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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Coronavirus

Food-as-Medicine Doctor Embraces Telehealth To Run Practice During Coronavirus

In a given week, Harvard-trained physician Robert Graham normally sees about twenty patients at his New York based medical practice where he combines traditional medical approaches with the rapidly emerging area of food-as-medicine.

But that all changed this past week as his town of New York City came to grips with the reality of COVID-19 and the CDC advised everyone to practice stay at home as a way to slow the pandemic.

To deal with the new reality, Graham sprung into action and started to implement a telehealth system that would allow him to continue his patient visits in an era of social distancing. He began to use a platform called Clocktree, a telemedicine platform with Zoom-like video conferencing capabilities. He also started requesting his patients use wearables like the Apple Watch to allow him to access their heart rate.

Graham started utilizing this new approach this past weekend and so far, he’s making it work.

“I did seven visits this weekend and have transitioned all appointments to virtual calls,” said Graham. ” I have closed my office till April 1st and transitioned all patients to this platform.”

I asked Graham if all of his patients were on board with using telehealth and he told me most have agreed, but not all.

“So far, about 70% have agreed, 10% rather just jump on call, 20% want to wait and reschedule for an in person visit.”

Telehealth has certainly gotten lots of attention in recent days as a way to expand the reach of over-taxed front-line medical experts to diagnose and treat COVID-19 patients, but it’s clear it’s also becoming a valuable tool for also family practitioners and specialists like Graham to connect with patients during extraordinary times.

I asked Dr Graham if he’s had to make any significant changes to the way he provides care as he transitions, at least temporarily, to telehealth?

“Yes, I had to clean my house,” he joked.

Restaurant Workers Community Foundation Announces Relief Fund for Foodservice Employees

The Restaurant Workers Community Foundation, a nonprofit created by and for restaurant workers, has formed a COVID-19 Crisis Relief Fund specifically to help restaurant employees as more businesses decide or are mandated by cities and states to close their doors.

And the list of those closures is growing by the hour. Ohio, Illinois, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland are among the states that have officially banned restaurants from serving food in the dining room right now in an effort to stem the spread of coronavirus. Entire cities — NYC and Seattle among them — are mandating the same, while other places, such as Washington, D.C., are requiring restaurants to reduce occupancy and get rid of bar seating.

All of these moves are necessary to help flatten the curve of the coronavirus spread. The unfortunate side effect here is the financial strain it will impose on businesses and in particular the workers who rely on their shifts to make ends meet, in most cases do not get paid sick leave, and  live paycheck even in the best of times.

To that end, RWCF’s website left the following statement about the COVID-19 Relief Fund.

“Our fund will:

  • Immediately direct money to organizations leading on-the-ground efforts in the restaurant community. 
  • To bolster our impact investing budget to provide zero-interest loans to businesses to maintain payroll during closure or re-open once this crisis has passed.
  • To establish a relief fund for individual workers facing economic hardships or health crises as a direct result of COVID-19″

Individuals and companies can donate money, either as a one-time transaction or on an ongoing basis. 

Starbucks in Coronavirus-Stricken Washington State Removing Tables and Chairs in Move Towards Take & Go Format

Here in Washington state, we’ve already seen restaurants pivot to new business models to deal with the fall out of COVID-19. And now, some select Starbucks have started to remove tables and chairs for customers and transition to a take-and-go format.

You can see what this looks like at the Starbucks in my own small town of Edmonds on the outskirts of Seattle:

In addition to removing the tables and chairs (or, more accurately, pushing them all into a corner), this Starbucks location has also removed the creamer station and workers are offering to add these to customer orders. Napkins have also been removed.

While Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson had hinted earlier this week they might move towards pick-up only formats, this is the first time that I’ve seen or heard of it in action.

As I wrote yesterday, traffic to restaurants in Washington and other states has tanked by up to 50%. Judging by the relatively crowd in this normally crowded Starbucks, the dropoff has been similar.

Update: A few hours after this post, Starbucks announced that it was going to a nationwide “to-go” model for at least two weeks.

