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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Direct to Consumer

The Very Good Butchers Will Ship Plant-Based Meats Directly to Your House

The Very Good Butchers, based in Vancouver, B.C, is a large player in the Canadian plant-based space that produces a wide variety of alternative protein products. The company recently reached out to me just in time for BBQ season to see if I wanted to try one of its vegan butcher boxes, and I was intrigued by the offer and decided to try it out.

Wheat gluten is the primary ingredient in most of The Very Good Butchers’ meat alternative products, as well as other plant-based ingredients like adzuki beans, kidney beans, mushrooms, jackfruit, and a variety of vegetables. This year, The Very Good Butchers acquired The Cultured Nut, which produces artisanal vegan cheeses, cream cheese spreads, and butter. The Very Good Butchers currently offer Cultured Nut’s products in a few of their boxes, and will eventually change Cultured Nut’s name to The Very Good Cheese Company.

The “butcher box” I received contained plant-based bangers (sausages), burger patties, jackfruit taco meat, and pepperoni. I’ll start out by saying that I am normally not a fan of seitan or wheat-based meat alternatives due to the texture and how dense these products feel. What I enjoyed most was the umami and smokey flavors of each of the alternative meats, and the fact that they were high in protein. What I did not like was how some of the products, like the bangers specifically, had a rubbery texture, which I attribute to the wheat gluten.

My favorite product was the alternative pepperoni, which had a strong fennel flavor and a slightly spicy kick; I sliced this on top of pizza. The plant-based burger patties had a great smokey flavor and came precooked with grill marks. Since the burger was quite dense, I opted to eat it over greens rather than in a bun. I ate the bangers alone, but I think I would have enjoyed them more eaten hot dog style in a bun with ketchup and mustard. The jackfruit taco stuffers were well-seasoned and provided a quick and easy meal inside a corn tortilla (this product would also be good as a burrito filling).

Not having to leave my house to gather up these plant-based meats was convenient, and I enjoyed the novelty of opening a box laden with vegan goods. Direct-to-consumer home delivery accelerated after the start of the pandemic, and companies like Chipotle and PepsiCo. began offering this type of service. As the world slowly opens back up and the “post-pandemic” world is seemingly in site, D2C services are still expected to grow by nearly 20 percent this year.

In addition to The Very Good Butchers, a few other plant-based meat companies offer direct-top-consumer home delivery. Last year when D2C services were surging, both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods launched their own direct to consumer platforms to allow customers to buy its products in bulk.

The plant-based space has come a long way in terms of creating products that closely emulate their meat counterparts. The Very Good Butchers do a good job of demonstrating of how plant-based ingredients can be transformed into a diversity of meat analogs. Although some plant-based alternatives aren’t exactly on par with what they are trying to replicate, it is still impressive to see what ingredients like wheat, soy, peas, and legumes can create. For many people seeking plant-based based alternatives, myself included, we are not looking for an exact replica of meat, but simply a high protein alternative that tastes good.

If you’re interested in checking out The Very Good Butcher’s alt-meat boxes, they are available on the company’s website. The smallest box starts at $50 (enough for 13+ meals), and the largest box costs $99 (enough for 28+ meals).

E-Fish Delivers Fresh Fish to Your Door 48 Hours After It’s Been Caught

When the pandemic hit, I shifted just about all of my grocery shopping online, including my proteins like chicken and fish. I still buy my fish online, getting frozen fillets delivered to my door each month.

But E-Fish, a startup that launched around the time the pandemic hit last year, says it can do one better. The company delivers fresh — not frozen — fish to your door 48 hours after it is out of water.

E-Fish started out as a fish marketplace for restaurants such as Jean-Georges, Esca, The Fulton, and Bellemore. But when the pandemic hit, many restaurants across the country shut down, cutting off E-Fish’s target market. Not only that, restaurant closures were also devastating the fish industry, who lost all those restaurant customers. So E-Fish pivoted, and like so many other restaurant food suppliers, launched its own direct-to-consumer sales channel.

Jeffrey Tedmori, Co-Founder and CEO of E-Fish, told me by phone this week that this D2C marketplace pivot was also helpful for fish harvesters because they can focus on catching fish while E-Fish takes care of all the digital marketing and sales.

E-Fish never touches the product. Instead, it has relationships with different fish harvesters on both coasts of the U.S. When you visit E-Fish and place your order, that order along with a shipping label is forwarded directly to the harvester.

That doesn’t mean your order ships right away, however. As Tedmori explained, when an order is placed, “A lot of the time the product isn’t even caught.” So the harvester goes out, catches the fish, preps it and ships it out to the customer. The result, said Temori, is an “Unparalleled level of quality.”

You’ll pay for that freshness. Two pounds of Black Cod will set you back $70 plus shipping and taxes (E-Fish ships across the U.S., except for Hawaii and Alaska). While that is probably more than your corner store, it is not that far out of line with other online fish markets like CrowdCow.

E-Fish has received Angel funding and is now part of the Techstars Anywhere accelerator cohort. The company currently has relationships with fishers in Massachusetts, Maine, Florida and California, and is looking to scale up from there.

