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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can read the full story here.

Food Robotics

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

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

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

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

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

You can read the full post here. 

Restaurant Tech

DoorDash Acquires In-Venue Order & Pay Specialist Bbot

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

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

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

You can read the full story here.

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

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

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

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

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

You can read the full post here.

Alt Protein

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

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

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

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

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

Why did you decide to start the company?

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

You can read the full story here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can read the full story here.

Food Retail & Tech

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

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

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

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

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

To read the full story, click here!

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

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

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

So why not at our home?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And according to Kolbeck, they learned a lot.

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

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

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

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

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Food Robots

Hyphen Wants to Be The Shopify for Restaurant Robots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Protein

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

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

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

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

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

You can read the full story at The Spoon

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

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

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

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

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

You can read the full story at The Spoon.

Food & Web3

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

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

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

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

To read the full story, click here!

Smart Kitchen

Haier Patents a Fridge That Cooks Eggs

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

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

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

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

To read full story, click on The Spoon. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virtual Event: The New Restaurant Tech Stack

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

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

This event is sponsored by Paytronix. 

Register for a free spot now!

Food Tech Predictions for 2022

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

Five Predictions for Consumer Food & Kitchen Tech in 2022

Meet The Smart Food Delivery Locker

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

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

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

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

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

Five Plant-Based Meat Predictions for 2022

The Year of the Whole Cut

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

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

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

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

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

Five Food Robotics Predictions for 2022

Restaurants-in-a-Box Start Rolling Out

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

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

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

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

Five Restaurant Tech Predictions for 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brave new labeling requirements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Restaurant Tech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Future Food

Motif Foodworks’ New HEMAMI Receives GRAS Status From FDA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food Robots

SJW Robotics Demoes RoWok, a Fully Robotic Wok Restaurant Kiosk

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

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

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

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

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

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

The NFT-Powered Dinner Club Has Arrived

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Startup Showcase Alumni Incredible Eats Lands Investment on Shark Tank

Dinesh Tadepalli has landed his shark.

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

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

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

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

Alt Protein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food Robots

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full story here.

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

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

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

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

Restaurant Tech

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

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

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

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

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

Read about Impossible’s new burger stand here. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Chang Dives Into Food Tech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Called It: Amazon is Building a Smart Fridge

Amazon is building a smart fridge.

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

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

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

Alt Protein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See the full story here. 

Food Robots

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

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

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

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

Read the full story here.

Flippy The Fast Food Robot Has Its Own National TV Commercial

Flippy’s about to hit the big time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Restaurant Tech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They decided to start a revolution.

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

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

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

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

Food Tech Goes Back to School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Headlines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data: Restaurant Tech’s Biggest Opportunity

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As online ordering becomes more the norm, the next step in on the path to digitization is all about data. More specifically, it is about making sense of the mountains of customer data brought about by the uptick in digital ordering. Think customer order history, dietary preferences, as well as external data like weather, nearby events, and other factors that could impact restaurant traffic.

A company that wants to help restaurants make sense of all this is Brightloom. 

Until relatively recently, Brightloom went by the name Eatsa, and for a time was a restaurant itself, pushing whole hyper-digitized, automated-dining concept long before major QSRs started adopting cubbies and kiosks. The Eatsa restaurant itself didn’t last terribly long. In fact, the company started shuttering these locations in 2017 and by the end of that year was licensing its automated-restaurant technology out to others instead of trying to own the whole stack.

In 2019, rebranded as Brightloom and pivoted sharply away from automated ordering tech to what CEO Adam Brotman refers to as a “data driven personalization service.” Instead of providing cubbies and online order systems for the restaurant front of house, Eatsa now provides a “customer growth” platform through which restaurants can access and analyze their data.

Brotman told me this past spring that the reason for the shift was that digital ordering “was becoming some[thing] of a commodity.” Even before the pandemic shut dining rooms down and forced more restaurants to rely on off-premises channels like pickup and delivery, businesses were incorporating more ways for customers to order digitally. All those order channels — apps, websites, even SMS — produce data that, with the right tools, can be extremely valuable to restaurants in terms of being able to offer customers relevant experiences and upsells.

