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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Meet Nommi, a Robotic Bowl Food Kiosk Designed by Wavemaker, C3, and Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto

Today Wavemaker Labs announced the launch of a new startup and bowl-making robotic kiosk concept called Nommi. Nommi will be “a standalone robotic kitchen that is able to produce and dispense any grain-, noodle- or lettuce-based dish through a fully integrated cooking system.”

Nommi is the latest robot startup concept to emerge from Wavemaker Labs, the food automation incubation studio behind Miso Robotics (Flippy, a back-of-house fry and grillbot), Bobacino (boba drinkbot), Future Acres (farm assistant) and Piestro (pizza kiosk). What’s unique about Nommi is the company is a product of a partnership between Wavemaker, C3 and chef Masaharu Morimoto, each of whom hold equity in the new company.

“As we started developing it, we really wanted to get partners to allow this to scale quickly, and really kind of stack the deck before we start playing,” said Buck Jordan, President and Co-Founder of Nommi and CEO of Wavemaker Labs, in a recent zoom interview with The Spoon.

C3, which has made a name for itself over the past couple of years for its aggressive expansion into virtual food haul concepts, has plans to order up to one thousand Nommi units over the next few years. While Jordan and C3 envision the Nommi augmenting some physical restaurant locations, the primary focus for the bowl food robot will be food delivery.

“We’re building this to be really delivery accessible,” said Jordan. “Delivery is going to double over the next five years, and so we want to be part of that.”

According to Jordan, while the initial machine will be designed to assemble food bowls that can be handed off to humans for delivery, Nommi envisions a future that will be roboticized from end to end.

The system is “designed and go through our system to be picked up by the regular delivery apps by human,” said Jordan. “But in the long term, we are trying to figure out a way to have a robotic transfer system to some of these robotic delivery machines out there to make a full end to end.”

Chef Morimoto will run the first Nommi, featuring menu items from his Sa’Moto restaurant brand. According to Jordan, Morimoto’s input had a significant impact on the robot design.

“Chef Morimoto wants really high-quality food,” said Jordan. “There’s no compromising when it when he puts his name on it.”

Because Morimoto wanted to delicately place ingredients in each food bowl, Nommi’s design team endeavored to build a robot capable of such high-fidelity food-making. This resulted in a wheeled cart system that moves around under food dispensing stations and rotates up to 360 degrees for precision ingredient placement. You can watch the Nommi assembling bowls via its wheeled cart system in the video below.

The Nommi Bowl Making Kiosk

Nommi fills a hole in Wavemaker’s portfolio for a fully automated bowl kitchen kiosk. Wavemaker’s most well-known food robot startup, Miso, makes back-of-house robots for fry and grill work. Piestro makes consumer-facing pizza robot kiosks. With Nommi, the company has designed a flexible bowl-food robot that, according to Jordan, is flexible enough to replicate a variety of menus from high-end chefs.

“There will be brands built from the ground up to be automated,” said Jordan. “And so we want to take the best in class food from Michelin star chefs and bring fine dining to the masses. We want to do in a fully automated way and be able to have a grain bowl made by Morimoto cost the same as a Big Mac.”

Each Nommi machine has a capacity for up to 330 bowls and lids. Each kiosk will come with up to 21 food lockers that hold finished bowls. Customers or food delivery workers can pick up the food at the kiosk using a QR code.

According to Jordan, the company hopes to start shipping its production unit in 2023.

A Conversation With Buck Jordan of Nommi

The Week in Food Tech Funding: Culture Biosciences & Tufts Nab Funding as Interest in Scaling Cell Ag Grows

Over the past 12 months, money has poured into cultivated meat startups as venture investors, celebrities, and governments look to get in on what many believe is the next big thing in alternative protein.

However, as the excitement grows, some are taking a harder look at how to scale the production of lab-grown meat to make a dent in the larger animal-based meat market. According to one estimate, the industry will need up to $30 billion invested in cell-based/fermentation production capacity if the alternative protein market hits just 11% of total meat consumption by 2035 and significantly more if consumer adoption exceeds expectations.

Much of that $30 billion will be directed to capital investment in building out long-term production capacity. However, before we get there, the industry first needs to invest in organizations building the necessary technology and production platforms to enable scale-up. This week saw two significant investments intended for just that: Culture Biosciences ($80 million) and Tufts University & partners ($10 million).

Culture Biosciences helps companies developing future food products with its bioreactor-as-a-service platform. The company introduced its first product a couple of years ago, a cloud-connected benchtop bioreactor service for cell-culture and bioprocess development. With their new round of funding, Culture looks to move beyond the bench with cloud-connected 5L and 250L bioreactors-as-a-service that will help firms optimize for pilot scale bio-manufacturing.

