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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Business of Food

NPD: 93 Million American Adults are Meal Kit Curious

The potential market for meal kits isn’t tapped out, as new research from NPD finds that 93 million adults in the U.S. still haven’t tried meal kits, but want to.

NPD said that the move from mail order to retail is attracting new customers, and the research firm lists three reasons why meal kits present a big opportunity:

  1. Users are highly satisfied with their meal kit purchases both online and in-store.
  2. Users are still experimenting with brands and formats, so their habits aren’t set yet.
  3. Meal kits can be more than just dinner, providing an opportunity for new categories and brands.

NPD also outlined who is buying meal kits:

Meal kit users are more likely to be Millennials, have households with kids, and higher incomes. Online and in-store meal kits appeal to similar demographic groups although in-store kits skew to households with children less than 13 years old and higher income levels.

NPD’s numbers mirror and reinforce a recent Nielsen survey that found that retail outlets have been the main source of growth for the meal kit industry, and that 23 percent of US households would consider purchasing a meal kit in the next six months. Nielsen also found that meal kits were being purchased by more affluent households.

All of this is to say that meal kits are–to paraphrase Monty Python–not dead yet, and in fact have the potential to be very much alive and thrive. The move into retail has been a shot in the arm for the meal kit sector and the shift is just getting underway. Kroger, which owns Home Chef, and Albertsons, which owns Plated, just started the nationwide rollout of meal kits in earnest last year.

With this much headroom to grow, we can expect to see more of a marketing push to parlay shoppers’ store loyalty into meal kit loyalty.

With USPTO Denial, Perfect’s Lawsuit Against Drop Moves to Trial

The ongoing, multi-year, multi-patent infringement legal battle Perfect Company brought against Adaptics Ltd, maker of the Drop cooking system, will be heading to federal court this summer. This next phase of the lawsuit comes after the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) denied institution of Inter Partes Review. Perfect announced the decision in a press release yesterday.

Without getting too far into the legal weeds, an Inter Partes Review (IPR) is:

“… a trial proceeding conducted at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board to review the patentability of one or more claims of an issued patent.” (via Smith & Hopen, U.S. registered patent attorneys)

Basically, it was Drop’s last chance to keep this lawsuit, which started in 2014, from going to trial. This IPR denial was over Perfect’s Patent 9,772,217, and follows a previous legal win for Perfect over its Patent 8,829,365. With both patents upheld by the USPTO board, the lawsuit moves on to trial in federal court in Tacoma, WA from June 3 – 6, 2019.

At its center, the dispute is over patents around the use of smart scales for weighing ingredients that communicate with apps for guided cooking. Perfect Company products include: Perfect Drink app-controlled bartending system, Perfect Bake app-controlled baking system and Perfect Kitchen PRO app-controlled smart kitchen system. The company also licenses out its technology for products include the Vitamix Perfect Blend and the NutriBullet Balance.

Drop started out in the hardware space, making its own connected cooking scale, but later abandonded that that in favor of integrating its software platform into the likes of GE Appliances, LG, Thermomix and Kenwood.

I spoke with Perfect Company CEO, Michael Wallace yesterday about the IPR denial, and asked him what the end goal of the lawsuit is. “What we’re really doing is protecting our space and our IP with our patents,” Wallace said, “The Adaptics guys have refused to pay a royalty or agree to our terms for a license.”

We reached out to Drop, and its Co-Founder and CEO Ben Harris provided us with the following statement:

“While Drop does not comment on pending litigation, we don’t infringe any of Perfect’s patents and are continuing to challenge the validity of Perfect’s patents in Federal Court. We look forward to our court date in June when a jury will finally decide if Perfect’s patents are valid and remain focused on our mission of building the KitchenOS, a unified solution for the smart kitchen that connects the whole cooking journey, of which Drop Scale is just one of hundreds of appliances.”

What was of particular note in the press announcement surrounding the latest USPTO ruling is that Perfect called out Drop investor Alsop Louie by name. Alsop Louie Partners led the $8 million Series A that Drop raised last year, and I asked Wallace why Perfect mentioned them specifically.

