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The Weekly Spoon: Nomiku’s Food Delivery Biz, Anova Nano Review, Amazon Go Is Growing (And So Are We!)

People love our newsletters, so we thought we’d start also making them available as posts. If you want to get the Weekly Spoon in your inbox, just subscribe here. On to this week’s newsletter…

As the worlds of technology and food continue to collide, one trend gaining traction is the pairing of kitchen appliances with food subscriptions.

The idea makes sense. Hardware-only business models are nearly impossible to pull off nowadays, as the combination of ever-faster commoditization cycles, fickle consumers and Amazonification of online commerce make for rough sailing for those startups setting sail into consumer technology. Unless your product becomes a viral sensation – which does happen periodically – you’ll need to develop a sustainable long-tail revenue model (or have a plan for one), especially if you plan to raise funding for your new business.

Consumer sous vide pioneer Lisa Fetterman knows full well the difficulty of building a consumer hardware business. The author and mother of two started Nomiku back in 2012 and has been evangelizing her sous vide circulators ever since, but at a sub-$300 price point, it was hard to pencil out the P&L for a product made in the lofty-rent space of San Francisco.

Fetterman and Nomiku also had to convince consumers to use a product which, while delivering amazing results, also requires a significant behavior change on their part.  For a generation raised on frozen food, having them bag, submerge and sear to get dinner on the table is a big ask.

Which is why Fetterman decided to incorporate the entire meal journey – meal planning, food, and cooking – into the Nomiku experience.  The company introduced their Nomiku Meals last year, a food delivery service that allows consumers to mix and match sides and entrees in prepackaged portions and prepare them in 30 minutes. After starting with a 300 person pilot last May, today Nomiku Meals is available in eight states and makes up the majority of the company’s revenue.

It’s too soon to tell whether Nomiku will ultimately succeed in the face of competition from meal kits companies and Amazon, but from the looks of it, things are off to a good start.

You can read my full piece about how Fetterman is transforming Nomiku into a sous vide powered food delivery company here.

Nomiku isn’t the only company making news in the world of sous vide. Anova started selling their latest-generation circulator to the general public the past week on Amazon, and after picking up a Nano last week at the Anova Kitchen, i put together an appropriately-sized review of the diminutive device. And finally, the Spoon’s Jenn Marston visited a new food hall that uses sous vide to cook everything on the menu.

With the July 4th holiday, it was a light work week for many in the States. To celebrate America’s independence in proper Spoon fashion, Chris Albrecht put together some ideas for a food tech Fourth. Catherine catches us up on efforts by Suggestic to incorporate AR into your diet planning.

If you’re on the east coast, be forewarned: The Spoon in headed your way. We’ll be hosting our first Spoon Food Tech meetup on the future of sustainable seafood in beautiful Providence, RI.  Ashley tells me the summers in Rhode Island are the best in the whole US, and while this Pacific Northwest resident is skeptical, I’m eager to eat some lobster and meet some of you at Providence Pilotworks on the 17th.

As you may have noticed, we’ve been growing here at The Spoon. We’ve added both Chris and Catherine as full-time writers this year, and have my old Gigaom friend Jenn Marston giving us lots of great insights every week.  It’s a great crew, and I’m very thankful to be working with them every day, and I hope you are enjoying their writing and insights into the fast-changing world of food tech.

With so much content, we’ve decided to start publishing the Spoon newsletter twice a week. I know it may not seem like that big of news, but for me, it’s yet another small sign of the exciting growth we’ve been experiencing.

It’s also been extremely gratifying to see what started out as a small idea to bring together the leaders across food, appliances, and tech to map the future of food at an event in 2015 grow into a company. It’s hard to believe that in the short time since we launched SKS in 2015, it now takes place on three continents; we just finished the inaugural SKS Europe, and I’m headed back to Tokyo for our second SKS Japan in August. And of course, we’re busy ramping up for the big show in Seattle in October.

I’m thankful to the sponsors who support us, and all the speakers who share insights about their businesses and where this exciting market is going. And of course, we’re thankful to all those who come to our events and participate in our growing community. We couldn’t do it without you.

Mike

P.S. Looking to get smart on food tech and meet industry insiders? Join our food tech Slack already

In the 07/06/2018 edition of the Weekly Spoon:

Suggestic Experiments with Augmented Reality to Help You Stick to Your Diet Plan

By Catherine Lamb on Jul 06, 2018 09:38 am
What if you could wave your phone over a restaurant menu and see “through” the descriptions, instantly assessing which dishes are best (and worst) for you to eat? That’s exactly what Bay Area startup Suggestic is working on. When users first open the free app, they set up their goals (lose weight, have more energy) and dietary […]
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Lisa Fetterman Is Reinventing Nomiku As a Sous Vide Powered Food Delivery Business

