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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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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

This is the Spoon’s weekly restaurant tech wrapup. Sign up today to get the Spoon delivered to your inbox.

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.

Are We Ready for Boozey Vending Machines?

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Did you ever have a fake ID growing up? I never did because I was too scared of getting caught. (I’m no McLovin.)

I was thinking about this illicit behavior because it looks like booze-dispensing vending machines could be on the verge of becoming a real thing. And where there is booze sitting in an unattended machine, there is a high schooler somewhere, figuring out some way to fool it.

Yesterday, we wrote a post about the Winecab Wine Wall, an automated wine storage, catalog and recommendation system. While the biggest version of Wine Wall clocks in at 15 feet and holds 600 bottles of vino, I was more intrigued by the much smaller, six-foot version that is “coming soon.”

This petite machine for your petite Syrahs looks a lot like a vending machine. And though the company only touts the Wine Wall for personal use (you know, for the people who can afford a $249,000 robotic wine sommelier), it’s really not hard to envision one of these machines in a hotel or grocery store or even small restaurant. Any place, basically, that wants to offer a curated wine experience without paying a human sommelier.

The problem, of course, would be preventing minors from getting their grubby mitts on the pinot grigio. How would a wine vending machine validate the age of the buyer?

The answer to that may lie in the far less high-falutin’ beer vending machine that PanPacific debuted last year. It did age verification through a combination of account registration and biometrics.

Would people want to hand over personal information like a fingerprint (or face, or finger-vein) data just so they could grab a Michelob Light anytime of day from a machine?

But boozey vending machines are becoming more of a reality, and this, in turn is creating very real new opportunities for alcohol retail. With their small footprints, unattended beer and wine (and more!) vending machines could sit, well, almost anywhere, selling booze around the clock. Whether or not this is a good thing for society is a different question altogether, but it’s one we’re going to have to grapple with, because it’s not something we’ll be able to fake our way through.

Beyond Meat Beefs Up its Offerings

Fake meat has become a very real business over the past couple of years. Plant-based burgers and sausages are better than ever and remarkably close to the “real” thing.

The two biggies in the plant-based meat game, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, have been locked in tit-for-tat battle over the past year, going back and forth with competing news announcements.

Over the last several months, both companies have announced new products, retail expansions, international expansions, and the launch of direct-to-consumer channels.

Beyond seems to have saved what could be its biggest news for the end of the year. The company announced this week that it is updating it’s signature Beyond burger patty. There will be two new versions: a meatier, juicier patty, and a more nutritious patty.

I say it’s the biggest because the company is messing with its current cash cow. What if the improvements are the New Coke of plant-based meat? Just because you can make tweaks to your formula doesn’t mean you should.

We’re cautiously optimistic, but we’ll have to wait to find out. The new burgers don’t arrive until early 2021.

More Headlines

Mealhero Raises €2.5M for Its Frozen Meals-by-Mail Service – The Belgium-based company says it’s quadrupled its customer base and doubled the number of orders since the pandemic.

Terra Kaffe Raises $4 Million for It’s Pod-Free Grind and Brew Coffee Maker – The superautomatic coffee machine sells direct to consumer.

The Delivery Hero-Woowa Bros. Merger Faces Antitrust Hurdles – The merger would give Delivery Hero an 87 percent stake in Woowa, and the combined user bases of the two would make up 98.7 percent of the entire restaurant food delivery market in South Korea.

Brooklyn Dumpling Shop Adds Miso’s Flippy Robot to its Automat Concept – The restaurant is also looking to franchise up to 1,000 locations.

New Restaurant Restrictions Put the Value of Restaurant Tech to the Test – One difference this time around is that unlike in March, restaurants have more tools at their disposal when it comes to fulfilling off-premises orders.

Where Did VCs Invest in Food Tech in October?

The one thing that doesn’t seem to be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic is investor’s willingness to open up their wallets for food tech companies.

Just in October:

And that’s not even the full list of food tech companies that announced fundraises this month.

So what can we glean looking at this sample list?