The second investment isn’t a traditional venture investment, but the $10 million USDA funding award to Tufts University for a cultured protein center of excellence is a vital investment nonetheless. In partnership with others, Tufts will lead an Institute for Cellular Agriculture to develop foundational technologies and processes to enable the cultivated meat industry to progress towards scaled production. The foundational work done by this organization will include everything from research on next-generation cell-culture medium to the development of education and leadership programs for the cultivated meat industry.

As companies try to take cultivated meat from the lab to the manufacturing plant, some question if cellular agriculture will ever be able to scale upwards cost-effectively and safely enough to justify all the investment. While we won’t know the answer to this question for a few years, it’s an encouraging sign that investments are being made to address the next big challenge in cellular agriculture.

And now, the rest of this week’s funding news:

Food Supply Chain

TrusTrace – $6 Million: TrusTrace, a Sweden-based startup building food supply chain traceability software solutions, has raised a $6 million Series A funding round. TrusTrace uses blockchain, AI, and bots to track products as they navigate their way through the supply chain. The company claims to have 8 thousand suppliers and 250 thousand products on the platform. My guess is TrusTrace and other traceability platform players are getting lots of inbound inquiries as everyone from ingredient and component suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers are trying to figure out how to work through the great 2021 supply chain disequilibrium.

Plant-Based Food

Grounded Foods – $2.5 Million: Plant-based cheese maker Grounded Foods has announced a $2.5 million raise. The company, founded by the husband and wife team of Shaun Quade and Veronica Fil, makes cheese products with hemp seeds and cauliflower. Grounded is already in 160 different retail locations today and plans to use the funds to expand further in the US and to set up for expansion into Europe.

Ag Tech

Kuva Space – €4.2M ($4.9M): Kuva Space, a provider of realtime agricultural data using space-borne hyperspectral camera technology, has raised $4.9 million. The company plans on using the funding to launch a constellation of six-unit nano-satellites to gather imagery in the 400 to 1,100 nanometer band. The company provides data that helps farmers optimize fertilizer and irrigation needs, optimal harvesting times, and early-stage pest or plant disease detection. With its second generation satellites, the company plans to expand its carbon monitoring capabilities.

Food Waste

Orbisk – €2.4M: Orbisk, which provides professional kitchens with automated analysis of food usage and associated waste flow using machine vision and AI, has received a €2.4 million grant from the European Commission’s European Innovation Council (EIC). The data from Orbisk’s analysis allows customers to adapt processes and purchasing to better manage and reduce food waste. Orbisk won the EIC funding with a pitch for its ‘Binspector’ project, under which the company will invest in dynamic AI models to increase accuracy and rapid adaptation in international menus, as well as further development of its food management algorithms.

Fish Tech

OptoScale – $4.1m (£3m): Optoscale, which makes machine vision and sensor technologies real-time monitoring of fish farm stock, has raised £3 million led by SWEN Capital Partners. The Norway-based company says it can analyze up to 200,000 fish per day using its technology, which compares with 50 to 100 fish using traditional analysis methods. Optoscale, which currently operates in Norway, Canada, and Scotland, plans to use the money to expand operations to Australia, Chile, and Iceland.

Restaurant Tech

ResQ – $39 Million: Well that was fast. After raising $7.5 million in a June seed funding round, ResQ, which provides a software platform for managing restaurant repair and maintenance tasks, has raised a $39 million Series A. Through their platform, restaurants can request, manage, and pay for a service, as well as manage the documents for these things. ResQ also connects restaurants with a network of contractors able to perform those services. The company’s list of available services includes HVAC, refrigeration, electrical, janitorial, plumbing, pest control, grease trap cleaning, preventative maintenance, and most anything else needed to keep a restaurant kitchen up and running. Since its seed round, the company has said its customer base has grown from seven states to 36 in the US. They plan to use the funding to grow their team by 400%.

C3 – $10 Million: Virtual restaurant/host kitchen platform company C3 has raised another $10 million in strategic funding from Swiss private capital firm, Lurra Capital, just a few months after it had raised a $80 million Series B. C3 (short for Creating Culinary Communities), works with kitchen operators (host kitchens) to fulfill orders for virtual restaurant brands. As of mid-year, the company operated about 40 virtual restaurant brands. The company plans to open 1,000 virtual brand locations by year’s end and has plans to open 12,000 globally by 2023.

Food Robots

Future Acres – $1.7 Million: Farm robotics startup Future Acres has raised $1.7 million via equity crowdfunding on Seedinvest. The company makes a self-driving robot called Carry that utilizes GPS and computer vision to navigate around the field and haul up to 500 pounds of produce. The company, which has raised a little over $400 thousand in pre-seed funding, plans to use the funds for product development, payroll, marketing and operations.

