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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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I Cooked With the BonBowl for an Entire Week and Now I’m Attached

Connected Kitchen, Next-Gen Cooking

I’m simultaneously the best and worst person to write a review of the BonBowl, a newly released personal induction cooker designed to make single-serving meals in about 15 minutes or less. On the one hand, I tend to make a lot of single-serving meals and, like any good Spoon scribe, I’m into kitchen gadgetry. On the other hand, I still tend to do a lot of actual cooking the analogue way and rather enjoy making a colossal mess in order to put a meal together.

Still, I pre-ordered the BonBowl, which arrived a few weeks ago, and decided to spend a week putting it through its paces. 

The device comes in two parts: a cooktop base that plugs into a wall and uses induction heating, and an accompanying bowl from which you can both cook and eat the food. The whole thing currently goes for $149 at the BonBowl website.

Before we get into the food, let’s talk about the setup. That won’t take long, because it’s literally a matter of removing the device from the box and plugging it into a wall. Bonus: I don’t have a ton of counter space in my kitchen. The BonBowl fits nicely into a little corner, where it now lives even when I’m not using it:

As far as what you can cook with it, the BonBowl site offers a range of recipes, including a handful by Trader Joe’s. There’s no app integration (yet), but if you don’t want to drag your computer into the kitchen, a handy card accompanies the device and lists multiple recipes with quick cooking instructions. Think single-serving pasta, mac ‘n’ cheese, or oatmeal.

I picked one of the Trader Joe’s recipes for my inaugural BonBowl meal, a simple tomato soup with gnocchi. The recipe has just four ingredients, and I was also struck by the convenience factor of not having to guess at a single-serving size (which I mess up on a daily basis). The meal took 15 minutes to make.

One huge plus is that the bowl itself is a non-stick dish with thermal insulation, so it heats the food but doesn’t become too hot to handle. Ever yank a glass bowl that’s been in a microwave out with your bare hands? Between the thermal insulation and induction heating of the device, that scenario doesn’t happen with the BonBowl. Cleanup is a matter of washing the bowl and spoon.

I made a couple other recipes from the BonBowl site, but what I really wanted to discover was whether the BonBowl could accommodate my weekly eating habits without my having to change them very much. For instance, every Sunday I make a huge pot of garlic rice and garbanzo beans, which serves as my go-to meal when I don’t have much time. Normally I reheat portions in a skillet, guessing at the serving size. (I don’t like microwaves and have never owned one.) For that week, I simply chucked the food into the BonBowl, set the time for 10 minutes, and went about my day until the machine beeped. 

One small quirk, if you can even call it that, is that a couple times the machine heated the food so well the meal had to cool for quite a while, though that problem was easily solved by adjusting the timer.

Beans, in fact, are an ideal food for the bowl. Garbanzo, black, pinto, the inimitable Heinz baked beans. I tried them all, and in fact the BonBowl is all I use now for heating beans, sauces, and other simple items. I reheated leftover pasta from a takeout order. I made a rice krispie treat that wouldn’t win awards for presentation but tasted great. I even scrambled an egg.

Less successful was my attempt at making a single-serving portion of a chicken recipe that’s been in my family for generations and is therefore about 150 years old, maybe older. The resulting sad little meal (see above) was probably a combination of a very old recipe, my trying to turn a four-serving dish into a one-serving meal, and the fact that the BonBowl is probably not the ideal gadget for highly experimental kitchen projects.

Which is totally fine, because I don’t think the makers of the BonBowl designed the device for complex recipes loaded with ingredients that have to be combined “just so” in order to create an edible meal.

Rather, the BonBowl seems designed as a way to make simple-but-healthy meals at home quickly and with minimal fuss (or cleanup).

But why, you ask, would I not just buy a hotplate for $30? Being able to cook and eat out of the same dish is one reason. Another is that the induction heating and precision cooking sensors properly cook the food, rather than zapping it to death (microwave) or burning it (hotplate). It’s also safer because rather than an entire hot surface, only the tiny button where the bowl sits heats up.

It’s also versatile. I can’t personally attest to using it in a college dorm room, but it seems ideal for that setting. I can attest to having in the past lived in some NYC apartments with dodgy kitchens, where a BonBowl would have saved a lot of money in takeout fees. These days, the BonBowl is not a necessity, but it’s proven itself a valuable addition to my kitchen and my weekly meal planning.

