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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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The USDA Launches Its Pilot Enabling SNAP Users to Grocery Shop Online

Today, the USDA announced the launch of a pilot program that will make online grocery shopping available to those receiving SNAP benefits. According to the official press release, “lessons learned from this pilot are expected to inform future efforts to expand online purchasing in SNAP.”

To start, the program allows those SNAP users in the state of New York with electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards (also issued by New York) to order groceries online, for either pickup or delivery. These users will be able to buy USDA-approved food products (No booze, for example.) SNAP benefits do not cover service or delivery fees.

As of right now, the USDA is working with Amazon as well as Walmart on the program. Regional chain ShopRite will join next week. For now, Amazon and ShopRite are piloting the program in New York City only; Walmart is serving upstate New York areas. In the coming months, the pilot will expand to other areas of New York as well as Alabama, Iowa, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington, the press release stated.

The program is launching at a time when online grocery is growing rapidly. Nielsen recently revealed that roughly a quarter of Americans buy groceries online, and that number will jump to 70 percent over the next few years.

But the roughly 39 million Americans using SNAP (also known as Food Stamps), have largely been left out of this brave new world of online shopping. A startup called All_ebt made some progress at the end of 2018 by using Facebook Messenger and virtual Visa cards to help SNAP users shop online.

Now, however, it seems the Feds are finally starting to recognize on a national level the need to include lower-income and underbanked populations, who have the same busy schedules as anyone else, or may suffer from disabilities that make physically going to a grocery store challenging.

USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue called this need out in the press release:

“People who receive SNAP benefits should have the opportunity to shop for food the same way more and more Americans shop for food — by ordering and paying for groceries online. As technology advances, it is important for SNAP to advance, too, so we can ensure the same shopping options are available for both non-SNAP and SNAP recipients.”

As online grocery continues to grow, retailers would be wise to join in these initiatives to include SNAP users and others on assistance programs, or risk facing the kind of backlash Amazon recently got over its Go stores, which many have seen as discriminating against lower-income and underbanked households. We expect other major grocery retailers to join the SNAP program in future, so stay tuned.

Walmart Tries to Challenge Amazon’s Grocery Supremacy through Voice Ordering

I’m not one to get excited about sporting rivalries, but I do get excited about grocery rivalries. And Amazon V. Walmart is shaking out to be the matchup of the decade.

Today Walmart made moves to challenge Amazon in the game of voice-controlled grocery ordering by announcing Walmart Voice Order. It’s a new voice-ordering capability the company is launching with Google. Starting this month, you can tell your Google Assistant (or Android or Google Smart Display) something like, “Hey Google, talk to Walmart” and then list grocery items you’d like to add to your cart. This function just keeps track of what items you want to order, though; to actually purchase them, you’ll have to give Google specific instructions to do so (though the release didn’t specify what those instructions would be).

Interestingly, Walmart actually partnered with Google Express, Google’s online shopping tool, two years ago. However, they broke off the partnership in January of this year, presumably to make way for this new voice platform.

One cool thing is that the new service will remember your frequently ordered items. So, for example, if you have a specific brand of plant-based Greek yogurt you like, you can simply say “Add yogurt to my cart” and Google will know which brand you’re talking about.

The added step of saying “Hey Google, talk to Walmart” is a little annoying, especially considering you can just say “Alexa, order yogurt” to get it directly through Whole Foods, or “Alexa, add yogurt to my shopping list” to save it for later.

The extra step of saying “Hey Google, talk to Walmart” may be a minor annoyance, but it does leave more opportunities for the voice assistant to get confused or mishear you. However, small UI nuances like that likely won’t give Walmart or Amazon an edge in the voice-ordering grocery game. Instead, it seems like the voice victor decider will come down to one thing: whether or not you have Alexa. Walmart might partner with other voice-ordering services down the road, like the Microsoft Cortana, but Alexa is likely off-limits since Amazon and Walmart compete so closely.

This could end up being a big disadvantage for Walmart simply due to Alexa’s sheer reach. Amazon owns 66 percent of the smart speaker market, according to eMarketer. And all those Alexa’s aren’t going to sell you Greek yogurt from just anywhere — they’ll push you towards Whole Foods. Which means that Amazon has a captive audience of consumers who it can easily nudge towards its own grocery purveyor, leaving Walmart out in the cold.