By Michael Wolf on Jul 05, 2018 02:00 pm
When Lisa Fetterman started Nomiku, all she wanted to do was get the word out about sous vide cooking. “When I first saw these machines in Michelin-starred restaurants,” said the CEO, book author, and mother of two, “I was like ‘Woah, this is it.’” By ‘it,’ Fetterman is referring to the technique employed by the […]
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Video: For Big Food, ‘We’re Past Innovation and Onto Disruption’

By Catherine Lamb on Jul 05, 2018 12:30 pm
Tyson Foods produces a massive one out of five pounds of protein consumed in the United States. Barilla isn’t any slouch either, with its 30% dry pasta market share in the US and 10% worldwide. That’s a whole lotta chicken and pasta, so when execs for the investment arms of these two food giants took the […]
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The Spoon Meetup in Providence: Blue Tech + Sustainable Seafood

By Catherine Lamb on Jul 05, 2018 08:17 am
This month we’re taking our food tech meetups on the road — to Providence, RI! We’re teaming up with SeaAhead and the City of Providence for this event, all about blue tech and sustainable seafood. Through panels and a town hall meeting, we’ll explore how innovation and technology can improve sustainability while still meeting the rising global […]
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Second Seattle Amazon Go Store is Bigger, How Long Until Cashierless Whole Foods?

By Chris Albrecht on Jul 04, 2018 06:00 am
In addition to expanding the number of locations of its Go stores, Amazon is also working on making them bigger. According to a story in Geekwire, Amazon is prepping a second Amazon Go location in Seattle opening in the Fall of this year, and this one will be 3,000 square feet, compared with the 1,800 […]
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A Nano Review Of The Anova Nano

By Michael Wolf on Jul 03, 2018 05:00 pm
When Anova named their newest product the Nano, there was no mistaking the message they were trying to get across: that this, the latest in their lineup of sous vide circulators, is their smallest yet. And so in the spirit of the Anova Nano, I present to you what is an appropriately small review of […]
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Celebrate a FoodTech Fourth of July

By Chris Albrecht on Jul 03, 2018 02:00 pm
It’s weird when a major holiday falls on a Wenesday, right? Do you take just the day off? The first half of the week? The last half? The whole week? Regardless of how much time you take off, we can help make your time at the grill a great one with these FoodTech finds. FOOD […]
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Video: Regional Perspectives on the Connected Kitchen Market

By Catherine Lamb on Jul 03, 2018 01:00 pm
At Smart Kitchen Summit Europe last month, a topic on everyone’s mind was the future of the connected kitchen market. In fact, we had a whole panel devoted to analyzing the regional perspectives of the smart kitchen marketplace: Chris Albrecht of The Spoon moderated the conversation between Holger Henke of Cuicinale, Robin Liss of Suvie, […]
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Impossible Burgers Take to the Skies in L.A. – N.Z. Flight

By Catherine Lamb on Jul 03, 2018 12:00 pm
Airplane food gets an (admittedly deserved) bad rap, but airlines are working to change all that with fresh, vertically-grown lettuce, local craft beers, and, now, plant-based burgers. Yesterday, Air New Zealand sent out a tweet announcing that the buzzed-about Impossible Burger will be available to Business Premier passengers on their Los Angeles to Auckland flight […]
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Is NYC’s Sous Vide Kitchen the Future of Food Halls?

By Jennifer Marston on Jul 03, 2018 11:00 am
Last week, Sous Vide Kitchen (SVK) joined NYC’s sprawling food hall scene, where associations with celebrity chefs are the norm and $300 caviar is a thing. Comparatively, SVK’s take on the food hall concept is far more down to earth, focused mostly around technology and how it can streamline and improve the process of ordering […]
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Second Seattle Amazon Go Store is Bigger, How Long Until Cashierless Whole Foods?

UPDATE: Since the time of this post, we learned that the second Go store is actually smaller.

In addition to expanding the number of locations of its Go stores, Amazon is also working on making them bigger. According to a story in Geekwire, Amazon is prepping a second Amazon Go location in Seattle opening in the Fall of this year, and this one will be 3,000 square feet, compared with the 1,800 square feet of its first location. It’s a baby step, but it’s another move towards creating a full-on (everything) store with Amazon grab-and-go technology.

We are big fans of the Amazon Go experience, and we actually called it out specifically in our innovative FoodTech 25. Relying on smartphones and a series of high-tech sensors and cameras to keep track of inventory and charge customers, the store is cashierless, allowing people to walk in, pick up what they want, and walk out. No checkout lines, no cash registers.

The existing Seattle store can feel a bit cramped, though that could be because when we visited it, the store was overrun with lookeeloos and journalists snapping pictures. Nonetheless, it certainly had more of a bodega vibe to it.

The additional 1,200 square feet at the next location could have any number of uses. Obviously, Amazon could add more packaged items, perhaps even produce, which was lacking in the first location. But the space could also be used for a larger prep area to assemble more pre-made sandwiches (Amazon says people love the Chicken Bahn Mi) or up meal kit production. Or they could just use it to hawk more of their Echo and Fire devices.

