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cryptocurrency

March 11, 2022

Slim Jim is creating a “Meata-verse” and a marketplace for virtual food

Last year, the meme-based cryptocurrency dogecoin got its first public earnings callout from the company that owns meat stick brand Slim Jim. Conagra Brands CEO Sean Connolly pointed to the social engagement from active dogecoin and Shiba Inu meme coin communities as big factors in Slim Jim’s win in the Adweek March Madness-style brand competition.

And now, it seems the company’s interest in Web3 technology goes beyond the gimmicky marketing campaign. Coindesk reported yesterday that Slim Jim had recently filed for trademarks under “Slim Jim,” “Meataverse,” and “Long Boi Gang” that announce plans for a virtual marketplace comprised of NFTs, virtual food products and virtual goods.

The filings also discuss “providing a metaverse for people to browse, accumulate, buy and sell virtual food products” and seem to indicate that the meat snack food brand will try and take a leading role in leveraging virtual environments to extend its reach and engage the next generation of consumers in immersive experiences.

Slim Jim joins other food brands like Nestle and McDonalds with forays into combining food and Web3 technology as consumer interest in crypto and NFTs continues to rise.

To understand what the food metaverse might look like and why food brands across industries including restaurant, grocery, and CPG are planting their flags in Web3, join The Spoon community on May 4 for Simulate Spring Summit: Food Metaverse + Web3 virtual event. Early bird tickets start at $75 – register here.

December 5, 2021

Spoon Weekly: Starbucks Animal-Free Milk Review, Bitcoin Restaurants, Alt-Meat Sales Drop

It may be almost holiday time, but the food tech news keeps on coming. Plant-based meat slowdown, Starbucks animal-free milk trials, Bitcoin restaurants. Read all about it.

If you haven’t already subscribed to our newsletter, do so here to get the Spoon Weekly delivered to your inbox.

Will Jack Dorsey’s Block Usher In The Bitcoin Restaurant Era?

Here’s what we know: On Monday, Jack Dorsey announced he’s stepping down immediately from the top job at Twitter. On Wednesday, his payments company Square said it would change its name to Block and would, among other things, double down on cryptocurrency, blockchain, and building a decentralized payment system. I haven’t checked the news today, but I’m guessing he may have announced he’s creating a robot society or has plans for a teleportation system.

What does it all mean (besides the robots and teleportation)? For one, Jack Dorsey has had a busy week. But it also means the same guy who helped usher in real-time social media and democratize digital payments for small businesses may now be the one who helps make it easier for average Joe to buy everyday things with cryptocurrency.

Because right now, it isn’t easy. Crypto isn’t nearly as liquid as other conventional payment methods such as cash or credit. Sure, you can trade crypto without any problem – anyone with a Coinbase or Robinhood account knows that – but good luck paying for a bottle of mouthwash or buying a Big Mac with that wad of Dogecoin burning a hole in your crypto wallet.

So what can Dorsey do about it? Simple: with Square Block, he has all the different parts to make a payment value chain for crypto that will take it from what is mainly a highly volatile investment vehicle today to a street-spendable retail currency of tomorrow.

Click here to read the full post about Jack Dorsey’s Bitcoin bets.

The Spoon & CES Bring Food Tech To The World’s Biggest Tech Show

Did you know food tech will be a featured theme for the first time ever at the world’s biggest tech show in January and The Spoon is CES’s exclusive partner to help make it happen? 

There’s still time to grab a booth! If you want to sponsor the event, let us know. See you in Vegas!

Starbucks is Trialing Animal-Free Milk. I Decided to Try it Out to See If It Tastes & Foams Like Regular Milk

In case you haven’t heard, Starbucks is trialing animal-free milk in the Seattle market. No, we’re not talking Oatly or another plant-based milk, but a milk with cow milk-identical proteins made in a lab.

The alt-milk is from Perfect Day, a company that uses precision fermentation to create its proprietary β-lactoglobulin animal-identical milk protein. The company’s protein, which received GRAS approval from the FDA last year, has primarily been sold to consumers in the form of ice cream (and soon cream cheese), but not in the form of a milk product. However, this move could signify that one could be on the way.

The company created a special 2% “barista-blend” version of its alt-milk especially for the Starbucks trial. Starbucks is currently trialing the milk at two locations in the Seattle market, Bellevue (a city east of Seattle) and Renton (south of Seattle).

