Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Amazon

While Amazon Struggles With Futuristic Retail, Sam’s Club is Doubling Down on Computer-Vision To Aid Store Exits

An interesting set of stories came out over the past week, which showed how two retail giants are leveraging technology to help consumers get out of the store faster.

One one hand, you have Amazon halving its Go store count to 16 locations, shifting focus to licensing its “Just Walk Out” technology to third-party retailers.

On the flip side, Walmart’s bulk membership club Sam’s Club is investing more heavily to use computer vision to aid shoppers to get out of the store faster.

The key difference? Sam’s Club is using computer vision for receipt verification. Previously, members had to stop at the exit while associates manually checked receipts, causing bottlenecks. Now, cameras at the exit automatically scan carts and verify purchases, allowing members to walk out without interruption. AI works in the background to refine accuracy, while employees are freed up to assist shoppers rather than policing receipts.

Contrast this with Just Walk Out, which is Amazon’s effort to eliminate the checkout experience all together which, it appears for many people, is still too weird and feels a little to close to shoplifting.

As I wrote last year, Just Walk Out is “a radically tech-forward evolution of checkout, but one in which Amazon appears to have widely overestimated just how many people would use it and how easy it would be to implement. Self-checkout fits most shoppers’ needs when they are in a hurry, and there aren’t that many situations where consumers feel they need to skip checkout altogether.”

Is Amazon Working on Something Big in Virtual Restaurants and Digital Food Halls?

What is Amazon up to now?

That was my first thought upon reading a LinkedIn update from Nick Avedesian, a longtime ghost kitchen and virtual food hall executive (and a speaker at The Spoon’s ghost kitchen virtual event in 2020). According to Avedesian, he has just taken a new position at Amazon titled Senior Program Manager, Industrial Launch & Execution, where he will “be supporting projects across our Fresh Food Productions and Amazon Grocery Logistics initiatives!”

Before Amazon, Avedesian held roles at several startups in the ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant space, most recently as the Head of Growth for Byte Kitchens, a startup that raised $6 million in 2022 to build out a digital food hall business. Before Byte, he was with Local Kitchens, which raised $40 million this June to expand its virtual food hall business. Prior to Local Kitchens, Avedesian was the Head of Development and Operations for DoorDash Kitchens.

So, Avedesian, who has spent the past five years overseeing the physical build-out of kitchen spaces tied to onboarding new restaurant brand partners for virtual food halls, is now going to work for Amazon to support projects across Fresh and grocery logistics. Could this mean Amazon plans to launch its own multi-tenant, multi-brand food halls? And if they do, how will those food hall restaurant brands be presented to customers?

While it’s still too early to be certain, I suspect there’s a strong possibility that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. One potential scenario is that Amazon might be planning a combination of in-venue buildouts for new restaurant menus and food offerings from licensed partners at Amazon Fresh stores—similar to what Wonder is starting to do at Walmart. Given Avedesian’s expertise in building both new and retrofit kitchen facilities for multi-brand food halls, I can easily imagine these kitchens, along with customer-facing food hall offerings, being implemented at Fresh locations and possibly other sites as well.

It’s not as if Amazon is entirely new to the idea of ghost kitchens or virtual restaurants. The company was an early investor in Deliveroo, a ghost kitchen and virtual brand pioneer. They are also an investor in Grubhub and recently announced that Amazon Prime users get free Grubhub+ and can order directly from within the app.

Naturally, one update isn’t a guarantee of a new project within Amazon, but there are other small indicators that something is afoot. One of Avedesian’s new coworkers is Kaitlin Garton, a project launch specialist at Amazon, as well as Gavin Worsdale, a manager for industrial launch and execution for Amazon’s worldwide grocery business division.

Amazon’s grocery business has been scrutinized closely as of late, partly because the company hit the brakes earlier this year on the expansion of its Fresh stores and the use of its Just Walk Out technology. However, the company has signaled that they are not getting out of or downsizing their food initiatives, and now you have to wonder if they see an opportunity in using their own kitchens in a virtual food hall business as a growth driver, both in-store (at Fresh and possibly Amazon Go storefronts) and perhaps in centralized kitchens (such as those that produce food for Whole Foods).

The company also has a robust grocery and food delivery business and could begin offering a variety of new home delivery options featuring meals from chefs or restaurant chains.

Whatever they’re up to, we’ll be keeping an eye on things. I’ve reached out to Avedesian to see if he has any specifics on what he’ll be working on, but given Amazon’s notoriously secretive ways, my guess is he’ll likely decline to comment.

Food AI Bulletin: Google’s Robot Breakthrough & Wendy’s Spanish-Speaking AI Drive-Thru Bot

While it’s mid-summer, and while most of Europe (and a good chunk of the American workforce) is taking some well-deserved time off, the AI news hasn’t slowed down one bit.

This week’s Food AI bulletin has updates on a new Google breakthrough on enabling better contextual understanding of our homes (including our kitchens), how Gemini is powering new features in Google’s smart home products, Wendy’s release of a Spanish-language edition of its AI drive-thru assistant, Amazon’s AI refresh of Just Walk Out, a new AI-powered digital tool called the NOURISH to help those living in food deserts make better food choices, a Danone and Microsoft multiyear deal to upskill employees on AI tools, and a survey that shows South Korean students prefer AI-generated healthy food options over more conventionally developed products.

Here we go:

Google’s New Robot Breakthrough Could Make It Easier to Train Your Robot Butler to Cook or Grab You a Cola

In the past, robots were challenged in doing useful tasks with autonomy, in part because they didn’t generally understand what they were seeing and how it related to a person’s specific living situation, etc.