“Alsop made a big bet on them. We thought it was important,” said Wallace, “This is a big investment bet. We decided to call that out. The money they are spending on this case are investment dollars.”

Whether this rattles Drop’s investor remains to be seen, but unless this dispute settles relatively soon, we’ll see both parties in court.

WeWork Launches WeWork Food Labs, an Innovation Lab & Accelerator For the Future of Food

Affordable workspace is hard enough to come by in old New York when you’re an independent company on a shoestring budget. For independent food startups, it’s twice as difficult because it involves finding both office and kitchen space. Unless you have deep pockets and a good realtor, looking for either of makes getting your wisdom teeth removed sound fun.

To provide both and also foster young, innovative companies across the food chain, WeWork has launched WeWork Food Labs, an innovation hub for food companies that rolls physical workspace, programming, a startup accelerator, and a food industry community into one package. And, as the name suggests, it’s specifically aimed at startups across multiple areas of the food industry, from food robotics and AI to alternative proteins, new ingredients like CBD, kitchen appliances, and logistics — all areas WeWork suggests are areas ripe for disruption.

According to materials obtained by The Spoon, WeWork calls Food Labs “the first of its kind workspace and global platform dedicated to startups impacting the future of food.” The program is designed to help startups grow and at the same time tackle issues in the food industry that become more pressing each year: How do we feed a predicted 10 billion people worldwide by 2050? How do we do so while also lowering carbon emissions, cutting back the amount of land we use, and teaching consumers about chronic disease like diabetes and obesity?

Food Labs will use two different programs, or “tracks,” to work with companies looking to solve those issues (and others).

The first track is what WeWork refers to as its “continuous programming.” Pretty much any startup in the food industry is welcome to apply. WeWork will choose between 40 and 60 companies from the pool of applicants. Those companies then get get access to the WeWork Food Labs facility, which will be housed on the eighth and ninth floors of the WeWork offices at 511 W 25th St. in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.

The space will look and function much like a regular WeWork space, with both open and private desk areas, conference rooms, phone booths, and other WeWork office fixtures. In addition, Food Labs will also house an R&D kitchen, a photo studio, showcase space for CPGs, a mock merchandising area, and a tasting table. The rooftop will hold space for urban agriculture along with other green spaces. Startups working out of Food Labs will also have the chance to use the space for events.

While space is the biggest benefit here, it should also be noted that participating companies will, by joining Food Labs, get access to The We Company’s 400,000-strong body of members, all of whom are potential new customers. WeWork noted that “Food Labs can create massive impact by powering sustainable, accessible, nutritious and delicious food solutions for The We Company’s global community.”

Those companies selected to be part of the track are encouraged to hang on to their membership for at least one year. Given the lack of space in New York City for food businesses, I doubt that will be an issue.

You can see a few renderings of the forthcoming space at the end of this post.

Food Labs’ second track is more of a traditional startup accelerator format: a shorter-term program that helps startups move from one specific stage of growth to another. As is the case with most accelerators, selection criteria is more rigid here, and WeWork will select between six and eight companies to participate in each cohort. Selected participants take part in a five-month program and get opportunities for grants, equity investment, and follow-on funding. They can also use the WeWork Food Labs space sans membership fee.

For the accelerator, WeWork has allocated $1 million to be shared across the selected companies.

WeWork getting into the food innovation game isn’t completely surprising news. The company has long been a champion of cutting edge startups, and the food and beverage industry is teeming with them right now. As well, WeWork has tried to be at the forefront of certain movements in the food industry, most notably by cutting meat from its menu and meal-reimbursement policy in July of 2018, citing environmental concerns as the chief reason for the move. And the company invested in foodtech earlier this year by backing (an undisclosed sum) surfer Laird Hamilton’s superfood startup, Laird Superfood.

WeWork hasn’t yet chosen participants for its accelerator. According to a press release sent out today, the company is currently taking applications. Food Labs Programming kicks off in Spring 2019; the flagship space in Chelsea will open in October 2019.

