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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Choco

Mikuna Foods Hopes Its New Funding Will Take Its Superfood Chocho To New Heights

If there’s a category of superfoods that has the potential to surpass super, Mikuna’s line of chocho protein products aspires to claim that title. The competition is intense, but the uses for a clean, gluten-free, low-glycemic, multipurpose powder-like food go well beyond juices and smoothies.

“Chocho is the future of plant-based proteins, and as we look ahead to the brand’s product and innovation pipeline, Mikuna is poised to lead the plant-based industry back to its clean, whole food roots,” company CEO Tara Kriese said in a company statement.

 Chocho is a lupin that, once milled, becomes a protein-rich powder. It is indigenous to South America in the Andes Region, particularly in Ecuador and Peru (where it is known as Tarwi). Mikuna’s founder, Ricky Echanique, is a fifth-generation farmer from Ecuador who suffered from digestive issues. He found the answer in his backyard, discovering that this plant provided solutions to his ailments. After discovering the power of this superfood, it became Echanique’s mission to bring chocho to the world.

 Kriese, a former SVP for plant-based meat company Impossible Foods, brings her market knowledge and personal passion to the company. In an interview with The Spoon, the CEO spoke about her daughter, whose multiple life-threatening childhood allergies took her to the plant-based, clean food world long before it was fashionable.

 After being introduced to Echanique in 2020 and learning of Mikuna and chocho, Kriese knew she was on to something big. “I couldn’t believe that no one was using this amazing crop,” she said. And it’s no one-trick pony, something borne out by the company’s relationship with Erewhon, which features the protein in juices that it features in its in-house Tonic Bar and in juices it sells in the store.

 The well-known Los Angeles-area gourmet supermarket’s use of chocho is part of Mikuna’s current multipronged strategy, which will evolve with its new investment dollars. The company sells its original or pure product along with vanilla and cacao varieties direct to consumers via its website. They also are available at Amazon and in retailers and foodservice locations across Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, and California.

Mikuna’s seed round investors include Olympians and World Champion athletes like Leticia Bufoni, professional skateboarder and six-time X Games gold medalist, professional surfer, and three-time world champion Mick Fanning; and professional snowboarder and Olympic gold medalist Sage Kotsenburg.

“I’ve always wanted a protein powder that’s clean, and Mikuna is as clean as it gets with just one simple ingredient, chocho,” says Professional Surfer Mick Fanning. “With Mikuna, I’m investing in both the future of nutrition and our planet, and to join such an impressive community of individuals to support Mikuna’s growth was a natural fit for me.”

Backed by more than hype, Kriese senses that, like her, when consumers learn of the power and versatility of this Andrean superfood, they will have a “chocho moment” just as she did.

Choco Raises $100M to Digitize Restaurant Food Procurement

Restaurant tech company Choco announced today it has raised $100 million in in Series B funding led by growth equity firm Left Lane Capital. Insight Partners along with existing investors Coatue Management and Bessemer Venture Partners also participated in the round, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Choco has raised $171.5 million to date.

The company’s mobile app effectively digitizes the relationship between restaurants and their suppliers, allowing the two groups to chat with one another through the app. Restaurants can place orders directly through the Choco app as well as view and edit all order sheets. Choco also released a new feature at the beginning of 2021 specifically designed for multi-unit restaurants to give them a more comprehensive overview of not just what they’re ordering but where it comes from and who is in charge of that relationship. At the time, Choco’s Global Industry Advisor, Chelsea van Hooven, said multi-unit restaurants make up about 40 percent of Choco’s current user base.

The company’s original pitch was around fighting food waste in the restaurant industry. While that remains a part of Choco’s overall benefits for restaurants, wasted time and money are also now part of the overall package of benefits the company is pitching. Replacing siloed paper-and-pen processes with digital ones, where all data is viewable from a single place, has the potential to cut hidden costs in the back of house and in doing so improve restaurant margins. 

Digital was largely seen as a “nice-to-have” feature before the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. Now, many claim that digitizing operations is a “must have,” and that those who don’t will wind up getting left behind.

While that may be true for large chains (think McDonald’s or Chipotle), it remains to be seen how much this full digitization of the back of house can actually help smaller independent restaurants. In other words, we have yet to see whether the cost to implement and run technology is worth the returns it brings to these smaller restaurants.

Choco says demand for its platform is up and partly driven by the pandemic pushing more restaurants to go digital. The company currently has over 10,000 active restaurants and suppliers on its platform. It will use the new funding to expand within its six current markets: the United States, Germany, France, Spain, Austria, and Belgium. The company will also expand into several new markets, and has plans to double its head count by end of the year.

