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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Byte Foods

Oh My Green Acquires Byte Foods Business from Byte Technology

Oh My Green announced today that it has acquired Byte Foods, the food distribution and logistics service of Byte Technology. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Before we get too far, it’s important to make the distinction between Byte Foods and Byte Technology. In 2015 Byte launched its own line of smart fridges for offices that wanted to provide healthy eating options for employees but weren’t able to afford a full catering solution. As we wrote back in 2018:

To use the fridges, employees simply swipe a credit card and pick what they want. A receipt for each purchase is sent to their email address. Each food item has a disposable RFID tag on the bottom, which Byte supplies to their producers. Before and after the fridge door opens, Byte scans the tag to determine what the employee took, then charges them accordingly. Each fridge also features a screen with nutrition and dietary information as well as prices.

Since its launch, Byte Foods had grown to 500 smart fridges installed around the Bay Area. But those locations all had to be managed and stocked by Byte, and owning and operating your own mini-stores is not a super scalable business for a startup. So in 2019, Byte bifurcated into Byte Foods, which managed its own fridges, and Byte Technology, which is responsible for the underlying technology and software management platform that powers Byte’s fridges.

Instead of deploying its own fridges, Byte Technology sells the hardware and licenses out its platform to food providers like grocery stores and restaurants. These food providers can then wrap these smart fridges in their own branding to extend their sales channels to where people are — namely at work — without the cost of building an entirely new permanent physical store. Through Byte Technology’s platform, these grocery and restaurant licensees get access to all the data from their customers, as well as inventory management tools and analytics.

By selling its Foods business, Byte Technology will be able to focus its energies on the much more scalable software side of the business. Byte Technology currently operates 1,000 smart fridge stores across the U.S., and with this acquisition, OMG will become a customer of Byte Technology.

Like Byte, Oh My Green is an office catering startup based in the Bay Area. OMG offers a full suite of food related services for corporations from chef-made catering to stocking the office room with snacks. OMG has raised $20 million in seed funding and with the acquisition of Byte Foods’, OMG will be able to offer an additional, Goldilocks-like sales option for companies that want to provide more than snacks but less than full catering.

In the press announcement, OMG says that in addition to offices, the company plans to provided smart fridge storefronts to hospitals, government facilities and universities.

OMG’s acquisition is another step into the forthcoming golden age of vending machines that we are entering into. Smart fridges like Byte’s, and robots like Chowbotics’ Sally are providing new levels of fresh food to high-traffic areas 24/7.

Byte Foods Opens up Its Smart Vending Platform With Byte Technology

Byte Foods officially announced yesterday that it is shifting its focus from a company that owns and operates smart fridge vending machines into Byte Technology, which licenses out its technology platform to third party retailers.

The move is something the company has talked about openly before with The Spoon. Byte Co-Founder, Lee Mokri, told us about the shift in a Q&A in February, and earlier this month, Byte CEO and Co-Founder, Megan Mokri mentioned it in our Spoon Slack Chat on food robotics and automation, saying:

Byte enables food retailers of any size to embed their storefronts in places where consumers spend time away from home – at work, in healthcare settings, hotels, universities, etc.

It’s this ability to push retail out to high-traffic locations that makes Byte’s move particularly interesting. Rather than trying to pull shoppers into a store, retailers can push their stores out to where people already are. As Lee Mokri told me in our Q&A:

A lot of these clients that we’re working with, they see the Byte fridges as building out this Omni channel approach where they’ve got the products in the store, they’ve got a presence online, but what Byte allows them to do is have products at hand. Where if you’re hungry and you want to grab a sandwich from a local grocer, you don’t want to drive to the grocery store or walk a few blocks to the grocery store. You can just walk a couple of feet from you and grab that same sandwich. The idea is that those products are always at hand to their customers.

The Byte shopping experience is also a data-rich one, as it can track exactly which products are being purchased, when and at what location. These analytics in turn allow the retailer to better manage their inventory. They can direct particular products to locations where they are most popular, and re-stocking can be done with more precision, making the retailer’s supply chain more efficient.

But the shift to more of a technology platform also benefits Byte because it allows the company to scale in a way that it couldn’t do by solely operating its own machines. Byte doesn’t need to build up its own brand recognition or develop robust sales channels because it can leverage that of its retail partners. A partner’s brand recognition should, ideally, drive more sales as consumers will know the brand they are purchasing from. These sales will generate more data that can be used to make Byte’s underlying software platform smarter.

