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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Business of Food

Delivery Hero Acquires Glovo’s Latin America Operations

Berlin, Germany-based Delivery Hero announced today it has acquired fellow third-party delivery service Glovo’s Latin American operations for €230 million (~$272M USD). The transaction is expected to close in the next few weeks, according to a press release from Delivery Hero.

The deal covers all Latin American countries in which Glovo operates: There is some overlap here, as Delivery Hero already has operations in Argentina, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. Acquiring Glovo obviously means Delivery Hero will widen its reach in Latin America considerably. 

Any delivery service aiming to enter or expand in the Latin America market will need to ensure they offer affordable options for restaurants. By some accounts, roughly 96 percent of independent restaurants in Latin America are not even online right now, and restaurant tech is far less developed than in, say, the U.S. and Europe. Even so, the Latin American market is the fastest-growing one outside the Asia-Pacific region.

Delivery Hero CEO Niklas Östberg said in today’s press release that Latin America “is a region with exceptional growth potential for online delivery.” 

The acquisition also means more consolidation for the Latin America food delivery sector. Glovo actually exited two Latin American markets earlier this year. Meanwhile, iFood and Domicillios.com merged in April and together compete with the other major player, Softbank-backed Rappi.

Delivery Hero’s last big acquisition was at the end of 2019 when the company bought its South Korean food delivery rival, Woowa Bros.’ Baedal Minjok service, for $4 billion. Prior to that, it had acquired InstaShop, an online grocery marketplace with operations in the Middle East and North Africa. Delivery Hero now operates in 44 countries worldwide.

Glovo will continue to operate its Latin America markets until March 2021, at which point, pending regulatory approval, they will become a part of Delivery Hero’s network.

Yelp: Permanent and Temporary Restaurant Closures Are Increasing

Roughly 61 percent of businesses listed as “closed” on Yelp have shuttered permanently, according to the platform’s latest Local Economic Impact report.

A total of 32,109 restaurants that were marked as open on the Yelp platform on March 1 are now closed, the new report details. Those numbers make the restaurant industry the most impacted by the pandemic of any business type on Yelp.

Those numbers, of course, only account for the restaurants listed on Yelp’s platform. The National Restaurant Association, which represents the entire restaurant industry, released its own findings this week that said 100,000 restaurants, or nearly one in six, are closed either permanently or for the long term. But whether you go by Yelp’s numbers or the Association’s more widespread findings, the conclusion is the same: the uptick in restaurant closures continues to rise.

As far as Yelp’s new data is concerned, restaurant closure rates vary across the country. As today’s report notes, “Bigger states and metros with higher rents and more stringent local operations for small businesses throughout the last six months have felt a greater toll.” Geographically speaking, California, Texas, Florida, and New York had the highest number of closures of states, while Los Angeles, NYC, San Francisco, Chicago, and Dallas topped the list for cities.

Types of restaurants with the most closures include breakfast/brunch spots, burger joints, sandwich shops, dessert places and Mexican restaurants.

Yelp’s report wasn’t all gloomy news, though. It also noted that some restaurants have been able to maintain low closure rates. Not surprisingly, those are the restaurants focusing on delivery and takeout, offering food that travels well. While a small silver lining, that point suggests the work restaurants have been doing for the last six months to shift their strategies towards more to-go-friendly formats is not in vain.

Yelp’s new report, along with the Association’s figures, both come just days after the the CDC released findings that suggest those who eat in restaurant dining rooms are twice as likely to be at risk for COVID-19.

Kbox Global Raises £12M to Expand Its Virtual Restaurant Network

Virtual restaurant platform Kbox Global announced this week it has raised £12 million (~$15.5 million USD) to expand its food delivery concept. The round was led by London-based venture firm Balderton Capital, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Founded in 2019 in London, Kbox operates more than 30 delivery-only restaurant brands. It licenses these brands, along with a technology stack, to restaurants and other foodservice operations looking for incremental revenue to add to their businesses.  

To do this, Kbox assesses each restaurant, including its location and main demographic, then uses those factors to choose the most relevant virtual restaurant brands for the business to offer. Restaurants cook and fulfill the orders themselves, with their existing staff, while Kbox’s tech stack integrates with third-party delivery services that handle the last mile of the delivery.