As of now, voice ordering still isn’t a huge sales channel for grocery. In fact, only 16 percent of Americans even order their groceries online, period. But as our world grows more connected voice technology becomes more integral in our day-to-day life, I imagine that will change. Maybe someday people will even choose to buy a Google Assistant or Alexa based off of whether they prefer shopping at Walmart or Whole Foods.

According to TechCrunch, Walmart’s Google voice shopping for in-store pickup will be offered at more than 2,100 Walmart stores and for online delivery at over 800 stores.

The Walmart news came just hours after Amazon announced a new wave of price cuts at Whole Foods in an attempt to make the natural grocery outlet more wallet friendly. By cutting costs, they’re hoping to do away with their nickname of ‘Whole Paycheck’ and attract a wider swath of consumers — including ones who tend to shop at more budget grocery chains, like, ya know, Walmart.

Video: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels Visits Singapore to Talk AI With Inventors of the Rotimatic

Back when I worked at Gigaom, every year we’d invite Amazon CTO Werner Vogels on stage at our big cloud computing conference and interview him about the future of the Internet and distributed computing.

Nowadays Vogels is conducting his own interviews, heading out to far-flung locales to talk to innovators about how they are using cloud computing and AI to build products and change the world in ways both big and small.

It’s all for his new Amazon web show titled Now Go Build with Werner Vogels, and for his most recent interview, the cloud computing pioneer went to Singapore to talk to the inventors of the Rotimatic about why they built machine learning into a home food robot.

The video is a fun watch as Vogels visits with the wife and husband team of Pranoti Nagarkar and Rishi Israni in the middle of a bustling Singapore restaurant and later heads into the kitchen to try his hand at making his own rotis.

The conversation high point for me was hearing Nagarkar and Israni talk about why they decided to power what was, at first, a fairly simple automated roti maker with machine learning.

“I remember there is one particular phase where we tried to make it an embedded system where you have a fixed program that could run it and it could find out the right proportion of flour and water,” said Nagarkar, who came up for the idea of the Rotimatic after getting tired of making roti every day by hand.

“That wasn’t enough,” she said. ” You had to build machine learning in because every time you make a dough ball you learn something more about it and you use it for the next dough ball. It just kept making the machine better and better.”

Israni agreed and said they also realized machine learning would be necessary to ensure high performance of the robot over its lifetime.

“We see machine learning mostly in computer systems where things aren’t moving much” said Israni.  “Here with life, there is degradation in all the tolerances and all the parts, so the performance of parts keep shifting over time.

Eventually, the conversation turned towards the challenges of today’s food system.

“I’ve realized a few big problems with our world,” said Israni. “Seventy percent of illnesses are lifestyle disease-related, and they are primarily related to the type of food you consume.”

The other big problem is food waste. “One-third of world’s food is wasted,” said Israni.

Israni sees these two challenges are intertwined. “On one hand, you have people who are unhealthy who are maybe eating a little more than they need and the other you have people who are dying because of lack of food. We find that these two problems are prime problems to be solved by the kitchen of the future.”

How does a more technology forward kitchen helping solve these challenges? According to Israni, through shared data and more connected appliances.

“This is an information data problem,” he said. “We already know how to fix the knowledge gaps, but we can also execution gaps by building machines that are fully connected and exchange information with one another to delivery a cooking experience.”

Vogels agreed.

We also need “to see all of these devices as a platform and not only as a single function device,” said Vogels. “Software eats the world.”

“But you can’t eat software,” replied Israni with a smile.

You can watch the full video below:

Now Go Build with Werner Vogels – S1E2 Singapore | Amazon Web Services

7-11 is Testing Scan-and-Go Tech, Beer on Tap, and Handmade Tortillas at Its New Store

The humble convenience store seems next on the list for food disruption, if by disruption you mean organic smoothies and an onsite wine cellar.