We see a lot of companies in the food tech space choosing to be more of a platform for other services, rather than trying to just go it alone. Eatsa backed away from running its own restaurants in favor of licensing out its automated services to power others like Wow Bao, Mac’d and Deliveroo’s new food hall. And Robby partnered up with Pepsi to create branded delivery robots to drop off snacks on campus for hungry college students.

We’ll have a chance to catch up and learn about Byte’s platform transition with Lee Mokri, who will be speaking at our upcoming ArticulATE food robot and automation conference in San Francisco on April 16. He’s just one of the awesome speakers sharing their expertise throughout what promises to be an amazing and insightful program. Get your ticket today!

Slack Chat Recap: The Perils and Promise of the Food Robot Revolution

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver‘s main piece over the weekend was on robots and automation. If you are in the food service industry you can (and should) watch the clip below, but I can also save you a click: Oliver basically says the whole situation around jobs being automated is… complicated.

As we’ve written before, the food service industry in particular is ripe for automation, and it’s one of the topics we covered during our recent Spoon Slack Chat with Megan Mokri, CEO of Byte Technology, Charlie Andersen, CEO of Augean Robotics, and David Rodriguez, Head of Business Development for Kiwi.

Admittedly, all of these companies are working to help bring automation across different segments of the food stack, so they have some skin in the game. But they were still circumspect about its societal benefits and drawbacks. When I asked the panel what the industry should do about the human displacement caused by robots and automation, the response was mostly optimistic (answered copied directly from Slack):

Megan Mokri (Byte): So much to say on this one. The reality is many industries in the US are facing a labor shortage – food and ag is hugely impacted, as is retail. Automation is critical if these industries are to keep pace with growing and shifting consumer behaviors.

Charlie Andersen: Re: automation and the impact on labor, this story is still being written. Certainly, the impact of automation is to enable one person to do far more work, or to remove people from tasks they no longer want to do. But in the process, more tasks are created and new opportunities are unlocked. (in the case of farming, there is way way too much work to do already)

David Rodriguez: The size of the markets we build should increase the total number of human operators! In our case, we need fewer people to do more deliveries, but we do so many deliveries that we need to hire more and more people!

But our Robo-Slack Chat wasn’t all dour news about an impending robot revolution. There are lots of cool things about robots, too!

One is how Byte’s automated smart fridges are stocked. Because the fridges automatically keep track of their contents, Byte has insight into which products are popular and where, and can use that data to power Byte’s demand algorithms and inventory planning, and can even allow for dynamic pricing. Byte also leases out their technologies to CPG and other food service companies, allowing them to more efficiently stock their own Byte-powered fridges.

But you can’t stock those fridges if you don’t have food, and as Charlie Andersen reminded us, agriculture and working on a farm is hard work. Robots can carry out some tasks more safely than a human could. For instance, the Augean Burro can carry 150+ pounds of grapes for hours in 110 degree weather without getting heat stroke or dehydrated. But in addition to labor changes, robots can also push farms towards more organic production because this can also reduce the amount of chemicals needed and the overall environmental intensity needed for fruit and vegetable production.

From that example, it’s easy to see robots as lending a helping hand, but in the city, robots running around underfoot could be seen as more of a nuisance, and become a target for theft or vandalism. One way Kiwi combats this is by designing the robot in a way that creates empathy from people looking at it. For instance, the Kiwi-bot has big eyes, making the robot look “cute.” This cuteness makes mean ole humans reluctant to harm the robot. Rodriguez says that in Berkeley they’ve had zero instances of theft and only a few cases of vandalism.

We are only at the beginning of seeing what robots are capable of and how they will literally change – and complicate – our world. But Slack Chats like this, as well as our upcoming ArticulATE conference in April (get your tickets!) help drive the conversation so we can figure some of those answers out now.

Automation: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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.

SnackNation Raises $12M to Expand into Hospitality and Transportation Channels

I worked for a video game startup for a while and one of the best perks was the “wall of snacks.” Packed with free cookies, gummies, chips and more, it helped me pack on more than a few extra pounds by the time I left.

SnackNation is a startup that wants to satisfy snack cravings with food that’s better for you than gummies and chips, and the company just announced yesterday that it has raised a $12 million Series B round to help expand that mission (hat tip to Nosh). This latest round was led by 3L Capital and brings the total amount raised by SnackNation to $22.5 million.

