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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Covid-19

Impossible Foods Raises $500 Million Series F to Weather Global Volatility

Impossible Foods, makers of the eponymous plant-based meat, raised a $500 million round of funding late last week, Forbes first reported early this morning. Impossible added on Linkedin that it was a Series F round, and Reuters reports this brings the total amount raised by the company to $1.3 billion.

The round was led by South Korean firm Mirae Asset Global Investments, with participation from existing investors Khosla, Horizons Ventures, and Temasek.

Impossible’s fundraise comes amidst a global pandemic that has caused disruptions to daily lives around the world. Impossible Foods’ CFO David Lee wouldn’t comment on whether flexitarians are stockpiling Impossible meat, but he did say:

“With what’s happening in the world, it’s important to reassure our customers that we are built to withstand short-term shocks,” Lee said. “We’re able to stand tall. We have the ability with long-term investors.”

Just a couple months ago (though it feels like a lifetime), Impossible debuted its plant-based pork at CES in January and launched a plant-based Impossible Sausage Croissan’wich with Burger King.

Fast forward to now and the spread of COVID-19 alters our reality on an ongoing basis. With markets tumbling and a potential recession on the horizon (or already here), raising a sizeable round of funding makes a lot of sense for Impossible. Plant-based meat rival Beyond Meat went public last year, and plans to open up a new production facility in Asia by the end of this year.

Even with enough funding, this pandemic could impact Impossible in other ways. As my colleague, Catherine Lamb wrote last week:

Supply chains are another thing that could well be affected by COVID-19. Import restrictions in China have dramatically slowed down the country’s exports of meat and poultry. Alternative protein companies who import their plant-based ingredients from other countries, especially China, could also face production slowdowns as trade slows.

With fresh capital and a bulked up war chest, Impossible navigating this crisis is way more, well, possible.

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.

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 . . . 

Inspired Home Show Canceled Due to Coronavirus

Another trade show has gone down due to the coronavirus.

Last month we learned the Inspired Home Show (previously known as the Housewares Show) had cancelled the portion of its annual trade show that featured OEM parts from manufacturers in China. Today we learned they’ve called the whole thing off.

From the announcement issued today by the International Housewares Association:

“After careful consideration regarding the ongoing spread of Covid-19 (Coronavirus) overseas and recent cases in the United States, the International Housewares Association’s Board of Directors has decided not to hold The Inspired Home Show 2020, scheduled to take place March 14-17, 2020 at McCormick Place in Chicago.”

It’s an extraordinary move to cancel a trade show less than two weeks before it opens, but it’s an illustration of how fluid and fast-moving the situation is around the coronavirus.

Just a few weeks ago we learned that Mobile World Congress was cancelled in its entirety, and while another big show, the Natural Products Expo West in Los Angeles, is expected to open this week, there’s been a huge number of exhibitor cancellations in recent weeks and some forecast the show’s attendance could be down by as much as 60%.

If it wasn’t already obvious that COVID-19 was drastically changing the 2020 outlook for nearly every industry (including housewares and kitchen appliances), the cancellation of the North America’s biggest small home electronics trade show should drive the point home.

We’ll have more on the implications of this cancellation in coming weeks.