According to materials sent to The Spoon, the NYC Food Labs location will be the first of several. There aren’t specifics yet, but Denver and Seattle are on the list of potentials, as are places where food insecurity is an especially an especially urgent issue to fix. For those locations, WeWork has said it will work with organizations like The World Food Programme and “propel innovation” and make food “more accessible, nutritious and sustainable.” Right now, that list of cities includes: Mumbai, India; São Paulo, Brazil; Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Barranquilla, Colombia; and Bangkok, Thailand.

Disclosure: The Spoon is a launch partner with WeWork Food Labs. Read Mike’s Publisher’s Note here to learn more about why we’ve teamed up with WeWork and the editorial standards we’ve put in place for coverage of WeWork Labs companies moving forward.

Eatsa Unveils New Features for Virtual Restaurants, Powers Deliveroo’s Food Hall

Restaurant automation company eatsa announced yesterday a new suite of products aimed specifically at virtual restaurants and delivery-only restaurant concepts. Third-party delivery service Deliveroo is the first to use the technology, at its new food hall in Singapore.

This is eatsa’s first foray into virtual restaurants, also called ghost kitchens, which are basically restaurant-grade kitchen spaces with no dining area and, most of the time, not even a pickup area. More and more restaurants are using these to offload delivery orders from the main kitchen or test out new food concepts. Some restauranteurs also use them to kickstart a brand in a cheaper, less risky way than would be with a full-service operation.

To that end, eatsa’s new tech suite is all about making the prep, pickup, and delivery of food more efficient. New software, called the Omnichannel Intelligent Queue Software, calculates the exact status of an order based on kitchen throughput. With that capability, the eatsa app can give a customer a minute-by-minute status update. For drivers, this more precise ETA helps them know exactly when to get to the restaurant to pick up the food, so it doesn’t sit for too long.

Drivers also get some directional help via the new features — literally. Eatsa’s already known for its digital status boards it has up in restaurants. A version of these will be in the virtual kitchens, along with pickup stations. Eatsa’s shelf-like surfaces that are controlled by sensors and can display the name on the order as well as branding for the third-party service delivering the order.

The first customer for eatsa’s new features is Delveroo, who just opened another Editions site, at Alice @ Mediapolis in Singapore. Customers can order delivery or pickup from the food hall, which features 10 kitchens serving Korean, Vietnamese, Greek, and Japanese food (among other types). In the case of pickup, customers order at self-service kiosks in the hall and retrieve it from one of eatsa’s cubbies, which function much the same way as the aforementioned shelf system.

Companies across the delivery chain are now involved in virtual restaurants and ghost kitchens, from companies like Kitchen United, who rents out kitchen space, to Uber Eats, who might start peddling its own restaurants and food concepts via ghost kitchens.

Eatsa has already teamed up with a few notable names over the last couple years, for traditional restaurants, including Wow Bao in Chicago and MAC’D in San Francisco. The eatsa tech’s popularity is said to be soaring, and expanding overseas and teaming up with a high-profile company like Deliveroo seems to prove that point.

It’s smart for the company to move into the virtual kitchen space, where it’s tech could help it stand out quite a bit. As CEO Tim Young told me a while back, the company’s system is designed to make restaurant operations easier and more efficient, and it’s end-to-end, which means you can roll up every step of your operation into a single system. As restaurants large and small adjust to a world where mobile order and delivery needs to be as efficient as in-house dining, an all-in-one automated platform like eatsa’s could solve several problems at once.

Uber Eats Is Doing Ghost Kitchens. Here’s How That Could Change Food Delivery

A Bloomberg article from yesterday reported that Uber has a pilot program underway in Paris where it rents out commercial-grade kitchen space to restaurants selling food through the company’s Uber Eats app.

An anonymous source who spoke to Blooomberg said Uber has been leasing space in Paris on the down low since 2018 and stocking it with kitchen equipment. Uber then rents those spaces out to “restauranteurs planning eateries that cater exclusively to delivery customers.” According to the source, Uber has not publicly announced this pilot program.