SnackNation is a snack delivery service that “exists to inspire more conscious food decisions.” The company heavily curates its offerings, and according to Nosh, they only offer products that pass “an ingredient review and tasting panel.”

SnackNation has been focused on office snack delivery, and counts Microsoft and MailChimp among its customers. According to the SnackNation website, prices for offices start at $299 a month for 140 – 160 single-serving snacks (consumer boxes start at $9.99). SnackNation says the new money will be used to open up new distribution channels into hospitality and transportation, as well as to scale its direct-to-consumer business.

There’s no shortage of snack box subscription services out there, all of whom are looking to foist their treats on us, no matter the time of day. ZeroCater just raised $12 million to help fund its office snack endeavors. Byte Foods (one of our #FoodTech25 companies) built a more modern vending machine for fresh office snacks. As noted, SnackNation is moving into hospitality and transportation, and Cargo raised $5.5 million so Uber and Lyft drivers can sell you snacks while you ride.

With all this money and activity, it looks like the “wall of snacks” will be breaking free of the office and following me around everywhere. Good thing I work from home.

The Food Tech 25: Twenty Five Companies Changing the Way We Eat

Here at The Spoon, we spend most days writing and thinking about those who are transforming what we eat. No matter whether a startup, big company, inventor, or a cook working on new approaches in the kitchen, we love learning the stories of people changing the future of food. So much so, in fact, that we wanted to share those companies that most excite us with our readers.

And so here it is, The Spoon’s Food Tech 25: Twenty Five Companies Changing the Way We Eat

What exactly is the Food Tech 25? In short, it’s our list of the twenty five companies we think are doing the most interesting things changing the way we create, buy, store, cook and think about food.

As with any list, there are bound to be a few questions about how we got here and why we chose the companies we did. Here are some answers:

How did we create this list?

The editors of the Spoon — myself, Chris Albrecht, Catherine Lamb and Jenn Marston — got together in a room, poured some kombucha (ed note: except for Chris), and listed all the companies we thought were doing interesting and important work in changing food and cooking. From there, we had numerous calls, face-to-face meetings and more glasses of kombucha until we narrowed the list down to those you see here.

Is this an annual list?

No, this is a list of the companies we think are the most interesting people and companies right now, in mid-2018. Things could definitely look different six months from now.

Is this list in a particular order or are the companies ranked?

No, the list is in no particular order and we did not rank the 25 companies.

Why isn’t company X on the list?

If this was your list, company X or Y would most likely be on the list (and that’s ok with us). But this is the Spoon’s list and we’re sticking to it (for now – see above).

And of course, making this list wasn’t easy. There are lots of companies doing interesting things in this space. If we had enough room to create runners-up or honorable mentions, we would. But we don’t (and you don’t have enough time to read a list like that).

So, without further ado, here is the Spoon’s Food Tech 25. If you’re the type that likes your lists all on one page, click here.


EMBER
Ember bills itself as “the world’s first temperature control mug,” which basically means you can dictate a specific temperature for your brew via the corresponding app and keep your coffee (or tea or whatever) hot for as long as you need to. The significance here isn’t so much about coffee as it is about where else we could implement the technology and relatively simple concept powering the Ember mug. The company currently has patents out on other kinds of heated or cooled dishware, and Ember has cited baby bottles and medicine as two areas in which it might apply its technology. And yes, it allows you to finally stop microwaving all that leftover morning coffee.

 


INSTANT POT
The Instant Pot is not the highest-tech gadget around, but its affordability, versatility, and speed have made this new take on the pressure cooker a countertop cooking phenomenon. It also has a large and fanatical community, where enthusiastic users share and reshare their favorite Instant Pot recipes across Facebook groups and online forums. By becoming the first new breakout appliance category of the millennial generation, the Instant Pot has achieved that highly desirable (and rare) position of having its brand synonymous with the name of the category; people don’t go looking for pressure cookers, they go looking for an Instant Pot.

 


DELIVEROO
We chose Deliveroo out of the myriad of food delivery services because of their Editions project, which uses customer data to curate restaurant hubs in areas which have unfulfilled demands for certain chain establishments or cuisine types. This model allows food establishments to set up locations with zero start-up costs, and also gives customers in more restaurant-dry areas a wide variety of delivery food options. Essentially, it’s cloud kitchens meets a food hall, with some heavy analysis to help determine which restaurants or cuisines customers want, and where. These “Rooboxes” (hubs of shipping containers in which the food is prepared) show that Deliveroo is a pioneer in the dark kitchen space, and are doing serious work to shake up the food delivery market.