Though Amazon didn’t officially announce the second Seattle store location (it confirmed Geekwire’s story), news of it did break on the same day the company announced its 2018 Prime Day sale, which this year includes discounts at Whole Foods, Amazon’s brick and mortar grocery chain.

The new Amazon Go location will still be much smaller than a Whole Foods, but it will begin to scale up Amazon’s in-store tech; its computer vision will need to scale up and work seamlessly with more items, more people and more activity. These incremental steps will continue to train this technology, ratcheting up until eventually we (presumably) get the first cashierless Whole Foods store.

In addition to this bigger version of Go, Amazon is set to open new retail locations in San Francisco and Chicago. The Chicago store will reportedly be 625 square feet. As these announcements roll out, we will continue to track not only the location, but also the size of new Go stores to see how quickly they evolve.

Report: Microsoft Working on Amazon Go-like Cashierless Tech

Microsoft is reportedly working on its own cashierless checkout technology in a bid to take on cross-town rival, Amazon, according to a story in Reuters.

The reported technology is similar to the Amazon Go store experience, where what you put in your cart is automatically tracked and charged to you without the need to go through a checkout line or cashier. Reuters goes on to report that Microsoft has engaged in talks with Walmart about the technology.

If true, the news isn’t that surprising for a number of reasons. First, Amazon Go uses technology like computer vision and artificial intelligence to know what you put (and keep) in your bag. Computer vision and AI are two areas of focus for Microsoft research. Second, we’ve known since December that Walmart is exploring its own computer vision-based cashierless store experience (and last month, the retailer killed its Scan and Go approach to cashierless shopping).

Finally, and most obvious, nobody wants to cede even more of the future of shopping to Amazon, and grocery shopping is no exception. Amazon already owns Whole Foods and is expanding discounts and two-hour delivery for its 100 million-strong Prime members. Plus, the first Amazon Go store is very impressive, is expanding into Chicago and San Francisco, and absolutely should be replicated elsewhere.

Moves like these have sent grocery retailers scrambling to compete. Target and Walmart are expanding their two-hour delivery service. Albertsons partnered with Instacart, and Kroger just invested more heavily in Ocado to build out twenty rapid-delivery robot warehouses here in the U.S.. Not to mention Walmart experimenting with its own fridge-to-fridge delivery service similar to Amazon Key.

Plus, other smaller players are working on their own versions of cashierless tech. All_ebt has Amazon Go-like ambitions for those on food stamps. Caper has its own computer vision and deep learning smart checkout cart. And AI Poly, whose CEO is speaking at our Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle, has its own autonomous market in the works.

So while Microsoft provided a big “no comment” for Reuters, the idea of the Redmond giant working on such technology shouldn’t come as a news flash to anyone following the industry.

The Food Tech 25: Twenty Five Companies Changing the Way We Eat

Here at The Spoon, we spend most days writing and thinking about those who are transforming what we eat. No matter whether a startup, big company, inventor, or a cook working on new approaches in the kitchen, we love learning the stories of people changing the future of food. So much so, in fact, that we wanted to share those companies that most excite us with our readers.

And so here it is, The Spoon’s Food Tech 25: Twenty Five Companies Changing the Way We Eat

What exactly is the Food Tech 25? In short, it’s our list of the twenty five companies we think are doing the most interesting things changing the way we create, buy, store, cook and think about food.

As with any list, there are bound to be a few questions about how we got here and why we chose the companies we did. Here are some answers:

How did we create this list?

The editors of the Spoon — myself, Chris Albrecht, Catherine Lamb and Jenn Marston — got together in a room, poured some kombucha (ed note: except for Chris), and listed all the companies we thought were doing interesting and important work in changing food and cooking. From there, we had numerous calls, face-to-face meetings and more glasses of kombucha until we narrowed the list down to those you see here.

Is this an annual list?

No, this is a list of the companies we think are the most interesting people and companies right now, in mid-2018. Things could definitely look different six months from now.

Is this list in a particular order or are the companies ranked?

No, the list is in no particular order and we did not rank the 25 companies.

Why isn’t company X on the list?

If this was your list, company X or Y would most likely be on the list (and that’s ok with us). But this is the Spoon’s list and we’re sticking to it (for now – see above).

And of course, making this list wasn’t easy. There are lots of companies doing interesting things in this space. If we had enough room to create runners-up or honorable mentions, we would. But we don’t (and you don’t have enough time to read a list like that).

So, without further ado, here is the Spoon’s Food Tech 25. If you’re the type that likes your lists all on one page, click here.


EMBER
Ember bills itself as “the world’s first temperature control mug,” which basically means you can dictate a specific temperature for your brew via the corresponding app and keep your coffee (or tea or whatever) hot for as long as you need to. The significance here isn’t so much about coffee as it is about where else we could implement the technology and relatively simple concept powering the Ember mug. The company currently has patents out on other kinds of heated or cooled dishware, and Ember has cited baby bottles and medicine as two areas in which it might apply its technology. And yes, it allows you to finally stop microwaving all that leftover morning coffee.