That’s begun to change in recent years, in part because we’ve seen significant advances in robot navigation as researchers using new tools such as Object Goal Navigation (ObjNav) and Vision Language Navigation (VLN) have allowed robots to understand open commands such as “go to the kitchen.”

More recently, researchers have created systems called Multimodal Instruction Navigation (MIN), which enable robots to understand both verbal and visual instructions simultaneously. For example, a person can show a robot something like a toothbrush and ask it where to return it using both the spoken request and the visual context.

Now, Google researchers have taken things a step further by creating what they call Mobility VLA, a hierarchical Vision-Language-Action (VLA). This is a “navigation policy that combines the environment understanding and common sense reasoning power of long-context VLMs and a robust low-level navigation policy based on topological graphs.”

In other words, showing a robot an exploration video of a given environment will allow it to understand how to navigate an area. According to the researchers, by using a walkthrough video and Mobility VLA, they were able to ask the robot and have it achieve previously infeasible tasks such as “I want to store something out of sight from the public eye. Where should I go?” They also write that they achieved significant advances in how easily users can interact with the robot, giving the example of a user recording a video walkthrough in a home environment with a smartphone and then ask, “Where did I leave my coaster?”

One of the biggest challenges around having robots be useful in a food context is that the act of cooking is complex and requires multiple steps and contextual understanding of a specific cooking space. One could imagine using this type of training framework to enable more complex and useful cooking robots or even personal butlers that will actually be able to do something like fetching you a cold beverage.

You can watch a robot using this new Gemini-enable navigation framework in the video below:

“You’re Food Delivery Is Here”: Google Bringing Gemini Intelligence to Google Home

Speaking of Google, this week, the company announced a new set of features coming to their suite of smart home products that their Gemini model will power. The new features were revealed as part of an announcement about a new version of the company’s smart thermostat and its TV streaming device. According to the company, they are adding Gemini-powered capabilities across a range of products, including their Nest security cameras and its smart voice assistant, Google Home.

By underpinning its Nest camera products with Gemini, the company says its Nest Cams will go from “understanding a narrow set of specific things (i.e., motion, people, packages, etc.) to being able to more broadly understand what it sees and hears, and then surface what’s most important.” Google says that this will mean that you can ask your Google Home app questions like “Did I leave my bikes in the driveway?” and “Is my food delivery at the front door?”

During a presentation to The Verge, Google Home head of product Anish Kattukaran showed an example of a video of a grocery delivery driver which was accompanied by an alert powered by Gemini:

“A young person in casual clothing, standing next to a parked black SUV. They are carrying grocery bags. The car is partially in the garage and the area appears peaceful.”

After what’s been a somewhat moribund period of feature-set innovation for smart homes over the past couple of years, both Google and Amazon are now tapping into generative AI to create new capabilities that I’m actually looking forward to. By empowering their existing smart home products like cameras and their smart home assistants with generative AI models, we are finally starting to seeing leaps in useful functionality that are bringing the smart home closer to the futuristic promise we’ve been imagining for the last decade.

Wendy’s Pilots Spanish-Language Drive-Thru AI Voice Assistant

This week, Wendy’s showed off its new Spanish-language capabilities for its Fresh AI drive-thru voice assistant according to announcement sent to The Spoon. The new assistant, which can be seen in the Wendy’ s-provided b-reel below, has a conversant AI bot that seamlessly switches to Spanish, clarifies the order, and upsells the meal.

Wendy's Demos Fresh AI Drive-Thru in Espanol

According to Wendy’s, the company launched its Fresh AI in December of last year and has expanded it to 28 locations across two states.

This news comes just a week after Yum! Brands announced plans to expand Voice AI technology to hundreds of Taco Bell drive-thrus in the U.S. by the end of 2024, with future global implementation across KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. Currently, in over 100 Taco Bell locations, the company believes the technology will enhance operations, improve order accuracy, and reduce wait times.

Amazon Previews New Generative AI-Powered Just Walk Out

Last week, Amazon gave a sneak peek at the new AI model that powers its Just Walk Out platform.

In a post written by Jon Jenkins, the VP of Just Walk Out (and, as Spoon readers may remember, the former founder of Meld and head of engineering for the Hestan Cue), we get a peek at the new AI model from Amazon. Jenkins writes the new technology is a “multi-modal foundation model for physical stores is a significant advancement in the evolution of checkout-free shopping.” He says the new model will increase the accuracy of Just Walk Out technology “even in complex shopping scenarios with variables such as camera obstructions, lighting conditions, and the behavior of other shoppers while allowing us to simplify the system.”

The new system differs from the previous system in that it analyzes data from multiple sources—cameras, weight sensors, and other data—simultaneously rather than sequentially. It also uses “continuous self-learning and transformer technology, a type of neural network architecture that transforms inputs (sensor data, in the case of Just Walk Out) into outputs (receipts for checkout-free shopping).”

Academic Researchers Creating AI Tool to Help Americans Living in Food Deserts Access Better Food Options

A team of researchers led by the University of Kansas and the University of California-San Francisco is tackling the issue of food deserts in the U.S. with an AI-powered digital tool called the NOURISH platform. According to an announcement released this week about the initiative, the group is supported by a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator program and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The project aims to provide fresh and nutritious food options to the estimated 24 million Americans living in areas with limited access to healthy food. The platform will utilize geospatial analyses and AI to identify optimal locations for new fresh food businesses, linking entrepreneurs with local providers and creating dynamic, interactive maps accessible via mobile devices in multiple languages.