The Week in Food Tech Funding: Apeel’s Quarter Bil, Bug Farm Beta Hatch Snatches $10M

The waning days of August usually mean a slowdown in news, but not so in the red hot food tech space. This week’s food tech funding news includes (yet another) quarter-billion round for food waste unicorn Apeel, a bug farm’s fresh $10 million, and the continued steady drumbeat of funding going into ghost kitchens.

Apeel’s Appeal

Food waste reduction continues to garner investor interest and food-life extension startup Apeel is leading the pack. The company, which announced this week it had raised a $250 million Series E, plans to use its new funds to ramp up operations for 10 new supply networks over the next year to add to its already impressive 30 food suppliers and 40 retailers in 8 countries.

The new funding round comes just a year after its celebrity-infused (Oprah, Katie Perry) Series D – also for $250 million – and brings the company’s total funding to $635 million at a $2 billion valuation. That makes Apeel the most highly valued startup in food waste prevention, above Imperfect Foods (valued at $700 million in January of this year).

Apeel’s, um, appeal is that life-extension technology is perhaps one of the most effective tools to fight food waste at grocery stores, which throw away about one-third of produce in any given year. Apeel isn’t the only player in the space as Hazel and Ryp Labs (the 2019 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase winner) also have life-extension tech, but Apeel is the one with far and away the most market traction.

I’ll be watching to see if Apeel uses its funding and strong market position to continue to expand its product portfolio beyond its core life-extension coating technology. This year’s acquisition of hyperspectral imaging company ImpactVision was a move in that direction, and I can see the company making more adjacent moves under the broader food waste prevention umbrella.

Ghost Kitchens/Virtual Restaurants

C3, $10 Million: C3, a virtual restaurant startup that operates 40 different concepts as part of its virtual food hall concept, has secured a $10 million strategic investment from private equity firm TriArtisan Capital Advisors. The investment, announced this week, is part of a larger $80 million series B funding round announced last month.

BigSpoon Foods, $2 Million: BigSpoon Foods, a ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant operator based in India, has raised a $2 million pre-Series A round from Dubai-based NB Ventures. BigSpoon runs its own kitchens in a number of mid-sized (what it calls tier 2) cities and also has a portfolio of virtual restaurant brands. It offers a “digital franchise” model that turnkeys a new franchise with a ghost kitchen facility and an arsenal of delivery-only restaurant brands for approximately $20 thousand per location.

Bug Farms

Beta Hatch, $10 Million: Cashmere Washington-based mealworm farm raised a $10 million funding round which it plans to use to expand production at its flagship production facility east of Seattle. Beta Hatch’s 42 thousand square foot facility produces mealworms for use in feed for livestock and pets and plans to use its cash infusion to increase production by 10x over the next year.

Alt Protein

Melt&Marble, €750,000: Melt&Marble, formerly known as Biopetrolia, announced this week it had raised a €750,000 (~$876,000 USD) seed round to further develop its fermentation-based fats for plant-based foods. M&M and others like Motif are building out the toolbox for plant-based meat brands to make their products more meat-like.

Shandi, $700,000: Singapore-based Shandi, a maker of plant-based chicken analogs (including shreds, pieces, strips, and drumsticks), has raised a $700 thousand seed round. This round, its second seed round, was led by the large Singaporean food conglomerate Tolaram Group.

Delivery & Marketplaces

Trifecta, $20 Million: Organic meal kit startup Trifecta has raised a $20 million Series B. While many first-gen meal kit startups fizzled, some of the entrants’ focus on health and sustainability seems to be gaining traction. Trifecta, Thistle, and Freshrealm have all raised funding rounds this year, which means the category has moved beyond the cold-shoulder many of them got after the disappointing Blue Apron IPO and closures of companies like Chef’d and Plated. As for what it plans to do with the money, Trifecta will expand its meal offerings and hopes to (perhaps ill-advisedly)become ‘Peleton of Nutrition’ with an expanded set of digital offerings.

Do you have funding news? Drop us a line and let us know.

C3 Raises $80M to Expand Its Virtual Food Hall Concept

Virtual restaurant company C3 (Creating Culinary Communities) has raised an $80 million Series B funding round co-led by Brookfield Asset Management and REEF Technology. Egon Durban and Greg Mondre Managing Partners and Co-CEOs of Silver Lake Partners, along with Dean Adler, Co-Founder of real estate investment firm Lubert-Adler.

C3’s business these days is as much about real estate as it is about restaurants. The company operates more than 40 virtual restaurant brands, leveraging underutilized kitchen spaces around the country to cook and fulfill those orders. For example, the company has a partnership with Graduate Hotels and uses kitchen spaces at Graduate locations to serve delivery-only orders to guests and the surrounding community.

