Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Weekly Spoon

The Spoon Weekly: Wonder’s Big Bet, Parc’s Cold Chain Spinout, a Hard Look at Model for 15 Minute Grocery

Will Wonder Reinvent the Food Delivery Biz, or Become Another Cautionary Tale? Only Time Will Tell

Imagine you wanted to build a complete-from-scratch meal delivery company.

Not just the delivery part like Doordash. I’m talking about building a company that is essentially an entire restaurant and food delivery industry in a box, one that works with big-name chefs to develop new restaurant concepts, builds centralized food production facilities, creates a network of mini-kitchen hubs around a large metro area, and owns the delivery network to get the food to people’s doors.

In other words, everything. If that sounds like a big vision, it is, and it’s exactly what Marc Lore is building with Wonder. The founder of Jet.com and Diapers.com described the concept in a Linkedin post last December:

Our innovative, vertically-integrated approach begins with exclusive menus from the country’s best chefs and restaurants. A central commissary sources high-quality, fresh ingredients and serves as the start of each meal’s journey. Orders are then fired, finished, and plated in our mobile kitchens just steps away from your door, and served as soon as they’re ready — allowing you to experience the food the way it’s meant to be enjoyed. 

Lore is no stranger to big industry-shifting ideas. He created Diapers.com, one of the early pioneers in online baby products (acquired by Amazon), and Jet.com, a discount-pricing-based online retailer acquired by Walmart in 2016. He also has plans to build a Utopian city in the American west.

Read the full story at The Spoon. 

PARC Spinout EverCase Uses Electric & Magnetic Fields to Store Food in Freezers Without Ice Crystals

If you’ve ever put meat or fish into a freezer, you’ve probably noticed it doesn’t look nearly as fresh once you thaw it out.

That’s because the process of freezing food alters and damages its structure at a cellular level. As the temperature drops, water molecules slow down, and ice crystal embryos form ice nucleation sites. From there, the ice spreads to freeze the entire piece of food. Water within the food expands by up to 9% when frozen, causing food cells to rupture. When frozen food thaws, nutrients and flavors leach out from the food, often in the form of drip loss (that red liquid dropping from a warmed piece of red meat).

But what if you could store and preserve food in a freezer at sub-zero temperatures and avoid the damage incurred by traditional freezing? That’s the idea behind a new startup called EverCase, a spinout from storied research and business incubator Xerox PARC.

Read the full story about EverCase’s freezer tech here at The Spoon.

Delivery and Grocery Tech

The Case for 15-Minute Grocery Delivery is Questionable. So Why Did It Raise So Much Capital?

For about as long as I’ve been seriously watching the Internet industry, companies have been trying to make a business of home grocery delivery.

It started back in the late nineties when companies like Webvan and Homegrocer raised massive amounts of capital after convincing investors that food shopping would be largely done online in the future.

Webvan would raise almost $400 million in venture investing and another $375 million through an IPO. HomeGrocer raised $440 million in venture capital and almost $288 million going public.

None of it was enough. The two companies would eventually merge and went bankrupt less than a year later.

Of course, some online grocers survived, including some originating in the early days of the Internet. Ocado, conceived in the year 2000, continues to this day and is one of the biggest online grocers (and grocery automation technology companies).

But despite the occasional success story like Ocado, the reality is online grocery shopping is a tough business, one that seems to possibly work as part of a broader omnichannel market approach where grocers like Walmart, Kroger, and now, yes, Amazon offer both in-person and online shopping experiences for the consumer. And even Ocado.com is essentially an omnichannel model, partnering in the early days with Waitrose.

Which brings us to the 15-minute grocery category, a model built around hyper-local delivery with distributed micro-fulfillment centers placed in dense urban markets like NYC, Philadelphia, and other locations. Startups in this space focus on convenience, offering a limited set of items, not unlike you might find in a convenience store like 7-Eleven (but usually with a little more fresh food sprinkled into the mix).

You can read the full story about 15-Minute Grocery’s questionable business model here at The Spoon. 

Food Media

Is Roku About To Bring Us Shoppable TV Content Featuring Martha Stewart & Other Culinary Giants?

Last week, Walmart and Roku announced a deal that would allow TV viewers watching streaming via a Roku device to purchase items – including food items – using their remote.

According to the announcement, the new experience will allow customers to click on and purchase items advertised within the “moments of entertainment” (translation: during an actual show and not an explicit commercial), as well as during commercial breaks during ad-supported programming.

The new integration will allow viewers to click on a shoppable ad and proceed to checkout. The customer’s payment information will be pre-populated from Roku Pay, Roku’s payments platform, and then the customer taps “OK” on the Walmart checkout page to place the order. A Walmart purchase confirmation is emailed to the customer.

By taking shoppable commerce to the TV screen, Walmart is going beyond the shoppable integrations the company has previously done through partnerships with SideChef and Tasty. While the rise of video-centric social media platforms is blurring the lines, TV watching (including streaming) typically is a much different experience than time spent in front of our computers doing activities like online shopping.

Read the full story here.

Future Food

Coming Out of Stealth, Paleo Unveils Six Animal-Free, GMO-Free Varieties of Heme

In 2024, imagine walking into Burger King and ordering a mammoth burger. No, not one that is bigger than your head; this Whopper will taste like the extinct proboscideans that roamed the earth millions of years ago. It’s all part of the magic from a Belgium-based food ingredient company called Paleo.

After two years, Paleo has come out of stealth mode to announce its technology to bring the authentic taste and aroma of meat and fish to plant-based meat and fish alternatives with a non-GMO, animal-free heme. As part of that announcement, the World International Property Organization has published Paleo’s patent application, finally allowing Paleo to share details of its precision fermentation technology. 

Hermes Sanctorum, CEO and co-founder of Paleo: “When we set out to create the ultimate animal-free meat or fish experience, we quickly zeroed in on heme. Without exaggeration, we can say that we cracked the code of heme, allowing us to produce GMO-free heme that’s bio-identical to the most popular meats and tuna – as well as mammoth.”

Read the full post here at The Spoon.

Podcast: A Conversation With Good Food Institute’s Bruce Friedrich

If you work in the alt-protein industry or even just interested in the space, chances are you know about the Good Food Institute.

In this episode, we catch up with GFI’s CEO and founder Bruce Friedrich to talk about everything alt-protein and the future of meat.

Some of the topics we cover in this podcast include:

  • The current state of alt-protein sales
  • Why plant-based meat sales plateaued in 2021
  • The need for investment in alt-protein infrastructure
  • The politics of alternative meat
  • When will cultivated meat get regulatory approval for retail sale in the US
  • The need for affirmative messaging around alt-proteins

You can listen to the full episode below by clicking play or, as always, find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Food & Web3

From the Paneraverse to the Wendyverse, the Food Web3 Trademark Gold Rush is On

While it’s uncertain at this point just how profitable the food industry’s efforts to build out a presence in the metaverse will be, what we do know is those sure to make out in the near term around all these food web3 initiatives are trademark attorneys.

All anyone has to do is make a casual search of the USPTO’s trademark database or check out trademark Twitter (there’s a Twitter for everything) to see that there’s been a rush by food brands to file web3-related trademarks to ensure they have their place reserved in the metaverse for whenever they’re ready to make a trip.

Coverage of these filings in the crypto-press is often templatized, usually featuring tweets from one of a couple of trademark attorneys making a name for themselves on crypto twitter by talking about different trademark filings. Whether it’s Snickers or Chuck E. Cheese or Panda Express or you name it, the stories generally tell us these brands are set to enter or headed to or already have entered the metaverse.

To read the full story, click here!

The Spoon Food Tech Weekly: An Airbnb for Appliances, the Fermentation Frenzy

This is our weekly food tech newsletter. Subscribe if you’d like to get this in your inbox.

Today is our spring edition of SimulATE, the first and only event exploring the intersection between food and web3. We’ll be talking to the folks behind FriesDAO, OffLimits, CattleProof and more. Join us!

Fermentation May Be Centuries Old, But It’s Attracting a Whole Bunch of New Money ($1.69 Billion to Be Exact)

You know what they say: everything old is new brewed again.

At least that’s true when it comes to fermentation, that ancient food and beverage production process that is currently an overnight sensation. It is going well beyond the time-honored probiotic-rich staples of sauerkraut, kefir, pickles, miso, yogurt, and kombucha. The process of fermentation is being utilized in the creation of alternative, sustainable proteins to take the place of meat, eggs, seafood, and dairy. And it’s projected to get even more significant in its scope and revenue.

Data in The Good Food Institute’s 2021 State of Fermentation Industry Report points to the growth of fermentation as a traditional means to create probiotic-rich foods and plant-based products. According to the report, a total of $1.69 billion was invested in 54 fermentation-based startups in 2021.

Other data from GFI’s report:

  • Fifteen known startups dedicated to fermentation for alternative proteins were founded in 2021, along with new suppliers focused on fermentation-enabled alternative protein ingredients.
  • Eighty-eight known companies are now dedicated to fermentation-enabled alternative proteins, increasing 20 percent from the number of known companies in 2020.
  • 2021 saw the first growth-stage fundraising in the fermentation industry, including three deals >$200 million.

To read the full story, head here.

An Airbnb for Air Fryers? How the Sharing Economy is Slowly Coming to Home Appliances

Back in 2016, the CEO of Swedish appliance company Electrolux floated the idea of possibly using a sharing economy model for washing machines.

“We have a few fun ideas we are testing, like: how about a laundry Uber, where people share their unused laundry time?” Jonas Samuelson said at the time.

While Electrolux never did launch an Uber-for-laundry service, it did eventually launch a subscription vacuum-as-a-service business in Europe for its robotic vacuum. Even so, the idea of sharing economy meets home appliances really hasn’t gotten much traction.

Until now. Kinda.

That’s because Tulu, an Israel/NY startup is bringing a version of the appliance-as-a-service concept to apartments and condos in the United States, the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Israel. The company, which just raised a $20 million Series A funding round, offers short-term rentals on everyday household items like air fryers, printers, micro-mobility products (e-scooters), and more. They also power small shops for consumables like food.

You can read the full post here.

Kitchen Tech

As Political Fight to Ban Natural Gas Rages On, Microsoft and Others are Pressing Ahead With All-Electric Kitchens

If you’ve paid attention to natural gas regulation over the past few years, you’re probably aware a growing number of municipalities and state governments have pushed to ban the use of the gas hookups in new home and office builds as they look for ways to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions.

It started with Berkeley in 2019, and since that time, a number of cities in California and New York have followed suit with efforts to restrict or outright ban the use of natural gas. Predictably, GOP-controlled legislatures around the country have fought back by passing “preemption laws” that prohibit cities from banning natural gas. According to CNN, twenty states with GOP-controlled legislatures have preemption laws prohibiting cities from banning natural gas.

But while the political battle between old-world gas adherents and those looking to reduce our reliance on gas rages on, big companies like Microsoft are reading the tea leaves and building electric kitchens. According to a story in Fast Company, the software giant is building an all-electric kitchen in one of its newest buildings in Redmond, Washington.

You can read the full post here. 

Restaurant Tech

Ghost Kitchen Startup Hungry House Partners With JOKR, Omsom and Others For Season Two

Hungry House, a ghost kitchen startup based in New York City, announced today it has formed a partnership with 10-minute delivery startup JOKR to distribute chef-created meals around New York City.

The company, founded by Zuul alum Kristen Barnett, announced the news today as part of the launch of its “season two,” which also includes news of new featured chefs and other partnerships. The deal is interesting in that JOKR and other ultra-fast grocery apps are where customers generally order shelf-stable packaged goods and maybe a little fresh produce. Under this new partnership, JOKR users will now be able to order fresh meals designed by chefs and cooked up in Hungry House’s facilities.

