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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Amazon

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 Alexa Getting Better at Guessing Follow Up Requests

One big area where virtual assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant fall short of real human assistants is their inability to contextualize and anticipate what you’ll want next.

Currently, requests made to virtual assistants are often siloed, and go something like this:

“Alexa, how long should I steep tea?”

Alexa answers, with something like “Five minutes,” and then:

“Alexa, set a timer for five minutes.”

In a corporate blog post today (hat tip Geekwire), Amazon announced that Alexa is now getting better at bundling those types of requests together. Amazon refers to this as figuring out your “latent goal,” and actually provides tea steeping as an example. Asking Alexa how long to steep tea could have Alexa guess that your latent goal is to make tea. This, in turn would trigger an immediate and automatic follow up response from Alexa like “Would you like me to set a five minute timer?”

While this seems straightforward, as with so many AI-related tasks, understanding what people want isn’t exactly easy. From Amazon’s blog post:

The first step is to decide whether to anticipate a latent goal at all. Our early experiments showed that not all dialogue contexts are well suited to latent-goal discovery. When a customer asked for “recipes for chicken”, for instance, one of our initial prototypes would incorrectly follow up by asking, “Do you want me to play chicken sounds?”

Beyond tea, it’s not hard to think of how identifying latent goals could be useful in a smart kitchen. In the case of asking for chicken recipes, Alexa could follow up with offers to pre-heat an oven, or, more relevant to Amazon, offer to order you the necessary groceries for delivery that day (preferably from an Amazon grocery store).

Amazon says this latent goal capability is available now in English in the U.S. And while it doesn’t require any additional work from developers to activate, they can make their skills more discoverable with the Name-Free Interaction Tool Kit.

FWIW, I tried asking Alexa the tea steeping question, and it did not follow up with a timer suggestion. So its latent goals capabilities seem to still be, well, latent.

Amazon’s Alexa Fund Invests in At-Home Vertical Farming Company Rise Gardens

Rise Gardens announced today it has received an investment from the Amazon Alexa Fund that builds upon a $2.6M seed round Rise closed in May. The amount invested by the Amazon Alexa Fund was not disclosed.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the deal is both a collaboration and a cash investment that will “fuel new products, accessories and further R+D” for Rise Gardens.

The Chicago-based Rise is best known for its standalone console (roughly the size of a standard bookcase) that contains a hydroponic grow system for consumers at home. The system does most of the hard work—calculating nutrition and pH levels, knowing when and how much to water the plants—for the user, whom it notifies via a corresponding app.

Rise’s system is also modular, so it can be added to or subtracted from over time depending on how many greens your household consumes each week. Users can also grow beets and tomatoes in addition to leafy greens and herbs.

Rise raised $2.6 million in seed funding earlier this year; Amazon’s new investment is an extension of this seed funding, according to today’s press release.

Amazon’s investment in Rise sounds promising, not just for the company but for the entire vertical farming sector. To start, Rise CEO and founder Hank Adams hinted today at Alexa functionality for the Rise system: “Collaborating with the Alexa Fund will better enable us to integrate our smart, connected garden with Alexa, making indoor gardening even easier. We are also excited about the opportunity to work with Amazon to evolve and expand how we reach consumers with our device and consumables business concept,” he said. The details of that Alexa integration are scant as of now, but one imagines being able to ask Alexa about your plant’s pH levels or tell the speaker to adjust the light mixture. On the flip, Rise could notify users via Alexa when it’s time to water the plants.

There’s no question that consumer-grade vertical farms are still a pretty niche product right now, since many of them cost more than the average person can easily afford. (Rise’s single unit console starts at $549.) But the pandemic and accompanying disruptions to the food supply chain have undoubtedly increased folks’ desire to control more of what they eat, which has led to an influx of new devices. From Gardyn’s stylish take on at-home farming to consumer electronics companies like LG building them into the kitchen, vertical farming is definitely making its way into the home. 

Amazon, of course, wants to control your entire home, including your kitchen, so it’s not surprising the Seattle tech giant would partner making at-home vertical farming products. As well, the company has made forays into the gardening space before, like this patent from 2017. Amazon knowing what types of plants you are growing can fuel its selling machine to recommend recipes and other groceries.

