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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Weekly Spoon

Newsletter: Why Online Grocery Shopping is Like Kevin Costner, Meet Drinkbot, and a Coffee Cherry Drink

I’m a big fan of “The Rewatchables” from The Ringer podcast network. Basically it’s a bunch of pop-culture-savvy writers talking about well-known movies they enjoy, well, re-watching. A couple months back they did Field of Dreams, which celebrated its 30th anniversary [ed. note: !!!] in April.

Field of Dreams is most famous, of course, for its “If you build it, he [not ‘they’] will come.”

That’s kind of how I look at the online grocery space right now. Retailers are building out the massive infrastructure needed to support online grocery shopping — the shoppers just aren’t quite there yet.

I got to thinking about mullet-Kevin Costner and his cornfield when I saw a report from Gallup last week that said 81 percent of Americans never order groceries online. Yikes!

Why then, you might ask, is Kroger building out 20 robot-powered smart fulfillment warehouses and testing out self-driving delivery? Why did Giant Foods open up a physical facility only for ecommerce orders? Why are Ahold Delhaize, ShopRite and Albertsons experimenting with robotic micro-fulfillment centers? Why is Walmart looking to deliver groceries directly into your kitchen?

Because Field of Dreams. Retailers are building all the pieces out now to help shoppers eventually migrate online. And it looks like consumers are already starting to cotton to it.

That Gallup statistic is actually an improvement over a similar survey Gallup made last year, which found that 84 percent never grocery shopped online. A 3 percent drop in “nevers” is a 3 percent gain in people who have at least tried online shopping.

Online grocery shopping still has a way to go. Even I don’t do it, mostly because I put it off until the last minute and then realize on a Sunday night that Oh no! I need to pack kid lunches for summer camp tomorrow morning. That and the unfortunate green banana incident.

But in addition to more adults (slowly) buying groceries online, there is a generation of kids growing up with online grocery shopping being a totally normal way to get food. The Gallup data even bears that out, finding that 19 percent of adults with children under 18 bought groceries online at least monthly (that’s up from 14 percent from last year).

The point is, online grocery shopping is coming. They are building it, and we will (eventually) come for it.

Drinkbot will serve you cloud-based mocktails (and more)

Speaking of building something, Botrista is a startup looking to build out the robo-restaurant of the future.

Botrista is interesting because it’s starting with robot-made drinks — something every restaurant serves — and because of the company’s business model. Botrista provides the Drinkbot hardware to restaurants for free and charges its clients both on a per-drink basis (anywhere from $1.40 to $1.90 per drink) as well as for the ingredients to make any of the hundreds of recipes in the Drinkbot library.

The no-cost upfront model means more restaurants could adopt Drinkbot, and the cloud based drink library means that those restaurants could easily offer a rotating selection of drinks: from mocktails to juices to fusion teas.

Botrista is in a few trials in the Bay Area right now, but we’ll be watching the company to see if this new model will help accelerate automation in restaurants.

riff cold brewed

Cherry-oh! A new type of RTD coffee beverage

And speaking of something to drink: I love everything about coffee (making it, the smell, etc.) except the taste. Can’t stand it. It’s far too bitter for my sweetooth-y palate, so I’m intrigued by this new RTD Sparkling Coffee Cherry Tea from Riff Cold Brewed.

As Garrett Oden wrote for The Spoon:

The drink is made from cascara, the dried coffee “cherry” that’s left behind once the beans are harvested. Cold brewed and carbonated, Alter Ego is a slightly-sweet alternative to the super sugary drinks that are common in grocery stores and gas stations, with 6g of sugar, 35 calories, and 105mg of caffeine—roughly the same amount as a small cup of coffee.

In addition to this sweeter taste, it’s also better for the environment because it upcycles the coffee cherries instead of discarding them into giant piles that rot.

Oden tried a few cans of the sparkling stuff and found it to be “smooth, refreshing, and delicate.”

With Labor Day, and all the accompanying barbecues just around the corner, now might be the perfect time to put on Field of Dreams and try it out.

Newsletter: Tokyo Takeaways, Fighting Food Waste, and Reality TV Style Restaurant Rescue

My dad’s super power is writing thank you notes. He never misses sending one. Ever. So it is with the spirit of Pappy Albrecht that I am transforming this week’s newsletter into a big, wet, sloppy thank you to Tokyo for all the great food tech times The Spoon had there last week.

The first thank you goes out to our partner company, SIGMAXYZ, which hosted us and put on the Smart Kitchen Summit: Japan conference. Much like our upcoming SKS: North America show in Seattle (get your tickets now!), the Japan summit featured two days packed with tremendous talks, presentations and demonstrations.

What SKS: Japan highlighted more than anything is that the foodtech community is a global one that is still enthusiastically innovating, pushing boundaries and thinking big. I mean, there was a TV in a plate, and not one but two different roadmaps for feeding people in space, along with a talk on teleporting sushi, for goodness’ sake.

The second thank you goes out to the city of Tokyo itself, which provided seemingly endless opportunities for eating well. I don’t think any member of The Spoon team had a bad meal while there. Whether it was grabbing (many) egg salad sandwiches at the 7-11, enjoying a delicious pasta meal while listening to vinyl in a record cafe, or slurping up ramen noodles in some non-descript restaurant, I learned that you don’t need high-tech for haute cuisine.

Finally, one last thanks goes out a little closer to home. While Mike, Catherine and myself were in Tokyo, Jenn Marston did the real hard work of keeping the site up and running with fresh content. Thank you, Jenn!

Check out some of the best of what we saw at SKS Japan right here.

Image via Hazel Technologies.

Hazel Technologies Raises $13 Million
Food waste was not a problem for us during our trip. It’s safe to say we ate everything we were given. Gladly. However, food waste remains a huge problem around the world.

Thankfully there are a number of startups tackling the issue head-on through a number of different tactics. One way we’re seeing more of lately is extending the life of food itself. Hazel Technologies announced a $13 million Series B round of funding yesterday for its take on food waste. Here’s Jenn explaining their method:

The USDA-funded company makes packaging inserts in the form of sachets with 1-MCP technology that get placed in boxes of bulk produce at harvest time. The sachets (see image above) are biodegradable, 3.5cm packets that can be tossed amid the produce and emit a vapor that reduces the respiration rate of produce and increases resistance to the plant hormone ethylene. Doing so slows the decay of produce, increasing its shelf life of fruits and vegetables.

Hazel joins other startups like Stix Fresh, Apeel Sciences and Cambridge Crops in using science to slow down the decay of food, and help save us from our waste problem.


Deliveroo to a Restaurant’s Rescoo
Finally, in a move that sounds straight out of reality TV, UK-based food delivery service Deliveroo launched a “Restaurant Rescue Team” last week.

It is basically what it sounds like: Deliveroo will identify dead or near-dead restaurants on its platform and send out a (presumably peppy and pretty) squad of staffers to offer them a ghost kitchen within the Deliveroo Editions program, as well as helping out with branding, menu development and pricing support.

It’s a smart idea, and one assumes Deliveroo will use their data to identify restaurants that could actually make them money, so it’s not a huge risk for the company.

Soon your Deliveroo-delivered meals may include made-for-TV uplifting stories with a side of joyful tears.

Newsletter: Back-to-School Delivery Apps and High-Tech Sushi Burritos

While my colleagues are across the Pacific this week at the SKS Japan show, I’ve been thinking about college. Specifically, how college and university campuses are a lucrative frontier for food delivery.