In March of this year, C3 said it would also bring its virtual restaurant concept to residential spaces, starting in Nashville, Tennessee and Phoenix, Arizona. The company recently partnered with Kitopi to take C3 brands overseas to the UAE, has a deal to use Reef locations for kitchens, and last month said it would make its virtual brands available to Chowly’s 10,000-plus restaurant customers.

For all C3 concepts and partnerships, meals are available through the company’s CITIZENS GO mobile app, which is powered on the back end by online order company Lunchbox’s software.  

The $80 million fundraise will go towards further expansion in the form of signing leases with real estate developers at various mixed-use, retail, and hospitality spaces. According to today’s press release, these leases will serve to open CITIZENS food halls, which are brick-and-mortar versions of the C3’s virtual food halls. These spaces will also provide additional kitchen space with which to fulfill delivery-only orders for C3 brands. 

The virtual food hall concept itself isn’t new, with companies like Deliveroo, Zuul, and others employing their own versions of it. Few have pursued expansion as aggressively as C3, however. The latter says it has opened 250+ digital brand locations in the U.S., will have 1,000 by year’s end and is on track for 12,000 kitchens globally by 2023. 

Local Kitchens Raises $25M for Its Virtual Food Hall Network

Virtual food hall Local Kitchens has raised $25 million in Series A funding roughly one year after launching. The round was led by General Catalyst with participation from existing investors Human Capital and Pear VC. New investors Fifth Wall and Penny Jar Capital also participated. Local Kitchens says this round brings its total funding to $28 million. 

The San Francisco Bay Area-based company was founded by three ex-DoorDash employees in the summer of 2020. There are currently four Local Kitchens locations, all of which are in California: Cupertino, Menlo Park, San Jose, and Lafayette. 

These facilities function as combination ghost kitchen/virtual food halls. Orders from all participating restaurant concepts are cooked under one roof, while customers can order via the Local Kitchens website or onsite at a self-service kiosk. 

One notable feature of Local Kitchens is its ability to offer customers mix-and-match functionality when ordering digitally. In other words, customers can order from multiple different restaurant concepts and bundle them into a single transaction, rather than having to create a separate transaction for each restaurant. Kitchen United uses a similar approach for its ghost kitchens, as does Crave Collective, C3, and the newly opened Helbiz Kitchens.

“Bundling” virtual restaurant concepts together is one of those technological functions that looks simple on the surface but is rather a complicated execution on the back end. Speaking recently with The Spoon, Kitchen United’s Atul Sood explained that this idea is time consuming and expensive from a development perspective, and suggested that we may see more third-party restaurant tech in the future that helps ghost kitchen facilities integrate this feature. 

For Local Kitchens right now, customers can only order meals for pickup, though the company says delivery is “coming soon.” It is yet unclear who will delivery the food: a third-party service like DoorDash or an in-house operation. Up to now, the default delivery method has been third-party services. Lately, though, more ghost kitchen facilities have started using their own fleets, and Local Kitchens currently has an open position for Delivery Driver on its jobs website. 

The company says the new funding will allow it to build out more locations in California and eventually expand beyond its home state. 

C3’s 10,000 New Kitchen Partners

Unless you make a point of regularly ordering from virtual restaurants, you may not yet have heard of names like Sam’s Krispy Chicken or Plant Nation. They, along with many others, are delivery-only brands created by C3 (Creating Culinary Communities), a restaurant company that’s lately been on a mission to get these brands into seemingly ever pocket of America. The company’s virtual restaurants are in hotels, residential buildings, and even brick-and-mortar food halls. And thanks to a recent deal, they’ll soon be available via a lot more restaurants, too. 

C3 announced last week it had struck a partnership with point-of-sale integration company Chowly, whose technology platform makes it easier for restaurants to manage online orders coming from multiple sales channels. Through the deal, Chowly’s restaurant customers will get the option to be a “host kitchen” for C3’s virtual restaurants and share in the revenue from those sales. 

Host kitchens, as the name suggests, are spaces within existing restaurant kitchens that are dedicated to fulfilling orders from virtual, delivery-only brands. Companies like Fat Brands and Wow Bao have popularized the concept among restaurants, giving underutilized kitchen space a purpose and hopefully making the business incremental revenue in the process.

In the last year, we’ve also seen the rise of companies whose main business is to come up with new restaurant concepts and license them out to existing restaurants. Besides C3, Ordermark launched its NextBite business based on this idea, and Virtual Restaurant Concepts (best known for Mr. Beast Burgers) offers a similar concept.

C3’s deal with Chowly will give restaurant customers that use the Chowly platform an easier way to sell delivery-only restaurant brands than they could do on their own. Rather than having to conceptualize and figure out how to market and deliver wholly new virtual brands, Chowly’s restaurant partners can simply license a turnkey solution from C3, who handles the marketing, branding, and technical logistics of the operation via its exclusive ordering/delivery app, Citizens Go. The restaurant just has to cook the food and get it out the door.

