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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Amazon Key

Amazon Expands In-Garage Grocery Delivery to 5,000 Cities and Towns Nationwide

Amazon announced today that its Key by Amazon In-Garage Grocery Delivery is expanding to more than 5,000 U.S. cities and towns. Key In-Garage Delivery launched in five cities last November, and with today’s expansion will become available everywhere Amazon delivers groceries.

Amazon Key In-Garage delivery is available to Prime members shopping through Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market. To use Key, the customer must have a compatible connected smart garage door opener. When the order is placed, the customer selects “Key Delivery” for no extra charge. When the order arrives, delivery people open the smart garage door, place groceries inside, close the door and notify the customer.

Placing grocery deliveries inside a garage can have a number of benefits for the customer, including keeping food out of direct sunlight and other weather-related elements, as well as helping prevent theft by porch pirates. It also adds flexibility for customers who don’t have to be at home to wait for a delivery.

In-garage delivery followed a previous attempt by Amazon to offer in-home delivery when customers weren’t there. But customers weren’t too keen on letting strangers open their front doors and placing packages inside their homes while they were out. In-garage delivery was a bit of a social compromise. Amazon could still securely deliver packages inside a domicile while customers were out, but weren’t granted access into someone’s actual house.

Grocery delivery experienced a record year in 2020 as the pandemic pushed people into grocery e-commerce. As a result, all the major grocery retailers invested heavily in systems to meet that accelerated demand and provide faster service to customers. Amazon’s chief retail rival, Walmart, for instance, launched its Delivery+ subscription service last year and is trialing delivery to connected smart lockers that sit on a customer’s porch.

While Key In-Garage Delivery is probably not a resource-intensive program for Amazon to implement, one has to wonder if the company shouldn’t be focusing more attention on curbside pickup. Recent data from Brick Meets Click show that the majority of grocery e-commerce customers choose curbside pickup over delivery or ship-to-home options. And during its earnings call yesterday, Albertsons said that curbside pickup was up 865 percent over the course of 2020.

Prime members interested in trying out Key In-Garage Delivery can check its availability by visiting www.amazon.com/key-grocery.

Amazon to Start Delivering Groceries Direct to Your Garage

Amazon announced today that it will start delivering groceries directly to the inside of people’s garages as part of its expanding Key service.

Amazon’s Key In-Garage Delivery service allows Prime members with a myQ smart garage door opener to receive packages inside their garage when they aren’t at home. With grocery, that program will now include food in addition to packages.

The expansion of in-garage grocery delivery shouldn’t come as a surprise. Amazon has been making big moves into grocery over the past year. In October of 2019, the company made grocery delivery free for its Prime members. Then it opened two Go grocery stores in Seattle earlier this year before opening three Amazon Fresh supermarkets in Southern California.

Amazon is making all of these moves because online grocery is poised to become big business. The pandemic spurred record amounts of grocery e-commerce earlier this summer. More importantly, online grocery shopping is projected to be 21.5 percent of total grocery sales by 2025.

As such, giant retailers are all battling each other for your grocery buck. Walmart, for instance, has partnered with Instacart and launched its own Walmart+ service to rival Amazon Prime.

Both Amazon and Walmart had competing in-home delivery options at one point that allowed delivery drivers into your house while you’re out. But letting strangers into your garage when you’re away is probably more palatable than letting them into your kitchen. Placing groceries in your garage also means food won’t sit on your porch waiting to be either stolen or (less) damaged by the sun or other elements.

Starting today, Amazon’s in-garage grocery delivery is available to Prime members ordering from Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh in select areas of Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.

Amazon Looks to Your Garage as a Key to In-Home Delivery

Towards the end of 2017, Amazon launched its Key delivery service, which used a combination of connected cameras and smart locks so delivery people could drop off packages inside your house while you’re away. A few months after the debut, a survey showed that people weren’t really into the idea (understandably) of letting randos into their abodes.