This One Graph Shows How Bad Things Are For Restaurants Because of Coronavirus

If pictures tell a story, the one below is not a pretty one for restaurants:

The chart, which I created using data from OpenTable, shows the percentage difference year over year on each day for diners from February 18th all the way through yesterday, March 13th. OpenTable has data available for each state (you can check your own state here), but for this chart I included those areas most impacted by Coronavirus as well as Florida, which seems to be emerging as a hotspot. I’ve also included the data for the total of the United States.

What does it show? That restaurant traffic went from what looked like decent growth in places like Washington state just a month ago to simply dropping off a cliff. Data for yesterday, March 13th, showed Washington state restaurant traffic was down by 53%. New York, also grappling with an outbreak, traffic was down 54%.

While traffic hadn’t dropped to the same extent in California or Florida, it’s trending that way, and the United States as a whole has seen traffic drop by 36%.

What’s struck me is the velocity of the decline. Last week total US traffic at restaurants was down 8% compared to the previous year. Just a week later, the drop was over four times that.

Looking beyond the US, the picture doesn’t get any better. Below is a chart showing how coronavirus is hitting countries like Mexico, Germany and Ireland.

Interestingly, Ireland’s restaurant industry saw the biggest overall drop this past week, with its restaurant traffic down by 54% as of yesterday, compared with just 13% a week prior.

COVID-19’s impact on the restaurant industry is expected to only get worse in coming days. We’ve seen some of the industry’s biggest and most successful names already grappling with this change and having to furlough or lay people off. Because of this, we’re looking to highlight some of those companies stepping up to help. If your company is offering resources or discounts to help restaurants impacted by coronavirus, drop us a line at tips@thespoon.tech.

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Restaurants and Partners Innovating to Survive During the Coronavirus

The COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent social distancing are affecting many folks, but one of the groups that’s been the hardest-hit is the hospitality industry, especially restaurants. So we at The Spoon are putting together a list of companies in or adjacent to the food and restaurant space who are offering ways to help foodservice establishments struggling during the coronavirus.

Please feel free to leave any additional companies in the comments section or email us at tips@thespoon.tech. We’ll be updating the list. Stay safe and healthy out there!

SOFTWARE HELPING RESTAURANTS

Photo: Foodetective

Switzerland: Foodetective

Plenty of restaurants are trying to focus more on takeaway and delivery, but third-party delivery services can charge high fees that cut into restaurants’ already razor-thin margins. Foodetective is trying to let restaurants keep more profits in their pockets by offering free takeaway and delivery platform for restaurants — in Switzerland. Swiss restaurants can go onto Foodetective’s website and set up a profile to sell their food online without having to pay commissions to delivery services.

Maybe (more) third-party delivery services here in the U.S. will take note.

Photo: Bbot

Nationwide: Bbot

Steve Simoni, founder of smart ordering software provider Bbot, told The Spoon that they would be providing discounted setups of their software to help restaurants better support delivery and pickup. Simoni said that they won’t charge the monthly fee for their software until June 1.

“We’re trying to make it cost effective and easy for them,” he wrote to us. However, participating restaurants will need to figure out their own delivery service to partner with to actually get the food to diners’ doorsteps.

Photo: Lavu

Nationwide: Lavu

Restaurant PoS system provider Lavu Inc. just released its Corona Virus Relief plan. According to a Linkedin post by Lavu’s CEO Saleem S. Khatri, the company is no longer charging software payments to restaurants that are shut down in response to the outbreak.

Lavu is also waiving fees for Menudrive, its online ordering platform, so restaurants focusing more on delivery don’t have to pay as much to third-party services.

Finally, Khatri wrote that Lavu has partnered with an undisclosed capital partner to help restaurants in dire straits gain access to short-term capital.

RESTAURANTS REINVENTING THEMSELVES

Seattle: Addo

Chef Eric Rivera is known for his wacky, creative theme nights at his Seattle restaurant addo. But in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, he has started diversifying addo’s offerings to cater to diners who might be cautious to dine out in a group setting.

Seattlites can order to-go meals from addo @ home, which includes three pre-prepped meals plus wine, for pick-up or delivery. Rivera has also created addo pantry, a source of dry goods, hot sauces, and more made in-house which people can pre-order for pickup or delivery (delivery comes with a flat fee). Pick-ups and deliveries for addo pantry start on 3/22.

