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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Weekly Spoon

Newsletter: And Now for Some Cool Food Tech News

This is the web version of our newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry.

Usually in these newsletters, I try to tie together a bunch of disparate threads into a unifying story that makes me sound soooper smart. What I don’t like to do is just recap stories we’ve published on the site.

But I’m breaking that rule today, kinda. Yes, I’m recapping a bunch of stories that we have published recently on The Spoon, but they are all unified by a theme of startups getting things done. These companies are pivoting and even launching in the blurst of times.

Check out these cool examples of food tech companies making the most of our bad situation.

  • The Great American Takeout (part 2) encourages you to help put some money in the pockets of your local restaurants.
  • Pepper is a NY-based startup that pivoted from restaurant supply management to connected restaurant food suppliers directly to consumers.
  • Anycart launched a shoppable recipe platform to help all of cook different kinds of meals while sheltering in place.
  • Kitchen United is holding an online seminar to help restaurants understand how the just-passed stimulus bill can help them.
  • GoSun is expanding from solar cooking to portable water filtration
  • Our very own Jenn Marston put together an awesome list of restaurant tech deals (while you’re at it, sign up for her new restaurant tech newsletter!).

What cool thing is your food tech company doing? We’d love to know! Drop us a line and tell us.

Join us for our online COVID Strategy Summit

Perhaps you’re inspired by the above list of companies making COVID-driven moves, but aren’t sure what your company’s next steps should be. If so, you should join us on April 6 for our COVID-19 Virtual Strategy Summit for Food and Restaurants.

No travel required to get there and 100 percent socially distant, this online summit will features talks and fireside chats from leading experts including:

  • Chef Mark Brand – Founder of Save-On Meats and creator of the Token Program to feed those in food insecure situations
  • Sara Roversi– Founder of the Future Food Institute
  • Dana Gunders – Executive Director of ReFED
  • Paul Freedman – Professor of History at Yale University and author of American Cuisine: And How It Got That Way
  • Ryan Palmer – Partner at Lathrop GPM and chair of firm’s Restaurant, Food, and Hospitality group

Save your spot today!

Tip your delivery driver!

Instacart’s gig workers, known as Shoppers, called for a nationwide strike earlier this week. They were calling attention to and looking to force changes to their working conditions during this time of global pandemic.

Instacart responded with some concessions and new safety protocols, but it wasn’t enough to stop workers from striking — a move that was followed by work stoppages at Whole Foods and Amazon warehouses.

The reason I bring this all up is to reinforce that these workers are showing up and doing their job in dangerous times. Be kind to them, especially if you have the ability to keep your job and work from home. Be kind, and tip them as generously as you are able.

Newsletter: COVID-19 Could Help Us Build a Better Restaurant

Welcome to the first-ever Weekly Spoon newsletter that’s entirely focused on restaurant innovation. That we chose to launch this just as a pandemic is sweeping across the globe is entirely intentional. Of all the food tech sectors out there, none has been hit so hard or will change — forever — as drastically as the restaurant biz.

With that in mind, let’s kick this thing off by not rehashing the gloomy stuff. Instead, let’s highlight some ways in which the current restaurant business meltdown is spurring a ton of initiatives that could make a better overall industry in the long term — if we let it.

The Virtual Tip Jar Will Stick Around

As anyone whose ever waited tables, tended bar, or delivered pizzas knows, tips are an important portion of workers’ incomes. With most bars and dining rooms closed right now, an astounding number of what are basically virtual tip jars have popped up online. We first got wind of this last week, when we came across a site called chatt.us that lets at-home drinkers leave tips for service workers in Chattanooga, Tenn. via Venmo or CashApp. 

A little more digging uncovered more of these virtual tip jars in, well, pretty much every state from Maryland to Idaho. One site in particular, serviceindustry.tips, lets you choose specific cities from a list and direct your funds to workers in that area from a very user-friendly web interface. Others are simple spreadsheet interfaces, though no less popular from the number of entries on some of them.

While these virtual tip jars can’t make up for the lost wages and job layoffs many restaurant workers now face, they could at least provide some aid to those currently struggling.

They could also be a valuable tool for the restaurant industry even when dining rooms re-open. As one restaurant owner explained to me recently, in-house staff prepping the off-premises orders don’t see any of the tips left through third-party ordering platforms. A virtual tip jar could be a way for customers who wanted to hand over a little extra to tip those employees for their work. There are also well-documented issues around tipping delivery drivers in general. Since fewer folks seem to carry cash these days, a virtual tip jar could be a way to bypass that aspect of the platform, thereby making sure it’s the worker who gets the tip — not the tech companies.

Ditto for Contactless Delivery and Payments

Three months ago “contactless delivery” wasn’t even a phrase, at least not in the vernacular sense. In an effort to stem the spread of coronavirus worldwide, what started in China (see above image, courtesy of Yum China) has now quickly caught on. All the major delivery platforms as well as grocery sites like Instacart and individual restaurant chains now either use contactless delivery as the default option or make it clearly available through their apps.

I doubt we’ll revert back to the old method once this horror show is over.

At their most basic, contactless delivery methods as well as contactless payments are just more hygienic. Fewer germs can spread when cash and cards aren’t being handed back and forth over a counter, or when customers and their delivery couriers stand a certain distance apart during a drop-off. I doubt I’m the only person who’s ever ordered delivery while having bronchitis. Contactless delivery would go far in protecting workers — many of whom do not get paid sick leave — from illnesses their customers might be carrying while they’re stuck at home. Vice versa, too.

And if this look into China’s (sort of) newly reopened restaurant scene is anything for the rest of the world to go by, mobile payments will see a boost, too. More customers will be using apps like Apple Pay, CashApp, and Google Pay to avoid constantly handing over a credit card.

Simpler Menus Will Beget Better Service

“Pare down your menu” is a directive I’ve been hearing a lot as restaurants quickly pivot to serving customers through takeout and delivery channels. That means offering only the items that are easy to produce, will travel well, and are ones that customers actually want. 

