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Weekly Spoon

With New Smart Grills, Next Summer Will Be Smokin’

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My wife always tells me to be in the moment. To be present. But even though I am enjoying my summer so far, I really can’t help but get excited for next summer. In particular, I’m excited for backyard barbecues next year because grills are about to get smarter and more connected, so I can spend more time socializing and less time with a spatula in hand babysitting those burgers.

Spurring this excitement for the 2022 grill season is news this week that Traeger Grills bought connected thermometer company MEATER. Terms of that deal were not disclosed but it is the second acquisition we’ve seen in the grilling space this year following Weber’s acquisition of smart oven maker June back in January.

I should say that while I’m a suburban dad, I’m not a big grill guy. I’m not good at it and don’t really enjoy it, so I like the idea of a smart grill taking over the work for me. I’ve used the Traeger WiFire smart pellet grill on more than one occasion, and it allowed me to make delicious ribs and briskets, thanks to its mobile app with remote monitoring and temperature control.

Now that Traeger bought MEATER, I look forward to seeing how the grill maker will implement that technology in future products. In particular, I’m curious to see what MEATER’s design team can do for Traeger. Traeger’s app is… fine. But MEATER’s is more visually appealing, more robust, offers more data and in my previous experience, is more stable. Marrying MEATER’s user experience with Traeger’s hardware will elevate the connected grilling experience even further.

But I’m also looking forward to early 2022 to see what Weber will do with the JuneOS. We got a taste of what’s to come earlier this year when Weber released its first grills that incorporated June’s technology. Those grills provided more precise temperature control and some guided cooking. But what those grills lacked was the automated cooking that you get with the June Oven.

I own a June and love it. My family literally uses it multiple times a day, every day. The reason we cook with it so often is because you can just load food into it and tap a button. The automated cook programs cycle through the various heating elements, adjusting the temperatures.

I would love to extend that automation to the outdoor grill, though that might be a tough ask. Part of the allure of grilling is cooking with an open flame, and precise control over fiery charcoal briquettes doesn’t seem possible. I’m hoping/betting that there is something Weber and June can do through a combination of electric heating elements and perhaps wood pellet control. If they can, we’ll most likely see something along those lines in grills early next year.

Perhaps I am alone in these smart grill dreams. Shifting burgers and hot dogs around on a grill (perhaps with a beer in one hand) is a longstanding tradition that many people probably wouldn’t want to give up. But if we can get smart grills to market next summer, well, those barbecues will be something that I will definitely be able to enjoy in the moment.

More Headlines

Instacart Appoints Fidji Simo as its New CEO – Simo was previously Vice President and Head of the Facebook app at Facebook.

Wells Fargo Picks 5 Indoor Ag Companies for Its Latest Innovation Incubator Program – Companies chosen for the program include Atlas Sensor Technologies, GrowFlux, and Motorleaf.

Instawork Raises $60M to Connect Local Businesses with Hourly Workers – The company says its platform finds professionals work in less than 24 hours with shifts paying an average of $18 an hour.

Beyond Meat Launches Plant-Based Chicken Tenders at Restaurants Nationwide – The new chicken tenders are made from faba beans and pea protein.

Rise of the Beer Robots!

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Beer is the pizza of beverage automation.

Previously, I’ve noted that if you want to see the future of food tech, you should look at pizza. From robot assembly to self-driving vehicle (and drone!) delivery to vending machines, pizza tends to be a vanguard for innovation.

Just as pizza paves the way for interesting food technology, beer appears to be the beverage to watch when you want to know where drink automation is heading.

Consider two news bits we highlighted on The Spoon this week:

Part of what makes these two stories of note is that the companies featured are on opposite ends of the spectrum. Hop Robotics is a small, one-man operation that only has one commercial prototype; Heineken is a giant global using robotics basically as a promotional gimmick. (You can enter to win its Beer Outdoor Transporter.) Regardless of their intentions, both companies are looking to make it easier and faster for you to grab a brew.

