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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Apps

Pepper the App Aims to be the Instagram for Cooking

Jake Aronskind realized that every time he went on a social media platform, most of what he was seeing was food. After the pandemic began, this was amplified. Seeing people he never thought would be cooking and baking made him realize that there needed to be a more specialized platform for sharing food and recipes. This resulted in him and several cofounders developing the Pepper app.

Specialized social media platforms exist for activities like running (Strava), reading (Goodreads), and hiking (AllTrails). Still, most foodies share their culinary creations on the most popular platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, TikTok, and Pinterest. I recently spoke with Aronskind prior to Pepper’s Labor Day weekend launch, and he said, “It’s this idea of building a platform for a specific niche in your life. At the end of the day, Instagram, Facebook, all these other platforms, are simply not made for niche activities.”

Pepper most closely follows the format of Instagram. The app features a newsfeed where you can see the posts from friends and the people you follow. Instead of just adding a caption to go along with a photo, the poster can add a full recipe or list of ingredients. Similar to hashtags, there are options to categorize the recipe with different tags, including different diets (i.e., vegan, keto, gluten-free), difficulty level, and meal type.

From the app’s explore page, trending recipes can be seen from other users. If you find a recipe you want to make on the explore page or newsfeed, you can click the “save” button on the photo. The “saved” section on your personal profile hosts these posts, acting almost like a digital cookbook.

Pepper the App Animation Video
Pepper’s how-to video

Social media is how many of us stayed connected with others during the pandemic, and in 2020, Americans spent an average of 82 minutes per day on social media platforms. Cooking and “stress-baking” became coping mechanisms for dealing with the negative psychological effects of the pandemic, so it’s no surprise that food posts have dominated social media platforms in the past year and a half.

Recon, a food social media app that launched at the beginning of summer (founded by former Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff), connects users through photos of homemade dishes and restaurant reviews. Whisk, a recipe-sharing app, partnered with TikTok at the beginning of the year to trial run the integration of its recipe saving and grocery list features. Foodqu!rk is an online platform where users find their food personality and connect with others through dietary preferences.

The Pepper app launched this week, and it is available for free in the iOS App Store. It will likely be available for Android phones by the end of the month.

Apple App Clips Could Speed Up Adoption of Contactless Payments

At its developers conference today, Apple announced the launch of App Clips for iOS, which is designed to give users some functionality of a mobile app, without downloading the entire thing.

Apple’s presentation for the new App Clips highlighted some very Spoon-y real world scenarios: Paying for your morning coffee from Blue Bottle, discovering a restaurant nearby, and getting recipes for Drop-enabled connected appliances.

Typically, you would have to download three different apps to to engage in those three scenarios. But with App Clips, the user pulls down just a bit of the app through NFC, QR codes or special Apple Clips codes. The “Clip” pulled down allows the transaction to proceed without having to create a new account (because it uses Apple Sign In) or a credit card (because it uses Apple Pay). Android users already have something similar through that OS’ Instant Apps.

Apple Introduces App Clip at WWDC 2020

App Clips still needs to be adopted by the place you’re doing business with in order to work, but it’s easy to see why eateries would want to in this pandemic world. A ton of people use iPhones, and even though restaurants are re-opening, customers want to minimize human-to-human contact there, which means more contactless payments methods.

Apple is pitching this as a way to discover new apps, but it seems more like a way to avoid downloading them. Part of the problem with connected appliances, or contactless payments is that you have to download the app and create an account and enter your credit card number. A first world hassle to be sure, but a hassle nonetheless when you’re in a hurry. If I can just scan a QR code to grab a recipe from Drop or pay for a cortado from Blue Bottle without having to go through all the traditional rigamarole, well, I’m all for it, I’m tired of managing so many app accounts.

Apple Clips could open up a new micro-transaction business model for home appliance companies like Drop and June. Instead of signing into a service for a whole recipe book, I could just pay for the recipes I want.

The are potential downsides for companies participating in App Clips. How much of a cut is Apple taking on this quick transaction? Will that cut be worth it? How much data will Apple will share with the Clip participant? Will your local coffee shop get the sales data and analytics generated through Clips? Or will Drop know which customers are downloading which recipes? Knowing Apple, they probably won’t.