Those things and much more are part of 7-11’s new “innovation station” store which the company announced this week. Located in 7-11’s hometown of Dallas, TX, the store will serve as a testing ground for the company to try new foods and food technologies, and see what sticks with customers. This is the first of a planned six locations for the so-called innovation station. The store is less than two miles away from the original ice house where 7-11 started nearly a century ago.

Some of the initiatives seem a natural fit for a convenience store that’s testing ways to make food better and faster. The store is equipped with scan-and-go technology, which allows customers to grab items (excepting beer, wine, tobacco, and other age-restricted products) and purchase them using their smartphones. The store is also offering a frozen-yogurt and ice-cream bar, baked goods made in-house, and seating both indoors and outdoors.

The new store will also include a Laredo Taco Company cafe, which will offer the chain’s famous handmade tortillas, salsa bar, and plate meals like enchiladas and fajitas. 7-11 acquired the trademark rights for Laredo from Sunoco in 2018.

Elsewhere in the new store, customers can find cold-pressed juices, made-to-order coffee drinks, kombucha and nitro-brew coffee on tap, and an area called “The Cellar” that features expanded wine selections and a growler-filling station.

The scan-and-go tech is especially interesting, as it could speed up the transaction process for customers so they can breeze in and out in minutes, rather than waiting in a line six people deep. That said, my colleague Chris Albrecht noted last year that something like Amazon Go, which lets you walk in, shop, and walk out, “is light years ahead of its competition when it comes to cashierless checkout, and putting the ‘convenience’ in convenience store.” As he rightly points out, you still have to manually scan the item to purchase it at 7-11, as opposed to literally just grabbing it and walking out of the store. So 7-11 still has some work ahead in terms of standing out in this area. (Though the same could be said of most convenience stores that aren’t Amazon.)

It’s also a smart move to offer food options beyond the usual convenience store fare of beef jerky, Doritos, and Twinkies. As someone who spends gratuitous amounts of time on the road, I can tell you the novelty of junk food wears off pretty quickly. The idea of finding a made-to-order latte or a fresh taco en route sounds like the definition of convenience to me.

Growlers and wine cellars I’m less convinced about. But as 7-11 noted in the press release, many of these initiatives are limited-time offerings and, according to 7‑Eleven executive vice president and chief operating officer Chris Tanco, meant to “explore new ideas that weren’t even on the retail radar a few months ago.”

Newsletter: Nigella Lawson’s Instagram Competitor and the Coolest Foodtech Startups at Y Combinator

This is the post version of our weekly newsletter. If you’d like to get the Weekly Spoon in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

If you’re a food tech polymath — interested in a little of this, a little of that — then this was your week.

First and foremost: We’ve got your food celebrity fix. This week the Food Network fangirl in me was excited to hear that chef/cookbook author Nigella Lawson has launched a new app that helps food-lovers take better pics of their meals. We might have an Instagram competitor on our hands! Called FOODIM, the app is currently only available in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. But I for one can’t wait to download it and see if it can make my avocado toast (sorry, millennial) look better than my go-to Instagram Ludwig filter.


via GIPHY

Speaking of new and exciting ventures, Y Combinator recently released the lineup for its 2019 Winter cohort: a whopping 200 companies. We sifted through the list to pick out the 10 food tech startups you should know, from a smart coffee scale to autonomous advertising robots.

We were especially excited to see Shiok Meats included in the list. The company is the first cell-based meat company to be accepted into the coveted accelerator, which means that cellular agriculture is heading towards the mainstream — or at least more investment.

Though they’ll be decamping to Silicon Valley for Y Combinator, Shiok Meats is actually based in Southeast Asia — which is where we (and others) are predicting cultured meat will first come to market. I took a deep dive this week into the reasons cell-based meat will first be available in Asia, not Silicon Valley. TL;DR: keep your eyes trained on Hong Kong, people.

Another company in the latest Y Combinator batch is creating a homemade-meal sharing marketplace. Shef is like AirBnB but for home-cooked meals. In the U.S., peer-to-peer home cooking networks are relatively new. In fact, they only became legal a few months ago with the passage of the law AB 626 in California.

