health experts, consumers, and many others have debated the merits of juice for years now. Increasingly, critics have pointed to the amount of sugar in juices — even natural ones — and said there’s as much sugar in a glass of OJ as in a soda.

Better Juice’s technology is currently designed to target orange juice’s specific sugar composition. However, the company says seed round of investment will allow it to expand into other product lines, including ice cream, soft drinks, and jam. Funding will also go towards building a full-scale manufacturing plant in Israel, which will increase production capacity “by 40-fold.” Additionally, the company will expand its sales and marketing teams as it moves into commercialization stage.

In the next few months, Better Juice plans to bring its product to market. How seamlessly it can integrate its technology into existing manufacturing processes will be a key factor. The company has said in the past that its column is easy to install and doesn’t require special training or a specific set of skills. Once the column actually comes to market, we will see how well this assertion holds up.

The company opened its pilot production facility in January of this year and currently has partnerships with “leading beverage companies.”

June 23, 2021

Motif Adds Umami to Its Plant-Based Meat Tool Box

If you’re like me and love the umami savoriness of meat and seafoods, I’ve got some good news for you: plant-based ingredient engineering unicorn Motif just announced they’ve added the ability to create umami to their toolbox of technologies for plant-based food.

According to this week’s release, Motif’s latest protein “provides the rich umami flavor and mouth-watering aroma associated with beef — all without the animal.” Motif says the new umami technology will be available by the end of this year.

The technique Motif uses to create its umami protein is precision fermentation, the same process used by a number of companies building enabling platforms and ingredients technologies for meat substitutes. Impossible Foods, for examples, uses precision fermentation to create the famous plant-based heme that give its meat that same iron-y flavor you get in real beef.

One interesting aspect of the story not mentioned in the release is how Motif leveraged its relationship with Ginkgo Bioworks, the company it spun out of in 2019, to help build the umami taste technology. In an email, a Motif spokesperson told The Spoon they “were able to use our partnership with Ginkgo to take advantage of their throughput screening and strain development capabilities, which allows us to innovate and scale production rapidly.” It’s clear that, even as one company plans its IPO and the other raises the kind of money that will almost certainly require it to go public, the two companies remain closely intertwined.

Umami wasn’t the only new technology Motif debuted this week. The company also announced it had achieved a new way to give plant-based meat a meat-like texture that “delivers real, meaty chewdown and juiciness.” Unlike the company’s fermentation-derived umami tech, this new meat texture technology “was able to replicate the texture of animal tissue using plant proteins and plant-based carbohydrates” through “advancements in materials science and production.”

June 23, 2021

ResQ Raises $7.5M for Back-of-House Restaurant Tech

ResQ, whose software platform manages restaurant repair and maintenance tasks, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding, bringing its total funding thus far to $9 million. Homebrew, Golden Ventures, and Inovia Capital led the round, which also saw participation from various angel investors, including Instacart president Nilam Ganenthiran, Gokul Rajaram (Doordash, Board of Pinterest and Coinbase), and AirBnb’s Lenny Rachitsky, among others. ResQ’s restaurant customers, including Yum Brands! franchisee Soul Foods, also participated.  

The company’s technology focuses on a very specific part of the restaurant back of house: repairs and maintenance. Through the ResQ platform, restaurants can request, manage, and pay for a service, as well as manage the documents for these things. 

ResQ also connects restaurants with a network of contractors able to perform those services. The company’s ever-growing list of available services right now includes HVAC, refrigeration, electrical, janitorial, plumbing, pest control, grease trap cleaning, preventative maintenance, and just about anything else needed to keep a restaurant kitchen up and running.

Digitizing the management of such things would, ResQ suggests, help with revenue recovery in the restaurant back of house. The company says restaurants typically spend between 3 and 5 percent of annual sales on repairs, and that the ResQ platform has saved businesses 10 to 30 percent in annual repairs and maintenance spend. 

Keeping costs in the restaurant back of house down has been a topic of growing interest for the last several months. Lockdowns and restrictions stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic decimated already-thin margins for businesses. Many have said digitizing the back of house, whether through inventory management, back office-focused platforms, or maintenance management, is an important way to keep costs down. Granted, much of that talk comes from the tech companies selling these services and the investors funneling money into them. Realistically, smaller, independent restaurants won’t necessarily have the budget to pay for more software, at least not while the industry slowly recovers.