Ghost Kitchen, Meet the Automat

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce

Inexplicably, I’ve always wished I could have experienced the Automat in its heyday. Created at the tail-end of the Nineteenth Century, Automats consisted of a wall of cubbies containing simple food and beverage items users could unlock for a nickel. It was essentially fast food before fast food existed.

Fast forward to 2020, and it looks like I may yet be able to experience the concept, albeit a higher-tech version of it.

As we chatted on this week during our Editor podcast, the Automat is making a comeback. That’s thanks to restaurant companies launching cubby systems that are equipped with temperature control functionality and that can be unlocked with a user’s own smartphone. Brooklyn Dumpling Shop is the latest to iterate on the old concept, following in the footsteps of Minnow, Brightloom (née Eatsa), and others.

The resurgence makes sense, given the restaurant industry’s sudden shift to off-premises formats and simpler foods that travel well. Which is why I can think of no better location for Automat 2.0 than outside a ghost kitchen.

One of the major selling points for ghost kitchens is that they allow restaurants to operate without incurring the costs of a front-of-house operation. The ghost kitchen as we know it is also specifically designed to serve off-premises formats. Up to now, that’s been primarily delivery, but the pandemic has generated so much interest in ghost kitchens that we’re now seeing different styles of the concept emerge, including those that offer pickup. Kitchen United lists both options on its website, as does DoorDash (for its DoorDash Kitchens facility). Having a pickup option means restaurants can still take advantage of the ghost kitchen format without necessarily coughing up the sky-high commission fees associated with delivery orders.

At the same time, the pandemic continues, and even if it were to magically disappear tomorrow, our heightened expectations around cleanliness and “contactless” restaurant experiences are here to stay. Which is to say, customers are going to want minimized human contact for restaurant transactions for a long time to come. 

It doesn’t get more minimized than the Automat. By way of a hypothetical example, imagine a virtual deli that has a kitchen space from which it fulfills online orders. It would fulfill delivery orders, but also maintain a cubby system outside to hold any pickup orders. Throw a few tables and chairs near the machine where those who want can eat onsite. Other than the smartphones and the digital ordering, the setup isn’t hugely different from the original Automat concept.

Of course, some ghost kitchen companies choose to locate their facilities in former warehouse districts that don’t get much foot traffic. But as we outlined in our recent Spoon Plus report on ghost kitchens, that’s the exception, rather than the norm right now. Most ghost kitchen operators will tell you location matters, and the closer you can locate one to customers, the better.

And actually, we’re already trekking towards this automat-in-a-ghost kitchen future. Besides the above examples, Starbucks launched its Express stores in 2019 that act as ghost kitchens for nearby locations and include a wall of pickup lockers onsite. Other fast food chains have whittled their dining room concepts down to more to-go-friendly formats, and many of these orders are now being fulfilled in ghost kitchens.  

Automats were originally a precursor to fast food. These days, it seems like fast food may yet prove to be the forerunner to Automat 2.0.

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Location-based Picnicking

You may remember a year or so ago when I wrote about Domino’s partnering with a company called what3words to delivery food to street corners, parks, and other non-traditional addresses. 

It seems what3words is at it again with food delivery, this time partnering with Honest Burgers in London to deliver to random swaths of grass in the city’s Clapham district.

What3words’ platform divides the entire world into 3m x 3m squares, which are GPS coordinates. An algorithm then converts the coordinates into three-word addresses to give each a unique (and often bizarre) name (see image above). With this technology, you could literally choose a random patch of a park sans any notable landmarks or other identifiable items and get your burger delivered to your exact location.

The program with Honest Burgers is only running for a few days and restricted to Clapham. But with more of the restaurant experience taking place outside the four walls of the business, a technology like this could become huge. That’s assuming the restaurant biz makes it through winter and and once more heads to outdoor spaces.

Cracker Barrel’s gone the ghost kitchen route. The company said at its earnings call this week that it plans to convert one of its locations in Indianapolis, Ind. to a ghost kitchen that will handle large-scale catering orders as well as some individual orders placed via third-party delivery services. The store will also be used to help fulfill delivery orders from other nearby Cracker Barrel locations during busy times, like the upcoming fall/winter holiday season.

Meanwhile, Shake Shack said this week it has expanded curbside pickup to 40 percent of its stores, and that roughly one third of all app orders are being placed for curbside. The company has plans to extend curbside to 50 of its locations by the end of September, and is also exploring the possibility of more drive-thrus and walk-up windows.