Like it or not, Amazon’s moves in food tech tend to influence others, which means the collaborations and products that come out of the Rise partnership will influence the future of at-home vertical farming for everyone. 

Food Tech News: Greenhouse Gas Straws, Improved Amazon Grocery Delivery

If you’re ready for a break from all those political memes, here’s your chance to catch up on some final pieces of food tech news from the past week. A few stories that stood out to us include foodware made from greenhouse gases, improved Amazon grocery delivery, PBR’s THC-infused seltzer, and a limited-edition plant-based tuna melt.

Straws made out of pollution

Newlight Technologies, a biotech company based in Southern California, launched commercial foodware and fashion lines made from pollution-eating microorganism secretions. In the company’s Huntington Beach facilities, ocean water conditions are recreated in vats, and then microorganisms are added. Then the vats are purposefully polluted with collected greenhouse gases. Microorganisms then gobble up greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, and their excretions are gathered to be dried and formed into pellets. The substance that is molded into pellets in called AirCarbon, and it is then melted and molded to make things like straws, utensils, and wallets. The end products are actually carbon-negative since the gases did not end up in the environment.

Amazon adds feature to improve grocery delivery

If you tried ordering a grocery delivery through Amazon at the start of the pandemic, you might remember checking for available slots around 10 times a day with no luck. Or you might have been one of those people who woke up in the middle of the night to reserve a slot. Amazon just announced a new feature as a solution to this problem: if there are no available slots at the moment, a customer can sign up to wait for the next open delivery time. With the new feature, customers will be given an estimation of when the next available spot will be then notified when it opens. They will have two hours to place an order.

Photo from Npr

Pabst Blue Ribbon releases THC-infused seltzer

Last week Pabst Blue Ribbon announced the release of its 4.2 percent hard cold brew coffee. This week, the company’s new THC-infused seltzer hit shelves. The lemon-flavored seltzer contains no alcohol and has 5mg of THC. The new beverage is targeted at consumers who are curious about cannabis and would prefer eating or drinking it rather than smoking it. Apparently the product is already popular, with both the first and second productions selling out quickly. Priced at $24 each, four-packs of the seltzer are available at dispensaries and online.

Veggie Grill launches Good Catch tuna melt sandwich

Gathered Foods, makers of Good Catch plant-based tuna, partnered with vegan restaurant chain Veggie Grill to release a limited edition tuna melt sandwich. Good Catch makes a protein-rich plant-based tuna from a blend of six legumes: peas, chickpeas, lentils, soy, fava beans, and navy beans. This January, Good Catch raised a $32 million Series B funding round, and Veggie Grill is the first restaurant that Good Catch has partnered with. The tuna melt sandwich will be comprised of a tuna salad, American cheese, pickles, and tomato on griddled rye bread, and it will be available until the end of the year.

The Food Tech Show: Amazon Intros Palm-Pay, Bear’s New Servi Robot

This week the Spoon team got together to talk about yet another potentially controverisal bit of palm reading tech from Amazon and other news from around the food tech world, including:

As always, you can get the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download the episode directly to your device or just click play below.

Amazon Launches Palm-based Contactless Payment Method

You have to, errrr, hand it to Amazon. The e-commerce giant today announced Amazon One, a new contactless payment method that relies on scanning your palm as you enter its store.

Amazon One is now an entry option at two of Amazon’s Go stores in Seattle (the 7th & Blanchard and South Lake Union stores, if you’re in the Emerald City). To use the new system, you insert your credit card into the terminal and hover your palm over the device. The terminal scans your palm print and from that point on, you just need to hold your hand over the One terminal upon entering the store. After that, the Go technology kicks in and automatically keeps track of and charges you for what you take from the store.

You do not need an Amazon account to use Amazon One, just a mobile phone and a credit card. But you can tie your Amazon account to One, should you choose.

In addition to its own physical stores, which include Go convenience stores, Go Grocery stores, Fresh grocery stores, Prime stores and more, Amazon envisions One being used by other retailers. From the blog post announcing the technology:

In most retail environments, Amazon One could become an alternate payment or loyalty card option with a device at the checkout counter next to a traditional point of sale system. Or, for entering a location like a stadium or badging into work, Amazon One could be part of an existing entry point to make accessing the location quicker and easier.