Setting aside the potential conflict this could ignite with Uber co-founder and ex-CEO Travis Kalanick — who operates his own ghost kitchen concept in Los Angeles — a heavyweight company like Uber/Uber Eats getting involved in ghost kitchens could majorly impact the rest of the food delivery space.

As more software, apps, sales channels, and companies enter the restaurant food delivery space, fulfilling the influx of orders remains an operational headache for most restaurants. One food industry player, ClusterTruck CEO Chris Baggot, noted ealier this year, part of the problem is that restaurants treat delivery as an add-on business rather than the business. But delivery is projected to grow 12 percent per year for the next five years, and does create financial and operational issues for restaurants as they try and accommodate this growth. And lately, both established brands wanting to try new concepts and independent operators who lack the capital for a full-service restaurant are turning to ghost kitchens as a solution.

If Uber were to operate its own ghost kitchens on a widespread basis, it could save many a restaurant some of the hassles listed above. To be clear: we don’t yet know a whole lot about Uber’s kitchens in Paris right now, and the company isn’t publicly discussing the pilot program yet.

At the same time, it’s not hard to imagine a third-party delivery service taking over more of the operations up and down the operational stack. Uber suggested that much last year when it acquired Ando, David Chang’s delivery-only ghost kitchen restaurant. As Allan Weiner wrote at the time, the acquisition suggested food delivery companies like Uber Eats were on their way to becoming suppliers of “vertical consolidation.”

There’s another phrase for that: “walled garden.” It’s a controversial business concept, chiefly because of the amount of power it gives to the company, who controls the information or product available to a consumer (think Facebook Messenger not chatting with Apple Messages). Translated to the restaurant world, that would mean Uber controlling the choices that pop up when you search “Mexican Food” on their app, thereby limiting the restaurants you see to the ones who work directly with Uber.

But if we go by the Bloomberg article, Uber’s Paris kitchens are aimed at restaurant operators planning delivery-only concepts, which means those “restaurants” aren’t yet on the market. There’s no consumer choice to limit (which is the main objection to walled gardens), because these new restaurants wouldn’t be available without Uber.

For consumers, then, a vertically integrated Uber delivery stack could actually mean more choice, as they would get a chance to discover new restaurant choices they wouldn’t have otherwise had access to.

The other side of that coin is that it could “uberize” the restaurant industry. It might make financial sense for an independent restaurant to team with Uber and in the process save on costs, but doing so triggers the question of how much control Uber would then get over the restaurant brand. Would the Uber logo have to appear on all promotional materials? On packaging? Would Uber demand a say in the menu? Would it be the one to decide when to pull the plug if business wasn’t up to snuff?

We can’t get the exact the answers based on one lone article. But there’s no denying the presence of third-party delivery services with ghost kitchens. Both DoorDash and Postmates have dabbled in renting out kitchen space to restaurants. Grubhub invested $1 million in 2018 in Green Summit Group, one of the old guard of ghost kitchens. And Deliveroo operates not just its own kitchens in Europe but also a food hall.

If Uber’s really serious about this walled-garden approach to delivery, we can expect to see the other major players trying out their own vertically integrated restaurants, starting with the ghost kitchen.

Cinder Rises From the Ashes, Backers to Get Their Grills Courtesy of Desora

Cinder Grill, the crowdfunded smart countertop cooking device that, errr flamed out last year (read our coverage of the legal saga), appears to be reborn, courtesy of an acquisition by Desora, who announced the news today.

In a pretty rare turn of events, the nearly 1,000 people who backed Cinder on Indiegogo will actually be getting the product they paid for! Most backers of failed hardware project get bupkis, but Desora posted the following on the crowdfunding platform today:

The Cinder Grill and its technologies were acquired and absorbed by Desora. Cinder is now being reintroduced as part of the Desora family of precision grilling and food products, including iKamand, a smart grill controller, ProJoe, Classic III, and Big Joe III, high-caliber grills powered by Desora. All of you who have supported Cinder previously will be receiving your grills as we bring the product to the U.S. market.

The Cinder can also be purchased online now for $429.