The New York City Council passed a bill that lets restaurants add a “COVID-19 surcharge” of up to 10 percent to a customer’s bill for up to 90 days after indoor dining reaches full capacity. In other words, for the foreseeable future. The bill is an attempt to help restaurants generate additional revenue as the struggle to keep the lights on continues.

Food Tech News: InnerPlant Launches Sensor Plants, $3.5 Million Grant for Cultivated Meat

Foodtech

I’m taking over the weekly Food Tech News post, and this week I bring you both plant-centric and meaty news. Money is being pumped into cultivated meat research, a plant-based burger company signed a partnership with a football team, and tomato plants can now tell you if they are feeling stressed. Oh, and the world’s smallest gum company raised $1.2 million in funding.

InnerPlant Launches “Living Sensor” Plants

InnerPlant, based in Davis, California, announced the launch of the InnerTomato™ this week. The tomato plants are fed a protein that amplifies the natural signals a plant releases to warn neighboring plants of different stressors. A farmer can use an iPhone, drone, or satellite to take a photo of the plants, and through augmented reality, will be able to see if the plant is a certain color. Different colors signal if the plant needs water, is stressed, or under attack from a certain disease or pest. This is InnerPlant’s first proprietary plant.

Photo from UC Davis’ Aggie Transcript

UC Davis Receives Funding For Cultivated Meat Research

UC Davis recently received a $3.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to research cultivated meat. One of the main goals of this five-year grant is to develop methods to amplify stem cells efficiently. Researchers aim to create methods that enable sustainably lab-grown meat to be an option for feeding a rapidly growing world population. This is the first major grant in the U.S. for cellular agriculture.

The World’s Smallest Gum Factory

Copenhagen-based True Gum just raised $1.2 million (USD) from a German VC Oyster Bay. True Gum makes plant-based gum that is free of petroleum ingredients (which are found in many gum brands), and instead uses a sustainably-sourced tree sap, called chicle, from South America as the main ingredient.

Planterra’s Brand, OZO, Partners With Denver Broncos

OZO, a brand of Colorado-based Planterra Foods, just signed a three-year partnership with the Denver Broncos. Planterra is a subsidiary of JBS Foods, the largest beef and pork processor in the world. OZO’s products include plant-based ground beef and burger patties made from pea protein, and are currently available in 12 U.S. states. As part of the partnership, OZO will be advertising at the Mile High Stadium and serving up its vegan burgers from its traveling food van.

The last time we brought up the Denver Broncos and the Mile High Stadium on The Spoon, it was to announce the installment of a beer-pouring robot at the stadium. Vegan stadium burgers and beer robots might be convincing enough to get me into a football stadium during a pandemic.

Tesco and Olio Team Up to Fight Food Waste

And in some non-meaty but still-sustainable news, Tesco and food-sharing app Olio announced this week they have partnered to fight food waste. Olio volunteers (of which there are around 8,000) will pick up surplus food at Tesco stores then upload it to the Olio app. Food is then distributed for free to households in need and community groups looking to help.

Tesco is launching this food-drive-like initiative across all 2,700 of its U.K. stores. The company said it was able to redirect 36 tons of food — which would have otherwise gone to waste — through an earlier trial of the program.  

Delivery Hero Heads to Japan via Its foodpanda Service

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce

Slow down, Delivery Hero, I can’t keep up with all your news this week.

On the heels of multiple other announcements, the Berlin, Germany-based third-party delivery service said at the tail-end of yesterday that it is launching operations in Japan via its foodbanda subsidiary.

Through foodpanda, Delivery Hero will launch service in six cities to start: Kobe, Yokohama, Nagoya, Sapporo, Fukuoka, and Hiroshima. The company said in today’s press release that it plans to expand its Japan presence “continuously,” though an exact timeframe for other cities was not mentioned. The foodpanda service will, in addition to providing restaurant meals, also deliver groceries and household goods to users.

Including Japan, Delivery Hero now operates in well over 600 cities around the world, either under its own moniker or via subsidiary brands like foodpanda. And, as I said a minute ago, the company has been on a bit of a tear in terms of of news announcements this week. On Wednesday it said it plans to acquire fellow delivery service Glovo’s Latin America business, which will add several countries to Delivery Hero’s already existing presence in that region. Also this week, the company announced a new partnership with World Food Programme to integrate a donations feature into all of Delivery Hero’s digital properties, making it easier for users to donate meals to those in need.