Hop and Heineken aren’t alone in this endeavor to speed up beer service, as we’ve steadily seen other automation startups come to market. In the U.K., EBar makes big, mobile vending machines meant for events and large venues that will pour a pint in under 30 seconds. The Revolmatic comes out of Poland, and is a countertop machine with a rotating tray that can dispense 450 beers an hour. Macco Robotics in Spain is taking a slightly different approach, employing a humanoid robot with arms to pour your beer in 23 seconds.

All of these machines are meant for events and large gatherings (sports, concerts, conferences) and, when set up in age-restricted areas, can act as unattended beer retail operations. This is helpful in a couple of ways. First, these robots can take over the grunt work of just pouring hundreds of beers an hour. These speedy workhorse machines can help customers spend less time in line for drinks and more time at their event. Automation can reduce overages with consistent, perfectly portioned pours, saving money and reducing waste. These robots also free up human bartenders to focus on more complicated drinks and customer service. And finally, while we are coming out of this pandemic (fingers crossed), venues and retailers will still be looking for and adopting contactless technologies that reduce human-to-human interaction.

Beer isn’t the only beverage getting the automation treatment. Both Rotender and Celia robots are making mixed cocktails, and Botrista just raised $10 million this week for its cloud-connected mocktail and fusion drink dispenser. But I think we’ll see the most automation activity in the beer space. I mean, beer is a huge market. According to the National Beer Wholesalers Association, 2020 U.S. retail sales of beer and malt-based beverages was $100 billion, and that was during a pandemic, when restaurants, bars and stadiums were closed. (Sales were $120 billion in 2019.) And for automation startups, a beer machine is just easier to make because it doesn’t require as many mechanical bits and bobs that are needed to make cocktails (ice, different bottles of booze, mixers, etc.).

Perhaps what’s most fun about Hop Robotics is its size. If one guy in South Carolina can build a working beer robot in his garage, imagine what well-funded companies will create. Whatever the future brings, beer and pizza night will never be the same.

Image via Vegano.

More Headlines

Vegano Launches an All-Vegan E-Commerce Grocery Marketplace in Canada – For now, the service operates in the Metro Vancouver area as well as Squamish and Whistler. The company said it plans to expand to Toronto and Montreal by the end of this year in addition to heading Stateside and launching in Los Angeles.

Czech Online Grocer Rohlik Raises $119M, Its Second Nine-Digit Round This Year – This funding comes just months after Rohlik raised a €190 million (~$230 million USD) Series B round in March of this year. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Rohlik to nearly $380 million.

AiFi and Trigo CEOs Weigh in on When Cashierless Checkout Will Go Mainstream – TL;DR, look for most major cities to have at least one next year, with more saturation coming in ten years.

Farm.One Launches a New Vertical Farming Facility in Brooklyn – The space will grow various microgreens as well as herbs and some flowers. All crops are grown using the hydroponic method and artificial lighting, with plants harvested “hours before delivery,” according to the company.

Why 10-Minute Grocery Startups Are Not the Next Kozmo.com

Spoon readers of a certain age will undoubtedly remember Kozmo.com, the turn-of-the-century online service that would deliver snacks, magazines, DVDs and more to you in under an hour. Have a hankering for some Ben & Jerry’s while watching Gladiator? Kozmo would whisk both over to you with no delivery fee. It was glorious.

It was also short-lived. Because you could basically order a Snicker’s bar for delivery and Kozmo didn’t charge you for the convenience, it soon burned through all of its $250 million in venture capital and went out of business.

For those who lived through it, you might be tempted to think that the new wave of hyperlocal, dark grocery stores promising delivery of goods in as little as ten minutes is just Kozmo 2.0 — but you’d be wrong. Much has changed since Kozmo’s brief heyday, and those changes could usher in an entirely new way of thinking about how we get our groceries.

