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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

dessert

Yo-Kai Express Adding Boba Dessert to its Machine and Meal Kit

Pretty soon, you’ll be able to get more than just ramen from Yo-Kai Express vending machines and meal kits. Yo-Kai Founder and CEO, Andy Lin, shared on Linkedin today that his company will be adding a frosty dessert to its menus.

The Yo-Kai “signature snow ice,” Lin wrote, consists of “Himalayan salt whip cream with brown sugar boba black milk tea.” No specific timeframe was mentioned but Lin said the dessert would be available in Yo-Kai machines and home meal kits “soon.”

We reached out to Lin to fill in some details and will update the post when those arrive. Overall, this marks another bit of expansion for the vending machine startup.

When we first started covering Yo-Kai, its automated vending machines served hot ramen to customers in high-traffic areas like malls, airports and corporate campuses. But as the pandemic hit the U.S., those locations saw fewer and fewer people.

So, if people can’t come to you, you may as well go directly to them. In April of this year, Yo-Kai started selling ramen meal kits that ship directly to consumers’ doors (if you live on the West Coast).

Like the meal kits, the addition of a cool dessert isn’t too much of a surprise either. Once made, Yo-Kai’s bowls of ramen are frozen and stored that way inside the vending machine before being reheated. A similar, pre-made frosty snow ice dessert in a bowl seems like a pretty easy thing for the Yo-Kai machine to dispense as well.

It should also be noted that according to the Yo-Kai website, two of its machines are installed at Milk Tea labs in San Francisco and San Jose. So offering a boba/black milk tea doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch.

As I’ve written before, I’m all-in on vending machines (and wrote an extensive report on them for Spoon Plus Subscribers), in part because of their ability to offer really good food, from a very compact space around the clock. While I haven’t had the chance to test out Yo-Kai’s snow ice dessert, given how much I liked their ramen meal kit, it’s hard to imagine them making their first foray into desserts a bad one.

Reis & Irvy’s FroYo Robot Kiosk Hopes to Bring in Cool Profit for Grocery Stores

We’ve seen robots in grocery stores before restocking shelves and packing products — but now, robots will be used for perhaps their most important task yet: dispensing frozen yogurt.

Billed as “the world’s first robotic frozen yogurt vending kiosk,” Reis & Irvy launched in 2016 as a subsidiary franchise concept of Generation NEXT Franchise Brands. Starting this spring, they will finally begin deploying their frozen yogurt vending robots to select grocery retailers in 17 U.S. states. Their brightly-colored machines dispense froyo (or gelato, ice cream, or sorbet) within 60 seconds. Customers can choose between 7 flavors and add up to 6 toppings.

Compared to your average strip-mall frozen yogurt store, the Reis & Irvy robot has a pretty limited selection. You can’t spend 10 minutes sampling every one of the sometimes dozens of flavors available, nor can you customize your amounts of froyo or pile on the toppings. But the robotic machines do offer a few things that traditional froyo stores don’t. First of all, there’s none of the guessing or price shock that goes into paying for your yogurt creation, which is often weight-based. With Reis & Irvy’s machines, all you have to do is choose your size, flavor, and toppings, and a robotic arm will dispense it exactly —no surprisingly high price thanks to all those gummy bears you added on.

The main selling point of the froyo robots, however, is convenience. Reis & Irvy froyo vending operations will be franchised to retail areas which already get a lot of food traffic, like grocery stores. Which won’t be too hard to do, since their machines only take up 15 square feet of space.

By installing their froyo robots in retail stores, parent company Generation Next Franchise Brand is hoping to drive impulse snack purchases. So instead of grabbing a guilty pleasure packet of Skittles from the tempting display as you’re in line to check out, you might decide to get a froyo on your way out of the store. After all, it only takes 60 seconds.

Reis & Irvy is also hoping to piggyback off of froyo’s recent popularity. The frozen yogurt market is projected to grow at 20% CAGR; a rise which is driven in large part by the well-publicized health benefits of probiotics. Of course, if you top your low-fat frozen yogurt with mountains of M&M’s, it won’t be much of a step up from a processed packet of junk candy. But consumers perceive froyo as a healthy snack, and by making it convenient and quick, Reis & Irvy hopes to draw in people who wouldn’t go out of their way to stop at a frozen yogurt store.

The machines are an easy way for grocery stores and to add new revenue stream which can be operated 24/7, without the overhead and expenses that come with stand-alone stores. We’ve seen similar food automation in coffee shops with Cafe-X and fast food with Eatsa, but Reis & Irvy ups the ante by integrating it into pre-established retail spaces. By doing this, they hope to offer customers an extra perk which can help keep them shopping longer encourage store loyalty. With the looming threat of Amazon and other grocery ecommerce companies, brick-and-mortar supermarkets need all the appeal they can muster.

As part of the initial rollout, the company anticipates shipping approximately 185 units in May and 250 units in June. Their machines will feature frozen yogurt “consumables” exclusively from Dannon, and will take card, cash, Apple pay, Google wallet, and even some forms of cryptocurrency. Just in case you wanted to pay for your vanilla-chocolate swirl in Bitcoin.

I’m not sure if Reis & Irvy’s robot will necessarily disrupt the froyo industry, since people will probably still hit up stand-alone frozen yogurt stores to take advantage of their variety and DIY appeal. However, I do think they have a chance to disrupt online grocery delivery services like Instacart. Or at least give supermarkets a little firepower (er, yogurtpower?) to fight back.

Dessert Meets Tech and It’s Love at First Bite

It’s February 14, which means sappy love songs, heart-shaped chocolate boxes, and . . . 3D printing?

