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What Shape Will Food Robots Take?

This is the web version of our weekly Spoon newsletter. Subscribe today to get all the best food tech news delivered direct to your inbox!

This issue of our newsletter is a bit a of a two-for-one. We’re going to talk about the future of food robotics and invite you to join us at our upcoming virtual summit — where we’ll talk about the future of food robotics.

But first, the news.

There were three stories this week that, when taken together, help form the basis of the question, What will food robots look like as they become more mainstream? For now, we’re focusing on robots that serve food and drinks, and not on the totes and rails of grocery automation. Consider these three robots:

The Revolmatic is a machine, plain and simple. Hook it up to a keg and it will just crank out beer after beer after beer. The Revolmatic can be used bare bones as a bartenders assistant, or there’s a version with a contactless payment system, turning it into a vending machine. This type of brute force pouring could definitely come in handy selling drinks at high-traffic locations like a beer garden, stadium or festival.

Piestro is making a standalone machine that can make a pizza in three minutes and hold up to nine pizzas in smart lockers for pickup. While it is a big, enclosed kiosk and makes food quickly, the clear glass allows users to watch the pizza being made adding a theatrical aspect to the process. It’s easy to imagine Piestros in an aiport or corporate campus or mall, cranking out pizzas all day.

Then there is Blue Hill, which is positioning itself as using robots to create a premium coffee experience you find at your local cafe. This robot purposely moves at the same speed and, thanks to advanced computer vision, the same movements as human baristas. This means the robot froths milk, high pours and even makes latte art just like a person. It aims to put some art into automation.

I like these three examples because they present a sort of Goldilocks scenario when it comes to food robotics. Revolmatic is all about brutalist speed and throughput, Piestro adds some colorful design and human interaction to its robot while still pumping out pies, and for Blue Hill, speed is sacrificed to make a more specialized product.

That’s not to say there is a “just right” size and shape for food robots. There is plenty of opportunity for a range of offerings. But it is worthwhile to think about what we are going to want from robots. Do we want co-bot assistants that just take over grunt work? Yes. Do we want good food produced quickly? Sometimes. Do we want artistry with our automation? Maybe? All of these answers are dependent on context (where they are located, how much time we have, etc.), and this is all new — we don’t know how users will react to robots.

But it’s these types of questions that we will be tackling at our upcoming ArticulATE food robotics and automation virtual summit on May 18. We will be talking with industry leaders about robotic topics like last (and middle) mile delivery, restaurant robots, restaurants that are robots, smart vending machines, autonomous driving, as well as the evolving rules and regulations around automation.

We have a ton of great speakers lined up including executives from FedEx, Manna drone delivery, Chowbotics/DoorDash, Zippin, Tortoise, Swisslog, Refraction AI, Gatik, Karakuri, Future Acres, Yo-Kai Express, Mukunda Foods, Pix Moving and many more.

The one day event is being held on the Hopin platform, so you can learn and participate in the day from the comfort of your own home. Get your ticket today!

Sophie’s Bionutrients Unveils The World’s First Plant-Based Burger Patty Made From Microalgae

More Headlines

Sophie’s Bionutrients Debuts New Burger Made from Microalgae – The Singapore based startup can currently make between 20 – 100 patties per week.

AeroFarms Partners With Hortifrut to Grow Blueberries, Caneberries Via Vertical Farming – The decision to grow blueberries and caneberries makes this project standout.

Squarespace Acquires Hospitality Management Platform Tock for $400M – Restaurants using Sqarespace for their website can now integrate order and guest management services.

Tracking the Next Generation of To-Go Concepts for Restaurants – This intelligence briefing for Spoon Plus looks at some some off-premises success stories to come out of the pandemic-era restaurant industry.

Will Grocery Delivery Become the Next Utility?

When was the last time you went grocery shopping? Prior to the pandemic, chances are good that you made a few trips per week to the store — a weekly haul plus a couple of trips for last-minute needs (milk!) and wants (wine!). When the pandemic hit trips to the store went down and online shopping went up.

Now, as vaccines roll out and we can see the light at the end of this very dark tunnel, there are questions one again around how we will go grocery shopping. Will the record-breaking grocery e-commerce converts continue to shop online? How many in-person trips to the store will people make each week?

At the same time, however, there is a new model of grocery shopping emerging. It’s almost like Grocery-as-a-Service, to borrow from the cloud computing world. There are a number of startups turning grocery shopping into more of a utility, promising to get you your food and other goods within fifteen minutes of your ordering them. And they are all raking in big funding amounts.

Since the start of this year, we’ve seen a steady stream of fundraises for startups in this space. Weezy, Jiffy and Fridge No More all raised sizeable rounds so far in 2021. But things kicked into high gear this week when GoPuff raised $1.5 billion and Berlin-based Gorillas raised $290 million. That is a lot of cheddar to get a wedge of cheddar delivered in 15 minutes.

The idea behind these startups is pretty straightforward. Create small, delivery-only (or “dark”) grocery stores and place them deep inside dense, residential neighborhoods. These stores carry a limited inventory that can be customized for the neighborhood they are in. Set up a small delivery radius and allow people to order food via an app. Orders are packed in minutes and because the delivery area is small, it can be done on bike or scooter, so no need to drive a car in traffic or find parking. In less time than it takes to watch an episode of Superstore, your grocery order arrives at your door.

Obviously, these type of speedy delivery marts can only work in tightly-packed, highly-populated areas, where you can make multiple deliveries per hour. But if they do catch on, will they change the way we shop for food?

Take Fridge No More, for example, which wears its ambitions on its apt company name. There is no minimum order with Fridge No More and no delivery fee. The company says they can make money because they don’t have to invest in a store that serves walk-in customers (e.g. no nice lighting or cashiers). If you live in their service area, you could make multiple orders throughout the day. Run out of milk? It arrives 15 minutes later. Want to bake cookies but don’t have chocolate chips? Order and wait a few minutes. Last-minute cocktail party? Get a couple bottles of booze and a bag of chips way before your guests arrive.

Getting groceries becomes like getting water to your home. Whenever you need it, you can just fire up the app and have them appear.

