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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

biometrics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chopt, Dos Toros Piloting CLEAR’s Biometric Platform to Screen Restaurant Employees

Biometrics in the foodservice industry tends to raise questions, but the debate over whether restaurants should use it may soon become a thing of the past. Founders Table, a restaurant group that includes Chopt and Dos Toros Taqueria, announced today it has teamed up with the CLEAR platform to test a health screening process on employees. The success of this pilot could mean a new form of employee health management is on its way to the restaurant biz.

According to a press release, a pilot of this program will start with the reopening of Chopt in Washington, D.C., and Dos Toros in NYC. More than 30 employees will use the new “Health Pass by CLEAR,” which was released this year, as part of their daily health screening. 

Anyone who’s been to an airport in the last few years will recognize CLEAR as the company that keeps kiosks near the terminal that scan a user’s fingerprints to identify them and enable faster check in. Health Pass by CLEAR does away with the kiosk aspect of this, as the system works on mobile devices to connect health information to employees biometric data like their faces and fingertips. 

Once set up in a restaurant, employees verify their identity with biometrics from a mobile device, and also complete a real-time health quiz (based on CDC guidance). They upload their data to their test provider, which verifies their health scan and identity. The system can also perform temperature checks. The idea is that once restaurants have near-instantaneous results on these elements, they can decide whether to send a worker who isn’t feeling well or has a high temperature home.

Biometrics, of course, bring up a lot of questions around data privacy. However, most of those questions originated in a pre-COVID world, and more people could be wiling to part with that data in order to be assured they’re eating, working, shopping, etc. in a safer environment. CNBC mentioned recently that “health screening could become an everyday task for many Americans.” That would make sense in a restaurant — even those with off-premises formats — where the operating model relies on other people touching your food.

Plenty of other companies offer health-related tools for restaurants. Squadle released its own scanner in June, and DragonTail Systems is using its AI to scan the cleanliness of food prep areas. Then of course there’s PathSpot, which scans employees hands to ensure proper hand washing. CLEAR, however, goes the most in depth because of the identity recognition aspect of its system. And if its pilot with Founders Table proves a valuable tool for restaurants, many other chains will likely adopt the system.

Seahawks Fans Can Now Buy Beer With Their Fingerprints. Is That a Good Thing?

Planning on a Seahawks game in the near future? Leave your wallet at home.

Ok maybe take your wallet, but you won’t need it to buy beer and snacks during the game, or even to enter CenturyLink Field. CLEAR, who makes biometric scanning technology, has teamed up with the Seahawks as well as the Seattle Mariners and the Seattle Sounders to get fans through security faster and allow them to purchase concessions without an ID or credit card.

If you do much traveling, you’ve probably already seen CLEAR’s technology at work in airports, speeding up the security checkpoint process for those who enroll. It’s also in a handful of sports arenas around the country, where it’s used mostly for entry into games as well as access to VIP areas. CLEAR members, who pay $15/month, do an initial scan of their biometrics at a CLEAR kiosk (below). CLEAR stores that information (the company is Safety Act Certified), and can access it whenever someone scans a fingerprint on one of its machines.

At Seattle sports games, CLEAR will not only speed up entry into games, it also marks the first time the technology will be used to simultaneously verify your ID and pay for alcoholic beverages. And while CLEAR is at other sports arenas around the U.S., the Seahawks are the first NFL team to have gotten involved with this technology.

As anyone who’s ever been to a sports game knows, wait times to get into the venue, and to buy food and drinks are often downright exhausting. Scanning a fingerprint instead of fumbling with a wallet is an obvious time saver. Or in CLEAR’s own (somewhat philosophical) words, “When you are you, instead of something in your pocket, life is more frictionless, more secure, and more predictable.”

For the stadiums, it not only eases congestion at the entrance gates and minimizes the risk of someone trying to purchase booze with a fake ID.

CLEAR is only in a few stands at CenturyLink and Safeco fields right now, but the concept of biometrics at entertainment venues could boost a wide range of business in future: music festivals, movie theaters, and even the local bar, to name just a few.

Or it could just alienate people who, perhaps rightly so, are wary of handing over their fingerprints to purchase a beer. Biometrics have few guard rails in place right now around user privacy, and many (including yours truly), have concerns around how invasive the technology could become in terms of how it gathers and uses data. Plus, despite advocates talking up the secure aspect of the technology, biometrics produces data, which remains susceptible to hackers. In other words, once your face or thumbprint or DNA are in the system, they’re that much harder to protect.

Don’t get me wrong, I think biometrics as a way to improve business holds a ton of potential. But if the most recent Facebook saga shows, we’re not taught, as average consumers, to think twice before handing over information about ourselves in exchange for entertainment. Biometrics will become the norm at some point, in entertainment settings and otherwise. So by all means, use CLEAR to get your $15 drink at the next Seahawks game. Just know you’re handing over way more than a fingerprint when you send yours into the datasphere.