Boston Consulting Group notes that one-third of restaurants’ digital customers ordered online for the first time during the pandemic. That number is expected to go up, and restaurants will have to meet that demand. “Going digital” nowadays means being able to message and connect with restaurant customers directly, knowing what they buy from how, how often they’re buying it, and through which channels. 

“Even just having a great looking website or mobile app is not easy. Organizing your data and doing data driven, personalized marketing, on your email and push notifications, that is even harder,” Brotman said. 

Brightloom addresses those types of areas for restaurants, and the company has recently seen its popularity among restaurants grow. The company claimed in a press release this month that restaurants using the Brightloom platform “experienced lifts in revenue per guest of 5.7% or more across 23 million guests.” The company has also added larger-name chains, such as Ruby Tuesday and El Pollo Loco, to its roster of customers. Finally, Brightloom also recently launched Brightloom Pro, which includes more customization capabilities for individual restaurant brands. 

Food tech investor Brita Rosenheim recently noted that it’s “dizzying” for restaurant operators to make decisions around how to use their data. Because of that, there is a tremendous opportunity for restaurant tech companies that can partner with these restaurants  to help them “utilize customer data to better uphold their brand, funnel customers into more profitable channels, and make better decisions about merchandising, pricing, and promotions.”

If you want to learn more about this brave new data-centric restaurant world, join The Spoon and guests on August 17 for a virtual Restaurant Tech Summit. Brightloom and Adam Brotman will join the likes of Olo, Delivery Hero, Wow Bao, and many other restaurants and restaurant tech companies. Grab a ticket here, and come ready to ask some questions. 

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Bbot Raises $15M Series A for its Restaurant Ordering and Payment Software – The company said it will create new POS and loyalty program integrations with the new funds, and will focus on features for food halls and virtual brands. 

Delivery Service Swiggy Raises $1.25B – The “heavily oversubscribed” round includes the $800 million the India-based delivery service raised earlier this year.

Zenput Raises $27M to Manage Operations for Multi-Unit Restaurants – Multi-unit restaurant operators, grocery stores, and convenience stores can release new operating procedures and health and safety protocols and enforce them across all units. 

Retailers: Don’t Fret Over Online Grocery’s Downward Trend

In looking at Brick Meets Click/Mercatus online grocery sales data since March of this year, you might start to worry. After matching a record high of $9.3 billion in total U.S. grocery e-commerce in March, the numbers have steadily come down. April’s tally was $8.4 billion. May fell to $7.0 billion. And just this week, the latest data showed total U.S. online grocery sales dropped again to $6.8 billion.

But as Brick Meets Click Partner and Research Lead David Bishop explained to me by phone this week, there’s no need to panic.

“We’ve expected and predicted that 2021 would be a very choppy year,” Bishop said, adding the the pandemic, the subsequent delta and lambda variants and government relief like the child tax credits coming out will make for a very up and down year. But, he added, “Keep an eye on the big picture. We are still at significantly higher levels than prior to the pandemic.” More importantly, Bishop reassured me, online grocery shopping isn’t going anywhere. “We’re still at 70 percent of the peak, and we’re going to keep more than 50 percent of incremental gains.”

A closer look at Brick Meets Click’s numbers shows that almost the entirety of the drop in online grocery sales came from ship-to-home services (think mail order services like Imperfect Produce, Crowd Cow, etc.). Store delivery and home pickup options remained flat from May to June at $5.3 billion, and this, Bishop said, is where retailers should be paying attention — especially when it comes to curbside pickup.

Brick Meets Click’s June data showed that 33 percent of monthly active users received online grocery orders only via pickup, compared with 16 percent receiving their online groceries only via delivery. “The customer is signaling that pickup is the preferred method when given the option between home delivery and store pickup,” Bishop said.

Bishop also said that in the broader landscape, especially in the media, the message has been about delivery, and the need for faster delivery. (We at The Spoon are certainly guilty of adding to that narrative.) “The fact of the matter is that more households use pickup than delivery,” said Bishop, “And the sales gap is widening.”

Bishop doesn’t think retailers should abandon delivery, but more emphasis and resources should be put towards adding and improving curbside pickup options for customers. This in turn will create a virtuous cycle with customers. Adding more curbside pickup options with faster, more convenient pull-up options will get more people to use curbside pickup services.