Danone Announces Multiyear Partnership with Microsoft for AI

An interesting deal focused on bringing AI training to a large CPG brand’s workforce:

Danone has announced a multi-year collaboration with Microsoft to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) across its operations, including creating a ‘Danone Microsoft AI Academy.’ This initiative aims to upskill and reskill around 100,000 Danone employees, building on Danone’s existing ‘DanSkills’ program. Through the AI Academy, Danone plans to enhance AI literacy and expertise throughout the organization, offering tailored learning opportunities to ensure comprehensive training coverage. The partnership will initially focus on developing an AI-enabled supply chain to improve operational efficiency through predictive forecasting and real-time adjustments. Juergen Esser, Danone’s Deputy CEO, emphasized that collaboration is not just about technology but also about fostering a culture of continuous learning and innovation. Microsoft’s Hayete Gallot highlighted the significance of AI in transforming Danone’s operations and the broader industry, aiming to empower Danone’s workforce to thrive in an AI-driven economy.

My main critique of a deal like this is that it essentially brings training and curriculum to train employees from an AI platform provider with skin in the game in Microsoft. As someone who’s long weaned myself off of most of Microsoft’s software products, I’d hate to go into a curriculum that will mostly be largely Microsoft AI tools training, not really broader AI training.

It is a good deal for Microsoft, with a smart focus on upskilling by Danone. Let’s hope Microsoft’s training brings a broad-based AI tool belt to the Danone workforce that is not entirely walled-gardened within Microsoft’s products.

Survey: Korean Students Prefer AI-Driven Health Foods

While some Americans are becoming more concerned about AI’s impact on our lives, it appears that at least some South Korean students are embracing AI in the development of healthier food options.

According to a recent survey conducted by Korea University Business School, young South Koreans are more likely to trust and purchase healthy functional foods (HFF) developed using artificial intelligence (AI) than those created through traditional methods. The study involved 300 participants and revealed that AI-developed HFFs scored higher in trustworthiness, perceived expertise, positive attitude, and purchase intention. The AI model, NaturaPredicta™, uses natural language processing to analyze botanical ingredients, significantly reducing the time and cost required for new product development. However, researchers noted the potential bias due to the relatively young demographic of the participants and suggested broader studies for more representative results.

Food Tech News Show: Blackbird Launches Pay, DoorDash Delivers Big Numbers

This week on the Food Tech News Show, we are joined by Kristen Hawley, long-time restaurant tech journalist who writes for Fast Company, Eater and her own site, Expedite.

The Food Tech News Show

Blackbird Launches Blackbird Pay

This week, Blackbird, founded by Resy and Eater’s Ben Leventhal, launched Blackbird Pay. Blackbird is a blockchain-based guest loyalty and payments platform designed to better connect restaurants and diners. Diners can use the app to pay at participating restaurants with stored credit card information or loyalty points, and Blackbird charges a 2% processing fee per transaction, lower than standard restaurant POS systems.

Andrew Simmons Ends Pizza Automation Experiment

Andrew Simmons announced the end of his Pizza Roboto project after investing over $300K. His post on Linkedin details the challenges he faced around spinning up new locations and the mixed success of his pizza subscription plan. This news coincides with RestoGPT launching a pizza subscription program based on Simmons’ plan.

DoorDash Sees Digital Orders Surge Despite Industry Headwinds

Amid financial pressures, DoorDash reported a 19% year-over-year increase in total orders and a 23% rise in revenue in its Q2 2024 earnings report. The company noted that digital ordering remains resilient compared to declines in other restaurant industry channels.

Yum Brands to Expand Voice AI Across Taco Bell Locations

Yum! Brands announced plans to expand Voice AI technology to hundreds of Taco Bell drive-thrus in the U.S. by the end of 2024, with future global implementation across KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. Currently in over 100 Taco Bell locations, the company believes the technology will enhance operations, improve order accuracy, and reduce wait times.

Amazon Unveils New Just Walk Out AI Model

Amazon revealed details of its new AI model powering the Just Walk Out platform, despite removing the feature from Fresh stores earlier this year, indicating the platform’s continued development and potential.

You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,, or by clicking play below. Don’t forget to like, rate, and review!

Amazon Gives a Peek at the New AI Model Powering Just Walk Out Platform

This week, Amazon gave a sneak peek at the new AI model that powers its Just Walk Out platform.

In a post written by Jon Jenkins, the VP of Just Walk Out (and, as Spoon readers may remember, the former founder of Meld and head of engineering for the Hestan Cue), we get a peek at the new AI model from Amazon. Jenkins writes the new technology is a “multi-modal foundation model for physical stores is a significant advancement in the evolution of checkout-free shopping.” He says the new model will increase the accuracy of Just Walk Out technology “even in complex shopping scenarios with variables such as camera obstructions, lighting conditions, and the behavior of other shoppers, while allowing us to simplify the system.”

The previous Just Walk Out AI model was built in 2018 using generative AI and machine learning models available at the time. This technology, while advanced for the time, could only power a sequential processing of key variables – shopper movement and location in the store, what they picked up, and the quantity of each item—each action processed one after another. This sequential processing worked in most simple scenarios, but complex scenarios like multiple shoppers accessing the same area at a given time, would lead to potential errors that would need to get sorted out at checkout.

The new system differs from the previous system in that it analyzes data from multiple sources—cameras, weight sensors, and other data—simultaneously rather than sequentially. It also uses “continuous self-learning and transformer technology, a type of neural network architecture that transforms inputs (sensor data, in the case of Just Walk Out) into outputs (receipts for checkout-free shopping).”

Jenkins writes that the new system will be better at navigating these complex situations that would result in potential errors with the previous system. He detailed a scenario where a shopper picks and puts down multiple varieties of yogurt, and while doing so, another customer reaches for the same item or the freezer door fogs up and obscures the cameras’ view. In this scenario, the new system processes inputs from various sources such as weight sensors on the fridge shelves and continuously learns from these inputs, eventually deciding which are most important in order to accurately sort out who took what.