App Clips will put the onus on companies to make the full versions of their apps worth the full download. What kind of loyalty programs or features will make a permanent place on my homescreen worth it?

Clips make make contactless payments easier, but they could also clip some companies’ app-related wings.

French Nutritional Coaching App Foodvisor Raises $4.5M

Foodvisor, a nutrition assistant app that aims to help people eat better, announced today that it has raised $4.5 million from the VC fund Agrinnovation (operated by Demeter) along with other angel investors. With this round, Foodvisor has raised $5.3 million to date.

Foodvisor creates an AI-powered food diary that allows users to keep track of what they eat. The app uses a combination of computer vision and deep learning so that all a user need do is snap a picture of the food they are eating. Foodvisor can then identify the food on the plate, serving size and create a detailed nutritional report. Foodvisor says its app can identify 1,200 different food items and is constantly learning new ones.

The company says it will use the new money to accelerate growth in the United States where, the Foodvisor CEO makes a point to say in the press announcement emailed to The Spoon, that “70% of the Americans are overweight or obese.” Foodvisor says that currently 20 percent of its user base comes from the U.S.

They say that you lose weight in the kitchen and get fit at the gym. Keeping track of what you eat is a good first step for anyone looking to shed a few pounds and get healthier. Foodvisor isn’t the only app that uses your smartphone camera to help make food journaling easier. Bite.ai offers a free consumer app as well as an API that other business can tap into to for similar food recognition services.

Foodvisor offers a free app for iOS and Android as well as premium version that offers more personalized advice and recommendations for a monthly subscription that costs from $4.99 to $6.99.

Fasting App Zero Fills Up with $2.8 Million in Funding

Fasting app Zero announced today that it has raised $2.8 million in a new funding round from True Ventures and Trinity Ventures (h/t Axios Pro Rata). This brings the total amount raised by the company to $4 million.

In its press announcement Zero describes itself as:

Instead of focusing on short-term wins or specific diets, Zero’s fasting protocols are focused on when people eat, not what they eat. The app connects people who are interested in fasting to the tools, resources and community to help them find the best fasting routines for their health, in addition to tracking progress and milestones over time.

Zero says its app has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times, and users have completed more than 35 million fasts to date.

Typically at The Spoon, we cover how technology is changing the way people eat. We write about using your breath to determine your diet, startups that say your biome can impact your health, or even using AI to figure out what to choose at a restaurant. But I guess that should also include technology that gets people to not eat as well.

Intermittent fasting is a hip trend with the tech bros of Silicon Valley, with acolytes like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey who say it helps him be more efficient and focused, and sleep better. Zero CEO, Mike Maser, said that fasting helped him survive cancer.

While we’re not doctors and can’t advocate or reject the promises of intermittent fasting, Zero says it has an advisory team of doctors and researches that use science to guide and support the company’s fasting protocols.

One thing Zero isn’t hungry for after today, however, is cash.

Wasting Enough Food to Fill a Stadium? One of These Apps Could Help

Earlier this year, I wrote that the U.S. wastes enough food each year to fill a college football stadium. Meanwhile, on a global level, about one third of the food produced for human consumption gets thrown away. And sometimes it’s for seemingly pointless reasons, like grocery stores throwing out pineapples with crooked tops.

Grocery stores aren’t alone; restaurants, catering companies, and schools, not to mention consumers, all contribute to this stadium-sized food waste problem.

Which is where mobile apps could help. While they’re not the only food waste technology out there, apps have a relatively simple — but effective — mission: cut food waste by connecting the ones with too much food (restaurants, grocers) with those who either need food or want to pay less for it. And a number of these apps now play specific roles, from supplying food-insecure areas with produce to connecting buyers with local food or simply giving city dwellers a cheaper option for dinner.

Below are just a few of the companies and apps worth noting and, should they serve your area, using to source your dinner. Note this isn’t a comprehensive list, and I’ve doubtless left off some big ones. Feel free to share ‘em in the comments below.

BuffetGo

As its name suggests, BuffetGo works with lots of markets and buffet-style restaurants, offering consumers insanely discounted prices on leftover breakfast, lunch, and dinner items.