 


INSTANT POT
The Instant Pot is not the highest-tech gadget around, but its affordability, versatility, and speed have made this new take on the pressure cooker a countertop cooking phenomenon. It also has a large and fanatical community, where enthusiastic users share and reshare their favorite Instant Pot recipes across Facebook groups and online forums. By becoming the first new breakout appliance category of the millennial generation, the Instant Pot has achieved that highly desirable (and rare) position of having its brand synonymous with the name of the category; people don’t go looking for pressure cookers, they go looking for an Instant Pot.

 


DELIVEROO
We chose Deliveroo out of the myriad of food delivery services because of their Editions project, which uses customer data to curate restaurant hubs in areas which have unfulfilled demands for certain chain establishments or cuisine types. This model allows food establishments to set up locations with zero start-up costs, and also gives customers in more restaurant-dry areas a wide variety of delivery food options. Essentially, it’s cloud kitchens meets a food hall, with some heavy analysis to help determine which restaurants or cuisines customers want, and where. These “Rooboxes” (hubs of shipping containers in which the food is prepared) show that Deliveroo is a pioneer in the dark kitchen space, and are doing serious work to shake up the food delivery market.

 

AMAZON GO
There are any number of ways that Amazon could have been included in this list, but its Amazon Go stores are what we think will be the real game changer. The cashierless corner store uses a high-tech combination of cameras and computing power, allowing you to walk in grab what you want — and leave. That’s it. At its first location in Seattle, we were struck by how seamless the experience was. As the locations broaden, this type of quick convenience has the potential to change the way we shop for snacks, (some) groceries and even prepared meal kits.

 


INGEST.AI
Restaurants have more pieces of software to deal with than ever. In addition to all the delivery platforms they are now plugged into, there have to deal with payments systems, HR software, and inventory management software. And right now, none of those applications talk to each other. Created by a former IBM Watson engineer, Ingest.ai promises to extract and connect the data from ALL of those disparate software pieces and tie them together to give restaurant owners a holistic, data-powered view of their business. It also helps them have more precise control over their business and automate tasks like food ordering and staff scheduling.

Want to meet the innovators from the FoodTech 25? Make sure to connect with them at North America’s leading foodtech summit, SKS 2019, on Oct 7-8th in Seattle.

NEXT

For Good Eggs, the Real Competition is the Smaller Players

Yesterday when online grocery delivery service Good Eggs announced that it had raised a $50 million Series C round, much of the news coverage focused the looming threat of Amazon + Whole Foods. But I think the more interesting question to ask is how will Good Eggs fend off the smaller competition, including the small stores of Amazon Go.

To be sure, giants like Amazon, Walmart and Albertsons are threats to any startup in the grocery space. And in one sense, Good Eggs is taking them head-on. Good Eggs CEO Bentley Hall told me in an interview yesterday that he wants his company to be a “complete solution” for customers, offering everything from fresh produce to booze to meal kits, all delivered within a two-hour window.

But a broad selection and fast delivery are table stakes for an online grocer anymore. To set itself apart from its bigger competitors, Good Eggs has created a niche: focusing on locally sourced food, only carrying products that meet a strict set of quality and ethical criteria, employing its own drivers rather than contracting out, and growing slowly and only within California (for the foreseeable future).

This attention to sustainable and ethical detail will play well in lefty California locales like the Bay Area and Los Angeles, giving Good Eggs a sizeable customer base where its niche approach can differentiate against those bigger players. Perhaps even more so now that Amazon Fresh is no longer selling goods from local third-party vendors.

But it’s on the smaller end of the spectrum where I think Good Eggs will face its bigger challenge.

One startup that could give Good Eggs a run for its money is Farmstead. Also servicing the Bay Area, grocery delivery service Farmstead uses a combination of micro-hubs and artificial intelligence to heavily curate and optimize inventory management to reduce over-ordering. It’s almost like a mini version of Good Eggs, with a few key distinctions:

First, Farmstead’s micro-hub stores are small, so they can be set up in more residential neighborhoods — closer to the people they deliver to. Good Eggs is sticking with the bigger store strategy; they have one in the Bayview area of SF and, with their new funds, they’re building another big facility in West Oakland.

Farmstead’s micro-hubs also serve as pickup points. So rather than waiting at home for a delivery, customers can pull up to Farmstead location while they are already out and about and a Farmstead runner will load their grocery order directly into their trunk. Additionally, if Farmstead’s AI works as promised, it will help the company control inventory and costs by knowing what its customers want and sourcing the exact right amount to meet demand.