Unless you’re in an urban campus like NYU, where delivery, takeout, and street food options already abound, the average college campus has everything a food-delivery service could want in terms of customers: lots of bodies packed tightly together, pulling late hours in locations where food isn’t always a given (e.g., the library).

Third-party delivery services like DoorDash and Grubhub already provide a presence on campuses, along with a much-needed alternative to soggy spaghetti and stale Cheerios. But for bigger corporations who’ve long been a part of the university foodservice world, third-party delivery is a competitive threat to their very relevance on campus.

Not surprising, then, that some of these legacy foodservice companies are starting to respond with their own contributions to delivery. This week food services provider Aramark, who works with more than 400 universities in the U.S., announced it had acquired meal delivery company Good Uncle.

Via Good Uncle’s app, students can order chef-made meals and snacks that are typically cheaper than the average restaurant and don’t have delivery fees. While Good Uncle’s reach is relatively small right now, serving just eight campuses, its business model makes a lot of sense for an older company like Aramark trying to stay relevant to students in the food delivery era.

Exactly how Aramark will leverage this new acquisition remains to be seen, but it’s a smart move to get into the delivery space now. Grubhub has already been working its way onto campuses via its 2018 acquisition of Tapingo, and a growing number of delivery bots on campus brings both new ways to do food delivery for students and more competition for existing players. That includes Aramark rival Sodexo North America, who this year partnered with Starship Robotics to unleash fleets of wheeled bots onto college campuses.

An Eatsa-style Empire in Japan

But back to Japan.

My colleague Chris Albrecht got to experience not one but two awesome food-centric things this week: sushi burritos and high-tech restaurants.

Chris headed over to Beeat Sushi Burrito, a Tokyo restaurant that serves sushiritos and is powered by an end-to-end system that automates most of the order, pay, and pickup process for customers.

As Chris noted, though, UBO, the company behind the restaurant, is more focused on tech than food:

“Instead of selling sushiritos, UBO has developed the entire system from the software platform to the cameras installed in the cubbies that read the special QR codes that identify each order. UBO wants to license its tech stack to other restaurant chains, who can then integrate the automat style of eating into their own locations.”

It’s not unlike the Brighloom (nee Eatsa) system here in the U.S., which is an end-to-end restaurant tech stack that automates much of the customer’s restaurant experience and will do so even more now that it’s licensed some of Starbucks’ technology.

So while a sushirito empire isn’t the end goal for UBO, Beeat Sushi Burrito is another example of how the restaurant experience is getting automated and suggests we’ll see many more iterations of this in future, on either side of the Pacific. And, most likely, in colleges and universities, too.

Until next time,

Jenn

Newsletter: I May Have Been Wrong About DIY

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Spoon readers may recall that a couple weeks back I speculated on DIY and the IKEA-ization of food tech gadgets. You can read the full thesis here, but the TL;DR version is that shipping parts for people to assemble smaller devices at home is cheaper for bootstrapped startups and theoretically not too hard for consumers and thus, DIY could be a viable business model for small companies just starting out.

If my experience with MyBar.io’s DIY cocktail robot is any indication, I may have missed the mark on that prediction. Don’t get me wrong, I think the idea of more gadgets being DIY is still solid, but the actual implementation is going to require a lot more work and time from anyone who wants to sell this way.

My problem with the MyBar wasn’t actually building the cocktail robot. But for a few hiccups, that part was pretty straightforward. All the laser cut parts fit together easily, the pumps worked and the result was a solid machine.

The problem was the software. The accompanying MyBar app almost made the whole enterprise pointless as poor design, weaker wireless connections and repeated crashes made me want to throw the whole thing into Puget Sound.

I didn’t. It eventually worked, and MyBar actually went on to be a hit at my recent party. But the whole experience was instructive because I was expecting a lot from what is essentially a literal one-man operation. Juan Pablo Risso runs MyBar and was super great at designing the hardware, taking my order, shipping it and being responsive to all my customer service complaints. But he’s just one dude.

Risso, and anyone else who wants to try the DIY path to profits can’t just focus on the hardware, they need to spend as much time on the software. A pretty machine that’s easy to assemble is only as good as the app or lines of code that run it.

FarmBot, which will launch DIY farm robotics kits later this year, looks like it might have a promising approach. It’s been running how-to videos on YouTube to walk people through using its software. It’s smart to get these videos out and onto a wildly popular platform for people to familiarize themselves with the app before it’s out in the public.

Do-It-Yourself issues are all solvable, they just require more time finessing the product or possibly more money or bringing on more partners before going to market. DIY is doable for startups; founders just need to realize that they don’t have to do it all themselves.

I think my co-worker is wrong about this
You’d be smart if you subscribed to my co-worker Catherine Lamb’s Future Food newsletter. She’s an expert on alternative proteins like plant-based meats, non-dairy milks and when she writes about something like flora-based ice cream, I seek it out immediately.

But she and I have wildly divergent views on Beyond Meat’s new ground product Beyond Beef. She’s a vegetarian, so she found the new pea-based product to be such an uncanny simulation of meat as to be off-putting.

As a more free-wheelin’ flexitarian, I find Beyond Beef to be delicious. It’s got a great umami flavor, but the texture is the star. It’s more rigid and less spongy that previous iterations of Beyond’s “meat.” I’ve used it in a few pasta sauces and the whole family has enjoyed it. Highly recommend.

I get and will still seek out Catherine’s opinion on many things, but when it comes to Beyond’s new offering, well, we’ve got beef.

A robot that’s just right?
There’s a lid for every pot, or so the saying goes. In the case of autonomous delivery robots, this might actually be true as there are a number of different form factors coming to market (to bring you food from the market).

Not to get all Goldilocks, but on the big end, you have Udelv and its big self-driving vans, then you have AutoX and its regular self-driving sedans, next down you have Nuro and Robomart that make pod-like, half-sized vehicles, and on the small end are cooler-sized rover bots from the likes of Kiwi and Starship.

Squeezing somewhere in between a pod-like low speed vehicle and a rover bot is the new REV-1 from Refraction AI, which launched at the end of last week. This three-wheeled delivery robot is different from other solutions on the market as it only has three wheels, has ditched LIDAR for its navigation, relying instead on cameras mostly, and it’s fast enough to travel in either the roadway or the bike lane.

Being able to use the bike lane opens up new delivery route options for the REV-1 and could make it just the right size for both urban and suburban food delivery.

The thing about any autonomous delivery vehicle, however, is the fact that they only get your groceries to the curb. If you want them brought inside, you have to do it yourself.

Newsletter: The Spoon’s Food Tech 25 Is Here. So Is the Battle for the Drive-Thru.

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One of my favorite things about tech is that it starts a lot of debate. Even within our small team here at The Spoon, we’re constantly on different pages about what’s groundbreaking and what’s just hype, whether something’s progressive or just invasive, how to spell the phrase “food tech.”

So when it came time to put together our annual Food Tech 25 list, which dropped yesterday, you can bet it took a whole lot of discussion to whittle the entire food industry down to just 25 companies.

As we always do, though, the Spoon team — Mike Wolf, Chris Albrecht, Catherine Lamb, and myself — managed to compile a list of companies we individually and collectively, believe are truly impacting the human relationship to food. That impact takes many forms, from the way Creator makes it possible for humans and robots to coexist in the kitchen to Yo-Kai’s vending machine of the future to Goodr’s efforts to use tech to keep food out of the trash and redistribute it to those in need.