Before we get into the why speedy grocery delivery might work this time around, let’s recap which startups are doing it. Europe has grabbed a bunch of headlines throughout the year so far with companies like Weezy, Jiffy, Gorillas, Getir and Glovo all pulling in substantial amounts of funding. Here in the U.S. Gopuff raised $1.5 billion and bought BevMo to operate its half-hour delivery services. DoorDash has its own line of DashMart stores that are steadily opening in different cities. New York City boasts three different speedy grocery delivery services from Fridge No More, Gorillas and JOKR, the latter of which just launched this week. And finally, Food Rocket took off last week in San Francisco.

All of these startups basically work the same way. They open up small, dark stores deep in heavily populated city neighborhoods. Each store carries a limited number of SKUs — with inventory customized to the neighborhood they are in — and have a very limited delivery radius. When an order comes in, it’s processed and, because the customer is not that far from the store, food can be delivered quickly on foot or scooter (no need for a full-sized car that has to navigate traffic and finding parking).

For many of these services, there is no minimum order and no delivery fee. OK, that part does sound very Kozmo like. But here’s why I don’t think these speedy delivery startups will suffer the same fate.

1.) Improved Technology. It’s been 20 years since Kozmo crashed and burned. In that time we’ve seen the rise of cloud computing, data science, machine learning, mobile technology… basically everything about technology is bigger, better, faster, stronger now. This means that delivery routes can be optimized, inventories can be better managed and there is just greater operational insight to unearth efficiencies that would have remained hidden two decades ago.

2.) Strict Boundaries. These startups aren’t trying to deliver everything, just the stuff people in the neighborhood want most often. Yes, people will still order one pint of ice cream, but the stores won’t stock every brand of ice cream, nor will they carry DVDs and magazines. Additionally, each store will have a small, defined delivery area so fulfillment can be accomplished quickly by scooter or e-bike. Faster deliveries should equate to the ability to make more deliveries per hour. Limited delivery zones also means that startups will need to be cognizant of equity issues, and make sure everyone gets to participate in this new grocery paradigm — not just the rich folks.

3.) Consumer Behavior. As I have written ad nauseaum over the past year, the pandemic forced large swaths of people into online grocery shopping. Food retailers saw their online business jump an average of 300 percent in the first months of the pandemic. After months of social distancing and lockdowns, that online behavior has remained sticky with consumers. Grocery e-commerce sales for pickup and delivery were $6.6 billion in April 2021, up from $4.0 billion in April 2020.

4.) It’s On-Demand. We now live in a world where people expect just about everything on-demand. Movies, music, even restaurant meals can all be ordered with a few taps of your mobile phone. Though the speedy delivery category is new, it’s easy to see how alluring it will be to have groceries be more like a utility that show up whenever you need them. The co-founder of JOKR told me last week that its customers first use the service because they forgot something, but those customers come back and subsequent basket sizes are bigger and aren’t just last-minute items. That data is anecdotal and early on, obviously, but it’s not hard to see people getting hooked on the convenience.

Now, this doesn’t mean that all of these speedy grocery players jumping into the space are going to succeed. Far from it. Many will fail, and that’s okay in the grand scheme of things — failure happens to a lot of startups across pretty much every industry.

Kozmo’s failure may have been a better cautionary tale than a business, but hopefully this cohort of speedy startups can learn from its mistakes.

Image via MeaTech 3D.

More Headlines

MeaTech 3D Files a Patent for Printing More Cultivated Meat – The company uses bio-inks to form cell types like muscle and fat, and scaffolding material, which provides structural support cells can adhere to as they grow and mature into an whole cut of cultured meat.

McDonald’s Testing AI-Powered Drive-Thrus in Chicago – The tech is currently being used in ten locations and reportedly has an order accuracy rate of 85 percent.

Alternative Meat Start-up Hooray Foods Raises $2M in Seed Round – The startup’s only product right now is plant-based bacon, which uses a fat encapsulation process, to provide a juicer texture to its alternative meat.