The company says there are no upfront fees for restaurants looking to utilize this concept, which is a way for restaurants to diversify their food offerings without investing in a full brick-and-mortar operation. In essence, restaurants are turning themselves into ghost kitchens for Kbox brands by partnering with the company.

The idea of one restaurant licensing and running a completely different brand from a third-party is a more recent development in the world of ghost kitchens, though Kbox isn’t alone in expanding the concept. Chicago-based Wow Bao said in April it was licensing its own menu to other restaurant brands in much the same manner as Kbox. Some Fatburger locations double as ghost kitchens for the chain’s sister brand Hurricane Grill & Wings. And let’s not forget about the celebrities launching their own virtual restaurant brands that existing businesses cook and fulfill. 

Needless to say, restaurants need any extra revenue they can get right now, thanks to the pandemic shuttering dining rooms left and right and all but forcing many brands to go the ghost kitchen route. However, we’ve yet to see many numbers about how financially fruitful it is to run a third-party brand out of one’s own restaurant kitchen.

For its part, Kbox says it is on track to have 2,000 of these kitchens in the UK before the end of 2021, and is also in the midst of an international expansion. The company has franchise agreements in Australia and India and says operations will launch in another eight countries at some point next year. The new capital from Balderton will support this expansion, as well as help Kbox establish a presence in the U.S. in earl 2021.

Surplus Food Startup Hungry Harvest Closes Series A Round at $13.7M

Food rescue startup Hungry Harvest has closed its Series A round at $13.7 million, according to a company press release. The round was led by Creadev with participation from Danone Manifesto Ventures, Quadia, and Maywic Select Investments.

Hungry Harvest is one of several companies out there rescuing “ugly” produce and other staples from groceries in an effort to curb food waste and redistribute food to those in need. The company collects fruits, vegetables, and other items deemed cosmetically unfit for mainstream retailers and packs them into variety boxes customers can order and have delivered to their doorsteps. Users can customize their boxes based on how often they cook, how many people they are feeding, and whether they prefer organic produce or will eat anything. Boxes range in price from $15 for a “Mini Harvest” all the way up to $42 for a “Super Organic Harvest.”

The company also donates to local organizations fighting food insecurity in the U.S. Hungry Harvest says it plans to use the new funds to improve the customer experience for its products and scale its social mission of getting affordable food to those in need. 

The concept of rescuing ugly produce from landfills has steadily grown in popularity over the last couple years as the world’s multibillion-dollar food waste problem becomes more top of mind for more consumers. Those consumers now have ample options when it comes to purchasing cheaper produce that would get tossed at a grocery store, including Karma, Imperfect Produce, and Misfits Market. Some of these companies are actually partnering with grocery stores, as Flashfood is doing with Meijer stores in Detroit. 

For it’s part, Hungry Harvest currently delivers to Baltimore, D.C., Philadelphia, Charlotte, Raleigh, Miami and Detroit.

Fighting Consumer Food Waste at Home Means Rethinking the Refrigerator

What’s the most effective way to fight food waste in the home? Take a look at your fridge.

Most consumers at this point are aware of the world’s multibillion food waste problem. A great many more now understand that, at least in North America and Europe, the bulk of that waste happens at consumer-facing stages of the food journey, including our own homes. What we’re less certain of is how to curb that excess.

Researching solutions for “The Consumer Food Waste Innovation Report,” which you can read on Spoon Plus, I came across a number of different methods for reducing food waste in the home. But after sifting through the many storage and preservation options out there, the meal-planning and meal-sharing apps, I’m left wondering if the trick to reducing at-home food waste isn’t just re-envisioning the refrigerator itself.

The appliance hasn’t changed much over the last several decades. But in 2020, the pandemic is keeping more folks at home, we have more information about how much food we’re actually wasting (it’s a ton), and more investment in the food tech sector in general. The convergence of those factors makes now an ideal time to change that point and introduce more innovation into the world of refrigerators. Here are a few ideas:

Smarter Features That Are Actually Affordable

By now, many consumers are at least aware of high-tech refrigerators that can track items placed in the fridge, alert owners when those items are running low, and scan and identify foods to help consumers plan meals and find recipes. LG’s ThinQ and the Samsung Family Hub are two appliances that lead the smart fridge market.