That’s not breakfast, at least not right now. In a statement this week, McDonald’s announced it was temporarily pulling breakfast items from its menu and will focus on serving its most popular items. Taco Bell also nixed breakfast items for now. More chains are likely to follow.

Of course, these moves are in response to the potentially billions of dollars the restaurant industry will lose over the next few months. I suspect, however, that slimmed down menus could actually improve certain aspects of the restaurant industry, particularly where tech is concerned. Have you ever tried to navigate a Taco Bell self-service kiosk? Finding Waldo inside Google Maps was an arguably easier task.

Smaller menus could also speed up times in the drive-thru, improve AI-powered upsell recommendations, and use fewer ingredients overall, thereby reducing food waste.

In no way am I suggesting that menus need to look like this one from 1973. And who knows? Breakfast and Monster Tacos might go back on the menu at some point. But maybe this strange, unsettling shift in which we now find ourselves can show us that simpler menus leads to better experiences for everyone involved.

Keep on truckin’,

Jenn

Newsletter: Covering Food Tech in the Time of COVID-19

This is the web version of our newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry.

How can we help?

Honestly, that is the overriding discussion we’ve had here at The Spoon over the past couple of weeks as this epidemic turned into a pandemic and then into a full-on international crisis.

We just want to be a useful resource for the food tech industry in these trying times. As such, we’ll still be covering industry news (like Impossible raising a(n Impossible) whopper of a Series F – $500 million), but a lot of our immediate emphasis will be on how COVID-19 is impacting the entire meal journey today, tomorrow and what it will mean well into the future.

Team Spoon has already put together some great resources for those wondering how COVID-19 is already altering the food tech biz, including:

And we’ve got more in the works. But what stories would be most helpful to you, Spoon reader? Whether you work in a startup, a huge CPG company, a restaurant or a grocery store, we want to know what information will be the most helpful in getting you through this. Drop us a line and let us know what you want to see covered, and we’ll do our best to make it happen.

We don’t just write about the food tech community, we’re a part of it, and we’ll do our best to help it get through all of this. Thanks for reading. Stay safe, stay well and stay far apart from each other.

Drinkworks Launches Beer Pods

After everything happening every day, who could blame you for wanting/needing a drink. But with bars and restaurants increasingly closed, what’s a person to do? If you’re in one of the states where it’s available, Drinkworks has good brews for you!

The home cocktail robot expanded beyond mixed drinks this week and launched its first beer pods. Pop one into the Drinkworks, press a button and out pours the beer. No homebrewing necessary.

The beer is made by Los Angeles-based Gold Road Brewery, and is actual beer that has been freeze distilled down to its essence. A four-pack of wheat-based beers will set you back $12.99, but in these trying times, that may not be a huge price to pay.

What is the Future of Ghost Kitchens

With dine-in areas being shut down and restaurants pivoting to delivery, could ghost kitchens be a lifeline for the restaurant industry?

We’ll be holding an appropriately socially distant webinar on the future of ghost kitchens on March 19th (that’s this Thursday) at 10 a.m.

We’ve actually been planning this webinar for awhile, but the topic has certainly taken on a new importance given world events. Guests Ashley Colpaart, CEO of the Food Corridor, Shawn Lange, President of Lab2Fab, a division of Middleby will be able to provide an insider’s perspective as to what’s happening with ghost kitchens, where they are headed, and how COVID-19 is already changing the business.

The webinar is free and you can register for it here.

Newsletter: Silver Linings from the Dark Cloud of COVID-19

Look. I don’t want to write about COVID-19 again, and you probably want to give your brain something else to think about. But given the impact it is having across the food tech landscape, with new developments continuing to happen every day, it seems derelict if I don’t write about it.

However! Despite the dark cloud coronavirus continues to cast over the country, there are some silver linings to be found. So let’s find the good in all this bad.

Dark cloud: Dire straits for dine-in restaurants
Things are not looking good for restaurants whose main business is customers eating on-site. Technomic released the results of a survey last week that found 3 in 10 consumers plan on eating out less as people avoid public spaces and… other people. Worse, Technomic found that of those people refraining from eating out, 31 percent say that reduction will last for one to three months.

Silver lining: Delivery and drive-thru to the rescue?
While people may not dine as much on-prem at restaurants, Technomic is quick to point out that this could be a boon for drive-thrus and delivery only restaurants like pizza delivery places.

And if consumers dealing with COVID-19 in the US are like those in China, we should indeed expect a rise in demand for restaurant delivery. Third-party delivery companies like Postmates and Instacart are already preparing by implementing new no-human-contact delivery options.

Dark cloud: Panic shopping leaves supermarkets bare
If your local Safeway is anything like mine, the cleaner aisle and the dry goods aisle are both pretty picked over if not completely bare. People, fearing a quarantine are stocking up in case they need to wait this whole thing out for a while. That’s not great, especially if you’re not able to get out to the store until later (after everything is picked over) because of work or mobility issues.

Silver lining: Online grocery gets a boost
Because of this outbreak, more people are trying online grocery shopping. NPD says that 21 percent of US consumers ordered perishable groceries online in the past month (as of March 2), which is up from 18 percent at the same time last year.

True, perhaps only industry watchers in grocery and food tech may find a boost in online shopping a silver lining, but if people are forced into trying online grocery shopping, then we can more quickly gauge how many consumers will stick with grocery e-commerce once this emergency passes (and it too, shall pass). This faster turnaround will also help retailers see any ROI faster on the logistics infrastructure investments they’ve been making over the past couple of years (read: robot micro-fulfillment, self-driving vehicles, etc.).

Dark cloud: The gig economy and health insurance
Questions around the ethics and business practices of third party delivery services have been swirling around for a few years now. Businesses like Uber Eats, DoorDash and Postmates are built on cheap labor in the form of contract workers, not employees. Gig economy startups are so desperate to keep workers as contractors, they are spending tens of millions of dollars to fight new employment rules in California.