In India, however, the home chef marketplace is already pretty hot. This week Chris profiled FoodCloud, a platform connecting home cooks with nearby hungry diners. Guess who’s using it to make a killing? Grandmas.

In other news:

  • Starbuck’s announced it will invest an eye-popping $100 million into a new venture fund to help incubate new up-and-coming food and retail tech startups.
  • The founder and ex-COO of Blue Apron launched a new venture aimed at reversing climate change through regenerative agriculture, starting with heritage chickens.
  • Amazon meal kits made their long-anticipated move into Whole Foods, which will give the e-commerce company another sales channel and more of their absolute favorite thing: data.

Finally — are you in San Francisco? (Or do you want an excuse for a quick trip?) Join us at ArticulATE, our one-day conference on all things food robotics and automation! This week we did a Q&A with Ryan Tuohy of Starship Technologies — the company that makes the wee food delivery rover bots — to get a taste of how automation will shape the future of food delivery. Snag your tickets today to hear him as well as speakers from Google, Sony, Albertson’s and more. Use code NEWSLETTER10 for a 10% discount!

San Francisco Targets Amazon Go with Cashless Retail Ban, Third Region to Do So

Amazon may have to put the brakes on the aggressive rollout of its automated Amazon Go stores, as more local governments are proposing bans on cashless brick-and-mortar retail operations. San Francisco is considering such a ban, following recent similar moves by other cities and states.

San Francisco’s cashless ban was first proposed back in February, but at that time did not include Amazon Go, because the stores don’t have employees handling cash. This week, however, San Francisco District Five Supervisor Vallie Brown expanded the proposed ban to include Amazon, which operates three Go locations in the city. The proposal comes on the heels of New Jersey’s cashless retail ban earlier this week, and Philadelphia’s earlier this month. New York City is considering such a ban as well.

Amazon Go locations are small, bodega-sized stores that have no cashiers. You scan the Amazon Prime app on your phone as you enter the store and high-tech sensors and cameras keep track of everything you take, automatically charging your credit card as you leave.

As my colleague, Jenn Marston has written, “Those who are against cashless businesses argue that restaurants and stores only accepting those payment forms exclude poorer communities and those for whom credit cards might not be an option.” Stores that have implemented cashless operations say they are safer (nothing to rob) and more accurate bookkeeping.

Amazon, however, is probably less concerned with safety and accuracy in its Go stores than it is with shopping efficiency (FWIW, we recognize the societal implications of cashless retail, and we loved shopping at Go). Amazon is all about removing friction from the retail experience, so you buy more stuff from them.

Amazon’s cashless troubles are compounded by the fact that the company is facing a broader backlash after its much-maligned second HQ search, and has become one of the targets of a larger anti-tech sentiment, with presidential candidates calling for its breakup.

This anti-Amazon sentiment gives the company less leverage in any fights it wants to pick with cities to keep the Go train rolling. Amazon had reportedly threatened to pull out of its Philadelphia location over accepting cash, which didn’t stop the city from enacting the ban anyway.

So what will Amazon do if more cities decide to ban cashless retail? The company can’t pull out of every city, and dense urban environments are where Go stores work best. But it’s hard to imagine the company going back and curtailing its AI and computer vision work it’s put into Go as it really is a great retail experience, and there’s too much data to be had watching us shop.

Amazon is laying some groundwork for Go experiences outside of cities. The company is looking at shrinking the already small Go stores to fit inside office buildings. Going more private like that could help it sidestep anti-cashless regulation.

But if the anti-cashless trend catches on, how long before Amazon Go is gone?

With Whole Foods Debut, Amazon Meal Kits Are Just Getting Warmed Up

It was no real surprise to read that Amazon brand meal kits are surfacing in select Whole Foods. I was honestly wondering what was taking Bezos and co. so long to get there. But Amazon pushing its own meal kits in the high-end grocery chain comes at a time when in-store retail is driving growth in the meal kit sector, and also as Amazon reportedly looks to create its own supermarket chain.

Grocery Dive was first to report on Amazon’s meal kits out in the wild, confirming with the company that they are available in select locations in the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California, Nevada and Arizona. Previously, the meal kits had been sold through other Amazon outlets like Amazon Prime and Fresh, as well as through its Go convenience stores.