To get food just search within your area on the app, choose a restaurant, and purchase a voucher. (The average price is $5.) The app then designates specific time windows for you to pick food up (usually after the lunch rush or at closing time in the evening/night). You don’t have to purchase a specific meal. Instead, you show up, grab a to-go container, and fill it up as much or as little as you like.

Flashfood

This Canadian company keeps edibles out of landfills by offering them for pickup or delivery.

Participating grocery stores can sell items nearing their expiration date (which would normally be thrown out) through the Flashfood app at discounted prices. Consumers choose the food they want from selections posted to the app, where they also pay for it. They pick the food up directly from the store. At the moment, it looks like the service is only available in Canadian stores.

Flashfood’s other food waste reduction method is compiling boxes of “not-good-enough” food (ahem, pineapples) and shipping them direct to consumers. The contents of the box vary depending on what’s available/not wanted in any given week. Flashfood delivers in Canada as well as Detroit at the moment, and plans to expand to other U.S. cities soon. (In the meantime, U.S. consumers have Imperfect Produce to supply their needs.)

Food For All

If you’re in Boston or NYC, Food For All will sell you discounted meals from local joints. You just have to pick the food up at a designated time.

The company started in collaboration with the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health in 2016. It partners with a pretty wide range of places, from tapas, Indian and Latin American restaurants to bakeries to a marshmallow shop. I’ve tried the app and found that it’s especially handy in finding things I wouldn’t normally pay full price for, like a bottle of cold-pressed juice.

Participating restaurants can also use the app to donate a set number of meals to homeless shelters and other charity organizations.

Food Rescue US

Food Rescue has a proprietary mobile system it uses to match food donors (grocery stores, restaurants, etc.) with receiving agencies in food-insecure areas. So, for example, the algorithm might match a participating deli with a nearby homeless shelter or soup kitchen.

Food Rescue delivers the items directly to the receiving agency via volunteer drivers. These drivers — called “food rescuers” — operate much like Lyft drivers, using a map to see available pickups and selecting the ones that are closest or make the most sense for them to pick up. Anyone can become a volunteer driver, regardless of what sort of vehicle they drive or how often they’re available.

Food Rescue operates in multiple states right now, including Connecticut, Florida, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina.

goMkt

This company is basically a food marketplace in app form: cafes, bakeries, restaurants, and delis can use it as a platform on which to post unsold inventory. Users browse what’s on offer or get notified when food becomes available in their area. As with other apps, users pay within the app and can then pick the food up for a heavily discounted price.

According to a recent interview, goMkt will soon launch a B2B version of its app geared towards wholesalers, manufacturers, and large supermarket groups.

A bigger waste problem

One thing that will definitely need to be addressed in the future: packaging. While that’s a post for another day, it’s worth noting that a lot of these restaurants still use to-go cartons made from Styrofoam or other harmful materials. Yes, we need to tackle the actual food part of food waste first. At some point, though, we’ll need to broaden the definition of “waste” in order to address the market as a whole.

Multitasking Smart Side Table Sobro Halfway to Funding Goal

Remember when your nightstand used to just hold a book, a glass of water, and an alarm clock? Wait, it still does? (Mine, too).

The Sobro side table/nightstand would scoff at such simplicity. The latest furniture item from Storebound, the folks that brought you the ultimate mancave coffee table, just reached the halfway mark on its $500,000 funding goal on IndieGoGo.

The sleek side table looks like a slightly chunkier version of what you’d find in IKEA. And it’s seriously pimped out: connected Bluetooth speakers, wireless charging for two phones, a storage drawer that locks, app-enabled mood lighting, and all the power outlets your 21st-century heart could desire. Which all sounds pretty useful to me, except for the app-enabled colorful mood lighting, which seems like a last-second add-on to make the Sobro table seem more “hip.”

Though it markets itself as an end table slash nightstand, its special features definitely skew towards the latter. For one thing, the table has a motion-sensor-activated LED light (separate from the mood light) on its front that’s meant to function as a nightlight, guiding your path as you stumble to the bathroom.

The product’s connected app also has an “intelligent sleep mode” that can help you create good sleep habits. If it’s anything like other sleep apps, presumably you enter your bedtime and approximately when you need to get up, and the LED light bar simulates a sunrise to wake you at an ideal time in your REM cycle. The app also offers a variety of white noise sounds to lull you to sleep, controls the brightness of the nightlight, and can manage the mood lighting feature of the table.