Contract workers, however, don’t get healthcare. As a result, gig workers are faced with a choice: stay home and lose money, and maybe even pay an extraordinary amount out of pocket to be seen by a doctor; or continue to work, increasing the chances of becoming another vector for the disease.

Silver lining: The gig-reckoning
It’s unfortunate that it has taken a global pandemic to give gig-based startups any semblance of a conscience, but at least coronavirus is forcing the issue. It’s not much, but Uber, DoorDash and other gig startups are “in talks” to set up a fund to help pay workers afflicted with COVID-19. As my colleague Jenn Marston wrote:

One possible result of the current outbreak is that it could prioritize the issue of gig workers’ rights and spur both regulators and tech companies into action faster. Coronavirus isn’t the last public health crisis we’ll see in our lifetimes. As gig economy jobs become the norm for a growing number of the population, ensuring better protection for workers’ health needs to be built right into the job description.

Sadly, given the trajectory of the disease, this probably isn’t the last time we’ll be writing about the coronavirus. But hopefully we’ll have more silver linings than dark clouds in stories to come.

Has your food tech business been impacted either good or bad by coronavirus? Drop us a line and let us know.

Amazon Go is a go!

Get yer Amazon Go!
Amazon Web Services made it cheap and easy to build out computing infrastructure, and the result was thousands of new startups springing up. Now that Amazon is selling its cashierless Go technology to third parties, will the same happen for bite-sized retailers?

Amazon unveiled its “Just Walk Out” business this week, providing the infrastructure for any store to turn on cashierless retail experiences. Customers stick their credit card in a turnstile upon entering, grab what they want and get charged automatically upon leaving.

Big retailers, which are already trying to fend off Amazon from eating the whole shopping world, probably won’t sign on, but smaller players and big brands could find it easier to create pop-up retail experiences almost anywhere.

They just need to open up their own stores in places before Amazon does. 🙂

Sweet! Truly (green) compostable packing!
Let’s end this newsletter on a good note. You know that compostable packaging you get at the restaurant or grocery store? Yeah… chances are good that’s not really compostable. It’s got forever chemicals in there.

But Sweetgreen is rolling out a new type of compostable to-go packaging devoid of those bad chemicals. As The Spoon’s Catherine Lamb wrote:

The containers are made of fibers from bagasse, an agricultural waste product, which is blended, heated, and covered with a natural coating so it won’t leak.

The only bummer is that the lids are still made from plastic. But! Those will be phased out soon. So. You know. Silver lining.

Keep washing your hands.

Newsletter: Can Food Tech Weather the Coronavirus?

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

The hardest part of sitting at the urgent care clinic this past weekend wasn’t feeling pretty awful. No, it was listening to the person in the exam room across the hall, who spent what seemed like the entire time in one big, painful, spasmic coughing fit. It was so loud that my lungs were rattling. So of course my first thought was coronavirus has hit my little town.

I know, and knew at the time, that it (probably) hadn’t, so I remained calm. But you spend enough time reading headlines about the deadly disease’s rampant spread and you start to think it’s not a matter of if, but when you’ll encounter it.

The food tech world, which has in many ways been at the forefront of this pandemic, felt the impact of the coronavirus over the weekend when the Inspired Home Show decided to cancel its upcoming International Sourcing Expo. The expo typically houses seven Chinese pavilions, and the decision was made in association with Chinese pavilion organizers.

The Inspired Home Show is still going on, but for such a big convention where so many people gather to do a ton of business, the decision will undoubtedly have ripple effects beyond just the show.

I’m writing this on Monday afternoon, a day when coronavirus fears sparked a pummeling of markets around the world. Whether or not those losses regain tomorrow, who knows, but between viral panics and yesterday’s story in The New York Times about the rash of layoffs across the tech world, it feels like we are nearing some kind of tipping point. Almost reminiscent of the infamous Sequoia Capital PowerPoint a decade ago that got everyone panicked.

Hopefully the food tech startup world has enough execs who lived though those Sequoia days and are better prepared for what could be a major slowdown in growth.

Are we, as an industry, ready to remain calm as the sounds of calamity continue?

What are some delivery robo no-nos?

Not to get stay with the whole global pandemic thing, but we’ve written before about how the coronavirus could shape the future of food delivery. When you need to limit human-to-human contact, will autonomous delivery robots need to pick up the slack?

Self-driving delivery bots like those from Starship are already delivering food to college campuses around the U.S. But before cities can more fully deploy them on public streets there are a number of considerations that must be taken into account.

Ariel Yehezkel and Allison Wu Troianos of the law firm Sheppard Mullin put together an excellent primer on topics like liability and privacy implications of autonomous robot delivery for The Spoon. Anyone making, operating, leasing, buying or thinking about robots should read it.

The more we prepare now, the better the chance that robot delivery will become a reality.

Fizzy Travel Water FTW!

But let’s lighten things up a bit. Get a little effervescent, even.

No matter what situation you find yourself in, it’s always important to remain hydrated. The only hydration hiccup for seltzer fans like myself is that there’s no really good way to take your bubbly water with you. Cans stay open and your drink goes flat. You could carry fuzzy water in a reusable flask, but that, too seems less optimal. Like a lot of fizz is getting lost in the transfer into the container.

But Spoon Founder Mike Wolf wrote about a new solution from Drinkmate that will give seltzerheads their sparkling water on the go. The instaFizz is basically a steel thermos with its own CO2 system. Pour your water in, load the CO2 cartridge, twist the cap, and voila! You got your bubble water right there with you, complete with a cap to keep all that good gas in.

Read all about it, and see if the $60 instaFizz is right for you.

Lastly, some of the Spoon team is headed to NYC this week for our Customize food personalization event on Thursday, February 27!

There are just a few tickets left so if you’d like to join us, grab yours here — use code SPOON15 to get 15 percent off while you’re at it. 

