Weekly Spoon

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Shoppable Recipe Service Northfork Raises $1.1MInnit Teams With SPINS to Add Personalization, Guided Cooking and Shoppable Recipes to Grocer Websites
• Thermomix Users Can Now Order Ingredients With Launch of Shoppable Recipes on Cookidoo
• Fexy Media’s Cliff Sharples Talks Serious Eats Sale and Getting Out of the Editorial Business
• Whisk Launches B2B Content Management Tool to Structure and Organize Recipe Data
• SideChef Now Offers Shoppable Recipes Through Walmart

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

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

(Cooler) Screen Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Headlines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider the Fridge

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Headlines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Predicting the Next Flavortown

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

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

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

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

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

More Headlines

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

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

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

We’re running out of synonyms.

Since the pandemic hit in earnest, we’ve written about surges, spikes, booms, waves, deluges and just about every other artful synonym we can think of for “big increase” in a particular trend.

The latest [insert unused vivid descriptor here] is companies creating their own direct-to-consumer sales channels. Beyond Meat became the latest D2C entrant this morning by announcing its new e-commerce site through which it can sell its plant-based beef and sausage products.

Beyond’s D2C play comes just months after its rival, Impossible Foods launched its own D2C channel. But it’s not just plant-based meats that are going the D2C route. Companies across the food tech world are following suit. In the past six months:

• Pepsico launched its own D2C site to sell snacks.
• Barn2Door raised $6 million to help farmers sell their food direct to consumers.
• Restaurant food suppliers Cheetah, DineMarket, Pepper, and Choco all pivoted to sell directly to consumers.
• Chipotle launched a D2C service connecting its consumers with its farm suppliers.
• Vertical farm company Fifth Season started selling greens direct to consumers (in Pittsburgh)

That list doesn’t even include all of the small CPG startups that are selling their unique snacks and such via their own websites.

There has been so much activity that we had not one, but two different deep dive conversations about launching D2C brands during this pandemic on our Spoon Plus service.

While the pandemic didn’t create all this D2C activity, it assuredly accelerated it. With restaurants shut down and people stuck at home, there has been record amounts of online grocery shopping. So people are getting used to the idea of buying food online, and there is a new market suddenly available to brands now.

But in addition to more money, going direct to consumers means that brands can own that relationship. With those relationships comes all kinds of customer data that opens up new insights and opportunities (to, you know, sell more stuff).

The big challenge for companies going direct, however, will be educating those customers about new D2C sales channels. Sure, people are forming new habits around grocery e-commerce, but they are still shopping with established retailers like Walmart and Amazon. Companies will need to provide some kind of additional value for direct purchasing to incentivize consumers to make that switch.

Now that more brands than ever are building out direct sales channels, we’ll have to see if a surge, spike, boom, wave, or deluge of consumer sales follows.

Contactless Restaurant Tech Reinvention Is Already Here

Direct-to-consumer isn’t the only food tech trend getting a boost from the pandemic. In the restaurant biz, the emergence and stupidly fast ascension of so-called contactless technologies is the big story.

At this point, most front-of-house-focused restaurant tech companies now offer some form of contactless tech for the dining room. Companies include Sevenrooms, Presto, Zuppler, Bbot, PayJunction, and many, many others. The typical software package includes digital menu capabilities and features that let customers order and pay for meals from their own mobile devices. The majority of these offerings utilize QR codes strategically placed on tabletops and signage to facilitate this contactless service.

This sudden switch — from a server writing your order on a notepad to keying in menu items yourself — happened at lightning speed as a way to reopen dining rooms quickly and safely after pandemic-induced shelter-in-place mandates. But just as quickly, we’ve now reached a point where it’s quite frankly hard to tell one solution from the next, and the pressure to iterate is already upon us.

Enter Order for Me, a Los Angeles-based company that has added some bells and whistles to the contactless tech stack. Most notably, these are the ability to keep a virtual tab open throughout the meal and, most important, the ability to split a check between multiple diners. Paytronix has a smilier setup, and it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion others will follow. Open tabs beget impulse purchases, like dessert, which beget higher tickets. In contrast, having to create a new transaction for every new cocktail or slice of cake requires just enough effort on the part of consumers to dissuade many from making those purchases. Plus, a single tab that can be split multiple ways is just easier. To use another buzzword, it’s more frictionless.