Chile’s NotCo Nabs Investment From Danny Meyer-Affiliated Growth Equity Fund – The company says the investment will help it further expand in the U.S. and launch new products in the Latin America market

The Alt Chicken Sandwich Wars on the Horizon

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I feel like the chicken sandwich wars deserve their own Ken Burns-esque documentary. Slow pans over pictures of fried chicken, layered with pickles, slathered with some top-secret spicy sauce, resting between artisanal buns. Maybe Peter Coyote could even narrate, reading tweets from various QSRs about the superiority of their particular sandwich, or from disappointed customers who stood in line for hours but were still unable to get one.

OK, that’s a silly idea. But in all honesty, chicken sandwiches, tenders and nuggets are about to get vastly more interesting and deserving of their own documentary. Especially since they won’t contain any chicken as we currently know it. Instead, future chicken battles will involve plant-based chicken and chicken meat that was cultivated from cells, not raised on a farm.

This was a big week for those types of alternative chicken. Consider these Spoon headlines from just the past couple of days:

That doesn’t even count the news from earlier this month that plant-based meat giant Beyond Meat is focusing its development on a chicken product.

Why the sudden wave of alternative chicken? Well, for one, there’s money to be made. According to the Good Food Institute, the plant-based meat market is worth $1.4 billion, with sales growing by more than $430 million between 2019 and 2020, so it’s a category on the rise. And with retailers like Target launching — and promoting — their own line of plant-based foods, it’s easy to see the company pushing interest in plant-based foods even higher.

You could say that this “sudden” surge in plant-based chicken isn’t so sudden at all. Plant-based chicken, especially nuggets, is a pretty mature sector, with a number of options already available at your local market. From smaller startups like Rebellyous and NUGGS, to established meatless brands like Quorn and MorningStar Farms, and even conventional meat giants like Tyson’s Raised & Rooted, there is no shortage of alt-nugget options.

One has to wonder, however, what’s going to happen with all these plant-based players when cultured chicken comes on the scene. Cell-based meat recreates animal meat using animal cells and bioreactors. It’s actual meat, but it’s grown in a facility and doesn’t require the raising (and slaughter) of animals.

Cell-based meat is steadily moving from the realm of science fiction to reality. Eat Just made the world’s first sale of cell-based meat (cultured chicken!) in Singapore last year. And UPSIDE Foods said its first product will be a cell-based chicken that it hopes to sell commercially this year, pending regulatory approval. UPSIDE chose chicken because of its versatility and widespread use across geographies, and is building a big, full-stack production facility in the Bay Area to mass produce it.

The question hanging over UPSIDE and all cell-based meat companies, however, is whether consumers will want to eat “lab-grown meat.” Despite claims that it will be better for the environment, free from antibiotics and disease, and free from ethical complications, people may be averse to something they don’t consider “natural.”

Of course, all these alterna-chickens need to taste good in order to gain any sort of traction in the market. But if they do, the chicken sandwich wars won’t be between QSR brands — they’ll be between new entirely new types of chicken. Seriously, someone should do a documentary about it.

More Headlines

C3 Launches Brick-and-Mortar Food Halls for Its Virtual Restaurants – The company announced Citizens, a network of brick-and-mortar food halls for its virtual brands.

Motif Adds New Tech to Bring That Elusive Stretch to Plant-Based Cheese – Extrudable fat technology and Prolamin technology will create more authentic fat textures and create more stretchy cheese.

SavorEat Creates Plant-Based Egg Venture Called Egg’n’up – The alternative egg will be crafted from SavorEat’s patent-pending 3D printing technology that uses cartridges filled with a mixture of nano-cellulose fiber and other undisclosed plant-based ingredients.

Grubhub Debuts ‘Commission-Free’ Platform Aimed at Independent Restaurants – It will allow independent restaurants to build their own online storefronts and process orders free of commission.

Europe? The U.S.? Israel? Which Country Might Be Next to Approve Cultured Meat

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Ever since Eat Just nabbed the world’s first regulatory approval to sell cultured meat in Singapore (and followed that milestone up by actually selling it), myself and many others have wondered which market will be next. 

The question was asked again this week when an article from Food Navigator zeroed in on Europe, noting, “Europeans want to know when it will be their turn: when will cultivated meat be served on EU plates?” It seems the most probable answer is three to five years. 