 

AMAZON GO
There are any number of ways that Amazon could have been included in this list, but its Amazon Go stores are what we think will be the real game changer. The cashierless corner store uses a high-tech combination of cameras and computing power, allowing you to walk in grab what you want — and leave. That’s it. At its first location in Seattle, we were struck by how seamless the experience was. As the locations broaden, this type of quick convenience has the potential to change the way we shop for snacks, (some) groceries and even prepared meal kits.

 


INGEST.AI
Restaurants have more pieces of software to deal with than ever. In addition to all the delivery platforms they are now plugged into, there have to deal with payments systems, HR software, and inventory management software. And right now, none of those applications talk to each other. Created by a former IBM Watson engineer, Ingest.ai promises to extract and connect the data from ALL of those disparate software pieces and tie them together to give restaurant owners a holistic, data-powered view of their business. It also helps them have more precise control over their business and automate tasks like food ordering and staff scheduling.

Want to meet the innovators from the FoodTech 25? Make sure to connect with them at North America’s leading foodtech summit, SKS 2019, on Oct 7-8th in Seattle.

NEXT

For Good Eggs, the Real Competition is the Smaller Players

Yesterday when online grocery delivery service Good Eggs announced that it had raised a $50 million Series C round, much of the news coverage focused the looming threat of Amazon + Whole Foods. But I think the more interesting question to ask is how will Good Eggs fend off the smaller competition, including the small stores of Amazon Go.

To be sure, giants like Amazon, Walmart and Albertsons are threats to any startup in the grocery space. And in one sense, Good Eggs is taking them head-on. Good Eggs CEO Bentley Hall told me in an interview yesterday that he wants his company to be a “complete solution” for customers, offering everything from fresh produce to booze to meal kits, all delivered within a two-hour window.

But a broad selection and fast delivery are table stakes for an online grocer anymore. To set itself apart from its bigger competitors, Good Eggs has created a niche: focusing on locally sourced food, only carrying products that meet a strict set of quality and ethical criteria, employing its own drivers rather than contracting out, and growing slowly and only within California (for the foreseeable future).

This attention to sustainable and ethical detail will play well in lefty California locales like the Bay Area and Los Angeles, giving Good Eggs a sizeable customer base where its niche approach can differentiate against those bigger players. Perhaps even more so now that Amazon Fresh is no longer selling goods from local third-party vendors.

But it’s on the smaller end of the spectrum where I think Good Eggs will face its bigger challenge.

One startup that could give Good Eggs a run for its money is Farmstead. Also servicing the Bay Area, grocery delivery service Farmstead uses a combination of micro-hubs and artificial intelligence to heavily curate and optimize inventory management to reduce over-ordering. It’s almost like a mini version of Good Eggs, with a few key distinctions:

First, Farmstead’s micro-hub stores are small, so they can be set up in more residential neighborhoods — closer to the people they deliver to. Good Eggs is sticking with the bigger store strategy; they have one in the Bayview area of SF and, with their new funds, they’re building another big facility in West Oakland.

Farmstead’s micro-hubs also serve as pickup points. So rather than waiting at home for a delivery, customers can pull up to Farmstead location while they are already out and about and a Farmstead runner will load their grocery order directly into their trunk. Additionally, if Farmstead’s AI works as promised, it will help the company control inventory and costs by knowing what its customers want and sourcing the exact right amount to meet demand.

Hall brushed aside concerns, this saying that after being in groceries for six years, Good Eggs has the experience Farmstead, which only recently got its seed round, lacks. “You need to know a lot about the supply chain,” Hall said. And it’s not just supply chain knowledge; Hall went on to describe all the technology Good Eggs has built over the past six years, including its own demand forecasting, warehouse management, driver tools and website.

Good Eggs is also focused on being the “complete solution” for its customers. Farmstead, on the other hand, is splitting its attention between managing its own stores and licensing its inventory AI platform out to other restaurants and grocery stores.

But part of Good Eggs’ complete solution is in meal kits, which consumers want more of as part of their grocery store experience. It’s not in the meal kits themselves where Good Eggs will face competition, but in the convenience — namely, where and how meal kits are sold.