They also cost thousands of dollars, making them out of reach for most consumers. True, having cameras and image-recognition technology inside the fridge is a relatively new concept, so a higher price point is to be expected. But in order for the new applications of those technologies to be most effective, they’ll need to get cheaper. By that I mean, we’ll need to see options for them build into most fridges.

Another option is add-on tech for the fridge. As we note in the report, Smarter makes a device can be retrofitted for any fridge and recognize the items inside. Fridge Eye has a similar device.

Smaller Fridge, Bigger Freezer

“Everyone loses something in the back of the fridge,” food waste expert Dana Gunders told us when interviewed for the report. Her point is that the sheer size of most modern refrigerators means older items will get pushed out of view and forgotten as newer ones are placed in the fridge.

High-tech fixes like the ones mentioned above can help, but the fridge design itself seems ripe for an upgrade. Or downgrade, as it were, since a smaller fridge compartment with a bigger freezer might be a surefire way to reduce food waste. Much of our food, even items like milk and bread, can be frozen until we need to use them. And research shows that things like frozen fruits and vegetables maintain more or less the same nutrients as their fresh counterparts. 

Better Storage to Accompany the Fridge

Back in the 1930s, when the electric refrigerator was just starting to get popular, General Electric sold fridges by promoting the then-newish concept of leftovers to consumers. Along with tips and cookbooks, the appliance-maker sold food storage containers designed to stack up in the fridge and hold leftovers. 

Maybe to curb food waste, we need a kind of rebirth of that concept, this time geared towards curbing food waste and with a high-tech twist. Major appliance manufacturers could team up with startups like Mimica, BlakBear, or Silo to sell smarter storage options — think smart labels and temperature sensors — alongside their appliances. They could also find ways to integrate some of those new technologies into fridge doors, drawers, and other compartments.

For more thoughts on the reinvention of the refrigerator as well as how else we can fight food waste at home, check out the full “Consumer Food Waste Innovation” report at Spoon Plus.

The CDC’s New Findings Put Restaurant Tech In the Hot Seat Once Again

The big restaurant news over the weekend was a new set of findings from the CDC that suggest a higher risk for COVID-19 among those who eat in restaurant dining rooms.

The inescapably obvious point is that the findings are worrying for restaurants planning to reopen or increase the capacity of their dining rooms. That in turn brings up a less-obvious point, that the so-called contactless technologies out there that say they’ll make restaurants safer have yet to prove their value.

As has been extensively covered, the CDC’s report found that adults who test positive for COVID-19 were “approximately twice as likely to have reported dining at a restaurant” than those who tested negative.

These are exactly the types of findings the restaurant industry has tried to avoid, and it has used a lot of tech to do that. When dining rooms first started to reopen, restaurant tech companies rushed to bring contactless “kits” — software that enables digital menus, ordering, and payments — to market. There are now so many of these offerings it’s often hard to distinguish one from the next.

To be super-duper clear, no company is claiming they’ll fend off COVID-19 with a QR-code enabled menu feature. It’s also worth noting that we don’t have extensive data yet on how many restaurants (including those in the CDC study) have actually implemented contactless software, which is expensive and a time-consuming process.

While we don’t know how vast contactless implementations are, we know restaurant tech companies use phrases like “safe,” “contact-free,” and “end-to-end contactless experience” all over their marketing copy and product-speak nowadays. 

But giving a piece of software the “contactless” label and actually eliminating (as opposed to minimizing) human-to-human contact in the dining room are two different things. Customers might be able to browse a menu, order a meal, and pay for it from their own device, but someone still has to run the food to the table, refill drinks, and step in if there is a problem with the order. Humans still cook and plate the food, and even spreading tables further apart won’t necessarily stop the spread of coronavirus. (One study found that infectious droplets can spread up to 16 feet away from the infected person.)

In their current form, contactless restaurant tech solutions can’t totally eradicate human intervention in the restaurant experience. Even if it could, there are still the other diners to contend with (see above), which means contactless tech can’t completely wipe out the risk that someone will get COVID-19 from going out to eat. Hence the CDC’s latest findings.