Newsletter: PicoBrew is up for Sale, What Does That Mean for the Home Brewing Market?

On Friday, The Spoon’s very own Mike Wolf got the scoop that home brewing appliance maker, PicoBrew, was in receivership and being put up for sale.

Read Mike’s full story for all the details, but the TL;DR version: PicoBrew was going after a lot of different markets including both home and professional beer brewing, cold brew coffee and even spirits aging. All of which added up to a complex cap table, and none of which added up to a breakthrough business.

But perhaps more interesting is that PicoBrew is the latest in a long line of crowdfunded beer brewing devices that didn’t make it as an independent, ongoing concern. HOPii, iGulu, and Brewbot, all promised to make beer brewing easy for the masses, and all are gone.

To be fair, those other devices never really got out of the starting gate. HOPii ran into legal trouble before going into production, iGulu ran into a string of problems during production, and Brewbot reportedly only made a few units before it ran out of money.

PicoBrew, on the other hand, had always been a gold standard for crowdfunded hardware. The company raised millions and actually delivered their products (they even canceled the Pico U crowdfunding because it wasn’t trending as well as previous campaigns).

So the question becomes, is the home beer making appliance market dead? If PicoBrew can’t make it work on its own, can anyone? We’ll definitely be watching BEERMKR more closely now. That company had already delayed shipping its product by more than a year, and now the Coronavirus epidemic in China could delay it even further.

The one reason to hold out hope for BEERMKR, however, is that it is a more open platform than the PicoBrew. Initially, the PicoBrew required PicoPaks of ingredients to make beer, something the company later relented on and opened up. From the get-go BEERMKR lets you add your own ingredients, not locking the user into a particular eco-system.

The MiniBrew is another appliance making a go of it. That company raised €2.6M in funding at the end of 2018, and has been shipping across Europe since then. The company has set a target of 2020 to enter the U.S. market, so we’ll be keeping eyes on them as well.

But independent home brewing companies will face pressure from another side as LG has its own beer brewing appliance, which it showed off at IFA last year. However, LG’s Homebrew wasn’t on display at CES, so who knows how much emphasis it’s putting on the device. But with its combination of sales channel and marketing muscle, will LG’s mere presence prevent more hardware startups from entering the beer making biz?

Who knows? Perhaps LG or some other consumer appliance company will swoop in and buy PicoBrew’s assets and the device will live on. If that happens, The Spoon will be working hard to get that scoop.

The coronavirus’ impact on food tech

Let’s just start this by saying that the deadly coronavirus epidemic is frightening in just about every conceivable manner. And while there are far more important ramifications about the disease, for our purposes, it’s worth taking a moment to see how it is impacting the business of food tech.

We haven’t heard from any big food tech companies specifically, but manufacturing is impacting production of all kinds tech companies like Nintendo, Apple and Tesla. It’s a safe bet that food-related consumer electronics companies won’t be immune from this.

As noted above, the outbreak is delaying the production of some Kickstarter projects, and hopefully those campaigns raised enough money to weather this crisis.

We’ve also seen how food delivery is adapting when there is a fear of human to human contact. Robots are being used to deliver food to people stranded in a quarantine hotel in Hangzhou, China. Each floor has its own robot that runs down the hallway announcing itself, as people wearing surgical masks pop out to retrieve food off the bot.

Elsewhere, KFC and Pizza Hut are employing a contactless method of food delivery. Human delivery drivers get their temperature taken before they depart, wear a surgical map and drop food off at an outside spot. The driver sets the food down and stays ten feet away from the recipient while the food is picked up. Hands and delivery boxes are disinfected after each delivery.

Looking ahead, it’s worth thinking about how this pandemic could permanently alter the delivery business in China and elsewhere. Will this accelerate more autonomous delivery vehicles a la Starship and Kiwi? Will sterilization protocols become de rigeur for any delivery vehicle? Will there be greater adoption of external, temperature controlled delivery lockers that sit outside apartments and houses?

Hopefully the spread of corona will subside soon, so we can start to answer these questions.

Customize is coming! Get your ticket today!

Hard to believe, but Customize, our food personalization summit is almost here! Happening February 27 in New York City, we have put together a stellar lineup of speakers including:

  • Scott Wu, CTO, Compass Group, will be talking about the impact of personalization on food service and restaurants.
  • Brian Kathmann, Dir., Commercial Platforms, Healthcare – 84.51° Kroger will be talking about the early results from the big grocery store’s entry into food as medicine
  • Dr. Sherry Zhang, CEO, GenoPalate, will be talking about how our DNA could shape personalized food choices
  • Josh Baillon, Digital Innovation Manager, Nestlé, will be discussing some of the key considerations for a big CPG as they create a personalized food business

Tickets are going fast, so you’ll want to make sure you have a spot at the table. Use the special Spoon subscriber discount code THESPOON15 for a 15% discount off your tickets. 

Newsletter: Consolidation Is Imminent for Food Delivery, Plus Customize is Coming to NYC

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If 2019 was the year restaurant food delivery companies went mainstream, 2020 is shaping up to be the year mergers and acquisitions whittle the competition among these third-party services down until just a couple companies emerge victorious.

Case in point: this week, Uber announced it is selling its Eats business in India to Zomato, a local rival that processes at least half a million more orders per day in that country than Eats does. Uber’s exit from the Indian market leaves just two major players: Zomato (which Uber will have a small stake in) and Swiggy, who also has access to deep pockets thanks to backing from investment firm Naspers.

And that news is just the latest in a series of announcements that all suggest acquisitions and mergers are the fuel pushing further consolidation worldwide in the crowded food delivery space. The ongoing bidding war over UK-based service Just Eat looks to finally be at an end, with Takeaway.com, who originally planned to acquire the company, coming out as the winner. The combined entity of Just Eat and Takeaway.com would form one of the largest food delivery companies in the world. In the States, Postmates has reportedly been exploring a sale instead of its planned IPO (which still hasn’t happened). A Wall Street Journal report from earlier this month said Grubhub had hired financial advisors to consider “strategic options including a possible sale” — though Grubhub denies the claim.