Since I live in Seattle, I decided to head on over to Bellevue and see how precision-fermented milk tasted in a cup of Starbucks coffee.

Click here to see how Perfect Day’s animal-free milk foamed and tasted.

Zippin Checks In at JFK With Autonomous Checkout Technology

In a hurry but still hoping to grab a snack before you jump on your flight? If you’re at JFK in New York City, you might be in luck, at least if you’re passing Gate B 42. Because that’s where the airport just teamed up with Zippin, a maker of AI-powered cashierless checkout technology, and SSP America, an airport foodservice operator, to launch a new grab-and-go convenience concept called Camden Food Express.

According to the release sent to The Spoon, here’s how it works: Customers enter the store through a turnstile tapping their credit card as they enter and begin shopping by picking items off shelves. As they do, Zippin’s AI system automatically identifies the items and builds the customer’s virtual cart with the corresponding monetary value. When the customer leaves the store, the total amount spent is automatically charged to the card the customer used to check-in at the store entrance.

For Zippin, its partnership with JFK and SSP is a nice feather in the cap for a company with a portfolio of deployments, including hotels, stadiums, and grocery stores. Zippin’s move into airports follows other cashierless tech platforms like Amazon’s Just Walk Out, which showed up in Dallas airport earlier this year.

Click here to read the full story about Zippin’s deployment at JFK.

What The Heck is Causing The Plant-Based Meat Slowdown?

No two ways about it: Plant-based meat has hit a sales slump.

According to recent data from market watcher SPINS, sales in the overall plant-based meat market dropped 1.8% year over year for the four-week period ending October 3rd. This follows an even bigger drop in the category earlier in 2021 starting around April, when the plant-based category dropped over 15% year over year.

The drop in overall plant-based meat sales jibes with what some industry bellwethers are seeing. According to Michael McCain, the CEO of Maple Leaf Foods, his plant-based meat sales dropped in every channel the company sells into in the third quarter of this year. McCain was perplexed as to the reason and said the company is reevaluating their “investment thesis”.

Maple Leaf wasn’t the only one. Beyond, where company CEO Ethan Brown came out and said the plant-based meat company had seen its sales drop 13.9% year over year and forecast a potentially bumpy road ahead.

So what’s going on here? Fast-growing nascent markets are supposed to go up, not down and down some more.

While there’s no way to know for certain without more data. it’s worth taking a stab at potential causes for the drop in plant-based meat. 

You can read why plant-based meat sales are suddenly sluggish here.

The Media Was Fascinated with a TikTok Video of a Robot at Denny’s. Here’s What it Means.

Maybe it was a slow news week. Perhaps it was the sight of pancakes hitching a ride on a robot at America’s late-night diner. Whatever the reason, it seemed like every news organization wrote the same story about a TikTok video of server-robot showing up to dish out breakfast at a Denny’s.

They all had a variant of the same headline: “Viral Video of Robot at Denny’s Sparks Debate.” From there, the authors sifted through comments made by TikTok viewers, some cheering the idea of faster service and lower tips, others angry about a robot stealing a job.

While the sudden interest in a social media post about a server robot may say as much about the modern media landscape as it does about the use of robotics at restaurants, the reality is Denny’s deploying robots is kind of a big deal. After all, as America’s most famous 24-hour diner, Denny’s holds a special place in our collective consciousness, a place where almost anyone can get a cheap meal as well as apply for – and often get – a job.

And it’s these two things that Denny’s represents – a place with affordable food and an employer of everyday Americans – that seemed to be in tension with one another when looking at both the comments on the video on TikTok as well as the framing by the media.

To read the full story about Denny’s server robot, click here.

Hazel Technologies Announces New California Hub To Expand Produce Conserving Technology

Starting in the mid-twentieth century, the advent of new fertilizer production technologies allowed the world to grow crops at a new scale. While that so-called Green Revolution helped producers to feed more people than ever, it also created a focus on crop production rather than systems efficiency. And that imbalanced focus has led to a worldwide agricultural system that wastes about a third of the food it produces, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

During a stint as a chemistry fellow at the Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern University, Dr. Aidan Mouat wondered what could happen if we used chemistry to create a new revolution — one that targeted the food supply chain. That idea led to the 2015 launch of Hazel Technologies, a Chicago-based company that manufactures high-tech produce packaging and storage solutions to extend shelf life.