Adding those pickup options, however isn’t as simple as a CEO snapping their fingers. Operational plans need to be put into place as to how the customer orders, who does the order packing, where that order is staged before pickup and who takes it out to the car. Additionally, larger chains need to order signage that directs people to pickup spots for all their store locations, and there may be city regulations that need to be met before traditional parking spots can be reserved for pickup. All that takes time.

Now that we have data around how consumer behavior is evolving with online grocery shopping, retailers can take action and adjust. Yes, there will be continued month-to-month fluctuations in the numbers, but the overall trend remains the same. “We’re trying to reinforce the underlying point, which is, we have had the acceleration [of grocery e-commerce] thanks to the pandemic,” Bishop said. “This is the year of reconciliation. Retailers and customers will re-jig how they operate and behave.” And The Spoon will be here to cover how stores and customers change with the times — so don’t worry.

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Plant-Based Cheese Company Nobell Foods Raises $75M – The company basically trains soybeans to produce casein, which it says could wind up being cheaper than the costs of producing cheese using cow’s milk.

Instacart and Fabric Partner to Offer Automated Fulfillment to Grocers – Rolling out later this year, the robot-powered fulfillment service will be offered for both inside existing stores or standalone facilities.

Bbot Raises $15M Series A for its Restaurant Ordering and Payment Software – The company offers a range of hardware tools such as tablets, scanners and printer controls, as well as a suite of software to enable contactless and online ordering and manage catering.

Food Rocket’s CEO About the Nuts and Bolts of Speedy Grocery Delivery

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Earlier this week, I did a post on speedy grocery delivery service Food Rocket’s big plans to add ghost kitchens and eventually open up its platform to other retailers. But as I was going over my notes, there was a bunch of great insight from my conversation with Food Rocket Co-Founder and CEO Vitaly Alexandrov about building this new type of grocery model, that I wanted to highlight some of it in this week’s newsletter.

For the uninitiated, Food Rocket is among a new cohort of upstart grocery delivery services that promise to deliver your groceries in as little as ten minutes. Gopuff, Gorillas, JOKR and Fridge No More are other players in the space, and while most of the action has been in New York City so far, California is getting in on the fast grocery action as Food Rocket expands from San Francisco to LA, and Gorillas announced it was heading out west as well.

All these companies basically work the same. They open small, dark stores that carry a small number of items and offer a limited delivery radius. In the case of Food Rocket, Alexandrov said their stores are around 3,000 sq. ft., holding 2,000 – 2,500 SKUs. “We are mostly about daily needs,” Alexandrov said. This means milk, eggs, toothpaste, napkins. “We cannot store an item for a month,” he said, “That is why we focus on items that are repeatable.”

But as I noted earlier this week, Food Rocket is also getting into the ghost kitchen game, to offer its own line of fresh, ready to eat meals. “People like to buy something already prepared for them instead of just buying cucumbers and cheese,” Alexandrov said.

In order for these stores to generate enough deliveries to justify their presence, Alexandrov said they need to set up in locations where there are 50,000 households in that 1 – 1.5 mile delivery radius. Hence, these speedy delivery services starting out in dense cities like New York and San Francisco.

Food Rocket has only been operating since the end of May this year, and the whole concept of on-demand, ten minute grocery delivery is novel to most people, so as a result, Alexandrov doesn’t have a ton of customer data to develop broad trends yet. However, there are some customer patterns that the company has noticed, such as the average Food Rocket customer places 6 – 7 orders a month. “The first order is small in terms of value,” he said, “Several avocados or bananas, just to try. Then they start to buy more and more and more. Then they start to buy ready to eat [meals].”

This consumer dabbling at first and then going back for bigger baskets is something we’ve heard before from JOKR in New York City. It makes sense since Food Rocket currently has no minimum order and no delivery fee (though they will be adding such a fee at some point). Once you see that the service works, why not order a bunch of stuff you and have it show up at your door ten minutes later?