As with most tech innovation, there will be questions around equity as these types of services roll out. Will speedy on-demand grocery be available everywhere, or only to people who can afford it? Will suburban and rural areas be shut out because the economics don’t work? These are all really good questions and ones I hope are meaningfully addressed as these startups start spending their funding on expansion.

The more existential question from the rise of these startups is how they might impact our relationship with grocery shopping, assuming they can scale. Just as the pandemic pushed people into new habits, will always-on, cheap delivery change the way people shop for their groceries?

Photo by Caroline Attwood on Unsplash

More Headlines

Cell-Cultured Fish Startup Bluu Biosciences Raises €7 million – The cultured protein fund-a-palooza continues!

7-Eleven Is Adding Drive-Thrus to Its Restaurant Business – Get a Slurpee without leaving the car.

Chipotle Invests in Self-Driving Delivery Vehicle Company Nuro – The use of autonomous vehicles actually makes a lot of sense of the digital-forward QSR.

Ex-WeWorkers Have Launched Santa, A Hybrid ‘Retail Experience’ Startup Focused on ‘Small US Cities’ – The digital/physical retail hybrid is currently hiring up.

Could Food Companies Cash in on NFTs?

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Seems like you can’t swing a Nyan Cat these days without reading about NFTs.

For the uninitiated, NFT stands for non-fungible token, and in a nutshell it’s a way to use blockchain technology to create scarcity — and value — around digital goods. Some examples include NBA Topshot, which lets you “own” digital highlights of NBA games, an NFT album by the Kings of Leon, and oh yeah, Taco Bell released its own digital art as NFTs this week.

I will readily admit to being an old man, so the thought of paying top dollar for what is essentially bragging rights associated with “owning” a piece digital art escapes me. I don’t get it. But, thanks to the Taco Bell example, rather that just shouting get offa my lawn, I started thinking about other ways food companies could use NFTs.

Again, the basic premise around NFTs is to create value by using the blockchain to authenticate and limit the number of “original” digital items available. Copies can still be freely made, but the value for the buyer is in owning that validated original.

At first it seems odd that food and eating, which are entirely physical acts, could ever have a collectable digital counterpart. But with a little creative thinking, food-related NFTs could become a way to drive awareness of their brand and possibly make a little extra scratch on the side.

Here are just a few ways NFTs could be used in the food world:

Recipes: A chef/restauranteur could mint and sell recipe NFTs. I imagine there are a number of cooks out there who would buy an limited edition original recipe from a Thomas Keller, or Padma Lakshmi or (insert famous chef), even if the menu was already in a cookbook. Bonus, instead of just admiring the recipe, the owner could actually make the meal. This approach could also work for bars/bartenders.

Menus: Collecting restaurant menus is already a hobby for some. Making them digital NFTs would open up a new wide open market. Menus are digital anyway, but if a restaurant added some artwork and released limited edition, menus could move from just useful to collectable.

Food Photography: Modernist Cuisine is already known for its high-end photography. Physical prints can be bought (starting at $850), but making them or any other food photography a digital NFT could make those images more affordable (or, you know, possibly even more expensive).

Wine: Wineries could offer up “digital corks” that accompany sales of fancy bottles of wine.

Of course the mere fact that a food tech blog is writing about NFTs could be a sign that the fad is over. Things that shine this bright on the Internet (we’re looking at you, $69 million dollars for NFT art by Beeple), tend to burn out quickly.

But there are some high-powered folks like Mark Cuban who believe in (and have invested in) NFTs. And Taco Bell’s NFTs sold out in half an hour (with all the proceeds going to charity), so there still must be some air left in these tires.

At the end of the day and after our pandemic year, restaurants could use any source of income they can get, so digital NFTs could be a very real opportunity.

Seattle Food Geek, Scott Heimendinger helped me bounce some NFT ideas around for this story.

Image via Grönska.

More Headlines

Sweden’s Grönska Raises $2.4M to Expand Its Vertical Farming Operation – The company grows leafy greens in a fully controlled vertical farming environment and also launched its GrowOff cultivation system, which is a smaller, five-story controlled-environment grow system.

Oishii Raises $50M to Raise More High-End, Vertically Grown Strawberries – Not just any strawberries — Omakase strawberries that sell in packs of eight for $50.

StartLife Announces 8 Agrifoodtech Startups in its Sixth Cohort – Companies include cultured meat startup, CellulaREvolution, and Revo Foods, which makes plant-based salmon.

Online Grocer Cropswap Launches New Feature to Help Food Insecure Families – For the Nourish LA partnership, Cropswap as added an in-app donation feature that lets users give a seasonal Harvest Box to those in need for $50.

Why It’s Time to Check Out Online Grocery

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The Safeway near my house finally got curbside pickup which, because we’re in a pandemic and find outsized joy in the little things, made me deliriously happy.

For the past year, I’ve eschewed in-person grocery shopping, opting instead to drive 30 minutes to the Walmart because it has reliable and easy curbside pickup. So having a curbside pickup option less than 15 minutes away is fantastic. And if the first three months of 2021 are any indication, there will be even more online grocery shopping options for me and you and many many more people across the U.S. (and the world).

First, there has been a tremendous amount of investment in the online grocery space so far this year. This activity seems to have culminated over a 12-hour period this week when four different online grocery startups from the U.S. and across Europe all announced significant funding rounds: Instacart ($265 million), Rohlik (Czech Republic, $230 million), Flink (Germany, $52 million) and Crisp (Netherlands, $36 million).

Even prior this week though, there has been a steady drumbeat of hefty online grocery investment over the past two months. Good Eggs raised $100 million, Weezy raised $20 million, Rosie raised $10 million, Imperfect Foods raised $110 million, and Chinese grocery app Xingsheng Youxuan raised a whopping $2 billion.

But it’s not just new funding that’s generating headlines for online grocery. Walmart is going hard after your grocery dollar. This week it eliminated the $35 minimum order for its Express two-hour delivery. In January, the retailer announced it was adding automated micro-fulfillment centers to dozens of its stores and that it was experimenting with temperature-controlled smart delivery lockers for home use.

Walmart’s not the only one. All the major retailers are gearing up to process more online grocery shopping orders. Albertsons is testing a new drive up automated pickup kiosk. Stop & Shop is piloting smart lockers in Boston for pedestrians and bike riders. And Kroger is getting ready to open up the first of its planned 20 smart, robotic warehouses for order fulfillment.