I’m hoping readers enjoy this list, but I’m also hoping it sparks some healthy dispute, too. Who else should be on the list? For that matter, who shouldn’t, and why? We encourage you to email us with any additions, subtractions, rants and raves on the matter.

And, most important, congratulations to the companies who made it on this list!

Image via Unsplash.

Drive-Thru Tech Moves Into the Fast Lane

One area of food tech that’s going to raise many more questions over the next few years is the QSR drive-thru. Specifically, how AI is changing the drive-thru and what that means for both restaurant operators and customers.

We’ve been following closely the story behind McDonald’s acquisition of Dynamic Yield, a New Zealand-based AI company whose tech has already been rolled out to almost 1,000 Mickey D’s drive-thru lanes. Then, this week, Clinc, best known for its work in the financial sector, announced a new funding round that will allow the company to expand into other markets with QSR drive-thrus at the top of the list.

Clinc’s using AI-powered voice controls to facilitate more natural conversation between the customer and the ordering system in the hopes of making the drive-thru experience smoother and faster. Drive-thru order times are much longer than they used to be, and companies are betting AI will speed up the order process by making it more accurate and also making more personalized recommendations, like immediately suggesting a pastry to someone when they place their morning coffee order. There are even companies working on making those recommendations not just in real time but also based on existing customer data. One such company is 5thru, which does away with voice altogether by scanning your license plate number, which is attached to a profile stored with the restaurant and can make real-time recommendations based on your existing preferences and order history attached to that license plate number. Cue progressive-versus-creepy debate.

Join the Conversation at The Spoon’s New Food Tech Fireside Event

As much as we value the sound of our own voices over here, though, we actually want to hear more from readers on their thoughts around tech. That’s why we started a new online event, The Spoon’s Food Tech Firesides. Every month, we’ll hold a virtual sit down with one or two food industry innovators and invite the audience to join in the talk via written questions.

First up will be Tessa Price of WeWork Food Labs and Peter Bodenheimer from Food-X talking about food accelerators: what they are, what they’re not, and which companies and entrepreneurs should consider them as a path towards growth.

The event takes place May 30 at 10:00 a.m. PDT/1:00 p.m. EDT. Catch the full details here, and be sure to register early, as there’s limited space available.

May your week be filled with lively debate.

Onwards,

Jenn

Newsletter: Nigella Lawson’s Instagram Competitor and the Coolest Foodtech Startups at Y Combinator

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If you’re a food tech polymath — interested in a little of this, a little of that — then this was your week.

First and foremost: We’ve got your food celebrity fix. This week the Food Network fangirl in me was excited to hear that chef/cookbook author Nigella Lawson has launched a new app that helps food-lovers take better pics of their meals. We might have an Instagram competitor on our hands! Called FOODIM, the app is currently only available in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. But I for one can’t wait to download it and see if it can make my avocado toast (sorry, millennial) look better than my go-to Instagram Ludwig filter.


via GIPHY

Speaking of new and exciting ventures, Y Combinator recently released the lineup for its 2019 Winter cohort: a whopping 200 companies. We sifted through the list to pick out the 10 food tech startups you should know, from a smart coffee scale to autonomous advertising robots.

We were especially excited to see Shiok Meats included in the list. The company is the first cell-based meat company to be accepted into the coveted accelerator, which means that cellular agriculture is heading towards the mainstream — or at least more investment.

Though they’ll be decamping to Silicon Valley for Y Combinator, Shiok Meats is actually based in Southeast Asia — which is where we (and others) are predicting cultured meat will first come to market. I took a deep dive this week into the reasons cell-based meat will first be available in Asia, not Silicon Valley. TL;DR: keep your eyes trained on Hong Kong, people.

Another company in the latest Y Combinator batch is creating a homemade-meal sharing marketplace. Shef is like AirBnB but for home-cooked meals. In the U.S., peer-to-peer home cooking networks are relatively new. In fact, they only became legal a few months ago with the passage of the law AB 626 in California.

In India, however, the home chef marketplace is already pretty hot. This week Chris profiled FoodCloud, a platform connecting home cooks with nearby hungry diners. Guess who’s using it to make a killing? Grandmas.

In other news:

  • Starbuck’s announced it will invest an eye-popping $100 million into a new venture fund to help incubate new up-and-coming food and retail tech startups.
  • The founder and ex-COO of Blue Apron launched a new venture aimed at reversing climate change through regenerative agriculture, starting with heritage chickens.
  • Amazon meal kits made their long-anticipated move into Whole Foods, which will give the e-commerce company another sales channel and more of their absolute favorite thing: data.

Finally — are you in San Francisco? (Or do you want an excuse for a quick trip?) Join us at ArticulATE, our one-day conference on all things food robotics and automation! This week we did a Q&A with Ryan Tuohy of Starship Technologies — the company that makes the wee food delivery rover bots — to get a taste of how automation will shape the future of food delivery. Snag your tickets today to hear him as well as speakers from Google, Sony, Albertson’s and more. Use code NEWSLETTER10 for a 10% discount!

Newsletter: The New Thermomix TM6, Briggo’s 470,000 Robot-Made Drinks and Beyond Beef

This is the post version of our weekly newsletter. If you’d like to get the weekly Spoon in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

There are days when everything goes according to plan, and then there are days where everything blows up. Today, for instance, I had a lovely newsletter all written and ready to launch at 6 a.m. filled with lovely bits about robots, and our upcoming ArticulATE summit.

And then my boss, Mike Wolf, had to go a break the news about the new Thermomix TM6 do-anything cooking device, debuting in Germany and Austria today. The story’s popularity is currently melting our servers, and judging from our Google Analytics, Germans love David Hasselhoff and learning about new Thermomixes!

So here I am, closing in on a 1 p.m. deadline re-writing the newsletter, and I’d be remiss if it didn’t lead off with the TM 6, which now sports a bigger touchscreen, integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and instant access to 40,000 recipes. You should join the throngs of people slamming our site right now to get the full scoop.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention our upcoming ArticulATE food robotics and automation conference happening in San Francisco on April 16th. I did a Q&A with ArticulATE speaker Chas Studor, Founder and CTO of Briggo coffee. In it, he shares that Briggo’s robotic Coffee Haus has made more than 470,000 drinks, and explains why he wants Briggo to be a full-stack coffee company (they source and roast their own beans), and not just a fancy automated latte dispenser

Studor is just one in the killer lineup of speakers we have coming to ArticulATE including high-level execs from Google, Starship, Dishcraft, Cafe X, Sony, Creator, AutoX, Albertsons, Robomart and so many more! Tickets are limited — I know a lot of conferences say that, but for real, get them before they are gone.

Another thing that’s bound to be killer (ironically, with no killing) is Beyond Meat’s forthcoming Beyond Beef, which is a plant-based version of ground beef that The Spoon’s Catherine Lamb wrote about this week. Details are scarce right now, but given how much I love the company’s burgers and yet-to-be-released plant-based sausage patty, I’m optimistic that Beyond Beef will be the base of many of my future bologneses.

As a journalist, I probably was too effusive in my praise of Beyond just then (I like Impossible too! Is that fair and balanced now?), but it’s also honest feedback. However, feedback is one thing when pointed towards a big company about to go public; it’s quite another when you’re rating another human being — like a server in a restaurant.