Upon hearing the news, we had a few questions, the first of which being, who is Desora? The company hadn’t come across our radar, but it has the aforementioned line of outdoor grill and grill control products including the iKamand smart grill temperature controller, so the Cinder acquisition is on brand for the company. According to Crunchbase, Desora has raised an undisclosed Series A round from Morningside Group, a Shanghai-based “private investment group founded in 1986 by the Chan family of Hong Kong.”

In the press announcement, Desora said it acquired Cinder in November 2018, which is a month after Cinder filed for bankruptcy UPDATE: Following the publication of this article, I learned from Desora’s CEO that his company’s acquisition offer was made before Palate Home actually filed the bankruptcy paperwork.. As we wrote back in October:

Chapter 7 bankruptcy means that Palate Home’s assets will be sold off to pay its creditors. What this means for the future of the technology behind Cinder is unclear. Will the underlying IP be acquired and baked into a different product?

We reached out to Desora to see if we could suss out any further details around the acquisition, the state of manufacturing and the future of the Cinder.

Instacart Expands Its Alcohol-Delivery Services to 14 U.S. States

Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, Instacart has announced it has expanded its alcohol delivery and now sells booze via roughly one-third of its 300 retail partners.

Said partners include BevMo!, Total Wines & More, Albertsons, and Kroger. The expansion brings Instacart‘s presence in the booze-o-sphere to 14 states total: California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Washington.

It’s another move in an ongoing push from the grocery retailer to offer booze delivery in as many states as laws permit. According to a press release, Nebraska and Michigan are next on the list, and customers there will be able to purchase booze via Instacart in the near future.

More alcohol sales could potentially give Instacart and other online grocery retailers the kind of interest the sector needs right now. Although there are diehards out there addicted to buying their groceries and everything else they can manage online, Americans largely aren’t into the idea. In fact, just 4 percent of respondents to a recent Gallup poll reported buying groceries online “once a week or more.”

There are plenty of reasons online grocery isn’t quite as popular as the headlines want you to believe. As a consumer, you get less control over things like cuts of meat and produce selection when you order online. Others are in the tricky spot of not wanting to pay a delivery fee for each order but not buying enough each week to justify an Unlimited membership, which offers free delivery on orders of $35 or more. And some just like grocery stores.

Alcohol-delivery sales, on the other hand, are on the rise, and some suggest booze and groceries are the match made in heaven online food and bev needs: according to Investment firm Rabobank, “online grocery is poised to become the most important driver of online alcohol sales.”

Yes, there are plenty of other online alcohol retailers out there, from Drizly, who raised $34.5 million last year, Swill, and a host of other smaller companies. But Instacart expanding its alcohol business presents customers with a value-add they can’t get with booze-specific services: the one-stop-shop effect. Instead of buying groceries via one online store and wine from a totally separate one, consumers can lump all their edible purchases into one cart and hit a single button to purchase.

I realize having to buy food and booze from two separate online retailers is not a real problem in the context of the rest of the world. It is, however, a piece of the overall puzzle delivery businesses are trying to solve in terms of offering convenience to customers, and in doing so compete with larger e-commerce operations (like Amazon).

Instacart customers can purchase wine, beer, and spirits in much the same way as they purchase broccoli on the service, the only difference being that they have to flash an ID at the door. The expanded service is available now in the states mentioned above.

“Inspecto” Gadget Promises Real-Time Contaminant Testing in Food Supply Chain

Whether or not you care that your food is organic, locally sourced or non-GMO, one thing I think we can all agree on is that we’d like our food free of harmful chemical contaminants. But testing food for such contaminants requires samples to be sent to a lab, which is a time-consuming and expensive process.

Inspecto is looking to simplify and speed up this process for food producers and manufacturers with its device dubbed, appropriately, Inspecto. Using the small appliance, samples of food can be loaded into a special Inspecto capsule on-site, whether that’s at a farm or further along the supply chain. The capsule is inserted into the machine, which uses Raman Spectroscopy to analyze it for contaminants.

