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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Business of Food

Instawork Raises $60M to Connect Local Businesses with Hourly Workers

Instawork, an online marketplace that connects local businesses across the U.S. with available workers, announced today that it has raised a $60 million Series C round of funding. The round was led by Craft Ventures with participation from Grelock, Corner Ventures, Four River Group, WndrCo and Tilman Fertitta (owner of Landry’s and the Houston Rockets). Existing investors Benchmark, Spark Capital, GV, Burst Capital, and SV Angel also participated. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Instawork to $100 million.

Instawork’s platform supports a number of industries, including food and beverage and hospitality, where qualified workers like servers and chefs can post their services. Instawork checks references and makes sure each worker is indeed qualified, then connects them with open shifts available at different companies such as Marriott, Sodexo, and Sun Basket. After a shift, the worker gets paid within hours of completion and can rate their experience.

In a press release sent to The Spoon, the company said it has grown dramactically over the past 15 months and now has more than 1 million workers across the U.S. on its network. Instawork said the number of available shifts on its platform has grown 8x in less than two years, with professionals finding work in less than 24 hours with shifts paying an average of $18 an hour.

Labor remains a hot button issue in the food a beverage sector. Though restaurants and bars have been fully re-opened as the pandemic recedes, they are having a tough time filling open positions as the industry grapples with issues around worker safety and fair pay. As those issues get resolved, platforms like Instawork, ShiftPixy, Shyft, and Jobletics can help fill in short-term workforce gaps.

Beyond Meat Launches Plant-Based Chicken Tenders at Restaurants Nationwide

Beyond Meat announced today that it is launching its new Beyond Chicken Tenders at select restaurants across the country. The plant-based chicken tenders are made from faba beans and peas and have 14g of protein per serving.

That Beyond Meat is expanding the availability of its chicken products is no surprise, since poultry is the most consumed meat in the U.S. It certainly wasn’t going to be a category that Beyond ignored. The company had an earlier chicken strip product that it pulled back in 2012 to focus on its alternative beef and pork. In 2019, Beyond piloted a Beyond fried chicken product with KFC in Atlanta before expanding that program to more states including North Carolina, Tennessee and California. In April of this year, Bloomberg reported that Beyond was telling its customers to expect a chicken product this summer.

Beyond is launching at a time when demand for chicken is soaring, thanks in part to the chicken sandwich wars that restaurants are duking out with one another. As a result, The Wall Street Journal wrote in May that chicken supply is limited and prices are steep. Introducing a plant-based chicken could help restaurants fill in any supply gaps for certain demographics — kids, for instance, probably wouldn’t know if they were eating plant-based tenders vs. animal-based ones.

On the flip side, however, Beyond is entering into an increasingly crowded plant-based chicken tender/nugget space that already includes products from startups such as Daring, Rebellyous, Nowadays, and SIMULATE, as well as giant retailers like Target, which launched its own line of plant-based foods. However, given Beyond’s size, market cap, and extensive retail and restaurant relationships, it towers above its competition and could wind up squeezing out some of these smaller startups before they have the chance to fully mature.

Beyond Chicken Tenders will be available at roughly 400 restaurants across the country starting today. To see if and where they are being offered close to you, visit this restaurant locator.

Aleph Farms Raises $105M in Series B Funding

Cultivated meat company Aleph Farms announced today it has completed a $105 million Series B round of funding, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $118 million. The Series B round was led by L Catterton and DisruptAD with participation from Skyviews Life Science, Thai Union, BRF, and CJ CheilJedang. Existing investors VisVires New Protein, Strauss Group, Cargill, Peregrine Ventures, and CPT Capital also participated in the round.

Israel-based Aleph Farms said the new funds will go towards increasing manufacturing, growing operations internationally, and expanding product lines. Currently, the company is developing a cultivated beef steak and will unveil a prototype for that product in November at the Agri-Food Innovation Summit. 

There is of course an enormous difference between unveiling a prototype and making these whole-muscle cuts of cultivated meat at scale. One of the challenges for cultivated meat companies is being able to produce large quantities of product at a cost that is on par with traditional meat. Aleph Farms launched a new production process at the end of 2020 that will eventually be able to reach that price parity, according to the company.