This is where Amazon comes in one of their potential competitors with its Amazon Go stores. The cashierless grab-and-go concept sets up in dense urban areas, which means that hungry city dwellers can literally walk into an Amazon Go on their way home from work and grab a meal kit to match their appetite. Granted, Amazon Go is only in Seattle now, but it’s expanding to San Francisco and Chicago, and you can bet it won’t stop there.

And if going to the Amazon corner store is too much of a hassle, Chef’d and Byte Foods announced a partnership today that will let workers grab and pay for a meal kit from a special fridge located inside office buildings on their way out the door. If that catches on, it will offer a convenience that’s hard to match.

My point isn’t that Good Eggs is doomed, or that it was a bad investment by Benchmark. Grocery is a big market that won’t be winner take all. But when looking at grocery competition, we shouldn’t let the shadows cast by Amazon and Walmart keep us in the dark about the smaller upstarts who could change the game.

Chef’d & Byte Foods Partner to Bring Meal Kits to the Office

Starting today, Byte Foods will place Chef’d meal kits in 100 of their unattended smart fridges throughout the Bay Area.

“Eighty percent of people don’t know what they’re making for dinner at 4 p.m.” Byte’s co-founder Lee Mokri told the Spoon. But with this new partnership, they don’t have to — they can swing by one of Byte’s smart fridges in their office or building lobby, swipe their credit card, and grab a Chef’d meal kit on the way out their door.

Each Chef’d kit contains two (or more) servings of ready-to-cook, pre-portioned ingredients. Mokri said that Byte fridges would have meal kits on 1-2 of their shelves, the remainder of which would feature the same healthy food and drinks they’ve been stocking. They’ll also be debuting two stand-alone Chef’d fridges, which can fit roughly 20 meal kits.

A big gripe of meal kit service users have is that they get locked into a delivery subscription from the get-go. Which is one reason why meal kits are making the move into retail; people get the pre-packaged convenience of a kit, but they can pick them up day-of depending on their mood and schedule. The Chef’d/Byte partnership takes this convenience one step further but cutting out the grocery store stop and bringing the meal kits to them.

Byte isn’t the first to figure out that people want meal kits on-demand, without the subscription strings. Meal kits are the second most popular item at Amazon Go’s cashierless retail store in Seattle (and soon SF and Chicago). Byte basically brings the convenience of Amazon Go right into your office, shortening the retail journey to a few mere feet. “We’re solving for immediate satisfaction,” said Mokri.

Byte’s smart fridge in action.

This partnership is a savvy move by Byte to forge a new revenue channel. We wrote about Byte’s journey to reinvent of the vending machine a few months ago. The San Francisco-based startup launched in 2015 with an aim to bring accessible, fresh, and healthy food into offices. Workers can walk up to a Byte fridge, scan their credit card to unlock the door, then select as many items as they’d like from their offerings (like Blue Bottle coffee and Sunrise Sandwiches). When they close the door, the fridge scans all remaining goods and figures out what was taken, then charges the worker accordingly and sends over a receipt.

Byte’s fridges cost $500/month to rent, which includes the services of them restocking the fridges daily (often in the middle of the night) and taking away any uneaten food for donation at the end of the day. Since Byte absorbs all the risk of food waste, they’ve developed a demand algorithm to optimize their stocking and pricing practices — in fact, Mokri said that they have three patents.

They also license out their fridges and tracking/stocking technology to other companies. The service is completely turnkey; the licenser buys a Byte smart fridge for $5,500, pays a small monthly fee, and is then free to brand it and stock it with their own goods. Partners also have access to Byte’s dashboard and stocking algorithms. So far, Byte has roughly 100 of these licensed fridges, and is piloting more.

It’s also par for the course for Chef’d, a white label meal kit service that seems to be consistently innovating when other meal kit companies are struggling. Last month they partnered with Innit to provided guided cooking for their meal kits, and they capitalized off the slow cooker trend with their recent Campbell’s partnership. Chef’d already offers the option to purchase their meal kits sans subscription, and by teaming up with Byte Foods they’re positioning themselves as even more convenient.

Byte plans to roll out Chef’d kits into all of their 500+ locations over the next six months. They have raised a total of $10 million so far and are beginning to raise their Series A round.