If you’re looking for a way to pay it forward in these uncertain times, Rivera just launched addo for the people. Through the program you can purchase $9 bowls of take-and-heat food either for yourself or as donations to local charities. The bowls are currently available for pickup at addo and Rivera and his team are in the midst of partnering with charities to coordinate food drop off.

Photo: Canlis restaurant in Seattle

Seattle: Canlis

James Beard Award-winning fine dining restaurant Canlis is completely reinventing itself in the wake of the coronavirus. The restaurant will shut down its dining room starting on Monday, March 16 and will pivot the following day to offer three new dining options: takeout-only breakfast option The Bagel Shed, pickup lunch offering Drive On Thru, and a meal delivery service called Family Meal.

All new offerings will be based on the Canlis restaurant site in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle, and the delivery range for Family Meal will be roughly 7 miles away from the restaurant. “Fine dining is not what Seattle needs right now,” reads Canlis’ new website. “Instead, this is one idea for safely creating jobs for our employees while serving as much of our city as we can. We’ve got this, Seattle.”

CREATOR GOES TAKE OUT

San Francisco’s hamburger restaurant, which already has robots that make its food, has gone to take out and delivery only. The restaurant has also taken on what seems like sci-fi level measures, as the company told us via email:

Our engineers have worked around the clock to create a transfer chamber that protects the inside of the restaurant from outside air yet still allows us to transport completed meals, in their hermetically sealed bags, out to customers. The chamber uses a positive pressure system combined with a self-sanitizing conveyor.

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Do you know of other restaurants/online platforms/services that are helping foodservice establishments survive during the coronavirus outbreak? Comment below or send us a tip at tips@thespoontech!

Updated: Grubhub Defers Commission Fees From Independent Restaurants, Sets up Charity Fund

Update: According its terms and conditions, Grubhub’s “relief” program defers rather than waives restaurant fees. Restaurants that sign up for the program are required to pay back fees at the end of the relief period. While that has no solid date yet, Grubhub “anticipates that such date will be no later than March 29, 2020.” At that point, restaurants have four weeks to pay back those commissions. 

Grubhub announced this morning at a press conference in Chicago that it is setting up a charity fund and also temporarily suspending its collection of commission fees for qualified independent restaurants in the U.S. The initiative, which is a response to the COVID-19 pandemic now impacting daily life around the world, is in collaboration with mayors of large cities around the country, according to a press release emailed to The Spoon.

In the release, the delivery service noted that not collecting these commission fees will provide cash flow relief to independent restaurants, who along with bigger brands can expect to see as much as a 75 percent drop in sales because of the pandemic. More customers are choosing (or mandated) to stay home, which means significantly less foot traffic headed to restaurants. And some cities are putting restrictions on the restaurants themselves. In NYC businesses, for example, must reduce their capacity by 50 percent beginning today at 5 p.m. 

Bigger brands (think Chipotle, McDonald’s) have billion-plus-dollar digital businesses to fall back on in this scenario. For mom-and-pop restaurants as well as smaller chains, the slowdown due to coronavirus could be life-threatening to business.

More delivery orders would help, but as I wrote earlier today, third-party services like Grubhub and DoorDash collect per-transaction commission fees that can absolutely gut a business’s bottom line. Which is why it’s encouraging to see Grubhub stepping up and acknowledging the changes it needs to make during this time. Currently, the company is working with mayors of Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, Boston and Portland.

At the same press conference today, Grubhub also said it is setting up a fund that will let proceeds from its Donate for Change program go towards charities that support drivers and restaurants impacted by COVID-19. Through the program, customers can round up the change from each order and donate it. The service will match donations from its subscription service members.

Most of the major delivery services are now offering features like contactless delivery. Some, like Postmates, have set up their own funds to support workers affected by coronavirus. The hope is that others will follow with further measures to protect local businesses as well as the workers transporting our food.

