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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Amazon

Will Amazon’s Scout Help Accelerate Robot Delivery?

Amazon unveiled Scout, its own li’l rover delivery robot via a corporate blog post today. Details are scant, but the cooler-sized, six-wheeled bot will make its debut near Amazon’s (original) HQ in Snohomish County, Washington.

The company’s announcement didn’t mention food or groceries, only saying Scout is “designed to safely get packages to customers using autonomous delivery devices.” But it’s not hard to imagine the rover bot transporting snacks, drinks and possibly even restaurant delivery (if sufficiently temperature controlled).

We don’t know exactly where in Snohomish county Scout is available, or how many robots will be in the initial fleet. Customers just place their Amazon order as they normally would, select a delivery range including “fast” (their word) and same day, and the package will arrive either by delivery partner or by Scout.

Though Scout is autonomous and will eventually roam the streets on its own, it will initially only run during daylight hours and will have a human Amazon handler accompanying it.

We’re not even done with January and it’s already shaping up to be a watershed year for delivery robots. In just this month:

And that doesn’t even include the forthcoming Postmates robot, “Serve”, or the Kiwi bots already making deliveries in Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, or Marble’s robot delivery rolling out across Texas.

If Scout’s trial proves successful, Amazon’s involvement in the space will certainly light a fire under the existing competition and accelerate robot delivery . And it looks like Amazon is putting some muscle behind the program. The Seattle Times pointed out, there are 21 job openings at Amazon related to Scout.

What will be exciting to watch with Scout is how this integrates into Amazon’s overall logistical arsenal. The company is obsessed with efficiency (and getting you to buy more stuff). It’s easy to see why Amazon wants in on delivery robots. Robots can (eventually) scurry around 24 hours a day delivering just about any type of package. They don’t take breaks, and if Bezo’s and company is smart, they’ll follow the Woowa Bros. approach and have these delivery bots do double duty and take away any empty amazon boxes from your home.

In addition to Amazon’s logistical genius, the other thing going for Amazon, which in turn could push the entire robot delivery sector forward, is clout. A company of Amazon’s size has a lot more political muscle than a startup in dealing with city and state lawmakers to get robot-friendly regulations passed.

Of course, as with any robot news, there will be questions of what workers are displaced, and what that means for society as a whole. It’s a topic (among many) we’ll actually be tackling at our upcoming Articulate conference in San Francisco on April 16. It’s a one-day summit that will explore what’s happening with food robots and automation, and where it’s all heading. Get your tickets now!

Survey: Amazon Has More Than 100M Prime Members in the U.S.

Amazon is famously secretive and vague with its stats, so we oftentimes have to look at outside sources to get a sense guess as to how various parts of the company are doing. Like a new survey out today from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (h/t Geekwire), which estimates that as of December 31, 2018, Amazon had 101 million Prime members in the U.S.

It’s worth taking a moment to note that in a letter to shareholders last April, Amazon said it had more than 100 million Prime members worldwide. We don’t know what the mix of U.S. v. non U.S. subscribers was back then, so we can’t be sure how much of an increase this represents.

But if Consumer Intelligence’s estimates are accurate, then there are a number of implications. First is that Prime Membership in the U.S. continued to grow. Consumer Intelligence says Prime membership grew 10 percent last year, which is slower than in years past, but still significant given the size of the audience. That growth was also at a time of growing backlash against tech companies, including Amazon.

More specific to our interests here at The Spoon, that massive Prime subscriber base means more people can be “nudged” by Amazon to shop special deals at Whole Foods, do online grocery delivery through Amazon Fresh, and experience same day delivery through Prime Now. Amazon Prime members can also be driven towards Amazon’s brick and mortar retail stores like the rapidly expanding cashierless Amazon Go convenience stores and the 4-Star store.

Amazon Prime membership also unlocks video and music features on the Alexa-powered devices, which can, in turn, drive loyalty to and more sales of those smart speakers and displays. There’s the obvious benefit of more direct revenue for Amazon (the company said it sold tens of millions of Alexa devices this past holiday). But it also keeps the Alexa install base at a point where smart kitchen appliance manufacturers like Samsung and LG will still want to incorporate Alexa voice controls into their devices. The more devices that use Alexa, the more Amazon can control the direction of the emerging voice control sector.