Uber’s motivation in the Zomato deal is in part all about cutting back on loss-making operations as the cash-burning business comes under increasing pressure to prove profitability over the next year. On that score, the company isn’t alone. Postmates shuttered its Mexico City operations in December. Deliveroo closed up shop in Germany last year. In 2018, Delivery Hero sold its German operations to Takeaway.com. And Uber itself ended its Eats business in South Korea last year.

Consider all that activity the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Most delivery companies are currently in the same boat as Uber, where investors are applying pressure to show the food delivery model can in fact be profitable and not just burn through money. So it’s safe to say that many services will continue shutting down or selling loss-heavy operations around the globe over the next several months and opening the door to further consolidation.  

At-home Indoor Farming Is Suddenly the New Black

There’s a new trend afoot in the connected kitchen: vertical farms built specifically for the home and meant to be used by your average consumer. 

Ever since CES, when major appliance-makers like LG and GE showed off flashy vertical farming concepts for the consumer kitchen of the future, here at The Spoon we’ve gotten a seemingly endless series of pitches and news announcements about this indoor-farm-to-table concept. The idea is simple: make an indoor farm that ranges anywhere between a flowerpot and a bookshelf in size, outfit it with accompanying technology that automates much of the actual work around growing the plants, and sell the product to consumers for, in most cases, under $1,000.

In the last several weeks alone, Rise Gardens, the Planty Cube, Miele, and many others have shown off products that hit these marks. But while there’s a lot of excitement (bordering on hype) around growing salad greens in your own kitchen, the still-nascent market hasn’t yet hit the point where the questions start to sprout up. Are these farms really as easy to use and automated as companies say? Can they actually save people money? Can individuals with a terrible track record when it comes to gardening (me) grow something that actually tastes good?

The next several months should provide some answers to these questions. 

Customize Is Almost Here!

That’s a wrap for this week. But before I go, here’s a quick reminder that we’re gearing up for Customize, our first NYC event. Personalization is changing everything from restaurants to grocery stores to our own kitchens, so join the Spoon team and our amazing group of speakers on February 27th! Just use the special Spoon subscriber discount code THESPOON15 for a 15% discount off of tickets. 

Keep growing,

Jenn


Newsletter: Everything We Saw in Kitchen and Food Tech at CES 2020

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The Spoon team descended on Vegas last week to try and find all the food and kitchen tech we could lay our hands on. We also held our second annual FoodTech Live event because, well, we’re lazy and we wanted the food tech to come to us.

And now that we’re back in the snowy foothills of the Pacific Northwest, the Spoon team had some time put our thoughts about the tech expo together, record a podcast, and decipher what it all means. 

So here it is, our CES Food Tech wrapup. I’ve got kitchen tech covered below, then Catherine looks at Impossible Pork and what else she saw on the fake meat front, and finally Chris gives his thoughts on robots and kitchens coming out of what has been an eventful couple weeks in that space. 

Kitchen Tech at CES

Because I’ve gone to CES more times than I could count, I’ve gotten pretty good at searching out what matters to me the most so as to make productive use of my time. That’s always been a challenge in food tech since CES and its exhibitors have largely ignored the category. But that all changed this year because of what happened last year: The launch of the Impossible Burger 2.0. 

And while fake meat is a long ways from a smart oven or a food robot, I think having the food tech unicorn choose CES as its venue to launch its new products has just given momentum to everything food-related, included the future kitchen.

What did I see? Well, I wrote a deep dive full kitchen tech wrap-up report detailing everything kitchen tech at CES this year, but if you’re looking for the short-short of it here are the top takeaways:

Personalization is Impacting Everything, Even Physical Space

There’s no doubt, personalization is impacting everything in food (heck, it’s why we decided to have a dedicated event on it). But when it comes to personalization, we usually are talking recipes or diet plans, not physical space. GE wants to change that, and so they showed off an adaptable kitchen concept that personalizes the space depending on the needs of the individual. 

Of course, there was also lots of meal planning and recipe personalization, as well as a couple startups like DNANudge and Sun Genomics looking to help you build meal journeys based on your personal biomarkers and DNA. 

Food Waste Only Gets A Half-Nod

There were better and more capable smart fridges to help us take better inventory and there were smart pantries to help us keep track of our dry goods, but I didn’t see a whole lot of effort focused on helping us reduce consumer food waste. One company, however, that wanted to help us all get better at composting our food waste was Sepura Home, which had a good solution that integrated with your home disposal to route food waste to a composter and liquids down the drain. 

Focus on Full Meal Journey Rather Than Point Solutions

When it comes to the smart home and connected kitchen, we’re used to seeing standalone technologies that show off a cutting edge new technology rather than a bigger solution tailored towards solving consumer problems. I think that’s starting to change, as companies like GE and Samsung showed off bigger ideas tailored towards helping people solve problems and connect the different parts of the meal journey. 

Drink Tech!

There were so many drink tech offerings at CES it was hard to keep track. We wrote about the Matcha making machine, tried out the Spinn and saw new beer-making robots.  We even checked out a new seltzer machine that is targeting reducing plastic waste in hotels and homes.

Countertop Cooking

Being a kitchen tech nerd, I have to admit it was cool have the guy who basically invented the home sous vide circulator give me a walkthrough of the Anova Precision Oven (you can listen along to Scott Heimendinger’s guided tour here.) We also took a look at the Julia multicooker here. 

Once again, check out my full kitchen tech wrapup for CES 2020 here. But first, see what Catherine has to say about fake meat this year at CES…

Impossible Pork at CES 2020 [Photo: Catherine Lamb]

I came into CES especially excited about one thing: Impossible Foods’ press event. The company had teased something major on Twitter, so I guessed we would see a new product — probably pork or chicken. And pork it was!