Indoor food production is attracting money with both BrightFarms and Plenty raising more than $100-plus million each for their farming solutions.

Food delivery could become the new normal as the pandemic keeps dining rooms closed and pushes more people towards online grocery commerce. Instacart and GrubMarket both offer ways to get you groceries at home, while Zomato and Ordermark advance restaurant delivery.

Plant-based foods are still hot, with Australia’s V2Foods angling to bring its plant-based burgers to Asia and LIVEKINDLY looking to expand into the U.S. as well as develop plant-based chicken and eggs.

Grocery is going to change with Cooler Screens bringing big, bright electronic advertising to a store’s refrigerated section, and Apeel’s plant-based coating extending the shelf life of produce.

Again, this is a small sample siz, and not completely representative of all the companies that have raised money this month or even the past few months. But it reinforces a bigger trend that we reported on back in June: Despite economic upheavals brought on by the pandemic, food tech companies continue to find investment.

This makes sense considering that everyone on the planet has to eat. What we can start to see from these investments is where the biggest changes are coming to how we eat.

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

Robot Report

In addition to big funding news, this week also saw what could wind up being two big developments in food robotics:

White Castle announced that it was adding Miso Robotics’ Flippy ROAR cooking robot to 10 more locations. Considering White Castle’s first pilot with Flippy was just announced in July, this seems to be validation for automation in QSR kitchens. Not only can robots provide more contactless meal prep and create social distance for employees, robots can work around the clock, which is important for a restaurant chain like White Castle, which is open 24 hours a day.

Also this week, we learned that Briggo’s automated Coffee Haus is now Costa Coffee BaristaBot. Coca-Cola acquired the Austin, TX-based Briggo earlier this year. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the deep pockets and brand recognition of Costa Coffee could provide the means to not only expand its own automated vending ambitions, but kickstart growth for the entire robo-barista sector.

The pandemic certainly accelerated interest in food robots and automation, so bet on seeing more of them actually deployed in 2021.

More Headlines

Mobile Servers and Menu Innovation: Crave’s Virtual Food Hall Brings Fine Dining to the Delivery Realm – Crave employs its own couriers, which it calls “mobile servers.” They are W-2 employees, and many are former servers out of work because of the pandemic.

Uber Expands Grocery Delivery to Manhattan – online grocery could heat up again as the pandemic shows no signs of slowing down.

Deep Branch Secures €2.5M to Scale Up Production of Novel Protein Using CO2 Inputs – With today’s news, Deep Branch is expanding to mainland Europe as part of an effort to accelerate the scaling of production for the company’s novel protein.

Lunchbox Raises $20M to Expand Its Online Ordering System for Restaurants – Lunchbox’s software integrates digital ordering, loyalty programs, delivery dispatch, marketing, analytics, and many other features into a single interface, effectively eliminating the need for restaurants to juggle multiple restaurant tech platforms on the front end.

DouxMatok to Scale Production of Its Sugar Tech in N. America with Lantic – DouxMatok’s technology makes sugar particles more efficient, so you don’t need as much of it.

In-House Delivery Needs to Disrupt Delivery

Some of the talk at last week’s Smart Kitchen Summit revolved around two newish concepts that are especially compelling when it comes to thinking about restaurants: in-house delivery and disrupting third-party delivery. Together, the two could substantially shift the the off-premises meal journey of the future.

Technically, in-house delivery — also called “native delivery” or “direct delivery” — is a decades old practice championed by Domino’s, Jimmy John’s, and other restaurants that have always used their own staff to ferry orders to customers’ doorsteps. But ever since customer demand for delivery went through the roof and then some, most restaurants have found it more economically feasible to offload delivery operations to third-party services like DoorDash and Uber Eats. 

As we cover ad nauseam around here, third-party delivery comes with its own lengthy catalog of grievances, and many restaurants don’t actually make money from those orders. On top of that, they lose control of customer relationships and oftentimes their own branding. 