Firstchop Shuts Down as COVID Crushed its B2B Pivot

Firstchop has a special place in my food tech journalist heart. I was there when the company first launched back in the Fall of 2017, and today, nearly three years later, I’m writing about its collapse.

Firstchop started its startup life amid the consumer sous vide mini-boomlet from a few years back. Unlike Anova and Chefsteps however, Firstchop gave away its sous vide wand to get you to subscribe to its protein delivery service. The company would send you a box of chef-prepared meats that you just had to heat up in the sous vide bath.

“Sous vide really caught fire and then collapsed,” Firstchop founder Ajay Narain told me earlier this year. “Unrealistic expecations were built around what sous vide could do. People thought it would be great for all of these different use cases, but it has a lot of limitations.”

So Firstchop abandoned that business to pivot to B2B, re-launching to sell prepared microwaveable meals to offices. At first, the switch to B2B was more fruitful for Firstchop. At the time of its official launch, Narain said that Firstchop sold three times as much product in the first month than it had the entire previous year of selling D2C.

In an email exchange this week, Narain said that Firstchop had also set up distribution through KeHE and Vistar (for offices), had brokers and had meeting scheduled with retail buyers at ExpoWest.

However, those good times quickly soured. Firstchop’s new debut was at the end of February, which is right as the pandemic was starting to hit the U.S. ExpoWest was cancelled. “Getting meetings became impossible,” Narain wrote to me in our exchange. “The office vending market absolutely collapsed. Not sure when it will ever recover as people get comfortable permanently or semi-permanently working from home.”

As a result, Firstchop has shut down.

In his email, Narain wrote that he kind of wished he had stayed in the D2C market as other players in that space like Blue Apron have rebounded. Indeed, direct to consumer channels have boomed across the food tech landscape during this pandemic. Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

Like any good entrepreneur, Narain isn’t done with the startup game. He said he’s already working on something new and still in the food tech space. Though he wouldn’t say more, I’m sure I’ll be writing about that when it launches.

Equal Parts Bundles Coaching With Cookware In Effort To Lure Millennials Into the Kitchen

For those new to cooking, it’s easy to feel lost the first few (or few dozen) times in the kitchen.

But what if you had a personal cooking coach to text with questions about techniques, meal suggestions or even dinner party tips? That’s the idea behind Equal Parts, a cookware brand from Millennial-focused direct-to-consumer startup Pattern Brands.

Here’s how Equal Parts coaching+cookware works:

When you buy a new cookware set from Equal Parts, you get an accompanying bundle of cooking guidance as part of the package. Guidance comes in the form of eight weeks of seven-days-a-week text messaging access to cooking coaches that provide advice on pretty much anything related to the meal journey, from teaching new cooking skills like sautéing to walking through a meal plan to grocery shopping guidance. Coaches are available each day from 4 PM ET to Midnight ET.

The cookware + coaching kits range in price from $65 for a utensil bundle all the way up to $499 for a 20 piece “Complete Kitchen” bundle that includes pans, knives, mixing bowls and more.

Once your eight weeks of text-based coaching is up, you’re ready to spread your wings and fly solo or, as the company puts it on their website, it’s time to “build your intuition in the kitchen” because, after a couple months, “you won’t need us anymore”.

Guided Cooking For The Millennial Generation?

In a way, Equal Parts offers guided cooking, only instead of using connected pans and software, the Millennial-focused brand offers up personalized guidance in a delivery format that is second nature to pretty much anyone in the under-35 crowd: texting.

Another difference with connected products is the temporal nature of the guidance. While products like the Hestan Cue offer the prospect of continuous guidance over the lifetime of product, the reality is most folks usually have a few go-to meals they cook, so the idea of weaning people off of their coaching makes sense. I also suspect giving a limited time window to use the coaching probably is enough to incentivize many to actually use it and not shove their pans in the drawer.

The company behind Equal Parts is a venture funded startup from Pattern Brands, a company founded by some of the marketing agency whizzes who helped launch direct-to-consumer brands like Warby Parker, Everlane and Bonobos.  While many of the early D2C success stories have been largely focused on fashion and lifestyle categories, the kitchen and other more “domesticated” brand concepts have come into focus the last few years as Millennials move both into parenthood and up the career ladder.

And while Equal Parts is a new take on cookware, it isn’t the first new take targeted at the under-35 set.  Great Jones is another buzzy cookware brand that launched in the last few years, and let’s not forget Buzzfeed Tasty’s cookware brand partnership with Walmart. Tasty has also tried its hand at guided cooking with the Tasty One Top, a product it seemed to lose some interest in over the past year as many of the core team behind the product like Ben Kaufman  (ed note: Buzzfeed emailed us to let us know that Ben Kaufman is still acting as company CMO through the end of this year even as he focuses on his new startup Camp) have moved on.

So will text-message powered coaching be the secret ingredient to establish Equal Parts as an up-and-coming cookware brand? Too soon to tell, but it’s definitely worth a shot.  While the Instant Pot may have become the first cooking gadget Millennials can call their own, the race to become the cookware brand for a generation is too big an opportunity to pass up.