Jenn Marston wrote about Toast launching a real-time feedback tool for restaurants this week. Basically, guests can leave immediate feedback on their dining experience via tablets and other technology in the restaurant. The goal is to help restaurant staff address issues early and hopefully provide better customer service, and Toast’s new product is actually part of a larger wave of real-time restaurant feedback tools. But being a server is already hard enough, I can’t imagine what it would be like if customers were giving me a thumbs up or down while I try to attend to their every need.

What you need to do, however, is get out there and enjoy your weekend! Happy Friday.

In the 03/08/2019 edition:

Hold Your Bitcoins. Starbucks Isn’t Taking Crypto for Coffee Just Yet

By Jennifer Marston on Mar 08, 2019 12:00 pm
Last summer, Starbucks announced an investment in a company called Bakkt, an open-source platform that enables the buying, selling, and spending of cryptocurrencies. That was pretty much the extent of the news — until now. This week, crypto publication The Block reported that Starbucks had secured “a sizable equity cut” in Bakkt and will be […]

Meet the TM6, Thermomix’s Latest Generation Do-Anything Cooking Appliance

By Michael Wolf on Mar 08, 2019 11:00 am
Back before there were Instant Pots, cooking robots and smart ovens, there was the Thermomix. And today, the original all-in-one kitchen appliance got a little (or maybe a lot) smarter with the launch of the TM6, the sixth generation of the cooking appliance popular with everyone from the world’s top chefs to working moms and […]

ArticulATE Q&A: Briggo’s Coffee Haus has Served 470,000 Cups of Robot-Made Drinks

By Chris Albrecht on Mar 08, 2019 08:30 am
Look in any coffee shop in any city in America (or perhaps even the world) in the morning and chances are you’ll see people lined up to get their first cup of joe. Pretty soon, however, those people could be lined up in front of a robot that automatically and tirelessly slings custom-made lattes 24 […]

Why Philadelphia’s Ban on Cashless Business Is a Good Thing

By Jennifer Marston on Mar 08, 2019 06:29 am
Philadelphia, PA yesterday became the first major U.S. city to ban cashless stores, The Wall Street Journal reports. A new law will “require most retail stores to accept cash” and goes into effect in July 2019. The law would not include parking garages, stores like Costco (which require membership) or hotels, according to the WSJ. […]

MealMe’s Instagram-Meets-Yelp-Style App Helps You Decide What’s for Dinner

By Jennifer Marston on Mar 07, 2019 01:00 pm
The average consumer nowadays will probably use multiple different apps to figure out where to eat on any given night: discovery, recommendations, booking a reservation or ordering food for delivery. As the folks at Hypepotamus recently noted, a new company, MealMe, wants to simplify the food lover’s food journey by bringing its many pieces into […]

Bright Cellars Raises $8.5M Series A for Personalized Wine Delivery Service

By Catherine Lamb on Mar 07, 2019 11:00 am
Unless you’re a sommelier, figuring out which wine to buy at the grocery store (red? white? rose? sparkling? orange?) can be more of a random choice than anything else. Milwaukee-based startup Bright Cellars is trying to make the whole “figuring-out-which-wine-to-buy” thing a little easier with its B2C wine subscription service which matches consumers with bottles curated to […]

Nielsen: Move Into Retail Making Moola for Meal Kits

By Chris Albrecht on Mar 07, 2019 09:00 am
The move into retail has been a smart one for the meal kit industry, as the new sales channel helped drive meal kit growth in 2018, according to a report out this week from Nielsen (h/t Grocery Dive). Overall, Nielsen found that meal kit users (both online and offline) have increased 36 percent throughout 2018 […]

Amazon Closing All Its Pop-Up Stores in Whole Foods and Elsewhere

By Chris Albrecht on Mar 07, 2019 06:45 am
Amazon will close all 87 of its pop-up stores in the U.S., including those nestled inside Whole Foods, by the end of April, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. These small Amazon-branded pop-up stores were typically a few hundred square feet and served as a way to sell Amazon products like Kindles, Echos and Fire […]

Alpro Lets You Have Your Plant-Based Fried Chicken (and Eat the Bucket, Too)

By Catherine Lamb on Mar 06, 2019 03:10 pm
I went vegetarian a few years ago, but one meaty food I still miss is fried chicken. The good news is that starting tomorrow, I’ll have a plant-based option to feed that craving — if I’m willing to take a flight to the UK, that is. In honor of Plant Power Day — which is […]

Newsletter: Food Tech is Going Big Time in 2019

My dad is buying a June Oven.

Normally, I wouldn’t foist the day-to-day tech purchases of the Albrecht family on our Spoon readers, but it occurred to me that this particular decision is somewhat emblematic of where the entire food tech sector is at, and why 2019 could be a watershed year for the industry at large.

Why does my septuagenarian father, who normally doesn’t give a whit about gadgets, want a June? Because it’s automated, repeatable and to him, safer. He likes how the June will cook meat to the proper temperature automatically, that he’ll get the same result every time, and how he doesn’t have to worry about whether or not he left the stove on when he’s out and about. And I’m sure he’s not an outlier.

The second-gen June is among a raft of smart cooking appliances coming to market. The Brava, second-gen Tovala, and the forthcoming Suvie have the ability to turn everyday people into people who cook every day. And as these appliances get more affordable, the audience for them is moving beyond early adopters and into the mainstream.

We’ve seen this greater interest in food tech reflected in our readership. Our audience grew by 186 percent since January of this year, and we had our fourth and biggest ever Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle this October. It’s not just smart ovens that people want to know about. This year, our readers have loved stories on alternate proteins, news about the changing delivery landscape, CBD products, food robots, food personalization and more.

All this is to say that food tech is being called up to the big leagues in a big way in 2019. Speaking of which, you should check out some of our specific predictions for the coming year. Catherine Lamb wrote about the coming rise of CBD edibles. Jenn Marston said to watch out for more ghost kitchens and drone deliveries. And I raised my articulating hand to say that 2019 will be a breakthrough year for food robots.

But before we pop the champagne get all Auld Lang Syne, let’s take a look at the last bit of big food tech news in 2018.

Mike Wolf got the scoop on the much-delayed Spinn Coffee maker raising $3 million. Will this cash infusion mean that the connected coffee maker will finally make it to market?

For those budding or serial entrepreneurs looking for a little help with their food tech ambitions next year, Jenn put together a list of big CPG company accelerators like those from Land O’ Lakes and Coca-Cola.

As Amazon Gos continue to pop up around the country, the debate over who gets to participate in the cashless retail revolution will heat up. One company looking to make the Go experience available to all is All_ebt. We confirmed this week that All_ebt’s users on SNAP assistance will be able to shop (for USDA approved items) at cashless grocery stores like Go.

And finally, if you are looking for a new holiday tradition — may we suggest you be like Catherine and her family and hold a White Castle eating contest which, thanks to the Impossible slider, is now open to vegetarians!

It’s been a fantastic year. Thank you for being with us throughout 2018, we look forward to even bigger and better things in 2019.

Happy New Year!