Perhaps most important, however, is that all this activity from Prime members across brick and mortar, online and mobile app orders, voice commands and appliance interaction provides Amazon with more data. This data can then be used to better understand and market to existing and potential customers, make Alexa even more useful/powerful — and generate even more Prime memberships.

Report: Amazon Building More Whole Foods, Will There Be Room for Robot Fulfillment?

Never let it be said that Amazon slows down, even during the holidays. The Wall Street Journal reports that Bezos’ behemoth has plans to add more Whole Food stores across the country so its two-hour grocery delivery service can reach even more people.

If true–The Journal’s story is based on “people familiar with the plans”–the news isn’t terribly surprising. Amazon is very competitive and has a history of sacrificing profitability for aggressive growth. A Progressive Grocer report earlier this year ranked Amazon as the eighth largest grocer in the U.S. And although Amazon is the leader in online grocery sales, a recent report from Brick Meets Click shows that shoppers spend way less with Amazon than they do with other grocery retailers.

Walmart, the largest grocer in the U.S. has 4,700 American locations, and the company says it has a store within 10 miles of 90 percent of the population. Walmart was on track to make same day delivery available to 40 percent of the U.S. population by the end of this year, and has a goal to make it available to 60 percent by the end of next year.

Whole Foods, on the other hand, has 470 locations (including in the U.K. and Canada) with two-hour delivery available to Amazon Prime members in 63 cities. So you can see how Amazon is playing catch up here. The question is how they will catch up, and that’s not just about the number of stores.

Part of The Journal story says that some of the spaces Amazon is looking at are slightly larger than the average Whole Foods locations, with the extra space being use for delivery and pickup. Does this mean that Amazon could be jumping on the in-store robot fulfillment center bandwagon?

Albertsons, Ahold Delhaize and Walmart are building out robot fulfillment centers in their stores to facilitate super-fast online grocery order fulfillment (Kroger is building out dedicated standalone robot warehouses). Amazon is already big into robotics in its warehouses, and started experimenting with half hour grocery pickup in select Whole Foods. For a company dedicated to efficiency and speed, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see some sort of automation being built into new locations from the ground up.

Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods in 2017 scared and catalyzed the grocery industry into spending money and innovating throughout 2018. If Amazon is ramping up its geographical presence, and it seems likely it will, buckle up because 2019 is going to be a wild ride for everyone in the grocery game.

What Amazon Did (and Didn’t) Mention in its Holiday Sales Press Release

With Christmas now over it’s time for the annual releasing of the vague holiday sales stats from Amazon! This year, Bezos’ behemoth did not disappoint and shared with us a press announcement filled with unspecific terms like “record breaking” and “millions more.”

As we said back in November, though these puff pieces from Amazon are light on actual hard content, they are good to check in on and parse through if only to get even an iota of understanding as to what’s selling (and what Amazon is pushing) during one of the busiest shopping times of the year.

However, it might be most interesting to start with what Amazon was not touting this year: namely, it’s Alexa-powered microwave. Sure, a microwave probably isn’t topping a whole lot of holiday wish lists, but Amazon debuted the inexpensive device with plenty of fanfare earlier this year, in plenty of time for the holiday season. Plus, Amazon took the time in this press release to highlight how robust sales were for other mundane-and-not-necessarily-holiday-wishlist-toppers like Blink connected security camera, Amazon Smart Plug, Ring Video Doorbell 2, and TP-Link Kasa Smart Plug Mini Outlet.

Perhaps the middling to negative reviews of the Amazon microwave turned people off. But for a device that is meant to showcase how an Alexa integration could/should work, it’s absence from a year end wrap up — even in the vaguest terms — still stands out.

Also, last year’s holiday press release gave a specific shout out to the then just launched Amazon Key in-home delivery service. No mention of that this year either. Is this a change in strategy, or do people just not want to give strangers access to their front door? (Or both?)

But back to what the company did sell:

Echo devices. Amazon said it sold “millions more Amazon Devices this holiday season compared to last year – the best-selling Amazon Devices this holiday included all-new Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick 4K with all-new Alexa Voice Remote, and Echo.” The emphasis is ours there, since the company said it sold “tens of millions” of Alexa-enabled devices during the 2017 holiday season. It’s important to keep an eye on sales of voice assistants because whoever grabs the most market share will help determine who dominates the smart kitchen/home of the not-too-distant future.