The post also gave an update on the current installed base of Just Walk Out technology. According to Amazon, Just Walk Out is currently in 170 third-party locations, including airports, stadiums, universities, hospitals, among other locations. The system is installed in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada and the company plans to double the number of third-party stores with the technology in 2024. 

The Food Tech News Show: Apple’s Building Home Robots!

Join us at 1 PM Pacific where we’ll be talking about the food tech stories of the week!

This week, we’ll be joined by Scott Heimendinger, former founder of Sansaire and current builder of the next big idea in home knives at Seattle Ultrasonics.

The live stream can be watched below.

We love robots - FTNS

Here are the stories we’ll be talking about:

Apple is working on robots for the home! – From Bloomberg: “The original concept for the robot was a device that could navigate entirely on its own without human intervention — like the car — and serve as a videoconferencing tool. One pie-in-the-sky idea within Apple was having it be able to handle chores, like cleaning dishes in a sink.

Google has used its latest AI to create a new tool that creates a fusion recipe between two culinary cultures. Lifehacker: “According to Google,  Food Mood can provide creative inspiration for your next meal. Select two countries and this fusion recipe generator will create one for you. You can choose whether you would like to cook a starter, a soup, a main course or a dessert. For example, why not try a unique blend of flavors from Sri Lanka and Uganda or mixing influences from Oman and Belgium? This experiment was created by artists Emmanuel Durgoni and Gaël Hugo, and uses Gemini 1.0 Pro via Vertex AI.”

Whirlpool has let the entire Yummly team go. Appliance giant Whirlpool has laid off its entire Yummly team. According to industry sources, the company recently laid off all the employees for the recipe and cooking app and website. These sources tell the Spoon that it’s unclear what the company plans to do with the property it acquired in 2017.

Amazon Pulling ‘Just Walk Out’ from Amazon Fresh Grocery Stores – According to a story published in The Information, Amazon is planning to pull its Just Walk Out cashierless technology from its large-format grocery store, Amazon Fresh.

One Robot Pizza Chain Operator Breaks Down the Cost Each Part of the Pizza-Making Process – For small operators (and big ones as well) in the pizza business, Andrew Simmons’s posts on Linkedin have become must-read material.

Amazon Details Usage of Generative AI-Created Synthetic Data to Train Just Walk Out Technology

For a while now, we’ve known the basic gist of how Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology works: A combination of computer vision, machine learning, and other sensor data helps enable a friction-free shopping experience in which customers pick items off the shelf and walk out the door without ever having to stop at a cash register.

But in a recent blog post by Amazon’s retail technology team, the company explained how it all worked in greater detail than we’ve seen in the past, including how the company has been using generative AI to train its Just Walk Out platform for long-tail cases that are rare but entirely possible in the unpredictable environment of retail.

According to Gérard Medioni, vice president and distinguished scientist at Amazon, the company uses a generative AI called a generative adversarial network (GAN) to create synthetic data for training Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology. The Just Walk Out team used datasets from millions of AI-generated synthetic images and video clips mimicking realistic, and sometimes rare, shopping scenarios, including variations in lighting, store layouts, and crowd sizes. According to Amazon, this training using generative AI-created synthetic visual data enables Just Walk Out to recognize and properly interpret millions of customer actions.

“When the customer exits, having an accurate account of their purchases is critical,” Medioni said.

The company also went into detail about how Just Walk Out and its Amazon One palm-based bioauthentication technology does – and don’t – work together. According to Amazon, the two systems operate independently of each other, keeping a person’s biometric information associated with their payment separate from Just Walk Out. When a shopper enters the store, the Just Walk Out system assigns the shopper a temporary numeric code, which serves as their unique digital signature for that shopping trip. When a shopper exits, the code disappears. When they come back, they get a new code.

Medioni says that Just Walk Out associates a person’s “pixels” to the one-time payment code assigned for that trip and the products they pick up off the shelf.

“Just Walk Out tech doesn’t collect any biometrics. All we need to know is where that person is on the floor, and where their hands are in relation to the store’s merchandise.”

According to Medioni, the system is sophisticated enough to track groups of shoppers assigned to a single payment instrument, and the system can create a single receipt for a group shopping trip.

“We had a tour bus that came in one day, and they had 90 people all paying with a single credit card,” Medioni adds. “Even if people leave the store separately and we can still keep track of the group’s purchases.”

While Amazon has shown mixed signals regarding its retail footprint, the company appears to remain interested in developing its technology platform for usage by other retailers. My guess is they’ll likely see some smaller retailers and non-grocers (like stadiums/sports venues) adopt the technology, but larger grocers will remain reticent to jump on board with technology developed by a competitor.

If you’re interested in how generative AI will change food retail, join us at the Spoon’s Food AI Summit on October 25th in Alameda!

The Weekly Spoon: Sugar Alternatives Are the New Sweetness for Food Tech

Here in America, we like the sweet stuff. Whether it’s sodas, candies, or ice cream, we consume more added sugar than any other country.

Not surprisingly, all this sugar consumption can lead to health issues like diabetes, which has given rise to a massive sugar replacement industry offering up a variety of synthetic replacements like aspartame or sucralose and natural ones like stevia and monk fruit.

But as it turns out, even low or no-calorie alternatives sometimes come with their own health risks. For example, synthetic replacements like sucralose and saccharin have been shown to spike blood sugars, wreak havoc on your gut health and even become toxic when exposed to high temperatures. And while many have embraced natural alternatives like stevia and monk fruit sweeteners over synthetic sweeteners in recent years, recent research has shown that the sugar alcohol erythritol, which is often added to stevia and monk fruit as a sweetener, has been linked to heart attack and stroke.