Be kind.
-Chris

In the 12/28/2018 edition:

Burritos by Air Highlight Noisy Headaches Associated with Drone Delivery

By Chris Albrecht on Dec 28, 2018 08:08 am
There was a lot of chatter about drones this past year: Uber Eats is accelerating its drone ambitions, Zomato acquired a drone company in India, Amazon got a patent for in-flight drone recharging. There was so much activity that my colleague, Jenn Marston predicted that 2019 will be a big year for delivery by drones. […]

Big Food Has Big Plans for Foodtech Accelerators in 2019

By Jennifer Marston on Dec 27, 2018 01:39 pm
Just a little less than a year ago, we highlighted what was then a new trend the foodtech space: major CPGs launching food accelerators geared towards emerging brands. From Chobani to General Mills to Kraft-Heinz, it seemed Big Food had an appetite for assisting younger, trendier, and often healthier brands to grow in 2018. Some […]

Video: Bellwether Cuts Out the Coffee Roasting Middleman

By Catherine Lamb on Dec 27, 2018 09:00 am
“A lot of people don’t realize just how big coffee is,” said Nathan Gilliland, CEO of Bellwether Coffee at the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit. Seriously, though: according to him, coffee is the most consumed beverage in the U.S., with people drinking more cups of joe than bottles of water, wine, and beer combined. Not only are […]

My Whole Family Tried the Impossible Slider from White Castle (and Loved It)

By Catherine Lamb on Dec 27, 2018 06:00 am
My family has a… rather unique Christmas tradition. For Christmas Eve lunch, when the 15-odd crew of us gather at my grandparents’ home outside of Cincinnati, OH, we have a White Castle slider eating competition. The record: twenty-one. (Blegh.) As a vegetarian I usually have to abstain from this tradition. But this year, oh this year, […]

What Amazon Did (and Didn’t) Mention in its Holiday Sales Press Release

By Chris Albrecht on Dec 26, 2018 11:00 am
With Christmas now over it’s time for the annual releasing of the vague holiday sales stats from Amazon! This year, Bezos’ behemoth did not disappoint and shared with us a press announcement filled with unspecific terms like “record breaking” and “millions more.” As we said back in November, though these puff pieces from Amazon are […]

Spinn Raises $3 Million As It Eyes Production Of Long-Delayed Coffee Machine

By Michael Wolf on Dec 26, 2018 09:00 am
Spinn, the grind and brew centrifugal coffee machine that is nearly two years past its original ship date, has raised an additional $3 million in funding that it plans to use to ramp up production of its coffee maker. The funding announcement came as part of an update to early buyers via the company’s community […]

Delivery in 2019 Will Be About Ghost Kitchens, Drones, and Boone, North Carolina

By Jennifer Marston on Dec 26, 2018 06:00 am
The food delivery craze will normalize at some point, but not soon. Right now, it’s a segment projected to be worth $365 billion by 2013, and even companies with inherently undeliverable foods are delivering. All of which is to say, food delivery holds a well-earned spot on the list of 2019 hot topics. Major delivery […]

2019 Will Be a Breakthrough Year for Food Robots

By Chris Albrecht on Dec 25, 2018 06:00 am
Right now the year 2019 is still (slightly) in the future, but 2019 will also be a year where we start to feel like we’re living in the future. The reason for that can be summed up in one word: ROBOTS. The food robots are coming and while they won’t become ubiquitous next year, 2019 […]

All_EBT Allows Those Underbanked to Participate in (Some) Cashless Retail

By Chris Albrecht on Dec 24, 2018 12:00 pm
The number of Amazon Go stores are set to explode over the coming years, and while the grab-and-go convenience stores are a marvel of modern technology, they also raise thorny ethical issues surrounding cashless retail. You can only use Amazon Go if you have an Amazon account, and to get an Amazon account you need […]

Whirlpool Awarded Comprehensive Patent For Kitchen-Centric Computer Vision System

By Michael Wolf on Dec 24, 2018 10:00 am
Over the past couple years, there’s been what can only be described as an intellectual property land grab in the world of computer vision as Google, Amazon and Microsoft file more patents in an effort to establish foundations from which to launch an innumerable amount of AI-driven products and services over the next decade or more. […]

Spoon Newsletter: LG’s HomeBrew Appliance, Spinn Update, World’s First Cell-Grown Steak

This is the post version of our weekly newsletter. If you’d like to get the weekly Spoon in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

When it comes to smart kitchen startups, there is no shortage of companies trying to change how we make our morning cup of joe.

One of the highest profile startups in this space over the past couple of years is Spinn, maker of a grind-brew coffee machine that utilizes a patented centrifugal brewing technology. I was intrigued enough with the company and its tech to plop down over $300 to join the first “batch” of orders in 2016, but almost two years past the promised ship date, I’m still waiting for my Spinn.

The company has hit some snags as they work to get their coffee maker to customers. While many of the Spinn’s early customers have been understandably frustrated, it appears most are hanging on, intrigued by the company’s periodic updates showing progress on the product. If they’re like me, I suspect many are getting frustrated with a company that continues to advertise and sell their overdue appliance, all the while creating more and more distance between new customers and those still waiting at the front of the line.

Still, I know I have no one to blame for investing my money in a Spinn with the knowledge that coffee startup products have been historically risky investments. With companies like ZPM and Arist turning out to be colossal misses and others like Bonaverde sputtering along for years and periodically shipping out products, I knew full well that I might never see the product. In the end, I may have been better off putting my money towards a Tesla like Spoon reader Rebecca:

“I put money down for this machine in Nov. 2016 (I’m a 1st batch-er) and at around the same time my husband put down money for a Tesla Model 3. At least I now have a smooth ride to the coffee shop!”

You can read my latest update on my Spinn journey here.

Coffee isn’t the only category that can be rough sailing for new startups. The home brew market has been notoriously tough as well, with companies like HOPii and iGulu struggling to ship and others like BrewArt and Brewie failing to get much traction.

Still, this hasn’t stopped South Korean consumer electronics giant LG from jumping into the game. The company recently announced they would debut a new home brewing device by the name of the LG HomeBrew at CES.  The capsule-based beer brewing appliance, which makes roughly the same amount of beer as a PicoBrew Pico per cycle, is expected to ship sometime next year.

What’s interesting to me is a company like LG usually only gets into a business if they see a high volume opportunity, which begs the question what will they do to differentiate their product?  While PicoBrew has certainly raised awareness around automated beer brewing, the company has yet to make home brewing a mass-market hobby, something I am sure LG hopes they can do.

Either way, next year promises to be an interesting one when it comes to tech-powered boozing at home. About a month ago, Keurig and AB InBev launched Drinkworks, a capsule-based instant serve cocktail, cider and beerbot machine expected to ship in limited quantities next year.

While home bev-tech space continues to slowly gestate, the pro market continues to move along at a rapid clip. Just this week, a robot powered bartender by the name of UR5e debuted at Broncos Stadium. The new bartenderbot is essentially robotic arm that grabs a beer cup and fills it (through the bottom, no less) for waiting customers.

Moving beyond beverage bots, this week also saw the introduction of a new sidewalk delivery bot from Postmates that goes by the name of Serve. Serve, which looks like the lovechild of Minion and Starship deliverybot, is expected to roll out in Los Angeles over the next year. And speaking of food delivery, this week Chris wrote about the breakup of Amazon and Instacart, something that’s been rumored ever since the big online retailer acquired Whole Foods.

There’s lots more great analysis to catch up from this past week, including looks at the first cell-grown steak and what the new farm bill means for CBD, so make sure to check it out.

That’s it for now. Have a great weekend and we’ll see you next week!

Mike

In the 12/14/2018 edition:

Presto Eats May Be the Most On-Trend Meal Kit Company Yet. But Will It Succeed?