Good restaurant tech should in essence digitally recreate (or better yet, improve) the dining room/drive-thru/takeout experience we all knew prior to the pandemic. So while virtual tabs and splitting the bill are small developments, they underscore the point that tech’s first and most important job in the restaurant biz right now is to serve up familiar processes in digital format and work as seamlessly as possible for all parties involved.

Food Tech News Roundup

FTW Ventures Announces $4M Fund for Early-Stage Food Tech Investment – The firm will invest in 15 to 20 early-stage and pre-seed food tech startups with check sizes between $100,000 and $500,000.

Pairwise Gets Greenlight from USDA for CRISPR-Engineered Mustard Greens -With changes engineered by CRISPR technologies, Pairwise hopes to create a nutritious alternative to kale and Brussels sprouts that also tastes good.

Meet the World’s First Travel Mug Made From Paper – The newly unveiled travel mug is made from paper cups collected from coffee shops and grocery stores. The mug is fully insulated, dishwasher-safe, and, according to the company, built to last for 10 years.

Very Good Butchers Will Soon Bring its Vegan Meats to the U.S. – Canadian company offers a myriad of plant-based meat alternatives; steaks, ribs, bangers, and roast beef to name a few, using ingredients such as vital wheat gluten, jackfruit, a variety of beans, and a combination of vegetables and spices.

Bond Pet Foods Creates Cultured Chicken Protein Prototype for Pet Nutrition – The company took a “one-time blood sample from a heritage hen named Inga and coupled the genetic code with food grade yeast in a fermentation tank.

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How many ovens in your kitchen is too many ovens?

I ask because Anova announced yesterday that it’s steam+convection combi oven is now on sale for $599 (shipping in North America at the end of September). And even though I have a traditional built-in oven, a microwave oven, and a June Oven (and who knows, maybe an E-Z Bake oven somewhere in storage), I kinda want the Anova oven.

I should preface by saying I haven’t tried the Anova out yet, so who knows how it actually performs in real life, but it sure is enticing. The biggest selling point is its steam/humidity controls. Rather than having me explain it to you, go watch this video of the inimitable Scott Heimendinger (who worked on on the Anova oven) extol the virtues of steam.

But back to the question at hand. How many ovens is too many ovens?

I love my June oven, which, thanks to its computer vision and automated programs, does all the cooking for me. This is doubly great during these nice summer months when I’d rather be outside than indoors cooking. But the June doesn’t have steam, man.

The Anova has steam, but it doesn’t have the automated cook programs of the June. So… I definitely need both right? (Please forward all affirmation/validations to my skeptical wife.)

During our Spoon podcast this week (go give it a listen!), my colleague Jenn Marston pondered aloud whether kitchens even need built-in ovens anymore. I don’t think we’ve quite reached that point yet. The built-in oven is a deep institutional tradition in a home and not something that will die off anytime soon. A traditional oven is also better for a family of four or more. Plus, I’m still hesitant to buy “smart” big appliances because I don’t want them to be bricked. A bricked countertop oven is easier to dispose of/recycle than one built into the kitchen.

The point is, there is a ton of great innovation still happening in the kitchen space, and since this pandemic has me eating more at home — I want all of it.

Now I just need the space for it.

New Food Revue

Kitchen innovation doesn’t end with the new appliances coming into our kitchens. The food we put in those appliances is changing as well.

I mused about this in a post earlier this week after noticing that my days recently have started with a bowl of Magic Spoon cereal and ended with a scoop (or two… or three) of Brave Robot ice cream.

Magic Spoon is gluten-free, keto friendly and bills itself as a healthier kids cereal (for adults), and Brave Robot is the ice cream brand from Perfect Day, which re-creates dairy proteins without the animal.