Read the full story about Hazel’s new hub, head over to The Spoon.  

October 25, 2021

Dinner DAO is Creating IRL Dinner Clubs Built Around NFTs

After eating at home for much of the past 18 months, most of us are itching to get out into the real world and have dinner with interesting people. If this is you, may I suggest a new way to break bread: An NFT dinner club.

That’s the idea behind Dinner DAO, a new community creating IRL (in real life) dinner clubs using non-fungible tokens.

Here’s how it works: Prospective diners become members of a club – or Dinner DAO (DAO stands for ‘decentralized autonomous organization’) – by buying a Dinner DAO NFT. The cryptocurrency raised during the sale of the NFT is pooled in a shared treasury and used to purchase meals whenever the club gets together throughout the year.

Like many NFTs, Dinner DAO uses Ethereum because of the cryptocurrency’s built-in smart contract functionality. Dinner DAO NFTs are minted using a platform called Unlock, which creates the locks and keys for NFT membership. Membership can take the form of a season pass or even one-off dinner tickets.

Dinner DAOs are location-based, meaning members join together for dinner in a specific city. Members discuss potential restaurants using the Dinner DAO Discord, which acts as the central gathering spot for the community. From there, they vote on where to eat using Snapshot.org, a decentralized voting site popular with the crypto crowd.

The Dinner DAO concept is the brainchild of artist and designer Austin Robey. Robey, who lives in Brooklyn, created the first Dinner DAO NFT for New York City, and the first meal was at a restaurant in Little Italy called Shoo Shoo Nolita. I asked Robey how his club paid for the meal since memberships are purchased in virtual currency and most restaurants want dollars or another government-backed currency. He told me that one of the members of the club had a Coinbase debit card (Coinbase is a company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange, and where many users keep cryptocurrency balances stored in the Coinbase wallet). The group transferred Ether from the pooled treasury to the member’s debit card and Coinbase converted it to US dollars when the bill was paid at the restaurant.

“I think it feels like it would defeat the purpose if everyone’s paying with a Bank of America credit cards,” said Robey.

If this all sounds like a lot of work, it is, at least for those not well-versed in cryptocurrency and NFTs. But for crypto converts, creating a Facebook group and paying for things with a regular credit card goes against the organizing principle of the virtual currency and NFT movement: decentralization. Robey and other Dinner DAO members are ok with taking more time to create a crypto-based dinner club because, in doing so, they are pioneering a new way to meet for a meal without having to rely on big technology companies or banks. In other words, they are getting together in real life by putting their dinner club on the blockchain.

“I have just have been interested in collective ownership within tech and collective governance within tech,” said Robey. “Which is part of the reason why I’ve been excited about digging into things that Unlock can do in the web three in crypto space to enable these new forms of human and corporate organization.”

Those who want to organize a new Dinner DAOs can do so by joining the Dinner DAO Discord and creating a proposal for a new city. Users vote on potential cities and, once awarded, the new Dinner DAO chapter lead will mint an NFT and put it on an exchange such as Opensea. Chapter leads are only allowed to invite two in-real-life friends and the rest must be new acquaintances. Once the eight seats are sold (each Dinner DAO club has a total of eight members), chapter members vote on a location and, finally, get together and eat a meal.

The newest Dinner DAO chapter is in Portland. The city lead is web anthropologist Amber Case, who was attracted to the idea of Dinner DAO because she felt the old-world way of splitting a check was such a pain. In her application for the Portland chapter, Case wrote she had at one point tried to create a dinner club, but “when we looked at the fundraising aspects of it, it quickly became annoying. My former co-founder and I even tried to make a startup to make it easier to split the check! We put that idea on ice while we waited for something better to emerge.”

Almost a decade later, Case has found her something better in Dinner DAO. If you’d like to look into creating a Dinner DAO, you can check out the group’s website.

May 3, 2021

Should Food Tech Cos Fuel Bitcoin Adoption?

For those following the cryptocurrency markets, this weekend saw a big milestone as Ethereum passed the $3,000 mark. That still pales in comparison to Bitcoin’s price tag of nearly $58,000 per coin (at the time of this writing), but it reinforces that there is growing interest in digital currencies among the general public.