Don’t know what Raman Spectroscopy is? We didn’t either, here’s a quick introduction from Wikipedia:

Raman spectroscopy (/ˈrɑːmən/); named after Indian physicist Sir C. V. Raman) is a spectroscopic technique used to observe vibrational, rotational, and other low-frequency modes in a system.[1] Raman spectroscopy is commonly used in chemistry to provide a structural fingerprint by which molecules can be identified.

The fingerprints Inspecto looks for are the chemical contaminants (more on those in a minute) that can wind up in our favorite foods. After testing the sample, Inspecto beams the physical analysis to the cloud where Inspecto’s algorithms process the findings and deliver results back, usually within a half hour, depending on what is being tested and tested for.

The result is the ability for food producers to test their ingredients for contaminants in the field in real time. So a Japanese coffee company could test green coffee beans for a particular contaminant in South America before the beans ever get on a boat, without needing (or waiting) to send samples off to a lab.

I spoke with Inspecto Co-Founder and CEO, Avner Avidan, who told me that while his company’s technology can be used to detect just about any liquid or solid contaminant, right now, Inspecto is focusing on analyzing big crops like coffee, wheat, rice and soy for chemical contaminants such as acrylamide, which, Avidan says it can detect all the way down to 50 parts per billion.

While Inspecto can be installed along the supply chain, one thing it can’t do is broad scanning and analysis. That means that there won’t be some gigantic Inspecto-beam situated above a conveyor belt scanning food in real-time as it passes underneath like ImpactVision and P&P Optica do using hyperspectral imaging to detect foreign matter. Inspecto is more like the Nima sensor, using a combination of special hardware and capsules that analyze a particular food for one contaminant.

Right now, Inspecto is finalizing its exact pricing plan, but Avidan said the company will sell both the device and single-use capsules. For larger customers, there may also be a data subscription for greater access to analytics.

Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, has raised $1.7 million USD in seed funding and is currently in trials with three food companies in Europe and one in the U.S.. Inspecto’s plan is to continue trialing throughout this year and go to market in 2020.

Hold Your Bitcoins. Starbucks Isn’t Taking Crypto for Coffee Just Yet

Last summer, Starbucks announced an investment in a company called Bakkt, an open-source platform that enables the buying, selling, and spending of cryptocurrencies. That was pretty much the extent of the news — until now. This week, crypto publication The Block reported that Starbucks had secured “a sizable equity cut” in Bakkt and will be “heavily involved in developing the card and app that will allow it to serve as Bakkt’s first merchant-on-platform.” (Starbucks has no cash investment in Bakkt, and specific financials of the deal were not disclosed.)

But hang on to your Bitcoins, folks: the news doesn’t mean Starbucks will start directly taking crypto for lattes. Bakkt’s software is built to act as the middleman between merchant and cryptocurrency, which means Starbucks customers would have to download Bakkt’s software and use their digital currencies through that. Starbucks, in turn, would swap the cryptocurrency it receives for fiat, or currency the government deems legal but is not backed by a physical commodity. So crypto enthusiasts’ dreams of unseating capitalism will not be realized with this deal.

Taking the point of view of Starbucks, though, working with an intermediary makes sense. Cryptocurrency is a bearish market right now, with Bitcoin dropping 80 percent since its buying spree started in 2017. As we wrote last August, “the reality is that Bitcoin and others remain highly volatile in terms of price, which is one of the biggest reasons more retailers haven’t adopted them as forms of payment.” There are also numerous regulatory and financial risks involved with crypto, so not directly accepting it is simply safer. There is also the question of whether something like Bitcoin could even handle a percentage of the volume of Starbucks’ transactions in real time.

Still, it does put the coffee retailer at the forefront of a trend that, despite a bearish market, is going to generate more not less action in the coming years. As Starbucks told the Hard Fork: “We anticipate that a range of cryptocurrencies will gain traction with customers and, through our work with Bakkt, we will be uniquely positioned to constantly consider and offer customers new and unique ways to pay seamlessly, at Starbucks. As we continue to move forward with this work, we anticipate we’ll have more to share in the coming months.”