For its part, ResQ has plenty of bigger restaurant chains that are clients in the meantime. That list currently includes Wendy’s, Burger King, Panera, KFC, and Taco Bell, to name a few. 

ResQ will use its new funding to build up its team and launch its service in new markets. Currently, ResQ is available in Los Angeles, Dallas, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Chicago. 

 

June 22, 2021

S2G Ventures Unveils the First Five Investments for Its Oceans & Seafood Fund

S2G Ventures has invested in five different companies as part of the inaugural investments for its $100 million Oceans & Seafood fund. The point of the new fund is to support companies and entrepreneurs building new systems, solutions, and processes geared towards the “blue economy.”

The World Bank defines the blue economy as “the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods, and jobs while preserving the health of ocean ecosystems.” In other words, it calls for a more sustainable approach to doing business when it comes to our oceans and the life within them. Multiple areas are touched by the blue economy, including maritime transport, renewable energy, fisheries, and waste management strategies. Even tourism could play a role.

Via a statement, S2G Managing Director Kate Danaher called sustainably managed ocean ecosystems “a pillar of global environmental recovery, a driver of economic growth, and a foundation for food security and human health.” The firm says its Oceans & Seafood fund is the largest in North America. It will invest in companies helping to “build marine ecosystem resilience, de-risk the ocean supply chain, maximize the value of natural resources and support animal and human health.”

Thus far, companies in S2G’s group of inaugural investments are:

ReelData. Based in Canada, the company makes software it says can increase land-based aquaculture’s profitability, sustainability, and scalability. Initial products include AI-informed feeding systems, biomass estimation and health/stress analytics.

ViAqua Therapeutics. The Israel-based biotech producer makes orally administered RNA-based treatments for shrimp to improve their resistance to disease. S2G says the company has the potential to apply its technology across “all aquaculture species and platforms where cost-effective RNA production and novel delivery systems (such as nano and micro encapsulation) are needed.”

Moleaer. U.S.-based Moleaer has nanobubble tech that can treat water systems, including removing harmful pathogens and increasing recoveries of natural resources. 

Additionally, S2G has invested in two undisclosed companies. One is an “ocean surveillance company” that will track dark vessels and illegal maritime activity. The other is a “fishmeal and oil technology company” based in the U.S. that holds proprietary zero-waste fishmeal technology that could be applied to other parts of protein production in fisheries.

The focus of the overall fund will be divided into three areas: ecosystem resillience, resource optimization, and consumer centricity. S2G said it believes focusing on these areas will improve ocean health while still “generating above average financial returns.”

June 22, 2021

Uber, DoorDash Moving Further Into Grocery Delivery Space

Uber is acquiring the remaining 47 percent in grocery delivery service Cornershop, according to Uber’s most recent 8-K filing, released at the end of last week. The all-stock transaction is expected to close next month. 

The deal follows Uber’s acquisition in 2019 of a majority stake in Chile-based Cornershop. At the time, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi had already said grocery was an area he wanted to see his company delve deeper into. One pandemic and nearly two years later, the company has done just that. In April of 2020, the company expanded its grocery delivery service to international locations, including a partnership with Carrefour in France. In July of 2020, Uber launched grocery delivery via Cornershop in Canada and Latin America as well as parts of the U.S. Separate from Cornershop, Uber also expanded its grocery service into Manhattan. 

Uber’s grocery service expansion has come amid record levels of online grocery shopping in the wake of the pandemic. While numbers have leveled off somewhat since the height of lockdowns in the U.S., stats nonetheless highlight grocery e-commerce’s continued popularity. For example, Brick Meets Click data showed that online grocery sales for pickup or delivery were $6.6 billion in April of this year. That’s down from the $7.1 billion in grocery e-commerce sales in March of this year, but up from $5.3 billion in April 2020.