The process is the first part of a phased build-out for Aleph’s forthcoming pilot production facility, which the company says will be operational by 2022. Aleph Farms also plans to do an initial market launch at that time. The Series B funding will, in bigger-picture terms, go towards helping the company realize that goal. 

Aleph’s announcement today follows recent news from other cultivated meat companies that are also opening pilot production facilities and also aiming for commercial launches in 2022. That includes MeaTech 3D, also based in Israel and also developing whole cuts of cultivated meat. Another Israeli company, Future Meat, has already opened its facility and says it plans to sell cultivated meat in the U.S. by 2022.

Before anyone sells anything, however, these companies must get regulatory approval for each market they want to enter. So far, just one company, Eat Just, has regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat, and that’s only in Singapore. Along with price parity, getting regulatory approval is a major topic in the cultivated meat conversation these days. 

Aleph Farms says it is working with regulatory agencies, though the company did not specify for which markets. Part of the company’s international expansion will be to the United Arab Emirates and the wider Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. Aleph said it is also evaluating the possibility of a manufacturing facility located in the UAE.

Traeger Grills Acquires Connected Thermometer Company MEATER

Traeger Grills, best known for its wood-pellet grills, announced today that it has acquired wireless meat thermometer company MEATER. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and according to the press announcement, MEATER will continue to operate as a standalone company within Traeger Grills and Joseph Cruz will continue as MEATER’s Chief Executive Officer.

MEATER, which came out of Apption Labs, makes wireless Bluetooth and WiFi connected thermometers ($69 – $269, depending on the model) and an accompanying mobile app to give users continuous monitoring and guided cooking instructions. Stick the MEATER into your protein, select the type of protein that you’re cooking and the thermometer gives you real-time tracking of internal and ambient temperatures. Once the food hits the target internal temperature, the MEATER app sends you an alert to pull your protein out of the heat and tells you how long to let it rest.

Traeger has its WiFIRE connected wood pellet grills also provides users with similar monitoring and target temperature functionality through a mobile app (and Apple Watch!). But unlike with MEATER, you can control the heat of the grill remotely to make adjustments to your cooking wherever you are in your home.

Despite similar features, it’s easy to see why the MEATER acquisition makes sense for Traeger. The MEATER software and user experience is more robust and visually appealing than Traeger’s homegrown app. And with MEATER, Traeger will now be able to expand its market beyond just those who own Traeger grills and beyond grilling season. Traeger can integrate its brand into the MEATER software and play a part in people cooking proteins on any type of grill, as well as their stoves and ovens when the weather turns cold.

Traeger acquiring MEATER can also been seen as a response to Weber buying smart oven maker June at the beginning of this year, as the two companies look to modernize in this connected era. The first line of June-integrated Weber grills announced in February of this year featured real-time temperature monitoring and guidance both on a grill display and on a mobile app. It’s not hard to imagine that future versions of Weber/June grills will feature the ability to automatically or remotely control cooking temperatures as well.

In other words, with both of these acquisitions, next summer will be definitely be hot for new, smart grills.

C3 Raises $80M to Expand Its Virtual Food Hall Concept

Virtual restaurant company C3 (Creating Culinary Communities) has raised an $80 million Series B funding round co-led by Brookfield Asset Management and REEF Technology. Egon Durban and Greg Mondre Managing Partners and Co-CEOs of Silver Lake Partners, along with Dean Adler, Co-Founder of real estate investment firm Lubert-Adler.

C3’s business these days is as much about real estate as it is about restaurants. The company operates more than 40 virtual restaurant brands, leveraging underutilized kitchen spaces around the country to cook and fulfill those orders. For example, the company has a partnership with Graduate Hotels and uses kitchen spaces at Graduate locations to serve delivery-only orders to guests and the surrounding community.

In March of this year, C3 said it would also bring its virtual restaurant concept to residential spaces, starting in Nashville, Tennessee and Phoenix, Arizona. The company recently partnered with Kitopi to take C3 brands overseas to the UAE, has a deal to use Reef locations for kitchens, and last month said it would make its virtual brands available to Chowly’s 10,000-plus restaurant customers.

For all C3 concepts and partnerships, meals are available through the company’s CITIZENS GO mobile app, which is powered on the back end by online order company Lunchbox’s software.  