Retail outlets such as Go and Whole Foods is where all the action is in meal kits. A recent Nielsen report showed that the majority of growth in the meal kit sector came from in-store sales, generating $93 million in revenue across 2018. That number is could climb even higher as NPD found that nearly 100 million American adults still haven’t tried meal kits, but want to. NPD also found that consumers are not tied to a particular brand of meal kit yet, so there is room for a company like Amazon to come in and grab marketshare without having to fight set-in habits.

So there is burgeoning demand for meal kits, and Amazon is ready to get you one in just about any way imaginable. You can buy them online when you’re planning ahead, at a Go store when you’re, well, on the go, and at a Whole Foods for either of those occasions.

But Whole Foods isn’t just another sales channel for Amazon. It also provides the company with more of what it hungers for the most: data. Selling Amazon meal kits in Whole Foods gives the mothership more insight into where, what, when and how people purchase meal kits. This data can then be used to refine all its meal kits processes for when the company opens up its own grocery stores.

That’s right: if you missed it, Amazon is supposedly eyeballing its own grocery store chain. The Wall Street Journal broke the news earlier this month that Amazon is planning to build up to a dozen, 35,000 sq. ft. retail outlets. Connecting meal kits with its own stores and with delivery is a no brainer and something The Spoon’s Mike Wolf saw coming awhile back when he wrote:


The bottom line is [Amazon] want[s] 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.

Meal kits are also the perfect form factor for Amazon to deliver to your door or office. They are already packaged up into their own stackable boxes (no irregular shapes) that can be shipped out same day via Amazon drivers or Scout delivery robots.

That Amazon is looking to expand its meal kits presence as part of the reinvention of the meal journey shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone paying attention.

Why Philadelphia’s Ban on Cashless Business Is a Good Thing

Philadelphia, PA yesterday became the first major U.S. city to ban cashless stores, The Wall Street Journal reports. A new law will “require most retail stores to accept cash” and goes into effect in July 2019.

The law would not include parking garages, stores like Costco (which require membership) or hotels, according to the WSJ. But it will affect restaurants, grocery stores, and other food retailers, including Amazon Go stores.

Amazon had asked for an exemption for the new law but was told by Philly lawmakers that in order to get one, Amazon Go stores would have to require membership a la Costco. Currently, Amazon’s cashless grab ’n’ go stores are not restricted to Amazon Prime members, as they would have to be if Amazon were to go for an exemption from the new law in Philadelphia.

It’s the latest move in a series of pushbacks over the last several months around businesses going cashless. In NYC, councilman Ritchie J. Torres introduced legislation last November that would require restaurants and retailers to accept cash. New Jersey has passed a bill banning cashless stores earlier this year. Massachusetts has been legally requiring stores to accept cash since the 1970s.

Massachusetts wasn’t concerned about Amazon swallowing up the world when it passed its law over 40 years ago, but the more recent efforts are most certainly in response to the growing number of establishments trying to go cashless. In the food world that includes Sweetgreen, Tender Greens, the Milk Bar, and Dig Inn. And, of course, Amazon, who currently has Go stores in Seattle, Chicago, and San Francisco. Some industry heavyweights have defended the movement towards cashless business, with Union Square Hospitality’s Danny Meyer citing safety as one of the biggest reasons. Meyer also said that “with the growing ubiquity of plastic and mobile payment, many businesses are choosing to eliminate cash from their operation entirely.”

The thing is, mobile payments aren’t ubiquitous yet, and nor are credit and debit cards. Those who are against cashless businesses argue that restaurants and stores only accepting those payment forms exclude poorer communities and those for whom credit cards might not be an option. Councilman Torres went as far as to say that “insidious racism” underlies the cashless model.

According to a survey by Gallup, most Americans “see the death of cash in their lifetimes.” Countries like Sweden are already well on their way to dumping cash, with IKEA even testing a cashless location in Gavle (north of Stockholm). But even a forward-thinking nation like Sweden is dealing with pushback, with some claiming cashless businesses discriminate against the poor, those with disabilities, and newly arrived refugees.