We got to taste the faux pork in a number of applications and it was juicy and fatty, though slightly more neutral-tasting than traditional pork — a great blank canvas for a number of porky recipes. If you’re feeling FOMO right now, don’t sweat it — you can soon you can sample the faux pork for yourself in the Impossible Croissan’wich, featuring Impossible’s plant-based pork sausage, which is rolling out in select Burger King locations this month.

While eating a bao stuffed with plant-based pork, I couldn’t help but wonder — what will be the next food to make a splash at CES? Last year Impossible stirred up a lot of attention when it won the Best of the Best award from Endgadget, even though it was the first edible food company to show at the tech expo. Now that the company has proven that food is, in fact, technology, it has opened up the door for more food companies to make a splash at CES.

One company to keep an eye on is Dutch startup Meatable. The cultured meat startup, which is growing pork muscle and fat cells outside of the animal, actually had its own small booth at CES this year. They didn’t have any of their actual meat on display, but Meatable’s CEO Krijn De Nood told me that they were hoping to bring cell-based pork samples to Vegas in 2021 for a limited taste test. They plan to start selling the pork on a large scale — pending regulatory approval — by 2025.

I guess that means we’ll have to start building up an appetite for CES 2021.

FlowWaste’s image recognition device. [Photo: Catherine Lamb]

Other cool stuff I saw (and tasted) on the CES show floor:

Food Robots: Do We Need Them?

While Chris wasn’t able to get around CES this year (save for our event FoodTech Live), he was watching for food robots and saw buzz around quite a few:  

I was unable to attend CES this year, and as such, I missed a bunch of robot stuff. LG showed off a mock restaurant with a robot cooking food and making pourover coffee. Samsung demoed a concept robot that was billed as an “extra set of hands” in the kitchen that could grab items, pour oil and even wield a knife. IRobot, maker of the Roomba vacuum announced it too was developing robotic arms to load dishes or carry food to the table. And of course, who could forget the robot that makes raclette melted cheese.

But in the end, he started to wonder: Do we need these more advanced robots in the consumer kitchen? …my initial response to robot arms swerving around a kitchen is why? Are these robotic ambitions the best way to gain greater convenience in the kitchen, or do they just make things more complicated? Let’s acknowledge that there are definite use cases for robotic arms to help those with disabilities or who are otherwise movement impaired. The University of Washington is working on a voice-controlled robot that can feed people who need such assistance. And researching how robots interact with odd-shaped and often fragile objects like food can help the robotics industry overall. That’s one of the reasons Sony teamed up with Carnegie Mellon to develop food robots, and why Nvidia built a full kitchen to train its robots. But in our homes, and especially smaller apartments with even smaller kitchens, robot arms seem like more of a menace than a help, taking up space and potentially getting in the way. A case of futuristic form over function.

You can read Chris’s full piece about the robotic consumer kitchen and where he thinks it’s all going here. 

Newsletter: My Smart Thanksgiving was Kinda Dumb, Ghost Kitchens and 3D Printed Vitamin Gummies

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A couple months back, The Spoon got in a little tiff with WIRED writer (and all around great guy) Joe Ray when he bylined an article that said the smart kitchen is very stupid.

As we’re a publication that’s all about the convergence of food and technology, this, naturally, got our goat. But here’s the thing, though. Ray wasn’t totally wrong. I experienced this firsthand over Thanksgiving when I tried my hand at connected holiday cooking.

Thanksgiving is typically the domain of my wife. But with an abundance of guests and a shortage of ovens, I decided to try my (slow) hand at smoking a turkey.

Armed with a Traeger pellet grill equipped with WiFire tech, and a block of Meater connected thermometers, I figured contributing to the holiday feast would be a snap.

I was wrong. I wrote about the whole experience, but the TL;DR version is this: Between getting the thermometers to actually connect (they didn’t) and a less-than-stellar app experience, my smart holiday cookout actually had to rely on the brains in my head and not in any device.

Thankfully, the turkey wound up tasting great, even if it did take a little more time and manual work than I was expecting. It tasted so good, in fact, that smoking another one next year is probably not a dumb idea (I just won’t be using any smart appliances).

Ghost Kitchens Are Very Much Alive
Everyone, it seems, is looking to get in on some of that sweet ghost kitchen action. Travis Kalanick, DoorDash, Chick-fil-A and now grocery retailer Kroger are making use of facilities that specialize in fulfilling meals for delivery (no dining in).

Yesterday, The Spoon’s Jenn Marson wrote about Kroger hooking up with the (fantastically named) meal delivery service ClusterTruck to launch multiple ghost kitchens. As Jenn wrote:

While the partnership is a high-profile one for a regional company like ClusterTruck, which is available mostly in the Midwest at this point, it’s also a smart move for Kroger. The concept of operating virtual restaurants out of ghost kitchens appeals nowadays to not just restaurants but also lifestyle brands, diet concepts, and celebrity chefs. Grocery stores were bound to follow at some point.

The line between grocery store and restaurant is already blurring, with many retailers offering fully prepared hot meals ready to go. So it makes sense that as off-premises dining continues to grow that we’ll see more retailers jump into the ghost kitchen delivery game. Why not order a hot dinner for tonight and get your groceries for the week dropped off on your doorstep at the same time?

Photo: Nourished

A 3D Printed Vitamin Gummy
Everyone eats their kids’ gummy vitamins, right? Or is that just me?

Well, my days of stealing vitamins may be soon be a thing of the past, if Nourished makes it to these shores. As my colleague, Catherine Lamb wrote about today, Nourished makes 3D printed gummies layered with vitamins personalized for your needs.

The vitamins won’t be cheap ($51 for a month’s supply), but Nourished says its 3D printed approached improves the pills’ efficacy. As Catherine writes:

Typically, active ingredients that show up in vitamins — like ashwagandha and Vitamin A — interfere with each other when combined into the same capsule. However, by printing these ingredients on top of each other, Nourished can fuse them into the same bite-sized supplement.