Why is all of this happening right now? Not to brag, but because of people like me. I’ve switched over almost entirely to online grocery ordering (for the aforementioned curbside pickup). At a time when the pandemic is still very much a part of our lives, it’s a simple thing that I can do to help mitigate any potential spread of the virus to myself and others. Even after the pandemic recedes I imagine that most of my grocery shopping will happen online, with less frequent trips into the store.

And I’m not alone. According to the most recent survey data from Brick Meets Click, U.S. online grocery sales hit $9.3 billion in January, with 70 million households placing an average of 2.8 orders across delivery, pickup and ship-to-home categories. Online grocery is projected to hit $250 billion and take up 21.5 percent of total grocery sales by 2025. So online grocery startups are bolstering their warchests to expand their footprints while industry stalwarts invest to solidify their leading positions.

Whether we’re in a pandemic or not, people will always have to eat. What they won’t have to do, however, is go into a grocery store to get their food.

More Headlines

Postmates X Spun Out of Uber to Become Serve Robotics – The new company will be headquartered in San Francisco and led by Ali Kashani, who headed up Postmates X.

Gotham Greens Heads West, Partners With University of California-Davis to Grow Better Greens – The California greenhouse is expected to open in 2021 and, like other Gotham facilities, will grow leafy greens that will then be sold to retailers and foodservice businesses.

Ocean Hugger Will Re-enter the Plant-Based Seafood Space Via a Partnership With Nove Foods – The venture comes after after the pandemic forced Ocean Hugger, which previously sold products primarily to foodservice businesses, to cease operations.

Gatik Gets $9 Million (CAD) to Winterize its Autonomous Middle-Mile Delivery Tech – Part of that money is coming from Ontario, Canada’s government.

Will Foodtech’s Funding Streak Continue in 2021? (Looks Like it!)

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Thirty-one billion dollars was invested in agrifoodtech startups in 2020, according to the AgFunder 2021 Agrifoodtech Investing Report, released this week.

Technically, $26 billion was invested, but AgFunder expects that there are some deals from 2020 that we just don’t know about yet. But let’s stick with that bigger, $31 billion number. Bigger is better, and for the purposes of this newsletter, I want to set the bar high because 2021 could be another record-breaking year for investment in food tech.

Before we get too far, I need to lay out a bunch of caveats. There is still a loooooong way to go in 2021 and lord knows what could happen. The pandemic accelerated a lot of technology adoption by grocers and restaurants last year. As grocery e-commerce rocketed to its own record-breaking highs, retailers looked to add automation while at the same time minimizing human-to-human contact. Restaurants that were forced to close down dining rooms pivoted hard towards systems that made takeout and delivery better and more efficient. This sudden pivot to pandemic-friendly tech drove interest in startups, which in turn, attracted the attention of investors.

With vaccines being deployed, the pandemic will start to recede, one can hope, by the end of this year. If that holds true, the question then becomes how consumers will react to new freedoms, and will those freedoms result in a retrenchment away from tech and thus from further big investments in food tech?

Alright, with those caveats out of the way, here’s why I’m bullish on 2021 being another boffo year for food tech. I did a quick search of the companies just we at The Spoon have covered getting funding from the beginning of the year. By my (back of the envelope) math, roughly $3.2 billion has been raised so far in less than two full months of 2021.

Granted, of that $3.2 billion, $2 billion of it was just for one company, Chinese online grocer app Xingsheng Youxuan. But even without that number there was still $1.2 billion raised by 30 different companies (around the world) in January and February of this year. And that’s just the companies that we covered here at The Spoon, which does not include hardcore ag tech, supply chain companies, and other downstream areas of the food system.

Now, $1.2 billion is an impressive number. But if we look at AgFunder’s numbers, at $31 billion, that’s an average of ~$2.6 billion per month (the lower $26 billion figure averages out to ~$2.2 billion per month). If you think AgFunder’s scope is too broad for our purposes here, Pitchbook reported that during the first three quarters of 2020, $8.37 billion was invested in food tech. That comes out to an average of $930 million a month. Measured against that figure, $1.2 billion over months this year (~$611 million per month) is trailing 2020. But it’s still early. January has the tail end of the holiday season where nothing gets done, and is the start of the year, so things are just getting warmed up.

Even if the beginning of 2021 is a bit slow (comparatively), there are signs that point to continued investment in food tech. Online grocery remains sticky with consumers, big grocers like Walmart are investing in more automation to meet that demand, and restaurants are spending money on enhanced drive-thru operations and advanced menus.

The point is that $1.2 billion is still a strong start to the year, and it looks like foodtech will continue to find its groove with investors throughout 2021.

More Headlines

Traeger Launches Apple Watch App to Monitor and Control Your Grilling – Slow cook those briskets directly from your wrist.

Survey: 91 Percent of US Restaurants Will Invest in Kitchen Automation in 2021 – Why the rush to digitize the back of house? “In order to take advantage of opportunities like multiple revenue streams and creative dining experiences, the back of house needs to be buttoned up,” notes the report.

Sweetgreen to Go Carbon Neutral by 2027 – The company says it will achieve this through its decisions around ingredient sourcing, building design, and energy usage, among other things.

Driscoll’s is Using Consumer Physics Technology to Bring Sweeter Berries to Market – Near-infrared technology takes over much of the manual work of finding the sugar content in berries.

We Need to Talk about Cashierless Checkout

What the heck is happening with cashierless checkout right now? To put it mildly, a lot.

There has been a steady stream of news in recent months about startups creating new grab-and-go shopping experiences where consumers can walk into a store, take what they want, then simply leave. These systems automatically charge customers for their items as they exist the store without those people having to visit an actual cashier.

Things really turned up in the cashierless space yesterday when AiFi announced a new partnership with Wundermart to create up to 1,000 new unattended locations. But we weren’t done yet because right after that story went up, Standard Cognition announced that it had raised a $150 million Series C round of funding and plans to open 50,000 checkout free stores over the next five years.