What contactless tech can do is speed up the order and pay process, help restaurants keep labor costs lower (fewer staff to pay), and even drive more people to restaurants’ native mobile apps instead of third-party delivery platforms. It can also speed up formats like curbside pickup and drive-thru, areas where restaurant operators should perhaps spend the bulk of their energy implementing contactless tech.

For now, at least, all signs point to off-premises formats like drive-thru and takeout as the areas where restaurants should be spending the bulk of their energy, period. The National Restaurant Association just released new figures that note one in six restaurants have closed either permanently or for the long term. I doubt the CDCs findings will make that number any less bleak anytime soon. For the present, restaurants should continue to focus on developing their off-premises formats, whether that’s faster curbside service via contactless tech, a ghost kitchen, or even a makeshift drive-thru lane.

As far as the dining room is concerned, it may be time for bolder moves than a QR code. By that I mean more robots to do things like run food and wash dishes, and more creative ways of arranging the dining room layout. In other words, it’s probably going to take more than iterative tech to get the restaurant biz back on its feet.

Delivery Hero Partners With World Food Programme to Integrate Donations Into Its Apps

Berlin, Germany-based Delivery Hero announced today it has partnered with the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) to integrate the latter’s ShareTheMeal program into its own delivery platforms.

WFP launched ShareTheMeal, also based in Berlin, in 2015. Anyone who downloads the app can use it to donate money that will go towards ShareTheMeal’s goal of getting 800 million meals to those in need over the next five years.

But since a growing number of folks nowadays already use delivery apps, ShareTheMeal and Delivery Hero decided to bake the donation functionality right into the delivery platform. Via an API, ShareTheMeal will be integrated into Delivery Hero’s apps. After placing an order, Delivery Hero customers will see a button that says “Donate a Meal.” Upon pressing it, they can choose from three different meal options based on how much they want to donate. The donation is tacked onto the total price at the checkout stage of the transaction.

The idea is to make the process of donating meals as easy and “seamless” as ordering delivery for oneself.

And it’s not the first time a third-party delivery services has tried donations. Uber Eats, for example, launched an in-app donation feature for restaurants early on in the pandemic. DoorDash, meanwhile, has partnerships with Copia, Replate, and other companies to divert food from landfills and redistribute it to those in need.

Delivery Hero is one of the world’s largest third-party delivery platforms outside of China, and a high-profile partnership with a UN subsidiary will hopefully translate to more meals donated around the world. To start, the ShareTheFood integration will be in Delivery Hero’s delivery platforms in Austria, Bulgaria, Finland, Malaysia, Norway, Romania, and Sweden. The company says more markets will follow soon.

National Restaurant Assoc.: Nearly 1 in 6 Restaurants Closed During Pandemic

Approximately 100,000, or nearly 1 in 6 restaurants, are closed either permanently or for the long term, according to new data from a National Restaurant Association survey released today. Adding to the bad news, the Association reports that 3 million restaurant workers are still out of work and projects that the industry is on track to lose $240 billion this year.

The news comes six months into the COVID-19 pandemic that continues its sustained presence here in the U.S. The restaurant industry was hit particularly hard, especially in the early months of the pandemic as state and local governments across the country forced closures of restaurant dining rooms. Many restaurants have re-opened, but at a reduced capacity and with greater reliance on off-premises formats like delivery and takeout.

The Association’s survey asked restaurant operators about the six-month impact of the COVID pandemic, and discovered that most restaurants are hanging on by a thread and don’t see a bright outlook over the next six months.

Specific findings from the Association’s survey include:

  • Restaurant sales were down an average of 34 percent.
  • The foodservice industry lost $165 billion in revenue between March and July and is on track to lost $240 billion this year.
  • The majority (60 percent) of restaurant operators say that their operational costs are higher now than pre-pandemic.
  • Restaurant staffing levels are at 71 percent of what they would normally be.
  • Forty percent of operators doubt that their restaurant will be in business six months from now without additional assistance from the U.S. government.

The survey adds more data that continues to paint a bleak outlook for the restaurant industry. In July, a Yelp survey found that 60 percent of closed restaurants were shuttered permanently.

