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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

bread

Four Years After CES, Breadbot’s Robotic Breadmaker is Dishing Out Loaves at Grocery Stores

For robot startups seeking to make a splash at CES, there are a few options: holding a large press conference, making it weird and creepy, or serving cocktails. However, one method stands out above the rest for drawing in crowds: wafting the aroma of freshly baked bread (aka ‘the Subway method‘).

That’s what the folks behind the Wilkinson Baking Company did back in 2019, and the end result was their robot, the Breadbot, became a sensation that year at the world’s largest tech event. The smell of fresh bread pulled in journalists, tech nerds, and passersby like a tractor beam, garnering the type of press that big budget brands like Samsung would envy.

The small Eastern Washington-based company, co-founded by brothers Randall and Ron Wilkinson, has been working diligently to bring their product to market since then. Their goal was to transition from a working prototype to a production-ready machine suitable for grocery stores.

As part of the transition, the company also looked to find a new CEO. The Wilkinson brothers, both in their late sixties, wanted a CEO that could take the early-stage startup from a small LLC with a big idea to one that was mature enough to raise funding and bring the first product to market. Paul Rhynard, a former strategy consultant for McKinsey who also had experience raising capital as Chief Strategy Officer for Russell Investments, stepped in for Randall in April of last year and has since helped raise a seed round of $3 million last summer to fund the build-out of the company’s first production run of robots.

According to Rhynard, the new robot was built after testing the early prototype in a small grocery store in Eastern Washington.

“The machine that was at CES has been dramatically updated,” Rhynard told The Spoon. “One of the key differences is we rebuilt the brain of it. We have fully custom chipboards and a custom tech stack that run the machine. It was a huge update from a control and software standpoint of actually operating the machine.”

The company also made significant upgrades to the mechanical system, including adding four hoppers instead of one, which allows the Breadbot to make four varieties of bread throughout the day. The new Breadbot has significant updates to how it bakes and measures bread quality which, according to Rhynard, allows the machine to achieve more consistent results.

“So now we have a machine that we can scale up and start to place in grocers around the country,” said Rhynard.

And that’s what they’re starting to do. The company built 20 robots and so far has placed seven of them in different grocery chains which include Super One Foods, which is operating a Breadbot in a store in Northern Idaho and two more in Montana, and last month the company installed a Breadbot at Akins Fresh Market in eastern Washington. Three more Breadbots are set to be installed in a high-end Milwaukee, Wisconsin grocery retailer this month.

Rhynard says the company’s business model is a lease-plus-fee model, where grocers pay a monthly fee and a small amount per loaf baked. In return, Breadbot provides a turnkey solution, which includes providing bread mix, yeast, bread bags, and ongoing maintenance.

In return, grocers get what is essentially a bakery in a box that sits in full view of the customers on the store floor. The machine, which can produce up to 200 loaves a day, can produce bread throughout the day, with each loaf taking about 96 minutes from start to finish to make a loaf. In the stores it is currently operating, the Breadbot is making three varieties of bread: Nine grain, homestyle, and honey oat.

According to Rhynard, early on stores aligned the baking of the bread with the hours of the baking staff, which meant the Breadbot baked all the bread in the morning. Now, he says, some stores are going to start experimenting with baking bread during peak shopping hours, from four to seven at night, which will allow shoppers to buy hot, freshly made bread (and take in that fresh-baked bread smell).

Rhynard says that while grocery stores are their key target customer, they are also having talks with other potential types of customers, including cafeterias and the military. The company is also talking to potential customers in places where fresh-baked bread is difficult to come by, including Hawaii, which imports the vast majority of its bread from the US west coast.

To fund further growth, Rhynard said the company is now starting to look to raise a Series A. He knows it will be challenging given the current state of the market, but he’s optimistic the company’s current traction will attract new backers.

For now, though,the company is busy finding new customers looking to pull in shoppers with the smell of freshly baked robot bread.

Meet the Breadbot 2.0

As It Turns Out, Italians Are Making Lots More Bread (and Pasta) Too During Quarantine

Here in the States, there’s been lots of talk about how we’ve become a nation of bread bakers with the arrival of quarantine life.

As it turns out, bread baking is an international phenomenon. In a recent Medium post by the CookPad team, they analyze recipe usage data from their Italy team to show how interest in bread making has spiked in the Bel Paese an order of magnitude higher than before the pandemic.

According to the data, interest in the recipe for “pane di grano duro” (which translates to ‘durum wheat bread’ in English) jumped 12-fold, garnering more views during the lockdown than the entire top 10 recipe list did pre-lockdown.