Other food-related bits from the Amazon holiday round up include:

  • Shopping via Alexa tripled this year compared to last.
  • The DASH rapid egg cooker was a top-seller at the new Amazon Four Star store. (Probably because it is amazing.)
  • Customers nearly tripled the number of requested recipes this holiday season over last year and asked Alexa for cooking-related advice twice as much.
  • “Alexa helped mix hundreds of thousands of cocktails this holiday season – with eggnog and Moscow Mule being the most requested drinks.” (Last year Alexa only helped make “tens of thousands” of cocktails with Martini and Manhattan being the most requested.)
  • Theo Dark Chocolate Bar, Cacao with Sea Salt and the fresh chicken bahn mi sandwich were top sellers at Amazon Go stores.
  • The best-selling items for Prime Now pick up at Whole Foods were organic honeycrisp apples, boneless/skinless chicken breasts, and Atlantic farm-raised salmon filets.
  • The fastest grocery delivery was in St. Paul, MN, where that grocery order got to its destination in 12 minutes and 19 seconds.
  • Boston, Hoboken, NJ and San Francisco were the cities with the most grocery delivery via Prime Now and Whole Foods.

So that puts a bow on this Christmas. Join us again next year for this holiday tradition, when we’ll see if “thousands of people” have bought an Amazon House.

Startups! They’re Just Like Us! Amazon and Instacart Break Up

Like Ben and Jennifer, Brad and Angelina, and Cardi B and Offset*, Instacart and Amazon have broken up. In a blog post today, Instacart announced that it was winding down (consciously uncoupling?) its grocery delivery relationship with Amazon.

Like with so many other power couples, this breakup wasn’t entirely a surprise. Instacart and Whole Foods first hooked up back in 2014. The two then put a ring on it, as it were, with a five year deal signed in 2016. But then Amazon came in and bought Whole Foods in 2017. Totes Awk!**

Amazon has it’s own delivery service, so we kinda knew Instacart was going to be on the outs soon enough. The split will begin in earnest in February and continue ramping down over the months that follow.

The news itself has been extensively covered already, but what we are most interested in is: How is Instacart taking this, and what will they do next?

For its part, Instacart seems to be doing just fine. Whole Foods had been playing an increasingly smaller role in Instacart’s overall business. Whole Foods reportedly represented just 5 percent of Instacart’s revenue, down from 10 percent of revenue the previous year.

At least Instacart can sleep easy at night on its giant pile of VC money. Throughout 2018, Instacart has raised $950 million. So it’s got some runway to get out there, and meet new people. Actually, it’s been doing just that, expanding its relationships with Sam’s Club and Kroger.

Despite all that good news, I’m still a little worried about Instacart falling into the same patterns of relying on others. Sure it’s got some new partners, but where is the innovation? Team InstAzon announced their breakup on the same day that Postmates unveiled a shiny new delivery robot that it built in-house and will be scurrying around neighborhoods next year.

Kroger, too, is showing signs that it may not be Team Instacart 4EVR. It’s started building robot-powered smart warehouse and distribution centers (no need for Instacart’s human shoppers there) and testing out self-driving grocery delivery vehicles with Nuro in Scottsdale, AZ.

Hopefully, this break up will give Instacart the “me” time it needs to figure itself out, maybe finally take up robotics (or drones) and get to a place where it can live its best life.

*I’m too old to know who Offset is, but my millennial colleagues assure me that it’s worth putting him in there.

**Again, my millennial colleagues assure me that this is how the kids talk. Though I’m not sure why they had to stifle a laugh when telling me that.

Amazon Shrinks Go Store to Go After Hungry Office Workers

Amazon is looking to grow its burgeoning Go store experience by thinking small. Reuters reports that Amazon has created a smaller version of its cashierless convenience store that can fit inside existing high-traffic areas like office buildings.

Like so many of Amazon’s products, the first such mini-Go is already in place in one of Amazon’s office buildings in Seattle. Coming in at just 450 square feet, this Go-lite sells snacks and salads to hungry Amazonians.

Word of the micro-Go comes just days after a report that Amazon was in talks to put its regular Go stores in airports. Putting the pieces together, we can see Amazon’s plans for its Go store rollout take shape: just put them everywhere.