The bad news won’t just end with restaurant closures, however. There is an entire tech industry built on the backs of restaurants including POS software, inventory management, staffing, and delivery integration, not to mention the equipment and other hardware manufacturers.

The permanent shuttering of so many restaurants could also lead to less diversity and further consolidation of the restaurant biz — in other words, fewer local sandwich shops and more Subways and other chains that have the size and revenue to withstand this tumult.

In response to the tumult, restaurants large and small have turned to all manner of solutions, from ad hoc drive-thrus to ghost kitchens to creative attempts at outdoor dining. All these efforts should be applauded. None of them guarantee the future of the dining room or the independent restaurant. Like the Association’s survey today, they suggest that the last six months have forever altered the restaurant experience as we knew it.

Spoon Plus: The Consumer Food Waste Innovation Report

Nowadays, governments, grocery retailers, industries like agriculture and grocery, tech companies, and many others are working to fight food waste at both the local and international level. In the developed world, at least, much of that focus over the last 12 months has been on the consumer kitchen, which is responsible for by far the most food waste in those regions.

This report will examine why so much food is wasted in the consumer kitchen, what new technologies and processes can be leveraged to fight that waste, and the companies working to change consumers’ relationship to both food and waste.

Report highlights include:

  • One-third of the world’s food goes to waste annually. In the U.S. and Europe, the majority of that waste happens downstream, at consumer-facing businesses and in the home.

  • Food waste at home is a three-part problem that stems from a lack of awareness about waste, inadequate information and skill sets around home cooking, and the convenience economy driving consumer behavior.

  • Grocery store shopping, current recipe formats, inconsistent date labels, and a lack of smart storage solutions for grocery purchases and restaurant leftovers are the main drivers of at-home food waste.

  • The refrigerator itself may be one of the single biggest contributors to food waste. Moving forward, appliance-makers will need to consider overhauling the appliance’s entire design to help consumers fight food waste.

  • Solutions for fighting food waste will come from a range of different players. For tech companies, areas of focus will include more smart appliances and more tech-enabled storage systems as well as meal-planning and meal-sharing apps.

Companies profiled in this report include LG, Samsung, Vitamix, Smarter, Ovie, Bluapple, Mimica, Blakbear, Silo, Mealhero, MealBoard, Kitche, No Waste, Ends & Stems, and Olio.

Introduction: The Size of the World’s Food Waste Problem

In 2012, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released the first edition of its now-famous report, “Wasted, How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food From Farm to Fork to Landfill.” That report proved to be a groundbreaking look at the inefficiencies in the U.S. food system that lead to massive amounts of food waste from the farm all the way into the average person’s kitchen. 

The report also proved to one of the biggest catalysts for change in recent years. Since its publication, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced federal targets to cut food waste by 50 percent by 2030 — the first goal of its kind in the U.S. Similarly, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 12.3 seeks to “halve global food waste at retail and consumer levels, as well as to reduce food loss during production and supply.” As NRDC noted in the second edition of “Wasted,” published in 2017, food businesses have made commitments to reduce waste, and 74 percent of consumers polled say fighting food waste is important to them. Most recently, the Consumer Goods Forum launched its Food Waste Coalition that aims, in part, to support SDG 12.3 by focusing on consumer-facing areas of food waste like home and retail. And these are just as sampling of the countless efforts happening on both international and local levels in the war on food waste.

Even so, the oft-cited figure, that one-third of the world’s food supply goes to waste, is as relevant now as it was nearly a decade ago when NRDC first published its report.

In 2020, food waste is a multibillion-dollar problem with environmental, economic, and human costs that grow more urgent as the world advances towards a 10-billion-person population. The United Nations’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates food waste’s global carbon footprint to be 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases, and that economic losses of this food waste total $750 billion annually. The United Kingdom’s Food Waste Recycling Action Plan (WRAP) notes that keeping food scraps out of landfills would be the equivalent of removing 20 percent of cars in Britain from the roads. Meanwhile, over in the U.S., rescuing just 15 percent of the food we waste could feed 25 million Americans each year, or well over half of the 40 million Americans facing food insecurity.  