Grocery Stores Get Scrubbing with Extreme Sanitizing Measures

My wife commented yesterday that in all our years of marriage, our fridge and pantries have never been this stocked. Dry goods, frozen foods and pasta sauces? Check, check and check.

But even with that (hopefully sufficient) amount of preparedness, there are still perishable food items that we go through pretty quickly. Milk, fruit, yogurt, etc. So we are still making trips to the local grocery store. On one such trip this week, we saw how our supermarket is going to new, extreme lengths to stay clean and reassure nervous shoppers that it’s okay to go in.

First, all the shopping carts are being sanitized. You can’t even bring the cart back into the store yourself. They stay outside, where employees then take them and give them a thorough wiping down before bringing them back into the store. The same wipe downs happen with the credit card machines after each use.

These same types of sanitation protocols are going at other retailers. We at The Spoon have seen it at our local Costco and PCC Market, and The Island Pacific Supermarket chain in California sent us a press release this morning announcing all of the new sanitation procedures it has put into place.

Like so many new behaviors this pandemic is creating, I wonder if these safety measures will just become the new norm. If you take two seconds to think about it, it’s kind of crazy that we all use the same checkout touchscreen without some kind of wipe down in between. The supermarket is the place sick people go to buy medicine! After this subsides, how many of us will carry around Clorox wipes in our pocket to give touchscreens or ATMs and shopping carts a quick once over?

There isn’t a lot of good to be found with this outbreak, but better hygiene procedures for the public places we frequent might just be one of them.

Week in Restaurants: How Restaurants Are Responding to Coronavirus

Restaurants large and small face a major sales slump due to declining foot traffic and mandates from city governments to reduce capacity in the dining room. Meanwhile, larger chains are under pressure to provide more paid sick leave to their workers, and based on the number of businesses now focusing on to-go and delivery formats, we’re about to see a massive surge in delivery orders. Here’s what the week in restaurants and restaurant tech looked like in the wake of a pandemic.

Starbucks Considers Switching to Delivery, Takeout Format

Starbucks already temporarily suspended its reusable cup program last week. Then yesterday, in a letter to customers, company CEO Kevin Johnson wrote that the chain is considering an off-premises-only model for some stores for the time being. That would mean customers could only order via the Starbucks mobile app, and all orders would have to be for pickup, delivery, or drive-thru. Johnson said closing entire stores outright would be a last resort, and that any changes made to store formats would be decided on a “community-by-community and store-by-store” basis.

NYC Restaurants Must Reduce Capacity

New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio said Thursday that New York City bars and restaurants must reduce capacity by 50 percent starting today at 5 p.m. Gatherings for 500 people or more have been completely banned. De Blasio said small businesses affected by this change have the option of no-interest loans to consider, and those who face eviction should check the city’s website for free legal assistance.

 

Restaurants Add Paid Sick Leave for Workers

Darden, the parent company of Olive Garden, Longhorn Steakhouse, and Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen launched a new sick leave policy this week where employees earn one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked. The new policy applies to about 180,000 restaurant workers across Darden’s portfolio. A Darden spokesperson mentioned that this is a permanent change that has actually been in the works for some time. “We did accelerate the rollout given the current environment,” he added.

McDonald’s announced paid sick leave for up to two weeks for employees that are asked to quarantine themselves due to coronavirus. The policy applies to corporate-owned stores only. Workers are currently demanding paid sick leave for all employees across both corporate and franchise locations.

Noodles & Company is also now offering emergency pay for quarantined workers at company-owned stores. The plan is similar to McDonald’s, where hourly workers who normally do not get paid sick time will receive paid time off if they are unable to work after being diagnosed with or quarantined because of COVID019. The company is said to be working on a longer-term paid sick leave policy for employees. 

Starbucks, in addition to its moves above, is also now offering catastrophe pay to workers who have been diagnosed with or exposed to COVID-19, as well as anyone who “comes into close prolonged contact with someone in their store or household” who has the virus, according to a letter from company president Rossann Williams. These groups are eligible for up to 14 days of catastrophe pay. Additional pay replacement “may be made up to 26 weeks” if an employee is still unable to return to work.