A handful of retailers out there currently take crypto. Overstock.com is basically a crypto company now. Shopify stores accepts it, as do NewEgg and Microsoft. The latter makes sense, as Microsoft powers the cloud infrastructure behind Bakkt.

We’re still a long ways off from digital currencies being part of the daily routine at the coffee shop, grocery store, or drive-thru. Starbucks’ involvement in the space is significant, but we’ll have to wait for more developments before we can legitmately get excited about the possibilities of crypto for lattes.

Why Philadelphia’s Ban on Cashless Business Is a Good Thing

Philadelphia, PA yesterday became the first major U.S. city to ban cashless stores, The Wall Street Journal reports. A new law will “require most retail stores to accept cash” and goes into effect in July 2019.

The law would not include parking garages, stores like Costco (which require membership) or hotels, according to the WSJ. But it will affect restaurants, grocery stores, and other food retailers, including Amazon Go stores.

Amazon had asked for an exemption for the new law but was told by Philly lawmakers that in order to get one, Amazon Go stores would have to require membership a la Costco. Currently, Amazon’s cashless grab ’n’ go stores are not restricted to Amazon Prime members, as they would have to be if Amazon were to go for an exemption from the new law in Philadelphia.

It’s the latest move in a series of pushbacks over the last several months around businesses going cashless. In NYC, councilman Ritchie J. Torres introduced legislation last November that would require restaurants and retailers to accept cash. New Jersey has passed a bill banning cashless stores earlier this year. Massachusetts has been legally requiring stores to accept cash since the 1970s.

Massachusetts wasn’t concerned about Amazon swallowing up the world when it passed its law over 40 years ago, but the more recent efforts are most certainly in response to the growing number of establishments trying to go cashless. In the food world that includes Sweetgreen, Tender Greens, the Milk Bar, and Dig Inn. And, of course, Amazon, who currently has Go stores in Seattle, Chicago, and San Francisco. Some industry heavyweights have defended the movement towards cashless business, with Union Square Hospitality’s Danny Meyer citing safety as one of the biggest reasons. Meyer also said that “with the growing ubiquity of plastic and mobile payment, many businesses are choosing to eliminate cash from their operation entirely.”

The thing is, mobile payments aren’t ubiquitous yet, and nor are credit and debit cards. Those who are against cashless businesses argue that restaurants and stores only accepting those payment forms exclude poorer communities and those for whom credit cards might not be an option. Councilman Torres went as far as to say that “insidious racism” underlies the cashless model.

According to a survey by Gallup, most Americans “see the death of cash in their lifetimes.” Countries like Sweden are already well on their way to dumping cash, with IKEA even testing a cashless location in Gavle (north of Stockholm). But even a forward-thinking nation like Sweden is dealing with pushback, with some claiming cashless businesses discriminate against the poor, those with disabilities, and newly arrived refugees.

There may be middle ground, and some folks are working to find it. For instance, a company called All_ebt uses a combination of Facebook Messenger and virtual Visa cards to let those on SNAP assistance shop online and even at Amazon Go stores. It’s not a magical fix that will solve all the issues surrounding the cashless model. But if we are in fact headed towards a cashless future, we need more companies and organizations like All_ebt who are willing to use tech to find a way to include everyone in this new movement. Until we get more of those efforts to find middle ground, a citywide ban on cashless business is probably a good call.

MealMe’s Instagram-Meets-Yelp-Style App Helps You Decide What’s for Dinner

The average consumer nowadays will probably use multiple different apps to figure out where to eat on any given night: discovery, recommendations, booking a reservation or ordering food for delivery. As the folks at Hypepotamus recently noted, a new company, MealMe, wants to simplify the food lover’s food journey by bringing its many pieces into one single app.

Matthew Bouchner and Will Said, both students at Emory University, created the MealMe app as a kind of Instagram-like social network for food that also integrates table booking and ordering capabilities. The idea is to offer a one-stop-shop for all your food needs by aggregating the many disparate parts of the food journey into a single interface.