Worldwide, different regions waste food in different ways. UN estimates show that per capita waste by consumers in Europe and North America totals to 95-115 kg/year. That number drops significantly, to 6-11 kg/year, in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeastern Asia. Overall, 40 percent of losses occur at post-harvest and processing levels in developing countries. Not so in developed nations, where over 40 percent of food waste occurs at retail and consumer levels.

Given the enormous amounts of waste occurring at the consumer level in Europe and North America, it makes sense that recent efforts towards fighting food waste now go towards understanding how and why food gets wasted downstream, at grocery stores, restaurants, and, most importantly, within consumers’ own homes.

The full report is available to subscribers of Spoon Plus. To find out more about Spoon Plus, click here. Use discount code NEWMEMBER to get 15% off an annual or monthly subscription. 

Just Salad Launches a ‘Climatarian’ Menu for Digital Orders

Fast-casual chain Just Salad announced today that it will launch its “Climataraian” menu on September 17. The menu, available exclusively for orders placed via the chain’s app and website, will collect and feature those Just Salad items with the lowest greenhouse gas emissions, according to an email sent to The Spoon. It will also display the carbon footprint and GHGs for each item.

The Climatarian menu will have two categories. The “Carbon Counter” is for customers wishing to have the bare minimum of carbon emissions associated with their meal. The “Conscientious Carnivore” is for “meat-eaters concerned about climate change.” The carbon footprint of each item in these categories will be displayed via the digital menu.

Just Salad hasn’t limited this carbon labeling to just menu items on the Climatarian menu. As the company announced back in June, all menu items on the Just Salad app and website will now come with a corresponding carbon footprint, which reflects total GHGs associated with the production of each item. The official rollout of these labels will happen alongside the launch of the Climatarian menu and apply even to “build your own” offerings. 

These menu additions seem aimed at taking some of the guesswork out of eco-friendly eating for consumers. It remains to be seen if seeing “0.41 kg CO2e” and “0.77 kg CO2e” labels on a menu will actually motivate customers to choose the more climate-friendly option in the same way they might choose the lower-calorie option when faced with the numbers. Carbon labeling on restaurant menus is practically unheard of at this point, so it’s reasonable to expect an adoption curve. 

Both the carbon labeling and the Climatarian menu offer us a glimpse of how versatile the digital menu of the future could be in terms of the information it provides. For example, carbon labels could automatically adjust in real time to include GHGs associated with last-mile delivery. And with more restaurant menus going digital and the sustainable restaurant discussion again becoming a priority, Just Salad likely won’t long be the only chain offering environmental info on its menu items. 

This week’s news folds into Just Salad’s larger sustainability goals, which include ditching single-use plastics and sending zero waste to landfills by 2022.

Beyond Meat Launches New Plant-Based Meatballs

Beyond Meat announced today that it has launched Beyond Meatballs, a new line of pre-formed and pre-seasoned plant-based meatballs that will be available at select grocers nationwide starting this week.

According to the press announcemt, Beyond’s new meatballs, which are derived from peas and brown rice have:

  • 19g of plant-based protein
  • 30 percent less saturated fat and sodium than leading brands of animal-based meatballs
  • No cholesterol, antibiotics or hormones

Beyond said this is the company’s third new retail product launch for this year, but really it’s more like two and a half. The company launched its plant-based sausage at retail in March, then launched its Cookout Classic in June, but the latter was really a bulk re-packaging of its existing burgers.

The addition of meatballs is more of a convenience play. Sure, you could make your own plant-based meatballs by forming them out of the ground Beyond Meat. But that takes more work. Having meatballs ready to go for a sandwich or spaghetti is a smart way to diversify your flexitarian menu-planning options.

Beyond’s announcement today also continues the rapid back and forth announcements that have gone on all summer long between Beyond and its main rival, Impossible Foods. As I wrote earlier, most of the announcements from the two plant-based giants have been about scale and not entirely new lines of products (i.e., new kinds of plant-based meat) and these Beyond Meatballs continue that trend.

The Beyond Meatballs will hit retailers such as Whole Foods, Stop & Shop, Kroger and Albertsons across the U.S. this week and continue rolling out through October. They will have a suggested retail price of $6.99 for 12 meatballs.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post said that the meatballs would be available in early October.

Time to Recirculate the To-Go Cup Debate

Since we now live in a world where the to-go order is the main attraction at restaurants, we need to start treating the issue of excess single-use packaging with a whole lot more urgency.