Hey, Delivery Companies: It’s Time to Make Social Distancing Profitable for Restaurants, Too

To delivery or not to delivery? That question, asked frequently nowadays, just got more complicated in the wake of the World Health Organizing (WHO) declaring COVID-19 a pandemic.

Food tech expert and Modernist Cuisine’s former technical director Scott Heimendinger left a tweet yesterday that not only highlighted the issue but also underscores how complex potential solutions are:

https://twitter.com/seattlefoodgeek/status/1238118335427923970?s=20

Restaurants operate on absurdly thin margins during the best of times. Overhead costs like labor, inventory, rent, equipment, card processing fees, and a litany of other deductions all eat away at these thin margins. Now businesses are seeing sales nosedive as more and more consumers opt to stay home instead of going out to eat. For example, in the Seattle area, where the first U.S. deaths from coronavirus occurred, some restaurant sales have dropped as much as 40 percent. As the number of cases throughout the country rises, there could be a ripple effect, particularly in crowded urban areas like NYC, Boston, San Francisco, and other cities.

You’d think delivery would be the answer to this problem of declining foot traffic. After all, you order delivery from Joe’s Pizza or wherever, and you manage to feed your family without leaving the house while putting money in the restaurant’s coffers, right?

Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. Third-party delivery services like DoorDash, Grubhub, and others are, to borrow, Heimendinger’s word, “notorious” for gutting restaurants with hefty commission fees which are sometimes as high as 30 percent of each transaction. However, most small and independent restaurants still use these services for delivery because they lack the resources to manage the entire delivery process (drivers, marketing, technical logistics) themselves. So more customers staying home because of COVID-19 could translate to more delivery orders, but that won’t necessarily improve restaurants’ bottom lines.

Third-party delivery services are also known for ethically questionable policies around how they treat the folks shuttling the food from the restaurant to the consumer, from sketchy tipping policies to fighting legislation that would reclassify these gig workers as employees and give them access to health benefits and paid sick leave. 

Heimendinger  addressed this in another tweet, asking followers, “Are you aware of any delivery services stepping up to change their fee structure to help restaurants retain more of their revenue during the #COVID19 crisis?”

And in fact, some of these services have made moves in that direction. All of the major services have or are readying contactless delivery features, which limit the human contact between drivers and customers. Uber, DoorDash, and Postmates have been in talks to set up a fund that would compensate drivers affected by COVID-19. Independently, Postmates has also launched two different funds: one to cover medical costs for drivers affected by COVID-19 and the other to temporarily waive commission fees for new merchant partners operating small restaurants.

There is no guarantee that any of these measures will be able to adequately protect workers. At the same time, I agree with Heimendinger that local restaurants need consumers’ support at a time when foot traffic will continue declining as social distancing becomes more widespread. 

I don’t believe there are any easy answers to this issue. If we double-down on delivery orders, we help pay workers’ wages, but we’re also only reinforcing an unsustainable business model that is decimating local restaurants. If we forgo delivery as well as dining in, we’re also helping decimate local restaurants.

The onus is on the delivery companies. DoorDash, Grubhub, and others need to be waiving or at least reducing restaurant commission fees right now. More of them need to help cover medical expenses for checkups and provide paid sick leave so that drivers who aren’t feeling well and potentially infected aren’t out making the rounds and possibly infecting restaurant workers and customers. At least some delivery fees for customers should be waived, as those premiums add up quickly and make restaurant meal delivery out of reach for lower-income families. Finally, delivery services need to accelerate the availability these changes now if they want to avoid playing the villain yet again.  

Dark Days, Resets and the Eventual Birth of Good Things

If you’re old enough to remember 9/11, you remember how crazy and upended everything felt in the days, weeks and years following that day.

There was the immediate shock of watching the planes hit the buildings – I still remember the sound of my wife’s voice when she called me into the room and pointed at the television – and then there was the long period of uneasiness in the following days of entering a time where there was no defined playbook.

It’s been a couple decades since and memories have faded, but I’ve never forgot how that moment in time not only altered things in a big societal way – politics, travel, international relations – but also how it set into motion lots of smaller changes in so many lives, changes that ultimately sprouted into new relationships, careers, and even new businesses.