Image Credit: CookPad

And also much like the States, Italians are also seeking comfort through food. Views for ice cream, torta, and fried rice balls were way up. And this being Italy, it should be of no surprise that pasta-making saw a huge increase: Fettuccine saw over a 700% jump in interest in during quarantine.

Italians are also sharing what they are making online too. According to Cookpad, “cooksnaps” (where cooks take photos of their creations) have jumped 3-fold in the app.

I guess it shouldn’t be any surprise that Italians (and Brits, Canadians and pretty much everyone else) are baking more bread and cooking more in general. The big question is what all this forced-home cooking will do to behavior in the long term and what it means for different participants in the food and cooking ecosystem. It will be a couple of years before we can gauge the staying power of new habits learned during this time, but my guess is all of this quarantine cooking is, at the very least, giving some of us skills that can better equip for life.

Sourd.io is the High-Tech Sourdough Starter Monitor All of Us Newbie Bakers Could Use

I think my sourdough starter is on life support. I’ve discarded it, fed it, proofed it, but it still seems… anemic. I think? I dunno, like so many other trapped at home, this is my first sourdough starter so I’m kind flying blind. But maybe I don’t have to, thanks to a high-tech gizmo put together by Christine Sunu (hat tip to The Verge).

Yesteray, Sunu published a pair of posts on the Twilio (where she works) blog about a DIY device she created to check in on your sourdough starter. Dubbed Sourd.io, the device is basically a cap that fits on top of your starter jar and monitors the temperature, humidity, and rise level of your sourdough so you know when it needs to be fed.

But we’re sorry to say that this solution is not for the technological faint of heart. The instructions involve setting up a Twilio Developer Kit for Narrowband IoT (which also means you can only use it in the US), the Arduino IDE, and the use of a 3D printer. But hey, since you’re stuck at home learning new skills, why not add building electronics to your repertoire?

While there are countless awful things about this pandemic, one bright spot has been the resourcefulness of people in coming up with innovative solutions to everyday problems. Last week Adrien Hertel released a free, downloadable JavaScript program that alerts you when delivery slots at Amazon and Whole Foods open up.

If you’ve come across other DIY solutions to quarantine-induced issues, drop us a line and let us know!

Can’t Find Yeast? This Geneticist Says There’s a Solution Hiding in Your Cupboard

Obviously, Americans are baking a lot of bread right now. Don’t believe me? Just look at the aisles of your local grocery store — nary a packet of yeast to be seen.

According to NPR, sales of baking yeast were up 647 percent during the week ending in March 21, and 456 percent the week following. But if you can’t find those elusive packets to make your loaves/waffles/focaccia rise, don’t despair! One geneticist has a solution.

Sudeep Agarwala, a geneticist specializing in yeast for biotech company Gingko Bioworks (the parent company of alternative protein company Motif Foodworks), posted a tweet at the end of March that made a pretty bold claim:

If you’re an adamant baker, you likely know where Agarwala, is going. In the tweet thread he goes on to describe how to make your own sourdough starter using dried fruit (which is covered in natural yeast!), water, and flour. If you follow the instructions correctly you should be able to have your own burbling sourdough starter in two days.

For those of us who have been on Instagram lately, the fact that you can make sourdough starters at home is not exactly ground-breaking news. You likely know someone right now who is giving you updates on their starter’s progress — maybe you’ve even got one going yourself! Agarwala’s tweet also gives tips on how to experiment by adding wine or beer to tweak your starter’s flavor profile, or incorporating breadcrumbs to keep the starter fed when you can’t find flour.

What was more surprising from Agarwala’s tweet — and our subsequent phone conversation — was his broader take on bread’s role in the current pandemic.

“Yeast is technology, flour is culture,” Agarwala told me, as things turned anthropological on our call. “I can tell you the technology, but the actual cultural reasons being all of this… that’s a much bigger question.” His take? We’re baking so much bread because it’s familiar and comforting; “bread returns us to our childhood.”

Well, at least some of us. Agarwala did note that the fact that everyone in the U.S. seems to be using their fermentation skills to create bread right now is, well, a little basic. “There are plenty of other things that can be fermented — lentils, oats, rice,” he said.

Maybe as the rising mania around homemade bread starts to overproof and fall, we’ll see consumers begin to experiment making fermented comfort foods from different regions around the world. The next hot “it” food flooding your Instagram could be Indian dosas, thin pancakes made of fermented lentils and rice, or injera, the spongy Ethiopian flatbread made from teff flour. “Now is the time for all the multiculturalism we’ve been harvesting to take precedence,” Agarwala told me. “It’s exciting.”