Despite these problems, consumers continue to eat up sugar substitutes around the world. In fact, the market for sugar substitutes is expected to grow from $18 billion in 2022 to over $28.5 billion by 2032, fueled by increasing demand for healthy lifestyles and growing interest in sugar alternatives in Asia.

This continued interest in sugar replacements could mean a big payoff for those innovators who can create alternatives that sweet taste without all the downsides of the current offerings. This week The Spoon covers two of these startups creating new sugar alternatives that represent a significant departure from those currently on the market.

First, there’s Oobli, which has figured out how to sweeten its teas and chocolates using a sweet protein called brazzein. While brazzein is a sweet protein found in the Western African oubli fruit, it is incredibly costly and difficult to extract. Oobli (which takes its name from the fruit) has discovered a way to create a chemically identical version of brazzein via microbial fermentation. They launched their chocolate line earlier this year and launched their sweet teas this week.

The other company we covered this week is Incredo, which doesn’t replace sugar but maximizes its sweetness properties while minimizing its impact on the body. The company does this by binding cane or beet sugar to a natural carrier, which then maximizes the sweetness as it hits the sweet taste receptors on the tongue. According to Incredo, their sugar reduction solution results in 30-50% less added sugar in foods.

As I wrote earlier this week, I had a chance to try out the Oobli peach sweet tea on stage at the SynBioBeta conference, and I think the company may have a hit on its hands. It tasted just as good as the sugary sweet stuff!

If you get a chance to try either of these new sugar alternatives – or know of one we haven’t written about – drop us a line! 

This is the online version of our newsletter. If you’d like to get the Spoon in your mailbox, subscribe here.

Is Amazon Serious About Underground Delivery?

In 2017, Amazon was awarded a patent for something one might find in a science fiction novel: underground package delivery.

And while it seemed like they ripped a page out of a Hugh Howey novel, the argument for underground delivery tunnels – no carbon emitted into the air, reduced traffic, etc.- kinda made sense. 

But even so, the idea still sounded a bit nuts, and for the next few years, there wasn’t any signal the company was serious about the idea until last month when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was seen checking out the prototype for an underground delivery to home solution from Pipedream Labs. 

Spoon readers might remember Pipedream Labs as the company with big plans to build an underground delivery network of pipes around cities to shuttle food or other items all the way to the home. The company is working with Wendy’s and other restaurants in the near term – you gotta pay the bills after all – but still has hopes to build the bigger vision of a citywide underground delivery network.

In fact, in a recent Twitter thread, Pipedream CTO Canon Reeves said the company is now courting master-planned community builders with a system that would deliver into the home.

Check out the full article on PipeDream Labs here.

Google Wants to Put an End to Single-Use Plastic, So It Put Out a Call For New Ideas

We all know plastic is bad for the environment, but despite all the videos of plastic bottles and wrappers floating in oceans and piling up in landfills, billions of single-use containers are used and tossed every year.

Google has decided to do something about it, so it’s launched a call to food companies with sustainable packaging to submit their products to the Google Single-Use Plastics Challenge. According to the company, Google will test out those products that meet state and federal requirements and pass muster with Google’s Food program standards in the company’s U.S.-based cafes and MicroKitchens. Finalists will have the opportunity to pitch their products to Google and “leading global food operators” to scale them across Google’s U.S. offices.

Reading the fine print, Google is prioritizing reusable serviceware and packaging but will also accept packaging concepts that are edible, fiber-based, or unlined serviceware/packaging. The company will accept some post-consumer recycled packaging for certain categories, and while it will accept glass and aluminum, it makes clear these are “not preferred.” Those with plastic, bio-based, compostable, multi-layer, or PFAS-lined products need not apply.

While big corporates have made progress in recent years in eliminating plastic in the form of straws and drink containers, a whole bunch of plastic is still being used in food service and cafeterias every day. Google’s effort goes further by emphasizing food service plastic in all forms, including plastic containers and wrappers, a huge problem that has gotten less attention than plastic bottles, straws, and cutlery.

For those interested in applying to the Google Single-Use Plastic Challenge, you’ll need to hurry since the deadline is May 30th.

Restaurant Tech

Wow Bao Launches the ‘Hot Buns Club’, a $99-a-Year Web3 Loyalty Program

Wow Bao, the digitally nimble Asian food startup that’s expanded nationwide in recent years through an asset-light virtual restaurant model, announced the launch of its NFT program last week. The new NFTs, called Digital CollectaBaos, will be proof of membership in a new super-fan tier called the Hot Buns Club within the company’s Bao Bucks loyalty program.

Wow Bao laid out a web3 vision last November that will eventually include such far-out concepts as metaverse vending machines, but before they take their steamed buns fully into the virtual realm, it’ll start onboarding dedicated customers through its NFT-powered subscription program for $99 bucks a year.

The initial benefits for Wow Bao NFT holders include 10% off delivery orders, double Bao Bucks points on purchases, 10% off merch orders, and contest giveaways.

The Wow Bao NFT program is built on the Polygon network, a Proof of Stake consensus algorithm blockchain that proponents say is more environmentally friendly than many other Ethereum-based digital currencies. Despite the blockchain underpinnings of its new loyalty supertier, Wow Bao is – at least for the time being – downplaying the crypto angle given all the bad press the technology has gotten over the past year, positioning it instead as a digital collectible with associated member benefits.

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

Finalists for NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge Include Astronaut Oven & Air Protein Technology
 

Last week, NASA announced the finalists for the final phase of the Deep Space Food Challenge, a competition designed to help explore and better understand how these agencies can feed humans in space. The US Space Agency awarded $750,000 in prizes in the second phase of its Deep Space Food Challenge, and the winning teams will compete in the final phase of the challenge and $1.5 million in prize money.