The $80 million fundraise will go towards further expansion in the form of signing leases with real estate developers at various mixed-use, retail, and hospitality spaces. According to today’s press release, these leases will serve to open CITIZENS food halls, which are brick-and-mortar versions of the C3’s virtual food halls. These spaces will also provide additional kitchen space with which to fulfill delivery-only orders for C3 brands. 

The virtual food hall concept itself isn’t new, with companies like Deliveroo, Zuul, and others employing their own versions of it. Few have pursued expansion as aggressively as C3, however. The latter says it has opened 250+ digital brand locations in the U.S., will have 1,000 by year’s end and is on track for 12,000 kitchens globally by 2023. 

MeaTech Says It Will Develop Cultured Pork Products

Israel-based alt-protein company MeaTech 3D has begun research and development activities around cultivated pork, the company announced today. 

Initial activities will focus largely on developing porcine cell lines, which the company says could expand its number of potential addressable markets since pork is the most widely consumed meat in the world. The porcine cell lines will add to MeaTech’s existing cell ag efforts, including cell lines for beef and chicken.

In May of this year, the company announced plans for a pilot production facility that will first be used to increase the production of its cultured fat product and then go on to produce entire cuts of cultivated meat using the company’s 3D bioprinting technology. 

Cell lines are a crucial step in the process of making cultivated meat, since cells are the starting inputs for any eventual product. However, creating new cell lines is an expensive and time-consuming process, and researchers are still figuring out which types of cells are best suited for the kind of large-scale manufacturing most cultured meat companies are aspiring to eventually do.

Most of those companies so far have stuck to developing cultured beef or chicken products, not pork. Despite the latter being the world’s most most popular meat, a very small handful of companies is actually focused on that particular protein right now. Future Meat Technologies, also based in Israel, says its newly opened production facility is producing cultured pork. Dutch startup Meatable, New Age Meats, and Higher Steaks have also done pork prototypes during the last few years. 

MeaTech’s specific focus on cell line development will further set it apart from the masses as more companies announce plans to explore cultured pork products in the future.

How AppHarvest Is Investing in the First Generation of High-Tech Farmers

Agriculture may have been slower to digitize than other parts of the food sector, but these days a lot of folks would agree artificial intelligence, automation, and other technologies have a role to play in the future of farming. The presence of such things means farming will soon require lots of new skills, which in turn means training a whole new generation on a whole new set of tools. It means, in the words of AppHarvest’s founder and CEO Jonathan Webb (pictured above), “getting young people to really visualize what agriculture is” in a way they haven’t before.

Standing under a tent in the middle of a downpour outside Elliott County High School in Sandy Hook, Kentucky recently, Webb explained to me how his company is training the next generation of farmers while simultaneously investing in the company’s own future as a high-tech agricultural powerhouse.

We, along with with students, parents, teachers, and Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, were at the launch for the latest unit of AppHarvest’s high-tech educational container farm program, which teaches high-tech farming to Eastern Kentucky high-school students. Launched back in 2018, the program retrofits old shipping containers to house controlled-environment vertical farms that grow leafy greens. Farms at each school serve as hands-on agricultural classrooms where students can learn not just horticulture but also how to use the technologies powering the next wave of farming innovations around automation, connectivity, and data.

“What we’re doing here is trying to plant the seeds of what it means to be in an exciting industry and get that groundswell early,” Webb told me. 

He was talking specifically about the container farm program but might as well have been referring to the entire company’s MO. AppHarvest, itself a product of Eastern Kentucky, is both a Public Benefit Corporation and a Certified B Corporation, which means the company has to strike a balance between profit and less measurable purposes like environmental impact, transparency, and social good. 

The company’s main business is headquartered about an hour away from Elliott County High School, in Morehead, Kentucky, where AppHarvest operates a 60-acre high-tech greenhouse that grows different varieties of tomatoes. Two additional farms, one for leafy greens and another for tomatoes, are under construction, and the company just broke ground on a couple more last month. All of these farms provide or will provide produce for restaurants and grocery retailers within a day’s drive. They will also provide jobs for a local community that’s seen unemployment rise as the coal industry declines.

The high school container farms are altogether smaller and somewhat different in terms setup and technical specs, but the idea is the same: grow crops in a controlled environment and use technology to improve plant yield, quality, and nutrition profile. In doing so, people from the community get an opportunity to learn the kinds of skills that will be relevant as agriculture gets more and more digitized.