Bonus? These dishes don’t require flour — another sought-after ingredient that’s nearly impossible to track down at your local grocery store.

Done Rising? Some Signs Indicate Quarantine-Induced Bread Baking May Have Already Peaked

For most of March, bread baking was having its moment.

Quarantined would-be bakers flooded Instagram and Facebook with photos of freshly baked loaves. Google searches jumped for break-making how-to’s. Flour and yeast disappeared from store shelves.

But now, it seems the bread may be done rising.

According to data from shoppable recipe platform Chicory, searches for the recipe for basic home made bread reached a peak the week of March 22nd at 896 thousand total views. A week later, views dropped by 26% to 661 thousand.

Are consumers over breadmaking?

I doubt it. My guess is that more consumers than ever before are baking bread.

So why the drop? One reason may be consumers realized there’s plenty of bread to be found on store shelves after an initial wave of panic buying and are mixing store purchases with home baking. Another may be that after the initial wave of searches for that first bread recipe crested, many have moved on to making more loaves with the same recipe or using one road-tested by a friend.

And then, some, like our own Catherine Lamb, may have just realized bread baking takes a lot of time. I knew she had recently taken up baking bread, so I asked her how it’s been going.

“I still do bake it, but less frequently” she responded. “It just takes a lot of time (basically 24 full hours) with intermittent maintenance, so it’s not a spur of the moment thing.

“Plus,” she said, “I had SO MUCH bread.”

I figured if Catherine, The Spoon’s most prolific home cook and a person who’s Twitter profile pic has her holding an artisanal loaf, has lost patience with act of bread baking, I can only imagine how many “one and done” bakers are out there.

Finally, it’s possible the downward trend may only be temporary. After a slight dip in early April, Google Trends showed Google searches for the term bake bread rebounded this week.

I also have to wonder if many of the first time home bread bakers are moving onto new projects (including new types of bread). While basic bread and tortillas dipped this past week, views of “how to make banana bread” and “how to make your own sourdough starter” have continued to grow every week for the last month.

One thing that is clear is consumer behavior has changed radically over the past month. Certainly, many more people are baking bread now than at the beginning of the year, even if some of those may have already decided to go back to buying loaves at the store.

The real question I have is how permanent many of the behavior shifts will be after a couple months of quarantine. My guess is it will probably take at least a year or two to find out.

Lo-Dough is a No-Go for Bread Lovers, But Gives Food for Thought

When something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

Such is the case with Lo-Dough, a fat-free, gluten-free, high fiber product that’s meant to be a substitute for bread. With 90 percent fewer carbs than bread and 39 calories per serving (a serving is one 9-inch disc), it’s geared towards the health-conscious and paleo market.

Ben Holden, the Co-founder and Creative Director of Manchester, U.K.-based Lo-Dough, developed the company’s eponymous product in 2015 in his parent’s kitchen. He started commercial production a year ago and now ship to roughly 55,000 customers in 35 countries.

When Holden reached out to see if we would like to sample some of this miracle product, we said… well, sure.

Fast forward a few days: I picked up a box of twenty Lo-Dough discs, sealed in packs of two, from the Post Office. I ripped into one of the packs and tore off a bite. Reader, you guessed it — Lo-Dough was, indeed, too good to be true.

The pasty discs were thin, pliable, and had a texture that put me in mind of building insulation. The flavor? None, that I could discern. The Lo-Dough team says you can enjoy the product straight out of the packet (though I find it hard to imagine anyone chowing down on the flavorless, carboard-like disc on its own), though they push it chiefly as a base for sandwiches, wraps, burritos, and, their personal favorite, pizzas. Which makes sense, since it was pretty darn bland on its own.

Here’s where I think Lo-Dough could be, if not good, then at least not bad. Cover almost anything in tomato sauce and cheese, bake until bubbly, and it will taste, at the very least, passable. (I tried it, and it was.) And while there are certainly other carb-free pizza base options, like cauliflower crust, Lo-Dough does have versatility going for it: it’s flexible and neutral-tasting (read: flavorless) enough to work as well for Italian pizzas as for Mexican burritos and Turkish kebabs.

Which begs the question: If something tastes, at the very best, like nothing, why eat it at all? If you have to smother something in toppings — especially high-calorie ones like cheese and sauces — to make it palatable, is it really healthy?