In all seriousness though, the checkout line-less Amazon Go store experience is perfect for high-traffic areas like airports and busy office buildings. Shrinking the footprint down and reducing the inventory to real grab-and-go items like snacks lines up with the lifestyle of harried workers looking for a fast bite.

My first thought upon reading the news of the li’l Go store was how it would impact other tiny convenience stores coming to the market. Deep Mind builds similar small cashierless walk-in kiosks to create retail environments inside office lobbies and such. But its technology is hampered by the fact that it can only service one purchaser at a time.

Then there are companies like Byte Foods and Stockwell (formerly Bodega). Byte makes smart office fridges that vend food, while Stockwell makes credenza-sized mini-marts that employ similar grab-and-go technology for populous spaces like apartment buildings. How small will Amazon go with its Gos? Both could feel the heat if Amazon ratchets this tiny Go initiative, and there’s no reason to think that they won’t.

Amazon seems to be hitting the accelerator when it comes to Go, as the company is hiring like crazy to grow the Go team. Amazon is a trusted brand name that deeply understands delivery and fulfillment, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone if Amazon turns little shopping stores into a big business.

Why Amazon Go’s Reported Move Into Airports Would Make Sense

Amazon is reportedly targeting airports as future locations for its cashierless Go stores, according to a report in Reuters.

The Reuters story doesn’t have many details other than the Los Angeles and San Jose airports being specifically contacted by the retail giant as possible Go locations. However, airports are a natural location for Amazon’s convenience store chain.

First, airports are busy places where lots of people want speed and efficiency — the perfect audience for Amazon Go. Having a cashierless checkout store where you walk in, grab what you want and leave without standing in line seems like the best kind of retail experience for an airport’s high-traffic setting.

Airports are actually a pretty common target for automated retail experiences. Briggo’s coffee robot launched in the Austin airport earlier this year, and Cafe X has said airports are a natural fit for its coffee robot as well.

In addition to a potentially robust sales channel with a captive audience, for Amazon, there is always data to be mined. As Reuters points out, 350 million people got on flights at the country’s 12 top airports last year. That’s a lot of regional sales data, and data around what travelers purchase, but also travel data about individual account holders could be used to feed Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa. Knowing how often you go to airports or tying your calendar with upcoming trips into Alexa, gives Amazon a deeper understanding of you, which could be used to sell you more stuff.

Amazon’s move into airports isn’t guaranteed, and as Reuters says, many airports are public, which would require the famously secretive Amazon to share terms of any proposed deals publicly. That may turn the company off the notion.

However, we know that Amazon is on a massive hiring spree for its Go stores, so a big rollout beyond its existing seven stores is on the way. Chances are good that you’ll be shopping at one on your way to a future vacation or business trip.

Amazon Go is On a Massive Hiring Spree, and Not Just in the U.S.

Amazon Go, the retail store that uses cashierless technology so you can walk in, choose your items, and walk out without stopping to pay, has 338 open listings on its job site (big h/t to Sean Butler).

There are a few takeaways from this, but most notable is the sheer amount of investment in engineers on both the software and hardware side. There are a whopping 130 positions in software development, and 44 in hardware development.

But that’s just the start. While the majority of the listings are for Software Engineers, listings also include everything from Data Collection Technician to Creative Director to Security Engineer to Senior Vision Research Scientist. There are even 7 listings for real estate and construction positions, Whew!

They’re also searching for a Specification Technologist to join the Amazon Meal Kits team and help out with product development. Meal kits are already some of the most popular items at Go stores, so it’s not surprising that Amazon is looking to amp up its offerings, especially as they expand into new cities.

Many of the jobs are quite recent, and were either posted or updated within the past month. Which means that Amazon is poised to make some serious Amazon Go expansion moves in the new year, and willing to invest some serious man (and woman) power to do it. Good thing too, since the company is considering a plan to open 3,000 Go stores by 2021.

It’s also worth noting where the Go jobs are located. While the locations don’t necessary indicate where Amazon will set up future Go stores, it’s a good data point to learn where they will base R&D and development of their cashierless technology.

In the U.S. there are openings in Seattle (duh), Westborough, MA, San Francisco, and New York City. Abroad, there are listings in two cities in Israel: Tel Aviv and Haifa.