In-house delivery 2.0, then, is all about restaurants bringing some of that control back under their own rooftops. One SKS panelist mentioned fast-casual chain Panera as a pathbreaker in this area, as the chain still uses its own drivers for many of its orders and only offloads the technical logistics of processing an order to third parties. Bloomin’ Brands, parent company of Outback Steakhouse and Carrabba’s, also handles many of its delivery orders in-house, and Panda Express recently launched its own program that handles the entire delivery journey, from order processing to food transport.

Simultaneously happening is the rise of services like ShiftPixy, which use their technology to power custom-branded websites for restaurants that can process ordering and payments. ShiftPixy also works with restaurants to provide them with drivers, erasing third-party delivery from the process.

All of these approaches to in-house delivery were mentioned during SKS. In a discussion about the rise of ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants, one set of panelists agreed that in the future we will see a wider range of restaurants — major chains and independent mom-and-pop stores — gravitate to in-house delivery as a way of controlling their customer relationships and branding, to say nothing of dodging predatory commission fees from third-party services.

The mention of mom-and-pop shops is important to note. Right now, most can’t afford to build out their own mobile ordering and payments system and pay employees to deliver the food. That territory currently belongs to the Paneras and Panda Expresses of the world, which brings me to our second point: disrupting third-party delivery.

At SKS, more than one person I spoke to predicted that the act of unseating third-party delivery apps’ dominance over restaurants won’t come from imposing more rules and regulations, but from someone bringing a better, cheaper solution to the table. As more restaurant chains with deep pockets take back more of their delivery stack, those solutions might very well surface in the process. 

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Del Taco Is Launching a Drive-Thru-Only Concept

Following in the footsteps of KFC, Chipotle, Burger King, and other chains, Del Taco is doubling-down on the drive-thru as an important source of sales in the future. The Lake Forest, Calif.-based chain announced on its recent Q3 earnings call it will build a drive-thru-only prototype that can be placed at Del Taco locations with a smaller physical footprint. CEO John Cappasola said during the call this prototype will include “a modernized design, improved functionality, and other operational enhancements,” though he didn’t get more specific than that.

If this story sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because other chains have made similar announcements in the recent past. Most notable among them is Burger King, who several weeks ago announced its own drive-thru-centric design prototype meant to take up less physical space and serve more drive-thru orders in a shorter amount of time. 

Drive-thru has been the most important sales channel for QSRs during 2020’s lockdowns and continued uncertainty over the dining room. However, QSR Magazine’s recent 2020 Drive-Thru Study found that drive-thru times are nearly half a minute slower than they were last year, so it’s not a surprise more chains are redoubling their efforts to make the experience faster and more efficient. With winter fast approaching, outdoor dining is about to get way less appealing to consumers in many regions. Chains will need every order they can get from drive-thru, curbside, and other off-premises channels to make up for lost sales in the dining room/patio over the next several months.

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

A wider slowdown could erase up to 2 million jobs restaurant and retail, according to new research from Gusto cited by Restaurant Dive. The losses could total roughly $190 billion.

Following openings this year of three off-premises stores in Chicago, P.F. Chang’s will expand its to-go-concept to 27 locations by 2021. The company is also testing an in-house delivery service at 10 of its locations in the U.S.

As we reported this week, Burger King is piloting reusable cups and sandwich containers in New York, Portland and Tokyo next year. The program is being done in partnership with TerraCycle’s Loop, which is also doing the McDonald’s reusable cup trial in the U.K.

Augmented Reality Bites

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Virtual food hall, meet the augmented-reality restaurant menu. You’ll soon be best friends.

Hear me out.

Over these last few weeks, multiple news bites around virtual food halls have surfaced. These food halls are collections of restaurants that exist online and where meals are only available for delivery and pickup. They are in many ways a natural effect of the pandemic shutting down dining rooms and the restaurant biz going off-premises.

The latest one comes from Lunchbox. This week, the company integrated its online digital order platform into C3’s virtual restaurant brand ecosystem to bring a bunch of different delivery-only eateries under one virtual umbrella.