By Catherine Lamb on Dec 14, 2018 11:16 am
Whenever I get word about a new meal kit company, it’s hard not to be immediately skeptical. It’s no secret that meal kits are struggling: Chef’d surprised everyone when it shut down abruptly earlier this year. Boston hyper-local meal kit Just Add Cooking ceased operations this fall. And Blue Apron’s stock continues to underwhelm.

The Denver Broncos Get a Beer Pouring Robot at Mile High Stadium

By Chris Albrecht on Dec 14, 2018 08:04 am
While the Denver Broncos may be in the midst of a losing season, they could win over fans this weekend when a new robot starts dispensing Bud Light at Mile High Stadium (h/t The Washington Post). You’d think that such a mechanical miracle would have a fancy name like the “Robo-Bronco” or the “Elway 3000,” […]

Startups! They’re Just Like Us! Amazon and Instacart Break Up

By Chris Albrecht on Dec 13, 2018 04:00 pm
Like Ben and Jennifer, Brad and Angelina, and Cardi B and Offset*, Instacart and Amazon have broken up. In a blog post today, Instacart announced that it was winding down (consciously uncoupling?) its grocery delivery relationship with Amazon. Like with so many other power couples, this breakup wasn’t entirely a surprise.

The Farm Bill Just Passed — What Does That Mean for the CBD Market?

By Catherine Lamb on Dec 13, 2018 02:08 pm
After months of back and forth, Congress voted yesterday to pass the 2018 Farm Bill. The $867 million bill contains lots of wide-reaching legislative measures, like expanded farm subsidies, SNAP revisions, and permanent funding for farmers markets. But perhaps most interestingly, the bill legalizes the production and sale of hemp at a federal level.

What Bowery’s Latest Funding Round Says About Indoor Farming

By Jennifer Marston on Dec 13, 2018 12:00 pm
New Jersey-based indoor-farming startup Bowery announced yesterday that it has raised $90 million in fresh funding. The round was led by Alphabet Inc.’s GV with participation from Temasek and Almanac Ventures, General Catalyst and GGV Capital (Bowery’s Series A investors), and various seed investors. Bowery produces what founder Irving Fain calls “post-organic produce.”

ImpactVision Raises $1.3M Led by Maersk

By Chris Albrecht on Dec 13, 2018 10:11 am
ImpactVision, a startup that uses hyperspectral imaging to assess food quality, has raised $1.3 million, according to VentureBeat. The round was led by logistics and transportation company Maersk, and brings the total amount raised by ImpactVision to $2.9 million. As we wrote last year about ImpactVision: Using a combination of digital imaging, spectroscopy and machine learning, […]

Postmates Debuts its own Bright-Eyed Delivery Robot

By Chris Albrecht on Dec 13, 2018 06:00 am
You know what you can look forward to in 2019? More robots (but more on that in a later post). Case in point: delivery service Postmates announced today that it has developed its own autonomous delivery rover that will be hitting sidewalks next year. Dubbed Serve, the li’l robot is a bright yellow square-shaped box […]

Hi Fidelity Genetics Raises $8.5M for AI-Driven Plant Breeding

By Chris Albrecht on Dec 13, 2018 04:00 am
Hi Fidelity Genetics (HFG), which combines sensors, data and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve plant breeding, today announced that it has raised an $8.5 million Series A led by Fall Line Capital and Finistere Ventures. This brings the total amount raised by HFG to $11.5 million. There are two parts to the HFG system.

Deliveroo Goes Back to the Future with Brick and Mortar Food Hall

By Catherine Lamb on Dec 12, 2018 04:00 pm
You know how they say that in fashion, everything old comes back around and eventually is new again? It seems that the same might be true for restaurants. This week London-based food delivery startup Deliveroo opened up its first brick-and-mortar location in Hong Kong (h/t CNBC). The so-called Delivery Food Hall is home to five […]

Waitr to Acquire Bite Squad for $321.3M

By Jennifer Marston on Dec 12, 2018 02:00 pm
Online delivery platform Waitr has announced plans to acquire third-party delivery service Bite Squad for $321.3 million. The purchase price is a mix of cash and shares of common stock of Waitr. Both companies serve small- to mid-sized U.S. markets. Waitr is a full platform from online order and delivery. Restaurants partnering with the company […]

Spoon Newsletter: Amazon Go’s Hiring Spree & the Future of Food Storage

This is the post version of our weekly newsletter. If you’d like to get the weekly Spoon in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

It’s no secret that Amazon Go is expanding at a rapid clip, with cashierless retail locations popping up in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, and, soon enough, New York City. This week we took a look at the 338 job listings for the Amazon Go team, spanning everything from Creative Director to Senior Vision Research Scientist, including 7 positions in real estate and construction — the majority of which were posted within this month.

Intriguing. Most notable is the sheer amount of investment Amazon is making in engineers for its Go stores, both on the software (130 jobs!) and hardware (44 jobs) side. Though those numbers might seem eye-popping, they’re pretty necessary — Amazon has plans to open 3,000 stores with its walk-in-walk-out technology by 2021, and it needs to expand quickly if it wants to keep its unique value proposition in the food retail space (read: building checkout-free stores from the ground up).

Next up: cashierless Whole Foods? We’ll see, but it seems like just a matter of time.

In other grocery news, yesterday Farmstead raised $2.2 million for its AI-powered grocery strategy. The company originally tried to disrupt the grocery market by creating small “micro-hubs” which carried strategically stocked items, and were placed deep into residential areas.

However, Chris wrote about how the company seems to be moving away from their original business proposition: It’s operating out of a larger facility in San Francisco and recently revealed that it has been running a pilot program delivering groceries with autonomous vehicles. Since the vans are controlled by code, it means that Farmstead can collect buckets of data on its customers orders, location, and more, which can make delivery routes more efficient. More data, fewer problems.

No matter how it moves forward, Farmstead has a boatload of competition: more than $3.5 billion has been invested in food and grocery delivery startups in 2018 alone. And while $2.2 million is certainly a start, Farmstead will have to keep adding to its warchest if it wants a hope of competing against giants like Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart.

When you start in on the subject of futuristic food delivery, it’s not long before somebody mentions drones. This week, restaurant discovery and food delivery app Zomato took some steps towards acquired TechEagle Innovations, a drone developer.

Uber and Amazon are also exploring drone use for delivery, food and otherwise, but regulations around drone operations aren’t clearly defined — yet. Zomato and TechEagle are both based in India, so maybe we’ll see some drone food delivery action there before here in the U.S.

In other news: Chris wrote a great think piece about whether alterna-meats (think: Impossible burgers, plant-based nuggets, vegan fish) will stump smart ovens. He got started on the quandary when he tried to cook a plant-based Beyond burger in his June, which has a built-in HD camera to automatically recognize food you’re cooking, and the oven though it was a real burger. It may not be a pressing issue yet, but if sales of plant-based protein continue their exponential rise connected appliance companies may have to widen their scope to include specialized settings for alterna-meats.

Finally, Michael Wolf wrote about Tupperware’s new design crowdsourcing contest to find a way to use IoT tech to create a next-gen food container. The goal: a container that’s reusable, affordable, and “easy to use but technologically advanced.” In other words, the dream. Most interestingly, Tupperware puts strong emphasis on making products that appeal to the “Silver generation (55+). They’ve got a fair amount of competition in the smart storage space — to learn more about what’s out there, be sure to watch the video of our panel from 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit.