We’ve heard rumblings about some form of pay-with-your palm coming from Amazon for awhile now, so today’s announcement isn’t a surprise. It’s also not a surprise given Amazon’s devotion to speed and efficiency. Scanning your phone to enter a Go store may be easy, but waving your hand over a device is much easier and faster. This, in turn, could entice you to choose an Amazon store over the competition more often.

Amazon One is also coming out during a global pandemic and at a time when retailers are looking for more contactless payment methods. Amazon also licenses out its cashierless Go technology, and combining the two could be an attractive contactless option for retailers

Of course, given Amazon’s increasing dominance in not only retail but many other facets of our everyday lives, people may be reluctant to hand over their biometric data like a palm print. In its One FAQ, Amazon said it chose palm prints because they are more private, and that you can delete your data from the service after signing up.

I don’t need to be a palm reader to see that One will probably play an increasingly important part of Amazon’s physical retail experience, and that we could see it in a lot of other stores in the coming years.

Zomato: India’s Food Delivery Nearing Pre-COVID Levels

The food delivery market in India has almost bounced back to pre-COVID levels. A recent blog post by Zomato stated that gross merchandise levels are roughly 85 percent of what they were pre-pandemic, up from 75 percent in August.

According to Zomato, major cities like Delhi and Mumbai are nearing full recovery, while others “have recovered completely and have exceeded pre-COVID levels.” Affluent parts of cities are driving the recovery, which makes sense given the cost of using third-party delivery services. Zomato said more high-end restaurants have also gone online, which accounts for some of the growth as well. “Overall spends on such premium restaurants have grown by over 25% over pre-COVID levels,” the company said.

Other influential factors include more at-home delivery orders for celebrations and more group orders, since everyone’s stuck at home with their families.

Of course, the caveat here is that Zomato has quite a bit of skin in this game, it being one of India’s leading food delivery services. So while the stats from this recent blog post only include Zomato’s customer base, they’re likely a fairly accurate gauge of the entire India food delivery market. (Swiggy is the only other major delivery player in India right now.)

Zomato this year also expanded its services to include groceries and household goods (a move that other third-party delivery services like DoorDash have done in other parts of the world.) The company also raised $162 million earlier this month and said it is preparing for an IPO in 2021.

Right now, Zomato’s main competitor for all this growth is Proses-backed Swiggy, which has raised $1.6 billion in funding to-date. Everything could change, though, depending on how successful Amazon is at scaling its newly launched food delivery business across the country. Neither Zomato nor Swiggy is profitable yet. Amazon, meanwhile, already has a presence in India through its Amazon Fresh and Amazon PrimeNow platforms. 

Walmart to Launch Its Walmart+ Membership Service on September 15

Walmart today announced it will launch its own membership service, Walmart+, on September 15. The service will be available for $98/year or $12.95/month and include free same-day delivery from Walmart stores, fuel discounts, and other perks.

A Walmart+ membership gets you free, unlimited delivery “on more than 160,000 items” from Walmart stores (with a minimum order of $35), access to the company’s Scan & Go tech that lets customers skip the checkout line, and discounts on fuel. Walmart said in today’s press release that “the list of benefits will continue to grow over time.”

Walmart has been testing free delivery through its Delivery Unlimited program since last year. When Walmart+ launches across the company’s stores nationwide, current Delivery Unlimited subscribers will automatically become members of Walmart+.

Walmart+ was first revealed in February of this year in a move that immediately invited comparisons to Amazon and its Prime membership service. Speaking to TechCrunch today, Walmart said it was “not launching Walmart+ with the intent to compete with anything else.” And the service is by no means a mirror image of Prime, especially considering that Prime includes free access to streaming movies, music and more.

At least initially, Walmart+ seems to be focused more on groceries and household items (along with some toys and electronics), an area the company is already strong in. This focus on grocery makes sense given the record amounts of online grocery shopping still happening because of the pandemic. A recent survey showed that Walmart has actually overtaken Amazon as the leading retailer for online grocery shopping, and adding Walmart+ could help solidify its lead.

Walmart and Amazon have actually kind of switched places over the past week with their announcements. With today’s news, Walmart, which has a vast network of real-world stores, is announcing it’s Prime-like service. Last week, Amazon, the online retail giant, announced the opening of its first full-on real world supermarket in Woodland Hills, CA. Both moves help illustrate how important the grocery category has become for each company.