With Singapore already selling cultured meat at restaurants, five years seems a long time. But David Brandes, the Managing Director for Belgium-based company Piece of Meat, noted to Food Navigator that “bureaucracy and political interest” hold back the regulatory process, and that the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA)’s risk assessment process alone takes nine months.

Still, the European Commission has a clearly defined process for bringing cultured meat to market that is known as the Novel Food authorization, which makes it a logical market to try and bring a product into. For example, Mosa Meat, based in the Netherlands, has said it is focusing on Singapore and Europe for its first launches, specifically citing Europe’s Novel Food authorizations as a reason. Europe is also home to many other cultured meat companies, including Blue Biosciences, Mirai, and CellulaREvolution.

On the other hand, many have their sights set on the U.S. as the next destination for the sale of cultured meat. In 2019, the FDA and the USDA issued a formal agreement to jointly oversee regulation of cultured meat using existing frameworks. (The framework does not apply to cultured seafood, which is regulated exclusively by the FDA.)

U.S.-based companies are still leading the cultured meat industry, too, and have attracted huge amounts of investment in the recent past, including Memphis Meats’ $161 million round in 2020, BlueNalu’s $60 million fundraise, and, of course, Eat Just’s recent $200 million fundraise. The latter — still the only cultured meat company in the world cleared to sell a product — hasn’t explicitly said it will next launch commercially in the U.S. In a recent conversation, Eat Just founder and CEO Josh Tetrick only hinted, saying “I think it’s more likely than not that we’ll see clearance sometime in the next two years. I hope it’s this year — we’re going to be ready if it is. But it’s hard to tell.”

Additionally, California-based BlueNalu has said its products will launch in the second half of 2021, though it hasn’t yet said where. And an organization known as the Alliance for Meat, Poultry, and Seafood Innovation, which includes Memphis Meats, New Age Meats, Eat Just, and others, is dedicated to advancing the reach of cultured meat in the U.S.

Let’s also keep one eye on Israel. While its a smaller market than the U.S. or Europe, the country is like Singapore in that its government is very keen on advancing cultured meat. That includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyah, who in December of last year became the first head of state to taste cultured meat. He noted at the time that Israel will “become a powerhouse for alternative meat and alternative protein.”

Israel is also home to the world’s first restaurant dedicated to cultured meat, SuperMeat’s The Chicken. No products are sold their. Rather, consumers apply to gain entry then give detailed feedback in exchange for tasting the company’s cultured meat product. (Spoiler alert: it’s chicken.) 

There are also a growing number of companies coming from Israel, including Aleph Farms, Future Meat, and MeaTech 3D, which already publicly trades on the Tel Aviv stock exchange. 

Worth noting is that MeaTech 3D has also filed to go public in the U.S., which may suggest where its sights are set in terms of initial commercialization. Future Meat, too, has also said it plans to launch in the U.S. by 2022 via restaurants and direct-to-consumer sales. So while Israel may not necessarily be host the world’s second commercial sale of cultured meat, it may well provide the companies doing so elsewhere. Say, in the U.S.

Other Headlines

Tyson’s Raised & Rooted Expands into Plant-Based Burgers, Brats and Italian Sausage. Tyson Foods’ plant-based protein brand, announced today that it is expanding its lineup with three new offerings: burgers, Bratwurst and Italian sausages. 

Sweden: Stockeld Dreamery Launching First Plant-Based Cheese This Week. Plant-based cheese startup Stockeld Dreamerly, will launch its first product, Stockeld Chunk, at select stores in Stockholm, Sweden on May 6. 

OmniFoods Plans to Launch Its Plant-Based OmniPork Products in the U.S. This Year. OmniPork, the plant-based meat line from Green Monday subsidiary OmniFoods, will launch in the U.S. later this year.

Anatomy of a Digital Restaurant

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When Taster, a virtual restaurant company headquartered in London, announced its $37 million fundraise last week, co-founder and CEO Anton Soulier made clear that his company is trying to “redefine what it means to be a restaurant group in the 21st century.”