That’s it from me! Have a great weekend and stay warm.

Over and out,

Catherine

With New Contest, Tupperware Looks To Discover The Future of Food Containers

By Michael Wolf on Dec 07, 2018 07:00 am
Every couple months, I go into my fridge and throw out all the forgotten and fuzzy food. It’s a guilt-inducing process – as it should be – and every time I search for those containers with festering science experiments inside I think there has to be a better way. Of course, there is an obvious […]

Amazon Go is On a Massive Hiring Spree, and Not Just in the U.S.

By Catherine Lamb on Dec 06, 2018 01:44 pm
Amazon Go, the retail store that uses cashierless technology so you can walk in, choose your items, and walk out without stopping to pay, has 338 open listings on its job site (big h/t to Sean Butler). There are a few takeaways from this, but most notable is the sheer amount of investment in engineers on both the […]

Zomato Acquires TechEagle Innovations for Drone Delivery of Food in India

By Chris Albrecht on Dec 06, 2018 11:47 am
Restaurant discovery and food delivery app Zomato announced yesterday that it has acquired drone developer and fellow Indian startup, TechEagle Innovations. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Zomato currently works with 75,000 restaurants to deliver food in 100 cities in India. With the TechEagle acquisition, Zomato plans to build out a network for aerial food […]

Farmstead Raises $2.2M for its AI-Driven Grocery Retail and Delivery

By Chris Albrecht on Dec 06, 2018 07:28 am
Farmstead, an online grocer that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to predict product demand, today announced that it has raised $2.2 million in venture funding from ARTIS Labs, Resolute Ventures, Y Combinator, Red Dog Capital and other investors. This brings the total amount raised by the company to $7.5 million. Farmstead‘s hook is that its stores […]

Will Alterna-Meats Stupefy Smart Ovens?

By Chris Albrecht on Dec 05, 2018 02:00 pm
One of the benefits of using a connected oven like the June is the fact that the built-in HD camera automatically recognizes the food you’re cooking. Throw in a salmon and the June recognizes it, and helps you cook it perfectly. Even if it doesn’t automatically recognize a food, the touchscreen UI is clear enough […]

Newsletter: Are Cashless Restaurants Ethical? Plus, Robots, & Dash Buttons Debut On Family Hub

This is the post version of our weekly newsletter. If you’d like to get the weekly Spoon in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

Hey there, Chris here:

An old boss of mine used to tell me “Your conscience won’t always tell you when you’re right, but it will always tell you when you’re wrong.”

That’s good advice, but there are times when right and wrong aren’t so clear cut. In the food industry, that happens frequently, and this week The Spoon published a couple stories underscoring some of the ethical entanglements that come with innovation in food technology.

Jenn Marston highlighted an interesting discussion unfolding in New York City over the ethics of cashless eateries. A city councilman there wants to ban them, saying that cashless establishments leave out the poor, minorities and the underbanked. He’s not wrong … but getting rid of cash can also improve worker safety (nothing to rob) and improve accounting accuracy.

Which side is right? Is there even a “right” side? It gets tricky, right? If you think you have the right answer, leave a comment or drop us a line to let us know what you think.

Another topic fraught with ethical complications is robotics. Advancement in automation, especially for repetitive, manual tasks, means there will be far fewer jobs for us actual humans. Should we applaud or fear the rise of our robot replacements? The new robo-bartender pouring wine at Cyberdog isn’t probably too much of a threat, I mean, it doesn’t even make margaritas! (Yet…)

But what about the robot waiters at the new DAWN cafe in Tokyo? Japan is unique because their population is aging and the country is in need of labor. To add another ethical twist, the robo waitstaff at the DAWN cafe are being driven remotely by people with disabilities like ALS from their homes. So these robots are actually adding jobs — albeit temporary ones, as the cafe will only be open for a couple of weeks.

In the case of both cashless restaurants and food robots, the questions that arise are as interesting as the answers. Of course, that’s easy for me to say as I have a credit card and am not disabled. But these are the questions we need to raise now, before the robots decide for us.

Of course, there are questions that are simply more fun to ask. Like whether or not you should grow your own weed, Cloudponics has the device for you. It’s self-contained cloud-connected hydroponic GroBox will yield as much as one pound of dry bud in three months. Just be sure to check your local laws, first.

Speaking of getting local, Mike Wolf and Catherine Lamb jetted down to LA this week for our first foodtech meet-up in the City of Angels. The half-day event was jam-packed with great discussions, like the Future of Restaurant panel, where three CEOs gave us their take on how tech is transforming the eatery business. Tech like online reservations platform, Tock, which just raised $9.5 million this week, and Keatz, a Berlin-based startup that is creating ghost restaurant chains across Europe. Will these two startups change how we interact with restaurants? Another good question!

Finally, if you’re looking for an ethical way to spend your weekend, may we suggest drinking in some of Nathan Myhrvold’s high-tech, high-def food photography , or binge Netflix’s The Final Table.

Have a great weekend. Be kind.
-Chris

Stories in this issue:

Ford Motors Is Using Vertical Farming to Feed and Educate Detroit

By Jennifer Marston on Nov 30, 2018 01:00 pm
On Wednesday, Ford Motors and Detroit’s Cass Community Social Services announced a new hydroponic container farm that will grow produce year-round and help to feed Detroit’s food-insecure areas. The 40-foot shipping container was donated by the Ford’s philanthropic arm, the Ford Motor Company Fund. It’s the second part of a larger $250,000 grant from Cass […]

Modernist Cuisine’s Nathan Myhrvold on Photography, Robotics, and Pizza

By Catherine Lamb on Nov 30, 2018 11:55 am
If there’s one man who you can trust to take some out-of-the-ordinary food photographs — ones that both celebrate the natural phenomena of food and dissect it— it’s Nathan Myrhvold. For those out of the know, Myhrvold is a techy, inventive powerhouse: former CTO of Microsoft, founder of intellectual property company Intellectual Ventures, and driving […]

Raise a Glass for the New Robot Bartender in Prague

By Chris Albrecht on Nov 30, 2018 08:24 am
The sitcom, Cheers, probably would have been a lot less funny if the role of Sam the bartender had been played by an robotic, drink-pouring arm. I mean, sure, it can serve up glasses of chablis, but it probably can’t yell out “NORM!” Reuters reports there’s a new robotic cocktail slinger in town, and it […]

Is the Future of Meal Kits Frozen Dinners?

By Chris Albrecht on Nov 29, 2018 03:59 pm
Meal kits have been migrating away from mail order and into grocery aisles over the past year. But is the next step in meal kits a blast from the past?