Another thing to watch with Walmart+ is how many customers will adopt the Scan & Go technology, which allows shoppers to skip the checkout line by scanning product barcodes with their phones. Walmart’s approach is more manual than that of an Amazon Go store, which uses cameras and sensors to automatically track what shoppers are buying. Will the extra scanning step inhibit adoption of Scan & Go? Also, in the pandemic era, where contactless payments are increasingly table stakes, will Walmart incentivize more people to use Scan & Go, and will customers like the system?

We’ll mark our calendars and see.

Additional reporting by Chris Albrecht.

First Amazon Fresh Grocery Store Opening in Woodland Hills, CA

The first Amazon Fresh grocery store is finally opening in Woodland Hills, CA, the company announced via blog post early this morning.

This Amazon Fresh is the first of many planned physical grocery stores for Amazon. The store will feature free same-day delivery for Amazon Prime members, curbside pickup and will even let you pickup your Amazon packages at the store.

Unlike Amazon’s other subsidiary, Whole Foods, which doesn’t sell products with things like artificial flavors or preservatives, Amazon Fresh will carry all manner of CPG products.

Amazon was supposed to open the Woodland Hills store in April of this year, but the COVID-19 pandemic altered those plans. Over the past five months, Amazon used the location as a “dark store” to fulfill online orders as the company desperately tried to keep up with a surge in demand for grocery delivery.

Though this Woodland Hills Amazon Fresh won’t feature Amazon Go-like cashierless checkout, it does have the recently announced Amazon Dash Cart. These carts basically enable cashierless checkout by automatically keeping track of whatever items are put in it.

The opening of this Amazon Fresh comes during a time of record online grocery sales, thanks to the pandemic. But a recent Coresight survey found Walmart is now the leading retailer for online grocery shopping, while use of Amazon for grocery e-commerce has declined. Part of Walmart’s ascendancy could be attributed to its vast network of retail stores across the country that allow easy access to curbside pickup of e-commerce grocery orders.

The new Amazon Fresh isn’t open to the public yet. That will happen “in the coming weeks,” according to today’s blog post. In the meantime, select customers in Woodland Hills will be invited to come in and shop during this soft opening.

Survey: As Online Grocery Trends Up, Walmart Leads and E-Commerce is Here to Stay

Results of a new survey from Coresight Research (registration required) released today show that as grocery e-commerce continues to trend up, thanks to the pandemic, Walmart has overtaken Amazon as the leading retailer and online grocery shopping appears to be the new normal for many consumers.

Coresight has been conducting weekly surveys of US consumers since mid-March and today’s results are from a survey done on August 19th. In this latest survey, Coresight found that 60 percent of respondent had bought groceries online in the past 12 months, up from 52 percent back in March.

Coresight also found that Walmart became the leading retailer for online grocery shoppers, surpassing Amazon. In August 56 percent of the online grocery shoppers had bought from Walmart, up from 52 percent back in March. Amazon saw a decline in Coresight’s study, with 55 percent of online grocery shoppers indicating they bought from there, down from 63 percent in March.

Now that we are six months into this pandemic it seems like people are getting habituated into buying their groceries online. Coresight’s survey found that 36 percent of online grocery shoppers “plan to retain their current online purchasing frequency one the pandemic eases or ends.”

These findings aren’t too surprising. Other research firms have shown month-over-month record numbers of online grocery shopping since the pandemic hit the U.S.. But Coresight’s surveys help add to this body of research and round out the picture of how consumers are changing habits as the pandemic continues.

What is worth studying more is the Walmart v. Amazon rivalry. All grocery retailers struggled under the sudden crush of new customers when the pandemic first hit. Amazon, which saw its grocery business triple year-over-year thanks to COVID, actually had to implement a waitlist for new delivery customers. Coresight surmised from its data that Amazon grew its sales through bigger baskets from existing customers, while Walmart may have been able to attract more customers.

Anecdotally, this fits with my own grocery experience. As delivery windows were hard to come buy during that initial e-commerce wave, Walmart, with its massive network of real-world stores was still able to fulfill my online grocery orders through curbside pickup.