Being able to order a plant-based burger, chicken, and maybe a rice dish through a single digital interface sounds great until you zero in on that word digital. One of the potential problems with this new wave of virtual food halls is that customers will never have the chance to actually visit these restaurants in person. Your introduction to their food comes in the form of 2D thumbnails you have to scroll through on your phone and squint at to even get an inkling of what you’re about to order. If you’re familiar with the restaurant that’s less of an issue, but most virtual food halls and brands are new, and ordering from them is something of a culinary gamble.

Enter augmented reality (AR), a technology some say is the next great innovation for restaurant menus. Modern Restaurant Management ran a piece this week exploring the possibility of customers using their own smartphones to display 3D models of the food they are about to order. With AR, instead of a small, flat, 2D image, a user could “see” how the dish looks on their table, zoom in on it and view it from multiple angles to get a much better idea of what they’re about to buy.

I should note that the Modern Restaurant Management Post was authored by Mike Cadoux of augmented reality platform QReal. In other words, Cadoux’s has skin in the AR game.

But he makes a good point when it comes to thinking about AR in the context of the new off-premises reality in which restaurants now operate: “Early adoption of AR was hindered by the problem of getting the experience to the customer. People are loath to download apps, and delivery platforms had to service thousands of restaurants, most of which wouldn’t have access to 3D models. Now a restaurant or brand can push their own content to the customer. They would be wise to utilize all the smartphones capabilities and showcase their food with the next-generation of content.”

Spoon Editor Chris Albrecht actually spoke with Cadoux back in August, when QReal released a study with Oxford University’s Saïd Business School that found participants were more likely to order an item if they could view options in AR. “It’s like a test drive for a car,” Cadoux told The Spoon at the time. “Same way when you buy food, you want to think about what it’s like to eat it.”

The tech makes especially good sense for virtual food halls. As I said, these restaurants do not have dining rooms, so customers are relying solely on the digital realm to learn about the food. If, for the sake of argument, Lunchbox and C3 were to integrate AR into their ordering platform, they could better showcase the “fine dining” aspects of their food and in doing so make their meals more appetizing. Everyone else, from Zuul’s virtual-only sandwich chain to Steve Aoki’s pizza brand, could also reap the benefits of AR in the virtual restaurant realm.

AR is not yet mainstream, and its presence in the restaurant industry is still largely forthcoming. But since one pandemic year seems equal to five normal ones, an AR-powered food hall may be closer than we think.

Uber Engineer Says “No” to Uber’s Prop. 22

Californians, take note. One of the things those in the Golden State will vote on come November is Prop. 22, a $180 million ballot measure that would allow third-party delivery services to classify drivers as independent contractors. The measure would effectively override California’s Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5), which was signed into law last year and dictates that Uber, Grubhub, and other gig-economy companies must classify drivers and couriers as employees. 

Classifying them as independent contractors means delivery drivers would lack access to workers comp., paid sick leave, and other benefits W-2 employees receive. It goes without saying that a lot of folks are against Prop. 22. One of them is an employee at Uber.

Kurt Nelson, who’s been a software engineer at Uber since 2018, penned an op-ed at TechCrunch this week that argues drivers should be classified as employees. Nelson, who still makes deliveries for app-based companies in order to understand the gig economy, writes that Uber “refuses to obey” AB5 and instead prefers to “write a new set of rules for themselves” with Prop. 22. 

Among many other notable lines, there was also this gem about the gig economy: “I’ve met drivers who have to sleep in their cars, risk financial ruin over a single doctor’s appointment or go without life-saving medication. There’s no way around it. Uber’s Prop 22 is a multi-million effort to deny these workers their rights.”

You can read the piece in its entirety here. Uber has yet to make any public response to Nelson’s op-ed, so stay tuned.

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

Kitchen United CEO Jim Collins has stepped down to “focus on personal endeavors,” according to Nation’s Restaurant News. Collins played a major role in turning KU into one of the leaders of the ghost kitchen space. Michael Montagano, KU’s former chief financial officer and treasurer, has been named CEO.