This however, was just the latest news. The whole cashierless checkout space has been simmering with activity for quite some time. Consider these other headlines from just the past three months:

Why is all this happening right now? To find out, we hosted a Clubhouse chat yesterday with Trinh Le-Fiedler, Founder and CEO of Nomitri; Krishna Motokuri, Co-Founder and CEO of Zippin; and Lindon Gao, Co-Founder and CEO of Caper.

The panel agreed that one of the factors pushing the accelerated adoption of cashierless checkout is the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Cashierless checkout helps minimize human-to-human interaction. This helps protect both consumers and a store’s staff because you don’t have one cashier interacting with a bunch of different strangers throughout the day. Plus, the elimination of checkout lines also means that you have fewer customers congregating with one another.

In addition to the pandemic, competitive forces are also at play. As Gao pointed out, Amazon has rolled out services like Amazon Go stores and its own Dash smart carts. This has spurred other retailers into more examination and exploration of adopting their own cashierless checkout capabilities.

But, despite all the recent news about cashierless checkout, the concept is still a ways away from mainstream adoption. Fiedler, whose company is among the newest of the cashierless startups, noted that it’s much easier for a small- or medium-sized retailer to adopt new cashierless options because they aren’t weighed down by legacy IT systems.

For his part, Motokuri predicted that over the next two years most of the convenience-style shopping people do at stadiums or airports will be via cashierless stores. Larger convenience stores will need three to four years before they commit to cashierless technology.

Gao thinks that cashierless checkout needs to get “dirt cheap” before we see mainstream adoption. By that he meant the hardware, software and service needs to become much more inexpensive, and the ongoing operational costs need to be dirt cheap for the retailer as well.

More Headlines

Supply Change Capital Aims to Diversify Investments in Food Companies – Founded by Shayna Harris and Noramay Cadena at the end of 2020, the firm aims to invest in food and food tech companies with female, BIPOC, and LGBTQ founders.

Revol Greens Launches Its Own Plant-Based Nutrient Source for Greenhouses – Dubbed Plant Fed, the product is currently patent pending, and its existence on Revol’s farms means leafy greens will be fed entirely by plants and not with animal ingredients, as is often the case with fertilizer.

McDonald’s Agrees to Third-Party Audit of Disputed Technology Fees – The review, requested by a group of McDonald’s operators called the National Franchisee Leadership Alliance, will look into the $423-per-month technology fee McDonald’s announced in December of last year.

Gatik Debuts Electric Version of its Autonomous Middle-Mile Delivery Truck – The first of Gatik’s electric trucks will be Ford Transit 350 HDs that were developed in partnership with electric drive company Via Motors.

Which Smart Vending Startup Will Be Acquired Next?

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There are typically two consecutive reactions whenever a startup gets acquired.

Reaction 1: Whoa! They got bought for that much / that little?

Quickly followed by:

Reaction 2: Who’s gonna get bought next?

I’m not immune to this type of thinking. In fact I had those exact thoughts upon hearing the news that delivery service DoorDash acquired robot salad company, Chowbotics earlier this week.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, so we don’t know how much (or how little) DoorDash paid for Chowbotics, and execs weren’t made available to discuss the deal so we only have the prepared statements. Long story short, the Chowbotics robot vending machine can help restaurants expand menu offerings (salads!), and can help restaurants extend their brand reach without building a new location.

This idea of extending a brand without a ton of build out and investment could make more vending machine startups attractive targets to big food/restaurant companies. Slap a logo on a vending machine and set it up in a lobby and voila! Unattended restaurant. But automated vending machine companies could also be attractive because many of them haven’t raised a ton of money yet, so in the grand scheme of things, they could probably be picked up relatively inexpensively.

For their part, vending machine companies could want to be acquired by a big food brand. An acquisition would allow those working on the vending machine to focus on the technology without needing to worry about how they will finance scaling up robot production, nuture business development relationships or run the food side of the business.

We got a taste of this last year when Costa Coffee acquired robot-barista company, Briggo. Those re-branded Costa Coffee Barista Bots can now be deployed in hospitals, airports, corporate campuses — really at any high-traffic facility — without the coffee chain needing to lease a lot of space, build it out and hire staff.

So, which robot vending company might get acquired next? This is all speculation, of course, I have no inside track, but these acquisitions could make sense.

BLENDID
What they make: Smoothies
Funding: $13.5 million (currently running an equity crowdfunding campaign to raise more)
Who might acquire them? Jamba
Why? Jamba and Blendid already have one co-branded smoothie robot operating at a Walmart in California. Smaller, automated kiosks like Blendid’s could help Jamba squeeze into even more places like office building lobbies.

PIESTRO
What they make: Pizza
Funding: $1.4 million (equity crowdfunded)
Who might acquire them? Domino’s
Why? Domino’s is almost as much a tech company as it is a pizza company. Piestro’s machine allows it to still sell fresh pizzas (not frozen), and even have them delivered by robot.

CAFE X
What they make: Coffee
Funding: $14.5 million
Who might acquire them? Starbucks
Why? Thanks to the pandemic, Starbucks has already started paring back its dine-in concepts, leaning more in to takeout and off-premises. In addition to serving a multitude of drinks, Cafe X can also serve pastries.

YO-KAI EXPRESS
What they make: Ramen
Funding: Undisclosed
Who might acquire them? Sodexo
Why? Yo-Kai has already started installing machines on college campuses. Sodexo’s vast network of business on colleges could scale up Yo-Kai’s presence quickly. Plus Yo-Kai’s plans self-driving vending machines and countertop ramen device could extend Sodexo’s reach further on campus and into actual dorm rooms.

Again, this is all speculation. But if big food brands are interested in automation either for efficiency or expansion purposes, now might be a good time to buy.

More Headlines

Ember Shuffles CEOs, Jim Rowan Takes Over Consumer Division, Clay Alexander Becomes Group CEO – The executive moves could signal that Ember’s temperature-controlled shipping container is getting closer to market.

Uber Q4: Delivery Up 150% Year-Over-Year as It Expands Beyond Restaurants – Its food delivery business remains the strongest part of the business, a point hardly surprising since we’re still in the midst of a pandemic and restaurant dining rooms remain closed in many places.