I know, I know—we’re a smart-kitchen site, what are we doing covering a side table/nightstand?

Well, there’s a hint of kitchen built into the Sobro table in the form of its built-in cooler drawer. Really, though, the table is just an interesting addition to the smart home sphere; one that aims to fit a bunch of tech perks into one piece of furniture. And measuring 24-inches wide and 19 inches tall (with adjustable height if you want to make it taller), it does it in a pretty sleek size, too.

The Sobro side table has reached $250,000 of its $500,000 funding goal on IndieGoGo, with about a month left to go. Purchasers should expect to receive their nightstands sometime around October 2018. There are still a few of the Super Early Bird editions available for $299. Once those go, the price will jump to $349. According to the IndieGoGo site, the nightstand will eventually retail for $899.

I’ll probably stick with my no-frill nightstand setup, though it would be nice to be awakened by gentle LED lights and never have to hunt for a charger again. If they add an ice cream freezer drawer, though, the Sobro table may be too tough for me to pass up.

If you want to hear more about Storebound, the company which also brought you the PancakeBot, check out our podcast with their creator Evan Dash.

Now You Can Buy Insanely Cheap Restaurant Leftovers Using an App

The concept of food waste usually conjures images of servers removing half-eaten meals from diners’ tables and chucking the remains of the meal into the trash. There is, however, a completely separate type of restaurant food waste: the untouched edibles thrown out of the kitchen. Maybe someone ordered too many avocados, or the chef made more soup than there are diners to eat it. Whatever it may be, a lot of perfectly edible food is going to waste, and more and more see this as a big problem.

Solving that problem is the inspiration behind Too Good to Go, an app that functions a lot like Seamless, where you can buy back unused food from local restaurants at majorly discounted prices.

Through the app, a user selects the restaurant and purchases an order. From there, you just need to show up at the restaurant before closing time, where you’re given a takeaway box and can fill it with as much food as you care to. (I should clarify that restaurants sell unused food from the kitchen, not the scraps from diners’ plates.)

Prices range from £2 (roughly $2.59 USD) to £3.80 (about $4.93 USD), and you’re not just getting some third-rate takeout shack’s leftovers. Places like Yo! Sushi and Chop’d have gotten on board, as have supermarkets, buffets, bakeries, and universities.   

“Food waste just seems like one of the dumbest problems we have in the world,” co-founder James Crummie recently said. The restaurant industry is wasting about 600,000 tonnes of food each year, and in the UK alone there are one million people on emergency food parcels from food banks. Why do we have these two massive social issues that are completely connected, yet there is not much going on to address them?”

That 600,000 tons of food also produces another 200 tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile, the U.S. wastes enough food annually to fill a college football stadium, and it’s estimated that worldwide, one third of food produced for humans is lost or wasted.

Fortunately, TGTG isn’t alone in trying to do something about this. Here NYC, you can now buy surplus food from restaurants via the Food for All app. Users log into the app, purchase a meal made from the surplus food, and can pick it up one to two hours before closing time. You can even opt to eat the meal right there in the restaurant. Restaurants can choose to donate proceeds from each meal to charity.

Courtesy of Finland, BuffetGo lets users buy food from restaurant buffets for up to 90 percent off the original price. Twenty percent of the profit from each meal goes towards the United Nations World Food Programme. The service is available in a handful of countries, including the U.S.

These apps aren’t just helping the planet, though. For restaurants, they’re an easy way to save money, since wasted food is a big contributor to high food costs. And for diners, particularly those with tiny kitchens who rely on delivery and takeout, it’s a much cheaper way to get dinner on the table. All of those factors working together make the concept of buying leftovers via apps a very promising one for the future of food.

Allset raises $5M to take waiting off the menu

You would be forgiven for rolling your eyes when you first hear of Allset. The reservations app, which today announced it had raised $5M in Series A funding (hat tip: TechCrunch), wants to make the dining experience more “efficient” by letting you reserve a table, order and pay all before you even take your seat.

At first, this seems like yet another case of Silicon Valley trying to disrupt something that was actually just fine, thank you very much. After all, a restaurant is more than just food. It’s the ambiance, the slowing down for a minute to enjoy a meal.