Mobile POS platform GoTab launched an integration with hospitality labor management system 7shifts. The combined offering gives restaurant owners/operators the ability to view sales and labor data from the same interface.

Meal prep software company Meallogix announced a partnership with DoorDash this week. A press release sent to The Spoon notes that the deal gives Meallogix’ customers the option of using the third-party delivery service to manage their routes for the last mile of delivery.

Are Shoppable Recipes About to Have Their Moment?

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On paper, shoppable recipes are everything I want in a technology. They are, in some respects, the quintessential combination of discovery + action + convenience. Find a recipe you like then click a couple buttons to buy all the ingredients and have them delivered (in some cases on the same day).

Despite all that potential awesomeness, I have never once used a shoppable recipe. Part of that could be that I’m not coming across that many shoppable recipes, or if I am, it’s not abundantly clear that the recipe is shoppable. The point is, I write about and am an early adopter of this stuff and I haven’t done it. And I’ll bet dollars to donuts most of you haven’t, either.

But given certain market forces as well a bunch of recent announcements, shoppable recipes could be on the verge of having their moment.

First, the COVID-19 pandemic is still very very much in full swing, and dining in at restaurants is still very much limited. As a result, people are still, for the most part stuck and home, a situation that will only intensify because, you know, winter is coming. So there’s an audience on the lookout for meals to make at home.

And since people have been stuck at home for seven months now, more of them are taking to online grocery shopping. That trend isn’t going away anytime soon: grocery e-commerce is expected to grow to $250 billion by 2025. So this available market is getting more used to the idea of buying their food online — a defining trait of shoppable recipes.

Obviously, I’m not the only person paying attention to these trends. Recent announcements indicate that shoppable recipe companies are gearing up for some growth of their own. Consider these headlines from The Spoon just since June of this year (when it became abundantly clear the pandemic would be with us for the long haul):

That SideChef headline is from yesterday and it’s worth noting Walmart, a massive player in grocery, getting deeper into the shoppable grocery game. What is particularly interesting is that nearly 90 percent of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a Walmart. Walmart just launched its own premium service, Walmart+, which offers same-day grocery delivery. Taken altogether in that scenario, the path from meal discovery to dinner on your plate is just a few clicks away.

While I may have avoided shoppable recipes up until now, something tells me that they may soon become inescapable.

(Cooler) Screen Time

Speaking of things that are about to become inescapable. There’s a good chance that no matter where you look in the near future, there will be some sort of digital screen trying to grab your attention. I’m not saying this with disdain, just as a matter of fact.

Consider that Cooler Screens announced this week that it has raised $80 million.

Cooler Screens replaces those boring old clear glass doors found on in-store coolers with big, always-on digital screens. It might seem counterintuitive to replace a transparent piece of glass that you can easily look through to see the contents behind it with a screen that reports what’s inside. But unlike that inert piece of glass, the Cooler Screen serves up dynamic full-motion ads and promotions as well as upselling opportunities.

The company is in 50 Chicago-area Walgreens now and has plans to roll out to 2,500 of its locations.

And they aren’t the only company bringing screens to the store. AWM Smart Shelf does a similar type of digital display advertising, just on standard store shelves.

With the allure of eye-catching ads and a potential bump in sales, there’s more than a good chance that even while grocery shopping we’ll have to monitor our screen time.

More Headlines

I Tried Planeteer’s IncrEdible Spoon and Ate the Whole Thing – The spoons come in a variety of both sweet and savory flavors, including chocolate, vanilla, black pepper, masala, oregano chili, and plain.

Picnic Raises $3M for its Robot-Powered Pizza Assembly – This brings the total amount raised by Picnic to $20.7 million.

Change Foods Creates Cheese Through Fermentation – Add Australian-based Change Foods to the growing list of companies using fermentation to recreate diary products without the cow.

Grubhub Partners With Lyft to Offer Lyft Pink Members Delivery Perks – Grubhub announced today it has inked an exclusive partnership with rideshare service Lyft to offer the latter’s Lyft Pink members complimentary access to Grubhub+.