Neither of these two brands were around a little more than a year ago. Yet both occupy places in my kitchen, replacing traditional versions of those products. And it doesn’t end there: I also eat Impossible burgers, plant-based pork rinds, vegan cheese…

You get the gist.

There are so many new brands coming to or already at market at scale ready to take their place in our pantries and fridges, pushing out the old guard. It’s an exciting time. And delicious.

Food Tech News Roundup Daily Harvest has a vending machine – traveling about the East Coast giving out free samples of its vegan ice cream. Daily Harvest, which is known for its smoothie delivery service, is using the vending machine as a promotional stunt for its new Scoops vegan ice cream. The vending machine was in Rhode Island earlier this month and will next head to Domino Park, Brooklyn on Aug. 21 – 23, dishing up free Chocolate + Ooey, Gooey Midnight Fudge, and Mint + Dark, Melty Cacao Chips. Lever VC Launches Alt-Protein Fund for Early-Stage Companies – Alt-protein-focused venture capital firm Lever VC announced this week that it has launched a new fund targeting early stage plant- and cell-based protein companies. The Lever VC Fund I currently has $23 million in capital commitments, according to a company press release.  Mushlabs Raises $10M to Scale Up Its Mushroom-Fermentation Tech – Biotech company Mushlabs has raised $10 million in Series A funding for its mushroom-fermentation process that can provide alternatives to traditional meat.  2050 Company Kickstarts Powdered Smoothies Made from Upcycled Produce – Ugly fruits and veggies can be pretty appealing (and delicious) when you grind them into dust. That’s the basic pitch for the 2050 Company, which launched its line of instant smoothies made from upcycled produce via Kickstarter today.

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

In sci-fi movies, pods are typically something to be feared (see: Alien, Invasion of the Body Snatchers). But when it comes to food delivery, pods are something we should welcome with open arms.

When I talk about pods here, I’m referring to a cabinet of internet-connected cubbies that hold delivered meals and can be unlocked by the recipient’s own mobile phone.

I expect we’ll see delivery pods like these in more apartment and residential buildings because of the convenience they offer. With pods, a customer doesn’t need to wait around until the exact moment a delivery driver drops off their order. Instead, the driver places the food inside the insulated cubby and the customer simply receives a notification on their phone that the meal has arrived. The driver saves time, since they don’t have to hunt around a complex for an apartment number, and the customer gets the added convenience of being able to pick up their meal whenever they are able to.

In a move that underscores the growing popularity of this delivery-pods-for-apartments concept, Minnow just announced $2.2 million in seed funding for its delivery pod solutions. One of the investors was the venture arm of the Lincoln Property Company, which owns residential buildings in 28 states. It’s not hard to connect the dots and see Minnow pods popping up in all those Lincoln buildings.

The idea of a dedicated delivery locker-type service certainly isn’t new. Two years ago Alibaba showed off temperature-controlled lockers that are installed outside an individual apartment to accept food deliveries. (While insulated, Minnow pods are not temperature controlled.)

But given the COVID-19 pandemic, the adoption of all things contactless when it comes to food is getting accelerated. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see Minnow scale up quickly, and other players jump into the space.

While the pandemic could fuel the biggest growth for delivery pods, it could also be the biggest hurdle to pod adoption. As restaurants shutter and companies realize work can be done remotely, people are leaving big cities. Anecdotally speaking, I’ve heard from friends in San Francisco about apartment buildings becoming ghost towns, to mix my metpahors, as people either can’t afford or want to escape high rent prices.

Having said that, people will always live in apartment buildings, even if they aren’t in the heart of the city. So there is a tremendous amount of opportunity for pods to become a table stakes benefit for apartment dwellers.

Still, it’s probably a good idea to avoid pods stacked in the back of pickup trucks and found on outer planets.

Spoon Founder Braves Ice Cream Tasting

Let’s keep with the sci-fi theme and move from pod people to a robot. A Brave Robot, to be specific. That’s the name of Perfect Day’s spinoff ice cream brand.