Clearly I’m not the only one to have that thought, as two major QSR chains made sustainability announcements of their own this week. Both are aimed at reducing the amount of plastic that winds up in landfills and the ocean — no small feat considering the billions of single-use cups, straws, and containers we throw out each year, thanks in no small part to the convenience-driven delivery and to-go craze. 

On Thursday, Starbucks, sent out an update saying its “strawless lids” are now “the standard for iced beverages” at stores in the U.S. and Canada. The lids use roughly 9 percent less plastic than the normal lid-and-straw combo. The rollout of these lids applies to company-owned and licensed Starbucks stores, and is expected to be completed by the end of the month. Straws will still be available upon request. 

It’s an important milestone, especially considering Starbucks is arguably responsible for the populace’s current fixation with fancy drinks in plastic or plastic-coated cups. But it doesn’t actually remove single-use plastics from equation.

The latest initiative from McDonald’s does. This week, the company announced a partnership with zero-waste platform Loop to create a reusable cup program at McDonald’s locations in the UK. Users can opt for a reusable cup, for which they leave a small deposit that’s retrieved when they return the cup. Loop collects the empties, washes and sanitizes them, and puts them back into circulation. The concept is reminiscent of Dishcraft Robotics’ “dishes-as-a-service” model, which recently added reusable takeout containers to the items it collects, washes, and returns to the foodservice loop.

The obvious drawback here is that putting down a deposit at McDonald’s and then taking the time to return the cup is inconvenient. Inconvenience doesn’t sell with many consumers these days (which is another separate issue itself). 

A reusable cup system is, however, a bolder move than simply reducing plastic, and bold moves are what we need right now to get excessive packaging out of the foodservice world. That the McDonald’s pilot is coming from a multi-billion corporation with a $4 billion digital business is encouraging. But to become widespread, the entire restaurant industry is going to have to pitch in, from the major chains and supply companies to delivery services, mom-and-pop stores, and consumers themselves.

That’s no small ask at a time when the restaurant industry is utterly crippled from the pandemic and small chains and independent restaurants are permanently shuttering at an alarming pace. But with off-premises orders being the future of restaurants for the foreseeable future, no one can afford to shelve the glaring issue of single-use packaging for much longer, not without risking further environmental consequences.

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Zomato Raises $100M, Plans IPO

Zomato, one of India’s largest food delivery services, announced this week it has raised $100 million from Tiger Global and is preparing for an IPO in 2021.

The news is just another layer of development to what’s been a very busy year for Zomato. The company bought Uber Eats’ India business in March, raised a $5 million Series J round in April, and unveiled a grocery delivery service in the same month. It had to cut 13 percent of its workforce in May (thanks, pandemic), but things are clearly looking up for the service, as it raised $62 million from Temasek and just days ago said in a blog post that “recovery trends are strong.”

A prospective IPO is another sign of that recovery. In a letter to employees reviewed by TechCrunch, Zomato co-founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal set “sometime in the first half of next year” as a timeline for said IPO. At the moment the company has “no immediate plans” on how it will spend the investment from Tiger Global, if it spends it at all. Goyal called the cash a “war-chest” for future M&A and for fighting price wars from competition.

Given that Zomato competes fiercely with Swiggy for the Indian food delivery market, and given the consolidation the entire third-party delivery industry is undergoing, having a war chest doesn’t seem like a bad move right now.

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

Fast-casual chain Sweetgreen this week launched Collections, a new digital-only menu available through the restaurant’s app and website. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, menu items are curated according to specific themes and dietary preferences/restrictions, and will make recommendations that are unique to each individual customer.

Order-ahead platform Allset has teamed up with digital ordering platform Olo to streamline the pickup order process for participating restaurants. Olo’s system lets restaurants manage menus, pricing, and order fulfillment across multiple third-party platforms, thus creating fewer manual workflows for restaurant staff.

Starting Sept. 30, NYC restaurants will be allowed to operate indoor dining rooms at 25 percent capacity. The announcement, made by Gov. Andrew Cuomo this week, comes just as the city gears up for the colder days ahead that will limit outdoor seating for most businesses.