Perhaps most eye-catching on the list is Westborough, MA. That’s the home of Amazon Robotics, a subsidiary which works on Amazon’s mobile robotic fulfillment systems. According to job descriptions, that’s also where Amazon is building an Advanced Projects Group, which will develop “new technologies that go well beyond the current state of the art.”

The location is certainly strategic from a hiring standpoint: Westborough is less than an hour outside of Boston, making it an easy way to recruit tech-savvy post-grads from MIT and Harvard. I’m speculating here, but the Westborough job listings, with its proximity to Amazon Robotics, could also indicate plans on Amazon’s part to add more robots to its Go store experience.

Outside of the U.S., Amazon Go is hiring in Israel. This could simply be a way for Amazon to take advantage of Israel’s flourishing AI landscape and hire some top-notch computer scientists. But it could also indicate that Amazon is ready to expand its Go stores internationally.

It wouldn’t be the first company to bring cashierless tech Israel. Trigo Vision recently partnered with Israel’s largest supermarket chain Shufersal to implement its checkout-free tech in all locations across Israel. However, Trigo Vision and Amazon aren’t direct competitors: Trigo licenses out its tech to existing retailers, while Amazon builds its Go stores from the ground up.

Of course, even outside of Israel Amazon still has plenty of competition in the cashierless tech space. Microsoft has been working on its own version and has reportedly been in partnership talks with Walmart. In San Francisco, Aipoly is developing its own walk-in-walk-out store solution and Standard Cognition recently opened up a store in San Francisco to show off its technology.

Which is all the more reason that Amazon needs to grow fast if it wants to keep up its unique value proposition in the food retail space. The high number of job listings, and their wide geographic reach, show that when it comes to Go stores (and most things grocery, in fact), Amazon isn’t slowing down anytime soon. Now we just have to wait and see when they launch a cashierless Whole Foods.

Thanks to Sean Butler, who posted on his Linkedin about Amazon Go’s massive open jobs list. Do you have a tip for us at the Spoon? We’d love to hear it. 

Spoon Newsletter: Food As The Messaging Medium

A couple of years ago on a plane ride to Las Vegas for CES, I struck up a conversation with a guy sitting next to me by the name of Nathan Shields. When I asked Nathan what he does for a living, he told me “I make pancake art.”

Like many dads who make flapjacks for the kids, I consider myself something of an amateur pancake artist, but as I soon found out, Nathan’s work goes way beyond the Death Star and Mickey Mouse cakes I’ve made for my kids on Saturday morning.

Of course, we know food as an artistic and messaging medium is nothing new. All one has to do is watch an episode of The Final Table to understand the potential of food as a form of artistic expression. But Nathan’s work got me thinking about food as a medium for communication.

My thinking that was further sparked when I went to the opening press event in Vegas and saw a gigantic ice sculpture with the CES logo. This ice sculpture is there every year at CES, and it’s always a pretty cool sight, in part because there’s something fascinating about using a temporary medium like ice as a branding vehicle.

I was reminded of the CES sculpture a week ago when I saw an Instagram post by Scott Heimendinger. Scott, who is the technical director for Modernist Cuisine, can usually be found doing something crazy with food, and so while I wasn’t all that surprised to see him laser etching ice cubes, it made me wonder anew about the possibility of food to communicate ideas.

Photo: @SeattleFoodGeek

While ice is perhaps the most temporal of “food” items in that it’s only going to last hours if not minutes, the idea itself of food as a way to communicate is one I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. The early success of companies like Selffee or Ripples, both companies which print in real-time on food at events, are proof that food itself is a fairly underutilized medium for highly personalized marketing and personal messaging.

The CEO of Selffee, David Weiss, told me recently that they’ve worked at over 200 events this year, including at this year’s Super Bowl where they printed customized pictures on about 60 thousand marshmallows. Weiss also told me how they’d spent practically zero on marketing because the product – essentially a food-based selfie – markets itself (and the message printed on top) in an age of Instagram and social media.

Which is part of the reason I wanted him at our upcoming FoodTech Live event in Vegas (as well as the fact I just want my face printed on a cookie). And while David and his team likely won’t be printing on 60 thousand marshmallows, they will hopefully be printing hundreds of faces and other personalized requests on cookies on January 8th. We’ll also have Ripples printing on drinks as well.