Age, Location, Stickiness: Grabango Releases Stats About its Cashierless Checkout – More than 80 percent of visits are repeat visits for Grabango app users, and 45 percent of those are a tenth visit or more.

Survey: Curbside, Drive-Thru Usage High But Long Wait Times Are a ‘Dealbreaker’ – In the last month, 91 percent of respondents said they visited the drive-thru. An additional 67 percent are getting curbside pickup “as often or more frequently” now compared to 45 percent from last April.

Back to School for Virtual Food Halls

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We’ve said it once (actually, a lot more than once), we’ll say it again: university towns are the ideal testing ground for new meal delivery-related endeavors. Little wonder, then, that when launching its next virtual food hall, hospitality platform C3 (Creating Culinary Communities) chose Graduate Hotels, which operates more or less exclusively across America’s major college towns.

C3 specializes in delivery-only restaurant brands that cater to many different food types, from burgers to caviar. For this latest partnership, it will take over kitchen operations at Graduate Hotel properties, effectively turning those spaces into ghost kitchens for its virtual restaurant brands from which customers can order digitally.

A key piece of this news is that food will be available to the entire community, not just guests of the Graduate Hotel. For restaurant brands under the C3 umbrella, that means exposure to tens of thousands of individuals from student body populations, many of whom are already partial to digital ordering when it comes to how they get their meals. Just ask companies like Aramark, which acquired order-ahead app Good Uncle in 2019, Grubify, which was developed by Columbia students, and robot delivery company Starship’s college-centric user base. There are also, of course, the usual suspects: third-party delivery services like DoorDash and Grubhub.

Universities, and university towns with them, are an obvious testing ground for meal-related tech. Companies like C3 and those above have something of a captive audience, given that most campuses feature lots of bodies in a relatively small geographical area, people eating at all hours of the day/night, and a younger audience that has grown up using technology. Add faculty, staff, local residents, and hotel guests to that list, and that’s a massive potential customer base for C3 and its restaurant brands to reach when it launches at Graduate Hotels.

That we haven’t seen more of these virtual food halls on college campuses isn’t surprising, since students have been largely absent from their campuses — and therefore from college towns — for nearly a year because of the pandemic. However, as of last check, many colleges plan to reopen in the spring. Behaviors around how consumers get their meals has already shifted towards more digital ordering and to-go-friendly formats like delivery. By the time class is actually back in session, these behaviors will be even more firmly cemented into daily routines.

Side note: it would not be surprising to eventually see a virtual food hall like C3 team up with a robot-delivery company like Starship to further streamline operations, get deliveries out faster, and make them more socially distanced. 

Given all that, it seems C3 picked an optimal time to launch its virtual restaurants in the college town market — before everyone else rushes to do the same.

The Automat Comeback is Getting Legit

Another obvious meal-delivery concept that will in all likelihood hit college campuses one day soon is the net-gen Automat, a point underscored by the recent launch of Automat Kitchen in Jersey City, New Jersey.

These new versions of the mid-century staple are just as they sound: high-tech versions of the old cubby-style system a la Horn & Hardart. The difference nowadays is that instead of dropping a nickel into a slot to retrieve a meal, users can order ahead via an app and use a digitally delivered code to unlock the cubby door.

Towards the end of 2020, I wrote that the Automat would make a comeback thanks both to technology and to the industry-wide change towards takeout meals the restaurant biz has absorbed.

The Automat is well-suited for the pandemic era (which will probably last longer than the actual pandemic) because of it’s quick, cheap, and truly contactless nature. There is no human-to-human interaction involved with either placing a meal in a cubby or scanning a code to remove the food. And as ghost kitchens, delivery-only brands, and virtual food halls proliferate (see above), the Automat format looks increasingly attractive. 

Automat Kitchen’s version of it is a hardware/software combo that features made-to-order meals meant to be healthier takes on the comfort foods of yesteryear. It’s located in an office building connected to a shopping mall, so as the population ventures back to physical workspaces and stores, this location will see a lot of traffic.

Automat Kitchen joins the likes of the forthcoming Brooklyn Dumpling Shop as well as Minnow and Starbucks in bringing the automated cubby system to the restaurant experience. Expect plenty of other implementations to emerge this year.

Starbucks is considering more drive-thru-only stores with zero seating, the company said in its recent earnings call. Other possible future formats include significantly smaller location sizes and the ever-popular double-drive-thru lane concept.

Chipotle is testing out carside pickup at 29 of its locations in California. Customers order via the Chipotle app and, upon arriving at the restaurant, hit the “I’m here” button to get their food.

Mealco, a company that helps chefs create delivery-only brands, raised $7 million in seed funding. The round was led by Rucker Park Capital along with FJLabs and others.

Will Smart Carts Accelerate Automated Checkout?

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When you go grocery shopping today, the only reason you might even pay attention to your cart is because of a bum wheel that is either stuck or keeps turning around and around as you push it up and down the aisles.

But given the pace of announcements lately, there’s a good chance that when you go grocery shopping later this year, you might notice your shopping cart has a touchscreen, or a ring of cameras, or that it automates the checkout process for you.

In other words, your shopping cart is getting smart.

There is a wave of companies developing cashierless checkout systems by moving the entire process to your shopping cart or basket. Caper, Veeve, Tracxpoint, Storewide Active Intelligence, Imagr, and a scrappy young startup called Amazon.

Some systems use computer vision to recognize items, others use a barcode scanner, but these smart carts all basically do the same thing: keep track of the items you place in them and automatically tally up your bill for you to pay when you exit the store.

The use of smart carts can be appealing to retailers for a number of reasons. The COVID pandemic has grocers looking for ways to reduce human-to-human interactions. Smart carts could not only remove cashiers from the checkout equation, they might also free up cashiers for other labor, such as picking and packing, which is needed to keep pace with the growth in online grocery shopping.

For the shopper, smart carts can create a more frictionless experience because you don’t need to stand in checkout lines. And smart carts equipped with touchscreens can serve as revenue generators through new advertising and promotional space, as well as present recipes and guide customers through stores.

But smart carts can also be an easier way for retailers to get into automated/cashierless checkout because there is no retrofitting that needs to happen with existing stores. Cashierless checkout solutions from companies like Zippin and Grabango require the installation of cameras and sensors in stores, which can be time consuming and costly. A smart cart just requires the buying/leasing of new shopping carts.