There may be middle ground, and some folks are working to find it. For instance, a company called All_ebt uses a combination of Facebook Messenger and virtual Visa cards to let those on SNAP assistance shop online and even at Amazon Go stores. It’s not a magical fix that will solve all the issues surrounding the cashless model. But if we are in fact headed towards a cashless future, we need more companies and organizations like All_ebt who are willing to use tech to find a way to include everyone in this new movement. Until we get more of those efforts to find middle ground, a citywide ban on cashless business is probably a good call.

Amazon Closing All Its Pop-Up Stores in Whole Foods and Elsewhere

Amazon will close all 87 of its pop-up stores in the U.S., including those nestled inside Whole Foods, by the end of April, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.

These small Amazon-branded pop-up stores were typically a few hundred square feet and served as a way to sell Amazon products like Kindles, Echos and Fire devices directly to consumers in a physical retail environment. Amazon launched the first pop-up in Whole Foods in November of 2017.

Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, has this philosophy of asking “why?” five times to get to the root of a problem, but you probably don’t need that many to figure out why Amazon made this decision. While the company is shuttering these small pop-ups, it is massively ramping up other physical retail efforts.

In addition to the existing Amazon Book Stores, which have been around for a number of years, the company opened up its first 4-Star Store at the end of last year. Amazon is hiring like crazy to build out up to 3,000 Amazon Go convenience stores, some of which will reportedly be small enough to fit inside office buildings and airports (like a cashierless permanent pop-up!). Plus there’s that whole chain of Amazon grocery stores that could be on the way.

For Amazon, all that dedicated brick and mortar can deliver a better (and presumably more profitable) shopping experience than a sparse pop-up could.

Will Your Amazon Retrieval Robot Pick Up Your Groceries from the Amazon Store?

There’s a scene in Being John Malkovich where the titular character crawls through a portal inside his own head. The result is a crazy world filled with “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich” ad infinitum.

That’s kind of how I feel whenever I write about Amazon: the company is everywhere, launching so many things. Now comes word from The Wall Street Journal that Amazon is planning on launching “dozens” of its own grocery stores. These aren’t new Whole Foods locations; they would be Amazon grocery stores.

It’s important to note that this idea could never come to fruition. It’s based on “people familiar with the matter” and Amazon tries a lot of things, some of them stick, some Dash, err, don’t. There could any number of reasons for Amazon to launch its own grocery stores — if it’s one thing Amazon likes, it’s control — but let’s assume that Amazon grocery stores are going to happen and spend our Sunday morning doing a quick thought experiment to tie some Amazon threads together.

This may border on red-string conspiracy, but here are some things that we know so far:

  • Amazon’s raison d’etre is to remove friction from the shopping experience. Two-day shipping, voice shopping, in-trunk delivery, in-garage delivery, in-home delivery. All aim to get you your packages faster, so you subsequently buy more stuff.
  • As The Journal notes, Whole Foods doesn’t carry foods with artificial colors, sweeteners, preservatives or stuff like that. Ever tried to buy a plain ole can of Coke at Whole Foods?
  • While Amazon killed off the plastic Dash buttons last week, the company still has its Dash Replenishment system and virtual Dash buttons to facilitate easier restocking of household items.
  • Amazon has been learning how to do brick and mortar retail. It operates a number of Amazon store locations, has owned Whole Foods for a year and a half, and is rapidly expanding it’s Amazon Go Stores. Amazon Go locations in particular are interesting because Amazon builds them from the ground up to do cashierless checkout.
  • Amazon has gotten into the robot delivery business with the launch of its Scout.
  • The Spoon uncovered a patent that was issued to Amazon for an autonomous ground vehicle (AGV). Unlike other delivery robots, this robot would live in your garage (or whatever) and venture out to get your packages from a nearby delivery truck or some other fulfillment type mechanism.
  • Amazon invested in Plant Prefab, a company that makes prefab houses.

Wow. Amazon does have a lot going on. So let’s bring all this together.