As such, I thought it was worth re-surfacing a small bit my colleague, Jenn Marston wrote about Bitcoin in her most recent restaurant tech newsletter over the weekend:

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.

Cryptocurrencies actually have a long history with food. Pizza, of all things, was one of the first things “purchased” with Bitcoin. In 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz traded 10,000 Bitcoins with someone in exchange for them ordering him Papa Johns.

We’ve seen crypto gain acceptance in fits and starts since then. Other restaurant chains have dabbled in accepting Bitcoin, though these are more one-offs in various regions: Burger Kings and Pizza Huts in Venezuela, KFC Canada (for a limited time), some Subway stores, for example. Ramen vending machine, Yo-Kai Express accepted Bitcoin at one point.

But we’re starting to see more acceptance of crypto from big, established companies. Whole Foods started accepting cryptocurrency back in 2019. In April of this year, you could start buying Starbucks with Bitcoin through the Bakkt digital wallet. Chipotle used Bitcoin as the backbone of a promotional stunt. Landry’s jumping into crypto is another big company pushing acceptance of Bitcoin forward.

This is not a financial blog, so this post should not be construed as advice. But as more retail investors start buying crypto, and well established companies like PayPal and Tesla begin to adopt Bitcoin, is there a bigger opportunity for food tech?

At first, adopting cryptocurrencies might seem like a natural fit for many of the companies we cover. Restaurants, grocery retailers, vending machine companies are all looking to streamline and automate much of their operations. Adding a universal digital currency available anywhere in the world could, in theory, could remove some friction from the transaction process, and generate more sales.

But there are definite pitfalls to adopting a cryptocurrency. The whole process is still very complex. Not only are there are ton of cryptocurrencies with various utilities and values (and there are some shady players out there), just the act of buying and spending cryptocurrency is still complicated for the average consumer. Cryptocurrencies are also still volatile. Yes, the overall trend for Bitcoin over the past year has been a hockey stick, but it still has wild valuation swings, so the money you take in today could be worth a lot less an hour later. And then there are tax and regulatory issues around crypto currencies that haven’t been fully figured out yet.

We appear to be at some kind of public perception inflection point for cryptocurrencies. While this bull run could be interrupted with a severe downturn, there are more people than ever learning about, buying and spending Bitcoin. That’s an opportunity for sure, but one with no small amount of risk.

April 3, 2021

Food Tech News: Google AI Cake, Chipotle’s Bitcoin Giveaway and Robot Food Delivery

Welcome to the first Food Tech News round-up of April! This week we have news on a cake created by Google artificial intelligence, Kiwibot hitting the streets of Santa Monica, Ember’s new travel charger, and Chipotle’s bitcoin giveaway.

Google artificial intelligence created a cake recipe in partnership with Mars Wrigley

Google Cloud engineers created a machine learning model that uses hundreds of existing baked good recipes to develop a completely new recipe. The result was a “Cakie” (a cake and cookie hybrid) and the components of what makes a cake and cookie were generated with artificial intelligence. For the partnership with Mars Wrigley UK, Maltesers (chocolate-covered malt balls) were incorporated into the recipe to create the first-ever “Maltesers AI Cake.” Google trends revealed that “sweet and salty” was a top search trend, and the cake recipe used a buttercream frosting infused with Marmite. Earlier this year, the same machine learning model was used to create two totally new baked good recipes, the “Cakie” and “Breakie”.

Kiwibot and MealMe partner for food delivery in Santa Monica

MealMe, an app that compares prices and times of food delivery services, and Kiwibot, a teleoperated robot service that delivers food, have partnered to deliver food in Santa Monica. On April 1st, the companies began delivery for Blue Plate Taco and Red O Restaurant on Ocean Ave. Kiwibot’s robots provide contactless food delivery, and so far 100k deliveries have been completed in Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Jose, Denver, Taipei, and Medellin,

Ember launches car charger to keep beverages warm on the road

Ember, the creator of the self-heating coffee mug, has created a car charger to keep Ember Travel Mugs warm all day. The Ember Travel Mug is capable of keeping a beverage warm for three hours, but now it can be plugged directly into a car charger for an all-day charge. The car charger costs $49.95 on Ember’s website.