Hall brushed aside concerns, this saying that after being in groceries for six years, Good Eggs has the experience Farmstead, which only recently got its seed round, lacks. “You need to know a lot about the supply chain,” Hall said. And it’s not just supply chain knowledge; Hall went on to describe all the technology Good Eggs has built over the past six years, including its own demand forecasting, warehouse management, driver tools and website.

Good Eggs is also focused on being the “complete solution” for its customers. Farmstead, on the other hand, is splitting its attention between managing its own stores and licensing its inventory AI platform out to other restaurants and grocery stores.

But part of Good Eggs’ complete solution is in meal kits, which consumers want more of as part of their grocery store experience. It’s not in the meal kits themselves where Good Eggs will face competition, but in the convenience — namely, where and how meal kits are sold.

This is where Amazon comes in one of their potential competitors with its Amazon Go stores. The cashierless grab-and-go concept sets up in dense urban areas, which means that hungry city dwellers can literally walk into an Amazon Go on their way home from work and grab a meal kit to match their appetite. Granted, Amazon Go is only in Seattle now, but it’s expanding to San Francisco and Chicago, and you can bet it won’t stop there.

And if going to the Amazon corner store is too much of a hassle, Chef’d and Byte Foods announced a partnership today that will let workers grab and pay for a meal kit from a special fridge located inside office buildings on their way out the door. If that catches on, it will offer a convenience that’s hard to match.

My point isn’t that Good Eggs is doomed, or that it was a bad investment by Benchmark. Grocery is a big market that won’t be winner take all. But when looking at grocery competition, we shouldn’t let the shadows cast by Amazon and Walmart keep us in the dark about the smaller upstarts who could change the game.

Amazon Cashierless Stores are Go-ing to SF and Chicago

The Seattle Times reports that Amazon will be expanding its Amazon Go store locations into San Francisco and Chicago.

The cashier-less Amazon Go stores let you walk in, grab what you want, and leave. The first location opened in Amazon’s home city of Seattle earlier this year. There had been hints about Amazon expanding to SF and Chicago, but The Times noticed job listings for store managers in the two cities, and recently received confirmation from Amazon. Reportedly, the stores will go in the Loop District in Chicago and near Union Square in SF. No word on when these new locations will open.

Amazon Go uses combination of computer vision and in-store sensors to automatically track what customers take, then charges their credit card accordingly — without the need to interact with anyone. We here at The Spoon loved the experience of shopping there, and noted how Go’s compact, hyper-efficient, and fast shopping process is perfect for dense city environments like SF and Chicago.

In addition to typical corner store goods, Amazon Go also offers fresh sandwiches and meal kits. The latter of which is something to keep an eye on. As Amazon Go expands, how will the combination of pre-assembled meals and a super convenient shopping experience alter the meal kit landscape? The experience provides a level of convenience that mail order meal kits can’t match, and the grab-and-go technology makes Amazon a faster option for picking something up on the way home than going to a grocery store.

This certainly won’t be the last of Amazon Go’s expansion, so stay tuned here to see where new ones pop up.

Amazon Prime has More Than 100M Members, Set to Devour… Everything?

For the first time, Amazon has provided specific numbers around its Prime Membership business, and in the immortal words of Velma, Scooby-Doo’s smartest sidekick — “JINKIES!” In its letter to shareholders, the retail giant disclosed that it has amassed more than 100 million Prime subscribers worldwide since launching the service 13 years ago.

Geekwire did the math and on it’s face, this means that Amazon is pulling in at minimum $9.9 billion a year (5.5 percent of total 2017 revenue) just from membership fees. What started as a way to get faster shipping of your ordered items has transmogrified into a multi-headed beast that includes streaming video, music, and same day grocery and restaurant delivery (in select cities).

The company is also increasing Prime synergies at Whole Foods, which it purchased last year. It’s expanding free two-hour grocery delivery from select Whole Foods, and is using those real world locations to sell more Echo and Alexa devices (which begets more voice shopping), as well as pick up spots for Amazon Lockers.

Additionally, Marketwatch reports that Amazon is folding the Whole Foods loyalty program into Prime, and if all that weren’t enough, the same shareholder letter says that “[Amazon has] also begun the technical work needed to recognize Prime members at the point of sale and look forward to offering more Prime benefits to Whole Foods shoppers once that work is completed.”

This suggests, as industry watchers have predicted, that the company is looking at implementing Amazon Go-like functionality at Whole Foods — perhaps a TSA-like pre-check for fast lane service. In the shareholder letter Amazon seems pretty high on the early results of Go and its cashier-less, “just walk out” shopping. Amazon said top sellers at the Seattle Go location are things like caffeinated beverages and water but went on to add that customers “love” the Chicken Bahn Mi sandwich and Amazon Meal Kits.

Now, this could just be Bezos putting some heavy self-promoting spin on customer reactions to the Go store. However, one of the things we’ve written about here at The Spoon is the power of Amazon’s same day delivery and meal kits. The ability to order prepared ingredients and have it delivered before you get home (perhaps delivered inside your home) has the potential to fundamentally change how we shop and cook.