Square Gobbles up Zesty to Bolster Corporate Catering

Square, the merchant services company, announced today that it has acquired “certain assets” of the corporate catering startup, Zesty. This addition will help Square expand its food ordering service, Caviar. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Zesty is only available in the Bay Area, where it works with 150 restaurants to delivery corporate meals. The company had raised $20.7 million since launching in 2013, $17 million of that was in a Series A raised in 2015. Zesty will become part of the Caviar for Teams unit, which launched in 2016. The Zesty team will bring with it “full-fledged, white-glove corporate catering, allowing us to serve companies of all sizes,” Square said in a press announcement.

The acquisition comes at a time when the concept of corporate catering is going through its own evolution. It’s no longer just dumping food in a main room at 11:00 and having people scrum to get it while it’s still hot (and having the worst bits sit uneaten). New types of competitors are springing up with new approaches to feeding hungry employees.

Forkable uses smart recommendations to let employees order individual lunches rather than partake in large buffets. Allset flips the script entirely and makes it easier for employees to get out of the office and pre-order and pre-pay for meals at nearby restaurants. And Byte Foods sets up fridges with healthy snacks and food right inside the office.

But until those become more mainstream, Zesty will keep bringing in chafing dishes and, in the short term, continue operate independently.

Startups Aim To Bring Fresher Choices To The Office Vending Machine

Office life can often mean tight deadlines, which in turn often means making tough choices like ‘Funyuns or Fritos?’ when lunch rolls around.

But for those of us who believe that no time starved employee should have to sustain themselves on bags full of salt and high fructose corn syrup, things may be looking up: a new crop of startups are trying to revisit the office vending machine and bring fresher choices to those of us chained to our desk.

One of those startups is Byte Foods. The company operates a fleet of smart fridges installed in office break rooms and cafeterias throughout the Bay Area.  The company, started by the husband and wife team of Lee and Megan Mokri in 2015, licenses their fridges stocked with fresh food from local producers such as Blue Bottle and Mixt Greens. Companies pay a monthly service fee, and Byte manages food inventory, payments and allows the employer to check out purchasing patterns with a web based dashboard. Employees access the food by swiping their card, choose what they want, and a bill is sent to their smartphone.  Each food item has a small RFID tag on the bottom which helps the fridges determine which items the employee has chosen.

The Mokris ran food delivery startup 180 Eats before getting into fresh vending machines. The current version of Byte is a result of 2016 acquisition of Pantry, a company which made the fridge and software tech licensed by Byte when they launched in 2015. After a year of perfecting the combined offering of fresh food delivery with the product licensing model inherited from Pantry, the company is now looking to expand beyond the Bay Area with the cash from their recent $5.5 million funding round.

Another company bringing fresh food to office cafeterias as well as other locations such as O’Hare airport is Chicago based Farmer’s Fridge. The company, which operates in about 75 locations throughout the Windy City, stocks their fridges with fresh salads made in their kitchen. Customers can check their fridges for inventory with the Farmer’s Fridge app, which also helps them to find locations around town.

Like Byte, Farmer’s Fridge recently received an investment to fuel growth. The company recently received a $10 million investment led by French food giant Danone’s venture arm, Danone Ventures.  The investment team also includes former McDonalds CEO, Don Thomson, through though venture firm he founded, Cleveland Avenue.

It’s not just American startups who are rethinking the vending machine. Foodles, a French startup, is using a model similar to Byte where they will install turnkey connected vending machines stocked with food for $3,400 per month. The company, which is operating in a dozen locations throughout Paris, has raised just over $2 million in funding.

And as it turns out, big companies are also toying with the idea of fresher food from the vending machine. At SXSW this year, Panasonic showed off a smart vending machine called ‘Bento@Your Office’, which dispensed – you guessed it – bento boxes for employees.

In some ways, this new crop of startups is taking many of the ideas created by micromarket movement that’s started to gain traction over the past few years. Fresher food and better technology have started to push vending machine operators across the country evaluate new models. The vending market, which is a $20 billion plus market across food and other items, is a potentially significant opportunity for those looking to shake things up.

And that’s exactly what this new crop of startups bringing fresher food to offices looks to do. The race is on to create national footprints as these companies look beyond their home markets to find new customers for their turnkey fresh vending concepts.

And hopefully, for those of us racing to meet deadlines, we will soon have more choices than Funyuns or Fritos for lunch.

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