Perhaps looking for an acceptable middle ground, Amazon today announced it has partnered with garage door opener company, Chamberlain Group, to enable secure delivery of packages inside your garage. Amazon actually made a bunch of announcements around Key including a Wi-Fi-enabled deadbolt from Schlage, expanded capacities for the Ring video doorbell to lock/unlock doors and Key for Business. But it’s the garage access that caught our eye.

Amazon’s like water and has been looking for any opening it can find to deliver you more packages. In addition to Key, Amazon also debuted a delivery-to-your-trunk service (in select cars) last year. If Amazon can get inside your dwellings, it would help you avoid package theft… and ideally get you to order more stuff. And though the company doesn’t mention groceries specifically, it’s not hard to see how in garage deliveries could help expand delivery of perishable foods so they don’t sit on your front porch, and give Amazon an edge in the cutthroat world of grocery delivery.

Going through the garage could be a viable option for Key to get some traction. People skittish about a stranger in their home might be less so about their garage. Garages aren’t always connected to houses, and if they are, there is generally a locked door that separates it from the rest of the house. There could be enough of a buffer for customers to try it out.

Of course, if they can’t get in-home delivery through your trunk, your front door or your garage, then they could always just build an entire house around you for delivery.

Pop the Trunk. Will Amazon In-Car Delivery Open the Door to In-Home Drop-off?

Amazon announced today that it has formed a partnership with General Motors and Volvo to offer deliveries inside your car, which, according to The Wall Street Journal, will give the retail giant access to “potentially millions of vehicles” across 37 U.S. markets. The move could also be a way for Amazon to get consumers used to the idea of package delivery inside personal spaces and act as a stepping stone towards in-home delivery.

In-car delivery is available to Prime members and is part of the Amazon Key service, which was launched last year and allows Amazon to make package deliveries inside your house while you’re away.

For now, Amazon in-car delivery works with compatible 2015 or newer Chevrolet, Buick, GMC or Cadillac vehicles with active OnStar accounts, or Volvos from 2015 or later with an active Volvo On Call account. To get in-car delivery, users download the Amazon Key App and link their Amazon account with their connected car service account. Once the address of their car has been registered, customers select the “In-Car” delivery option at checkout. On the delivery day, customers receive a 4-hour time window for delivery and ensure that their car is parked within the range of the delivery location. The car is then remotely unlocked and the package is placed inside.

For anyone who might be concerned about giving a total stranger access to their car, in the press announcement, Amazon states:

Each time a delivery driver requests access to a customer’s vehicle, Amazon verifies that an authorized driver is at the right location with the right package, through an encrypted authentication process. Once this process is successfully completed, the car is then unlocked. Customers receive a notification via the Amazon Key App after the delivery is completed and the vehicle is relocked. No special codes or keys are ever provided to delivery drivers.

The press release doesn’t mention anything about groceries, but it’s not hard to imagine having staples like bread, sodas and other non-perishables waiting in your car either when you walk out of your office or waiting in your car in your driveway when you get home. As the delivery window inevitably shrinks down from four hours to something more narrow, the options for groceries will no doubt increase.

Amazon never ceases to surprise us, and perhaps this in-car delivery will expand beyond your driveway or office parking lot. Domino’s Pizza just rolled out delivery to landmark locations using what3words, so customers can get pizza delivered to parks or other generalized locations. If Amazon has your car information, there’s no reason it can’t deliver packages wherever you’re parked for an extended period of time.

But after watching the accompanying Amazon customer testimonial video, the bigger play for In-Car delivery seems to be as a gateway drug to get more people to use Amazon Key’s in-home delivery service. A recent survey from Insurance Quotes found that only 31 percent of respondents were comfortable with the idea of in-home delivery while they were away.

Perhaps they’ll be more comfortable allowing deliveries into their cars parked in their driveways. Not only is putting a package in your trunk a way to avoid package theft, but it can also allow for home deliveries without interrupting your day. Once they’ve experienced a few in-car deliveries, customers might suddenly feel a bit easier with a driver placing a package in their foyer.

If that doesn’t work, perhaps an Amazon robot answering your door and signing for packages will do the trick.