Smart cart adoption got a shot in the arm this week when we learned that grocery giant Kroger is testing out Caper’s smart carts at a location in Cincinnati, Ohio. The KroGo carts feature a touchscreen, barcode scanner and built-in scale to weigh fresh items. There’s no app to download or account to set up, and KroGo users get their own separate station for a speedy checkout.

Caper’s announcement follows a story we wrote last week about New Zealand-based Imagr, which is bringing its smart baskets to Japanese retailer H2O.

And of course, Amazon is rolling out its own smart Dash cart tech as it expands its real world grocery empire.

There’s still a ways to go before smart carts scale up to become an everyday occurrence, but expect to see more smart cart pilots roll out with different grocers throughout this year.

Now if only these smart carts could fix those bum wheels.

The Kitchen Robots of CES (and Food Tech Live)

Is it just us, or was CES a little lacking this year? I mean, it’s totally understandable, given the pandemic, that fewer hardware companies would race to announce/show off a product for a show no one is physically going to. It’s just that normally we’re up to our eyeballs in new gadgets, gizmos and smart appliances this time of year.

That’s not to say there was nothing worth noting at this year’s CES. Spoon Founder Mike Wolf rounded up the kitchen robots that were at the show the year, including:

Moley – The high-end, full robotic system with an articulating arm that you basically build your kitchen around.

Oliver – The countertop single-pot device that you fill with fresh ingredients and it does the rest.

Takumi – From Yo-Kai Express, the Takumi countertop device that automatically re-heats and re-constitutes containers of Yo-Kai’s frozen ramen.

Samsung Handy Bot – A robot that does the dishes and pours you a glass of wine? Sign us up.

Hopefully the world returns to normal this year, so we can get back to the craziness of being in person for CES next year. Or maybe we’ll just have to send robots in our place.

More Headlines

UK Researchers Kickstart a New Project to Study and Fight At-Home Food Waste Behaviors – Researchers will examine consumer behavior around food waste both during and after lockdown periods in the UK, and use those findings to develop new ways to help consumers fight food waste and change their behaviors in the home.

Spanish Government Funds BioTech Foods’ Cultured Meat Project – The project will investigate the health benefits of cultured meat, and determine if cultured meat lacks the common health concerns associated with animal meat, such as increasing the risk of high cholesterol and certain cancers.

Controlled Ag Company AppHarvest’s First-Ever Crop Arrives at Grocery Stores This Week – The Morehead, Kentucky indoor farm clocks in at about 2.76 million square feet, and AppHarvest says the facility is expected to produce about 45 million pounds of tomatoes annually.

Glovo Lands Real Estate Deal to Expand Its Ghost Convenience Stores – Stoneweg will build and refurbish these real estate locations in key Glovo markets to help the delivery service expand its reach with these delivery-only convenience stores.

Dragontail Systems and Pizza Hut Deploy Pizza Delivery Drones in Israel – The delivery drones won’t be dropping pizzas off at people’s front doors, however. Rather, they will fly pizzas to remote designated landing zones where delivery drivers will pick them up for last mile of the delivery.

Restaurants Are Critical to Cultured Meat’s Evolution

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This being a newsletter about restaurant tech, I normally spend more time on software and systems than actual food items. Last week, however, the big restaurant tech was the food. 

Eat Just dropped news at the beginning of the week that it had made the world’s first sale of cultured meat (following regulatory approval earlier this month). The buyer? A venue in Singapore called 1880 that’s something of a mix between a restaurant, club, and social enterprise. Eat Just’s GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken made its debut at 1880 this past Saturday, Dec. 19, at a launch party.

The news is historic for both Eat Just and cultured meat. But it’s also a major milestone for the restaurant biz, which will play an important role in helping both consumers and regulators understand why we need (underscore that word) to shift to forms of protein that don’t require things like animal slaughter and deforestation to bring into being.

We’ve long known that dropping animal proteins from our food system is one of the most impactful things humans can do when it comes to preserving the planet. More recently, the United Nations pinpointed increased demand for animal protein as a major driver for zoonotic diseases, including COVID-19. It’s hard to summarize the urgency here in a few sentences, but the call to action very clear at this point: change our diets or barrel straight into a future of mass food insecurity, extinct species, regions (including Singapore) completely under water, and the whole collapse of living systems.

The way to express those points is, quite frankly, not through newsletters like this but through culinary experiences that illustrate frightening stuff while simultaneously providing solutions for what could be.

Speaking to me on the phone this week, Eat Just said it chose 1880 as a launch partner because of the venue’s “focus on the future of food” and mission “to build a better planet.” Working together, the two created a menu for the launch of GOOD that essentially brings to life the urgency around finding more sustainable sources of protein.

About 40 people were invited to a four-course meal designed to be a history of our food system, from foraging to farming to melting icecaps. According to materials sent by Eat Just, “Each of course represent[s] an element of the story told through the life of the red junglefowl, the wild ancestor of domesticated chickens, which is found throughout Southeast Asia and is on the ‘endangered’ list in the Red Data Book, an anthology of Singapore natural heritage.” Providing a culinary representation of what the future could be if we stopped relying on animal protein, the meal culminated with three cultured chicken dishes, each one influenced by a top chicken-producing country: Brazil, China, and the U.S.

Importantly, Eat Just’s cultured chicken will also be available for purchase on 1880’s menu moving forward. (Attendees paid for the fourth course cultured chicken dish at the launch, too.) Even more important, the cost of a cultured chicken dish at 1880 will be around $23 USD, which is on par with regular chicken dishes at that venue and at most other upscale restaurants The feasible price point is huge, since reaching price parity with traditional meat is a major requirement for the evolution of cell-based meat from prototype to dietary staple.

Restaurants are essential when it comes to providing (relatively affordable) experiences with cultured meat because they have historically always played a role in the evolution of the what we eat. Consider the hamburger. As a food item, it’s older than the United States by centuries. But it wasn’t until White Castle opened in 1921 and introduced the world to “the slider” that the burger started down the path to ubiquity and eventually became a standard of diets around the world.