When a user opens the MealMe app, they see an AI-powered feed that combines Yelp’s data (location, cost, etc.) with user-generated data such as comments and likes, and pulls the most relevant results to that user. So if you live in Indianapolis and tend to order a lot of Thai food, the app will pull up restaurant results relevant to that criteria. The app also pulls in Yelp’s mapping feature, so you can see where your restaurant of choice is and your distance from it.

Image via MealMe.

Users can also snap photos of their meals and share them, much like they do on Instagram, and restaurants can do the same to promote specific items. When a user clicks on a photo, they are given the option to access services like Opentable or Postmates, to book a reservation or order delivery.

The visual aspect of this food journey is especially important to the MealMe folks. Research has shown that the visual cortex of the brain plays a much more significant role in decision making than was previously thought, and can impact whether or not we choose an item from a menu. So in addition to making the logistical side of “what’s for dinner” easier, MealMe also bills itself as a place for people who also just “love looking at food porn,” an activity that’s so popular it’s a bonafide industry.

In fact, multiple companies are now zeroing in on the visual aspect of the food industry and trying to turn it into a business. Wine n Dine, which like MealMe lets users order from within the app, is a food-porn-lover’s dream that shows a feed of pictures a la Instagram and even breaks pictures down into cuisine. And Pinon is another group of students, this time from the University of Massachusetts, who have created “smart” menus that show videos and interactive pictures of food items, and also lets users order from within the app.

Bouchner and Said have been at work on the MealMe app since 2018; it’s currently in beta, with a launch planned for later this year and is currently free to use. The company has said it makes money by taking commissions from delivery orders, offering targeted ad space, and selling premium data packages to restaurants and CPGs. Right now the company is currently bootstrapped and seeking a $120,000 seed round.

Square Roots Partners With Gordon Foods to Expand Its Indoor Farmprint

Urban indoor farming company Square Roots announced today it has teamed up with Gordon Food Service, a food service provider and distributor in North America. According to a press release (sent via email), the partnership will give Square Roots the chance to expand its farming footprint significantly while making locally grown produce more widely available.

Gordon Foods will assist Square Roots with building farms on or near Gordon distribution centers. Food grown on these farms will be available to Gordon’s customers, which include corporate clients as well as individuals buying from the company’s e-commerce store. Gordon is, according to the press release, a $15 billion company, so its deep pockets can facilitate the expansion.

Square Roots was founded by food entrepreneur Kimball Musk along with engineer-turned-entrepreneur Tobias Peggs. Since its inception in 2016, the company has been steadily rising as a leader in the vertical farming space. It’s known both for its indoor farms, which it operates out of recycled shipping containers, as well as its Next Gen Farmer Training Program. The latter is an entrepreneurial-meets-agricultural program designed to teach young adults the nuances of farming (right now the average age of a farmer is about 58). It places heavy emphasis on the technological aspects of urban farming, so participants graduate with as much tech savvy as they do plant savvy.

One cool thing about the Square Roots-Gordon Foods partnership is that it means more of these Farmer Training Programs across the continent. The deal includes building new Square Roots “campuses” on or near Gordon distribution centers, and each of these campuses will need people to care for the farms. Square Roots told me its Brooklyn HQ has 10 farms total and accepts 6 to 10 next-gen farmers each year. For new farms, the number of farmers will vary based on the size of the campus, Square Roots said.

Gordon operates 175 different distribution centers in North America. For them, the partnership is also a way for an old food brand to put on a newer, more modern face. The company has been in operation since the late 1800s and currently serves restaurants, hospitals, schools, and other food-service facilities. But as we’ve seen recently, even big institutions are starting to look beyond historical staples (green Jello, anyone?) and provide healthier alternatives to patients, students, and other customers.

While not a complete parallel, the deal does remind me of Corelle’s recent move to merge with Instant Pot: a century-old company teaming up with a young startup, presumably in response to the way our perception of food, cooking, and eating is changing. More and more consumers are growing aware of the quality of their food, and eating local is a growing movement that’s starting to become more than just a trend for rich hipsters. Big Food knows it. Old institutions know it. Gordon Foods has actually gone and done something about it, and possibly set a standard for other major distributors along the way.