Nourished is only available in the U.K. right now, but the company is heading for the U.S. next year. Just don’t tell my son.

Nourished is actually part of a wave of startups bringing more personalization to the food we eat. The Spoon is giving a nod to that space with Customize, a new one-day summit in NYC in February that will bring together leading innovators across the restaurant, retail, grocery, food and consumer industries to explore how personalization is changing these markets. Get your (personal) ticket today!

Newsletter: Will E-Bikes Take Charge? Plus, Precise Heating Comes Home

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Delivery robots like those from Starship and self-driving vehicles like Nuro‘s grab a lot of headlines when it comes to the future of food and meal delivery. And it’s easy to understand why–robots are cool, man! But I have one bit of advice when it comes to the business of food delivery as we head into 2020:

Don’t sleep on electric bikes. They could be a huge platform in cities.

This is a prediction I’ve made before, when Uber bought e-bike rental company Jump last year. But yesterday’s announcement that Australian company Bolt Bikes launched its e-bikes for delivery service in the U.S. and U.K. got me thinking about a potential bicycle boom in food delivery.

TechCrunch reports that Bolt rents out bikes for commercial use on a two-week contract for $39. As TechCrunch writes, “The Bolt Bikes platform includes the electric bike, fleet management software, financing and servicing. Subscribers get 24-hour access to the bike. A battery charger, phone holder, phone USB port, secure U-Lock and safety induction is included.” Postmates has reportedly been piloting Bolt Bikes in SF since June.

E-bikes are actually great for city environments. They are fast, nimble on traffic-choked streets and take (most of) the work out of going uphill. Plus they have human drivers, so you don’t have to worry about the potential human/robot issues that come with even small autonomous delivery vehicles.

Though they aren’t as well suited for longer distances, e-bikes could also work in some suburban areas with tightly packed homes (think: housing developments), especially as part of a hub-and-spoke model. Next summer, Uber Eats is testing drone delivery of food to centralized drop off points where delivery people pick orders up and drive them the last mile. Instead of cars rolling around the suburbs, an e-bike could make that last mile more economical, faster (no need to park) and more welcome for neighborhoods that don’t want a lot more delivery cars driving around.

Bicycles already have already enjoyed a place in food delivery, especially in more dense urban areas, but the advent of affordable e-bikes could really charge up their use for getting you fed.

Precision Temperatures

I’m going to steal from WIRED here for a moment, but:

TIRED: Heat
WIRED: Precise heat control to the exact temperature you want

We covered two different technologies this week deliver granular control to the way you heat either a beverage or your BBQ.

First up we took Ember’s new Travel Mug<sup>2</sup> out for a spin. The Tesla of travel coffee mugs runs a whopping $180 and keeps your coffee at a constant hot temperature of your choosing. This second-generation Ember mug features great design and clever controls, but sadly the promised three-hour battery life diminished pretty quickly in real world circumstances. Check out our full review.

On a much larger scale, the just-announced Weber SmokeFire grill features the connected cooking smarts of a June Oven. The two companies announced that the JuneOS will power the Weber Connect app that controls the SmokeFire. You can also get step-by-step instructions to become a master griller and dial in a constant temperature for those long brisket smoking sessions.

The Ember Travel Mug <sup>2</sup> is available now if you’re looking for a pricey stocking stuffer, and while the SmokeFire ($999) won’t be out until 2020, you can pre-order it on Cyber Monday.

The New Spoon Logo

A New Spoon

If you’ve been to our website this week, then you’ll notice an entirely new look and a new logo.

As Spoon founder Mike Wolf noted when introducing the new site yesterday:

We launched the Spoon in October 2016. At the time, we didn’t know what it would become, all we knew is that we wanted to tell the stories of the people and companies shaping the future of food and cooking.

He went on, saying:

With thousands of stories published and hundreds of thousands of readers per month, The Spoon is a big part of what we do and we figured it was time the site got a fresh coat of paint and maybe even a new beam or two.

The Spoon will remain the best place for all the food tech news and analysis you need to know, it’s just going to be easier to read and navigate. G’head and click through it and tell us what you think!

Speaking of our new logo, you’ll be able to see it on display in Vegas during CES at our second annual FoodTech Live. Last year we had over forty companies showing their stuff, so if you have new kitchen or food tech product and want to show off your wares, make sure to check out our event page!

Newsletter: The Drive Thru Matters More Than Ever. So Do Farm Bots and Decaf Coffee

From self-service kiosks to mobile apps to dedicated pickup shelves and portals, there’s no end to new tech trying to speed up the order-pay-collect process for customers at QSRs.

But if the last week has made anything clear, it’s that while those pieces certainly play a role in the future of the restaurant, the drive thru is still the most important area of growth — at least for fast-food. Even as Minneapolis tries to ban drive thrus, companies are pumping enormous amounts of money and energy into improving this area, most notably with last week’s news that McDonald’s, king of all QSRs, had acquired voice-tech company Apprente. It’s the second acquisition Mickey D’s has made in 2019 of a technology company whose offerings can speed up lagging drive-thru lines and move more customers in less time. In March, the mega chain acquired a company called Dynamic Yield and has since installed its AI tech in thousands of McDonald’s drive thrus to make the order experience more personalized for customers.

Others aren’t sitting still. In 2019 alone, Dunkin’ has expanded its “Next Generation” store, which features dedicated drive-thru lanes for mobile orders, to other parts of the U.S.; KFC started testing a drive-thru-only concept in Australia; and a slew of new tech companies have emerged offering various digital and AI-powered tools to take orders at the drive thru.

It’s not hard to understand why. As of last check, drive thrus still make up over 50 percent (in some cases closer to two thirds) of all orders for many QSRs. At the same time, bigger menus and more disjointed pieces of tech in the restaurant space have slowed down the order process and made wait times in drive-thru lanes longer. As Apprente CEO Itamar Arel, Ph.D., said back in 2018, “Fast food is not always fast and bottlenecks at ordering stations result in lost sales.” McDonald’s and others can’t afford those lost sales, so anything — whether an extra lane or a full-on tech makeover — to move people through the line faster could give QSRs an edge in the rising competition. You can bet there will be plenty more news from the drive-thru lane as more major QSRs revamp to take a page from McDonald’s playbook and reinvent themselves with tech.