HWY Haul Brings AI to Automate Fresh Produce Freight and Fight Food Waste – The company’s cloud-based platform allows farms (or stores or other suppliers) to schedule a vetted driver, determine the cost for each trip, monitor their route in real-time, and keep constant temperature checks (to ensure the food stays cold).

Ghost Kitchen, Meet the Automat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Location-based Picnicking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How AI is Transforming Food Development

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In the 1982 movie Tron, the inner workings of a computer included tiny people riding motorcycles and throwing deadly frisbees. Somewhat counterintuitively, if a Tron movie were made today about the modern inner workings of computer artificial intelligence, it would be far less exciting, with just those same tiny people in tiny white coats conducting tinier experiments around the clock, non-stop.

OK, that’s kinda silly, but that kinda is what’s happening in food tech AI right now. Over the past few weeks we’ve written about funding for three different startups using AI to do experimentation grunt work inside a computer before the real world work begins.

Yesterday, Brightseed announced that it raised $27 million in new funding for its AI-based approach for uncovering phytonutrients in plants. Basically, Brightseed’s Forager AI examines plants on a molecular level to find hidden compounds, predict what health benefits those compounds might have, and figure out how to source those compounds.

Brightseed’s AI is doing a lot of the leg work so when it is time to go into a real (or “wet”) lab, startups are more efficient with their time and resources. Brian Frank at FTW Ventures recently referred to this ideas as computational biology, but it’s also the idea behind synthetic data used for training robots.

In addition to Brightseed, we’ve also covered Spoonshot, which uses AI to make novel flavor combination predictions. Spoonshot also recently launched its Concept Generator, which basically allows CPG companies to develop an entire product virtually (complete with ingredients list) before actual physical prototyping starts. Climax Foods, which launched earlier this month, is turning data into plant-based cheese. The company uses machine learning frameworks to predict what kind of food different combinations of raw ingredients and compounds will yield. In the case of cheese – ingredient X + compound Y = this type of flavor and texture.

The idea of computational biology or synthetic data or AI algorithms modeling new products isn’t new, but it seems like we are at the beginning stages of it going mainstream. If this works as, well, predicted, it could unlock entirely new types of foods, flavors and more.

It could also give real world lab workers a little bit of a break, which they could maybe use to watch Tron.

Consider the Fridge

But let’s move away from the fictional people inside your computer and into the very real stuff inside your fridge.

Be honest, will all of what you currently have in your fridge make it on to your plate? Probably not. A fair amount of it will probably get tossed.

I don’t bring up your thrown-out broccoli to shame you, but rather to point you to an interesting piece by my colleague Jenn Marston. Well, two pieces she wrote, actually, both of which deal with food waste.

Food waste is a huge problem, and a lot of it happens on the consumer end. What if, Jenn writes, we thought about our fridges differently as an easy way to to trim our food waste fat:

“… the fridge design itself seems ripe for an upgrade. Or downgrade, as it were, since a smaller fridge compartment with a bigger freezer might be a surefire way to reduce food waste. Much of our food, even items like milk and bread, can be frozen until we need to use them. And research shows that things like frozen fruits and vegetables maintain more or less the same nutrients as their fresh counterparts.”

Changing up the fridge, however, is just one tactic the fight against food waste. Jenn also debuted a new deep dive market report for our Spoon+ membership service. The Consumer Food Waste Innovation Report details the scope of the at-home food waste problem, technologies being implemented to help stem that waste and a landscape of the startups that are tackling the issue.

More Headlines

H-E-B to Use Swisslog for Automated Micro-Fulfillment – The Texas grocery chain becomes the latest to look at robots to keep up with grocery e-commerce.

Surplus Food Startup Hungry Harvest Closes Series A Round at $13.7M – Speaking of fighting food waste, Hungry Harvest rescues “ugly” produce and other staples from groceries to help curb waste and redistribute food to those in need.

The CDC’s New Findings Put Restaurant Tech In the Hot Seat Once Again – Restaurants may increase the risk of catching COVID, what does that mean for all this contactless restaurant tech?