“We’ve tried to say at AppHarvest we’re not building facilities, we’re building an ecosystem,” said Webb. “Obviously our large production facility is the core critical center piece of that, but us investing in a high school education, we’re truly trying to create an ecosystem that includes facilities and the brainpower to be able to operate the facilities.”

This isn’t just feel-good talk, either. Technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, sensors, and analytics are coming to agriculture in response to multiple problems looming in the near future for the global food system. As McKinsey notes, “Demand for food is growing at the same time the supply side faces constraints in land and farming inputs.” With a population expected to grow to 9.7 billion by 2050, the planet needs to produce around 70 percent more available calories. At the same time, inputs like water supply and arable land are shrinking, raising costs for farming and negatively impacting an already burdened planet.

Part of the promise of controlled environment agriculture formats like high-tech greenhouses and container vertical farms is that they can grow more food faster, at a higher quality, and closer to the buying public. Many of these facilities operate via hydroponics systems that recirculate water, saving on that resource. (AppHarvest’s greenhouse runs off rainwater collected from the facility’s roof.) In the case of vertical farming, less land is required because plants are stacked. AppHarvest’s container farms, for example, can pack three to five acres of leafy greens into a forty-foot-long shipping container. Other large-scale vertical farms a la Kalera or Plenty are growing pounds of greens that number in the millions and also exploring additional crops such as berries.

Most individuals in this industry I’ve spoken to agree that indoor farming isn’t “the savior” that will wholly replace traditional agriculture. Nor was it never meant to be. Rather, greenhouse growers, vertical farm companies, and those operating container farms believe we need all of these formats working together and alongside traditional agriculture practices to try and resolve the above issues.

One of the many things needed to make that a reality is a new generation of young people interested in farming as a career and able to navigate the technical as well as horticultural aspects of agriculture. 

Right now, that’s a challenge. “We don’t have our brightest young people inspired to go into agriculture,” said Webb, adding that the issue is, “How do we inspire them early to get into agriculture and the technology sphere of agriculture?”

AppHarvest started investing in its education program before its main facility was ever complete, spending $200,000 of its initial $1 million investment on the program. “I’m not sure if there’s ever been a venture-backed company that’s taken 20 percent of their raised proceeds early and invested in education,” said Webb.

In 2021, AppHarvest has five different container farm programs operating at Eastern Kentucky high schools, all of them operating independently but also networked together, just as AppHarvest’s larger farms will eventually be networked. 

Students learn a huge range of skills working on these farms, from horticultural-related ones like seeding and harvesting to technology management across multiple farms to food safety, data entry, marketing, packaging, and creating a budget. Via a screen inside the farm, students can learn to track the pH levels of plants, carbon dioxide levels, temperature, humidity, and all the other variables present in a farm. And since farms from every high school are networked together, students can view one another’s activity. Elliott County High can see data from Shelby Valley High School in Pike County and vice versa, for example.

Webb says the farms are also an opportunity for schools and students to collaborate using different skillsets, whether technological, horticultural, or otherwise. “Some students might have more of a background or interest in horticulture. Some students might have more of a background or interest in craftsmanship. All we’re trying to do now is say, ‘Here, it’s your thing, bring it to life, and openly share information.’”

And while there’s no pressure, the hope is that some of these students eventually bring their skillsets to AppHarvest’s main operations and help improve them, along with indoor ag, over the coming years. “Hopefully in four years we have students that might end up at MIT. And then they’re telling us what to do,” said Webb, adding that the ROI here isn’t quick. The true impacts of the company’s investment in school programs probably won’t be seen for another five of six years, which is a few lifetimes when we’re talking about tech. 

“We get judged on quarterly earning calls, [but] that’s not the way I think,” he said. “I want us to think, first decade, second decade, third decade, and these are very long-term investments.”

He hopes to see more tech companies investing in high schools, and AppHarvest isn’t quite the lone wolf when it comes to this. Freight Farms, which deals exclusively in container farms, has a partnership with Sodexo to bring its units to K-12 schools and universities in the U.S. AeroFarms, also a Certified B Corp., has partnerships with various schools and community centers, too.