Speaking of facilities, Hungry House also announced an expansion beyond its first location in Brooklyn. Working with “nightlife experts” the No Thing Group, the company will open up a new multi-purpose location in Manhattan’s West Village. After Hungry House serves takeout and delivery out of the ghost kitchen during the day, No Thing Group will transform the new location “into a destination for craft cocktails” in the evening.

To read the full story, head here.

DoorDash Opens Ghost Kitchen in Brooklyn, Serving Up Little Caesars, MilkBar & More

When DoorDash opened the first DoorDash Kitchen in California back in 2019, we speculated when they’d be expanding their ghost kitchen business beyond their home state.

As it turns out, that answer is almost three years as the company opens its first location on the east coast. The latest location will be in Brooklyn, where the delivery company will partner up with five restaurants to offer menus for the delivery and take-out location. The restaurant partners for what DoorDash is calling a “delivery-forward food hall” are DOMODOMO, Kings Co Imperial, Pies ‘n’ Thighs, moonbowls, and Little Caesars. DoorDash Kitchens will also offer Birch Coffee and Milk Bar items, two popular NYC-founded chains.

DoorDash’s facilities partner for its NYC food hall ghost kitchen is commercial kitchen-as-a-service startup Nimbus. Nimbus, founded by Camilla Opperman and Samantha Slager, has two (soon to be three) locations in NYC, including Brooklyn, where DoorDash will set up shop. Like many newer commercial kitchen concepts, the idea behind Nimbus was to create space to power virtual brands for delivery and curbside pickup. The new location also has event space, where DoorDash and their restaurant partners can hold community meetings, dinners, and panel conversations.

To read the full story, head here.

Future Food

Sea & Believe is Making Plant-Based Whole Cut ‘Cod’ That Flakes Like Real Fish

Sea & Believe is a little different than the typical IndieBio company in that they already have a successful product on the market. The Ireland-based company sells two alt-fish products, an Irish seaweed burger and seaweed goujons, and today they are available in 50 stores across Ireland.

But as the company showed last week at IndieBio’s Demo Day, they are close to launching what they see as their biggest breakthrough yet: a plant-based whole-cut filet of ‘cod’ that flakes like real fish.

For company founder Jennifer O’Brien, Irish seaweed is a natural choice as a foundational building block for an alt-seafood product. Growing up in Ireland, O’Brien would eat seaweed to find relief for chronic asthma. The more she studied it, the more she realized the other benefits of seaweed, including its ability to deacidify the ocean, sequestering carbon at a rate three times higher per acre than forests.

Read the full post at here.

IndieBio Startup CellCrine is Developing Serum-Free Growth Media That Reduces Costs by 90%

Growth medium is widely recognized in the cell-cultured meat industry as one of the nascent sector’s biggest cost drivers. According to a survey conducted by the Good Food Institute in 2020, growth media made up 80% or more of the total operating cost for 38% of those cell-cultured meat manufacturers who responded, while 72% of respondents indicated that growth media made up half or more of their total operating costs.

As a result, a number of startups have been working on developing new approaches to create lower-cost growth media. One of these companies is CellCrine, which claims to be developing the world’s cheapest serum-free growth media. As a member of IndieBio’s 12th cohort, CellCrine pitched their idea this week at the biotech accelerator’s Demo Day.

CellCrine’s media utilizes what it says are proteins that are currently not a component of any media sold today. These proteins act as “cell culture activator” that coordinates the cell growth process and brings out the best performance from within cells. According to the company, adding these proteins as a supplement to cultured cell growth media “reduces the need for all other growth factors and recombinant proteins 90% or more.”

Read the full post here.

Food Robotics

Jack in the Box Pilot Testing Fryer & Drink Station Robots

Last month Miso Robotics and Jack in the Box announced a pilot test of robotic fryer and drink fulfillment systems. The new trial, which will take place in the San Diego market, will utilize the Flippy 2 and the Sippy product lines from Miso Robotics.

“This collaboration with Miso Robotics is a steppingstone for our back-of-house restaurant operations,” Jack in the Box COO Tony Darden said in the release. “We are confident that this technology will be a good fit to support our growing business needs with intentions of having a positive impact on our operations while promoting safety and comfort to our team members.”

The Flippy 2 will be used to automate the fryer station to cook up curly fries, tacos, chicken nuggets, and other fried food. The Sippy will automate cup dispensing and beverage filling and top the drinks with an airtight drink seal (think boba drinks) rather than the typical plastic lid.

To read the full story, click here!

The Spoon Weekly: Tobacco Plant Bioreactors, Roboburgers & Starbucks NFTs

Welcome to the Spoon Weekly. The Spoon Weekly features some of our favorite food tech stories from the past week. Make sure to subscribe to get it delivered directly to your inbox.

BioBetter is Turning Tobacco Plants into Bioreactors to Drive Down the Cost of Cultivated Meat Growth Media

Food tech startup BioBetter has developed a novel way to create growth factors for cell-cultivated meat utilizing tobacco plants.

Based in Kiryat Shemona, Israel, the company announced that it has developed a method to create growth factors via molecular farming techniques by essentially turning the tobacco plant into a bioreactor. BioBetter’s technology employs plant cells to produce growth factors instead of more traditional techniques which utilize yeast, bacteria, or CHO in a bioreactor to produce growth factors.

The company’s technology involves identifying the gene of the target protein, cloning it, and transferring it into the tobacco plant. They then select the highest-yielding plants, breed them to develop higher yields, and then ultimately grow and harvest the plants.

As the tobacco plants mature, their cells express the growth factors and store them until harvest. The company then uses a proprietary protein extraction and purification technology that enables it to exploit nearly the entire plant, producing a high purity product at lower overall costs.

To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.

As Meat Prices Rise, Could Plant-Based Meat Become a Value Option for Consumers?

Have you seen the price of meat lately?

It’s not pretty. The average price of a pound of ground beef in the United States has jumped over 20% in the past year and seems to just keep going up.

Meanwhile, the cost of a 12-ounce package of Impossible ground has continued to drop and is showing up at under $6 at some retail establishments, about the same price of a pound of extra lean ground beef.

Not quite price parity…yet. But as Impossible and other plant-based meat providers continue to ramp up volume, it’s worth asking: when meat alternatives reach price parity and, eventually, sell at a discount to animal meat, could customers start reaching for plant-based meat to save a buck?

You can read the full post at The Spoon.

Here Are Four Ways Starbucks Could Get Into The NFT Business

Starbucks is getting into the NFT business.

That’s according to company CEO Howard Schultz, who recently held a company town hall to discuss what the company’s plans are for the coming year. Schultz, who retook the reigns of the coffee giant this week, said the company would be in the NFT business before the end of the calendar year.

“If you look at the companies, the brands, the celebrities, the influencers that are trying to create a digital NFT platform and business, I can’t find one of them that has the treasure trove of assets that Starbucks has, from collectibles to the entire heritage of the company,” Schultz said.

While it can often be cringe-inducing when CEOs talk about new digital formats – something Schultz acknowledged by admitting he’s not a digital native – he’s right that the company has many assets that could be tokenized and create new ways to engage with its customers.

You can read the full post here. 

The Spoon is Hiring!

Do you love food tech? Are you a dynamic sales leader who can close? We want to talk! The Spoon is looking for a sales lead to help generate new sales, expand existing relationships and help build our business! Check this and other positions out at the Spoon Job Board!

Smart Kitchen

Holy Smokes: FirstBuild’s Arden Indoor Smoker Hits Crowdfunding Target in Two Minutes

FirstBuild, GE Appliances’ innovation arm, has launched its latest crowdfunding campaign, and this one looks like a potential home run.

The same group that brought you the Opal ice machine and the Paragon induction cooktop are now bringing an indoor pellet smoker called Arden to market via a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. The Arden can smoke up to two racks of ribs at a time or a small brisket, all inside your home without setting your fire alarms off.

The Arden uses a smoke-elimination technology that requires no additional filters to clean or replace. According to FirstBuild, the technology was first developed for GE’s smart hearth oven and has now been incorporated into the Arden.

The unit uses the same pellets used with other smokers. Once the smoke is pulled out of the chamber and into the smoke eliminator, it eliminates all smoke and just CO2 and water are exhausted into the kitchen. This allows users to sit the Arden on a countertop and smoke a slab of meat without any special venting.

To read the full story, head here.

Lomi, Unboxed: A First Look at The Lomi Smart Food Waste Composter

I find food tech fascinating – especially the products and solutions that have a shot at fixing a real problem in our food system. Tackling issues like food waste, food insecurity, nutrition, and accessibility, technology can give us the tools to change habits and systems.

But, I admit I haven’t always adopted tech in my own home that has made a huge change in our own food habits outside of our beloved sous vide, and nothing that stuck when it came to food waste. With growing kids, our grocery bills keep increasing, but I throw out more food on busy weeks than I’d ever like to admit.

Composting at home has never been an easy or…neat endeavor; we’ve tried several times, using smaller receptacles to collect food scraps to bring out to a larger pile. But no matter what, we abandoned our efforts for lack of time and patience. One year, we even subscribed to a service that would drop off nutrient-dense compost soil for us to use in our vegetable garden. We paid someone for THEIR broken-down food scraps — and it turns out, nutrient-rich, locally harvested, hand-delivered compost is not cheap.

To read the full story, head here.

Smart Kitchen Platform Company Drop Changes Name to Fresco

Drop dropped Drop.

The startup that started with a connected scale eight years ago announced it has a new brand identity. The company is now called Fresco, a name which “(reflects) the company’s priority to connect dots in the kitchen between appliances, home cooks and recipes to make cooking effortless,” said the announcement.

Fresco CEO Ben Harris said that the company needed a new brand given its evolution beyond its hardware roots.

“Drop was a great name for a physical product, but we pivoted to become a smart kitchen platform, providing end-to-end solutions to make appliances connected, from firmware development to IoT expertise and an app that pulls all the appliances together,” Harris said. “As a result, we needed a brand that better represented this.”

Drop is part of a cohort of smart kitchen startups that offer software and connectivity solutions to power kitchen appliances and help consumers cook and plan meals. While some of its peers have increasingly focused on shoppable recipes and looked to help power online grocery integrations, Drop has doubled down on expanding its solutions and increasing its partner roster in the connected kitchen and guided cooking space.

To read the full story, head here.

Future Food

Plant-Based Eggs Starting to Crack Open The European Market
 

Here in the US, a version of a plant-based egg from Eat Just, Inc. has been on the market since 2013, starting with an earlier version from when the company was Hampton Creek. The company’s current product, which uses its flagship mung bean formulation, began selling in the US market in 2019.

But if you wanted to try JUST Egg in Europe, you were out of luck.

That’s about to change. That’s because the company just got approval for its mung bean protein from the European Commission. The approval, which follows an earlier greenlight last fall by the European Food Safety Authority, paves the way for the introduction of JUST Egg to the European market by the fourth quarter of 2022.

That’s not the only good news if you are looking for an egg alternative in Europe. Berlin-based Perfeggt has been working on an egg alternative that derives its protein punch from fava beans, and is starting to ship in Germany.

Read the full post here.

Israel’s Vanilla Vida Wants to Expand and Improve the World’s Favorite Flavor

Here’s a fun fact: Did you know that vanilla is the world’s most popular flavor? In addition, how about the idea that 95% of all vanilla sold is synthetic, generally made from an oil or lab-developed chemical compound. Sounds like a supply and demand issue for a real deal vanilla pod.