While we don’t know Prime’s specific U.S. numbers, with 100 million around the world, a good chunk of that is here domestically. Amazon has the audience and all the pieces in place to own the way we discover, buy, and eat all of our meals.

Jinkies.

Analysis: Go is Amazon’s Latest Attempt To Control The Consumer Meal Journey

On Monday, Amazon’s store of the future finally opened its doors to the public.

By now you’ve probably read about how weird it feels to simply walk in, pick up stuff and walk out. It’s all true. When I finally did visit Amazon Go on Wednesday night, I found cashierless shopping a simultaneously disorienting and freeing experience. My 13-year-old daughter, who at first rolled her eyes at the idea of going to a new store (did I tell you she was 13?), couldn’t get over the grab and go experience and suggested we do all of our shopping at Amazon Go from here on out.

Ever since shopping at Go, I’ve been thinking about where this goes from here and the implications for the broader grocery and food retail marketplace. Here are my thoughts…

Amazon Go Doesn’t Get Rid of Humans, Just Better Allocates Them

One thing that instantly struck me were there were more employees stuffed in this 1,800 square foot retail store than any convenience store I’ve ever seen. Like Chris described in his review, it was as if Amazon had placed employees throughout the store to act essentially as walking-talking FAQs.

One could argue that Amazon isn’t getting rid of humans, but is instead reallocating them to areas where their unique skills are better suited. The same thought occurred to me on on Tuesday when I was in another highly automated store, Cafe-X. Ok, there was a robotic arm slinging cups around in a big glass cage, but the two friendly humans helped me out as I walked into Cafe-X made it seem more welcoming than a typical Starbucks.  Same when I went to Eatsa, where a friendly host with a clipboard welcomed me and answered questions.

By putting humans up front to onboard customers as they come in and answer any questions they may have, the experience was an overall much better one at Amazon Go (as well as Cafe-X and Eatsa). At Amazon Go, I also noticed the person manning the alcohol section (who checked IDs when you wanted to go in) would instantly reorder and straighten the bottles and cans every time someone walked in an grabbed something. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this at a normal grocery store.

Amazon Go Was Already Catalyzing Change Across Grocery. That Will Only Accelerate Now.

When Amazon announced Go in late 2016, execs at big grocery sat up in their chairs and started paying attention. When Amazon announced they planned to acquire Whole Foods, big grocery execs jumped out of their chairs and ran into strategy meetings and probably haven’t stopped looking at whiteboards with plans about what they should do ever since.

As with every large-scale shift, things seem to come quickly to casual observers, but the reality is IoT, machine learning, big data, robotics and other technologies have been slowly descending on the grocery and retail markets for some time. It just sometimes takes someone like an Amazon to accelerate change and force others to move more quickly.

Some have speculated that Amazon might treat its Amazon Go tech like it does cloud computing and let others us it. I don’t think that’s quite right.  Amazon already offers some of its AI technology like image recognition through a PaaS model at AWS, but I think its the magical combination of these that Amazon has perfected and likely will use in its own points of presence (Whole Foods, Amazon Go and, maybe, another retail chain through acquisition).

But, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other companies – big and small – already doing interesting stuff here. AIPoly’s technology is similar to the tech that Amazon Go has that enables grab-and-go shopping, and there are other efforts happening inside bigger companies to tackle this.

Amazon Understands The Meal Journey Could Be Way Smoother And Is Building A Low Friction Path To The Future

Consumers are complicated when it comes to food decisions. Some plan out their week and know what’s for lunch and dinner every day; others make decisions when their stomach starts growling and call out for pizza, search the freezer or head to a restaurant.

If you’re like me, you may be a meal planner and hangry meal-searcher depending on what your day or week’s been like.

Amazon knows this and wants to be there either scenario and all the points in between. While many often are looking at Amazon Go and on the elimination of the friction within the store, I think Amazon’s assembling a basket of technologies, products and services to eliminate consumer friction across the entire meal planning experience.

Think about all the various irons fire Amazon has targeted at the meal journey:

Amazon Fresh grocery delivery: they’ve been working on this for a decade. Whole Foods acquisition significantly improves their reach and ability to get to consumers homes.

Amazon Restaurants: A GrubHub like offering that allows you to order meals from local restaurants shipped to your home.

Amazon Meal Kits: The company’s same-day delivery answer to Blue Apron and other meal kits offerings.

Amazon Fresh Drivethrough Pickup:  Part Insacart, part McDonalds drive through. You can order your groceries, and an Amazon employee assembles your order, and you can pick up at a drive-through. Currently only offered in one location.

Amazon Dash: Amazon’s in-home commerce solution for ordering staples. The buttons are what got the press, but Amazon is moving the platform into appliances.

And, of course, now we have Amazon Go and Whole Foods.

Below is a quick and dirty graphic I put together to show the different “platforms” Amazon is working on to make sure they got you covered.