If you’re headed to CES in Vegas in January, and you want to have your face or logo printed on food – not to mention the opportunity to check out over forty interesting foodtech companies – you’ll want to make sure to RSVP for our FoodTech Live event as well.

Of course, it’s not just food itself that is evolving as the messaging medium, but the packaging itself. This week Jenn Marston wrote about how prog rock band The Lights Out recently teamed up with craft brewer Aeronaut brewery to release their new album on the side of a beer can. The “album” came in the form of a Spotify digital album and was accessible to the purchaser of a can of Aeronaut IPA via a scannable QR code.

Packaged food brands have experimented with electronic messaging integrations for the last couple of years, but a digital album is a new wrinkle. While I don’t expect to see the next U2 album released via a package of Jimmy Dean sausage links, it might be interesting to see where the idea of digital distribution via food packaging goes in the future.

This week had lots of other interesting news, including a recent patent issued to Amazon for personalized restaurant recommendations. The patent, issued just yesterday, describes a system that utilizes contextual information such as a person’s past behavior, their location and information from their social graph to suggest restaurant recommendations and possible reservations. Combine this recent patent with the Amazon patent issued earlier in the year for predictive restaurant ordering, and you have to wonder if Amazon is cooking up a next-generation restaurant reservation and delivery marketplace to compete with the likes of OpenTable.

There was also some good news coming out of NYC this week in the form of a reopening of the Pilotworks Brooklyn facility under new management. The location was shuddered along with all of Pilotworks locations over a month ago when the shared kitchen startup abruptly shut down, instantly putting hundreds of indie food entrepreneurs without a kitchen home. The facility, reopened and managed by Nursery, has offered to welcome back all of the previous food business operators.

You won’t want to miss our latest episode of the Smart Kitchen Show, which features a conversation from the Smart Kitchen Summit between the Wall Street Journal’s Wilson Rothman and Malachy Moynihan. Malachy was the head of product for both the first Amazon Echo and the Juicero, and he shares insights about product success and failure from these two vastly different products.

That’s it for now. Have a great week.

Mike

Updates from the Spoon

Video: Soggy Food Sucks Uses Thermodynamics to Keep your Fries Crisp During Delivery
Watch founder Bill Birgen’s winning pitch at the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase. His company Soggy Food Sucks uses condensation wicking to keep food crisp and crunchy (and decidedly not soggy), even after delivery.

InnovoPro Raises $4.25M to Bulk Up its Chickpea Protein
You’re hard-pressed to find a space undergoing more innovation right now than protein. In addition to soy, whey, wheat, pea and even cricket-based protein varietals, chickpeas are also making waves — and the Israel-based InnovoPro announced yesterday that it has raised $4.25 to bulk up its garbanzo protein.

Good Dot Paves Way for Plant-Based Meats in India with Vegan “Mutton”
Plant-based meat companies are largely based in two continents: Europe and North America. One company working to change that is Good Dot, a startup making plant-based meats, as their website states, “in India, for India, by India.”

Beast Mode: Chirp’s Launches Kickstarter for Cricket Protein Powder
For openminded bodybuilders who want to get ripped, there’s a new type of protein powder out ready for you to chug it down on the way to your morning CrossFit shred sesh. Today Chirps, the San Francisco-based company which makes insect chips in flavors like Sriracha and BBQ, launched a Kickstarter for its newest product: cricket protein powder.

Amazon Patents Personalized Restaurant Suggestions. Could a Reservation Platform be Next?
Michael Wolf stumbled upon a patent by Amazon for a personalized restaurant suggestion system. The patent will suggest restaurants to individuals based on their behavior, family and friends network, and specfic time-based events (birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, etc.)

Pilotworks’ NY Space Re-born as Nursery, Invites Former Tenants Back
The team at Chew announced today that it is opening a new food and beverage incubator called Nursery in the former Pilotworks Brooklyn location, and will invite back all former tenants to the space.

Kroger Expands Home Chef Meal Kit Sales in Walgreens Drug Stores
Kroger and Walgreens are building on a pilot program launched in October that has Kroger selling both grocery items and its Home Chef meal kits in Walgreens drug stores. Walgreens will carve out a “Kroger Express” area in some of its stores, and Kroger will also try selling Home Chef meal kits in select Walgreens locations.