The Journal reports that Amazon is eyeing locations that are 35,000 sq. feet for its new stores — half the size of a normal grocery store. If Amazon builds out its own locations it can carry whatever junk it wants, thereby not sullying the Whole Foods brand. But more importantly, with only half the square footage, the Amazon store could carry only the junk you want. Well, you and your neighbors. Amazon’s algorithms will be able to predict what items a particular area wants and how much of it and stock just that.

Building out its own half-sized stores would also make it easier for Amazon to architect them from the ground up to be cashierless. And since they are bigger than a Go store, they could hold more items and better serve as a type of delivery fulfillment center.

And that fulfillment center option is handy because if you, the shopper, don’t want to go to the store, no worries! You can order groceries online for delivery or pickup. And thanks to Alexa and/or Dash, Amazon at some point will know what groceries you need and when and can either dispatch a Scout robot to you, or call your AGV to come retrieve your groceries from the delivery vans making its rounds.

Who knows, perhaps Amazon is gaining enough building knowledge from Plant Prefab to make a sort of doggie door for your AGV, which would finally get Amazon deliveries inside your house.

On a long enough timeline, it’s easy to imagine Amazon doing anything (lord knows what they are working on that we don’t know about yet). But more immediately, it has all the pieces in place to make the notion of its own grocery stores more compelling than just another place to buy your bag of groceries. Perhaps they’d be the kind of place John Malkovich likes to shop.

Editor Roundtable Podcast: Forget Delivery Bots, Amazon Wants You to Keep a Robot in Your Garage

Gotta give credit where credit is due: Amazon sure has lots of ideas about how to get more stuff to your house.

While everyone thought Amazon was all about about delivery drones, pickup lockers and IoT-connected order buttons (ok, maybe not), the tech giant’s also been brainstorming about putting a robot in your garage that could go and retrieve your latest package for you.

That’s just one of the topics we tackle in this week’s podcast with the Spoon editorial gang. Other topics include:

You can listen to the podcast below, find it on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or your favorite podcast app, or download it directly to your computer.

Moar Data! Amazon Buys Smart WiFi Company Eero

Amazon announced today it is acquiring home mesh networking and WiFi router company Eero. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Eero is popular thanks to its smart mesh routers, which make setting up and connecting devices to your WiFi easy. But Amazon isn’t just buying Eero because of its sales. By owning Eero, Amazon will also get more data at the network level as to how consumers are using their internet-connected devices. Is your Roku gobbling up most of your data usage? Why don’t you check out an Amazon Prime Video free trial! And as my former colleague, Stacey Higginbotham of the Internet of Things Podcast pointed out, the opposite is true as well. Amazon can see which devices are inefficient, then build its own, ideally better, solutions.

The Eero system creates a mesh network by deploying small hardware beacons around your home. Kinda like how you can put multiple Echos throughout your house. The goal of Alexa has always been to replicate the ubiquitous “computer” from Star Trek–an invisible presence that responds to your vocal commands. Seems like adding Alexa functionality to the beacons is probably in the cards to work towards that ubiquity.

The Eero purchase also makes sense when you think about the press conference Amazon held back in November, where it launched “Frustration Free Setup.” Part of that mission was WiFi Simple Setup. As The Verge wrote then:

Now, compatible devices will be able to access the Wi-Fi credentials stored on your Amazon products so that they can automatically connect to the internet within seconds of being plugged in.

Connecting Alexa-powered devices to your Eero-powered network could now be even more vertically integrated, not to mention making Amazon-brand appliances like the Alexa microwave easier to install. If Amazon builds more connected appliances (fridges, dishwashers, countertop ovens, etc.), it could make installation that much easier and even direct Eero owners towards buying them (Amazon noticed you don’t have a fridge connected to the internet, you should totally buy this Amazon-brand one). This of course, would create more lock-in for Amazon’s Alexa ecosystem (good for Amazon, bad for consumers).

Of course, maybe your Amazon house will come with Eero already built in as well.

But the acquisition just happened today, and these are just the standard hot takes and speculation. However, as my other former colleague, Janko Roettgers of Variety pointed out on Twitter:

It’s old hat at this point to say this, but we are handing over not just more, but deeper data about our behaviors to big companies in the name of convenience. Most of us seem fine with that, so don’t expect these types of acquisitions from the big tech companies to stop.