The kickoff of the third phase is the culmination of almost two years of competition that saw hundreds of applicants get whittled down to 28 competing in the first round to eleven finalists for phase 2, and as of last week, eight companies competing in phase 3.

The following five US teams are among the eight finalists in phase 3:

  • Air Company of Brooklyn, New York, developed a system and processes for turning air, water, electricity, and yeast into food.
  • Interstellar Lab of Merritt Island, Florida, created a modular bioregenerative system for producing fresh microgreens, vegetables, mushrooms, and insects.
  • Kernel Deltech USA of Cape Canaveral, Florida, developed a system for cultivating mushroom-based ingredients.
  • Nolux of Riverside, California, created a solution that mimics the photosynthesis that happens in nature to produce plant- and mushroom-based ingredients.
  • SATED (Safe Appliance, Tidy, Efficient, and Delicious) of Boulder, Colorado, developed a space cooking appliance that would allow astronauts to prepare a variety of meals from ingredients with long shelf lives.

Read the full story here on The Spoon.

Is Jeff Bezos Eyeing The Buildout of an Underground Delivery Network?

Today, Wendy’s announced they will trial an underground delivery system later this year in partnership with Pipedream Labs. According to the announcement, the system will deliver orders to customers via a carside pick-up portal using “autonomous robots” that traverse an underground pipe system.

Spoon readers might remember Pipedream Labs as the company with big plans to build an underground delivery network of pipes around cities to shuttle food or other items all the way to the home. The company is working with Wendy’s and other restaurants in the near term – you gotta pay the bills after all – but still has hopes to build the bigger vision of a citywide underground delivery network.

In fact, in a recent Twitter thread, Pipedream CTO Canon Reeves said the company is now courting master-planned community builders with a system that would deliver into the home.

According to Reeves, the Home Portal system would look something like this:

Pipedream Labs Home Portal. Photo: Canon Reeves

And the delivery robots look like this:

Pipedream Delivery Robot. Image Credit: Canon Reeves

Building these systems into new master-planned communities makes lots of sense for a couple of reasons, the first of which is retrofitting existing homes for underground to in-home delivery would be extremely hard and very expensive. Master-planned communities present greenfield build opportunities for concepts like this, where customers can be presented with the option as a feature in a new home, and the cost of the home system can be rolled into a mortgage. Home builders can also build out the delivery infrastructure as they lay down other infrastructure, either going underground or along the community right-of-way areas (as they did in Atlanta in a public right-of-way).

But even if the company just focuses on new build opportunities, the idea is still a little far-fetched, the kind of far-fetched where you almost need a utopia-curious billionaire who invests in crazy ideas to get behind something like this.

Someone like, I don’t know, Jeff Bezos:

Jeff Bezos watching a demo of Pipedream Labs Home Portal. Image Credit: Canon Reeves

According to Reeves, Bezos stopped by last month to check out the home delivery prototype. And while Reeves didn’t say anything beyond that – like Bezos is interested in investing in the system – one could speculate that the guy who founded the biggest online ordering marketplace in the US might just be curious about what a future with an underground delivery network might look like.

Could he be there on behalf of Amazon? Maybe. It’s not like Amazon doesn’t invest in delivery infrastructure, and, in fact, the company invested around $40 billion from 2014-2020 and continues to do so. And, let’s not forget, Amazon itself has explored the idea of underground delivery before and was granted a patent for the idea in 2017.

And even if this isn’t an Amazon thing, but a billionaire-investor-Jeff-Bezos-thing, Bezos has shown a penchant for investing in big ideas like space flight, and if Elon can build underground tunnels for shuttling people around in Teslas, Bezos would be entirely in his right to think sending items around underground in pipes might have a future.

Amazon Now Lets You Buy Physical Goods in Virtual Worlds. Could It Work For Food?

This week, Amazon announced a new platform called Amazon Anywhere that enables the discovery and purchase of physical products from within virtual environments such as virtual and augmented reality and video games.

The platform, which the company showed off through an integration with an augmented reality pet game called Peridot (from the same company that made Pokemon Go), allows customers to buy physical products without leaving the game environment. Game players and VR explorers can see product details, images, availability, Amazon Prime eligibility, price, and estimated delivery date as they would on Amazon’s website. They tap the “buy” button and check out using the linked Amazon account without leaving the game, and from there, products will ship out and can be tracked and managed via the Amazon app or website.

Today in-game and virtual world purchases are limited to digital goods like currencies or digital characters, but Amazon’s new platform opens up a potentially interesting new way for players to buy physical products. The Peridot demo enables players to buy merch like t-shirts, hoodies, phone accessories, and throw pillows with game art on them, but what if shelf-stable food or food-related items were sold from within the virtual environment? Would emerging CPG brands, which often use DTC strategies early on, see this as a potential new channel to market?

While the idea is an intriguing one, the main problem with Amazon’s platform is it’s Amazon’s platform. Amazon is a relatively expensive place to purchase food, and smaller emerging DTC brands tend to prefer selling on their website using white-label e-commerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce/WordPress, Magento, and Squarespace until they finally graduate to retail.

However, in-world physical product purchases might get traction with bigger multichannel CPGs. Amazon tried to court big CPG brands early on with its IoT-powered Dash buttons, but eventually abandoned the project in 2019 (though they are still selling a Dash smart shelf). The company also tried to get a return on its massive investment in Alexa through sales of everyday consumables, but the division’s recent struggles show consumers, for the most part, still like to click buttons on a web page or an app to complete a purchase.

Which brings us back to Amazon Everywhere. The use of virtual or augmented worlds will grow in time, meaning Amazon’s early effort to build a platform could pay big dividends in the long run. Brands could tie products to stories or characters through experiences that would be pretty much impossible through more traditional advertising. With in-world purchases, they would be able to convert in an entirely new way.