As you can see, Amazon is making bets along every part of the meal journey; whether that’s one of those hangry “feed me now” moments or helping you plan out the family dinner for the next week, they have you covered. Add in efforts around the edges like programmatic, shoppable recipes, smart fridges, drone delivery and even intelligent garden systems, and you can see how Amazon has quietly assembled a holistic basket of platforms for consumers no matter how long or short their decision making time horizon may be.

The bottom line is they want to make feeding yourself through an Amazon platform so easy and friction-free you almost have no choice. While Amazon Go is just the latest and most visible sign of Amazon strategy, the company has clearly been positioning themselves to capture as much of the $5 trillion food retail marketplace for the last decade, and now they have all the pieces to be there at every step along the meal journey.

And that should be the scariest thing of all for any company in the food retail or delivery marketplace.

Review: Amazon Go is so Good it’s Completely Forgettable

Pete Davidson plays a recurring character on Saturday Night Live named Chad. The joke is that when presented with extraordinary circumstances, Chad just nonchalantly replies “OK!” Nothing phases him. That’s basically how I felt shopping at the new Amazon Go store in Seattle. It worked so well that there was nothing remarkable about it.

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days, here’s how Amazon Go works. You download the Amazon Go app to your phone. The app produces a QR code that you scan as you enter the physical store.

The store itself is like an immaculate, high-end bodega. It’s small, but efficiently packed with just about anything you could need from a grocery store. Produce, dairy, bakery items. There are cooks on-site that prepare sandwiches and meal kits. There are people there to re-stock shelves and field questions (there were actually quite a few workers, but I imagine this is because the concept is so new these particular Amazonians are living, breathing FAQs).

Once inside, you grab the items you want off the shelf and put them in your bag. Then you just walk out. No cashiers. No conveyer belts. No baggers asking “paper or plastic.” Just leave. Minutes later an accurate receipt of everything you took/bought appears in your app.

That’s it.

And it works exactly as advertised. In fact, shopping there was so seamless that it was anti-climactic. It felt like air. Like nothing. And that might be the best part of the experience. Though I made a special trip across town, everything felt so fast and easy that it was almost as if it didn’t happen. I went about my day as normal.

But despite all the convenience, Amazon Go is still a convenience store. It’s too small for carts (there are none anyway), so you won’t be buying a week’s worth of food here. And while the selection is remarkably broad, the produce in particular is lacking, especially for a family. But in a city full of millennials and people on-the-go, you can absolutely see this taking off.

It doesn’t feel like the future of shopping, it just feels like the way shopping should be. And that’s “OK!”

Amazon’s Market of the Future Is Finally Open for Business

After more than a year of waiting, Amazon’s mini-mart of the future, Amazon Go, finally opened today in Seattle.

With the long-awaited launch, Amazon’s finally gets to test its retail store of the future with real consumers (and not just employees), where customers can simply pluck items from shelves and exit the store without ever having interact with a cashier or other store employees.

This initial location resembles a nicely designed convenience store, albeit one stocked with high-end sandwiches and Whole Foods’ 365 brand snacks geared towards an affluent millennial customer base. Shoppers can also get salads, prepared breakfasts, some alcoholic beverages, and the odd pantry staple.

Customers enter the store by downloading the Amazon Go app at entryway turnstiles. Once inside, you simply pick the items you want from the shelves and exit the store. Purchases are automatically billed to your Amazon account. Sensors and cameras monitor the entire process, working with Amazon’s computer vision system to recognize who took what and charge the correct account accordingly. If you’re mistakenly charged for an item you didn’t grab, you can get a refund by simply pressing a button.

And while there are no cashiers—an angle Amazon is pushing hard—there are still some actual employees onsite, including chefs and people to check IDs for beer and wine sales.

The opening has received responses of all kinds on social media. Some praise it as “the future of retail.” Others are warier, many for legitimate reasons. Some are already discussing shoplifting, and it seems one customer actually did shoplift, though inadvertently.

While undoubtedly the biggest name to enter this space of “humanless retail,” Amazon’s not the only one. Both Robomart and AlPoly got a lot of attention at this year’s CES. The latter is essentially the startup version of Amazon Go, and so the idea of the tech giant acquiring them seems a likely possibility.

That, of course, begs the question of where else we’ll see this technology, either at more Amazon Go locations or implemented in other stores. Is it something we will eventually see widespread across Whole Foods locations? Would there ever be a drive-thru version? Let’s hope so.

‘Humanless Retail’ On Display at CES, But Will Humans Buy It?

One trend on display at this year’s CES is what I would describe ‘humanless retail’, where technology is used to sell physical goods to consumers without the help of humans.

Of course, this trend isn’t new. 2017 brought us a bunch of new ideas for taking the human out of the retail transaction by using machine vision/AI, IoT and more. What I saw on the show floor in Vegas is just a continuation of these concepts.