Vanilla Vida has done its homework and sees an opportunity to tickle the universal taste buds by using technology and data to produce large quantities of top-quality vanilla anywhere in the world. Madagascar and Indonesia are the top crop producers but face issues with uncertain weather, quality control issues, and a long drying process. With proof of concept completed, Vanilla Vida CEO Oren Zilberman is ready to expand beyond Israel and launch climate-controlled farms worldwide.

Zilberman’s experience as a VC is instrumental in the success of his new company. “When you are building a startup, you are always looking about what is the chance it can do a major impact and some change in the world and at the same time, have a really good business,” the company’s CEO said in a recent interview with The Spoon. He also explained that his experience led him not to want to develop something new or go into an unproven segment. By expanding the opportunity for a wildly popular product, such as vanilla, Vanilla Vida can hit the ground running instead of requiring a great deal of marketing to drive customer awareness.

Read the full post here

Food Robots

Chili’s is Trialing a Sidewalk Delivery Robot From Serve Robotics

Hankering for some Chili’s but don’t want to jump in your car? It might not be long before that grilled chicken and bowl of chili arrive at your front door via sidewalk robot.

That’s because Chili’s parent company Brinker has been secretly piloting a trial with sidewalk delivery startup Serve Robotics and is evaluating the possibility of a wider rollout.

The first hint of the Brinker-Serve pilot came via a small mention last week in an article in a Dallas publication about the company’s drone delivery trials with Flytrex. Both Brinker and Serve have since confirmed to The Spoon that they are running an early stage sidewalk delivery pilot but were not ready to discuss further details of a wider rollout.

“We can confirm Serve is working with Brinker International to roll out robotic delivery for Chili’s customers,” a Serve spokesperson told the Spoon. “We will have more to share once service is launched.”

To read the full story, click here!

Watch This Video of RoboBurger, a Robot Burger Vending Machine, Cooking Up Burgers

Over the past couple of years, there’s been no shortage of robotic vending machines cooking up everything from salads to bowl food to ramen to pizza. But, what we haven’t seen – until earlier this week – is a machine that makes the cornerstone meal of the American fast food marketplace, the hamburger.

The RoboBurger, a robotic burger vending machine, arrived at its first location in a New Jersey shopping mall. The machine, a fully autonomous machine that makes a complete burger in minutes, showed up at the Newport Centre mall in Jersey City, New Jersey. The box measures 12 square feet, plugs into a 220-volt wall socket, has a built-in refrigerator and an automated griddle and cleaning system. The self-contained machine holds up to 50 frozen burger patties and cooks each burger one at a time.

You can read full post here.

The Spoon Weekly: An OnlyFans for Foodies, Bear Ships 5K Robots, The Mini-Dishwasher Golden Age

This is the Spoon Weekly, a collection of some of the most interesting stories from the past week. Make sure to subscribe to get the top food tech news delivered straight to your inbox.

Can Food-Centric Streaming Platform Kittch Succeed Where Others Have Failed?

In 2016 I got a pitch about a hugely successful entrepreneur who was launching a streaming site dedicated to foodies.

Steve Chen, the co-founder of Youtube, was combining a love of food with his proven experience building online video to launch a new site that would “allow anyone to direct, produce, and host their own food show.” Called Nom, the site debuted at SXSW on March 9, 2016, and went live to the general public a few days later.

Two years and $4.7 million in funding later, Nom shut down.

There have been other sites with similar pitches since 2016, including YesChef, an “online education platform dedicated to cooking” complete with James Beard award-winning chefs like Nancy Silverton to teach cooking techniques and recipes. Or World Chef, a “platform for foodies; a place where truly special Chefs can share their extraordinary food experiences directly with their fans.”

And then was Fanwide’s hot-minute pivot to a chef platform in the middle of the pandemic, or GE’s attempt to create a video streaming platform for chefs called Chibo that has since shuttered.

So you’ll have to forgive me when my first reaction upon hearing the pitch for Kittch, a site that Vanity Fair calls Onlyfans for Chefs, is one of skepticism.

You can read the full story here.

Consumer Kitchen

The Golden Age of Tiny Dishwashers? Bob and Tetra Begin Making Their Way to a Countertop Near You

Ever since we first stumbled upon the diminutive dishwasher named Bob in the basement of the Sands convention center at CES 2019, we’ve been wondering when the little guy would arrive stateside.

The answer is this year. Daan Technology, the French startup behind the Bob, started shipping the small footprint dishwasher in Europe in 2020 and had originally slated the Bob to arrive in the US the same year. While that model Bob stayed in Europe, an updated global version is finally set to start shipping this year.

The company started a Kickstarter campaign this month and has bundles featuring Bob starting at $379 with an expected ship date of September 2022. For those who don’t want to buy through Kickstarter, my guess is the company will begin up selling Bob on its own website later this year.

Order options include a hose to connect the dishwasher to a faucet (Bob also has a one-gallon water reservoir that can be filled manually) and a range of colorful faceplates. The Bob Premium also includes an interesting UV-C ultraviolet option that allows the user to disinfect items (like phones) that can’t get wet.

You can read the full post here. 

Web3/Crypto

This Farmer’s Market Vendor Has Accepted Bitcoin for 5 Years. Here’s How Things Have Changed.

Back in 2017, before much of the general public had given cryptocurrency a second thought, Alessandro Stortini started accepting bitcoin as a form of payment at his local farmer’s market stand, La Pasta.

Since that time, virtual currencies have become mainstream as everyone from grandmas to pro athletes have jumped into the world of crypto. In fact, from 2017 to 2022, the number of crypto wallets went from under 12 million to over 81 million by January of 2022.

If you’re like me, you’d figure with almost seven times as many cryptocurrency wallets out there, the number of people looking to spend their virtual currency to buy pasta at their local farmer’s market would have gone up. Not so, according to Stortini.

“We got way more customers paying with bitcoin in 2017,” Stortini said.

Stortini told me the reason for that is because back in those early days, crypto owners were more willing to use it as a form of payment.

To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.

Emily Elyse Miller Wants to Reinvent Breakfast Cereal. That Means Vegan Ingredients, Edgy Mascots, and (Of Course) NFTs

Emily Elyse Miller knows a thing or two about breakfast.

Not only has the one-time journalist and fashion trends forecaster written a book on the topic (complete with 380 recipes from 80 countries), but she’d also run a consulting company that helped world-renowned chefs like Enrique Olvera develop breakfast events.

But after years of writing and teaching about first-meal, Miller realized that cereal, the centerpiece of the American breakfast for generations of kids and adults, had gone stale. So she decided to start a cereal company of her own to reinvent the category.

Called OffLimits, Miller’s company created a line of irreverent brands like Dash and Zombie, each with its own ‘moody mascot’ and a clean ingredient list.

The funky mascots were important for Miller, because while she loved the rainbow-colored pop culture she grew up with in the cereal aisle, she felt it was time for something new.

“Tony the Tiger is not cool,” said Miller. “Cereal is one of the only products that carry culture in this unique way, and that culture has not been updated in decades.”

Read the full post at The Spoon.

Alternative Protein

SuperMeat Partners With Japanese Food Giant Ajinomoto To Scale Cultivated Meat Production

SuperMeat, a cell-cultured meat company based in Israel, and Ajinomoto, a large Japanese food and biotechnology conglomerate, announced today the formation of a strategic partnership to “to establish a commercially viable supply chain platform for the cultivated meat industry.”

According to the announcement, the partnership, which will include an investment by Ajinomoto in SuperMeat, will combine SuperMeat’s expertise in cultivated meat with Ajinomoto’s R&D technology and expertise in biotech and fermentation capabilities.

One of the main focuses of the new partnership will be in the development of cell-cultured growth media, the broth which contains the nutrients needed for animal cell growth, which remains one of the biggest overall cost drivers in the creation of cultivated meat. According to a study by the Good Food Institute conducted in 2020 of cultivated meat producers, 72% of respondents indicated that cell growth media represented over 50% of their operating costs, and 38% said growth media represented 80% or more of operating costs. By combining SuperMeat’s technology advancements in cultivated meat with Anjinomoto’s biomanufacturing expertise, the two companies hope to drive down costs while increasing the supply of food-grade growth factors.

You can read the full story at The Spoon.

Food Robots

Meet Don Roverto, X’s Robotic Rover on the Hunt for The Next Magic Bean to Feed a Hungry Planet

When you spend thirty years looking for a magic bean, you’re open to a helping hand when trying to find the next one. For the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, that help has arrived in the form of a crop-roving robot nicknamed Don Roverto.

The farmbot is part of Project Mineral, an endeavor from X – Google’s famous R&D subsidiary that researches challenging problems and searches for moonshots – to scale sustainable agriculture. In a blog post published today, project head Elliott Grant describes how Mineral has been assisting the Alliance for Biodiversity and CIAT to accelerate their work to understand and uncover hidden crop traits within the world’s largest bean collection.

From the post:

The Alliance’s team has been using Mineral’s technologies at their newly opened Future Seeds genebank in Colombia, which contains over 36,000 varieties of beans. The hope is that what the Alliance discovers with Mineral’s tools can be used to grow better beans for the world, faster.

According to Andy Jarvis, the Associate Director-General with the Alliance, the organization has spent decades building and analyzing its bean collection. Finally, after thirty years of searching, they found a “magic” bean with intrinsic drought-resistant characteristics. With tools like Don Roverto, the organization can process its discoveries at lightning speed and find the next game-changing bean faster than ever before.

To read the full story, click here!

With 5 Thousand Robots Shipped, Bear Robotics Raises $81 Million Series B to Accelerate Growth and Expand into New Markets

Today restaurant robotics startup Bear Robotics announced they have raised an $81 million Series B. The round was led by IMM, with participation by Cleveland Avenue. The new funding brings the company’s total venture investment to $117 million.

Bear, co-founded by former ex-Googler and restauranteur John Ha, makes server robots that help hospitality businesses do everything from delivering food to tables to bussing tables. A few years ago, the company started trialing its first robot, Penny, in Ha’s restaurant, the Kang Nam Tofu House in Milpitas, CA. Since those early days, the company has shipped 5000 robots, with much of the volume coming last year.

The company has been on a roll lately, winning contracts with big names like Denny’s to Chili’s and a sports stadium or two. Bear’s biggest markets today are in South Korea and Japan, with the US quickly catching up. With their new funding, the company plans to expand further across the US, Europe, and additional countries in southeast Asia

According to Bear COO and cofounder Juan Higueros, the volume they’ve experienced over the past couple of years is the result of a concerted effort to ramp up mass production in 2020.

“It took us all of 2020 to get it done,” Higueros told me via Zoom. “We really started ramping in Q1 of 2020 in the US. It’s been growing at a nice steady pace ever since and we anticipate the US market will continue to grow.”

You can read full post here.

The Spoon Weekly: Cana Pricing, Humanoid Cashiers, AI-Powered Food Innovation

Welcome to the Spoon food tech weekly wrap-up, featuring some of our top stories of the past week!

Click here to subscribe and get The Spoon in your inbox.

Cana Unveils Pricing for Molecular Beverage Printer, Gives a Peek Inside

Last week Cana, a company building a countertop drink printer that makes nearly any type of beverage, announced pricing for the drink machine, beverage cartridges, and the estimated ship date for the product.

Called the Cana One, the company’s first countertop beverage printer will have a limited time price of $499 for the first 10 thousand orders, after which it will be priced at $799. Customers can reserve a Cana One at the lower price for $99 on the company’s website (the $99 will be applied to the purchase price).