That evolution took the better part of a century, which is to say that cultured meat will not come to White Caste or any other QSR tomorrow. It might not even hit those mainstream outlets next year. But as more cultured meat companies like Eat Just gain regulatory approval and provide culinary experiences and education, more consumers, governments, and food producers will start to better understand why we need it, along with other forms of alt protein, in the years to come. The hope of many is that cultured meat will eventually reach every grocery store shelf and dining table from Singapore to Dickson, Tennessee. To get there we need restaurants first. 

Craving a Better Ghost Kitchen Experience

Speaking of upscale dining, this week Crave Hospitality Group announced it had raised $7.3 million in seed funding for its Crave Collective facility in Boise, Idaho. 

Funding for ghost kitchens is definitely not exceptional in 2020. But as we learned recently when Crave took us on a virtual tour of its Boise facility, this company approaches the model a little differently. Food coming out of Crave’s kitchens is not your average burger-in-a-to-go-box fare. Rather, the company has teamed up with James Beard Nominees and Food Network Champions alike to bring a more upscale flair to the virtual restaurant/ghost kitchen experience. The idea is not to replace fine-dining restaurants where culinary creativity is valued above speed and efficiency. Rather, it’s to give these chefs and their restaurants a chance to reinvent their menus and in doing so hopefully survive the apocalyptic collapse of the an entire industry. 

Crave’s funding news this week is a good sign for full-service restaurants, which have struggled more than any other restaurant type during the pandemic. If investors are willing to bank on one upscale concept for ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants, chances are, they’ll fund more of them in the coming months and in doing so save some jobs and culinary experiences in the process.

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web 

In a first for the restaurant industry, the National Restaurant Association teamed up with third-party delivery services to release its Public Policy Principles for Third Party Delivery. The framework acts as a guide for lawmakers, offering best practices when it comes to third-party delivery services.

Burger King teamed up with Google this week to let customers search out, order, and pay for Burger King fare via Google Search, Maps, and Pay. More than 5,000 BK restaurants in the U.S. will provide this service.

For the first time ever this week, Shake Shack made delivery available directly via its own digital properties. Customers with the iOS app can order delivery meals directly from the brand, rather than going through a third-party platform. That said, Uber Eats is onboard as the exclusive handler of the last mile for this program.

The Autonomous Middle Mile is Far From Middle of the Road

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When it comes to self-driving vehicles, the middle mile jumped to the head of the line this week when Walmart announced that one of its middle-mile delivery routes in Arkansas will be driven by a completely autonomous vehicle in 2021. That means there won’t be a human driver in the truck as it goes about its route.

The autonomous delivery trucks are from Gatik, a company that has been working with Walmart for the past 18 months on middle-mile delivery. As a quick refresher, the middle mile is the route between a company’s two locations, like between a warehouse and a store.

While autonomous taxis and consumer delivery vehicles attract the most headlines, the middle mile is likely to be where we see the most progress when it comes to self-driving vehicles.

The autonomous middle mile relies on a specific route between locations. Because this route does not change, the self-driving vehicle only needs to learn and understand how to navigate this one trip. This scenario is far less complex for the AI trying to navigate, in real time, compared to the deliveries made by, say, food robots. The latter has to navigate a new neighborhood filled with new streets, traffic, people and other potential hazards each time it goes out, making the logistical and regulatory landscape of the job much more complicated.

Gatik Founder and CEO explained some of his company’s technology in a recent corporate blog post, writing:

Gatik has taken a radically divergent hybrid approach towards the system architecture, implementation & validation of self-driving vehicles — called ‘Explainable AI’. We decompose the massive monolithic DNNs into micro-models whose intended functionality is restricted to a very specific explainable task, and build rule-based fallback & validation systems around them. Given extensive knowledge of Gatik’s well-defined ODDs and hybrid architecture, we are able to hyper-optimize our models with exponentially less data, establish gate-keeping mechanisms to maintain explainability, and ensure continued safety of the system for unmanned operations.

You get all that?

In addition to making the technology a little bit easier, the constraints of middle-mile routes can also make regulatory approvals easier. A city concerned about safety issues associated with self-driving vehicles may be more open to the technology when it’s only applied to one route that can be intentionally created (e.g., it won’t go in front of a firehouse) and closely monitored. Gatik credited this limited approach for its approval to go humanless in Arkansas.

The middle mile allows different cities and states to dip their toes, as it were, into autonomous driving and learn from it. Assuming all goes well in the middle mile, those lessons can be applied to other forms of autonomous delivery, whether its robots in the bike lanes carrying burritos or rover bots roaming the sidewalk with groceries.

But in addition to being a new path to regulatory approval, the middle mile is also opening up new types of business. As Walmart explained in its corporate blog post announcing this week’s news, an autonomous mile could have other applications. While the middle mile doesn’t go to a consumers door, it could get e-commerce orders closer to the last mile.

Walmart laid out a scenario where it is shuttling goods from a dark store to a centralized pickup location. This could serve customers who order from Walmart online but don’t live near a physical location. But also, a fleet of autonomous delivery trucks could act like a conveyor belt running orders from a distribution center to a pickup point throughout the day. This could bring added convenience for consumers while simultaneously alleviating pressure on Walmart’s existing home delivery infrastructure.

Middle of the road is typically thought of as something that’s boring. But the middle mile use of the road is actually quite exciting.

Image via Bowery.

Hydro Power

Given all the investment in the space this year, indoor agriculture is poised to be pretty big in 2021. Part of the attraction to indoor farming is how technology and innovation can help bring greater efficiencies and yields to crop raising.

My colleague, Jenn Marston, covered two big indoor ag stories this week, and what caught my eye was that both companies have unique approaches when it comes to watering their crops.

From Jenn’s piece on AppHarvest, which is building a network of massive indoor ag facilities in Eastern Kentucky:

What is unique to AppHarvest’s approach is its rainwater system. Eastern Kentucky gets abundant amounts of rainfall, which AppHarvest captures and uses for its hydroponic system. This has a distinct advantage over using groundwater, since the latter contains sodium, which leads to agricultural runoff and the need for a system to be periodically flushed. AppHarvest’s greenhouse runs entirely off this rainwater. [AppHarvest CEO Jonathan] Webb says that to his knowledge, no other controlled ag system of this size in the world does that.