The company, founded in 2017, started out cooking food for its virtual restaurant brands from its own dedicated kitchen spaces then selling items via third-party delivery platforms like Uber Eats. Previously, Soulier was an early team member at Deliveroo, so he knows a thing or two about doing a delivery business — most importantly, how delivery has to continue to evolve.

Along those lines, Taster is taking a slightly different approach to the virtual restaurant nowadays. Instead of making the food itself, Taster licenses its five brands out to existing restaurants. The setup brings benefits to both sides. Restaurants can to make extra revenue by selling more delivery orders to not just their existing customers but fans of the virtual brands. Taster gets to expand faster, since it’s no longer having to handle every single order itself or build out kitchen infrastructure. As of last check, the company, which also has teams in Paris and Madrid, has more than 60 restaurant sites in nine cities acorss the UK, France, and Spain. The new funding, a series B round led by Octopus Ventures, will ensure further expansion for Taster’s brands.

In many ways, Taster could be seen as something of a blueprint for the digital-age restaurant chain, because it gathers a few different concepts that are popular into a single platform:

Underutilized Kitchen Space

Taster’s current model is built on helping restaurants put underutilized kitchen space to work. Businesses with extra kitchen space can license one or more of Taster’s restaurant brands and run it out of their own properties. It’s a way of offering a delivery brand without incurring the expense of a long lease with a traditional commissary space, which is too expensive for many restaurants. 

This “license a virtual restaurant” approach has become more commonplace over the last several months. Chicago-based Wow Bao started licensing a delivery-only version of its menu to other restaurants in 2020. Ordermark created an entire sister business around connecting restaurants with underutilized space to virtual brands. Restaurant company C3 has taken the concept beyond restaurants and is licensing its virtual food brands to hotels and luxury apartment properties.

Menus Designed for Delivery

From its inception, Taster has billed itself as a digital food court, serving up street food reimagined for delivery. In other words, the food is supposed to travel well. The company also involved Michelin-star chefs in the design of all its restaurant brands’ menus. 

In theory, at least, that ensures a certain level of quality stays intact throughout the entire journey the food takes from the kitchen to the customer. Even before the pandemic turned most of the restaurant biz into one giant takeout operation, issues with food quality were a major problem for delivery. This is another reason restaurants are now creating or licensing virtual brands instead of trying to repurpose their existing menus for to-go boxes. Under this arrangement, dining room food gets to stay where it belongs, in the dining room, and delivery orders are comprised of food that was built for travel.

Versatile Tech

Good food is the single most important part of any virtual restaurant. Arguably, the runner up is technology. It’s not enough anymore for a system to be simply be able to process digital orders and payments. Because of the growing order volume, delivery tech also needs to integrate with the back of house operations, track inventory and drivers, communicate with customers and integrate with the restaurant’s main POS system. It also needs to be able to integrate with third-party delivery services a la Uber Eats or Deliveroo.

To run a virtual restaurant out of their own kitchens, restaurants could cobble together various third-party solutions to get the above features under one roof. Or they could attempt to build an in-house system from the ground up. Both approaches have their drawbacks, from time and money to compatibility issues between different pieces of software. 

It’s another reason licensing a brand from a company like Taster or C3 or NextBite seems more practical at this point. Taster’s system, for example, can process orders and payments, help manage the kitchen, and track quality control, among other things. Users can also choose whether they want to order Taster brands via third-party delivery apps or Taster’s in-house app. Restaurants licensing Taster’s brands need not actually concern themselves with any of these logistical puzzles — the company handles all of the technology itself. C3’s tech is very similar, and there will doubtless be plenty of other such systems emerging in the near future.   

There’s little chance this “license a virtual restaurant” model will go out of vogue once lockdown restrictions ease and more cities around the world reopen their economies. Off-premises meal formats like delivery are at this point a normal part of doing business for restaurants. And as Taster’s recent fundraise suggests, interest in the evolution of the virtual restaurant is higher than ever.