Video: How Epic Fails Helped Markov Make a Robot that Cooks

By Catherine Lamb on Nov 29, 2018 02:00 pm
“Innovation” is a word that’s thrown around an awful lot in the technology world, and food tech is no exception. But creating actual innovation — that is, solving a problem in a new way — is really, really hard. And it usually requires a lot of failure. Which is why Arvind de Menezes Pereira, CTO […]

Should Cash-Free Businesses Be Made Illegal? This NYC Politician Thinks So

By Jennifer Marston on Nov 29, 2018 12:00 pm
The debate over cashless payments continues, and if you’re not familiar yet with its finer points, trust me, you will be soon enough: arguments both for and against the concept are heating up. Grub Street threw another log on the fire this week when it released an interview with NYC councilmember Ritchie J. Torres, who […]

DeepMagic Combines Computer Vision and AI to Make Mini, Unattended Amazon Gos

By Chris Albrecht on Nov 29, 2018 09:58 am
One of the questions that comes up when talking about Amazon Go cashierless stores is when the grab-and-go technology experience will scale up from a bodega-sized convenience store to a full-on grocery experience. But instead of thinking big, startup DeepMagic is going the other direction: developing small unattended, cashierless micro-retail outlets. Using a combination of […]

BroodMinder Open Sources its Beehive Sensor Data

By Chris Albrecht on Nov 29, 2018 06:00 am
There are plenty of companies out there making sensors that allow beekeepers to monitor their hives. What sets BroodMinder apart is that it makes all of the data generated by its users free and open to the public by default. BroodMinder is a small, bootstrapped company that sells basic hive sensors to the beekeeping enthusiast […]

Samsung Adds Amazon’s Virtual Dash Buttons To Family Hub

By Michael Wolf on Nov 28, 2018 03:13 pm
If you’re like me when you think of Amazon and in-home shopping nowadays, the first thing that pops to mind is Alexa. But before Alexa took over the world, Amazon had introduced another platform to enable effortless in-home shopping for pretty much anything: Dash. First came the wand and later Dash buttons, and eventually Amazon […]

Three CEOs on How Tech is Transforming the Restaurant Experience

By Catherine Lamb on Nov 28, 2018 02:12 pm
When the famed L.A. institution Canter’s Deli opened an outpost in the first Kitchen United (KU) location, the first visitors were two elderly ladies. They had read about the new Canter’s location in the paper and stopped in for some piping-hot matzo ball soup. “That’s when I thought ‘Uh Oh,’” said Jim Collins, CEO of […]

The Spoon Newsletter: European FoodTech Investment, Future of Grocery, SKS Vids

This is the post version of our weekly (twice-weekly, actually) newsletter. If you’d like to get the weekly Spoon in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

Catherine here! Pleasantly full from sampling Pizzametry’s pizza-making robot/vending machine, ready for a weeklong sojourn to Copenhagen to eat as many cinnamon rolls and fermented things as humanly possible.

Speaking of Europe, this week I spent a good chunk of time sifting through piles of data on the state of European food tech. Now, I’m not complaining — we at the Spoon love a good data sift, the nerdier the better. And we uncovered some interesting trends emerging across the Atlantic. Check out our distilled report to find out which companies, investors, and countries are forging the way in European food innovation.

There’s plenty of action right here in our own backyard, too. Take food delivery: a whopping $3.5 billion has been invested in startups in the space this year alone — and it’s only October.

We’re also seeing a lot of companies experimenting with delivery methods. Chris wrote about how Kiwi’s food delivery robots are rolling out in Los Angeles, which he thinks is a smarter play than Uber’s goal to start delivering your pad thai or chicken burrito via drone.

Outside of delivery, robots are also continuing their march into the restaurant space. Chinese hot pot chain Haidilao has teamed up with Panasonic to launch a Berlin location with a completely robot-run kitchen. Maybe good news for consumers, but bad news for people looking for entry-level restaurant jobs.

In the front of house, Jenn wrote about the partnership between Ordrslip, a company which powers mobile apps for restaurants, and payment software Square. Together, they can help smaller mom-and-pop eateries enter the age of mobile ordering and payments — something that’s becoming less of a nicety and more of a necessity.

Jenn also has the story about an epic Twitter thread from the founder of CircleUp about the future of grocery. Ryan Caldbeck’s seventeen-tweet thread told the story of a three hour conversation he had recently with an unnamed CEO of a large grocery chain. He provided a few key takeaways from the conversation, including how low-pricing is a losing strategy and how the old axiom “location is everything” holds less relevancy in an era of delivery-everywhere. What does matter? Product selection optimized by “non-commoditized data”. You can read Jenn’s post about Caldbeck’s thread here.

Also from this week: Chris wonders if 2019 could be the year that we move beyond traditional meat, as plant-based meat continues to gain popularity with vegetarians and flexitarians alike. It’ll be a while longer before the average person can sink their teeth into cell-based (also called cultured or clean) meat, however. In anticipation of its market launch, the USDA and FDA hosted a joint meeting earlier this week to discuss how they would label this emerging technology.

Oh yeah, one more thing: Our photos and video page from Smart Kitchen Summit 2018 is in. We have all our photos up and a bunch of videos (with most being up by next week), so check it out!

That’s all from me! Farvel (Danish for see ya later.)

Catherine

In the 10/26 edition:

Video: Richard Blais Wants to Make a Drone Delivery Service for Donuts
During his fireside chat at the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit, Richard Blais talks about his thoughts on the future of food technology in the restaurant and home kitchen: food delivery, robotics, and drone-delivered donuts.

Product Selection Will Drive Future Growth for Grocery, Says CircleUp’s CEO
Whether it’s about personalizing the shopping experience, changing the way stores are set up or shoppable recipes, most folks in the food industry have an opinion about what will drive future growth for grocery retailers. This week, another voice joined the conversation and offered a new take on where retailers should be looking in terms of future of grocery.

Haidilao and Panasonic Team Up for Robotic Hotpot Restaurant
Haidilao, which operates a hotpot restaurant chain, has partnered with Panasonic to open up a robot-run kitchen in Beijing on October 28. The new automated kitchen will reportedly be used to help Haidilao expand to up to 5,000 locations around the world.

Trendwatch: Is 2019 the Year We Move Beyond Traditional Meat?
Consumption of beef and chicken was estimated to hit a record high this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But traditional meat’s time at the top of the proverbial food chain may be nearing an end, if two new 2019 prediction pieces are to be believed. But how close is that to the truth?

Allergy Fears and Transparency Among Issues at latest USDA/FDA Meat-ing
Earlier this week, scientists, entrepreneurs, and concerned members of the public got together to discuss the future of cell-based (also called “cultured” and “lab-grown”) meat during a joint meeting put on by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). A big issue on the table: labeling.

Video: To Survive, the Future Kitchen Must be Personalized, Flexible, and Emotional
The first panel of the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) North America tackled the disrupted meal journey. Just after Jon Jenkins, Director of Engineering at Hestan Smart Cooking, Dana Cowin, former Editor in Chief of Food & Wine, and Michael Wolf kicked off SKS by discussing how the kitchen has to adjust if it will survive in the future.

Bee Vectoring Technology Uses Bees to Apply Pesticide on Crops
Bees are pretty remarkable creatures (once you get past all that stinging). They pollinate crops, make delicious honey, and if a Toronto-based agtech company, Bee Vectoring Technology, has its way, bees will be used to apply pesticides to crops to help ward off disease and increase yields.

$3.5 Billion Invested in Food Delivery Startups This Year
Investors have a big appetite for food delivery companies this year. The Wall Street Journal reports on Pitchbook data revealing that $3.5 billion has been invested in food and grocery delivery startups so far in 2018.

Kiwi Delivery Robots Expand into Los Angeles
If you live in the Westwood area of Los Angeles, you can see sunshine, the occasional movie star, and now delivery robots shuttling food to hungry local denizens. According to the Daily Bruin, Kiwi Campus started rolling out its delivery robots at the beginning of this month.

Cookitoo Brings Rental Kitchen Marketplace from Down Under to the Bay Area
Australian startup Cookitoo is bringing their online marketplace for underutilized kitchen space to the Bay Area, with hopes to expand into other U.S. cities over the next year and a half.