Even with the expansions in Latin America and Japan, and even though it’s the world’s largest food-delivery service outside of China, Delivery Hero’s lead is far from guaranteed for the long term. The entire food delivery sector, which has been a saturated market for a long time, is undergoing consolidation right now. Takeaway.com’s recent merger with Just Eat has formed another massive food delivery company, particularly since that newly formed entity swooped up Grubhub in the U.S. Also in North America, Uber Eats agreed to buy Postmates. Back in LatAm, Colombian heavyweight Domicillios.com merged with Brazil’s iFood earlier in 2020.

Delivery Hero isn’t immune to all this competition. In fact, the company cited this saturated market and extreme competition in April when it pulled foodpanda operations out of Canada. On the flipside, though, Delivery Hero also bought Woowa Bros.’ Baedal Minjok service to give itself a larger share of the South Korean market. 

So whether it’s high-ranking spot in the food delivery world remains, the company is clearly expanding aggressively at the moment, and Japan won’t likely be the last country it lays claim to in the near future.

Singapore’s Float Foods Unveils a Plant-Based Food Incubator for Indonesia

Business of Food, Education & Discovery, Foodtech

Plant-based food startup Float Foods said this week it has launched a new incubator for plant-based food innovators in Indonesia (h/t Green Queen). Dubbed NEWFOOD Startup 2020, the program is a joint effort between Float Foods and food incubator Ultra Indonesia.

According to the NEWFOOD 2020 website, the program will invest in “up to 10 of the strongest performing Indonesian companies” creating plant-based alternatives to animal products. Meat and dairy alternatives are the obvious products here. Companies working with tech solutions geared towards plant-based foods and novel packaging products are also welcome to apply. All companies should have a minimum viable product at the time of their application.

The program comes at time when the alternative protein sector is seeing a huge amount of demand and investment dollars. At last check, over $1 billion has been invested, with the bulk of that money going towards plant-based products. While the U.S. is still the largest market for alt-protein, the Asia-Pacific region is also seeing significant growth, too. Float Foods says that the market for plant-based proteins in Indonesia has witnessed “tremendous growth” in demand over the last few years and will grow at a CAGR of 6 percent in the Asia-Pacific region by 2025.

Part of the demand for plant-based proteins comes from new intel around safety and ethical standards in traditional meat-packing plants, not to mention outbreaks of COVID-19 at facilities.

The NEWFOOD 2020 program is looking for companies that can answer this demand. The program will be completely virtual, with 40 days of online mentorship sessions for pre-selected companies on a range of topics, including business development, distribution, financial projections, and company valuations. Following that, 10 companies will be selected via an online demo day and will receive up to $25,000 each.

The program is currently accepting applications. Registration closes September 25.

 

Kenwood Partners With Drop to Add Scale Function to the Cooking Chef Stand Mixer

Connected Kitchen, Next-Gen Cooking

You have your smart ovens, coffee makers and fridges, but what about a smart stand mixer?

Now’s your chance.

Last week, Drop announced they’d partnered with Kenwood to build in the Drop Smart Kitchen OS platform into the latest model of the Kenwood Cooking Chef mixer, one of the older stand mixer brands in the world.

Originally invented almost 70 years ago by the company’s namesake, Ken Wood, the Kenwood Chef was an instant hit and over the past few decades the modern version of the multi-function stand mixer has continued to be Kenwood’s biggest seller.

The Kenwood Chef eventually became the Kenwood Cooking Chef with the addition of a built-in induction heating element almost a decade ago, and the modern version has a variety of attachments like pasta cutters and coffee grinders. With the Drop partnership, the focus is on the integration of the Drop scale and guided cooking functionality.

In the video below, the two companies tout the product as “Your Chef that Weighs and Cooks” (emphasis mine):

By adding a scale to a mixer that already has built-in cooking capabilities and variety of attachments, the Cooking Chef puts itself into a growing category of multi-function products that act as the cooking version of a Swiss Army knife. Products like the Thermomix and ChefIQ weigh, cook, and steam food, all things that the Cooking Chef XL can now do as well.

This isn’t the first time that Drop has partnered with Kenwood, a subsidiary of De’Longhi. Last year, the two companies launched the CookEasy+ multicooker, a product the two had started working on in early 2018.