Restaurants, meanwhile, are opening back up to increasing levels of foot traffic and enthusiasm on the part of consumers for dining out. Those factors could bring restaurant deliveries via Uber Eats and others slightly down in the coming months. Additionally, some restaurants, now back open at full capacity, are dropping the delivery apps they relied on over the last year, having finally had enough of the high commission fees these services charge restaurants. Though some delivery services have responded with tiered pricing models for those commission fees, Uber Eats, DoorDash, and others have long known they need to diversify in order to stay on the path to that elusive profitability.

And speaking of DoorDash, it too had an announcement this week around grocery. The company announced a partnership with grocery chain Albertsons to offer same-day delivery from about 2,000 stores. The deal includes Safeway, Vons, and Jewel-Osco stores. The service will be powered by DoorDash Drive, the company’s white-label platform. 

June 22, 2021

Equinom Raises $20M Series C Round for Seed Breeding Tech

Israel-based Equinom announced today it has raised a $20 million Series C funding round led by Phoenix. The round also included participation from Fortissimo, Trendlines, Maverick, and BASF, and brings Equinom’s total funding to $27.6 million.

Equinom uses AI to improve upon the existing nutrition of seeds, including a seed’s protein content. Through its natural non-GMO breeding process, seeds with desired traits are selected and then bred. Equinom’s “Product Profiler” app allows food companies to select what traits they want in a particular seed for the product they are developing. According to its website, the company is working with soy, yellow, pea, sesame, and will offer boosted versions of chickpeas, mung beans, quinoa, cowpeas, and fava beans in the future. Across the world, Equinom is growing over 100,000 acres of these crops.

With this most recent round of capital, Equinom will expand its operations in marketing, research, development, and sales. At the beginning of May, the company partnered with Dipasa, a leading producer of sesame seeds, to launch a new variety of high protein sesame seeds. In addition to Dispasa, Equinom has had contracts with major food companies like Sabra and Roquette to improve upon the nutrition content of seed for use in plant-based foods.

Seeds, nuts, and grains are more sustainable and efficient to produce than meat, yet a common complaint regarding plant-based ingredients is that they often do not have the same high protein content as meat. It’s therefore a pressing issue to find nutrient-dense crops that can support a population that will reach 9.7 billion by 2050. Plant-based ingredients like chickpea, soy, peas, and lentils are nutrient-dense and contain a high protein content, but still fall short of the protein content found in a serving of, say, beef. By increasing protein content in these seeds, Equinom’s technology could prove valuable in helping feed more mouths with more nutritious and environmentally friendly food.

In the last quarter of 2021, Equinom is set to launch the highest pea protein concentrate available on the market, called “Smarter Pea Protein.”

June 21, 2021

Babylon Micro-Farms Gets $1M Grant to Further Develop Its Software for Controlled Ag

Babylon Micro-Farms, which operates a network of indoor grow systems in foodservice venues around the U.S., has received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, with the potential for $750,000 more in follow-on funding. The grant money will go towards further development of BabylonIQ, the company’s platform that remotely manages its distributed network of farms. 

This grant follows a 2019 Phase 1 grant of $225,000, also from the National Science Foundation, that enabled the company to start trials of its technology designed to capture growth and health metrics for plants. 

Babylon Micro-Farms started in 2016, originally in Charlottesville as a project at the University of Virginia. Over the last five years, the farm itself has gone from a tabletop model to the 15-square-foot controlled-environment farming module that’s now in numerous hospitals, cafeterias, and senior living residences. The goal is to be able to remotely manage this distributed network of farms, collecting the kind of data that can inform better growing conditions for all Babylon farms. 

BabylonIQ uses machine learning and computer vision components to capture data from the farms that can optimize both plants’ grow recipes (light levels, temperature, etc.) and best practices across the Babylon Micro-Farms network. The company says the platform will eventually be able to learn from itself and improve processes over time, which in turn would hopefully lead to better-tasting greens, higher yields, and a higher nutritional profile per plant.

The emphasis on improving the software that powers farms is in keeping with something Babylon Micro-Farms CEO, Alexander Olesen, told The Spoon in 2020: that the company isn’t “necessarily interested in the hardware aspect going forward.” One potential direction the company could pursue is that of focusing primarily on software and bringing that expertise to a partnership with a separate hardware company. Nothing more has been officially said about that, though today’s news seems to point along that path. 