Weeding Out the Labor Shortage Problem
The drive-thru isn’t the only area the food world is looking to speed up production. This week a company called FarmWise raised $14.5 million for its self-driving robots that remove weeds from crops without the need for herbicides or pesticides. (We expect these machines will be able to do much more than pull weeds in future, too.)

For the agtech world, machines like these not only save time, they also pick up the slack left by a major labor shortage in farm production. Farmers and ranchers in the U.S. say this labor shortage is the most limiting factor they face on their farms, and it’s not one that looks like it’ll be solved any time soon.

Hence, the robots. Every farm in America won’t have autonomous bots to pick weeds and harvest produce at the snap of a finger, but these machines are an increasingly appealing solution to the labor issue. Robots don’t need breaks, can work in sweltering heat and humidity, and in some cases can work faster than a human. As we look to solutions for both farm labor and wasted crops on the farm, these bots hold many possibilities.

Photo: Decafino

Disrupting Decaf
Meanwhile, someone wants to reinvent decaf coffee.

Decafino, a startup based out of Seattle, launched a Kickstarter campaign today for a tea bag-like product it claims can remove caffeine from any cup of brewed coffee. As my colleague Catherine Lamb detailed, the biodegradable pouch can be dropped in a cup of coffee (or caffeinated soda, for that matter), and within three to four minutes will remove the caffeine from the beverage.

If the product does as it claims, it could open up many more options for decaf coffee drinkers, who often face very limited selections at stores and coffee shops, and in some cases no options at all.

Personally, I’d have to be told I needed triple bypass surgery to stop drinking caffeinated coffee, and no doubt that day will come. In the meantime, there are plenty of folks out there who love the taste of coffee but for health reasons cannot drink the real thing. If Decafino is successful, these people might find a whole new world of drink choices.

Newsletter: Pickleball and Alt-Protein, Our Startup Showcase and the Bees Knees (Well, Feet)!

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I took up the game of pickleball recently. It’s a lot of fun, and being the spry 40-something that I am, I was feeling pretty confident during my first match against a team of septugenarians.

Until they proceeded to destroy me.

My glaring ageism was a mistake that I won’t repeat. Just because someone is decades older than you, doesn’t mean you can count them out. If anything, you should be more wary of challenging them.

With apologies to my colleague, Catherine Lamb, for stepping on her Future Food newsletter a little bit here, lately I’ve wondered if the alternative meat startups will run into the same issue with their entrenched, corporate elders.

Beyond Meat and a band of young upstarts like Impossible Foods and Rebellyous are leading the charge for a new generation of plant-based proteins that taste and look like animal meat. Beyond’s stellar IPO and Burger King’s initial success with the Impossible Whopper have certainly put plant-based meat over into the mainstream.

But the olds are waking up and fighting back. Traditional meat companies left and right are rolling out their own plant-based meat products:

That doesn’t even include the companies that are dipping their toes into plant-based meat with blended meat+veggie products like Perdue’s Chicken Plus and Tyson’s Raised & Rooted.

If that weren’t enough, Catherine was at the Good Food Conference last week where year-over-year growth in plant-protein was the big theme, and the stage was filled with speakers from big name companies like JBS, Perdue, and ADM.

Will these established players be able to flex their big budgets, existing supply chains and marketing muscle to squeeze out the up-and comers? At this point, both Beyond and Impossible aren’t exactly young pups, and each has been doing a good job so far of making their brand stick. But have they built enough loyalty and enough of a “moat” around their product to protect themselves from the olds? It seems to me they have, but I live in a bit of a food tech bubble, so it’s hard to gauge what everyday people outside the industry will want.

If we are truly in a plant-based protein revolution (and we at The Spoon definitely believe we are), then we are at the very earliest stages. Over the next year we’ll see if the startup software-style iterating process taken by Beyond and Impossible is enough to keep their products ahead of the incumbents, or if the incumbents will be able to show why they’ve been around for such a long time.

Game on.

SKS Startup Showcase
OMG, you guys! Our flagship Smart Kitchen Summit: North America {SKS} is mere weeks away! (You did get your tickets, right?) It’s already on track to be our biggest event ever and that includes our Startup Showcase.

Each year we invite a handful of cutting-edge companies to come up on-stage and show the world what they are working on. This year’s crop of candidates did not disappoint and we have pulled together a fantastic lineup that we are pleased to announce today.

To give you a preview, the finalists include a 3D food printer that creates food personalized just for you, video backsplashes that teach you how to cook, a stylish connected blender and a home chocolate making machine–as Bill Hader’s Stefon on SNL would say, this show has everything.

Now you just have to make sure you’re there to see the future of food tech before everyone else does. Use code THESPOON25 to get 25% off your tickets to SKS. Reserve yours now before they’re all sold out!

Bees as a Pesticide Delivery Service
I can’t say the words “the bees” without thinking of Nicholas Cage in The Wicker Man. Memes notwithstanding, bees play a really important part in the food we eat by pollinating crops!

As if all the pollinating wasn’t enough work from those worker bees, Bee Vectoring Technologies (BVT) is giving them a new job–pesticide applicator. BVT’s system starts with a tray of fungicidal powder set outside commercial beehives. Bees pick up the powder when they walk across it as they exit the hive and release it when they shake the pollen off a flowering plant.

The company’s fungicide to fight botrytis (that grey moldy fuzz that appears on fruit like strawberries) just got EPA approval last week. With this go-ahead from the EPA, BVT can unleash those bees on commercial crops.

That is something definitely buzz-worthy.

Ugh. Sorry.

I’m going back to the pickleball court.