With the addition of the Kenwood Cooking Chef XL, Drop continues to rack up impressive partnerships with some of the biggest players in countertop cooking. The company has been working with Thermomix (announced last year at the Smart Kitchen Summit) and also is working with pressure cooking giant Instant Pot.

Somabar Adapts to Pandemic, Adds Booze, Coffee and Juice to its Drink Menu

Foodtech

When I last checked in with Somabar at our Food Tech Live event in 2019, the company was making an eponymous automated drink dispenser that served up low-proof cocktails. The idea was that it could be used by bars and restaurants to create alcoholic cocktails without the need to get a full liquor license (think: Soju-based mixed drinks).

A lot Everything has changed since January 2019, including Somabar. Since the start of 2020 the company has been expanding the capabilities of the machine and positioning it as a more contactless way for restaurants, cafes, hotels and other hospitality locations to serve a wider variety of drinks around the clock.

“What SomaBar does, is it’s a professional mixologist of all things,” Somabar Co-Founder and CEO Christopher Hameetman told me by phone this week. “We’re now living in a world where we want to broaden our use.”

To that end, Somabar will now mix up just about any kind of cold drink you want. Low-proof cocktails, high-proof cocktails, cold brew coffee drinks, iced tea drinks, juices and, well, the list could go on.

The Somabar has six 750 ml and one 150 ml cannisters. Fill each cannister with whatever liquid you want: coffee concentrate, tequila, oat milk, orange juice — whatever. You then let the accompanying app know what you’ve loaded in each cannister. The app then tells you all the kinds of drinks you can make. Tap the button and voila! The Somabar dispenses your desire drink.

Or, don’t tap anything at all. The company has also added Siri and Alexa integrations to provide voice controls. Hameetman provided me a Zoom-based demo where he asked Alexa to mix him a drink, and while there was the occasional slight hiccup (which seems to come with any Alexa demo I’ve ever seen), it did work.

The idea with all this new functionality is to make Somabar more attractive in our modern, pandemic-stricken world. The expansions of Somabar’s drinks menu means that a restaurant could serve non-alcoholic drinks during the day (and to kids), and then swap out the canisters and serve boozey concoctions at night.

The voice-control features make Somabar part of the contactless 2.0 wave of restaurant tech, though I’m trying to figure out exactly how well voice control would work in a drinks scenario. You wouldn’t just have it out for anyone to use, because nowadays you can’t have lots of people putting their paws all over the same device. Having it behind a bar or counter seems too noisy for voice control and you would theoretically have only one person handling the cup, so they could presumably be the only person operating the app on a tablet.

Regardless, I could actually see the Somabar finding a place in restaurants, cafes and even small grocery stores/bodegas. The ability to make a wide variety of customized drinks throughout the day without needing to bring on a mixologist of some sort could prove very useful.

However, that versatility doesn’t come cheap. The Somabar is ~$4,800 (you can get a refurbished one for $2,800). The nice thing is — that’s it. There is no subscription for the software, so you get the drink library as part of that hefty price tag. And the open nature of the device means you can use your own ingredients instead of the pods that come with other automated drink machines like Drinkworks and Bartesian (though both of those are geared more towards consumers).

Somabar’s open nature could also help it further adapt, because 2020 isn’t done yet and a lot more everything could change.

Farmstead Launches Grocery OS to Help Other Grocers Get Those Online Dollars

Delivery & Commerce

Online grocer Farmstead announced today that it is making its in-house grocery delivery software, Grocery OS, available to other national and regional grocers.

Farmstead’s pitch is that Grocery OS can help traditional grocers migrate from physical stores to online, working up through dark stores and into warehouse-only formats. In doing so, Farmstead says Grocery OS will also provide more delivery capacity and get retailers more e-commerce revenue.

Grocery e-commerce has experienced record growth throughout the year as the COVID-19 pandemic pushed more people into online grocery shopping. According to a recent Mercatus study, online grocery shopping will continue to grow, hitting $250 and accounting for 21.5 percent of total grocery sales by 2025.

“COVID shows there is pent-up demand for online grocery,” Pradeep Elankumaran, Farmstead Co-Founder and CEO, told me during an interview this week. Of course, this pent-up demand translated at first into delayed grocery delivery windows, often needing to be scheduled weeks out, as well as waitlists and other breakdowns in the process.