Choco Rebrands, Launches New Feature For Multi-Unit Restaurants to Manage Their Kitchens

Choco, a mobile platform that digitizes and optimizes the relationship between restaurant kitchens and suppliers, announced today it has added a new feature specifically meant for multi-unit operators. 

The company’s platform is best known at this point for its ability to directly connect restaurant kitchens to suppliers in order to make the ordering and management of food inventory easier and more streamlined. Besides helping kitchens waste less (in terms of both money and actual food), Choco’s system promises to keep restaurants in the flow of their day-to-day work instead of puzzling over inventory.

Building on this idea, the new feature translates this optimization to restaurants with multiple locations or even multiple brands. Via the feature, which now comes baked into the Choco package and can be accessed from a mobile device, owners and managers can oversee their entire inventory and list of suppliers across all of their locations. They can view the entire list of suppliers for any given location as well as which team members are involved in ordering process and which specific suppliers they communicate with.

As Chelsea van Hooven, Global Industry Advisor at Choco, explained over to me over a call this week, the goal is to give restaurant groups a more comprehensive overview of not just what they’re ordering but where it comes from and who is in charge of that relationship. For a single restaurant or a small chain, this might be a fairly straightforward process. However, the more units a brand has, the more room for errors, redundancies, and unnecessary purchases in the restaurant kitchen.

Multi-unit restaurant brands comprise about 30 percent of the businesses in the restaurant industry, and make up 40 percent of Choco’s current user base.   

In addition to the new feature, Choco has also recently undergone a brand revamp. The company started out pitching food waste reduction as its main tagline, and doing so through digitizing restaurant kitchens. While fighting food waste remains an integral part of Choco’s mission, optimizing the restaurant kitchen so it runs more efficiently will be at the heart of the company’s work now. 

Building a more efficient kitchen is top of mind for a growing number of restaurants nowadays. Part of this is in response to the pandemic, which has decimated revenues and forced restaurants to operate off lean margins and even leaner operations. But van Hooven pointed out that we’re also now at a time when restaurants are more willing to explore new technologies that can improve business operations. The restaurant industry, once reticent to make any technologial upgrades, might have been forced into digitization, but now it’s the number one priority for most. Back-of-house tech, in particular, will see significant growth and investment this year.

Choco’s new feature is available as part of the overall software package at no extra cost.

Choco Is Challenging L.A. Chefs to Curb Food Waste With Food Creativity

As the world’s food waste problem gets literally bigger each year, so too does the amount of creative effort tech companies are putting into fighting it. The latest of these comes in the form of the Waste is Gold campaign, a pop-up event in Los Angeles in which three restaurants will serve dishes created from the food byproduct in their own kitchens. Powering the event is restaurant tech company Choco, which has big ambitions for fighting food waste both now and in the future.

The pop-up event will take place from Nov. 19–21 at Counterpart Vegan in Echo Park, Strings of Life in West Hollywood, and Beelman’s in Downtown L.A. These restaurants’ chefs will create dishes made from food byproduct (e.g., tomato soup from leftover vegetables) that will be available for takeout or outdoor dining. Customers can order online via the Waste is Gold website.

Choco is best known for its mobile platform that connects restaurant kitchens directly with suppliers to more easily order and manage their inventory. The company raised $30.2 million back in April, around the time it also launched a direct-to-consumer channel in response to the pandemic and ensuing restaurant industry meltdown. 

But speaking to me on a call this week, Chelsea van Hooven, the Global Industry Advisor at Choco, said that the company’s overarching goal was to fight food waste, and that Choco is working on a number of different projects to raise awareness about the problem, including the Waste Is Gold campaign.

She noted that the inspiration for this campaign came after working with Matt Orlando, owner and chef at Amass, a zero-waste restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark. In keeping with Orlando’s idea of building creative menus from food byproduct, Choco has given chefs participating in the Waste is Gold campaign a similar challenge.

For example, Mimi Williams, the executive chef for Counterpart Vegan, has created a ratatouille with spaghetti made from various parts of squash — parts that might normally be thrown out. Using more of the entire food, whether a squash, a pumpkin, or whatever else happens to be in the fridge, is lesson more chefs could take advantage of, and one that doesn’t necessarily require a lot of tech to execute on.