While it’s too soon to tell if consumers will bite, I have no doubt Amazon will attempt to find out. My guess is we’ll also see other players like Facebook and Microsoft follow Amazon’s lead and build out VR and video game in-world purchase platforms for physical products as well, but for now, it looks like Amazon has got the jump on them.

Watch as Seahawks Fans Use Amazon’s Just Walk Out Technology at Lumen Field

Now that the Geno Smith-led Seahawks have become a much better team by letting Russell Wilson walk out the door, they’re letting their fans do a little walking of their own.

This season, their home stadium (Lumen Field) became the first NFL stadium to deploy Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology. The technology, which allows users to pick up items and walk out without going to a cashier, first debuted by Amazon down the street at Amazon Go. Since then, cashierless checkout startups have proliferated, but none with the market traction of Amazon’s pioneering platform.

The new deployment at Lumen also includes the company’s Amazon One technology, which allows consumers to tie their credit card to their palmprint, enabling them to scan in with their palm and walk out when they are done shopping.

Amazon’s VP of Just Walk Out (and former smart kitchen entrepreneur), Jon Jenkins, pointed out why this type of technology makes sense in a sports stadium scenario.

“Just Walk Out is so important in sports because the last thing you want to do at a stadium is stand in line waiting for a beer while a huge play happens.”

You can watch a video of the Just Walk Out-powered Lumen Field store below.

Lumen Field's District Market, powered by Just Walk Out technology by Amazon

The Weekly Spoon: A Farmers Markets in the Metaverse & The Coming Home Robot Invasion

This is the Spoon Food Tech newsletter. To get it delivered to your inbox, sign up here.

Come With Me as I Walk Around a CPG Farmers Market in the Metaverse

Last night I walked around a farmers market. I spent about an hour walking from stand to stand, having conversations, and learning about new CPG products. Someone even offered me free candy. It was a blast!

And all of it happened in the metaverse. I attended a virtual pop-up farmers market put on by an organization called The Metamarket. The event featured over a dozen different CPG brands, each of which had a virtual exhibit stand in a virtual 2D Sims-like world that allowed me to interact with both the products and the people.

The platform The Metamarket used for the event is Gather, a virtual world/metaverse startup that started during the pandemic and has since raised $76 million in funding. Gather has some interesting features, including one called ‘proximity chatting’ in which a video pop window emerges for chats with people in the space (see below), making it a nice mashup of video game meets professional networking tool.

Come to SKS Invent on October 12th to Explore The Future of Food & Cooking. Use discount code NEWSLETTER to get 20% off tickets!

Robot Butlers & Roombas: Elon and Amazon Are Getting Serious About Building Home Robots

Last week, Amazon announced they were acquiring iRobot. The acquisition of the maker of the popular Roomba robotic vacuums comes less than a year after Amazon unveiled its own home robot, Astro.

The news came the same week we got a sneak preview of Optimus, Tesla’s robotic humanoid. After the preview, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he thinks the impact of the Optimus could someday exceed that of the company’s hugely popular electric vehicles.

“I’m sort of surprised that you know people are like analysts out there are not really understanding the importance of the Optimus robot,” Musk said. “My guess is Optimus will be more valuable than the car long term.”

While Musk has suggested his company’s robot will someday provide a nearly inexhaustible amount of “labor” (of the mechanized, non-human variety), he also outlined how the robot will also help us at home with everyday tasks.

“It should be able to, you know, please go to the store and get me the following groceries, that kind of thing,” he said.

For Amazon, much of the early hot takes on the company’s purchase of iRobot frame it as part of a larger effort by the online giant to better understand its customers. And no doubt, adding the home mapping capability of the Roomba to the already rich data profiles Amazon has through our purchase history and Alexa voice interactions will give the company an even better contextual understanding with which to sell us even more stuff.

But I also think Amazon is serious about becoming a leading platform builder in home robotics. Robotics are just a natural evolution of the smart home – something us old-timers used to call ‘home automation’ – and I expect the roboticization of the home will ultimately lead to a multi-hundred billion dollar market. Today’s consumer robot market – mostly products like the Roomba – is forecasted to be a $9 billion market next year. One can only imagine how big it will be once multipurpose, life-assisting robots that can do more than just clean our floors are widely available.

Read the full story at The Spoon.

Food Waste 

From Grad School Project to $115 Million Series B: Afresh’s Matt Schwartz on Building an Operating System for Fresh Food

While in graduate school Matt Schwartz had an epiphany.

At the time, he was learning about the food system as part of Stanford University’s Earth Program and also participating in an internship with food tech investor Dave Friedberg, and it was this combination of advanced education with a front-row seat to food tech innovation that helped him to see the future.

“That’s when I came to believe that things were heading towards fresh,” Schwartz told me this week in a Zoom interview. “That we need to move towards a more nutrient-dense form of eating, a less calorie dense form of eating, to be able to nourish the world sustainably. And those two things converged into saying, I want to accelerate this fresh technology thing.”

The focus on fresh food soon led Schwartz and his eventual cofounder of Afresh, Nathan Fenner, to do a graduate study in which they talked to close to one hundred people involved in the food supply chain. It wasn’t long before they realized that, despite the increasing importance of fresh food for food retailers, there wasn’t any technology optimized for managing it.

You can read the full story at The Spoon. 

Q&A: Goodr’s Jasmine Crowe Talks About Her Plan To Build a $100 Million Company Addressing Food Waste & Food Insecurity

Last month, food waste reduction and food insecurity startup Goodr raised an $8 million Series A funding round.

When Jasmine Crowe founded the company, the Atlanta-based startup used technology to help large food service providers reduce food waste. Over the past two years, Goodr has expanded its business to provide expertise to companies looking to provide food to those in food insecure situations.