The company will ship everything necessary to make a drink – the sweeteners, alcohol, and the molecular drink cartridges – to the customer’s home. When the Cana One auto-detects that cartridges are getting low, the company will automatically ship them to the customer’s home.

How much the Cana One user pays for ingredients largely depends on consumption. Customers will order drinks and pay anywhere from $0.29 to $2.99 per beverage. The more a customer consumes, the more they pay, and the faster Cana is shipping out replenishment to their doorstep.

You can read the full story here.

Food Robotics

Are We Ready for Humanoid Robots Like Ameca to Take Our Food Order?

If you watched the news coming out of CES, you probably saw a robot named Ameca talking to attendees on the trade show floor.

The robot, whose human(ish) eyes and facial expressions had Elon Musk freaked out when it showed up on Twitter last December, went viral during CES in January as press and attendees tweeted out videos of the humanoid interacting with attendees.

Ever since CES, I haven’t been able to shake the image of Ameca and wonder when we might see a robot like her at my corner restaurant. And, once humanoid robots start to show up in our restaurants, I can’t help but wonder how exactly consumers will feel about it? After all, it’s one thing to show off futuristic technology at a geek-filled conference like CES. It’s another to see it in your local restaurant.

Why wonder, you ask? After all, aren’t today’s front-of-house robots more R2D2 than C3PO, and didn’t a spokesperson for the company behind Ameca say it’s probably a decade before a robot like her is walking on the streets amongst us.

You can read the full post here. 

Restaurant Tech

DoorDash Acquires In-Venue Order & Pay Specialist Bbot

Food delivery giant DoorDash announced last week they have entered into an agreement to buy Bbot, a New York-based maker of order and pay software for restaurants. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Bbot, which offers a suite of off-premise and in-venue ordering solutions, is best known for its in-venue QR code offering that allows customers to pull up the menu, order, and pay for items with their phones. The company has seen rapid growth over the past couple of years as restaurants raced to upgrade their digital ordering capabilities and install contactless payment solutions during the pandemic. The company’s fast growth led to not one but two funding rounds in 2021 and was enough to convince Doordash to scoop up the company.

For DoorDash, which launched its restaurant e-commerce platform DoorDash Storefront in 2020, the BBot deal helps expand its digital suite to include payment and in-venue offerings.

You can read the full story here.

McDonald’s Resistance to Ice Cream Machine Fix Strikes Discordant Note Amidst Chain’s Tech Stack Modernization Push

You know how they say it’s not what you know, but who you know? That’s doubly true if you’re trying to insert yourself into McDonald’s technology supplier network.

Just ask Kytch, a company that makes a device that fixes the burger giant’s perpetually broken ice cream machines. You’d think that McDonald’s would welcome such a fix since, after all, their ice cream machines are broken so often they’ve become meme-worthy.

Apparently not, as illustrated by the burger chain’s orchestrated email campaign warning franchisees to stay away from Kytch, claiming it violated the machinery’s warranty, intercepted confidential info, and suggested the device was dangerous to operators since it has a remote operation function. McDonald’s also used the email campaign to promote a new ice cream machine from Taylor (the manufacturer of the oft-broken machines), which promised to have similar remote management features as the Kytch appliance.

According to Kytch, the McDonald’s email campaign killed their business and severely hobbled plans to launch an entire line of connected kitchen products for pro kitchens.

You can read the full post here.

Alt Protein

Cultivated Meat Has a Production Capacity Problem. Yossi Quint Has a Plan to Fix It

Yossi Quint wants the cultivated meat industry to succeed. However, to reach its potential, he thinks the nascent industry has one major hurdle to overcome: a severe lack of production capacity.

Quint arrived at this conclusion while working at McKinsey, where he often worked on projects for clients in the food and beverage industry. During one deep dive into the cultivated meat market, he became convinced that this new form of food production had the potential to be a multibillion-dollar industry, but would never fulfill its potential unless it can increase production by orders of magnitude over its current capacity.

To get there, Quint believed that equipment used to make cell-cultivated meat – giant metal vats called bioreactors – needed to be built specifically for the market. That’s because bioreactors used by today’s cultivated meat producers are usually modified versions of hardware made for the pharmaceutical industry, an industry with completely different unit cost economics than that of food.

Out of this challenge, the idea for his company was born. Ark Biotech is building next-generation, high-volume bioreactors for the cultivated meat industry. I sat down with Quint to discuss the challenges of developing hardware for the cultivated meat industry and where he sees the infrastructure market going in the future. The answers have been lightly edited for brevity.

Why did you decide to start the company?

I was working at McKinsey had the opportunity to work with many different companies. And I had a chance to dig pretty deep into the cultivated meat space and think in-depth about what was needed in this industry to succeed over time—doing everything from consumer insights work to thinking about how to reduce unit economics and scale up. But, as I dug into scale-up, I quickly realized that biomanufacturing will be the bottleneck for this industry to grow. And that there are very few, perhaps no players, out there that are offering sensible solutions for industrial-scale cultivated meat production.

You can read the full story here.

NotCo Built a Unicorn Using AI To Accelerate Food Innovation. CEO Matias Muchnick Tells The Spoon How They Did It

When Matias Muchnick started NotCo in 2015, food innovation was a slow-moving process.

“Food R&D was three guys in lab coats, doing trial and error in a developmental kitchen,” said Muchnick in a recent interview with The Spoon. “Reading research papers from 1980 about using soy to replace animal-based ingredients. That was it. So whenever you have an industry that has a very obsolete technology, then a lot of bad things happen.”

He and his co-founders wanted to create new plant-based food products, but they wanted to do it in a new way that didn’t rely on antiquated methodologies. Eventually, they started wondering if using technology like artificial intelligence could help them make better decisions and help create new types of food faster.

They decided yes and started building an extensive database of information about all the components that create the taste and experience of food.

“Your machine learning will always be directly proportionate to the amount of data and the dimensions of data that you collect,” said Muchnick. “So from the very beginning, understanding what data was relevant for the objective that we were trying to do, which was replacing animals with plants, was important to us.”

You can read the full story here.

Food Retail & Tech

Tech-Powered Retail is Flourishing in the Food Industry. Everywhere Else, Not So Much

When B8ta launched in 2015, I loved the idea. What wasn’t there to like about a highly experiential, tech-powered retail concept where consumers could try out cool new gadgets and companies could get invaluable early feedback about their products?

The same with Amazon Books, which opened the same year. I mean, sure, it almost seemed cruel that the dominant e-tailer was going to head to head with Barnes & Noble on their turf, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t intrigued to see how the tech giant might rethink physical goods retail.

Fast forward to this year, and within the span of a couple weeks, we’ve learned both B8ta and Amazon Books are closing their doors.

Contrast this with the world of food retail. Everyone from Amazon to Walmart to upstarts like Nourish & Bloom are employing cutting-edge technology like AI, robotics, and more to power new food shopping experiences. So why is it that tech-powered food retail is flourishing while other retail concepts seem to struggle?

To read the full story, click here!

The Spoon Weekly: Home Delivery Lockers, Shopify For Food Robots

Welcome to the Spoon Weekly. To get this delivered to your inbox, subscribe here!

Are Food Delivery Lockers the Next Must-Have Home Amenity?

Everywhere you look there are delivery lockers. Grocery stores, apartment buildings, office lobbies.

So why not at our home?

If you’re Jeremy High, the idea makes lots of sense. As a luxury home builder in the central California market of Monterey, High works closely with clients spec’ing out features customized around their lifestyles. A recurring ask he hears from his customers is they want a way to ensure that food delivered to their home is safe and kept at the right temperature.

The more he heard this, the more High wondered if a solution existed to help his customers. When he realized there wasn’t, he decided to build it himself.

High’s product, eventually called the Fresh Portal, is a food and package delivery locker built into the side of a home. It has temperature control zones for either hot or cold food and would be accessible both from the outside and inside. It would be managed by an app and integrated with third-party delivery service providers like UberEats or Amazon Fresh so they can access the outside of the locker and insert a delivery.

To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.

Read The Top Food Tech Stories of The Week!
Home delivery storage lockers, cow-free milk, and more!   Subscribe to the Spoon to keep up on the latest!

SIMULATE IS BACK THIS SPRING!
So much is going on in Web3 meets food, we’re going to bring SimulATE back in May! Use The Spoon newsletter discount code NEWSLETTER for 10% off early bird tickets!

New Podcast!
This week we caught up with Stephen Klein, the CEO of Hyphen, who is trying to democratize restaurant robotics with his modular makeline. Listen at The Spoon or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Check out The Spoon Job Board!
Looking for your next gig? Have an opening? Check out The Spoon Job Board!

A Conversation With Wildtype’s Justin Kolbeck About Building a Cultivated Seafood Company

Wildtype, a San Francisco-based cell-cultivated seafood startup, today announced it has raised a $100 million Series B funding round. The round, the largest to date for a cultivated seafood startup, is being led by private equity firm L Catterton and includes a number of high profile investors such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr. (through his Footprint Coalition and Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions) among others.

The new funding comes after the company’s June 2021 launch of its pilot production plant. With its new funding in pocket, Wildtype plans to expand the production capacity of its cultivated salmon and to begin work with culinary and restaurant partners.

I sat down with company CEO Justin Kolbeck to learn more about what he sees in Wildtype’s future. According to Kolbeck, expanding production would not have been possible had it not been able to build a pilot production plant with its $12.5 million Series A.

“The organizing thought there was let’s build a pilot plant on Series A money,” Kolbeck said. “And we built the world’s first operational cultivated seafood pilot plant. Was it intended to be our go-to-market plant? No, the idea was, how could we set something up quickly and modularly, that we could add capacity to, and start learning from as we scaled.”

And according to Kolbeck, they learned a lot.

“If we had waited till now to start building the thing, we wouldn’t have had the data, we wouldn’t have the know-how to inform something like what is a sensible floor plan? Because we wouldn’t have gone through the motions of growing cells, creating the scaffold, seeding the cells on the scaffold, and so on. And now we’ve done that, we’ve learned a heck of a lot.”

You can read and listen to our full conversation with Justin at The Spoon. 

Planning food tech world domination in 2022? Run a campaign with The Spoon!

We are experts in virtual events and webinars, have massive reach with our hugely popular newsletter, and reach hundreds of thousands of readers every month at The Spoon.

Reach out for a media kit and we’ll be in touch!

Food Robots

Hyphen Wants to Be The Shopify for Restaurant Robots

Imagine you’re a culinary student with dreams of owning your own restaurant.

In days past, that journey towards restauranteur would take 10 to 20 years as you cut your teeth, gained experience, and saved enough money.

But imagine if you could build a restaurant today or in the near future leveraging automation and software? There would be no big location remodel and a big loan to pay for it. Instead, you’d use a virtual restaurant model powered by fractional pay-as-you-go food robotics, food ordering apps, and third-party delivery, all allowing you to bring something to market in months instead of a decade?

That’s the kind of world that Stephen Klein wants to build. Klein’s company Hyphen announced this week that they’d raised a $24 million Series A funding round, and so I decided to catch up with him to hear about his vision for the company and the food robotics marketplace.

In short, what Stephen and his co-founder Daniel Fukuba believe they are building a Shopify for restaurant robots.

“Instead of enabling merchants to compete with the likes of Amazon, we’re enabling restaurants to compete with the likes of DoorDash,” said Klein.