Tech, however, definitely has a role to play in the fight against food waste. For her part, van Hooven said that Choco is exploring the role of data in this area and how her company can provide a layer of it that will bring awareness and understanding of food waste to more restaurants. Tracking inventory data, and therefore food waste data, needs to become a part of daily business for restaurants. “We’re analyzing data in every field of our life, we should definitely use it for the better and optimize our food system,” she said. It’s a sentiment the food industry is voicing more these days as data’s critical role in fighting waste becomes more and more apparent.

While it’s still early days for Choco’s ambitions around creating that data layer, the pop-up restaurant events will definitely be making their way to more cities in the future. 

Choco Raises $30.2M for Restaurant Food Supply Management, Opens D2C Channel

Choco, a startup that in normal times allows restaurants to more easily manage and order food supplies, announced today that it has raised $30.2 million in funding led by Coatue Management. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Choco to $71.5 million.

But, as we are all well aware, these are not normal times. With a global pandemic forcing restaurants to close dining rooms or cease operations entirely, there isn’t much “B” to be had for a B2B operation. So the company is doing what most of us are being forced to do — pivot, at least temporarily.

As part of today’s announcement, Choco is also launching a direct-to-consumer market that lets everyday people shop from those food suppliers no longer able to sell to restaurants. The program is rolling out to all of the 17 global markets Choco operates with special consumer webshops created for each one where people can order meat, fish, produce, cheese and more. Orders will come with next day delivery and Choco is donating 100 percent of the profits (after it recoups its cost) to help provide relief to restaurants in those markets.

Choco isn’t the only restaurant supply management company that has had to change up because of coronavirus. Pepper is a similar New York-based software company that announced the same kind of temporary D2C pivot last month.

Opening up these new channels should actually be a win/win. Suppliers can sell their food, generate revue and hopefully keep more people employed. They also give consumers an alternate place to shop for food at a time when traditional grocery e-commerce is choked with new customers. And for a bonus third win, the entire endeavor helps reduce food waste.

Choco’s D2C offerings started in New York, where the company says it went from zero to 6,000 customers in the first three weeks. Choco says its latest figures for that location is 500 orders per day with an average basket size of $90. If you are interested in using Choco, it’s available in the following cities, with more on the way.

The Week in Restaurants: Grubhub vs. NYC (Again), Choco Reinvents Ingredient Sourcing

Between trick-or-treat excursions, earnings calls galore, and the fact that AI is going to take over the restaurant industry, it’s been a busy week. While you battle the comedown from your Halloween sugar high, here are a few more bits of news from the restaurant industry this week.

Grubhub Had a Bummer of a Week
The Grubhub versus NYC restaurants showdown continues. This week, 30 members of the New York City council signed a letter demanding refunds for restaurants who were allegedly charged incorrect phone order fees by Grubhub. The letter is a response to a class-action lawsuit by a restaurant operator claiming they were charged for calls that did not result in actual orders, and it’s the latest event in an ongoing saga between Grubhub and NYC over how the third-party delivery service treats its restaurant partners. It also comes just on the heels of Grubhub’s disappointing third-quarter results, which show the service is slowing down in terms of growth and losing ground to DoorDash.

Choco Raises $33.5M for Ingredient Ordering Platform
Ask just about any restaurant operator, and they’ll tell you that sourcing ingredients is a time-consuming, error-prone process that still heavily relies on leaving voicemails and sending faxes. A company called Choco wants to change that with its mobile ordering platform for restaurants and suppliers that essentially acts like a food delivery app for ingredients. The company announced this week it has closed a $33.5 million Series A round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The service is currently available in 15 cities across the U.S. and Europe, at chain restaurants and Michelin-star joints alike.

Little Caesars Takes its Pizza Portal to Canada
Little Caesars unveiled its Pizza Portal technology to Canadian customers this week. The heated, self-service pickup station, which has been in the U.S. for a little over one year now, lets users order a pie via the Little Caesars mobile app then skip the in-store line and simply scan a QR code to unlock their “portal” and grab their food. The Pizza Portal is now available in “nearly all” Little Caesars locations in Canada. Whether the chain will ever join the masses and start offering delivery remains unknown, but as Pizza Portal’s expansion suggests, delivery or no, Little Caesars isn’t sitting on its hands when it comes to improving and growing its digital strategy.

Waitr Partners With Checkers & Rally’s for Delivery
Louisiana-based delivery service Waitr announced a partnership this week with burger chain Checkers & Rally’s to deliver from over 200 of the latter’s locations in the U.S. The move looks to be part of an ongoing effort on Waitr’s part to team up with larger, higher-profile restaurant chains.