These restaurants could also potentially reach a wider demographic by offering more food types on top of their own menus. I never thought I’d write “Captain D’s” and “high-end plant-based burger” in the same sentence, but that scenario’s entirely possible since Captain D’s is an enterprise customer of Chowly and C3 has a plant-based brand called Plant Nation. A Captain D’s location also offering Plant Nation for delivery could reach new and different customers and add more revenues through such a deal.

For C3, the deal is arguably even more lucrative. Chowly has more than 10,000 kitchen partners across the U.S., all of whom will eventually be able to licenses C3’s brands. That’s a major jump from the 250 kitchens in which C3 is currently in. The company says it will reach 1,000 locations by the end of the year and be in 12,000 kitchens by 2023.

The Chowly deal will be a huge help to that process — and enable C3 to expand more rapidly than it would if it had to forge each new individual kitchen partnership. Chowly’s enterprise brands include the aforementioned Captain D’s, Clean Juice, and Dickey’s Barbecue Pit, all of which give C3 and automatic sizable reach. 

The partnership will launch with these enterprise brands before branching out to include smaller restaurants within the Chowly network. The goal is to make all of C3’s brands available to all of Chowly’s 10,000 restaurants at some point in the nearish future.

As C3, Virtual Restaurant Concepts, NextBite and other virtual restaurant companies scale up, one question to keep in mind is how these companies are ensuring quality control across tens of thousands of restaurant partners. In other words, Sam’s Krispy Chicken will need to taste the same in Seattle, Washington as it does in Atlanta, Georgia in order to become popular on a large scale over time. An overnight sensation like Mr. Beast is one thing. Sustained, long-term loyalty from customers is another challenge altogether, and one for which consistency and high quality are crucial.

More Headlines

OpenTable Launches New Tools to Discourage Diners From ‘Ghosting’ on Their Reservations – The initiative will take the form of forthcoming new digital tools as well as “blog and social content educating diners on the impact of ghosting a reservation.”

South Korea: Lounge Lab Opens Brown Bana Robot Ice Cream Shop – South Korean robotics company Lounge Lab announced today that it has opened Brown Bana, a robot-powered ice cream store in Seoul.

Deliveroo Is Running a Reusable Container Program in Paris – Deliveroo France and circular-packaging company barePack have started offering customers of the delivery service the option to get their food delivered in reusable containers.

Virtual Restaurant Company Curb Raises €20M

Stockholm, Sweden-based ghost kitchen startup Curb announced this week it has raised a €20 million (~$24.4 million USD) round led by Point72 Ventures (h/t tech.eu). EQT, an existing investor, also participated in the round. Curb has now raised €23.2 million to date.

Curb is only a little over one year old, having been founded in May 2020 by ex-Delivery Hero employees Carl Tengberg and Felipe Gutierrez. The company raised an initial €3.2 million in December of last year, which went towards helping the company expand its delivery-only restaurant brands’ presence.

Curb operates what’s essentially a virtual food court, with many of the items meant to evoke street food. It’s collection of delivery-only restaurants include a Mexican-American concept, a burger restaurant, salads and bowls, and chicken wings, among other offerings. All concepts, menus, food preparation, design, and other branding elements are created in-house. Curb also operates its own tech stack. While specific details are not widely available publicly, the company has said it prioritizes data tracking and analysis to improve operations across its supply change as well as monitor customer demands and alter menu items accordingly. 

The company’s operation currently serves customers in Stockholm and Copenhagen, Denmark. Customers of Curb can order via a number of third-party delivery services that differ based on availability in a given location. Orders are prepped and fulfilled in ghost kitchen locations.

Taster, headquartered in London, U.K., is probably Curb’s nearest competitor in terms of what it offers. Like Curb, Taster has its own portfolio of virtual restaurants. Order prep and fulfillment is done in house, and items are available via third-party delivery platforms. The company raised $37 million at the beginning of May. In the U.S., a company called C3 offers a similar model to both Curb and Taster, with restaurant tech company Lunchbox powering the back-end technical capabilities of its virtual food hall.

Curb, meanwhile, says it will use its new funds to further develop its tech stack and grow its overall operations. 

C3 Launches Brick-and-Mortar Food Halls for Its Virtual Restaurants

Over the last year we’ve seen scores of brick-and-mortar eating establishments turn their restaurants into delivery-only concepts. C3, a hospitality company that runs a portfolio of virtual restaurant brands, has chosen to do things the other way around. This week, the company announced Citizens, a network of brick-and-mortar food halls for its virtual brands.