As Michael Wolf predicted in his prescient post “10 Trends Shaping the Future of Cooking in 2018,” dessert-tech is a market that’s growing fast. From intelligent ovens that speed up the cookie-making process to a whole mess of ice cream innovation, we’ve rounded up some of the sweetest (sorry) pairings in dessert-tech for your V-day holiday pleasure.

Desserts On Demand:

Some chocolate made-to-order ice cream from Solo Gelato.

Solo Gelato

This Israeli-based startup is basically applying the Keurig system to desserts. Currently, their capsules containing ice cream mixture are quite a bit bigger than the coffee pods, though the two systems work in a very similar way: after the Solo Gelato capsules are inserted, the machine “freezes and expels air” into them. Sixty seconds later, out comes fresh gelato. The company’s website also boasts a cloud-based database and “state of the art mechanical and cooling solutions.” Solo Gelato currently boasts a lineup of 24 flavors, with offerings including sorbet, traditional ice cream, and even boozy treats for the 21+ crowd.

Churned-to-order ice cream made with the freezing power of liquid nitrogen has been around for a few years. However, bringing on-demand ice cream into your home, Solo Gelato is hoping to “disrupt the ice cream industry” in the very way that coffee pods disrupted the coffee industry. (Side question: to what extent have coffee pods really done that?)

Tigoût

Another dessert company piggybacking off the Keurig model is the Argentinian startup Tigoût—though really, they’re more like a souped-up Easy-Bake Oven. How it works: pop two capsules into their designated slots in the top of the machine (I’m assuming one is liquid and one is dry ingredients, but no details are given). In just a few minutes (again, no details on cook time are given) you get a freshly baked pastry. According to LinkedIn, the startup is preparing to launch a minimum viable product (MVP) and has a patent in process.

Tigoût also has an integrated app which allows you to order more pastry capsules, monitor your baking process and set alarms. As of now, Tigoût offers seven different types of dessert capsules ranging from chocolate fudge to a caramel “volcano.”

CHiP’s cookie oven promises fresh, homemade cookies in 10 minutes.

CHiP Cookie Oven

What if instead of having a warm, melty chocolate chip cookie in, say, an hour—taking into account the time to soften the butter, make the dough, shape it, and bake it—you could get your mitts on one in only 10 minutes? That’s the promise of CHiP, a smart oven that uses patent-pending convection cooking technology to speed up the cookie baking process.

For all the tech nerds out there, CHiP is also wifi-enabled and can integrate into your smart-home system. Customers can order cookie dough pods in a variety of flavors, including vegan and gluten-free options, which are clad in biodegradable parchment paper for easy insertion into the oven. Milk not included.

Less Sugar, Less Dairy

Healthier options are another big trend in the dessert-meets-tech sphere, especially when it comes to ice cream. Vegan, non-dairy, high-protein and low-sugar desserts are gaining popularity, as proven by the runaway success of HaloTop. The low-calorie treat, which became the No. 1 best-selling ice cream in U.S. grocery stores in 2017, and other ice cream brands are scrambling to cash in on the healthier trend. Plant-based desserts such as the coconut-based ice cream NadaMoo!, non-dairy Ben & Jerry’s, and a whole host of vegan ‘screams have been rising rapidly in popularity.

NadaMoo! is a coconut-based ice cream based in Austin, TX.

However, not all health-conscious ice creams come in pint form. Veru is a company that uses patent-protected flash-freezing technology to make ice pops that are low-calorie, additive free, and (apparently) still manage to taste good. They make use of our old friend liquid nitrogen to freeze their ice cream mixes to temperatures as low as -196 degrees Celsius in just seconds. This quick freeze allows them to preserve maximum flavor so that they can cut calories without sacrificing on taste.

3D Printing

Another pioneer in the frozen-dessert field is Pixsweet, an L.A.-based company that participated in the Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase last year. Pixsweet makes customizable, 3D-printed popsicles, so you can turn everything from brand logos to unicorns into edible pops.

The pop possibilities are endless!

Pastry chefs are another group embracing the edible 3D printing trend. One of the most popular, who has also become an internet darling, is Dinara Kasko, an architect-turned-pastry chef known across the web for her sculptural desserts (just check out her 555,000 Instagram followers). Kasko uses computer modeling software to make intricate molds, which she then 3D prints and uses to make her custom cakes. The popularity of her desserts and the customizable pops from Pixsweet suggest 3D printing might play a significant role in the future of dessert.

Dessert Meal Subscription Kits

It seems that no matter your lifestyle and dietary preference, there’s a meal kit for that. Now sweet lovers can sate their sugary cravings with Sweetbake, a food subscription service from Nestle (its first) that caters to those with a sweet tooth. For $35 per month, subscribers get two ready-to-bake kits—just add milk, butter, and eggs. At first glance, it’s like a fancier version of boxed brownies, only you get the added thrill of receiving mail. However, Sweetbake’s repertoire extends far beyond chocolate chip cookies; their kits have ingredients for everything from gingerbread biscotti to peppermint brownie cups.

One of sweetbake’s dessert subscription boxes.

They’re not the only company breaking into the dessert delivery kit sphere: companies foodstirs and SoBakeable also offer baking subscriptions. The latter even provides videos with recipes and baking tips for those who download the companion app.

What’s Next?

One dessert-meets-tech innovation we’d love to see at the Spoon is a home bean-to-bar chocolate-maker. As contributor Allen Weiner has pointed out, “the home chocolate market appears to be a large, untapped opportunity.” Tech entrepreneurs, smart kitchen gadget makers, and startup upstarts—we’ve got your next project ready for you.

Did we miss anyone doing exciting things in the dessert/tech field? Tell us in the comments!