I wanted to catch up with Crowe to ask her about how the business has evolved, the challenges of raising venture funding as a Black founder, and where she sees the company going in the future.

You can read the full interview transcript below.

Before this most recent round, you’d managed to operate without a lot of outside funding.

We really just bootstrapped. To date have done more revenue than we’ve done in funding, which is something I’m personally proud of.

What was some of the thinking behind deciding to go after new funding?

It was really about scaling up to meet our demand. We had so many big deals that we were bringing in, so many new customers that we were onboarding. Because we have always been really lean and capital efficient, we’ve also had a very small team. So it really got down to ‘hey, we need to, we got to get more people in the door.’ And so that’s kind of really what happened. I was like, ‘I’ve got to raise money because I’ve got to hire more people.’

This round comes at a time where we are seeing a pullback in venture funding. You were right in the midst of that pullback.

We definitely were 100% all involved with that market change and it was scary. It was really scary because we just didn’t know. When I started raising funds in the market in late September, October of last year, and I remember one of my investors was like, ‘oh, Jasmine, your numbers are so great, look what you’ve done.’ At the time, I had only raised like $1.4 million or whatever prior to so we were like ‘you’re going to be able to raise this money so easily, like this is going to be the fastest money you’ve ever raised’. And it definitely wasn’t that. I think we had some struggles with it.

To read the full interview, click here. 

Food Delivery

‘Late Empire Sort of Stuff’: Wonder Faces Backlash Over Environmental Impact of Vans

By and large, the residents of the northern New Jersey suburbs where Wonder delivers agree that the well-funded startup’s food tastes great.

What they can’t agree on is whether having hundreds of Mercedes diesel vans idling curbside each night while Wonder employees prep meals is a good idea at a time when most experts agree climate change is fast becoming an existential crisis.

A story published in the Wall Street Journal details the bickering that has broken out amongst residents of South Orange and Maplewood, New Jersey, about the omnipresent vans zig-zagging through their towns each night.

On the one hand, some feel the Wonder trucks are an unnecessary and carbon-emitting extravagance.

“There’s a stigma of calling the Wonder truck and having them idle outside your house for the decadent purpose of making you dinner in a truck,” resident Will Meyer told the Journal. “It feels like this is late empire sort of stuff.”

And then there are those who don’t see a problem with the trucks.

“It doesn’t bother me,” said Lisa Bressler, who didn’t see the trucks being much different from Amazon and UPS trucks driving around town. “I guess I like unnecessary luxuries.”

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

Future Food

Here’s Our Q&A With Ranjani Varadan, Who Just Became Shiru’s New CSO After a Decade With Impossible Foods

When she became the first scientist ever hired by Pat Brown at Impossible Foods in 2011, Ranjani Varadan became a pivotal part of the R&D team for one of the earliest entrants in the modern plant-based meat industry. Over the next decade, she would play a part in helping guide Impossible through many technical milestones, from the very early days in its stealth lab all the way to commercial scaleup.

And now, Varadan hopes to witness many more seminal moments in the alternative protein space as part of her new role as the Chief Science Officer for Shiru, a company that makes ingredients for CPG companies building plant-based meats and other alternative proteins. Varadan will oversee all aspects of R&D, from discovery and screening to ingredient pre-production.

I sat down with Varadan to talk to ask her about her time at Impossible, the decision to come to Shiru, how she believes her new company differentiates itself in a fast-growing alt protein market, and what she sees going forward for the plant-based foods and alternative protein industry. Answers have been edited slightly for readability.

You can read the full interview with Ranjani at The Spoon.

Podcast: Building a Next-Generation Ingredient Company with Shiru’s Jasmin Hume

As the former head of food chemistry for Eat Just, Dr. Jasmin Hume thought there was a lot of white space for innovation when it came to food ingredients.

She knew food companies would increasingly need new and novel ingredients they could build plant-based food products around, but felt there wasn’t enough research being done to discover these critical building blocks.

So she decided to start a company to do just that. So far, the company has raised over $20 million and recently hired Impossible Foods’ former VP of R&D and strategic ingredients.

On the podcast, Jasmin and I discuss a variety of topics, including:

  • How the alternative protein market is evolving from early fully vertically integrated brands to companies like Shiru that build ingredients and solutions for a variety of companies
  • The new cohort of food companies utilizing AI and ML to build the next generation of food
  • How what Shiru is doing with precision fermentation is different from that of Perfect Day and others trying to create animal-identical proteins
  • Where Jasmin sees the ingredient industry going in the future
  • Plus lots more!

You can listen to the full episode at The Spoon or, as always, find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Food Robots

Ottonomy Debuts a Swervy, Customizable Delivery Robot in Ottobot 2.0 as it Closes $3.3M Seed Round

Earlier this month, Ottonomy, a maker of autonomous delivery robots, unveiled its second generation robot, the Ottobot 2.0, alongside its announcement of its $3.3 million seed funding round according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The new funding, which is led by pi ventures, also has Connetic Ventures, Branded Hospitality Ventures, and Sangeet Kumar (Founder & CEO of Addverb Technologies) joining the round.

As you can see in the video below, the second-gen Ottobot introduces several features, including a new swerve-drive capability (which Ottonomy calls “crab mode”) in which the Ottobot’s drive train can turn each wheel independently. This allows the Ottobot 2 to spin in place (aka ‘zero-radius turning’) and swerve as it navigates (vs. the more tank-style mobility of robots without a swerve drive) towards it destination. This type of advanced maneuverability allows robots to weave through tight spaces, something that the Ottobot will need with its emphasis on both indoor and outdoor delivery.

To read the full story, click here!