Perfect Day recreates dairy proteins in the lab by genetically modifying microflora and… well, let’s not fall down a casein and whey rabbit hole here. It’s ice cream! It should be fun, especially with a name like Brave Robot. So how is it? Spoon Founder, Mike Wolf, received a batch and wrote up a review for us, saying about the PB N’ Fudge flavor:

Any combo of peanut butter and chocolate usually can’t miss, so that’s where I started. It didn’t disappoint. The thick veins of fudge and peanut butter were as yummy as they sound, and maybe more importantly, the science-forward ice cream didn’t taste weird, or well, science-y, at all.

Yay science for not tasting so science-y! Check out the full review of all the flavors Mike tried. (spoiler: They were all great!)

Yo-Kai Express Sweetens Its Menu

While we’re on the subject of dessert, Yo-Kai Express, which makes (delicious) ramen dispensing vending machines, is adding a frozen sweet treat to its menu.

Company Founder and CEO, Andy Lin, wrote on LinkedIn earlier this week that Yo-Kai will soon offer a “Himalayan salt whip cream with brown sugar boba black milk tea” snow ice. The dessert will be available “soon” through both Yo-Kai’s vending machines and its mail-order meal kits.

While I’m a sucker for pretty much anything boba-related, I bring this news up because it marks another expansion for Yo-Kai. Over the past six months the company has started selling meal kits so you can make ramen at home, and is now getting into desserts.

Just like yo-kais themselves, who knows what will pop up for Lin and Co. next.

Japan Food Tech Mini-Event

Speaking of popping up, The Spoon crew — Mike, Jenn and myself — will all be hosting chats during the Virtual Food Tech Mini Summit this Friday. The event is done in conjunction with our Japanese partners who help us product the Smart Kitchen Summit Japan.

Starting at 5 p.m. Pacific Time, there will be three discussions:

• Food and Kitchen After the Pandemic, hosted by myself and featuring Robin Liss of Suvie, Kevin Yu of Sidechef and Masa Fukata of Panasonic
• Jenn’s discussion on the future of restaurant
• Mike’s panel on the future of cultured meat

Sign up and save your spot today!

Summer is finally here in the Pacific Northwest. I’m writing this on what is supposed to be the hottest day of the year in these parts and it is awesome. Since I’m in such a happy mood (as much as one can be during these end times), I want this week’s newsletter to reflect that. I want it to be fun.

So we’re going to talk about snacks.

Specifically, plant-based snacks, because I was lucky enough to have been sent a boatload of them recently to try out.

Here’s the thing. Plant-based snacks have gotten really good. Remember when healthy snacks used to equal, well, the equivalent of a funeral dirge? They were something you had to choke down because your mom wouldn’t buy actual Oreos. Yeah, those days are gone.

You guys! There are so. many. good. snacks out there, and they are coming from new and innovative brands. I wrote a post about them over the weekend, which I’m re-purposing here because I want you to know about them (and I want to get outside and enjoy this day, so it’s time to cut-and-paste my earlier work)!

• 12 Tides seaweed snacks. Delicious puffs of organic kelp that are light, airy and satisfying. Plus the packaging it totally compostable.
• Loca plant based nacho sauce. This potato-based cheese spread is akin to the “cheese” you find in a convenience store. I’m not going to lie — it smells to high heaven, but tastes devilishly good!
• Renewal Mill chocolate chip cookies. Made from upcycled okara flour, these cookies are soft and chewy and a perfect sweet treat in the afternoon.
• Kween Granola Butter. A spreadable granola with a lovely cinnamon tinge to it. My only complaint is the texture is a little gritty, but it is a nice sweet counterbalance to the saltiness of a Wheat Thin.
• Jack and Tom jerky. I’m not usually a fan of jackfruit, but prepared and dried in this fashion, this is a great vegan alternative to meat jerky, and the spiciness is powerful, yet playful.
• Pig Out Hella Hot plant-based pork rinds. Full of spicy flavor, zero actual pig skin.

While these treats tend to be a little pricier, I would much rather spend the money to support these burgeoning companies than buy another mega-brand of snack. Hopefully if more people do the same, these fledglings can scale up and bring their prices down.