Though things have calmed down and plateaued in grocery e-commerce, the trick now for traditional retailers is to build a system that can scale to meet continued demand. As Elankumaran said, however, running a digital-first store is a lot different from running a traditional store that people go in and shop at.

That’s where Farmstead claims its Grocery OS software stack can help. Grocery OS, which Farmstead uses for its own operation, promises to help traditional grocery retailers boost their delivery capacity, manage inventory, picking and packing orders, and handle marketing.

But as Elankumaran pointed out, transitioning to e-commerce isn’t just about grabbing a bigger piece of the pie. It’s also a defensive move for existing retailers. “You also have a whole bunch of pressure from Amazon and Walmart driving pickup and delivery,” he said.

Indeed, Amazon just opened up a delivery-only Whole Foods in Brooklyn and Walmart launched its Walmart+ subscription service that includes free grocery delivery.

According to the press announcement, Grocery OS is already being used by one of the “top 3” national grocers in the U.S. As noted, it’s also been used by Farmstead as that company has weathered its own pandemic growth spurt. While he wouldn’t provide specifics, Elankumaran said that Farmstead has experience 6x growth in revenue over the span of three or four months, grew its team size by 3x and moved into a 17,000 sq. ft. facility from its former 3,000 sq. ft. warehouse.

But Farmstead isn’t giving up its own grocery ambitions. Elankumaran’s goal is to build and scale Farmstead into a national retail brand. And he’ll be using Grocery OS to do it.

Odeko AI-Driven Platform Aims to Boost the Supply, Demand, and Lifespan of the Indie Coffeeshop

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce

A lot of us dread the idea of a world where speciality coffeeshops are gone “going for coffee” means getting a Starbucks latte delivered via DoorDash. 

Dane Atkinson, CEO of tech startup Odeko, clearly doesn’t want that day to happen either, which is why his company has developed a mobile ordering and supply chain management system that is, for now, specifically geared towards keeping specialty coffeeshops in business. 

Speaking on the phone this week about his company’s overall mission, he said “the really important message [is that] if we don’t sustain this industry, it really will become Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts. They will consolidate in smaller locations and the community and neighborhoods will suffer.”

NYC-based Odeko, which closed a $12 million Series A round in August, recently merged with fellow coffee tech company Cloosiv, has since the start of the pandemic looked for ways to help businesses make both the front and back ends of the coffee shop more efficient, less wasteful, and more financially sustainable over the long haul.

The consumer-facing side of Odeko’s business functions similar to those of mainstream coffee retailers. Customers order and pay for pickup through the company’s mobile app or website. At the moment, Odeko has about 10,000 coffeeshops on the platform across multiple U.S. states. Atkinson says the benefit for customers is its current focus on speciality coffeeshops, which simply means less sifting through irrelevant options to find a high-quality espresso. (Odeko vets its potential merchant partners in order to ensure they actually are specialty coffeeshops.)

The coffeeshops themselves get perhaps the most benefit from the platform. Listing a business on the platform means the coffeeshop itself doesn’t have to come up with the resources to create a mobile order app from the ground up. Odeko charges a 5 percent commission fee per order, which small compared to others, including third-party aggregators a la Grubhub.

Sales data is then used, via AI, to predict volume so that coffeeshops know how much to order in terms of paper supplies, baking ingredients, beverages, and other items needed to run a coffeeshop. Businesses can browse the company’s Cafe Supply Catalog to find all of these items, which Odeko then delivers as a single shipment. 

Atkinson said this supply side of the business is “exploding” now that restaurant industry margins are so tight that any amount of money lost through inventory waste or inefficient supply chain processes can spell the end for a business. “Previously, as a shop, you could get away with some waste in your inventory,” he noted. Now, throwing out unused inventory is akin to “your own salary you’re throwing out.” He says the system is “90 percent accurate” in terms of predicting inventory needs for a week.

The need to digitize the back of house and make it more efficient is a theme that comes up a lot nowadays, with companies like Galley and Souszen applying software, automation, and IoT to change how the back of house is run. Odeko stands somewhat apart from these companies because of its accompanying consumer-facing tech, and also its focus on independent and specialty retailers. It’s main competitor in the coffee-specific mobile order space is Ritual, though Ritual does not have a supply chain side of its business.

Odeko doesn’t necessarily want to solely commit itself to coffee for the long haul. Atkinson says the system could actually work for other types of food businesses, including juice bars or full-service restaurants, and that at some point down the line the company will expand in terms of the types of food businesses on its platform. For now, keeping the independent coffeeshop, the connective tissue of many neighborhoods, alive is its main mission. 