According to Klein, the big delivery companies are sucking up data from smaller restaurants and using that to compete with them. He believes if the smaller and regional players – as well as new food entrepreneurs – were able to use Hyphen’s automation technology to scale up new offerings, they’d have a much better chance to compete with the big players.

To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.

Alt Protein

Kraft-Heinz and NotCo Form Joint Venture for AI-Powered Food Products

This week Kraft-Heinz and NotCo, the food tech company behind the NotCo brand of plant-based foods, announced they are forming a joint venture to develop a lineup of plant-based food products.

According to the announcement, the new company will leverage the strengths of both companies to develop and bring to market a new line of plant-based products. Called The Kraft Heinz Not Company, it will leverage NotCo’s patented AI platform to develop the food products, while Kraft-Heinz will offer up its production capabilities and formidable sales channels to help bring the products to market.

In joining forces with NotCo, Kraft-Heinz is partnering up with one of the hottest new brands in the fast-growing alt-milk category. The Chilean-based startup has secured distribution deals with a number of premium natural and organic food retailers such as Whole Foods, Sprouts and others since entering the US market in late 2020. The deal also gives the CPG stalwart access to the startup’s patented AI product development platform.

And its this AI platform, which goes by the name Guiseppe, which NotCo cites for its fast success in the US market. Guiseppe works by sifting through huge datasets from the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Agricultural Library and other sources to find ingredient and processing combinations that would best mimic the elements (flavor, texture, etc.) of real meat or dairy in plant-based analogues. The goal is to find the types of combinations that can create a product that completely mimics traditional meat and dairy — a feat few if any plant-based protein-makers have yet to achieve.

You can read the full story at The Spoon

Betterland Foods Debuts Cow-Free Milk Powered by Perfect Day’s Animal-Identical Protein

This week Perfect Day and betterland foods announced the debut of betterland milk, a new cow-free milk using Perfect Day’s animal-identical whey protein produced via precision fermentation. According to the announcement, the new alt-milk will deliver “the same cooking, whipping, steaming, frothing, and baking functionality” as animal milk.

The partnership with betterland foods follows a familiar playbook for Perfect Day, which has previously gone to market with consumer brands incubated within The Urgent Company (TUC). Like Brave Robot ice cream and Modern Kitchen cream cheese brands, betterland milk will use Perfect Day’s genetically engineered whey (beta-lactoglobulin). However, unlike TUC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Perfect Day, it appears betterland foods is a young startup formed independently of Perfect Day.

That’s not to say that betterland founder Lizanne Falsetto, an experience consumer products founder who previously cofounded thinkThin (a maker of nutrition bars), didn’t create the company with Perfect Day’s cow-free proteins in mind. From the announcement:

“When I saw what Perfect Day founders Ryan and Perumal were doing to cultivate nutritious, more sustainable milk proteins, I felt the pull to not only get back into the industry, but to help build a portfolio of products that taste great, while being better for the planet,” said Falsetto. “That’s when betterland foods was born.”

You can read the full story at The Spoon.

Food & Web3

GourmetNFT Want to Help Culinary Creators Monetize Recipes & Food Experiences Using NFTs

The tried-and-true cookbook is dead. Long live the fractional cookbook.

The movement toward secure, one-of-a-kind recipes and food experiences are fueled by advances and acceptance of the technology surrounding Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). It could be a way to move beyond one-dimensional food presentations and feed the growing number of foodies who want more bells and whistles in their gourmet interactions. And then, there are chefs, who, faced with shrinking margins and the impact of COVID-19 on their businesses, are always on the hunt for new revenue streams.

“It has always baffled me as to why chefs and culinary creators, who are essentially IP creators and artists don’t get royalties unless they get into the whole hassle of writing and publish a cookbook,” Ruth McCartney, part of the team behind GourmetNFT, said in an interview with The Spoon. “When NFTs came along, my mind went to individual recipes and for foodies to be able to curate and compile all of their favorite recipes and cook from their iPads.”

To read the full story, click here!

Smart Kitchen

Haier Patents a Fridge That Cooks Eggs

If you’re like me, you think the refrigerator can use a rethink. Outside of adding a few smart features like Wi-Fi, internal cameras, and touchscreens, the biggest and most expensive appliance in our kitchen hasn’t changed a whole lot in recent decades.

Which is why I was intrigued to see this patent by Haier for a fridge with an internal egg boiler.

The patent, which was issued earlier this month to GE Appliance’s parent company, describes an appliance with an internal system for boiling eggs.

It works like this: The egg boiler is built into the refrigerator door. Once the system controller determines the boiler has eggs loaded into it, it orders hot water into the boiler to cook the eggs. After the eggs are cooked, the cooking chamber is flushed with cooler water to cool the eggs off. An alert is then sent to the user which would open the egg boiler and remove their finished eggs.

To read full story, click on The Spoon. 

The Spoon Weekly: Food Replicators, Pizza Hut Robot, Scaling Future Food

Cana Unveils a ‘Netflix for Drinks’ That Can Make Nearly Any Type of Beverage

In late 2018, food tech entrepreneur and investor Dave Friedberg got together with a few scientists for dinner and drinks and talked about a research study that suggested most any beverage is made up almost entirely of water, with only about one percent or so making up a drink’s unique flavor.

It wasn’t long before someone wondered aloud if it would be possible to create a machine that could synthesize nearly any drink.

“Why not just make the Star Trek Replicator and let people print any drink they want, when they want, right in their own home?”

That night the concept for the Cana, a ‘molecular drink printer’, was born.

The device, which one investor describes as a “Netflix for drinks”, uses a single cartridge filled with flavor compounds that Friedberg claims can make a nearly infinite number of drinks: “We know we can print an infinite number of beverages from a few core flavor compounds. We know we can do this across many existing beverage categories — juice, soda, hard seltzer, cocktails, wine, tea, coffee, and beer. Consumer taste testing panels score our printed beverages at the same or better taste levels as commercially available alternatives. Our hardware designs will print beverages quickly and accurately. Our pricing and the footprint of our hardware can yield significant savings and advantages for most households..”

To read the full article about Cana’s molecular beverage printer, head over to The Spoon.

Virtual Event: The New Restaurant Tech Stack

For today’s restaurants, it’s no longer enough to rely on disjointed technology systems cobbled together over time. Creating a great customer experience that attracts dining dollars starts with having the right technology in place. It starts with a stack, built from the ground up, with the future in mind.

Join us on February 16th at 10:00 am Pacific for The New Restaurant Tech Stack webinar; we will explore the challenges for restaurant operators to build a modern technology infrastructure to power their consumer experience across all consumer touchpoints. 

This event is sponsored by Paytronix. 

Register for a free spot now!

Food Tech Predictions for 2022

You want food tech predictions? We got em! Last week we look at restaurant tech, food robotics, plant-based meat and consumer kitchen tech. Below are excerpts from each.

Five Predictions for Consumer Food & Kitchen Tech in 2022

Meet The Smart Food Delivery Locker

For the last few years, companies like Walmart, Amazon, and others have been trying to figure out how to deliver food when we’re not home. Ideas have run the gamut, from delivering products directly to our fridges, onto our dinner tables, depositing groceries in our garage, to even dropping deliveries into our car trunk.

All this effort would be unnecessary if homes just had temperature-controlled storage lockers, something that – at least until lately – hadn’t existed.

Until now. This month Walmart and HomeValet announced a pilot program that will deliver fresh groceries to the HomeValet smart outdoor delivery receptacle. Another company, Fresh Portal, is building a temperature-controlled home delivery box that is accessible both outside (for delivery companies) and inside the home. And then there’s Dynosafe, who appeared on Shark Tank in the spring of 2021 and got an investment from Robert Herjavec.

While companies like Yale have been making smart boxes for delivery for a little while, there hasn’t been a widely available temperature-controlled smart storage box. In 2022, I expect we’ll start seeing more deals like the Walmart/HomeValet deal, as well as some integration deals with third-party delivery providers.

To read all of our predictions for consumer kitchen tech, head to The Spoon. 

Five Plant-Based Meat Predictions for 2022

The Year of the Whole Cut

After years of countless plant-based burgers and other minced alt-meat product introductions, the plant-based meat industry will see lots more whole cut analogs make it to market in 2022 and beyond.

We first got a hint at CES 2019 that Impossible was interested in whole cuts when The Spoon broke the story the company was working on a steak, but since that time we’ve seen a bunch of companies announce they are working on building whole cut alternatives.

Juicy Marbles, Novameat and Redefine Mean are also working on whole cut steak analogs. Others like Atlast are offering mycelium-based whole cut bacon. Then there are those making whole-cut seafood analogs like that from Plantish.

Many of these companies are looking to deliver their products in 2022, and you can expect a wave of new plant-based whole cut concepts introduced throughout the year.

You can read all of my plant-based meat predictions on The Spoon. 

Five Food Robotics Predictions for 2022

Restaurants-in-a-Box Start Rolling Out

Get ready for the restaurant in-a-box. There are a number of startups with robo-restaurant concepts already in fully operational pilot tests who are looking to expand with multiple self-contained robot restaurants in 2022.

Hyper-Robotics, which makes fully automated containerized robot pizza restaurants that can pump out up to 50 pies per hour, is beginning to roll out its pizza robot restaurants in Israel. Cala, a French startup that makes fully autonomous pasta-making robots, is already operating a robot in Paris’ fifth arrondissement district. Another startup called Mezli, which is currently running its containerized bowl-food restaurant in Kitchentown, has plans to eventually launch more locations.

These are just a few self-contained robo-restaurants and we expect to see many more rollout in 2022.

Check out all of my food robotics predictions for 2022 on The Spoon. 

Five Restaurant Tech Predictions for 2022

Restaurants Will Deploy More AI, Automation & Cloud-Powered Labor to Offset Labor Challenges

Like many other restaurant chains, Checkers has struggled in recent years to find enough workers to cover the various shifts. Going forward, they won’t have to worry about that when it comes to manning the drive-thru as the company rolls out AI-powered voice bots to 267 of their restaurants.

This is only one example of how we’ll see restaurants embrace more technology to deal with what has become a permanent labor shortage in the restaurant space. Of course, automation and robotics will also be a part of the equation, but I think we’ll also see more restaurants find help through remote labor through platforms like Bite Ninja.

See all my restaurant tech predictions for 2022 on The Spoon.

Planning food tech world domination in 2022? Run a campaign with The Spoon!

We are experts in virtual events and webinars, have massive reach with our hugely popular newsletter, and reach hundreds of thousands of readers every month at The Spoon. 

Reach out for a media kit and we’ll be in touch!

Here Are The Details About Flyfish Club, Gary Vaynerchuk’s NFT Restaurant Opening in 2023

While we already knew some of the basic details about Gary Vaynerchuk and VCR Group’s NFT restaurant concept, we’ve learned more in the last week about how the whole thing will work.

Here’s some of what we’ve learned and my quick thoughts:

Token as Membership. At a high level, the Flyfish Club and its NFT membership is essentially a new, crypto-ized spin on an old idea: a member’s only dining club. To start, VCR initially made a total of 1,501 membership tokens for the Flyfish Club available to the public and reserved 1,534 for the company. Membership remains valid as long as a person owns the token. As just like most NFTs, the owner can resell the token (and many are already trying to do just that) on marketplaces like Opensea.

Flyfish Has Two-Tiered Membership. Flyfish has two types of tokens available: a Flyfish token and a Flyfish Omakase token. The Flyfish token, initially offered at 2.5 Ethereum (~$8,400), gets you into the restaurant and cocktail lounge while the Omakase token, offered at 4.25 Ethereum (~$14,300), gets you all that plus entry into the exclusive Omakase room.