Photo from Chipotle

Chipotle hosted a giveaway of free burritos and bitcoin

For National Burrito Day, Chipotle partnered with the founder of Coil, Stefan Thomas, to giveaway $100,000 worth of Bitcoin and $100,000 in burritos. To win, contestants had 10 chances to guess a six-digit code. The giveaway only lasted for nine hours on April 1st on BurritosOrBitcoin.com. Update: I tried, and did not win.

March 16, 2021

The Creators Behind Rare Pizzas Want to Use Pizza Art NFTs to Fund a Global Real-World Pizza Party

If there was ever a way to mix the white-hot concept of NFT (non-fungible tokens) with food — outside of opportunistic taco chain promotions that is — making and selling unique digital pieces of pizza art as a way to raise money for real-world pizza purchases is a logical place to start.

And that’s exactly what a collective of creators behind the Rare Pizzas NFT project plan to do.

The collective, which details their plans via a “Pizza Manifesto” in a publicly available “Cheesepaper,” plans to use artwork from 300 or so digital “toppings” artists to “algorithmically” create digital pizza NFTs. These unique pieces of digital art will then be sold via NFT marketplaces such as Opensea and Rarible.

Using the funds from the pizza art NFTs and community donations, Rare Pizzas plans to give away up to 10,000 pizzas on May 22, which is national Bitcoin Pizza Day.

What’s Bitcoin Pizza Day? It’s the annual anniversary of the first recorded commercial transaction using bitcoin, when computer programmer Laszlo Hanyecz bought two Papa John’s pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. And now every year on the anniversary of that sale, the community celebrates this now very expensive pizza transaction and publications like Business Insider writes stories about how much ₿10 million is worth in today’s dollars (which is a lot).

The first NFTs of pizza art have already started to drop (on Pi day, of course), so if you want to get in on the NFT-pizza party early, you can load up your Blockchain wallet and head over and start shopping.

If you’re a pizza shop or restaurant and want to get in on the action, you can sign up here. Better hurry: the first 314 participating shops will get a Rare Pizza NFT.

March 8, 2019

Hold Your Bitcoins. Starbucks Isn’t Taking Crypto for Coffee Just Yet

Last summer, Starbucks announced an investment in a company called Bakkt, an open-source platform that enables the buying, selling, and spending of cryptocurrencies. That was pretty much the extent of the news — until now. This week, crypto publication The Block reported that Starbucks had secured “a sizable equity cut” in Bakkt and will be “heavily involved in developing the card and app that will allow it to serve as Bakkt’s first merchant-on-platform.” (Starbucks has no cash investment in Bakkt, and specific financials of the deal were not disclosed.)

But hang on to your Bitcoins, folks: the news doesn’t mean Starbucks will start directly taking crypto for lattes. Bakkt’s software is built to act as the middleman between merchant and cryptocurrency, which means Starbucks customers would have to download Bakkt’s software and use their digital currencies through that. Starbucks, in turn, would swap the cryptocurrency it receives for fiat, or currency the government deems legal but is not backed by a physical commodity. So crypto enthusiasts’ dreams of unseating capitalism will not be realized with this deal.

Taking the point of view of Starbucks, though, working with an intermediary makes sense. Cryptocurrency is a bearish market right now, with Bitcoin dropping 80 percent since its buying spree started in 2017. As we wrote last August, “the reality is that Bitcoin and others remain highly volatile in terms of price, which is one of the biggest reasons more retailers haven’t adopted them as forms of payment.” There are also numerous regulatory and financial risks involved with crypto, so not directly accepting it is simply safer. There is also the question of whether something like Bitcoin could even handle a percentage of the volume of Starbucks’ transactions in real time.

Still, it does put the coffee retailer at the forefront of a trend that, despite a bearish market, is going to generate more not less action in the coming years. As Starbucks told the Hard Fork: “We anticipate that a range of cryptocurrencies will gain traction with customers and, through our work with Bakkt, we will be uniquely positioned to constantly consider and offer customers new and unique ways to pay seamlessly, at Starbucks. As we continue to move forward with this work, we anticipate we’ll have more to share in the coming months.”

A handful of retailers out there currently take crypto. Overstock.com is basically a crypto company now. Shopify stores accepts it, as do NewEgg and Microsoft. The latter makes sense, as Microsoft powers the cloud infrastructure behind Bakkt.