InFarm Raises $170M to Expand Its Vertical Farming Network

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce, Foodtech

Berlin, Germany-based vertical farming company InFarm announced today it has raised $170 million in the first close of its Series C round, bringing its total funding so far to $304.5 million.

The investment round, a mix of equity and debt financing, was led by LGT Lightstone with participation from Hanaco, Bonnier, Haniel, and Latitude, as well as existing investors Atomico, TriplePoint Capital, Mons Capital and Astanor Ventures. InFarm said in today’s press release that it expects the Series C round to eventually reach $200 million.

InFarm has built its reputation, not to mention its coffers, on the idea of getting fresh, local greens to more cities around the world via its network of high-tech vertical farms. The farms are smallish, pod-like devices that can live in grocery stores, restaurants, and food distribution centers. The farms use hydroponics and cloud-based software to grow leafy greens in completely controlled environments. A big benefit with InFarms’ approach is that, since farms are placed inside grocery stores, greens can be harvested onsite and sold without having to travel. 

Sourcing greens close to the store is becoming more commonplace as companies develop smaller vertical farms. While InFarm might be the most high-profile player in this area of vertical farming, it isn’t the only company bringing greens literally to market. Farm.One just installed its own mini-vertical farm at a Whole Foods in Manhattan and has plans to expand to other stores soon. Vertical Field launched a geoponic vertical farm at New York’s famed Evergreen market in August. Brooklyn-based Square Roots puts a slightly different twist on the concept by placing its shipping container farms next to food distribution centers. The company currently has a partnership with North American distributor Gordon Food Service.

All of which is to say, InFarm may be leading the farm-in-a-grocery-store movement, but it won’t be the only company grabbing major investment dollars for long.

InFarm raised $100 million in June of 2019. Since then, it has struck deals with major grocery retailers around the world, including  Aldi Süd in Germany, Kroger in the U.S., Empire in Canada, and Kinokuniya in Japan, among other places. The company said today it expects its farming network to total more than 5 million square feet by 2025, making it the largest distributed farming network in the world. 

To do that, the company will expand to new cities in future. The new investment capital will go towards that goal. InFarm will also use some of it to complete development on a next-gen version of its farm. 

Apple App Clips is Out Today, Right in the Middle of the Contactless HeyDay

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce

Apple’s iOS 14 drops today, which means a bunch of new features are coming to your iPhone. Among the batch of goodies to be found in the update is the release of App Clips, which could help accelerate the adoption of mobile contactless payments across the food retail and restaurant space.

We covered App Clips back when the service was announced at Apple’s WWDC event. In a nutshell, App Clips allows you to pull down just a portion of a native mobile app to give you its basic functionality, without needing to download and set up the full app.

Let’s say, for example, you are at a Starbucks but don’t have the Starbucks app installed on your iPhone. Normally, you’d have to download the full app, set up an account and then enter a payment method before you could even start your order. Through App Clips, you can grab just enough of the Starbucks app to order and pay. No need to download the full app, no need for an account and since it uses Apple Pay, no need to enter credit card information.

The big limitation right now is that a cafe, restaurant or retailer has to be participating the program and developed an App Clip. But if/when they do, App Clips can be opened by scanning QR codes, tapping NFC tags, or opening links via Apple services like Messages or Safari. For a full run down of how App Clips works, check out this post from 9 to 5 Mac.

App Clips is definitely arriving at the right time. The COVID-19 pandemic’s sustained presence here in the U.S. is pushing cafes, restaurants and grocery stores towards more contactless payment systems in an attempt to reduce human-to-human contact.

There are a ton of companies bringing contactless payment tech to market. Order for Me, PayJunction and Bbot are among the many startups building contactless payment systems for restaurants. Kroger launched a contactless payment pilot at its QFC store in Seattle last month. And there are a number of other companies doing contactless 2.0, basically through holograms, voice control and pay with your face.

The difference with App Clips, though, is Apple’s massive iPhone installed base. If this catches on, and given it’s utility (no downloading full apps just to get a cup of coffee!), that seems very possible, it could spur vast numbers of people to switch to contactless mobile payments. We just need to see if Apple has the right, well, touch.

Delivery Hero Acquires Glovo’s Latin America Operations

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce

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.