One former coworker of mine quit his job as a technology analyst and went into the FBI to fight terrorism. Another woke up and realized he needed to get serious about his life and went on to start one of tech industry’s most well-known tech blogs. There are million other stories like this of lives inalterably changed across the country and around the world.

And while it’s too early to tell just how extensive the damage of the COVAD-19 coronavirus will be, it’s pretty obvious at this point that there will be many more deaths, economies will continue to slow and many jobs will be lost.

My suspicion is the impact will be big, on the scale of what we saw in 2001, and because of this we’re going to go through a reset that we’ll all have to grapple with. Resets can be bad in many ways – sickness, death and job losses are all very bad things – but I hope down the road we’ll also see some good.

We talked on this week’s podcast about the potential ways in which the coronavirus could accelerate change in the world of food, increasing adoption of fairly new technology and ways of doing things such as human-less check out, automated food dispensing and more.

But I think the bigger impact in the world of food and most other industries will be realized over a longer time horizon, in ways that only come with the way a reset makes us, societally and individually, rethink things in meaningful ways.

Forced to say home, cancel travel, and social distance? Difficult, no doubt, but such down time also means an opportunity to think about what it all means and to reassess. New business ideas, many of them taking into account our new mutual reality, will spring up and over the next year, two years, decade.

We still need to be realistic. There could be many dark days ahead. But, while many of us are going to have to grapple in the near term with potentially big disruptions to our lives, careers and businesses (I run an event business and I’m thinking about what this all means), I am still hopeful for what will be millions of inspiring stories of human resourcefulness and ingenuity that spring out of this globally shared experience in the coming years.

The Food Tech Show: How Coronavirus is Accelerating Certain Food Tech Sectors

It’s a scary and confusing time, so I hope getting together with some familiar food tech friends will give you a 30 or so minute respite from the madness.

One warning in advance though: we do talk a little coronavirus, but we do look at the possible bright side for some of those sectors in the food tech space where the outbreak could accelerate adoption.

Other stories we discuss in today’s pod include:

As always, you can find The Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your pods. You can also download it direct to your device or just click play below.

Audio Player

Postmates Launches Funds for Drivers and Restaurant Partners Affected by COVID-19

Postmates is launching two new programs this week meant to assist the delivery service’s drivers and restaurant partners impacted by COVID-19, according to an announcement from the company.

The company has set up the Postmates Relief Fund, which will cover the cost of medical check ups for its driers and couriers regardless of whether they have been diagnosed or quarantined. As of right now, drivers who have made at least one delivery in the last two weeks in any of the following states will be eligible for a credit from the fund: Wash., Ore., Calif., Nev., Utah, Colo., Ariz., Texas, Neb., Wis., Ill., Ind., Fla., Ga., Tenn., N.C., D.C., Penn., N.Y., Maine, Mass., and N.J.  

In the same announcement, Postmates also noted it is launching a pilot program that will temporarily waive commission fees for new merchant partners operating small restaurants. The idea behind the move is to give these smaller businesses a boost at a time when foot traffic to restaurants is down due to COVID-19. According to the announcement, “This Small Business Relief Pilot will waive all commission fees for businesses that are not currently delivering on the platform and operate in the City of San Francisco, but want to expand into on-demand delivery to help drive revenue as on-premise dining is impacted.”

Postmates has said it will “potentially” take this program to other cities in the U.S. as well.

Both of these efforts come just days after we learned Postmates as well as Uber, DoorDash, and other gig economy companies are in talks to see how they can band together to set up a potential fund to assist drivers/couriers infected by or quarantined with the COVID-19 virus. 

Some of these services, including Postmates, have also taken measures like implementing contactless delivery features to limit face-to-face human interactions. DoorDash joined that list this week, saying on Monday it is testing features for contactless delivery that will be launched soon. Uber, meanwhile, said it will compensate drivers — for both rideshare and Eats services — who can’t work for 14 days because of coronavirus diagnosis or quarantine.

With cases of COVID-19 on the rise in the U.S. and more employees now being mandated to work from home, we’re likely to see further demand for food delivery in the coming weeks. Stay tuned . . .