Amazon Key Adds More Connected Lock Options from Yale and Kwikset

Amazon Key, the in-home delivery service that allows packages to be dropped off inside your home while you’re away, added compatibility with five new smart locks from Kwikset and Yale today. This brings the total number of Amazon Key compatible connected locks to eight different models.

Amazon Key uses a combination of smart locks and connected cameras to allow delivery drivers to drop off packages inside your home while you’re away. It’s available to Prime members in 37 different U.S. markets and with today’s announcement, customers can customize their Key set up with an expanded variety of touchpad and keyway locks.

While this isn’t major news, increased lock compatibility for Key is another sign that Amazon really wants to get in your front door. Giving people a little more flexibility when choosing their front door lock provides potential Key customers with a teeny bit more control when contemplating the idea of letting delivery people into their unattended homes to drop off packages or groceries.

And right now, customers are wary of giving strangers access to their houses. According to a recent survey by Insurance Quotes, only 31 percent of respondents were willing to use Amazon’s in-home delivery service, with theft and privacy breaches being their top concerns.

Amazon seems to be well aware of this, and is assembling the pieces for a broader security solution that it controls. In March Amazon bought Ring, maker of the connected doorbell camera, which was a move that came just months after the company bought cloud security camera company Blink. It’s easy to see how live video of a delivery person walking up to your door, ringing your doorbell, placing a package inside and leaving could help calm people’s fears.

Still, earning people’s trust with Key is an uphill battle for what is essentially just another way to get you to buy more stuff. But we’re slightly more optimistic at The Spoon. And while there are definite concerns with in-home delivery, when it comes to food, it also allows more people to act on inspiration. If you stumble across an amazing recipe while you’re at work, you can order all the ingredients and they’ll be sitting inside your home–and not out in the elements–ready to be cooked that night. (Or, if you’re feeling super lazy, you can order from your favorite restaurant and have food ready to eat right as you walk in your house.)

Amazon’s Blink Buy Could be the Boost In-Home Delivery Needs

Amazon has purchased the company behind the Blink line of wireless connected video cameras and doorbells, in a move that could help the e-commerce giant accelerate adoption of its Amazon Key in-home delivery service.

Blink’s array of products includes a video doorbell as well as outdoor and indoor connected security cameras. These devices fit nicely with Amazon Key, which uses a combination of cloud-connected locks and indoor cameras for users to monitor any Amazon Key in-home deliveries. The Blink line is Alexa-enabled and wireless, so installation for potential Key users would be a snap.

Adding an external camera or video doorbell also gives Key users more vectors to keep tabs on delivery. People could watch the delivery van pull up and get a better image of the delivery driver (who is only supposed to open the door enough to slide the package through). Adding the outdoor camera could also help mitigate the WiFi security hole researchers found in Key earlier this year.

But with this acquisition, Amazon gets something more than just a new line of cameras. As my former colleague, Stacey Higginbotham writes, Amazon also gets its own image processing chip. “Another interesting aspect of this is that Amazon could actually use this plus its image recognition to determine what people have in their homes,” Higginbotham told us.

Which sounds… creepy. I mean, technically, Amazon already knows pretty much everything I have in my home since they probably delivered it. But if you consider that Amazon was already awarded a patent that lays out using image recognition to know what’s growing in your garden, knowing what’s inside your house isn’t exactly stretch.

The question now remains, will Amazon bulking up its security offerings make potential users feel secure enough to trust Key in-home delivery?

A Smart Kitchen Gift Guide for Last-Minute Shoppers

Well, you’ve done it. You’ve waited until the last minute to do your Christmas shopping and now it’s here. But don’t worry! Your friends at The Spoon have you covered. Here’s a Smart Kitchen Gift Guide for your favorite cooking companions packed with items you can still get before the big day.

Sous Vide Wand: The Joule was on our 2016 gift guide, but really either it or the Anova is a wonderful addition to your kitchen cabinets. Sous vide elevates cooking proteins like steak to another level, yet is versatile enough to make a range of foods including pies and cookies.

Hestan Cue System: If you’re like me, you enjoy deliciousness, but aren’t that great a cook. Enter the Hestan Cue system. It’s a combination of induction burner, pan and smartphone app that work together to provide you with guided cooking, so you can turn from average Joe Cook into Julia Child.