For example, last year we hear a lot about Amazon Go, a store concept where customers walk in and out without ever talking to a cashier. And this week, we saw the startup version of this in AIPoly, a company which offers a machine vision and sensor platform to create what the company calls “autonomous markets”.

Just as with Amazon Go, AIPoly customers register with the “store” and are identified as they walk in (or up to in the case of a kiosk) through facial recognition. The store then registers a purchase as the machine vision recognizes the products they pick off the shelves.

Below is a pic of the demo the company was showing off at CES.

And then there’s the Qvie, a single-product micro-vending machine that is essentially a connected lockbox version of the booze fridge in the Hilton. Qvie is targeted at the Airbnb host as a way to enable additional revenue through in-room sales, a trend that seems almost inevitable as Airbnb becomes a more and more viable alternative to hotel stays.

Finally, there’s Robomart, which can best be described as the love child of the controversial Bodega and an autonomous automobile.  The vision behind Robomart is a retailer such as 7-11 or Target would lease a fleet of Robomarts, stock them, and then bring the store to the consumer’s home. While it’s not exactly the same as Zume Pizza delivery trucks, it does something similar in making the retail location less relevant by bringing the point of presence closer to the consumer.

Robomart CEO Ali Ahmed told me he expects the first Robomarts to be available this year, which strikes me as extremely ambitious since the company is still raising funding to build out its vision. A mobile autonomous car-store combo doesn’t strike me as something you can do cheaply.

These are just three ideas I ran across in a couple hours on the floor at CES, enough to make clear that humanless retail is going to be much in 2018. The question for me is, will humans buy the idea of humanless retail, or is this just another case of Silicon Valley getting ahead of itself as it looks for addressable markets to apply new tech like AI, robotics and IoT?

The answer is yes, humanless retail is going to big. Sure, there will be lots of companies floating in the humanless retail startup deadpool before it’s all said and done (this is the case with pretty much every startup market in case you haven’t noticed), but the reason I think many of these early ideas will become much bigger and common is they’re simply evolutionary steps of what we’ve been seeing for decades and with much more rudimentary technology.

The self-service checkout at the grocery store, vending machines in your office, and the booze fridge in your hotel room are all innovations aimed at selling things to people without the need for another person to take money and put something in a bag. The only difference with these new ideas is the latest technologies to make humanless retail more convenient than ever before.

Analysis: Here’s Why Amazon & Whole Foods Make Perfect Sense

Blockbuster news this morning: Amazon is acquiring Whole Foods for $13.7 billion.

Needless to say, this is a huge deal. My immediate thoughts are this:

This deal signifies Amazon’s entry into physical brick and mortar in a big way. The company, which has been toying around with future store concepts like its own bookstore and the Amazon Go grocery concept store in Seattle, is betting big on physical store formats in the future.

The company can no longer simply be called an online retailer. They are now truly omnichannel.

This gives Amazon a flagship store network for food (and other products) for pickup and delivery in markets around the country. The company, which has been building out its distributed pickup locker network in places like 7-11 around the country, as well as slowly expanding the reach of Amazon Fresh, now has its own nationwide network of storefronts that they can leverage in the rollout of both.

The combined company also provides an opportunity to experiment with loyalty program benefits for the company’s Amazon Prime members. Imagine Whole Foods promotions for Amazon Prime members and even having special shopping hours for members of its subscription-loyalty club. Amazon can make finally take its loyalty program and extend physical retail benefits, not unlike members of Costco or other membership stores have been doing for years.

Perhaps most importantly, the integration of Whole Foods provides the perfect format for Amazon’s future-forward shopping concepts that they’ve been experimenting with in their Amazon Go concept store in Seattle. While I don’t see Whole Foods going cashier-less anytime soon, I do think IoT-powered shopping could ease buyer friction in the purchasing process. Expect Whole Foods to become sensor-packed stores that analyze and understand their clients better than anyone. I also expect Amazon to integrate its own technologies such as Alexa into the shopping experience and even find ways to promote its own Amazon replenishment platform Dash in-store.

Of course, it goes without saying the Whole Foods customer is not the everyman, mass-market customer. The company, which pioneered the organic grocery movement in the early 1980s, attracts a high-income crowd that is willing to pay a premium for products. It’s not the Safeway or Target customer. That said, this is exactly the type of customer that already probably spends lots of money on Amazon.

It’s a good fit.

Last point: I think this deal is an admission by Amazon that continued high-growth is dependent on further expansion into physical brick and mortar. While online commerce will no doubt continue to grow, after spending a decade experimenting with Amazon Fresh, the company has learned that getting greater wallet share in areas like fresh produce and grocery requires physical store fronts, no matter how much Amazon spends on things like drone delivery.

Want to explore the future of grocery? Make sure to check out the Smart Kitchen Summit, the only event about the future of food, cooking, and the kitchen. Use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets. Also, make sure to subscribe to get The Spoon in your inbox.