Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Amazon

Amazon Expands Palm Payment to Go Store in New York City

Amazon announced today that its pay-with-your-palm technology, Amazon One, is now available at the Amazon Go store at 11 W 42nd St in New York City. This marks the first time the contactless payment tech has been available outside of the Seattle area.

Amazon One lets participants use their palm as a biometric key to pay for items and, in the case of Amazon Go, gain entrance into the store. To sign up, shoppers insert their credit card in an Amazon One device and hover their palm over the scanner. After that, when shopping at One-enabled stores, shoppers just hover their palm over the device at checkout to pay. Palm scans can also be associated with existing Amazon and Amazon Prime accounts.

Amazon introduced its palm payment technology back in September of last year, rolling it out to a number of Amazon-branded stores like Amazon Go and Amazon 4-Star. With its implementation at the the New York Go store, Amazon One is now available in 14 Amazon-related locations including Whole Foods Markets.

Today’s expansion to New York marks the first time Amazon’s palm payment system has left the confines of Washington state. Amazon has not been shy about its ambitions around selling the technology into third-party retailers. Getting the technology into New York will help expose it not only to Amazon shoppers, but potential retail customers as well.

Amazon One is arriving at the right time. The pandemic has retailers looking to create more contactless shopping experiences that reduce touchpoints in the store. Hovering a palm over a scanner certainly does that, as there’s no terminal for a customer to touch, or a staffer to wipe down.

The bigger question around Amazon One, however, is how willing people will be to give up their very personal biometic data to Amazon. You may not mind the e-commerce giant knowing exactly how bad your addiction to Spindrift seltzer water is, or even letting the company open up your garage so a delivery driver can place groceries in there when you aren’t home. But customers may not be willing to, err, hand over their individual palm print for Amazon to have on file.

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 Adds Pay-With-Your-Palm Service to Whole Foods Store in Seattle

Amazon announced today that it is bringing the Amazon One palm-scanning payment technology to Whole Foods stores in Seattle. The move marks the first use of the biometric system at a non-Amazon branded store.

Launched last September, Amazon One allows people to connect a credit card (and Amazon Prime account, of course) with a scan of their palm. Once scanned, customers can then pay for items at Amazon One-enabled stores simply by waving their hand over a special terminal at checkout.

As of March 2021, Amazon One was available in 12 Amazon stores in the Seattle area including Amazon Go, Go Grocery, and Amazon 4-Star. Starting today, Amazon One will be available at the Madison Broadway in Seattle Whole Foods, and the company says it will be expanding the program to seven more Seattle area Whole Foods locations in the coming months.

The addition of Amazon One at Whole Foods isn’t a surprise, given that Amazon owns Whole Foods. But it’s further illustration of how Amazon is leveraging its deep technological capabilities to reshape shopping experiences — and putting pressure on other brick-and-mortar retailers to up their own checkout experiences.

Amazon has developed a number of different systems to make checkout more frictionless. Famously, Amazon Go kicked off the era of “just walk out” cashierless checkout technology, which lets customers go into the store, grab what they want and get charged automatically upon exit. Amazon has also developed its Dash Cart, a smart shopping cart that allows for cashierless checkout at its stores.

Amazon also aims to license its various technologies to third parties. For instance, the company created a cashierless airport convenience store with the Hudson’s brand. And in the FAQ accompanying today’s Amazon One news, the company says it is in active discussions with several potential customers to use the palm payment system.

There are a number of startups looking to bring their own brand of cashierless checkout to retail (and help stave off Amazon). Companies like Zippin and Grabango install cameras and sensors to re-create the same type of just walk out shopping experience. And there are a number of smart shopping cart companies including Caper, Supersmart and Veeve.

If you want to learn more about the future of frictionless checkout at retail, be sure to attend ArticulATE, our food robotics and automation virtual summit on May 18th. We’ll have speakers from Zippin, Nomitri and many more, so get your ticket today!

Amazon Expanding it Palm Pay System to More Amazon Stores in the Seattle Area

Amazon said today via an email to The Spoon that it is bringing its Amazon One pay-with-your-palm biometric identification and payment system to an additional three physical retail locations in the Seattle area.

Launched last September, Amazon One scans a user’s palm for things like gaining entrance to a store or facilitating payment at checkout. Users just need to hold their hand over the Amazon One device and associate their palm print with a credit card and mobile phone number (or an Amazon account, of course).

With this expansion, 12 Amazon retail locations will be using Amazon One including a number of Amazon Gos, Go Grocery, Amazon 4-Star, Amazon Books and Amazon Pop-Ups.

Admittedly, the addition of Amazon One payment to just three of Amazon’s own stores is not earth-shattering news. But it adds to what has already been an incredibly busy year in the cashierless/contactless checkout space. Startups like Nomitri and IMAGR have come out of stealth. Standard Cognition raised $150 million. And AiFi partnered with Wundermart to build a thousand cashierless checkout stores.

Amazon, however, remains the 800-pound gorilla in the cashierless checkout space. It kicked off the movement in earnest with its first Go convenience stores a little more than three years ago. And Amazon is licensing its cashierless checkout tech to other retailers. Airport store chain, Hudson, recently opened its first cashierless store powered by Amazon, with plans to open more. Amazon’s marketing flat-out says the company has big plans for expanding the use of its palm payment to other venues like stadiums, restaurants and more. So it could find its way into more non-Amazon stores in the near future.

We’re also starting to see biometrics implemented in other cashierless checkout systems. Zippin’s latest store in Japan adds a layer of biometric technology from Fujitsu that allows users to scan their palm to gain entrance and facilitate payment.

Of course, it remains to be seen just how willing consumers are handing over their biometric data to Amazon. Knowing what I purchase on a regular basis is one thing. Knowing the fine details of my exact palm print? That’s quite another.