For AppHarvest, the educational program is is an integral part of the operation, and one tied to the company’s long-term success. “It’s not a ‘nice to have,'” Webb told me. “It’s something we truly believe is going to give our company a competitive advantage medium to long term.” 

AeroFarms Talks R&D in the UAE for Vertical Farming

One place that gets a lot of attention these days when it comes to food tech initiatives is the United Arab Emirates. Like Singapore, the country is aggressively pursuing food and ag tech initiatives as a way to improve food security and quality within its own borders and in doing so become a more self-sufficient food producer.

The UAE got another big agrifood boost recently when New Jersey-based vertical farming company AeroFarms announced that its UAE-based subsidiary AeroFarms AgX LTD had started construction on an R&D facility in Abu Dhabi. The center will focus on new developments for indoor ag and controlled environment farming, and is expected to be operational in the first quarter of 2022.

“The region aligns very well with our value proposition,” Aerofarms cofounder and CEO David Rosenberg explained to The Spoon recently. “The UAE imports 90 percent of their crops, so there’s a food security issue. They also have relatively cheap energy.” He added that a facility for R&D in the country gives Aerofarms a “strong regional presence” from which it can expand to other areas in the Middle East and beyond. 

There’s certainly enough opportunity for indoor agriculture in this part of the world. Because of the desert climate, the UAE and other countries in the Middle East deal with a lack of arable land as well as water scarcity. Vertical farming operations like those of AeroFarms or another player, Vertical Field, claim to use significantly less water than traditional outdoor agriculture. And because of the vertical nature of the grow systems (plant trays are literally stacked inside a giant warehouse-like setting), companies can pack more plants into less space than would be possible on a horizontal field.

According to Rosenberg, the R&D center isn’t really to figure out how to grow food in the desert (“We could grow anywhere in the world”) so much as it is about growing plants specific to Middle Eastern eating habits in general. He cites mint and parsley, two popular foods in the region, as examples. Having an R&D center that focused on optimizing the grow cycle for these plants could increase quality, yield, and nutritional profile. 

The other goal of the forthcoming new center will be to apply the learnings discovered there to other parts of the region in the future. That includes research in areas like plant science, vertical farming and automation, accelerating innovation cycles and commercializing products.

Rosenberg says that versus a greenhouse, his company’s vertical farms can grow plants faster, producing around 26 harvests per year instead of 12 to 16. Right now, Aerofarms is best known for leafy greens, but the company has its sights set on other crops, too. In April of this year it announced a deal with Chile-based berry producer and distributor Hortifrut to research and develop blueberry and caneberry production. 

“Today we’re most known for leafy greens, but behind the scenes, we’re working with some of the biggest ag tech companies in the world to improve their genetics,” says Rosenberg. He adds that AeroFarms has grown 70 different varieties of berries, and that of the 550 different plants the company has grown, “probably 350 of them are in the leafy greens category.” He declined to elaborate on other crops, but suggested that information might surface soon to the public.

Last year, the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) invested $150 million in a few ag tech companies, AeroFarms being one of them. The forthcoming R&D facility will be one tangible result of that investment. 

AeroFarms announced in March its intention to go public via SPAC with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. 

Voice bots and Back Office Tasks: A Mid-year Look at Restaurant Tech

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As we’re fond of saying lately, last year’s pandemic-induced chaos accelerated the restaurant industry’s adoption of technology so much that about a decade’s worth of changes happened in the span of a couple months. Investor, restaurant tech guru, and friend of The Spoon Brita Rosenheim highlighted that point recently when she released her 2021 Restaurant Tech Ecosystem Map. 

The map, while not exhaustive, includes a staggering number of companies across many areas of the restaurant business, from ordering and delivery tech to back-office tools, business intelligence, corporate catering and ghost kitchens. Even a casual glance shows just how enormous (or bloated, depending on your point of view) the restaurant tech sector has gotten over the last 18 months. 