Eat My Face! How One Entrepreneur Found Meaning By Printing Faces On Cookies
Entrepreneur David Weiss pivoted from being a wholesale sweater salesman to co-founding a company that prints photos (specifically selfies) on cookies and drinks. The best part: they basically market themselves.

A Prog-Rock Band Is Releasing an Album On a Spotify-Coded Beer Can
With the help of Aeronaut brewery, Boston-based band The Lights Out will soon release an album on a beer can. Again. The prog-rock outfit worked with the Somerville, Mass. brewery in 2017 on a similar concept, releasing their album T.R.I.P. via a 16-ounce can of beer.

Chewse Raises $19M for Family Style Corporate Catering
Chewse has raised $19 million to expand its corporate catering services, bringing the total amount raised by the startup to more than $30 million. There is no shortage of corporate catering services, especially in Chewse’s home base in the Bay Area, but Chewse hopes to differentiate itself with its “family-style” meals.

Amazon Patents Personalized Restaurant Suggestions. Could a Reservation Platform be Next?

Every year in the run-up to Mother’s Day, I usually remember – often too late – to make a reservation at a nice restaurant to take my children’s mom (who is also, not so coincidentally, my wife) out to brunch.

Now I know what you’re thinking: I should probably offload this activity to my kids (she is their mother, after all, not mine). But the reality is figuring out a good restaurant to make reservations at is a challenge that pops up for me throughout the year, which is why I was intrigued to stumble upon this patent issued today to Amazon for personalized restaurant suggestions.

The patent, entitled “Implicit occasion personalization for restaurants,” describes a system that makes highly-customized suggestions based on a contextual understanding of a person’s past behavior, friend and family network, and specific time-based events such as birthdays, anniversaries and, yes, spouse-specific holidays that demand attention as to avoid marital doghouses.

In one example described in the patent, the system would recognize that a person has an important event coming up in their life, either based on their own calendar or that of their family or friends, and suggest a reservation at a high-end restaurant:

“Perhaps the date (e.g., March 5th) is the birthday, anniversary, or other occasion that is personal to the user, the user’s family and/or the user’s friends. The service provider may leverage the user pattern to make recommendations to the user. In at least one example, the service provider may recommend a reservation at the high-end restaurant to the user on or before the date.”

And while the system described in the patent can certainly help suggest restaurants for important dining occasions, it also describes helping with the more mundane ones. One proposed example has the system recommending new pho restaurants based on similarities to other restaurants the user patronizes.

This isn’t the first time Amazon’s dabbled in preemptive restaurants suggestions. Earlier this year, The Spoon uncovered a patent from Amazon that described a system that would use contextual information to trigger a preemptive restaurant delivery order. With this new patent, it looks like Amazon is trying to corner the market on predictive recommendations around a person’s entire restaurant purchasing behavior, whether that be for dine-out or delivery.

Not only would it make sense to integrate these services with the online giant’s food delivery marketplace as well as with Alexa (“Alexa, can you tell me what I should do for dinner tonight?”), but I can also envision Amazon building out their own reservation platform and marketplace to take on fast-growing startups like Tock and Resy and well as industry goliath OpenTable.

Surprise! Amazon Says it Sold a Lot of Amazon Devices (and Instant Pots, too!)

Amazon put out a news release today touting its record-breaking holiday shopping weekend. And, in what will come as a shock to absolutely no one, the company said the best-selling products across all categories sold on Amazon.com were Amazon devices like the Amazon Echo Dot, which Amazon just happened to put on sale… on Amazon.

Get where we’re going with this?

The retail giant is always vague on details, and this release proved no exception, saying only that it was the “Biggest holiday shopping weekend ever for Echo devices, with millions sold worldwide—all-new Echo Dot was the #1 selling product on Amazon globally, from any manufacturer, in any category.”

FWIW, last December, when Amazon released a similar batch of vague statistics, the company reported selling “tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices” worldwide over the entire 2017 holiday season.

OK, obviously Amazon releasing glowing stats about Amazon devices sold at a discount is a total corporate puffery, and I am complicit in writing about it. But, as vague as these stats may be, they are important to consider as more people adopt smart kitchen tech. Amazon’s Alexa is locked in a battle with Google Home to be your preferred voice ecosystem. Dominating voice control could in turn determine which kitchen appliances you buy, or impact where you buy your groceries.