To read all the details about Gary Vee’s NFT restaurant, head over to The Spoon.

ALSO!: David Rodolitz, the CEO of the Flyfish Club, will be speaking at our Food NFT and Metaverse mini-summit. Use discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets!

As Future Food Companies Look to Grow, A New Crop of Startups Lend a Hand on Biomanufacturing Scale-up

While companies creating precision fermented and cell-cultured food products continue to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, the reality is their products are still years away from making a significant dent in the overall consumption of a growing global population.

The primary reason for this is that these products still aren’t being produced at nearly the scale they need to feed billions of people. Some estimates have put the biomanufacturing capacity needed by 2030 at 10 billion liters in order to meet the projected demand for fermentation-based animal proteins.

The good news is that a growing number of companies are building out technology and services platforms to help these companies move towards scaled production. One such company is Solar Biotech, which makes customized plant architectures to help future food and other companies scale up their biomanufacturing capacity. The company has been working with startups such as Motif Foodworks and TurtleTree Labs to help them develop their product and move towards higher capacity production.

You can read the full story about the new crop of startups helping to scale future food at The Spoon

Pizza Hut Launches a Fully Robotic Restaurant-in-a-Box (Video)

This month, Pizza Hut debuted a fully automated robot-powered restaurant.

The ‘restaurant-in-a-box’ is based on technology from Hyper-Robotics, an Israel-based food robotics startup that makes containerized restaurants.

The restaurant is operating out of the parking lot of Drorim Mall, a shopping mall located in the central Israel city of Bnei Dror. The restaurant is fully self-contained, doing everything from dropping toppings to baking and boxing. About the only thing it doesn’t do is make the dough, but according to Hyper its pizza restaurant can hold up to 240 types of dough in different sizes.

When Hyper launched its robot pizza restaurant in November, it had a capacity of 50 pies per hour. It also had 30 warming cabinets, two robotic dispensing arms and dispensers for up to 12 toppings.

The customer initiates an order for a pizza directly from a touchscreen kiosk on the restaurant exterior or through the Pizza Hut app. After the pizza is made and boxed, a Pizza Hut employee takes the pizza from a dispensing tray and hands it to the customer. In future versions, the restaurant will be able to dispense the pizza directly to the customer.

To read the full story and see a video of the Pizza Hut containerized robot, click here. 

Spoon Weekly: The Rise of Molecular Farming & Cookie Robots in Alabama

2022 looks to be a big year for a number of innovating food tech approaches, including molecular farming. The practice, which involves genetically editing a crop so that its cells produce a protein, sidesteps some of the costly and tricky problems of growing proteins in traditional bioreactors since plants have built-in immune systems. As startups such as Moolec Science and Tiamat Sciences bring their products to market, many are eyeing molecular farming as a potentially exciting new approach to produce proteins at scale.

You can read about whether 2022 will be the year of molecular farming as well as the other top stories of the week in this week’s Spoon newsletter. If you haven’t already subscribed to The Spoon to get this and other stories in your inbox, what are you waiting for?

We Read the Public Comments on Cell-Cultured Meat Labeling So You Don’t Have To

After receiving about 1,700 comments, including many from private individuals, the USDA has closed its window for public comments on labeling standards for cell-cultured meat and poultry products.

Some of the most comprehensive responses to the USDA’s list of questions came from the Good Food Institute and New Harvest, nonprofit groups that share a mission of advancing the alternative protein industry. Environmental groups, agricultural associations, and cell-cultured meat startups also entered the fray. Here are some of The Spoon’s takeaways on the debate.

Brave new labeling requirements

The Good Food Institute and New Harvest presented different opinions on a key issue: whether or not the USDA should create unique labeling requirements for cell-cultured meat and poultry products.

Pointing to precedent created by regulatory agencies’ responses to other non-traditional production techniques, the Good Food Institute argued against the need for a new set of labeling requirements. The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service “has generally promulgated new labeling requirements only when a new process or method materially alters the finished product or where it raises different or increased food safety risks,” the Institute said in its letter. Even the practice of harvesting meat from cloned animals, the Institute pointed out, has not warranted new requirements.

While the Institute argued for maximum flexibility, New Harvest seemed focused on guiding the creation of a framework that would be easy to navigate and empirically informed. The group advocated for a required qualifier term, disclaimer, or visual icon on cell-cultured meat labels, but suggested that the USDA wait to decide on a specific qualifier until we have a better understanding of how consumers will react to different options.

To read the full post dissecting comments about how we should label cell-cultured meat, head over to The Spoon.

A Cookie Robot is Pumping Out That New Cookie Smell in Huntsville, Alabama

If there’s one of our five senses that’s continuously underutilized when getting people to open their wallets, it’s the sense of smell. Anyone who’s been lured into a Subway sandwich shop by that bread(ish) odor wafting in the air knows what I’m talking about.

So naturally, when the company behind a new Smart Cookie cookie-making robot reached out to tell me about their new machine and its deployment at Dipwich sandwich shop in Huntsville, Alabama, my first thought was how great it must smell.

The cookie scent wafting machine robot itself is pretty simple. First, a robotic arm puts paper-plated par-baked cookie into an oven. Once the cookie gets rethermalized to 350 degrees – which takes about two minutes – the robot will put toppings on top of the cookie and then place it in a small cubby for the customer to retrieve it. The robot has two ovens within the kiosk, and working at full-speed can pump out about 60 cookies per hour.

You can about the Smart Cookie robot and see a video of it in action here. 

Restaurant Tech

Jet.com’s Founder Launches Wonder, a Logistics-Driven Bet on The Future of Restaurants

Last week, Marc Lore, the ex-CEO of Walmart.com and founder of Jet.com, formally announced the launch of Wonder, a ghost kitchen-driven delivery brand powered by high-profile chef recipes and cook-en-route delivery vans. The company currently is delivering food to four cities in Union County in northern New Jersey and has plans to expand to New York and beyond in 2022.

Wonder has reportedly raised an eye-popping amount of money for a company that only formally announced itself today. According to reports, the company has already raised over $500 million in capital, which likely means a valuation in the multi-billion dollar range. The impressive raise is due to Lore’s track record of building highly successful and disruptive e-commerce businesses. Lore’s Jet.com effectively became the core engine of Walmart’s e-commerce efforts once the retail giant bought the company for $3.3 billion in 2016.

The company has partnered with several high-profile chefs to develop recipes and lend their names to virtual restaurants that Wonder will turnkey. Seventeen restaurants and chefs have partnered with Wonder, including Bobby Flay, Nancy Silverton, Daisuke Nakazawa, and Marcus Samuelsson.

The company was founded in 2018 by Lore and was initially run by his brother Chad. However, in 2019, former Diapers.com exec Scott Hilton took over in 2019, and now, Lore – who had mainly been acting in an advisory capacity – is stepping as the company’s CEO.

To read about Marc Lore’s futuristic vision for restaurants, click here.

Ghost Kitchen Operator REEF Continues Acquisition Spree, Buying Hospitality-Focused 2ndKitchen

REEF Technology, an operator of ghost kitchens and proximity hubs, announced it has acquired 2ndKitchen, a provider of turnkey food service to hotels, offices, buildings, and other hospitality businesses. REEF and 2ndKitchen will combine their businesses under the REEF brand and will operate under REEF’s Hospitality division. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The concept behind 2ndKitchen is to provide food service to local businesses that don’t have their own kitchen facilities, such as pubs, sports venues and hotels. The company handles everything, including setup, ordering, menu development, payment, fulfillment, and customer support. The company, which has set up shop in Chicago, New York City, Miami, Denver, Dallas and New Orleans, powers food service to over 100 thousand rooms and common areas today.

For REEF, the deal instantly adds a large inventory of customers for their kitchen business. The company, which has grown its ghost kitchen network from 50 in February to 450 as of October, needs lots of new open mouths to feed as it expands it food production capacity at a rapid clip, and this deal helps deliver just that.

Click here to read the full story about REEF’s acquisition of 2ndKitchen.

Future Food

Motif Foodworks’ New HEMAMI Receives GRAS Status From FDA

Motif Foodworks is on a mission to improve the taste and texture of plant-based foods, and in June 2021, the company raised $226 million USD to do exactly that. This week, the food-tech company made its most recent product called HEMAMI commercially available for large-scale distribution to its customers.

HEMAMI appears to be the combination of the words “umami” and “heme”. This novel ingredient is a heme protein derived from yeast, created via precision fermentation. Heme is a molecule that contains iron, and it is found in high concentrations in the blood of animals and humans. According to the company, HEMAMI can be used to improve the aroma and flavor of plant-based meat analogs likes burgers, sausages, chicken, and more.

Plant-based heme (made from a base of soy) is what gives Impossible Burger the realistic meat flavor and its “bleeding” texture. A Chicago-based start-up called Back of the Yards Algae Sciences developed spirulina-derived heme that can be sprayed onto plant-based burgers and other analogs to provide a meatier flavor.

You can read the full story of Motif’s new HEMAMI platform for more realistic plant-based meat products at The Spoon

In 2022, Molecular Farming Startups Will Move Toward Commercialization of Animal-Free Proteins

Like many of the technologies that are driving innovation in the alternative protein space, plant molecular farming has traditionally been used in the pharmaceutical industry. The practice — which involves genetically editing a crop so that its cells produce a desired protein — is being discussed as a way to rapidly produce proteins for COVID-19 vaccines.

In the food industry, molecular farming is one route to producing the animal proteins that give egg, dairy, and meat products their visual, taste, and functional properties. Molecular farming allows you to use the exact same protein that would normally be produced by a chicken or cow, without the need for any actual animals.

Moolec Science, a spinoff of Argentina-based agtech company Bioceres Crop Solutions, is probably the most prominent name in molecular farming for the food industry. Moolec already sells chymosin, a cheesemaking enzyme, which the company grows in safflower plants. They’ve also successfully grown meat proteins in soybean and pea plants.

To read the full piece on whether 2022 will be the year of molecular farming, head on over to The Spoon.

Food Robots

SJW Robotics Demoes RoWok, a Fully Robotic Wok Restaurant Kiosk

This week, SJW Robotics, a maker of robotic kitchen technology, publicly demoed its robotic kitchen prototype for the first time.

When we first covered SJW earlier this year, the company was still keeping the cooking robot under wraps since patents had yet to be filed. With all their patent applications in the mail, I caught up with company CEO Nipun Sharma on a zoom call to get a virtual walkthrough of the Toronto-based company’s first product, a robotic wok-centered kitchen and consumer-facing kiosk called RoWok.

Sharma started by punching in his order on a large touch screen on the front of the large kiosk. Once entered, the robot got to work by dropping pre-cut ingredients such as chicken cubes, green onions and julienne carrots from segmented storage siloes in customized proportions onto a perforated steel tray. The tray shuttled through a steam tunnel via a conveyor belt (“like a car in a carwash.”). Once warmed, the food was dropped into an oiled wok for cooking. After it was cooked, the food was put into a bowl, sauces added, and then the meal was prepped for serving. Currently the robot has a station for humans to put the bowled food on a counter, but Sharma says the plan is integrate cubbies where the prepared meals can be placed for pickup by the customer.

To read the full story about the RoWok, click here.

The Spoon Weekly: NFT Dinner Clubs, Robocorns & Impossible’s Burger Joint

This is the web version of the Spoon weekly newsletter where we wrap up of some of the most interesting stories in Food Tech. If you’d like to subscribe to The Spoon Newsletter, you can do so here.