But that’s not always the case, especially when you are busy and need to maximize your lunch hour. Being seated and served in rapid, automatic succession is actually a great time saver. Or if you are having a lunch meeting, the ability to pre-order and pre-pay makes can take some of the social awkwardness out of the process and allow you to be more productive.

And Allset believes it isn’t just good for diners, the company says it can be a boon to restaurants, helping them become more efficient and deliver a VIP experience. In this regard the startup is just one of a slew of services looking to optimize restaurant processes and the business of eating out.

Speaking of business, Allset also provides a service that allows companies to offer faster restaurant lunch experiences for employees. Having worked a startup that had catered lunches every day, the ability to actually leave the office in a timely manner (and experience actual sunlight) would have been a great perk.

And just as Facebook has expanded its foray into food delivery, and AirBnB lets guests book reservations via Resy, perhaps it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine a more business-focused social platform such as Linkedin expanding into the business of business lunches through some kind of partnership with Allset.

Allset is available in San Francisco and the Bay Area, New York City, Chicago, Boston, Austin, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Jose. Greycroft led the funding round announced today. Founded in 2015, Allset has raised more than $8.35 million in total funding so far.

Rubin: Essential Home Will Be The “Bridge” Between Competing Smart Home Ecosystems

Last night Andy Rubin got on stage with Walt Mossberg at the Code Conference to discuss his new company.

The two spent a good chunk of the conversation talking about the Essential Phone, but when they finally got to the Essential Home, they didn’t disappoint.

I wrote yesterday about what we already knew about the Essential Home smart home product, but Andy’s discussion with Walt gave us a better understanding of the company’s strategy for the device.

Rubin and his team have (correctly) identified the main problem of the smart home as one of too many competing ecosystems. The main goal of the Essential Home is to solve for that.

Per Rubin: “One of the problems in the home is the UI problem. There are too many things you have to interact with in your home.”

While we often use that term UI to describe the various consumer interaction layers such as voice, touch or motion, Rubin is using the term more broadly here. He points to a fragmented smart home world with too many competing apps, smart home protocols, and technologies. And, as the guy behind Android, Rubin admitted that in many ways he helped create the problem.

“I feel somewhat responsible. One of things Android helped do make really easy to write a mobile app. the guy building your IoT doorbell, he’s going to write an app.”

According to Rubin, the problem with so many apps and technologies is each time a consumer walks through their smart home, they are walking through a series of competing apps and ecosystems.

“In certain ways,” said Rubin “the industry has recognized what the problem is, which is you don’t want to launch someone’s app when you walk up to your front door to unlock it, where they have their own UI, their own login credentials, and when you finally get through front door and its time to turn on your lights, do the same thing with the guy that built your light bulb.”

He’s right in saying the industry knows fragmentation is the main problem in consumer adoption. In our survey of over 100 smart home execs last December, the number one hurdle to adoption of smart home products identified by industry insiders is confusion over too many smart home platforms.

In other words, fragmentation. Or, as Rubin puts it, “a UI problem.”

Rubin said the solution to the problem of UI fragmentation is to bridge all of these competing ecosystems by working to integrate as many of them as possible together.

“You have to think of it as a UI problem,” said Rubin, “and you have to solve the UI for the home as an interoperability and integration issue. You can’t just support ten devices; you have to support one hundred thousand devices.”

That’s a lot of devices, but Rubin plans to get there by bridging the various ecosystems across the world of Apple, Amazon, Google and more. In other words, he doesn’t want to compete with the giants, but instead wants to connect them to one another.

“You can think of this as everyone is creating an island by creating their own ecosystem, so building bridges is the best way to describe what we’re doing. It has to talk to all these ecosystems, whether it’s Smart Things, HomeKit, or Google Home, or Thread or Weave.”

Rubin didn’t go into the specifics of how he plans to solve the fragmentation issue, other than to say they think they’ve found a way to do it. Whatever the approach is, it sounds like one built from the operating system on up with a focus on security.

“We had to build a new operating system so it can speak all those protocols and it can do it security and privately.”

That operating system is called Ambient OS. It will be part of the new Essential Home which is rumored to ship in late summer.

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