The answer, I suppose, is that people are creatures of habit who love convenience as much as they love fad diets (hi, Paleo). Lo-Dough is good enough to be a substitute for the non-healthy foods you love, at least when covered with toppings. Most importantly, it can be used interchangeably.

It puts me in mind of other “miracle” healthy foods, like healthy ice cream success story Halo Top. And while I think Halo Top tastes a lot more like regular ice cream than Lo-Dough tastes like bread, they’re both riding the health-food wave.

Lo-Dough “bread” sells exclusively online and has a 6-month shelf life, direct to consumers. It retails for £5 ($6.44) for a two-piece pack, though you can also get 6 pieces for £14 ($18) and 14 for £26 ($33.50). If you’re really sold on the concept, you can also sign up for a monthly subscription service — though if you choose this option, I highly recommend making sure you have plenty of cheese on hand first. You will need it.

Get Food Waste-d: Toast Ale Turns Surplus Bread Into Beer

When it comes to food waste, there’s one culprit almost all of us throw away at least a portion of: bread. Maybe it starts sprouting mold or gets rock-hard. Or maybe you just don’t like eating the heels.

In the U.K., at least 24 million slices of bread are thrown away per day, making it Britain’s most wasted food. This can happen anywhere along the food system, from post-harvest cereal losses to bakery waste to you tossing out that stale baguette half.

Toast Ale is trying to divert some of that bread waste from the trash by giving it another life — as beer. The British company was founded in 2016 after social entrepreneur and Toast founder Tristram Stewart happened upon a brewery in Brussels that served a beer made with bread, just like original brewers used to make it 7,000 years ago.

“It was a lightbulb moment,” said Karen Kuhn, Head of Business Development for Toast Ale USA. “He realized we could divert a lot of bread from landfills, and at the same time start a conversation about food waste.” So Stewart developed a recipe and partnered with Hackney Brewery in London to make Toast’s first beer, in which one-third of the grain was replaced with surplus bread from local bakeries. According to Kuhn, bakeries (at least in the U.S.) have to pay to have their excess bread composted, so having a channel to get rid of their old bread for free — and have it go towards a cool finished product — is a no-brainer.

Since 2016, Toast has grown throughout the U.K. and now sells their brews in British grocery chains Tesco, Waitrose, and others. They donate 100 percent of their profits (after they pay the staff and keep the lights on) to Stewart’s nonprofit, FeedBack Global.

Toast’s ales, lagers, and IPAs retail for the same price as craft beer. While I haven’t had a chance to sample Toast yet (though I will when I head to London after SKS Europe!), they apparently aren’t missing anything when it comes to taste. Toast Ale took home a silver medal at the 2018 New York International Beer Competition and currently has a “Very Good” rating on Beer Advocate. 

In July 2017, Toast came Stateside and started producing their beer at a brewery in the Bronx, using surplus loaves from Bread Alone Bakery in Kingston, N.Y. Kuhn made it very clear that Toast only takes the bread that remains after bakeries donate to soup kitchens. “We never take bread from the human food supply,” she said.

A few months after their move to the U.S., Toast Ale released their brews exclusively with Whole Foods in New York City. Since then, they’ve been steadily expanding. In February of this year, they made it onto the menu of Shake Shack’s NYC locations, and recently also rolled out in shops in New York’s Hudson Valley. Kuhn promised the company would be entering more areas in the Northeast before the end of the year, with plans for a presence throughout the U.S. by 2019.

Though the U.S. branch is the only proper subsidiary company, Toast Ales also has a global licensing model which allows breweries around the world to license their brand and recipe so that they can also turn excess bread into beer. Right now, their ales and lagers are being brewed in Rejkavik, Rio de Janiero, and South Africa. They also do collaborations with breweries, bakeries, and other companies, including Eataly, Google, and Five Boroughs Brewing Company. If you’re a homebrewer (maybe you have a PicoBrew?) and have a few slices of bread lying around, you can even try your hand at the Toast recipe yourself.

Toast Ales has roughly 20 people on staff, most of whom work in the U.K.. Kuhn said that Toast just closed a round of funding using a model called “equity for good,” in which investors get back their initial investment and commit on reinvesting it in other social enterprises. While Kuhn didn’t disclose how much they raised, she said that Toast would use it to fund their expansion both in the U.K. and U.S..

“We’re hoping to take beer and use it as a way to start a conversation [about food waste] by printing our story on our can, sharing facts, and introducing an interesting concept that people aren’t familiar with,” said Kuhn. I’ll cheers to that.