The NFT-Powered Dinner Club Has Arrived

After eating at home for much of the past 18 months, most of us are itching to get out into the real world and have dinner with interesting people. If this is you, may I suggest a new way to break bread: An NFT dinner club.

That’s the idea behind Dinner DAO, a new community creating IRL (in real life) dinner clubs using non-fungible tokens.

Here’s how it works: Prospective diners become members of a club – or Dinner DAO (DAO stands for ‘decentralized autonomous organization’) – by buying a Dinner DAO NFT. The cryptocurrency raised during the sale of the NFT is pooled in a shared treasury and used to purchase meals whenever the club gets together throughout the year.

For those who’d prefer to create a Facebook group, get together with friends and split the bill with a bunch a credit cards, your old-world ways go against the central organizing principle of the virtual currency and NFT movement: decentralization. Dinner DAO members are ok with taking more time to create a crypto-based dinner club because, in doing so, they are pioneering a new way to meet for a meal without having to rely on big technology companies or banks. In other words, they are getting together in real life by putting their dinner club on the blockchain.

The Dinner DAO concept is the brainchild of artist and designer Austin Robey. Robey, who lives in Brooklyn, created the first Dinner DAO NFT for New York City, and the first meal was at a restaurant in Little Italy called Shoo Shoo Nolita.

You can read the full story about Dinner Dao at The Spoon.

The Spoon & CES Bring Food Tech To The World’s Biggest Tech Show

Did you know food tech will be a featured theme for the first time ever at the world’s biggest tech show in January and The Spoon is CES’s exclusive partner to help make it happen? 

Learn more here in my announcement about the partnership. If you want to sponsor the event, let us know. See you in Vegas!

Hacking Refined Carbs? That’s Better Brand’s Plan

So many of our favorite foods contain refined carbohydrates like white flour and white sugar. These ingredients reliably produce delicious foods, but they’re also associated with health problems like Type 2 diabetes and obesity.

California-based startup Better Brand is on a mission to hack refined carbohydrates, recreating their flavor without the health consequences. The company’s first product, the Better Bagel, has the carbohydrate content of two banana slices, the protein content of four eggs, and the sugar content of a single stalk of celery.

Company founder and CEO Aimee Yang told The Spoon that she set out to develop products that would make healthy eating easier while improving consumers’ relationships with food.

You can read The Spoon’s full interview with Yang here. 

Sponsor Message

With the Trattoria pizza oven from GE Profile Innovation Studio, the journey to restaurant-caliber pizza at home is closer than ever. Reserve yours today.

Startup Showcase Alumni Incredible Eats Lands Investment on Shark Tank

Dinesh Tadepalli has landed his shark.

Tadepalli, the CEO of Incredible Eats, appeared on Shark Tank last night to pitch his company and ended up getting four offers from various sharks before walking away with an offer from Lori Greiner for 15% of the company.

Regular Shark Tank watchers will know four offers are a lot, but it’s not all that surprising since Incredible Eats checks many shark boxes: an easy-to-understand product, proven success, and mission-driven.

That easy to understand product is edible cutlery that replaces disposable plastic spoons and forks. IncredibleEats’ edible spoons and sporks come in both sweet and savory versions — chocolate and vanilla for desserts, oregano chili and black pepper for soups and such — and in both large and small versions.

To read the full story about former Startup Showcase contestant Incredible Eats’ showing on Shark Tank, head over to The Spoon. 

Alt Protein

BIOMILQ Raises $21M in Series A Funding With Focus on Mission-Aligned Partners

In June, The Spoon reported on North Carolina-based startup BIOMILQ’s success in recreating human milk outside of the breast. The company is working toward manufacturing cell-cultured milk at commercial scale, hoping to provide parents who cannot breastfeed regularly with a nutritionally equivalent option.

BIOMILQ announced they’ve closed their Series A financing round with $21 million. This week, The Spoon got on Zoom with company co-founder and CEO Michelle Egger to discuss the funding round and BIOMILQ’s next steps toward commercialization.

“In the grand scheme of fundraising rounds in cellular agriculture, $21 million is par for the course,” says Egger. “But we’re particularly proud because we’re an all-female leadership team. It’s less about celebrating the dollar value and more about celebrating the fact that we were able to raise it with specific partnership criteria that helped us find mission-aligned partners.”

To read our interview with BIOMILQ CEO Michelle Egger, click here. 

Fruit Cells, Space Bread, and Cultured Meat Cartridges: Deep Space Food Challenge Announces Phase 1 Winners

On planet Earth, we face the challenge of feeding a rapidly growing population that is set to reach 9.7 billion people by 2050. In space, we face the challenge of feeding astronauts traveling through the galaxy for an extended period of time. Novel and innovative food technology could offer viable solutions in both realms.

For the first time ever, NASA and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) have come together this year to host the Deep Space Food Challenge. Companies competing in the challenge must be able to offer a solution to feeding at least four astronauts on a three-year space mission. The solutions should be able to achieve the greatest amount of food output (that is palatable and nutritious) with minimal input and waste. In addition to being used in space, the solution must also improve food accessibility on Earth.

To read more about the Phase 1 winners of the Deep Space Food Challenge, head over to The Spoon.

Food Robots

Ten Chili’s Restaurants Are Now Using a Server Robot Named Rita

Want your baby back ribs brought to your table via robot?

You may be in luck as Rita the robot, a version of the Bear Robotics Servi server robot platform, has now been deployed in 10 Chili’s restaurants across the US.

The news, shared via a social media post on Linkedin, marks the latest in a string of deployments for the Bear Robotics robot over the past year. The northern California-based company has seen wins across the US in 2021, from Florida’s Sergio’s to the Country Biscuit in North Carolina to Sangam Chettinad Indian Cuisine Restaurant in Austin.

But with over 1600 locations, Chili’s is the biggest win yet for Bear Robotics, and one which looks like it’s growing quickly. Bear announced they deployed Rita to a fifth Chili’s just a week ago, and since then, new locations have been added almost daily.

Read the full story here.

Dawn of the Robocorn? Micro-Fulfillment Robot Specialist Fabric Raises $200M on $1 Billion Valuation

Fabric, a maker of robotic micro-fulfillment solutions for grocery and e-commerce retailers, announced they have raised $200 million in a Series C funding round. The new funding puts the company’s valuation at $1 billion.

Formerly called Common Sense Robotics, Fabric works with large online grocers and retailers such as Walmart, Instacart, and FreshDirect to build automated micro-fulfillment centers via a mix of fulfillment-as-a-service and hybrid ownership models. The company’s solution involves an intricate blend of robotics, vertically stacked storage of products, and human operators and packers that help package up the final delivery and handoff to delivery drivers.

To read the full story and see a video of Fabric’s system, click here. 

Restaurant Tech

Impossible Foods Opens a Burger Stand in Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena

Nowadays, if you want an Impossible Burger, you have your choice of thousands of fast food joints or grocery stores to pick up the plant-based patty.

But last night, the Impossible Burger showed up in a new kind of place: its own.

This week Impossible and Climate Pledge Arena, the world’s first net zero-carbon sports arena, announced that the Impossible patty had been named the venue’s official burger. They also announced Impossible is opening two branded food stands in the home of the NHL’s newest franchise, the Seattle Kraken.

Called Impossible Market, the new plant-based burger stands feature a menu with the Impossible Burger, Impossible chicken nuggets, and other items made with Impossible plant-based beef like chili fries and street tacos.

Read about Impossible’s new burger stand here. 

Spyce Closes Location of First Robot Restaurant as It Turns Focus To Sweetgreen

When Sweetgreen acquired robot restaurant startup Spyce in August, one of the outstanding questions was whether the new owners would continue to operate the standalone Spyce restaurants. Finally, it looks like we now have an answer.

According to a post today by Spyce on their Facebook page, the company’s original location at Downtown Crossing in Boston will close at the end of this week.

Read about Spyce closing down its original location here at The Spoon. 

The Spoon Weekly: David Chang Loves Food Tech, Cultivated Meat U, Amazon Fridge

This is the web version of the Spoon weekly newsletter where we wrap up of some of the most interesting stories in Food Tech. If you’d like to subscribe to The Spoon Newsletter, you can do so here.

David Chang Dives Into Food Tech

There may be no one with more culinary street cred in America today than David Chang. Not only has the New York-based chef won multiple James Beard awards and seen his restaurant Momofuku called the country’s most important restaurant, but Chang himself is widely recognized as an astute observer of the food world who always has his finger on the pulse of the country’s culinary zeitgeist.

And what’s on Chang’s mind these days is a whole lot of food tech, at least if his new series on Hulu, The Next Thing You Eat, is any indication. While the six-episode series isn’t available until October 21st, we do have the video preview, which features shots of everything from food delivery bots to lab-grown meat to indoor robotic farms, so we thought it would be fun to play a game of ‘guess who’ and see how many people and companies we can recognize from the food tech revolution. 

You can see the different food tech startups and leaders we identified on The Spoon. If you see any we missed, drop us a line.

The Spoon & CES Bring Food Tech To The World’s Biggest Tech Show

Exciting News: The Spoon is CES’s exclusive partner to bring food tech to the world’s biggest tech show!

Many remember the debut of the Impossible 2.0 burger in 2019, a watershed moment for both the company and the plant-based meat industry. There’s also been food robots, ice cream makers and much more that have made a big splash at the big show.

However, up until this year, any food professionals coming to CES were attending despite the lack of a dedicated food technology and innovation area in the exhibition space or in the conference tracks. Because CES is *the* great convener in the tech world, we felt food tech needed representation. This led The Spoon to rent out the ballroom of Treasure Island for a couple of years running to produce Food Tech Live. We wanted to give the food industry a central place to connect and check out the latest and greatest in food innovation.

But now that’s all about to change as food tech hits the big time this coming January. CES announced in June that food tech is going to be a featured theme for the first time ever at the big show. We couldn’t be more excited, in part because we will get to see even more cool food tech innovation, but also because CES has chosen The Spoon as the dedicated CES partner for the food tech exhibition and conference portions of the show!

Personally, this is a big deal as CES has been the one constant in my career as a journalist, analyst and entrepreneur, so I am very excited to help bring food tech to the big show!

Read my full post here with the news and, if you’d like to bring your food tech innovation to CES, let us know here.

We Called It: Amazon is Building a Smart Fridge

Amazon is building a smart fridge.

That’s at least according to a report from Business Insider, who reports that Amazon is building a fridge that would utilize machine vision and other advanced technology to monitor food in the refrigerator, notify us when it’s about to expire, and automatically order & replenish items through Amazon.

Dubbed Project Pulse, the initiative is being led by the company’s physical store unit, the same group that developed Amazon Go’s just walk out technology. Other teams, such as Lab 126 (its California-based hardware team that developed the Echo) and Amazon’s grocery unit are also contributing to the effort.

Here at The Spoon, we’re not all that surprised Amazon wants to create a fridge, mostly because we (I) predicted it nearly four years ago. When I asked “Is Amazon building a smart fridge?” in 2017, I tried to connect some of the dots I saw in Amazon’s commerce and devices businesses. And let me tell you, there were a lot of dots.Read more about why we suspected they were building a smart fridge at The Spoon.

Alt Protein

USDA Awards $10 Million to Tufts University to Establish a Cultivated Protein Center of Excellence

Last night, news broke of the USDA’s $10 million award to Tuft’s University to establish a cultivated protein research center of excellence. The award is part of a $146 million investment announced by the USDA on October 6th by its National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s (NIFA) Sustainable Agricultural Systems program.

