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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

corporate food

ezCater Lauches Relish to Reimagine Corporate Lunches

In case you hadn’t heard, the buffet as we know it is dead. That includes the catered office buffet. Now, as people head back to the office, companies need new ways to provide lunch that’s more sanitized, more socially distanced, and still quick and convenient for workers.

Online catering marketplace ezCater launched one such way this week. Relish, as the service is called, lets employees order from a selection of local restaurants then delivers all food directly to the office, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Using Relish, companies can choose which days of the week they want lunch catered to the office and set a budget for how much employees can spend. Relish then offers meal suggestions from local restaurants near the office. Employees can choose their food from the suggestions, and all meals arrive individually packaged to a central drop-off point in the office. 

Companies cover the delivery costs and can choose to subsidize some or all of the meals.

Like other areas of foodservice, office catering is undergoing a reinvention, thanks to the pandemic, and catering services are trying to become integral parts of companies’ return-to-work strategies. With more employees working from home for the foreseeable future, some brands, like Ox Verte and Slow Up, have created direct-to-consumer channels that deliver to employees home offices. Recently, too, Uber for Business launched its Vouchers program, which lets companies customize the types of meals they want to cater, whether it’s for a single employee working from home or a 1,000-person virtual event.

It’s too soon to tell which of the above strategies will prove most popular among corporate customers looking to subsidize employee lunches. Getting large numbers of people back to the office before there is a COVID-19 vaccine could prove challenging. The ability to pivot in this pandemic world is especially important for ezCater, which has raised roughly $320 million in funding. It’s tough to scale your corporate catering when corporations aren’t going into their offices.

On the flip side, once a vaccine is found and more people physically head back to work, the company could emerge as a leader thanks to its early start in redefining the concept of office lunches.  

Oh My Green Acquires Byte Foods Business from Byte Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Startups Aim To Bring Fresher Choices To The Office Vending Machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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