The first location will open this July in New York City, with a second location planned for Atlanta, Georgia and slated to open in 2022. Further Citizens locations are planned for Seattle, Miami, and California.

The 40,000-square-foot Manhattan West location will be part food marketplace, part sit-down restaurant, and will feature all of C3’s existing restaurant brands in addition to new ones. Customers will be able to order meals from kiosks or the C3 app (which the company launched in collaboration with Lunchbox), then choose to either take food to go or eat it onsite. The location will also feature pre-made grab-and-go options.

The forthcoming Atlanta location will offer a similar setup, and also include a delivery option to the surrounding neighborhood. 

All food hall locations will be powered by C3’s in-house tech stack, which includes the Lunchbox-powered ordering software. 

Plenty of virtual food hall concepts exist currently, from Deliveroo Editions to Zuul’s newly launched effort that’s an online marketplace of restaurants working out of the company’s kitchen facility. Few of these have added any physical spaces outside of the kitchens, though that may begin to change as the pandemic recedes and people return to the world of onsite dining.

Citizens is part of C3’s overall plan to expand its restaurant business, which has previously only been available in the form of delivery-only concepts. Earlier this year, the company announced a partnership with Graduate Hotels to run virtual restaurants out of the latter’s kitchen spaces. C3 has also partnered with multiple residential properties.

This week also saw C3 expand for the first time outside of the United States, to the United Arab Emirates. Via a partnership with ghost kitchen network Kitopi, C3’s virtual restaurants will be available through the UAE as of this coming summer.

Anatomy of a Digital Restaurant

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When Taster, a virtual restaurant company headquartered in London, announced its $37 million fundraise last week, co-founder and CEO Anton Soulier made clear that his company is trying to “redefine what it means to be a restaurant group in the 21st century.”

The company, founded in 2017, started out cooking food for its virtual restaurant brands from its own dedicated kitchen spaces then selling items via third-party delivery platforms like Uber Eats. Previously, Soulier was an early team member at Deliveroo, so he knows a thing or two about doing a delivery business — most importantly, how delivery has to continue to evolve.

Along those lines, Taster is taking a slightly different approach to the virtual restaurant nowadays. Instead of making the food itself, Taster licenses its five brands out to existing restaurants. The setup brings benefits to both sides. Restaurants can to make extra revenue by selling more delivery orders to not just their existing customers but fans of the virtual brands. Taster gets to expand faster, since it’s no longer having to handle every single order itself or build out kitchen infrastructure. As of last check, the company, which also has teams in Paris and Madrid, has more than 60 restaurant sites in nine cities acorss the UK, France, and Spain. The new funding, a series B round led by Octopus Ventures, will ensure further expansion for Taster’s brands.

In many ways, Taster could be seen as something of a blueprint for the digital-age restaurant chain, because it gathers a few different concepts that are popular into a single platform:

Underutilized Kitchen Space

Taster’s current model is built on helping restaurants put underutilized kitchen space to work. Businesses with extra kitchen space can license one or more of Taster’s restaurant brands and run it out of their own properties. It’s a way of offering a delivery brand without incurring the expense of a long lease with a traditional commissary space, which is too expensive for many restaurants. 

This “license a virtual restaurant” approach has become more commonplace over the last several months. Chicago-based Wow Bao started licensing a delivery-only version of its menu to other restaurants in 2020. Ordermark created an entire sister business around connecting restaurants with underutilized space to virtual brands. Restaurant company C3 has taken the concept beyond restaurants and is licensing its virtual food brands to hotels and luxury apartment properties.

Menus Designed for Delivery

From its inception, Taster has billed itself as a digital food court, serving up street food reimagined for delivery. In other words, the food is supposed to travel well. The company also involved Michelin-star chefs in the design of all its restaurant brands’ menus. 

In theory, at least, that ensures a certain level of quality stays intact throughout the entire journey the food takes from the kitchen to the customer. Even before the pandemic turned most of the restaurant biz into one giant takeout operation, issues with food quality were a major problem for delivery. This is another reason restaurants are now creating or licensing virtual brands instead of trying to repurpose their existing menus for to-go boxes. Under this arrangement, dining room food gets to stay where it belongs, in the dining room, and delivery orders are comprised of food that was built for travel.

Versatile Tech

Good food is the single most important part of any virtual restaurant. Arguably, the runner up is technology. It’s not enough anymore for a system to be simply be able to process digital orders and payments. Because of the growing order volume, delivery tech also needs to integrate with the back of house operations, track inventory and drivers, communicate with customers and integrate with the restaurant’s main POS system. It also needs to be able to integrate with third-party delivery services a la Uber Eats or Deliveroo.