Landry’s a restaurant group that owns Morton’s The Steakhouse and Bubba Gump’s Shrimp, said in a recent interview that most of the company’s restaurant brands will start accepting bitcoin as payment in the coming months. CEO Tilman Fertitta cited “the next 90 days” as a timeframe.

Starbucks is using its AI technology, Deep Brew, to further improve personalization for customers but also to track vaccination progress throughout the world, the company said on its recent earnings call.

Uber recently announced a new feature,  Pickup and Go, that lets rideshare users see nearby restaurants and order/pickup food while they are in transit.

Will Beyond or Impossible Have a “New Coke” Moment?

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If there was ever an example of a bad product launch, it would be New Coke.

In the mid-80s, Coca-Cola futzed with its iconic formula to create a sweeter version of its soda that would replace its storied flagship drink. The launch did not go well, and 79 days later, the company brought the “Classic” formula back (New Coke eventually just… faded away).

I was thinking about New Coke this week as Beyond Meat announced a new 3.0 version of its plant-based burger, which will be released in stores next week. Since their respective introductions into the market, both Beyond and its rival, Impossible Foods, have tinkered with their plant-based burger formulas. Their goal is to keep refining their products to achieve ever more convincing facsimiles of traditional animal meat to entice more people to give up eating cows.

So far the results have been good. Beyond’s 2.0 burger was a vast improvement over the first version. But what happens if they take the tweaks too far? What if, cloistered away in their labs, Beyond and Impossible misjudge popular taste? In other words, what happens when Beyond or Impossible make their own plant-based New Coke?

The First "New Coke" Commercial 1985 Code Named Kansas

The scenarios don’t exactly match up. At the time of New Coke’s launch, Coca-Cola was an almost-century-old American institution, recognized and consumed the world over. By the 80s, almost everyone in the U.S. had a history with the brand and had grown up drinking it. They didn’t want any “improvements” from Coke; they wanted reliability.

But plant-based meat is a pretty new concept. Sure, sales of plant-based meat grew more than $430 million from 2019 to 2020 and the market is now worth $1.4 billion. But according to the latest data from the Good Food Institute, the plant-based meat sector only has a U.S. household penetration of 18 percent. That means there are a ton of people who have yet to even try Beyond or Impossible burgers. They wouldn’t necessarily even know that there was a previous version that tasted different, or formed that deep of an attachment to either product.

In some ways, Beyond and Impossible are the new Coke vs. Pepsi. Anecdotally speaking, there seem to be “camps” forming around either brand. You’re either Team Beyond or Team Impossible. In my house, for example, my wife and I prefer Impossible because to our palates it tastes more like a traditional hamburger. But my young son likes Beyond because he feels Impossible is too close to the taste of beef. (I poked around for some general brand loyalty data, but didn’t come across anything recent.)

If Beyond’s new burger, for whatever reason, is less pleasing to people (it could be because of taste or mouthfeel or whatever), will they give up and switch over to Impossible? There are lots of reasons to eat plant-based meat such as the ethics around eating animals and the environmental impact of meat. So eating Beyond or Impossible isn’t simply about taste. If Beyond’s new version is unappealing, there are other plant-based options that may not taste as good to some eaters, but people can still feel good about eating those alternatives.

Unlike Coca-Cola, I think there is still room for improvement in plant-based meat facsimiles. I don’t necessarily need them to “bleed,” but there can be some slight aftertaste issues, the texture could improve and both Beyond and Impossible have way too much sodium.

I do like Beyond Burgers (also their plant-based sausage patties are the best) and will be first in line to buy version 3.0 when it hits my store. And while I won’t wash it down with a Coke (too much sugar), hopefully I’ll consider the new burger a classic… until the next version is announced.

Image via HECTAR Hydroponics.

More Headlines

Meet HECTAR, an Open-Source Project for At-Home Vertical Farming – Rather than mass-producing a whole farm and selling it to consumers, the project’s creators have instead made a manual and documentation available for free download, so that any DIY enthusiast can build their very own hydroponic growing system.