Interestingly, Alexandrov doesn’t consider JOKR or Gorillas or Gopuff to be his main competition. “We compete with Amazon,” he said. This may seem contradictory at first, given that Amazon wants to sell you everything and Food Rocket stores intentionally carry very few items. But again, Food Rocket is focused on your daily needs, not your every need. And its fighting Amazon on the very battleground Amazon invented — speedy delivery.

Will this Food Rocket take off? If you’re in San Francisco (or soon LA), try it out and let us know!

Image via Afresh.

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FirstBuild is Making a Smart Mushroom Fruiting Chamber for the Home – With sensors, a web dashboard and closed-loop humidity control, the appliance has all the bells and whistles to help the aspiring fungiculurist create a high-tech fruiting chamber on their kitchen countertop.

Verve Motion Hauls in $15M for its Exosuit, Which Ahold Delhaize Piloted – The SafeLift suit doesn’t give the wearer super strength, but it can help prevent strains.

Wicked Kitchen, UK Plant-Based Food Brand, Raises $14M Series A Round – Wicked Kitchen will soon expand into the U.S. with its plant-based offerings, and will build out its teams in London, Austin, and Minneapolis.

Grocery, Meet the Ghost Kitchen

One year ago, Euromonitor International predicted the ghost kitchen market could be worth $1 trillion by 2030. 

The prediction, made by Euromonitor’s Global Lead for Food & Beverage Michael Schaefer, reverberated around a restaurant industry that was still deep in the midst of dining room shutdowns and restrictions related to a global pandemic. Little wonder that from that point on, many saw ghost kitchens as a kind of savior for the restaurant industry.

But Schaefer and Euromonitor were looking way beyond restaurants when they made their mega-prediction. At the time, (and later on at SKS 2020), Schaefer suggested the ghost kitchen market could reach $1 trillion because it will grow to encompass all manner of foodservice businesses: grocery outlets, dark convenience stores, and ready-made meals, in addition to restaurants. In other words, restaurants alone won’t push the market to the $1 trillion mark. Instead, it will get there because the lines between ghost kitchens, groceries, and the like will become less defined over time.

That already happening, actually, and was illustrated again recently with GoPuff’s announcement that it’s hiring staff for ghost kitchens. 

GoPuff isn’t a restaurant in any shape or form. It’s a new kind of grocery delivery service that operates in dense residential areas and promises to deliver food items to customers’ doorsteps 24/7 in roughly 30 minutes or less on average. The company’s $1.5 billion fundraise from earlier this year should indicate the popularity that the speedy-grocery-delivery segment currently enjoys. 

But GoPuff’s hiring advertisement calls for chefs as well, which suggests the company wants to add some restaurant concepts to its offerings. GoPuff isn’t alone in this. DoorDash, which began life as a restaurant delivery service, opened its own ghost kitchen in 2019 and now also operates “ghost convenience stores,” which are just as they sound. A Canadian company that’s just called Ghost Kitchens carries limited offerings from QSRs along with a mix of easy-to-fulfill grocery and convenience items like ice cream pints and frozen veggie burgers. ClusterTruck has its own virtual restaurant menu but also operates out of Kroger locations. And there are companies like C3, which operate delivery-only restaurants out of a range of physical locations, including hotels, residential properties, and other non-restaurant venues.

All of these versions of the ghost kitchen prioritize speed above pretty much everything else. They also roll up neatly into a statement Schaefer made this time last year about the trajectory of ghost kitchens.

“As more and more of the foodservice environment becomes optimized for delivery, a generation of consumers growing up with smartphones becomes accustomed and habituated to being able to order literally anything from their smartphone. That is going to drive ever-more innovation,” he said.

In 2021, that innovation appears to be the speedy delivery service. As companies further blur the lines between the ghost kitchen, the grocery, and the convenience store, they’ll launch new formats that are less about having a food experience and more about getting a food item in one’s hands as fast as humanly and technologically possible.   

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DaVinci Kitchen Equity Crowdfunds €500,000 for Robotic Pasta Kiosk – The company’s campaign ran from March to the end of June this year on Seedmatch, with 488 investors participating.

C3 Raises $80M to Expand Its Virtual Food Hall Concept – The $80 million fundraise will go towards further expansion in the form of signing leases with real estate developers at various mixed-use, retail, and hospitality spaces.