This is a big deal. The US has fallen woefully behind other countries in its support for developing next-generation food technology, which is why I suggested early this year that the Biden administration create a US taxpayer-funded food innovation hub. This does that for cultivated meat.

It’s also a sign that the US education system is racing to develop a curriculum for a field that – at least up to this point – has lacked the kind of well-established curriculum as other strategically essential fields such as computer science or biotechnology.  It’s about time since cultivated meat is a unique field unto itself which requires an educated and qualified workforce to power if it is to reach its full potential.

You can read the full story about the Tuft’s new Institute for Cellular Agriculture here.  

Revo Foods Wants To Build a 3D Printing Facility For Plant-Based Fish

Austrian startup Revo Foods produces plant-based fish products, but not the formed and fried items that are becoming increasingly common in grocery store aisles. Revo is making structurally sophisticated products: sheets of smoked salmon, salmon fillets, and sushi cuts with a realistic look and feel.

We’ve already seen cell-cultured meat startups use 3D printing to create cuts of meat with complex fat and tissue structures. Revo has brought 3D printing into the plant-based fish arena, and the company is betting that the resulting products will win over more seafood eaters.

See the full story here. 

Food Robots

Basil Street’s Pizza Robot Takes Flight With New Airport Rollout Deal

Basil Street, a maker of automated pizza vending machines, announced this week it has struck a deal with Prepango, a company that specializes in automated retail of food and beverage products in airports, to bring its pizza robot to airports across the US.

Launched this year, the Basil Street pizza smart vending machine – called Automated Pizza Kitchens (APK) – is roughly 20 square feet in size and holds up to 150 10-inch, thin-crust pizzas. When a customer places an order via the touchscreen or mobile app, the APK heats the flash-frozen pizza up using a non-microwave oven that cooks the pies in about three minutes.

Up until this point, the APK has been serving up pizzas in universities, business parks and corporate headquarters. That all changes in a couple weeks when the two companies bring the pizza bot to the San Antonio International Airport. From there, Basil Street and Prepango are eyeing launches of the APK in Chicago O’Hare International Airport, Cincinnati/North Kentucky International Airport, Indianapolis International Airport among others.

Read the full story here.

Flippy The Fast Food Robot Has Its Own National TV Commercial

Flippy’s about to hit the big time.

That’s because the fast food robot from Miso that’s in service in places like White Castle is going to be the focus of a new nationally televised commercial.

The ad opens with Flippy making fries in the kitchen of a fast food restaurant while a voiceover actor proclaims “Nothing hits the spot quite like good food, made fast.”

From there the 30 second spot toggles back and forth between a mother and daughter happily eating food and Flippy making fries back in the kitchen.

The voiceover continues: “The taste you grew up on, now made more consistent, more efficient, and dare we say, more delicous. Introducing Flippy, the world’s first AI kitchen assistant.”

The narrator brings the pitch home with the tag line, “Let the robots do the robotic work, so people can do the people work.”

To read the full story and see the Flippy commercial, click here. 

Restaurant Tech

Kitchen United Acquires Zuul: Has The Wave of Ghost Kitchen Consolidation Begun?

Ghost kitchen operator Kitchen United announced they had acquired Zuul, a ghost kitchen technology and consulting services company, for an undisclosed sum.

While this is one of the most significant acquisitions so far in the ghost kitchen space, it’s likely only the start of a wave of consolidation.

Even as funding still flows into the ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant space, many operators have realized that running an extensive network of multitenant kitchens is a capital-intensive business. Much of the recent funding in the broader ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant space has gone to companies that are creating platforms that make it easy for restaurant brands to launch new virtual brands through hosted kitchen models. While some companies, like Reef, continue down the heavy capex path powered by huge raises, venture and corporate capital has started to migrate towards hosted kitchen models and virtual restaurant brands that can take advantage of underutilized kitchen capacity in existing QSRs or independents.

Do you think the ghost kitchen space is going to see a wave of consolidation? Read the full piece at The Spoon and let us know what you think in the comments. 

PizzaHQ’s Founders Are Building a Robot-Powered Pizza Chain of the Future

Darryl Dueltgen and Jason Udrija had a choice: Expand their successful New Jersey pizza restaurant brand called Pizza Love, or start a tech-powered pizza concept that could change the pizza industry.

They decided to start a revolution.

“We’ve put a lot of time into building a labor-reduced, tech-driven concept that we believe will revolutionize the pizza industry,” said Udrija, who cofounded PizzaHQ alongside partners Dueltgen and Matt Bassil.

According to Udrija, PizzaHQ will utilize robotics and other technology to create a more affordable pizza (“almost a 50% lower price point”) while using the same recipe and high-quality ingredients of the pies made at their dine-in restaurant.

Once the pizza is boxed, it’s loaded into delivery vans and distributed to heated pickup lockers around Totowa, New Jersey, a borough about thirty minutes north of Newark. Customers will be able to track their delivery and will scan a QR code to pick up the pizza waiting for them in a locker. Third party delivery partners like UberEats will also be able to pick up orders from the pickup lockers and deliver to customers.

Read the full story about PizzaHQ and their pizza robot restaurant chain concept at The Spoon. 

Food Tech Goes Back to School

We are preparing for back-to-school in our home. And while there are still questions that remain around what back-to-school will actually mean for my middle-schooler, we are all excited for some return to normalcy (hopefully).

But in addition to educating children, schools are also a target market for emerging food tech sectors, as evidenced by a few announcements last week.

At the college level, both Kiwibot and Starship announced expanded rollouts for their robot delivery services to new schools. Kiwibot partnered with Sodexo to bring robots to New Mexico State University, Loyola Marymount University in California, and Gonzaga University in Washington state. And on that very same day, Starship announced it was deploying its robots to University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), University of Kentucky (UK), University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Daytona Beach, FL campus. For those keeping score, Starship now operates on 20 different campuses across 15 states.

It’s not hard to understand the allure of college campuses for robot delivery. They are small geographic areas with large populations (students, staff, faculty, etc.), typically with wide walkways and not a ton of traffic from larger vehicles. Rather than walking back and forth across campus to a food hall (like we did back in my day) and then back to the library or lab or dorm, students can have meals and snacks brought to them.

And, not for nothing, after schools shut down last year because of COVID-19, having a contactless method for food delivery will probably be welcomed on campus. Students who are sick don’t need to leave their room to infect others in the cafeteria.

Speaking of cafeterias, another recent piece of news from the food tech world is that grade school kids could soon be enjoying more plant-based protein options. During a video chat about the retail launch of Impossible Sausage this week, Impossible reps told me that the new product will carry the USDA’s Child Nutrition label. Having this label basically makes it easier for school districts to buy Impossible products.

USDA data show that schools served 5 billion lunches and 2.4 billion breakfasts in fiscal year 2019. School districts could be a huge source of revenue for Impossible, especially since it will sell a burger, a sausage and eventually (one has to assume), its plant-based chicken nuggets to cafeterias.

There are obviously much bigger issues to watch going into this school year than the market opportunities for food tech companies. But perhaps food tech companies engaging more deeply with the education market can lead to safer and healthier eating at school.

More Headlines

Too Good To Go Partners With Waze to Fight Food Waste – Called Waze for Good initiative, the app’s map will feature 100 Too Good To Go partner businesses where people can rescue food at a discount before it gets thrown out.

Civic Technologies Powers Age Verification Tech in New Vending Machine – If this proof-of-concept works, it could open up new avenues of unattended booze sales.

Shiok Meats Acquires Gaia Foods, Will Add Beef to Its Cultured Meat Lineup – Both companies are targeting markets in Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Japan, Taiwan, India, and South Korea. Shiok Meats hopes to blend cultured beef and shrimp in order to create a product that can be used in a variety of dishes, from dumplings and noodles to spring rolls.

Food Robots + Speedy Grocery Delivery = A Whole New Kind of Virtual Restaurant

One thing is becoming clear as all these speedy grocery delivery startups pop up, proliferate and pile on the funding: All this activity isn’t just about getting you groceries. Increasingly, it’s about getting you lunch and dinner.

Already we’ve seen 1520 expand into creating their own line of meals available for delivery. Gopuff is in the midst of a huge expansion into ghost kitchens. Food Rocket is also leaning more heavily on ready-to-eat meals, and is adding its own ghost kitchens.

However, I think the most interesting play in this space is coming from DoorDash, which is not a speedy grocery delivery service. Even so, DoorDash does have it’s own DashMart delivery-only convenience stores, and it also acquired robot startup Chowbotics earlier this year. As HNGRY recently reported, DoorDash is now testing Chowbotics’s Sally robot to make private label salads and microwaveable meals to be sold at DashMarts. This is a smart idea.

The whole point of speedy grocery delivery services like Gorillas and JOKR is that they will get you your food fast. With Chowbotics’ Sally, DashMart can offer a menu of salads, yogurt parfaits, or even grain bowl-style food, all of which can be dispensed quickly. Even better, the meal can be customized by the user and made on demand by the robot, so the store doesn’t have to order a bunch of packaged meals ahead of time, only to have them sit on shelves unsold.

The key factors at play here are speed and size. Fast delivery services need an automation solution that can prep a meal quickly, but it also has to be done in a space that’s pretty limited size-wise. Part of the reason these services like JOKR and Fridge No More believe they can economically scale is because they don’t need a lot of real estate to operate. These dark stores are typically around 2,000 – 2,500 sq. ft, so there isn’t a ton of room to house all the inventory and a lot of machinery. Part of the beauty of a Sally robot is that it’s only the size of a vending machine and could be plugged in just about anywhere.

Since Chowbotics is already owned by DoorDash, other speedy delivery will have to look elsewhere for any robo-solutions. Thankfully, there are a number of robot startups like Karakuri, Kitchen Robotics and RoboEatz that make standalone kiosks capable of assembling and cooking all kinds of hot and cold meals. Even better, because speedy delivery services typically operate on a hyper-local level, the ingredients and menus for any food robot could be customized for that neighborhood. Bonus: The delivery service can put all kinds of local order/deliver data to work to improve efficiencies — or add more services.

Adding more meal services wouldn’t even be that hard considering the advances in vending machine technology. A fast grocery service could deliver hot ramen from a Yo-Kai Express machine, or a pizza from a Piestro robot, or a boba tea from Bobacino.

Of course, robots ain’t cheap. DoorDash had the scratch to buy its own robotics company but these other services don’t. (Well, Gopuff’s second round of billion dollar funding could get it a few robots.) But there could be an opportunity if robots were paid for with revenue sharing. That way there’s little to no upfront cost for a delivery startup, and as the delivery service (ideally) grows and gets more use, robot companies could generate greater amounts of money.

Fast grocery delivery and food robotics are both very new ideas, and there might be some trepidation on both sides to partner with unproven ideas. But there could also be a peanut butter + chocolate type scenario where these two hot innovations help each other scale up fast.

More Headlines

Basil Street Using Equity Crowdfunding to Raise $20M for its Pizza Vending Machines – The company has thus far shunned traditional VC funding.

Air Protein Company NovoNutrients Raises $4.7 to Complete Its Pilot Program – NovoNutrients feeds the CO2 inputs it collects to naturally occurring microbes via a fermentation process. The resulting proteins have a variety of uses, including as ingredients in meat analogues as well as animal feeds.

DoorDash Expands Its Ghost Kitchen Operation in California – DoorDash Kitchens San Jose will house six different restaurant concepts from both nationally known restaurants and those from the San Francisco Bay Area.

ConverseNow Raises $15M for Restaurant AI Assistant Tech – The company says its assistants achieve an 85 percent order accuracy rate, and that they increase check size by 25 percent.