To run a virtual restaurant out of their own kitchens, restaurants could cobble together various third-party solutions to get the above features under one roof. Or they could attempt to build an in-house system from the ground up. Both approaches have their drawbacks, from time and money to compatibility issues between different pieces of software. 

It’s another reason licensing a brand from a company like Taster or C3 or NextBite seems more practical at this point. Taster’s system, for example, can process orders and payments, help manage the kitchen, and track quality control, among other things. Users can also choose whether they want to order Taster brands via third-party delivery apps or Taster’s in-house app. Restaurants licensing Taster’s brands need not actually concern themselves with any of these logistical puzzles — the company handles all of the technology itself. C3’s tech is very similar, and there will doubtless be plenty of other such systems emerging in the near future.   

There’s little chance this “license a virtual restaurant” model will go out of vogue once lockdown restrictions ease and more cities around the world reopen their economies. Off-premises meal formats like delivery are at this point a normal part of doing business for restaurants. And as Taster’s recent fundraise suggests, interest in the evolution of the virtual restaurant is higher than ever.

Landry’s a restaurant group that owns Morton’s The Steakhouse and Bubba Gump’s Shrimp, said in a recent interview that most of the company’s restaurant brands will start accepting bitcoin as payment in the coming months. CEO Tilman Fertitta cited “the next 90 days” as a timeframe.

Starbucks is using its AI technology, Deep Brew, to further improve personalization for customers but also to track vaccination progress throughout the world, the company said on its recent earnings call.

Uber recently announced a new feature,  Pickup and Go, that lets rideshare users see nearby restaurants and order/pickup food while they are in transit.

C3 and Lunchbox Launch a New App to Power Virtual Food Halls

Virtual restaurant company C3 and online order platform Lunchbox announced today the launch of a new restaurant app, CITIZENS GO. The app will provide ordering and delivery services for C3’s growing network of ghost kitchens, which number over 200 at this point, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Via CITIZENS GO, which is available for both iPhone and Android, users can access C3’s growing list of delivery-only brands, which the company fulfills in various ghost kitchen spaces around the country, including in residential buildings. To start, CITIZENS GO will be available in Los Angeles, Northern California, New York City, and Chicago. Miami, Austin, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Atlanta are slated for the near future. 

Lunchbox’s tech powers the back end of the app when it comes to processing orders and facilitating delivery. The two companies first partnered in October of 2020 to create this virtual food hall, and the resulting CITIZENS GO app has been in the works ever since.  

Among other things, Lunchbox is known for its online order tech that lets restaurants process and fulfill off-premises orders without the need for third-party delivery services like DoorDash or Uber Eats.

A notable feature of the new CITIZENS GO app is its ability to bundle orders from multiple different restaurant brands into a single transaction for the user. For example, a customer might have a craving for both a Plant Nation burger and something from Sam’s Krispy Chicken. Rather than having to create a separate transaction for each virtual restaurant (which is still required of users on third-party delivery services), customers can put anything they want on the app into a single shopping basket and pay on one ticket. 

The bundling concept is actually quite complicated to enable from a technological standpoint, so it isn’t yet widespread in restaurant world. But as Lunchbox’s platform illustrates, more restaurant tech companies are starting to offer solutions to enable the concept. An Ontario, Canada-based company called Ghost Kitchens has its own tech to bundle orders from its kitchens, and Kitchen United developed its own in-house tech to do the same for its facilities. 

Most operations, however, will be most likely to do what C3 did and partner with a third-party restaurant tech company to enable this bundling capability. At some point in the not-so-distant future, said feature will become a de facto part of the restaurant tech stack, particularly in the ghost kitchen.

In the meanwhile, C3 said in its press release today that new restaurant brands will be added to the app “in the coming months” to the CITIZENS GO mobile app.

C3 to Bring Ghost Kitchens to Residential Buildings

Ghost kitchen/virtual restaurant network C3 (Creating Culinary Communities) today announced a partnership with apartment operator Akera Living to place ghost kitchens inside the latter’s Kenect communities.

Kenect bills itself as a combination coworking space, social club, and residential community that’s become increasingly popular in urban settings over the last few years. Since the idea seems to be to jam as many amenities as possible under one roof, ghost kitchens were bound to show up in this setting sooner or later.

For Kenect properties, C3 kitchens will not only serve up delivery-only meals to residents, they will also provide food and drink for Kenect’s lobby bars, building cafes, and pool areas. For residents ordering in, C3’s virtual restaurant brands will be available.

The company will launch its kitchens in summer 2021 at Kenect buildings in Nashville, Tennessee and Phoenix, Arizona, with upcoming locations planned for more U.S. cities soon. 

The partnership is not unlike C3’s deal with Graduate Hotels, which was announced earlier this year. For that partnership, C3 is taking over the hotel chain’s culinary spaces and converting them into “multi-branded kitchens” that will serve C3 virtual brands to hotel guests and community residents. 