National Restaurant Assoc.: Nearly 1 in 6 Restaurants Closed During Pandemic – Roughly 100,000 restaurants in the U.S. have closed either for the long-term or permanently, the trade association found.

Beyond Meat Launches New Plant-Based Meatballs – The plant-based meat giant makes a play for convenience (and your pasta).

Summer Sizzled for Plant-Based Meat

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In a normal world, with Labor Day behind us, now would be the time that everyone gets back to work, nose to the grindstone, powering through all kinds of business before the holiday break.

But we aren’t in a normal world, and looking back, two companies that definitely did not take a summer break were Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. Both have been in what amounts to a plant-based Battle Royale, trading big announcements back and forth all summer long.

I don’t want to turn this newsletter into a litany of announcements (you can catch up by checking out our Impossible and Beyond story archives), but rather take this moment to reflect on the bigger picture.

Whether it was retail partner announcements, direct sales channel launches, or international deals, the one common thread for both companies was expansion. More stores, more buying options, more geographic markets.

Yes, there was some new product news. Impossible rolled out it’s plant-based sausage and Beyond did another pilot for its plant-based chicken. But most of the news wasn’t about new items, it was about scale.

This is good news for flexitarians and the plant-based market overall, which has seen a spike in demand during the pandemic. This means that for now at least, the companies have stabilized their offering and probably won’t be tinkering publicly with their fake meat formulas.

Both companies are also expanding at a time when ingrained problems with the traditional meat-packing industry are being illuminated by the coronavirus. According to the CDC:

Among 23 states reporting COVID-19 outbreaks in meat and poultry processing facilities, 16,233 cases in 239 facilities occurred, including 86 (0.5%) COVID-19–related deaths. Among cases with race/ethnicity reported, 87% occurred among racial or ethnic minorities.

So there is an opportunity for plant-based meat companies, which say that their product is better for the planet, to show that their working conditions are more better for workers.

All of this is to say that 2020 was a building year for both Impossible and Beyond. This isn’t exactly a hot take, but all of this scaling and expanding the two companies have done over the summer are going to lead to even more mainstreaming of plant-based meat throughout 2021.

Predicting the Next Flavortown

Spoonshot announced yesterday that it has raised a $1 million seed round of funding for its AI-based approach to flavor prediction. For those unfamiliar, Spoonshot hoovers up food data from all kinds of sources to suggest which flavors will work together in novel combinations.

But almost as interesting as the funding news is what I learned from speaking with Spoonshot Co-Founder and CEO Kishan Vasani, who told me that the compay has developed a new product called the Concept Generator.

Where the company’s Ingredient Network is a tool that let’s you explore the world of flavors, following rabbit holes of unique combinations, the Concept Generator promises to be more of a product-creation-tool-in-a-box.

With the Concept Generator, Vasani told me that CPG companies can basically come to the table with a particular product in mind. So a company could say they want some type of cracker that has is built around the cheddar flavor. The Concept Generator takes that idea and returns ideas for flavor combinations as well as an ingredients list to make that cracker.

If it works as Vasani says it does, the Concept Generator seems like it could be an easy (relatively speaking) way for smaller startups to get to market, as well as bigger companies to iterate products.

Dunkin Donuts

More Headlines

Cashierless Tech Could Move Dunkin’ Ahead in the Race to Reinvent the QSR Format – Using the Dunkin’ mobile app, customers receive a QR code to enter the store, and from there, grab their coffee and donuts and simply walk out when they’re done.

11 Food Tech Startups Will Join TechStars 2020 Farm-to-Fork Virtual Accelerator – The Farm-to-Fork Accelerator looks for early-stage entrepreneurs and companies addressing major issues in the food chain around food safety and security, supply chain management, and ag tech.

Human Improvement Founders Want to Make Cricket Protein Palatable for Masses (Spoon Plus) – Americans may not be excited by the idea of eating insects now, but consumer habits are adapting rapidly, and there’s no reason why people couldn’t embrace bugs as part of their diet in the near future.