Brita has her own takeaways and predictions bundled with her map, and you should definitely read through them if you are interested in learning more about restaurant tech’s near-term trajectory. Here, I’ll add a few of my own thoughts to the mix, including:

Rise of the voice bot. This is one category that’s slowly but steadily grown a presence in the restaurant industry over the last few years. But excepting maybe Domino’s chatbot, widespread voice-tech implementations at restaurants are still rare, though that will likely change in the next couple of years. McDonald’s threw heat on this topic last month by announcing it is currently testing automated ordering via voice tech at 10 locations, and that it expects this technology to be in all of its locations within the next five years. Meanwhile, the current labor shortage has left restaurants scrambling to make their operations more efficient. If correctly executed, going fully autonomous with the order process could shave seconds off every individual customers’ order. And those seconds (and costs) add up fast. 

The analytics opportunity. Marketing analytics for restaurants are another “it” category at the moment, if its slice of the restaurant tech pie above is any indication. In the words of Adam Brotman, CEO of Brightloom, online ordering tech has become “a commodity,” and that the next big frontier for restaurant tech is around analytics. When Brotman and I spoke a few months back, he explained that data — about customer preferences, transactions, order histories, etc. — is a huge opportunity for restaurants if they can figure out how to harness it. Seeing as that’s no small feat technically, a huge number of analytics and CRM companies have cropped up offering solutions to smaller businesses that can’t build these programs in-house. Expect more companies and much consolidation in this category.

Back-office bonanza. The sizable slice back-office tech gets in Brita’s market map reflects a trend we’ve written about before: that investment and interest in back-office tasks will continue to attract attention in the coming months. The back office was probably once the most “un-sexy” area of restaurant tech, since most of it has to do with digitizing invoices and schedules and helping businesses run payroll. One pandemic later, restaurants are trying to save on costs in as many areas as possible, and a surprisingly effective way to do that is through digitizing, centralizing, and streamlining some of these previously boring tasks. Like analytics, this category will see a wave of consolidation in the future, and in fact that is already happening.

As always, I welcome your thoughts on my thoughts, now and in the coming months as restaurant tech continues to evolve.

More Headlines

Local Kitchens Raises $25M for Its Virtual Food Hall Network – The ghost kitchen/virtual food hall, started by three ex-Doordash employees, has raised Series A funding roughly one year after launching.

Mobility Service Helbiz Opens Its First Ghost Kitchen – Italian-American mobility company Helbiz announced today it is launching its own ghost kitchen/food delivery/virtual restaurant business called Helbiz Kitchens.

Miso and Lancer Worldwide Aim to Automate Beverage Dispensing for QSRs – Miso announced a partnership with Lancer Worldwide, a global manufacturer of beverage dispensers, to develop an automated, intelligent system designed to speed up and organize drink orders.

Fraîche’s Smart Fridges Aim to Help NYC Offices Freshen Up Lunch Options

One of the big questions companies face as more of the population gets vaccinated is if and how they will re-open their physical offices. As Bloomberg wrote last month, some workers are just quitting their jobs instead of returning to offices. As such, companies are looking for ways to entice employees back into the building with different schedules and perks. Fraîche is pitching its smart fridges as one of those perks that can help ease people back into office life. The company is installing 10 of its fridges in locations across New York City this September.

On it’s face, Fraîche is kind of like Byte Technology in that it makes smart fridges where customers can grab what they want and get charged automatically. Unlike Byte however, Fraîche isn’t licensing its technology out to other retail brands. It will operate each fridge by itself and control what goes inside.

Technically speaking, Fraîche’s fridges work only with the accompanying app (unlike Byte, which allows you to swipe a credit card). Users create an account with the Fraîche app, including a selfie and their payment information. They can then check the inventory of their local fridge from the app, and when they go to grab something, the Fraîche fridge uses facial recognition (based on the selfie) to unlock itself. People take what they want and computer vision inside the fridge automatically keeps track of the items and charges users accordingly.

There are two main parts to Fraîche’s pitch. First, it can offer companies healthier, fresh food for employees without the need to build out a cafeteria or other on-site services. Smaller companies can’t afford to have such a cafeteria to begin with, and larger companies are figuring out their on-site food strategies. A Fraîche fridge can be stocked with healthy food choices, and is available around the clock.

The second part of Fraîche’s pitch is that, like Byte, companies can subsidize as much of the food offered as the like. So companies could foot the bill for half of a meal, or all of it, depending on their needs and budget. Tximista Lizarazu, CEO & Co-Founder at Fraîche told me by video chat this week that most companies he is talking to are choosing to subsidize food 100 percent. “They want to subsidize to make the office a better place than it used to be and convince people to come back,” Lizarazu said.