Meanwhile, a central “brain” for a network of smaller, module farms is still somewhat unique among controlled environment agriculture companies. Larger operations like Bowery or Plenty or even Square Roots have made much of their software systems that can remotely manage a network of farms. Babylon Micro-Farms is one of the first to do so for smaller-size farms found in cafeterias, hospitals, and other facilities that serve food. Farm.One is another such company.

Babylon Micro-Farms says this week’s Phase 2 grant also provides “financial resources to accelerate commercialization.”

June 21, 2021

Grubhub and Resorts World Las Vegas Partner on New Hotel Concept

Resorts World Las Vegas has announced a partnership with Grubhub for a new mobile order service. Guests of the forthcoming Resorts World Las Vegas property will be able to use the service to get food, drinks, and retail items for delivery and pickup during their stay.

Dubbed On The Fly at Resorts World Powered by Grubhub, the service lets guests order from all of the resort’s onsite food and beverage locations as well as certain retail stores. Items can be scheduled for pickup or delivered to the guest’s hotel room or the resort’s pool complex.

To use the service, Resorts World guests either access the Grubhub app or scan one of the many QR codes that will be located throughout the property. Users will also get the option to charge the purchase to their room, just as they would with a traditional room service order, or use their credit card. For poolside deliveries, guests access their order at a QR-code activated restaurant locker on the pool deck. 

The 88-acre Resorts World Las Vegas property will include three Hilton hotel brands in addition to the usual trappings of a Las Vegas property — casino, stores, restaurants, etc. The whole thing is slated to open this week, on June 24. 

It also marks the first time Grubhub’s service has been available at a hotel/casino property. The sheer size of Resorts World Las Vegas — three hotels and 40 food/bev outlets in an 88-acre property — gives Grubhub automatic access to a potentially huge customer base in Sin City. 

Last week, Netherlands-based Just Eat Takeaway.com said it had completed its acquisition of Grubhub, a $7.3 million all-stock deal that was originally announced one year ago. Currently, Grubhub’s strongest markets are New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. 

June 20, 2021

C3’s 10,000 New Kitchen Partners

Unless you make a point of regularly ordering from virtual restaurants, you may not yet have heard of names like Sam’s Krispy Chicken or Plant Nation. They, along with many others, are delivery-only brands created by C3 (Creating Culinary Communities), a restaurant company that’s lately been on a mission to get these brands into seemingly ever pocket of America. The company’s virtual restaurants are in hotels, residential buildings, and even brick-and-mortar food halls. And thanks to a recent deal, they’ll soon be available via a lot more restaurants, too. 

C3 announced last week it had struck a partnership with point-of-sale integration company Chowly, whose technology platform makes it easier for restaurants to manage online orders coming from multiple sales channels. Through the deal, Chowly’s restaurant customers will get the option to be a “host kitchen” for C3’s virtual restaurants and share in the revenue from those sales. 

Host kitchens, as the name suggests, are spaces within existing restaurant kitchens that are dedicated to fulfilling orders from virtual, delivery-only brands. Companies like Fat Brands and Wow Bao have popularized the concept among restaurants, giving underutilized kitchen space a purpose and hopefully making the business incremental revenue in the process.

In the last year, we’ve also seen the rise of companies whose main business is to come up with new restaurant concepts and license them out to existing restaurants. Besides C3, Ordermark launched its NextBite business based on this idea, and Virtual Restaurant Concepts (best known for Mr. Beast Burgers) offers a similar concept.

C3’s deal with Chowly will give restaurant customers that use the Chowly platform an easier way to sell delivery-only restaurant brands than they could do on their own. Rather than having to conceptualize and figure out how to market and deliver wholly new virtual brands, Chowly’s restaurant partners can simply license a turnkey solution from C3, who handles the marketing, branding, and technical logistics of the operation via its exclusive ordering/delivery app, Citizens Go. The restaurant just has to cook the food and get it out the door.