Do you have a favorite alt snack? Drop me a line and let me know about it!

This is the web version of our weekly newsletter. Subscribe to it and get all the best food tech news delivered directly to your inbox!

It’s the little things

Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best. My colleague, Jenn Marston, wrote about a new lunch container being used to help combat the spread of COVID on trains and in railway stations in Japan.

Awajiya has invented a bento box that comes with a built-in shield:

When folded according to the instructions, Awajiya’s lunchbox creates a three-sided shield-like structure around the box that can keep any airborne droplets from nearby people out of the food. It also guards against the eater’s own germs from spreading to others. Awajiya says the box is the same size as a regular bento box, making it easy to use on trains.

As Jenn points out, this is definitely not the most high-tech solution in the world, but it’s another arrow in the quiver in the fight against COVID. Combine this shielded bento box with masks and social distancing and hand washing and… it all adds up to if not eradicating the virus, then at least severely limiting it.

FreshDirect Finds Fabric’s Robots

When the pandemic hit NYC with full force in April, online grocer FreshDirect was slammed with new customers. So much so that it was reportedly excruciating to even get a delivery slot. Having to turn away shoppers during a time of record spending for grocery e-commerce is obviously bad for business.

So against that backdrop, it makes sense that FreshDirect is looking to automate some of its e-commerce fulfillment. The company announced a partnership with Fabric today to build out a robotic fulfillment center just outside of the D.C. Metro Area.

Fabric’s robots can assemble an online order in minutes, so customers in the D.C. area will be able to get two-hour delivery of their groceries when that facility opens up later this year. I spoke with Steve Hornyak, CCO of Fabric, by phone yesterday and he said that all the grocery retailers he’s speaking with are accelerating automation plans. Pre-pandemic, grocers wanted to wait on robotic fulfillment until 2021 or 2022. Those once-distant plans are being put into action now.

In other words, the robots are coming, and they are putting together your groceries.

The Spoon Plus Guide to Ghost Kitchens

Judging by our analytics, Spoon readers love ghost kitchens. You all can’t seem to click on those stories often enough. If you are one of those avid readers, I highly recommend you check out our latest Spoon Plus report, The Spoon Plus Guide to Ghost Kitchens, by Jenn Marston.

Euromonitor predicts that the ghost kitchen market is going to be worth $1 trillion (yes, trillion) by 2030. Jenn’s report lays out all the reasons why that prediction is probably accurate. As Jenn writes:

Much of the ghost kitchens’ rising popularity can be attributed to the rapid rise of the food delivery segment, which has been happening for some time now. Even more recent, though, are the economic fallout and changing consumer behaviors brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Put together, all these elements have accelerated the adoption of ghost kitchens much faster than what the industry expected even eight months ago.

Really, the entire report is worth your time. Yes, it’s only available to Spoon Plus members, but that’s easy (and inexpensive) to fix, especially if you want a ghost of a chance in succeeding in the future of the restaurant biz.

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Excuse me while I put on my crotchety old man pants, stand on my lawn and proclaim, “Back when I was in my early twenties and looking for an apartment, the only amenity we got was a laundry room that required fistfuls of quarters… and we liked it!”

One perk that was definitely not listed in any apartment complex brochure I looked at back then was an on-site automated convenience store. But that’s exactly what the residents of the Nineteen01 apartments in Santa Ana, CA are getting.

The QuickEats Close Convenience store is run by Aramark and uses AWM Smart Shelf technology to handle the cashierless checkout. That means once residents download the accompanying app, they can scan their phone upon entering the store, grab what they want and leave, getting charged automatically upon checkout.

There are plenty of cashierless checkout convenience store options (Zippin, Skip), but to our knowledge, this is the first one being built into a residential complex. And given the sad state of the world, this type of benefit could become more common.

With the pandemic still raging here in the U.S., and the hammer and the dance continuing as we close-open-close again, there’s a good chance that people will cocoon more in the future. They’ll stay at home and limit their trips outside the house to get stuff either out of fear or by law. Grocery delivery and curbside pickup are great, but if you just want an ice cream sandwich or bottle of Gatorade, it might not be worth the risk to venture out to the local 7-Eleven.