Hardware startups, software developers and appliance makers alike want to align with a winner when it comes to incorporating new smart tech into their products. Amazon can create its own dominance by dint of controlling one of the largest e-commerce companies on the planet. Consider that at last count, Amazon had 100 million Amazon Prime subscribers worldwide. That’s a huge user base to be potentially guided into buying an Amazon Echo device.

The more Echo devices are sold, the more people will want to use Alexa in their homes, which means more third-party support for even more devices and apps. The more third party devices and apps that incorporate Alexa means that Amazon is collecting even more of our data, which Amazon can then use to sell us more stuff, more of its own stuff (like groceries from Whole Foods) or even create more of its own devices like the Alexa microwave, which, now that we mention it, was not mentioned in the Amazon press release.

The point is, the more Amazon can flex its retail power, the more it can dominate the emerging world of smart assistants and voice control in our homes.

Alas, Alexa devices weren’t the only thing the company sold over the Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday shopping season. I throw this in here as just a bit of Amazon sales trivia, but Instant Pots continue to steamroll other kitchen appliances, with Amazon saying the Instant Pot DUO60 was also a top seller this past weekend. During the 2017 holiday season, the Instant Pot DUO80 was the top-selling kitchen item.

So take these numbers with the appropriate amount of salt, and be on the lookout for a release from Google touting its own Google Home Cyber Monday sales, followed by another holiday season recap from Amazon at the end of December.

Amazon Shutters U.K. Restaurant Delivery Service After Just Two Years

Amazon may seem like an unstoppable behemoth taking over everything from groceries to gizmos, but it seems the delivery giant is not completely immune to failure — especially when it comes to the competitive food delivery market.

Last week, Amazon quietly shuttered its restaurant delivery operations in the U.K., informing customers via email that they would “no longer be able to order from Amazon Restaurants UK after Monday, 3rd December” (hat tip to the Evening Standard). This news comes only two years after Amazon launched the delivery service — available through its £79 ($101) per year Prime Now app — in select areas of London. Amazon guaranteed food delivery within the hour, and originally offered free delivery for orders over £15 ($19 USD) (it later changed that to a £1.99 flat fee for all orders).

Despite its big name and massive reach, it seems Amazon Restaurants couldn’t compete against existing food delivery companies in the U.K. like Deliveroo and Uber Eats. Since 2013, Deliveroo has carved out a sizable chunk of the U.K. food delivery market and become one of the fastest-growing tech companies in Europe. The company also differentiates themselves with their Editions project: geographically-targeted hubs of delivery-only cloud kitchens Deliveroo began rolling out in 2017.

Editions uses customer feedback and user data to pinpoint exactly which restaurants lacking in certain areas, or which types of cuisine are popular. It then entices restaurants to join their cloud kitchen hubs and set up delivery-only operations. Since Deliveroo sets up and owns the hubs, they have exclusive rights to deliver food from all the restaurants within them — which means more market share for them, and less leftover for Amazon. So instead of just signing on popular restaurants, like Amazon did, Deliveroo creates them in the exact areas with the greatest demand.

Amazon Restaurant and Uber Eats both launched in the U.K. around the same time. But while the former is closing up shop, Uber Eats is reportedly planning to launch 400 “virtual restaurants” in the U.K. by the end of this year to compete with Editions. Instead of building their own cloud kitchen facilities, Uber Eats will operate these restaurants in existing space within kitchens that already partner with Uber Eats for delivery. The company also recently launched 24-hour delivery, which had Deliveroo quickly promising the same thing in the near future.

It seems that Amazon’s name recognition and promise for one-hour delivery wasn’t enough to succeed the crowded U.K. food delivery market. With players like Deliveroo and Uber Eats already established in the space, the company would have needed some serious innovation, to carve out a space for itself.

Stateside, however, Amazon stands a better chance. The U.S. has a bigger food delivery market and a wider competition pool, which may work in Amazon’s favor.

Tom Parker, Senior Corporate Communications Manager of Amazon, UK & Ireland, reached out to us with this comment: “We are closing Amazon Restaurants UK. We would like to thank all of our customers and merchants, and delivery partners for their support.”