These restaurants could also potentially reach a wider demographic by offering more food types on top of their own menus. I never thought I’d write “Captain D’s” and “high-end plant-based burger” in the same sentence, but that scenario’s entirely possible since Captain D’s is an enterprise customer of Chowly and C3 has a plant-based brand called Plant Nation. A Captain D’s location also offering Plant Nation for delivery could reach new and different customers and add more revenues through such a deal.

For C3, the deal is arguably even more lucrative. Chowly has more than 10,000 kitchen partners across the U.S., all of whom will eventually be able to licenses C3’s brands. That’s a major jump from the 250 kitchens in which C3 is currently in. The company says it will reach 1,000 locations by the end of the year and be in 12,000 kitchens by 2023.

The Chowly deal will be a huge help to that process — and enable C3 to expand more rapidly than it would if it had to forge each new individual kitchen partnership. Chowly’s enterprise brands include the aforementioned Captain D’s, Clean Juice, and Dickey’s Barbecue Pit, all of which give C3 and automatic sizable reach. 

The partnership will launch with these enterprise brands before branching out to include smaller restaurants within the Chowly network. The goal is to make all of C3’s brands available to all of Chowly’s 10,000 restaurants at some point in the nearish future.

As C3, Virtual Restaurant Concepts, NextBite and other virtual restaurant companies scale up, one question to keep in mind is how these companies are ensuring quality control across tens of thousands of restaurant partners. In other words, Sam’s Krispy Chicken will need to taste the same in Seattle, Washington as it does in Atlanta, Georgia in order to become popular on a large scale over time. An overnight sensation like Mr. Beast is one thing. Sustained, long-term loyalty from customers is another challenge altogether, and one for which consistency and high quality are crucial.

More Headlines

OpenTable Launches New Tools to Discourage Diners From ‘Ghosting’ on Their Reservations – The initiative will take the form of forthcoming new digital tools as well as “blog and social content educating diners on the impact of ghosting a reservation.”

South Korea: Lounge Lab Opens Brown Bana Robot Ice Cream Shop – South Korean robotics company Lounge Lab announced today that it has opened Brown Bana, a robot-powered ice cream store in Seoul.

Deliveroo Is Running a Reusable Container Program in Paris – Deliveroo France and circular-packaging company barePack have started offering customers of the delivery service the option to get their food delivered in reusable containers.

June 18, 2021

GoPuff Acquires rideOS for $115M

On-demand delivery service GoPuff announced today it has acquired fleet management company rideOS, with TechCrunch also reporting a $115 million price tag for the deal after speaking with sources familiar with the matter.

GoPuff, which raised $1.5 billion this past March, operates a delivery service that can fulfill orders — anything from food to baby products to alcohol — in 30 minutes or less, 24/7. To do this, the company operates micro-fulfillment centers in residential areas of cities. The company currently has these centers in over 650 U.S. cities.

As it grows both the number of markets in which it operates as well as the number of fulfillment centers in each city, GoPuff will need to further optimize its delivery operations and tech, which is where rideOS comes into play. For GoPuff, the rideOS deal means access to the latter’s proprietary delivery, routing, and logistics technology as well as the expertise to build new technologies that can further reduce delivery times and enable new modes of delivery. 

GoPuff acquired alcohol retailer BevMo for $350 million in 2020 and the U.K.’s Fancy Delivery in May of this year.  

The rideOS acquisition comes at a time when on-demand delivery startups are raking in the investment dollars and expanding services. Currently, that list includes Weezy, Glovo, and Getir in Europe, and Food Rocket, Fridge No More, Gorillas and JOKR in the U.S.

The concept will realistically only work in dense residential areas, where micro-fulfillment centers can be located within blocks of customers. Receiving an order, fulfilling it, and delivering it in under 30 minutes to a customer in suburban or rural areas seems less feasible given the greater distances couriers must travel. That means large swaths of the U.S. will likely never see extensive implementations of these services, while competition will increase in more concentrated urban areas.

GoPuff acquiring a fleet-management software platform could give the company a strategic edge in terms of being able to optimize routes for delivery, decrease fulfillment times, and possibly even handle more inventory.

GoPuff said it expects to “significantly increase” headcount by the end of the year and expand its presence in Silicon Valley, Pittsburgh, and Berlin.

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