Environmental Engineers Use Corn Waste to Treat and Filter Water – The UC Riverside lab found that corn stover could be turned into activated carob, also known as activated charcoal, by charring it. Activated carbon is commonly used to filter and treat water because it contains millions of microscopic pores that can absorb water and filter out toxins.

Something Better Foods Receives $500K Investment from ICA – Something Better Foods aims to make plant-based foods more accessible to people of color, and ICA’s goal is to “…accelerate great businesses through mentoring and investments to close the racial and gender wealth gaps.”

Irish Drone Delivery Startup Manna Raises $25M Series A – The round was led by Draper Esprit, and Manna says that a single operator can oversee 20 deliveries per hour.

Are Supply Chains Sexy Now?

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There was a time when my eyes would gloss over at the mention of supply chains. No offense to this vitally important industry that keeps shelves stocked and stomachs fed. It was just that “supply chain” conjured up images of corrugated boxes, trucks and people checking off items on clipboards.

Not anymore. When I hear the words “supply chain” now, I perk up and pay attention because there’s a good chance a startup is doing something innovative and dare I say, sexy, in the space. Supply chain’s are hot, y’all!

The latest example of this is RipeLocker, which raised a $5 million Series B round of funding this week. RipeLocker makes containers that dynamically adjust factors like oxygen, pressure, CO2 and humidity to extend the life of the perishables inside. The company says its containers have been shown to keep blueberries in “pristine condition” for eight weeks, and extend the life of fresh hops for six weeks.

But RipeLocker isn’t the only company with cool containers. Clean Crop Technologies employs what it calls High Voltage Atmospheric Cold Plasma (HVACP), which essentially zaps the air around post-harvest food with electricity to get rid of toxins, molds and pests while extending the food’s shelf life.

Electricity not cool enough for you? Well, what about blockchain? Varcode uses a combination of special temperature-monitoring barcode sticker and blockchain technology to validate that food traveling through the cold chain remains properly chilled throughout its journey.

The trucks working in that cold chain are also getting an upgrade. Gatik is developing self-driving delivery trucks for the middle mile. These trucks operate between two fixed points like a warehouse and a store location, driving back and forth to manage inventory — only soon they will operate without the driver. Walmart will be rolling out full driverless Gatik trucks on one of its routes this year.

Finally, even food grading along the supply chain is getting cool. Companies like AgShift are using computer vision and AI to automate food grading and bring objectivity to pricing between buyers and sellers.

Aside from all of these innovations being cool, they also serve a much bigger purpose: reducing food waste in the supply chain. From extending the shelf life of food to ensuring it travels properly and arrives where it needs to be on time, supply chain startups are tackling the issues around food waste head-on. That makes all this disruption even sweeter.

Gatik and AgShift will actually be speaking at our upcoming ArticulATE virtual summit to talk about how they are automating the supply chain. You’ll definitely want to hear to what they (and all the speakers at the show) have to say.

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xRobotics’ Pizza Assembling Robot Concludes Test with Dodo Pizza – The pizza assembling ‘bot hit an average productivity of 100 pizzas per hour.

Kroger Launches a Recycling Program in Partnership With TerraCycle – The program aims to make it easier for consumers to recycle flexible plastic packaging.

Liberty Produce Gets Grant to Further Develop CEA in Singapore – The compay will install its Liberator farming system, developed in the UK, at the LivFresh hydroponic farm in Singapore, where it will be integrated with existing greenhouse technology.

High-End Strawberry Grower Oishii to Launch ‘Everyday Berry’ via Vertical Farming – The company, famous for its very expensive Omakase Berry, is looking to launch the more affordable “everyday berry.”

What Shape Will Food Robots Take?

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

But first, the news.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will Grocery Delivery Become the Next Utility?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Caroline Attwood on Unsplash

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

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

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

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

Could Food Companies Cash in on NFTs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image via Grönska.

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

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

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

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

Why It’s Time to Check Out Online Grocery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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