And as Coresight points out, I’m not alone in finding online grocery shopping to be the new normal. Grocers have ironed out many of the early issues that plagued grocery e-commerce and with six months of shopping for groceries online now under their belt, people may have had enough time to establish new food buying habits.

Earlier this year, Coresight predicted that the online grocery sector would grow by 40 percent in 2020 to hit $38 billion in sales. I wonder if they will have to adjust that number as this new data comes in. Additionally, the grocery landscape continues to change. Not only is Amazon adding real world supermarkets to its arsenal of shopping options, but Walmart is expected to launch its new Walmart+ delivery service soon (and has since added Instacart as a grocery delivery partner), and new third-party players like Uber and DoorDash are now getting into the grocery delivery space.

UK Regulators Finally Approve Amazon’s 16% Stake in Deliveroo

The UK’s Competition Markets and Authority (CMA) has at last approved Amazon’s 16 percent minority stake in food delivery service Deliveroo. The CMA’s findings, released today, note that the proposed Amazon-Deliveroo deal “has not resulted, and may not be expected to result, in a substantial lessening of competition (SLC) within a market or markets in the United Kingdom (UK) for goods and services.”

That concern — that Amazon’s investment in Deliveroo would lessen competition and consumer choices along with it — has hindered the investment since it was first announced back in May of 2019. For a quick recap, here’s how the saga has played out since then:

  • May 2019: Amazon announces its participation as the largest investor in Deliveroo’s $575 million Series G funding round.
  • July 2019: The CMA opens an investigation into Amazon’s investment, saying there were “reasonable grounds” that such a deal would mean the two companies would “cease to be distinct.”
  • October 2019: The CMA launches a formal probe into the deal.
  • April 2020: The deal gets initial approval, with the CMA citing “significant decline in revenues” for Deliveroo thanks to the pandemic.
  • June 2020: Regulators grant provisional clearance of the deal.

With this final approval, the CMA did warn Amazon that that increasing equity ownership of Deliveroo could result in further investigation, according to CNBC.

The approval comes at a time when consolidation is rampant among third-party food delivery services worldwide. The CMA finally approved the Takeaway.com’s acquisition of Just Eat, a deal that has created the largest food delivery service outside of China. The newly formed Just Eat Takeaway.com then swooped up Grubhub. Uber Eats, meanwhile, had been looking to buy Grubhub but backed away from such a deal in part because of the regulatory scrutiny the move would raise. Instead, it acquired Postmates in July.

With the pandemic still wrecking much havoc on the restaurant industry, we will probably see more of this consolidation — and probably a good deal of scrutiny, too — before the year is out.

Amazon Q2: Online Grocery Sales Tripled Year-Over-Year

Amazon announced its Q2 earnings yesterday, and unsurprisingly, the company’s grocery business went gangbusters during that time. Amazon said that its online grocery sales tripled in Q2 compared with the same time period last year.

Of course, this growth can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, which was in full swing during the last few months. With large swaths of the country sheltering in place, people were pushed into grocery e-commerce. So much so that online grocery shopping experienced record sales month after month in Q2, hitting $7.2 billion in June.

This sudden demand for e-groceries caught every retailer, including Amazon, off-guard. Overwhelmed by demand, Amazon had to put new Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods delivery customers on a waitlist before they could place any orders.

To help ease the strain Amazon even went to more extreme measures, like converting the first of its full-on grocery stores in Woodland Hills, CA into a delivery-only fulfillment center. According to its earnings release yesterday, the company has increased grocery delivery capacity by more than 160 percent and tripled grocery pickup locations.

The COVID tide is raising all grocery retail boats as restaurants yo-yo between being open and closed. Amazon’s news comes days after grocery retailer Albertsons said that sales rose 21 percent to $22.8 billion for the quarter ending June 20, and that digital sales more than tripled.

The question Amazon, Albertsons and the entire grocery industry now face is how much of this record e-commerce spending is permanent. We’ve had basically five months of restricted movement/lockdowns, which is plenty of time for a new habit like buying groceries online to set in. Will people stick with it? And specifically for Amazon, will this alter any of it plans as it expands its real world grocery footprint? Amazon did debut its new smart shopping cart during Q2 as well, which indicates that it still expects people to shop at brick-and-mortar stores in some fashion in the future.

Like everything in the world right now, we’re watching it change in real time, and its unlikely anything will be settled by the end of Q3.