But if you have your own contactless convenience store in the lobby of your building, well, that’s a different story.

The QuickEats store is open to the public, but it’s not too hard to imagine these types of retail formats going behind a garden wall, as it were, and becoming available only to residents.

This was something that the ill-fated Bodega, later renamed Stockwell, was trying to do with its smart cabinets of food. They would be a lobby perk for apartment dwellers. While Stockwell shut down entirely in June, the idea of cashierless convenience might catch on now thanks to the pandemic, especially if those stores are automated and require minimal human operators.

Now that they’ve launched one, it’s not hard to see Aramark launching more QuickEats in residential buildings, especially since the pandemic has closed off former sporting event, college and corporate catering lines of business. Another player, Zippin, could also create a residential niche with its small-sized, pre-fab Zippin Cubes. Thinking slightly bigger, standalone housing developments could use AiFi’s Nanostores for a slightly more secure, standalone version of a neighborhood convenience store.

These danger, of course, is that these types of residential perks reinforce the have/have not inequalities already present in our society, and should be addressed. But the sad fact is that these larger equity issues will probably be ignored in favor of more immediate revenue, and potentially won’t be addressed as long as the pandemic continues.

I Urgently Need Brave Robot’s Alterna-Ice Cream

If there is one cool treat I wish I could enjoy this summer, it’s the Perfect Day ice cream. For the unfamiliar, Perfect Day uses yeast microbes to re-create dairy proteins without the animal. Former colleague, Catherine Lamb tried Perfect Day ice cream last year and found it to be delicious. Unlike plant-based ice creams, Perfect Day’s version was rich and creamy — just like the real thing.

But alas, I’m up in Seattle and Smitten, the company making Perfect Day’s flora-based ice cream is in SF and it’s WAY to expensive for me to buy and ship up here.

Good news though! The Perfect Day founders announced today that have backed a new endeavor, called Urgent Company, that will launch a variety of plant-based and alternative food brands. First up, Brave Robot ice cream made using Perfect Day’s tech. It’ll hit store shelves in California first (BOOOO!) and cost $5.99 a pint, but hopefully will scale quickly enough so I can enjoy it next summer.

The fate of QSRS is less grim. Full-service restaurants, however…

The NPD Group has been tracking restaurant business recovery during this pandemic, and the research firm’s latest numbers are a mixed bag.

NPD says consumer transaction at major U.S. restaurants declined 10 percent year-over-year for the week ending July 5. The good news? That’s a a slight uptick from the previous week’s 14-percent decline.

The not so great news? Most of those rebounding dollars are going to QSRs. As my colleague, Jenn Marston wrote:

NPD notes that “all of the improvement in the week sources to major quick service restaurant chains, where customer transaction declines improved by 4 points from the prior week’s decline of 13 percent versus year ago.”

As Jenn notes, this makes sense as QSRs are built for takeout, so they aren’t hit as hard as full-service restaurants based around in-store dining. With states like California closing indoor restaurants again, this type of QSR-heavy recovery will probably be the new normal for a while.

Building a Direct to Consumer Food Business In a Post-Pandemic World

While there is no immediate end in sight for this global pandemic, some day we will get past it. Which raises the question, and then what?

To help answer that, The Spoon is hosting a virtual fireside chat titled, appropriately enough, Building a Direct to Consumer Food Business In a Post-Pandemic World on July 23 at 10 a.m. PT.

Spoon Founder Mike Wolf will be chatting with Jeremiah Kreisberg, CEO of Slow Up, and Vanessa Pham, CEO of Omsom. All three will be discussing:

• What are the key company building blocks for creating a direct to consumer business
• Who are the key hires/personnel/outside partners needed to go DTC
• What is the DTC tech stack?
• Marketing and community building
• Pricing and product strategies vs distribution and retail channels
• and lots more!

This fireside chat is for Spoon Plus Members only, which is good because as a member you also get access to our premium reports, deep dive interviews and more!

Reserve your spot today!