The company’s expansion tactic is somewhat unique in the ghost kitchen world right now. Whereas most ghost kitchen-virtual food hall operations are currently in standalone facilities that require cars to deliver the food, C3 seems to want to bring the ghost kitchen as close as possible to customers. This concept of making a ghost kitchen a standard amenity on high-end properties isn’t widespread yet, though it will probably become so quickly, at least within the luxury property format. Whether it can translate to other settings remains to be seen.

Back to School for Virtual Food Halls

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We’ve said it once (actually, a lot more than once), we’ll say it again: university towns are the ideal testing ground for new meal delivery-related endeavors. Little wonder, then, that when launching its next virtual food hall, hospitality platform C3 (Creating Culinary Communities) chose Graduate Hotels, which operates more or less exclusively across America’s major college towns.

C3 specializes in delivery-only restaurant brands that cater to many different food types, from burgers to caviar. For this latest partnership, it will take over kitchen operations at Graduate Hotel properties, effectively turning those spaces into ghost kitchens for its virtual restaurant brands from which customers can order digitally.

A key piece of this news is that food will be available to the entire community, not just guests of the Graduate Hotel. For restaurant brands under the C3 umbrella, that means exposure to tens of thousands of individuals from student body populations, many of whom are already partial to digital ordering when it comes to how they get their meals. Just ask companies like Aramark, which acquired order-ahead app Good Uncle in 2019, Grubify, which was developed by Columbia students, and robot delivery company Starship’s college-centric user base. There are also, of course, the usual suspects: third-party delivery services like DoorDash and Grubhub.

Universities, and university towns with them, are an obvious testing ground for meal-related tech. Companies like C3 and those above have something of a captive audience, given that most campuses feature lots of bodies in a relatively small geographical area, people eating at all hours of the day/night, and a younger audience that has grown up using technology. Add faculty, staff, local residents, and hotel guests to that list, and that’s a massive potential customer base for C3 and its restaurant brands to reach when it launches at Graduate Hotels.

That we haven’t seen more of these virtual food halls on college campuses isn’t surprising, since students have been largely absent from their campuses — and therefore from college towns — for nearly a year because of the pandemic. However, as of last check, many colleges plan to reopen in the spring. Behaviors around how consumers get their meals has already shifted towards more digital ordering and to-go-friendly formats like delivery. By the time class is actually back in session, these behaviors will be even more firmly cemented into daily routines.

Side note: it would not be surprising to eventually see a virtual food hall like C3 team up with a robot-delivery company like Starship to further streamline operations, get deliveries out faster, and make them more socially distanced. 

Given all that, it seems C3 picked an optimal time to launch its virtual restaurants in the college town market — before everyone else rushes to do the same.

The Automat Comeback is Getting Legit

Another obvious meal-delivery concept that will in all likelihood hit college campuses one day soon is the net-gen Automat, a point underscored by the recent launch of Automat Kitchen in Jersey City, New Jersey.

These new versions of the mid-century staple are just as they sound: high-tech versions of the old cubby-style system a la Horn & Hardart. The difference nowadays is that instead of dropping a nickel into a slot to retrieve a meal, users can order ahead via an app and use a digitally delivered code to unlock the cubby door.

Towards the end of 2020, I wrote that the Automat would make a comeback thanks both to technology and to the industry-wide change towards takeout meals the restaurant biz has absorbed.

The Automat is well-suited for the pandemic era (which will probably last longer than the actual pandemic) because of it’s quick, cheap, and truly contactless nature. There is no human-to-human interaction involved with either placing a meal in a cubby or scanning a code to remove the food. And as ghost kitchens, delivery-only brands, and virtual food halls proliferate (see above), the Automat format looks increasingly attractive. 

Automat Kitchen’s version of it is a hardware/software combo that features made-to-order meals meant to be healthier takes on the comfort foods of yesteryear. It’s located in an office building connected to a shopping mall, so as the population ventures back to physical workspaces and stores, this location will see a lot of traffic.

Automat Kitchen joins the likes of the forthcoming Brooklyn Dumpling Shop as well as Minnow and Starbucks in bringing the automated cubby system to the restaurant experience. Expect plenty of other implementations to emerge this year.

Starbucks is considering more drive-thru-only stores with zero seating, the company said in its recent earnings call. Other possible future formats include significantly smaller location sizes and the ever-popular double-drive-thru lane concept.

Chipotle is testing out carside pickup at 29 of its locations in California. Customers order via the Chipotle app and, upon arriving at the restaurant, hit the “I’m here” button to get their food.

Mealco, a company that helps chefs create delivery-only brands, raised $7 million in seed funding. The round was led by Rucker Park Capital along with FJLabs and others.