Controlled environment agriculture company, Bowery’s plan to is to lose as little water as possible when growing plants. As Jenn wrote:

Other advances include energy-saving LED lighting, more automation of the growing process through BoweryOS, and some innovations in water circulation. The latter will come in the form of what Bowery calls “a comprehensive water transpiration system.” Transpiration is the release of water from plant leaves; Bowery’s system will capture and re-use this water, with the goal of reclaiming “nearly all” of the water used in the growing process.

If the technology watering indoor farms can help create a more equitable and environmentally friendly food system, well, we’ll drink to that.

More Headlines

Toast Launches a Winter Recovery Fund for Restaurants – Company offering a $35 million relief plan for restaurants as winter begins and the pandemic continues to disrupt normal operations.

Sony AI Unveils Trio of Food Projects Including AI-Powered Recipes and Robots – The new food-related endeavors include an AI-powered recipe creation app, a robot chef’s assistant and a community co-creation initiative.

Ritual Teams Up With NYC to Provide Commission-Free Delivery to Restaurants – The deal is part of the second phase of New York’s Empire State Digital Initiative, which is providing support for restaurants and foodservice industry businesses impacted by Covid.

Panasonic Testing Delivery Robots in Japanese Smart Town – Initial tests started in November; the company aims to begin home delivery tests in February of 2021.

And Now, a Moment for Culture(d Meat)

If you’re doing it right, your Thanksgiving leftovers should be gone by now (so many turkey+stuffing+gravy sandwiches!).

Evidently, preparing for Thanksgiving in the middle of a year-long pandemic was a “logistical nightmare” for BIG TURKEY (Butterball, Perdue, Foster Farms, etc.), thanks to labor shortages and reduced family gatherings.

This got me wondering how long it will be before we see lab-grown, cultured turkey on the tables. Sure, cultured meat still has to overcome issues around scale, affordability and widespread governmental approval. And there are some who doubt whether cultured meat will ever become a thing at all.

But as an industry sector, cultured meat’s march towards our dinner table continues to make gains. Just this week, Eat Just announced today that it received the world’s first regulatory approval to sell cultured chicken in Singapore. And that’s just the latest development capping off what has been a robust year in the cell cultured meat space that has also featured:

  • Meat-Tech announced that it had successfully 3D-printed a cultured beef fat structure composed of bovine fat cells and bio ink grown from stem cells
  • Future Meat is using fibroblast cells to help bring down the cost of cultured meat
  • SuperMeat opened up a restaurant that serves its cell-based chicken (in exchange for your opinion)
  • NovaMeat started testing its 3D printing technology on cell culture + plant-based meat hybrids
  • BioBQ is developed cell-based brisket
  • Vow is developing a cell-based meat platform portfolio that includes goat, pork and kangaroo
  • BlueNalu announced it’s opening a new production facility next year for its cultured seafood
  • Mosa Meat said it achieved an 80x reduction in medium cost for creating lab-grown meat
  • Higher Steaks created the world’s first lab-grown bacon and pork belly

And that doesn’t even include the Ouroboros Steak art project that designed a kit for creating cell-based human meat. (Relax, it’s not real.) (We hope.)

While 2020 has been a pretty garbage year for the most part, that just hasn’t been the case for cell-based meats. As you can see from the assortment of stories, lot of companies are working on the problem from a lot of different angles, and all of them are making progress.

Now, we won’t be serving lab-grown turkey next year (or, presumably the year after that), but watching all these startups innovate on food tech that could help make food production more abundant and equitable is something to be thankful for.

Upcoming Virtual Events from The Spoon

The Ghost Kitchen Deep Dive – December 9th – An all day event looking at the fast-changing ghost kitchen & virtual restaurant market.

Food Tech Live 2021 – January 11th – Check out the latest food tech innovation to start 2021 at our annual food tech product showcase.

Tetra’s Tiny Dishwasher (Finally) Headed to Market

Heatworks’ Tetra countertop dishwasher is an example of a product that I totally don’t need and yet totally want.

We first covered the Tetra back at CES 2018, where we were enthralled by the diminutive dishwasher that could clean a few settings of dishes with only a half gallon of water in ten minutes. Fun!

Well, things have been quiet on the Tetra front since that CES and we were wondering if the device would ever actually make it to market. Turns out, the company was trying to solve the complex issue around soap dispensing in its machine.

This week, Heatworks announced that it has partnered with BASF to make that complicated mechanism and bring the Tetra to market. According to the press announcement, the improved Tetra “will be designed to deliver custom solutions and dosing, dependent on the selected wash cycle, ensuring each cleaning cycle is optimized. Tetra’s cartridges will last for multiple loads and consumers will be able to sign up for a subscription, so that cartridges are shipped to them automatically.”

That last part about a proprietary soap cartridge is a bit of a bummer. We’re not a big fan of Keurig-style solutions that lock you into a particular ecosystem. But we are happy to see that the Tetra is still alive and expected to be available in the back half of 2021.

Blendid.com, Jamba Juice, Walmart, AI, Robot, Smoothy, Kiosk, Dixon, Ca, 111220

More Headlines

Exclusive: Blendid and Jamba Co-Brand New Smoothie Robot – The robot is now open for business at a Walmart in Dixon, California. This is the first co-branded robot from Blendid and its second to open up at a Walmart.

Zuul Teams Up With Thrillist to Launch Rotating Ghost Kitchen – A series of 10 different NYC restaurants will each hold a two-week residency offering exclusive delivery-only meal offerings made out of Zuul’s ghost kitchen facility in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood.

The Spoon’s Plant-Based Egg Round-Up – Plant-based eggs are poised to become the next big thing in the plant-based space, and it can be hard to keep up with all of the companies involved in this industry. We’ve pulled together some of the emerging and bigger players in this space.

3D Meat Printing Startup SavorEat Goes Public – The Israeli startup has had an initial public offering (IPO) on Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE), raising NIS 42.6 million ($13 million) in funding.

HungryPanda Raises $70M to Provide Food Delivery to Overseas Chinese Customers – The London, U.K.-based company will use the new funds to continue its global expansion, delivering authentic Chinese restaurant food and groceries to Chinese people living abroad.