We’re still a long ways off from digital currencies being part of the daily routine at the coffee shop, grocery store, or drive-thru. Starbucks’ involvement in the space is significant, but we’ll have to wait for more developments before we can legitmately get excited about the possibilities of crypto for lattes.

August 3, 2018

Can Bitcoin, Bakeries, and Banning Straws Fix Starbucks’ Lagging Growth?

Starbucks may have projected slower growth recently, but it looks to be business as usual for the coffee retailer, and that business traversed several industries and a couple continents this week.

Most notably, Starbucks is reportedly one of the key backers of a new company, Bakkt, which the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) created to better integrate cryptocurrencies into global commerce. In other words, there’s a high possibility Starbucks might accept Bitcoin as payment one of these days.

But as my hero John Oliver says, “this is a brand new, very complicated space and literally nobody knows how it’s going to develop so you need to be careful.” And while there’s much ado about crypto lately, the reality is that Bitcoin and others remain highly volatile in terms of price, which is one of the biggest reasons more retailers haven’t adopted them as forms of payment.

That could change, partly because Microsoft is providing the cloud infrastructure for Bakkt and companies like consulting heavyweight BCG are involved. There’s also this telling statement from Starbucks: “As the flagship retailer, Starbucks will play a pivotal role in developing practical, trusted and regulated applications for consumers to convert their digital assets into US dollars for use at Starbucks.”

Starbucks has been an undisputed leader in mobile payments over the years, so its involvement in the space isn’t that surprising, and it could make cryptocurrency more attractive to investors and therefore less volatile. The question is, will it be enough to turn hype into a mainstream form of payment?

Interestingly, in some overseas markets, Starbucks has been criticized of acting too slow when it comes to technological advancements. That’s a big reason for the company’s move this week to strike a partnership with Alibaba and integrate delivery services into its business in China. Starbucks will use the Alibaba-owned food-delivery service Ele.me to enable delivery at 2,000 stores by the end of the 2018. The deal includes a virtual store that integrates with Alibaba’s apps like Alipay and Hema.

Starbucks currently has 3,400 stores in China, with plans to double that number by 2022. But it’s also facing a lot of competition in this market, particularly from Luckin Coffee, who charges less and also just raised $200 million. That said, Starbucks still controls about 80 percent of the coffee market in China, and the company claims this deal with Alibaba “opens up 500 million or more active users of those apps that will have access to Starbucks.”

Stateside, the coffee giant has a slightly different tactic: standalone bakeries. This week, Starbucks opened the first of a planned 1,000 Princi bakeries, a “high-end Italian bakery chain.” The shop serves a mix of pizzas, pastries, beer, wine, and, of course, coffee.

Starbucks backed Italian bakery chain Princi in 2016; the Seattle store is the test location for this “upscale retail strategy.” Because apparently paying almost $5 for a latte is no longer considered upscale. Starbucks opened a Princi at its Reserve Rotary and Tasting Room last fall, as well as one at the Flagship Reserve store at the Starbucks HQ. This new location is the first standalone store. NYC and Chicago locations are in the works.

Starbucks is also one of the major chains joining the movement to ban single-use plastic straws, having recently announced it will eliminate them from all stores by 2020. But with all of the above expansion, not to mention Starbucks’ general reach, which is huge, will trading straws for sip-able lids make a difference?

That’s what several folks are wondering. The Guardian even weighed the new lids against the old lid-and-straw combo and found the former to be slightly heavier, therefore using more plastic. Starbucks’ notes these new lids are “made from polypropylene, a commonly-accepted recyclable plastic that can be captured in recycling infrastructure,” but that only matters if people actually recycle the lids. The numbers aren’t encouraging — only around 9 percent of the world’s plastic is recycled. Color me cynical, but since Starbucks partially helped create the disposable coffee world we live in, I’d say the company’s going to need a bigger fix if they want to make a true impact in terms of waste reduction. Hopefully they’ll continue to prioritize addressing waste issues, even as they push to pick up those lagging numbers.

We’ll have a chance to ask more at the next Smart Kitchen Summit, when we talk to Ben Pote, Starbucks’ Director of Culinary, Global Product Innovation. Swing by if you’re in the area, and leave your thoughts, musings, and rants on all this news in the comments below.

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