Nutribullet Balance: Smoothies are a delectable treat, but they aren’t always as *nutritious* as we’d like to believe. Give the gift of a healthy 2018 with the Nutribullet Balance, a Bluetooth smart blender with companion app that calculates the nutritional value of your smoothie as you add ingredients.

Ember Mug: Disclaimer, we have not tried this $80 coffee mug, but we loved it’s $150 traveling counterpart. The idea of keeping our hot coffee or tea at the perfect temperature is way too tempting. It’s too late to order online, but you can check your local Starbucks to see if it’s in stock.

PicoBrew PICO Model C: Is there a hop head homebrewer in your family? It’s not cheap, but PicoBrew makes it easy to brew beer from the comfort of your own kitchen. The Pico C is available via Amazon and in brick and mortar retailers.

Amazon Key Kit: For the adventurous early adopter, give them the gift of Amazon delivery people entering their unattended home! Snark aside, Amazon Key’s kit includes a cloud connected security camera and lock (hopefully they’ve patched the security hole) and gives users (in select areas) the ability to accept grocery and other Amazon deliveries when they’re away from home.

Dash Egg Cooker: Okay, so this device isn’t “connected,” but it is a smart idea for anyone who likes hard boiled eggs. Forget waiting for a pot of water to boil and timing when the eggs are done. The Dash Egg Cooker has been a game changer in my house, cooking up six hard boiled eggs in around 20 minutes.

Whatever you decide to get friends and family this year, everyone at The Spoon wishes all of you the happiest of holiday seasons.

Enjoy the podcast and make sure to subscribe in Apple podcasts if you haven’t already.

Hack Reveals Security Hole in Amazon Key

The idea of a delivery person entering your home when you aren’t there is new and unsettling. Which is why when Amazon announced its in-home Key delivery service last month, it went to great lengths to reassure potential customers that it had their security in mind. But a new story from WIRED about a successful hack of Amazon Key may keep nervous nellies away.

First, a quick recap of Amazon Key, a new service from the retail giant that lets its delivery people enter your home to drop off packages when you aren’t there. The service uses a combination of phone notifications, specific cloud locks and — most important for this story — cloud cameras that let you monitor the delivery as it happens or watch it after the fact.

But research firm, Rhino Security Labs, uncovered a flaw in the system that would allow a delivery person to hack the connected camera and create a freeze frame of the door shut after they leave. A homeowner watching remotely would see the shut door and assume everything’s fine, but the delivery person could actually be back in the house without the viewer seeing it. You can see it in action in this video:

Amazon Cloud Cam - DoS Attack Walkthrough

As WIRED points out, this isn’t an Amazon-specific issue, “It’s an issue for practically all Wi-Fi devices, one that allows anyone to spoof a command from a Wi-Fi router that temporarily kicks a device off the network.” The problem, they write, is that rather than shutting off or going dark, the camera continues to show the last frame it saw.

Right now, this attack on Amazon Key is a proof-of-concept and does require a specific set of conditions in order to be successfully achieved. In response to the WIRED piece, Amazon said that it’s drivers go through a thorough background check, and that the company was issuing an update to the software to provide faster notifications if the camera goes offline.

“The type of attack used to turn off the Amazon Cloud Cam is not esoteric, nor is it difficult to execute although it would be only available to rogue delivery drivers,” said Stacey Higginbotham, creator of the Internet of Things Podcast, “The bigger question here is whether or not consumers are ready to trust a company like Amazon inside their home and whether the insurance industry is ready to stand behind this type of access technology when people are inevitably hurt by those misusing the system. I think only then will the mainstream feel comfortable adopting it.”

And getting the mainstream comfortable is crucial for Amazon as it looks to expand further into grocery delivery, a huge reason it spent $13.7 billion to acquire Whole Foods. Additionally, as Mike pointed out today, the company is integrating with AllRecipes to create what amounts to an on demand meal kit service. Having all the ingredients delivered on the day you want to make a particular meal, even when you aren’t home, is critical for that type of same day service to work.