It’s not just companies that are interested in Fraîche, however. Building owners, too, are looking to attract tenants back, and Fraîche’s smart fridges are part of those leasing perk packages.

Right now Fraîche is focused solely on New York City. The company charges a monthly service fee to operate and maintain the machines, and also generates revenue from selling food. Fraîche currently makes and sells its own line of meals through its machine, but Lizarazu said that the company will be phasing that out in January to selling only food from local New York brands.

Fraîche started two years ago and has raised $1.2 million in Pre-Seed funding so far. Lizarazu said the company is stronger now than it was prior to the pandemic. “What we are doing is perfect for these hybrid offices,” he said. “We are in a better position now post-COVID, because of the health and wellness component.”

The question remains, however, whether food will help bring people back into offices.

Following Tensions, McDonald’s Cuts Tech Fees for Franchisees by 62 Percent

McDonald’s will cut technology fees for its U.S. franchisees by 62 percent following a third-party review of of billing, according to a report from Bloomberg. 

The original $68 million was announced in December of 2020, when corporate said it would charge franchisees a $423-per-month fee to cover a lag in outstanding technology fees. Outrage ensued from franchisees, who have pushed back against some of McDonald’s tech-related decisions in the past.

Those clashes have included everything from store design overhauls to disputes over delivery. At the same time, McDonald’s has been aggressively pursuing new technology implementations in an effort to digitize its fast-food business. It acquired AI company Dynamic Yield and voice-tech company Apprente in 2019. And though the chain has downgraded its Dynamic Yield implementations of late, it appears to be increasing its efforts around voice tech. McDonald’s latest move has been to implement voice-order technology at 10 stores in Chicago in an effort to automate more of the drive-thru experience for customers. At the time of that announcement, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski suggested we’ll see voice-ordering at all McDonald’s in the next five years.

Additionally, McDonald’s is one of the many QSRs to release new store designs following 2020’s upheaval. Future locations could prioritize formats like drive-thru and curbside pickup, and emphasize mobile ordering and more tech in the drive-thru lane(s).

Franchisees have argued against some new technologies in the past. It remains to be seen how onboard they will be with further digitization of the business in light of this new agreement with corporate. 

Franchisees own about 95 percent of all McDonald’s locations in the U.S.  

PitchBook: More than $10B Invested in Grocery Startups This Year

We’ve been saying that investment in grocery startups is downright frothy this year, and now PitchBook has put a number to all this VC activity. CNBC reports that venture-backed grocery startups have raised $10 billion so far in 2021, according to PitchBook’s data, vaulting past the $7 billion raised in the sector last year.

Part of the reason for the big jump is the mega-rounds that some grocery startups around the world raised during the first half of this year:

And that doesn’t even count all the other, smaller fundraises that have happened for companies like Food Rocket and Fridge No More.

The pandemic certainly had a hand in driving all this frothiness. Lockdowns, social distancing and general fears around catching COVID-19 pushed record amounts of people into online grocery shopping in 2020. Additionally, there are a wave of startups like Gorillas, and Gopuff and Fridge No More that are creating an entirely new type of on-demand, speedy delivery model. These companies operate dark stores in neighborhoods with a small delivery radius, promising grocery delivery in as few as 10 minutes. This is a new concept for most shoppers, and the allure of tapping a few buttons on your phone and food arriving minutes later could upend the way we buy groceries.

CNBC adds that all of this massive funding is disproportionate to the opportunity in the online grocery category. As such, there could be a wave of consolidation coming soon. This is true whenever money floods a particular sector, and it is especially worth considering given the fluctuating state of the pandemic.

Questions around how much consumers will stick with online grocery shopping once the pandemic recedes remains unclear. Vaccines have helped abate the virus, but they are rolling out at different paces around the world, and viral variants threaten to bring resurgences in case numbers. Brick Meets Click reported that online grocery shopping dropped to $7 billion in sales this past May, down 16 percent year-over-year. But that $7 billion figure is still 3.5 times higher than pre-pandemic online grocery sales.

But none of what might happen can change what’s already been done. That $10 billion has been invested, now we’ll just see which companies can bring bring returns.