Data Analysis Shows Strong Foot Traffic Debut (and Dropoff) for Amazon’s Woodland Hills Fresh Store

It was by no means high on the list of disappointments in 2020, but I was still bummed that I couldn’t visit Amazon’s first Fresh grocery store in Woodland Hills, CA when it soft launched in August of this year.

It was Amazon’s first full, physical supermarket (the company had opened smaller scale Go Grocery stores before) and excitement was high. What types of Amazon-type technology would Jeff Bezos bring to the grocery sector?

Evidently a lot of people were keen on checking out Amazon, Fresh, according to data released this week from Placer.ai, a company that uses mobile phone location data to gather and analyze foot traffic to real world retail locations.

According to Placer, Amazon Fresh saw a surge of customers in the first weeks it opened to the public in September. In a blog post this week, outlining its findings, Placer wrote:

The first week saw visits on par with two local players with very strong visits rates, Trader Joe’s and Ralphs. But, Amazon Fresh quickly burst ahead with four of the next five weeks seeing the location drive over 5,000 more visits per week than either of those two competitors.

Amazon Fresh was also getting roughly the same number of visits per visitor as comparable grocers. Ralph’s and Trader Joe’s were seeing 2.4 and 2.2 visits per visitor respectively, while the new Amazon Fresh was already seeing 2 visits per visitor, indicating that people were having a good enough experience at Fresh to come back.

Placer reports that one of the reasons Amazon Fresh enjoyed so much foot traffic is because of the store’s “True Trade Area.” When picking a location for a store, a grocer might consider its main customer base to be within a straight five-mile radius of that store. But Placer’s data gathering shows that this strict geographic limitation isn’t accurate, and that a store’s shopping base can actually come from further out. This expanded reach is what Placer calls the True Trade Area.

As you can see from this map, Amazon Fresh Woodland Hills’ True Trade area actually covers a large swath around Los Angeles, so it was pulling customers from outside of Woodland Hills.

I was curious about some of Placer’s findings, so I spoke with Ethan Chernofsky, Placer.ai’s VP of Marketing (and author of the Amazon blog post), by phone this week. My first question was whether some of Fresh’s sizeable foot traffic could be attributable to curbside pickup. Amazon.com’s customer base it so huge, perhaps people were just ordering groceries online and picking them up at the Fresh store, even if that meant driving to another part of town. But Chernofsky said that was unlikely, given the length of time people were staying at the Fresh location.

But while Amazon Fresh enjoyed an early boom in foot traffic, starting in October, Amazon Fresh saw its numbers fall. As the Chernofsky detailed his analysis “Between October and November, the Amazon Fresh True Trade Area decreased by 27.1%, just as monthly visits declined 27.6%. On the other hand, Ralphs saw visits rise 13.7% as its own True Trade Area declined by 7.1%.”

One explanation for the drop could be that the excitement wore off, and what was once shiny and new was no longer shiny and new. Chernofsky doesn’t think that’s it though. As he wrote in a corporate blog post “the close relationship between visits per visitor metrics between the top local grocers indicates that this location was actually succeeding in driving repeat visits even among the launch buzz.”

Instead, Chernofsky attributed the drop to the COVID resurgence in Los Angeles this fall. As the virus reemerged, travel and work was limited, so there was less cross shopping, or tacking on a visit to the grocery store during an errand.

Amazon Locations Around Los Angeles

Another factor could be the fact that Amazon added three additional Fresh locations in Los Angeles since the opening of the first Woodland Hills location. The Northridge and North Hollywood locations both opened in mid-November and seem like they would draw from the same pool of customers as the Woodland Hills location’s True Trade Area.

Regardless, data like that from Placer is worth looking at to see how well Amazon is doing as it starts its forays into real world grocery. I’m still looking forward to a time when I can see the Amazon Fresh stores in person.

Will Removing the Minimum Order Give Walmart+ a Boost with Grocery?

Walmart announced today that starting Dec. 4, it will remove the $35 shipping minimum on Walmart.com orders for its Walmart+ members.

An answer to Amazon’s Prime Membership, Walmart+ launched in September of this year. With today’s announcement, Walmart+ members will get free next-day and two-day shipping on items from Walmart.com no matter the size of their shopping basket.

Normally, we wouldn’t cover this type of announcement because it has to do more with the shipping of non-grocery goods ordered through Walmart’s website. In its press announcement, Walmart even specifically said that grocery deliveries will still carry a $35 minimum.

But we are covering it because Walmart and Amazon are currently duking it to grab your grocery dollars. Both Walmart+ and Amazon Prime offer free grocery delivery as part of their member perks, but the war between the two companies has steadily escalated.

By some accounts, Amazon has more than 120 million Prime members in the U.S. This is a massive base to which it can upsell its grocery services. Of course, Amazon has been building that user base for years, but over the past year, the company has also been building out its grocery infrastructure. In addition to owning Whole Foods, Amazon has launched its real-world Go Grocery stores and Fresh supermarkets, as well as expanded its free grocery delivery for members to provide services like in-garage delivery.

But it’s in that real world where Walmart has its biggest advantage over Amazon. Walmart already has a gigantic, nationwide footprint of more than 4,700 stores in the U.S. Walmart+ members already get free unlimited grocery (though, as noted, there is an order minimum), but Walmart can tie in other real world services like curbside pickup, discounts on gas and mobile scan-and-go cashierless shopping.

In short, if Walmart can attract more people to its Walmart+ offering, that will help it stave off Amazon from gobbling up more of the grocery biz. It’s still a big if, but removing the minimum order amount as Walmart did today could help it sway more users to join Walmart+ and use the service for more grocery delivery.

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.